The Black Book (25 page)

On their wedding day, while the girl and her fellow Beyoğlu party girls were busy getting all dolled up, putting on makeup and perfumes, the guy got his nuptial-day shave and strolled out on the main drag where he was captivated by a woman who was gorgeous beyond belief. The woman, who instantly robbed him of his reason, took him to her room in the Pera Palas Hotel where, after they made copious love, the luckless woman divulged that she was the bastard daughter of the Shah of Iran, sired on the Queen of England. She had come to Turkey to instigate the first phase of her master plan of revenge against her parents who’d abandoned the fruit of their one-night stand. What she wanted from the young man was for him to get hold of a map, half of which was being held by the National Bureau of Security and the other half by the Secret Police.

Inflamed by passion, the young man begged for her permission to leave and hurried off to the hall where the wedding was to take place; the guests had already drifted away but the girl was still weeping in the corner. He consoled her first and then confessed that he’d been recruited in the interests of a “national cause.” They put off their nuptials, and they sent out word to all the party girls, belly dancers, madams, and Sulukule gypsies that each and every cop who’d fallen prey to the dens of iniquity throughout Istanbul was to be pumped for information. When they finally got hold of the two halves of the map and put it together, the girl also put it together that her cousin had pulled a fast one on her, as well as on all the industrious working girls in Istanbul: he was really in love with the daughter of the Queen of England and the Shah of Iran. She hid the map in the left cup of her bra and holed up in a room where she exiled herself in her sorrow, at a brothel in Kuledibi frequented only by the cheapest whores and the worst perverts.

The shrewish princess ordered the boy cousin to go through Istanbul with a fine-tooth comb and get that map. As he conducted the search, he finally understood that he loved, not the instigator of the hunt, but the hunted one, not just any woman but the beloved, not the princess but his childhood love. He finally tracked her down to the brothel in Kuledibi, and when he observed through a peephole in a mirror his childhood love do an “innocent girl” number on a rich guy with a bow tie, he broke in and saved the girl. A huge mole appeared on his eye, the same eye he’d fitted to the peephole and thereby broken his heart (from watching his half-naked sweetheart joyfully playing the flute), and it would not go away. The identical mark of love also appeared under the girl’s left breast. When they got the police to raid the virago’s room at the Pera Palas to apprehend her, in her dresser drawers they found butt-naked photos of thousands of innocent young men who’d been enticed by the man-eating princess into having their pictures taken in various positions for her “political” blackmail collection. There were also mug shots of terrorists, manifestos stamped with the hammer and sickle, various political books and pamphlets, the will of the last sultan, who was a “queer,” and the master plan to carve up Turkey, which had been marked by the Byzantine Cross. The Secret Police knew all too well that it was this broad who was responsible for importing into the country the plague of terrorism, as if it were the French plague of syphilis, but since her collection contained innumerable photos of the members of the police force, wearing only their birthday suits and their “nightsticks,” her involvement was covered up, for fear that some journalists might get hold of the photos. The only news seen fit to print was the notice concerning the cousins’ nuptials, along with their wedding picture. The B-girl pulled out of her purse the notice she’d personally clipped from the newspaper, in which she herself could be seen wearing her snazzy coat with the fox collar and the same pearl earrings she wore this very minute, and she wanted it passed around the table.

Seeing that her story was received with some skepticism and, at times, with outright ridicule, the woman became cross and, saying her account was true, she called out to someone: the photographer who’d taken the innumerable dirty pictures showing the princess with her victims happened to be on the premises. The gray-haired photographer approached the table, and when the woman told him that in return for a good love story “our guests” would be happy to have their pictures taken, and compensate him liberally, the elderly photographer began to tell a story.

Some thirty-odd years ago, a manservant had stopped by his tiny studio to summon him to a house in the posh quarter of Şişli on the streetcar route. Since he had made his mark as a nightclub photographer, as he went up to the house he wondered why he’d been chosen for the job when, in his opinion, another colleague of his was more appropriate for upper-class shindigs. There, a young and good-looking widow invited our photographer in and proposed a deal: in return for a sizable bit of cash, she wanted him to drop off in the morning copies of the hundreds of photos he snapped at the Beyoğlu clubs every night.

The photographer, suspecting that there was some love entanglement behind this deal that he’d accepted somewhat out of curiosity, decided to keep an eye on the brown-haired woman, who had slightly crossed eyes, as best he could. After a couple of years, he realized the woman was not looking for the picture of a particular man she’d known or whose picture she’d seen before; neither the faces nor the ages of the men she chose from the hundreds she sifted through and wanted to see blown up or shown from other vantage points, were ever the same. In time the woman, having become familiar by virtue of their joint venture and more trusting by virtue of their shared secret, began to confide in the photographer.

“It’s useless to bring me the photos of these vacant faces, these blank looks, these expressionless visages,” she said. “I cannot make them out; I cannot see any letters anywhere in their faces!” The vague meanings she could hardly
read
(she used this word insistently) in other exposures of the same face always left her disappointed, leading her to say: “If this is all we can get at the nightclubs frequented by the melancholic and the depressed, my God, how blank, how vacant their faces must be when they are at their places of business, behind store counters, sitting at office desks!”

Yet it wasn’t as if they had not run into a couple of specimens that gave them both some hope. Once, the woman read a meaning that she dwelled on for some time in the terribly wrinkled face of an old man who, as they discovered later, was a jeweler, but the meaning was very ancient and quite stagnant. The wrinkles on his forehead and the abundance of letters under his eyes were nothing more than the final refrain of an obscure meaning that shed no light on the present but kept on repeating itself. Three years later they came across a face alive with muscular letters that did signify, they discovered, the meanings of the day. Excited by the stormy face, they had enlarged the photograph and soon learned that the subject was an accountant. On a dark morning, the woman showed the photographer a huge picture of the man that had appeared in all the papers with headlines like
HE BILKED BANK OF TWENTY MILLIONS
. Now that his fling with crime and transgression was over, the accountant’s relaxed face stared peacefully at the reader, as vacant as the henna-dyed face of a sacrificial sheep.

The listeners had already decided, of course, whispering among themselves and signaling with their eyes and eyebrows, that the real love story was the one between the woman and the photographer, but at the end the hero turned out to be someone entirely different: one cool summer morning, the moment the woman clapped eyes on that incredible, brilliant face among all the meaningless faces in a photo of a crowded table at a nightclub, she realized that the search she had conducted for the past ten years had not been in vain. A very plain, simple, and clear meaning could be read in all the subsequent photos of that young and fabulous face, easily taken at the nightclub that very same night and enlarged: it was
LOVE
. The woman could read the four letters of the new Latin alphabet so effortlessly in the open and clear face of the thirty-three-year-old man, who as they found out later repaired watches in a small shop in Karagümrük, that she snapped at the photographer when he said he couldn’t make out any of the letters that he must be blind. She spent the following days trembling like a prospective bride being shown to matchmakers, already suffering like a lover who knows in the beginning that she’s slated for defeat, and splitting hairs as she imagined the possibility of happiness when she sensed the smallest flicker of hope. Within a week, the woman’s salon was plastered all over with hundreds of photos of the watch repairman, who had been tricked under various pretexts into having his picture taken many times.

When the watch repairman with the incredible face stopped showing up at the club the night after the photographer managed to get closeups which showed him in more detail, the woman went berserk. She sent the photographer after the repairman in Karagümrük, but the man could not be found at his shop nor at his house pointed out by the neighbors. When he went back a week later, the shop was up for sale “as a going concern” and the house had been vacated. The woman was no longer interested in the photos the photographer brought from then on “for love”; she refused even to glance at intriguing faces other than the watch repairman’s. One of those windy mornings when autumn arrives early, he showed up at the woman’s door armed with a “piece” that he thought might pique her interest, only to be greeted by the nosy doorman who was pleased to tell him that the lady had moved to an undisclosed address. The photographer was sad that the story had come to an end—he had to confess to his listeners that he was indeed in love with the woman—but he told himself at the time that now he could perhaps embark on his own story, one he would construct by remembering the past.

But the real end of the story came many years later when he was absentmindedly reading a picture caption: “She Doused His Face with Nitric Acid!” Neither the name, the face, nor the age of the jealous woman armed with nitric acid was consistent with the lady who lived in Şişli, and the husband whose face got splashed with nitric acid was not a watch repairman but a public prosecutor in the Central Anatolian town where the news had originated. Nevertheless, although none of the details jibed with the characteristics of either his dream woman or the handsome watch repairman, the moment he saw the words “nitric acid” our photographer had intuited that this couple was none other than “them,” and he figured out that they’d been together all these years, that he’d been part of their game plan to elope, and that they’d used the ploy to eliminate many an unhappy fellow like himself who came between them. He realized how right he was when he bought another scandal sheet that day and saw the watch repairman’s face which, having completely melted away, had been altogether relieved of any letters and meaning.

The photographer, who could see that the story he had told while looking expressly at the foreign journalists was received with approval and interest, offered up a final detail, as if imparting a military secret that would crown his victory: the same scandal sheet had printed the same melted face (once again, many years later), claiming that it was the picture of the last victim of a Middle East war that had gone on much too long, with the following caption: “As they say, all is for love, after all.”

The company at the table was pleased to pose for the photographer. Among them were a couple of journalists and an adman Galip knew slightly, along with a bald-headed man who looked familiar and several foreigners who sat gingerly at one end. The sort of fortuitous friendship and curiosity that forms among people who share an inn for a night or a small accident had also developed at the table. Since most of the patrons had left, the club had become quiet, and the stage lights had been turned off some time ago.

Galip had a feeling the club might have been the actual location of
My Disorderly Babe
in which Türkan Şoray had played a call girl; so he put the question to the elderly waiter whom he’d summoned to the table. The waiter, perhaps because everyone had turned toward him, or else spurred on by the stories he’d been overhearing, told a brief story himself.

No, his story didn’t concern the movie that was mentioned but another, older movie that had been filmed at this very club in which he’d watched himself fourteen times during the week it played at the Rüya Theater. Since both the producer and the beautiful woman who played the lead had requested that he take part in a couple of the scenes, the waiter had been happy to oblige. When he saw the movie several months later, he recognized his face and his hands as his own, but his back, shoulders, and neck in another scene belonged to someone else; each time he watched the film, the waiter, though spooked by this, also tingled with an odd pleasure. What’s more, he could not get used to hearing someone else’s voice come out of his own mouth, a voice that he was to hear again in many other films. His friends and relations who saw the film were not as interested as he was in the hair-raising, mind-boggling, dreamlike substitutions, nor were they aware of any trick photography. Even more important, they never knew that a small trick could fool one into believing that one was someone else, or that someone else was oneself.

The waiter had waited in vain for years, hoping they’d show the film in which he appeared briefly when they played double features at the Beyoğlu theaters during the summer months. Had he been able to see the film once more, he believed he could have embarked on a new life, not because he would again meet himself as a young man but because of the other “obvious” reason that his friends didn’t comprehend but would be comprehensible to the distinguished company present.

The subject of “the obvious reason” was discussed extensively behind the waiter’s back. For most, the reason was, of course, love; the waiter was in love with himself, or with the world he saw in himself, or else with the “art of the cinema.” The B-girl put the kibosh on the subject by saying the waiter, like all ex-wrestlers, was nothing but a fag, seeing how he had been caught stark naked abusing himself looking in the mirror, as well as putting the pinch on the bus boys in the kitchen.