The Black Book (26 page)

The bald-headed man who looked familiar to Galip opposed the B-girl’s “unfounded allegation” against our wrestlers who practice the sport of our ancestors and began recounting his own observations concerning the exemplary family lives of these exceptional people he had once followed closely during his stay in Thrace. In the meantime, İskender clued Galip in as to who the old guy was: he had run into this bald man in the lobby of the Pera Palas Hotel at the height of the commotion when İskender was tearing out his hair trying to make an itinerary for the British journalists and hoping to locate Jelal—yes, it was possible that he’d called Galip that same evening. The old guy had joined in the quest saying that he knew Jelal, and that he also needed to find him for a personal reason. In the days that followed, he’d cropped up here and there, not only in search of Jelal but also to help him and the British journalists with small details thanks to his large circle of influence (he was a retired army officer). The guy got a real kick out of putting his limited English into use. Obviously, he was the sort of retiree who wanted to do something useful for the country with his time; he liked making friends and knew Istanbul quite well. After he got through talking about the Thracian wrestlers, the old guy began to narrate his own story.

Actually, it was more of a conundrum than a story: an old shepherd comes home at midday in pursuit of his flock which, on account of an eclipse of the sun, make for home on their own; so, after securing the sheep in the pen, he goes in the house only to find his beloved wife in bed with her lover. After a moment of hesitation, he gets hold of a knife and kills them both. He gives himself up, and he defends himself in front of the judge, putting forth a logic that sounds simple when he says that he didn’t kill his wife and her lover but some unknown woman and her paramour whom he’d caught in his own bed. Since it was impossible for the “woman” whom he knew, trusted, and with whom he cohabitated lovingly for many years, to do this to “him,” both the woman in the bed and he “himself” were two other people. The shepherd had no trouble believing this astounding substitution, seeing how the supernatural omen of the eclipse had bolstered his conviction. Naturally, the shepherd was ready to take the rap for the other self he remembered assuming momentarily, but he wanted the man and the woman he killed in his own bed to be considered a pair of thieves who’d broken into his house and shamelessly took advantage of his bed. After he did his time, no matter how long, he intended to set out on the road in search of his wife whom he hadn’t seen since the day of the eclipse; once he found her, and perhaps with her help, he would begin to look for his own lost self.

So, what was the punishment the judge meted out to the shepherd?

Galip listened to the solutions the company offered the retired colonel, thinking he had read or heard this old chestnut somewhere before but he just couldn’t remember where. As he examined one of the pictures the photographer had developed and handed out to the company, he thought for a moment that he would be able to remember just how it was that he knew the bald man and his story; he felt as if he’d then be able to inform the man of his real identity and that, just at that moment, the mystery of another illegible face would also be solved as it was in the photographer’s story about faces. When his turn came, while Galip concluded that it was necessary for the judge to forgive the shepherd, he was also considering that he might have solved the hidden meaning in the retired colonel’s face: it was as if the retired soldier had been one person when he began to tell his story, and when he finished it, he was another. What had happened to him as he told the story? What had changed him when he was through telling it?

Taking his turn to tell a story, Galip began an account which he said he had heard from a columnist, concerning the obsession of an elderly newsman who was single. This fellow had spent his entire life working for the Babıali dailies, doing translations for magazines, and writing film and theater criticism. Since he was interested in women’s wear and jewelry rather than the women themselves, he had never married. He lived in a small two-room apartment on a backstreet in Beyoğlu, keeping company only with his tabby, who seemed even older and lonelier than himself. The only rub in his uneventful life was toward the end when he began reading Marcel Proust’s seemingly endless book in search of time past.

The elderly journalist loved the book so much that for a long time he didn’t want to talk about anything else, but not only was he unable to find someone willing to invest himself as he had in the struggle to read all those beloved volumes in French, he didn’t even chance upon someone with whom to share his zeal. As a result, he became introverted and began retelling himself all the stories and the scenes in those volumes that he had read so many times that he’d lost count. All day long, whenever he met with adversity, or had to put up with rudeness and ruthlessness from unfeeling, unrefined, and greedy people whose sort also tended to be “uncultured” as well, he said to himself, “I am not here; I am at home now, in my bedroom, and I am thinking of my Albertine sleeping, or waking, in the next room, or else I am listening with pleasure and joy to Albertine’s soft and gentle footsteps padding around the apartment!” Whenever he was walking, out on the street, and feeling miserable, he imagined, like the narrator in Proust’s novel, that a beautiful young woman was waiting at home, that Albertine, even a casual meeting with whom he would have once considered a great happiness, was waiting for him, and he fantasized about Albertine’s movements while she waited. When the elderly journalist returned to his two rooms where the stove never put out enough heat, he would remember with sorrow other pages in which Albertine left Proust, internalizing the feeling of sadness that pervaded the forsaken rooms, and he would keep on recollecting things, as if he were both Proust and also his mistress Albertine: how it was just here that he and Albertine talked, laughing together; how she would visit him only after ringing the bell; his own endless fits of jealousy; the dreams of the trip to Venice that they’d take together—until tears of joy and sorrow flowed out of his eyes.

On Sunday mornings, spent in the company of his tabby cat, when he was irritated with the coarse stories published by the paper, or remembered the words of ridicule spoken by curious neighbors, insensitive distant relatives, and sharp-tongued rude children, he’d pretend he had found a ring in a compartment in his old chest, imagining it was the ring Albertine had left behind which his maid Françoise had found in a drawer in the rosewood desk; and then, turning to the imaginary maid, “No, Françoise,” he’d say loud enough for only the tabby to hear, “Albertine did not forget it; returning the ring would be futile, since Albertine will soon be coming back.”

What a pathetic and miserable country we live in, the old journalist reflected, where no one has come upon Albertine or knows Proust. The day someone who can understand Proust and Albertine appears will be the day, yes, when those poor mustachioed fellows in the street can perhaps begin to live better lives; perhaps then, instead of knifing each other at the first hint of jealousy, they too, like Proust, will reflect on reveries in which they bring to life the images of their lovers. All those writers and translators, who were given work at the newspapers since they were supposed to be literate, were as mean and obtuse as they were because they did not read Proust, did not know Albertine, and had no idea that the old journalist had read Proust, nor comprehended that he was personally both Proust and Albertine.

The astonishing aspect of the story was not the fact that the old journalist considered himself the hero of a novel or its author; after all, any Turk who passionately loves a masterpiece from the West which remains unread by his compatriots begins after a while to believe in all sincerity that not only does he love reading the book, but that he has written it himself. Eventually, this person will end up despising the people around him, not only because they have not read the book but because they have not written a book of the same caliber as his. That’s why the surprising thing was not the fact that the old journalist had considered himself Proust or Albertine for a long time, but that he had one day divulged the secret he’d kept to himself all these years to a young columnist.

It was perhaps because the old journalist had a very special feeling for the young columnist that he could confide in him; the young fellow possessed a beauty that was reminiscent of Proust and Albertine: he had the bud of a mustache on his upper lip, a strong and classical build, nice hips, long lashes, and, like Proust and Albertine, he was dark and somewhat short in stature; his silky soft skin had the shimmer of a Pakistani’s complexion. But the similarities ended there. The young and beautiful columnist, whose taste for European literature didn’t go beyond Paul de Kock and Pitigrilli, laughed uproariously when he first heard the tale of the old journalist’s secret love; then he announced that he would use this interesting account in one of his columns.

Realizing his mistake, the old journalist begged his young and beautiful colleague to forget everything, but the other turned a deaf ear and kept right on laughing. Once the old journalist returned home, he knew at once that his whole world had been demolished: in his deserted rooms he could imagine neither Proust’s jealousies, nor the time he spent with Albertine, nor even where Albertine had gone. That magical love that he alone lived and breathed in all of Istanbul, that sublime love that was his only source of pride and which no one could ever besmirch, was soon to be coarsely related to hundreds of obtuse readers in a way that would be like raping Albertine whom he’d worshipped all these years. The old journalist just wanted to die, thinking that Albertine’s name—the beautiful name that belonged to dear Albertine whom he loved so much, for whom he could die of jealousy, whose leaving destroyed him, and the sight of whom he could never, ever forget since the time that he first saw her riding a bicycle in Balbec—would be printed on pieces of newspaper which dumb readers, who never read of anything besides the ex-prime minister’s larcenies and the mistakes in the latest radio programs, would then spread under garbage pails or under fish to be cleaned.

It was this notion that gave him the courage and determination to phone the columnist with the silken complexion and the bud of a mustache, and explaining that “only but only” he could comprehend such a special but uncurable love, this human condition, his abject and boundless jealousy, he begged him never to touch on the subject of Proust or Albertine in any of his columns. “Besides,” he added with fortitude, “you haven’t even read Marcel Proust’s masterpiece!” “Whose what masterpiece?” asked the young man, who had already forgotten about the subject and the old journalist’s obsession. So the old man retold his story, and the insouciant young columnist once again shrieked with laughter, saying gleefully that yes, yes, it was the very story that he should write. He might have even been under the impression that the old guy actually wanted the subject ventilated.

And he went ahead and wrote it. In the column that was something like a short story, the old journalist was characterized much as in the account you have heard: a pitiful, lonely old man from Istanbul who falls in love with a weird novel from the West, imagining that he is both the heroine and the author of the book. The old journalist in the story has a tabby cat just like the real old journalist’s. The old journalist in the story is also shaken to see himself being ridiculed in a newspaper column. In the story within the story that was being told, the old journalist also wants to die upon seeing Albertine’s and Proust’s names in the paper. Lonely newsmen, Albertines, and Prousts in the story within the story within the story kept reappearing in infinite regression out of one bottomless well after another in the old writer’s nightmares during the last, unhappy nights of his life. When he woke from his nightmares at midnight, the old writer could no longer have the happiness of a love no one knew about. When his door was broken down three days after the publication of the cruel column, it was discovered that the old journalist had quietly died in his sleep, asphyxiated by the smoke that leaked from the stove that had refused to put out any heat. The tabby had not been fed in three days, but she still hadn’t mustered up the courage to chew on her master.

Despite its sadness, Galip’s story had cheered his audience by virtue of drawing them together. Several people, some of whom were foreign journalists, got up to dance with the party girls to the music that came from an invisible radio, laughing and enjoying themselves until it was time to close the place.

Chapter Sixteen

I MUST BE MYSELF

If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

—
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
,
The Talented Mr. Ripley

Some time back I remembered a metaphysical experiment that befell me twenty-six years ago on a winter’s night and which I related briefly in these columns. It must be ten or twelve years ago, I can’t be sure (these days when my memory is really shot, the “secret archives” I keep on hand unfortunately aren’t available for reference), but when I wrote on the subject, it brought on piles of letters. Among the letters from my readers, irate that I hadn’t written the sort of column they’d come to expect from me (why hadn’t I discussed national concerns, why hadn’t I described the sadness of Istanbul streets in the rain), there was one from a reader who had “intuited” that I was of the same opinion as himself on a “very important matter.” He divulged that he’d soon pay me a visit and put to me questions concerning some “special” and “deep” subjects on which, he believed, we were in agreement.

Just as I was about to write off this reader—who was a barber (this was odd in itself)—he turned up for real one afternoon. I had no time for him. Besides, I thought the barber might go on and on about his troubles and give me grief for not giving enough space to his endless woes in my column. Just to get rid of him, I told him to come back another time. He reminded me that he’d written that he’d be coming; on top of that, he had no time for “another time”; he had only two questions, ones that I could answer at once, on my feet. Pleased that the barber approached the subject so directly, I told him to ask away.