The Black Book (31 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors. It seethed with bats, poisonous snakes, rats, and scorpions like a well in a tale of fantasy. I had a feeling it was the very pit described in Şeyh Galip’s
Beauty and Love
and mentioned in Rumi’s
Mathnawi.
It so happened that sometimes when a pail was lowered into the pit, its rope was cut, and sometimes they said that there was a black ogre down there who was as big as a house. Don’t you kids go anywhere near it! we were told. One time when the doorman was dangled down from a rope that was tied to his belt, he returned from the zero-gravity journey he made into the infinite darkness of time with tears in his eyes and lungs blackened with cigarette tar for all eternity. I was aware of the fact that the desert witch who guarded the pit could also assume the shape of the doorman’s moonfaced wife, and that the pit was closely related to a secret that lay deep in the inhabitants’ memories. They were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about the pit, its memories and secrets as well as what it contained, like instinctive animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace. One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered that the pit had been covered over. It was then that I understood with horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this dark well the air shaft.
In reality, the new space the inhabitants called the air shaft in disgust and disgruntlement (unlike other Istanbulites who termed this kind of space a light well), was neither an air shaft nor a light well. When the place was first built, there were vacant lots on either side; it was not one of the ugly apartment buildings which later lined the street like a solid dirty wall. When the lot next to it was sold to a builder, the kitchen windows, the windows of the narrow and long inner corridor, and the windows of the little room that was used for different purposes on each floor (storage room, maid’s room, nursery, poor relation’s room, ironing room, a distant aunt’s room), all of which had a view of the mosque and the tram tracks, the girls’ lycée, Aladdin’s store, and the pit now faced the windows of the tall row-house style apartment building next door, only three yards away. That was how a lightless and oppressive space without a breath of air, which was reminiscent of an infinite well, was formed in between the dirty nondescript concrete walls and the windows that reflected each other and the floors below.
Soon pigeons discovered this space, which within a short time developed its own gloomy, old and heavy smell. They built roosts for their constantly increasing population on concrete ledges, on windowsills that broke off of their own accord, in the elbows of downspouts inaccessible to human hands—which in time became places that no one would want to touch—where they deposited their profusion of droppings. At times insolent seagulls, who are harbingers not only of meteorological catastrophe but also of other nebulous nastinesses, would join them, and so would black crows who lost their bearing at midnight and smashed into the windows in the dark well. One sometimes came across the corpses of these winged creatures, which the mice had picked to shreds on the obscured floor, as one ventured into the doorman’s airless low-ceilinged apartment, bending over in order to get through a low iron door that was reminiscent of cell doors (creaked like a dungeon door, too). Other things could be found on the repulsive basement floor that was encrusted with dirt a lot worse than manure: shells of pigeon eggs stolen by mice who went up the spouts to the upper stories, unlucky forks and odd socks that had slipped from flower-print tablecloths and sleepy bedsheets shaken out the windows and fallen into the petroleum-colored void, knives, dust cloths, cigarette butts, shards of glass and lightbulbs and mirrors, rusty bed springs, armless pink dolls that still batted their plastic eyelashes hopelessly yet stubbornly, pages of some compromising magazine and newsprint that had carefully been torn into tiny pieces, busted balls, soiled children’s underpants, horrifying photographs that had been ripped to shreds …
At times the doorman went from flat to flat showing one of these objects, which he held up by the corner in disgust as if he were taking around a criminal for identification, but the inhabitants in the building would not own up to any suspect articles that returned unexpectedly out of the slime of the nether world: “Not ours,” they’d say. “Fell down there, did it?”
It was a place they wanted to escape from like a fear they wanted to consign to oblivion and yet were unable to. They mentioned the place as if talking about some ugly, contagious disease: the void was a cesspool they themselves could, if they were not careful, accidentally fall into like the unfortunate objects swallowed up by it; it was a nest of evil that had been slyly insinuated into their lives. No doubt, the children were sick so often because this place gave them germs, those germs that were constantly discussed in the newspapers, as well as giving them the fear of ghosts and of death, which they began talking about at an early age. The strange odors that came in the windows and at times surrounded the building like free-floating terror also originated from that place; one could very well imagine that the whammies and the jinxes, too, seeped in from the dark gap between the buildings. Like the heavy dark-blue smoke in the gap, the catastrophes that befell the inhabitants (bankruptcy, debt, runaway dads, incest, divorce, infidelity, jealousy, death) were also connected in their minds to the history of this dark void: like the pages of books they didn’t want to remember which got jumbled together in their memory banks.
But, thank God, there is always someone who’s willing to go through the forbidden pages of such books to find treasures. Children (ah, children!), shivering with fear in the corridor where the light was kept off in order to save on electricity, slipped through the deliberately drawn curtains to press their foreheads curiously on the windows overlooking the dark void. Back in the days when all the cooking was done in Grandpa’s flat, the maid would yell into the dark void that dinner was on the table for the benefit of the inhabitants below (and in the next flat), and when the mother and son duo exiled to the attic apartment was not invited, they’d leave their kitchen window open to keep an eye on the subterfuges and the food prepared below. Some nights a deaf mute would stare into the dark void until his grandmother caught him at it. The servant girl daydreamed in her tiny room, staring into that place as she sorrowed along with the downspouts on rainy days, and so did the young man who would return victoriously to the building where a family which subsequently collapsed could not manage to survive.
Let us take a cursory look at the treasures they saw: the images of women and girls on the foggy kitchen windows but whose voices could not be heard; the back of a ghostly shadow slowly bending and rising in prayer; the leg of an elderly woman resting next to an illustrated magazine on a bed where the quilt has not been turned down (if one stays put, one will see a hand flip the pages and languorously scratch the leg); the forehead pressed on the cold windowpane that belongs to the young man who has decided that he will one day return victoriously to the bottomless pit and discover the secret concealed by the inhabitants. (The same young man watching his own reflection would sometimes see, reflected in the window opposite his from the flat below, his enchantingly beautiful stepmother who was in a reverie like himself.) Let us also add that these images are framed by the heads and bodies of pigeons crouched in the darkness, that the frame is dark blue, that slight movements of the curtains, lights that momentarily go on and off, and rooms that are well lighted will make bright orange tracks on the windows and in the sad and guilty memories transformed into these images: We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let’s do some dreaming. Have yourselves a very good Sunday, my dear readers.
Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is “Who in the world am I?”
—
LEWIS CARROLL
,
Alice in Wonderland
When Galip woke up, he saw that Belkis had changed her clothes and was now wearing a petroleum-colored skirt which reminded him that he was in a strange place with a strange woman. She had also completely changed her face and her hair. She’d combed her hair back like Ava Gardner’s in
55 Days at Peking,
and she had painted her lips the same Supertechnirama Red as in the film. Looking at her new face, Galip suddenly thought that people had been taking him in for quite some time.
Not long after, Galip had already removed the newspaper in the pocket of his overcoat, which the woman had fastidiously slipped on a hanger and put in the closet, and had spread the paper on the breakfast table, which had been cleared with the same fastidiousness. When he reread Jelal’s column, the notes he’d previously made in the margins and the words and syllables he had underlined seemed silly to him. It was so obvious the marked words were not the ones which would reveal the secret in the piece that Galip entertained the passing thought that the secret did not exist: it seemed as if the sentences he was reading signified themselves and, at the same time, something else. So much so that every sentence regarding the hero in Jelal’s Sunday column, who could not communicate to mankind an incredible discovery he had made on account of having lost his memory, seemed like it was a sentence that came out of another story concerning some other human condition known and understood by everyone. This was so clear and so true that there was no necessity to rewrite and to rearrange certain letters, syllables, and words he had chosen. In order to decipher the “hidden” meaning in the piece, all that was needed was merely to read the piece in good faith. As his eyes traveled from word to word, Galip believed that he was studying the City’s and Life’s secrets, as well as seeking the location and the significance of the place where Rüya and Jelal were hiding out; but each time he raised his head from the text and saw Belkis’s new face, he lost his good faith. He hoped he could keep his optimism intact and tried for a while to start from scratch rereading the text, but he could not clearly discern the secret meaning that he thought might become apparent to him. He felt the thrill of almost discovering the mystery concerning existence and the world, but whenever he tried thinking through the secret he was looking for by spelling it out, the face of the woman who watched him from her corner appeared in front of his eyes. After a while, having decided that he might be able to get close to the secret through the intellect, not through faith and intuition, he began making fresh notes in the margins and marking entirely different syllables and words. He had lost himself in his task when Belkis approached the table.
“Jelal Salik’s column,” she said. “I’m aware that he’s your uncle. Do you know why his underground mannequin looked so creepy last night?”
“No, I don’t,” said Galip. “But he’s not my uncle, he’s my uncle’s son.”
“Because the mannequin looked so much like him,” Belkis said. “Sometimes when I went up to Nişantaşı in hopes of running into you, I’d see him instead wearing the same outfit.”
“That’s the raincoat he wore years ago,” Galip said. “He used to wear it a lot back then.”
“He still wears it, going around Nişantaşı like a ghost,” said Belkis. “What are those notes you’re taking in the margins?”
“They are not about the column,” Galip said, folding the newspaper. “They concern a polar explorer who gets lost. Because he is lost, someone else steps in and gets lost in his place. The first missing person, the mystery of whose loss is deepened by the loss of the second person, apparently goes on to live in a godforsaken town under a different name, but it seems he gets himself killed one day.”
When Galip got through telling his story, he realized that he’d have to tell it again. As he told it again, he felt great anger against all the people who forced him to tell a story over and over again. He felt like saying: “Why can’t everyone be himself so that no one needs to tell any stories!” He’d gotten to his feet while he was retelling the story, and now he slipped the folded newspaper back into the pocket of his old overcoat.
“Are you leaving?” Belkis asked timidly.
“I haven’t finished my story yet,” Galip said with irritation.
As he finished telling the story, Galip had a feeling that there was a mask on the woman’s face. If he pulled away the mask with the Supertechnirama Red lips from the woman’s face, the total meaning would be clearly visible on the countenance underneath it, but he couldn’t figure out what that meaning might be. It was as if he were playing the game of “Why Are We Here?” he played in his childhood when he was bored out of his skull. Consequently, he was able to tell his story, as he did in his childhood, focusing on something else while playing the game. For a moment he thought the reason why Jelal was so attractive to women was because he could tell a story while he simultaneously thought about other things; but then, Belkis did not look like a woman who was listening to one of Jelal’s stories.
“Doesn’t Rüya ever wonder where you are?” Belkis said.
“No, she doesn’t,” said Galip. “I’ve been known to go home past midnight lots of times. On account of missing politicos, or swindlers who take out loans under false names. I’ve been gone until morning many a time, having had to deal with mysterious tenants who vanish without paying the rent, or unhappy bigamists who remarry using false identifications.”
