The Black Book (32 page)

“But it’s past noon,” Belkis said. “If I were Rüya waiting for you at home, I’d wish you’d call soon as you could.”

“I don’t want to call.”

“If it were me waiting for you, I’d be worried sick,” Belkis went on. “I’d be at the window, listening for the phone to ring. I’d be unhappier still, thinking that you didn’t call in spite of the fact that you knew I was worried and unhappy. Come on, give her a ring. Tell her you’re here, with me.”

When the woman brought the receiver to him as if it were a toy, Galip called home. There was no answer.

“Nobody’s home.”

“Where could she be?” said the woman playfully.

“Don’t know,” said Galip.

He opened up the newspaper again and turned back to Jelal’s column. He read the text again and again, so many times and for such a long time that the words lost their meaning and turned into mere shapes composed of letters. A while later, Galip thought he could write this piece himself, that he could write like Jelal. Before long he took his coat out of the closet and put it on, folded the paper carefully, and put the column, which he’d ripped out of it, into his pocket.

“You leaving?” said Belkis. “Don’t go.”

In the taxi he finally managed to flag down, Galip took a final look at the familiar street, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to forget Belkis’s face insisting that he not go; he wished the woman could have stayed in his mind wearing another face, inhabiting another story. He thought of instructing the driver, “Such and such street and step on it,” as in Rüya’s detective novels, but merely said he was going to the Galata Bridge.

As he was walking across the bridge, lost in the Sunday crowd, he was seized by a feeling that the solution to the secret he had been blindly searching for all these years, without ever realizing until just now that it was what he sought, was immediately at hand. Somewhere in a dark corner of his mind, as in a dream, he was aware that this feeling was a misapprehension, but the two sensations existed together in Galip’s mind without disturbing him in the least. He observed conscripts out on a pass, people out fishing, families with children hurrying to catch the boat. They all inhabited the secret Galip was working on, but they were not aware of it. When, in a moment, Galip solved it, they would all become aware of this fact which had for many years been impressed deeply on their lives—including the father out for a Sunday visit along with his sneakered son and the infant he was carrying, and the mother and daughter who both wore scarves sitting on a bus that went by.

He was on the bridge, walking on the Sea of Marmara side, when he began making for people as if he were going to run into them: the meaning in their faces which had been missing, stale, or used up for many years seemed to light up for a moment. While they tried figuring out who the reckless person was, Galip looked into their eyes and their faces as if reading their secret.

Most wore old jackets and overcoats, worn and faded. Walking along, they considered the whole world as ordinary as the sidewalk they were on, but they did not have a real foothold on this world. They were preoccupied; yet if they were provoked a little, a kind of curiosity that connected them to a profound meaning in their past surfaced from the depths of their memory banks and appeared, for a moment, on the masklike expressions on their faces. “I wish I could bother them!” Galip thought. “I wish I could tell them the story of the Prince.” The story he had in mind was now brand-new; he felt he had lived through the story himself and remembered it.

Most people on the bridge were carrying plastic bags. He stared at the bags, which had paper sacks, bits of metal, plastic, or newspapers sticking out of them, as if he were seeing plastic bags for the first time, and he assiduously read what was written on them. He was heartened for a moment, having sensed that the words and the letters on the bags signified the “other” or the “real” reality. But just as the meaning in the faces that went by him faded following the moment of brightness, the words and syllables on the plastic bags, after being momentarily suffused with a new meaning, also vanished in turn. Still, Galip kept on reading for quite some time: “… Pudding Shop … Ata Village … Turkmanufac … Dried fruits … it is the hour of … Palaces…”

On a bag that belonged to an old guy who was out fishing, he saw the picture of a stork instead of letters and realized that pictures could be read just as well as letters. He saw a bag with the faces of a pair of happy parents and their son and daughter who regarded the world with hope, on another bag there were a pair of fish, on others were pictures of shoes, maps of Turkey, silhouettes of buildings, cigarette packs, black cats, roosters, horseshoes, minarets, baklava, trees. Obviously they were all signs of a mystery. But what was the mystery? He saw an owl on the bag sitting next to an old woman who sold bird feed for the pigeons in front of the New Mosque. When he realized that this owl was either the same owl as the one in the imprint on the detective novels that Rüya read or its cunningly concealed twin, Galip clearly felt the presence of a “hand” that secretly brought order to things. There it was, another trick perpetrated by the “hand” which must be tipped and exposed; the owl had a secret significance but nobody besides Galip gave two hoots. Even though they were in it up to their ears, buried deep in the secret that had been lost!

So that he could examine the owl more closely, Galip bought a cup of corn from the old bat who looked like a witch, and he scattered the feed for the pigeons. Instantly, a black and ugly mass of pigeons closed in on the feed like an umbrella of wings. The owl on the bag was the very same owl as the one on Rüya’s detective novels. Galip was angry with a pair of parents who were proudly and blithely watching their daughter feed the pigeons because they were unaware of this owl, of this obvious truth, of other signs, of any sign whatsoever, of anything at all. They didn’t have a clue, not even a hint of suspicion. They were oblivious. He imagined he was the protagonist of the detective novel he imagined Rüya was reading, waiting for him to come home. The puzzle that had to be solved was between himself and that covert hand which itself remained hidden in spite of having arranged everything masterfully, pointing to a significance that was top secret.

When he himself happened to be in the vicinity of the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent, it was enough for him to see an apprentice carrying a framed picture of the same mosque made out of tiny beads to conclude that if words, letters, pictures on the plastic bags were signs, so were what they signified. The loud colors in the picture were more real than the mosque itself. Not only were inscriptions, faces, pictures the pieces in the game played by the hidden hand, but so was everything. As soon as he understood this, he realized that the district known as Dungeon Door, where he was walking through a jumble of streets, also had a special significance that nobody was aware of. Patient like someone nearing the end of a crossword puzzle, he felt that everything was about to fall into place.

He sensed that the garden shears he saw in jerry-built stores and on crooked sidewalks in the neighborhood, the screwdrivers ornamented with stars, the
NO PARKING
signs, the tomato-paste tins, the calendars on the walls of cheap restaurants, the Byzantine aqueduct hung with plexiglass letters, the ponderous padlocks on roll-down store shutters, were all signs of the secret meaning. If he wished, he could read these articles and signs as if reading human faces. That was how, having realized that pliers were the sign for “attentiveness,” bottled olives for “patience,” and the contented driver in the billboard advertising tires for “approaching the goal,” he decided he was approaching his goal with attentiveness and patience. Yet all around him were signs which were much more formidable to fathom: telephone wires, a circumcisor’s signboard, traffic signs, detergent boxes, shovels without handles, illegible political slogans, pieces of shattered icicles on the sidewalks, numbers on doors pertaining to the municipal electric services, traffic arrows, pieces of blank paper … They might perhaps be clarified shortly, yet everything was completely messed up, wearisome, and noisy. On the other hand, the protagonists in Rüya’s detective novels lived in a snug and equanimous world determined by a requisite number of clues that the author had presented them.

Even so, the Mosque of Ahi Çelebi consoled him, serving as the sign of a comprehensible fiction. Many years ago, Jelal had written about a dream in which he saw himself in this little mosque in the company of Muhammad and some of the saints. When he’d gone to consult an oracle in the Kasımpaşa district to get his dream interpreted, he was told he would keep writing until the very end of his life. He would have such a career of writing and imagining that he would remember his life as a long journey even if he never stirred out of his house. Galip had figured out much later that the article was an adaptation of a well-known piece by Evliya Çelebi, the historical travel writer.

He went by the Fruit Market, thinking, “Therefore, the first time I read it, the story presented one meaning, then a completely different meaning after the second reading.” He had no doubt that the third and fourth readings of Jelal’s column would each time reveal yet other meanings: Jelal’s stories, even if they signified something else each time, gave Galip the impression that he was on target, going through a series of doors just like the puzzles in children’s magazines. Absentmindedly walking through the jumble of streets in the Market, Galip wished he could instantly be someplace where he could go through all of Jelal’s columns once more.

Just outside the Market, he saw a junk dealer. The dealer had spread a large bedsheet on the sidewalk and put out a series of objects that enthralled Galip, who’d come out of the racket and stench of the marketplace without having arrived at any sort of conclusion: a couple of pipe elbows, old records, a pair of black shoes, a lamp base, a broken pair of pliers, a black telephone, two bedsprings, a mother-of-pearl cigarette holder, a wall clock that wasn’t running, White Russian banknotes, a brass faucet, a figurine carrying quivers which depicted a Roman goddess (Diana?), a picture frame, an old radio, a couple of doorknobs, a candy dish.

Galip named all of them, deliberately enunciating the words, as he examined each one carefully. He felt that what actually made objects enchanting did not reside in the objects themselves but in the way they were being displayed. The elderly dealer had arranged these articles, which could be seen in any junk dealer’s display, four down and four across on the bedsheet, as if it were a great big checkerboard. The objects were equidistant from each other like checkers on a board with the requisite sixty-four squares; they did not touch each other, yet the acuity and the simplicity in their arrangement seemed to be not accidental but deliberate. So much so that Galip immediately thought of vocabulary tests in foreign-language textbooks; on those pages too he’d seen the pictures of sixteen objects, all lined up just like this, which he’d named with nouns in the new language. Galip felt like saying, with similar enthusiasm, “pipe, record, shoe, pliers…”

But what scared him was the definite feeling that the objects had other meanings as well. While he stared at the brass faucet, he thought it signified “brass faucet” as in the vocabulary exercise, but he was excited to sense that the faucet could just as well signify something else. The black telephone on the sheet, in addition to representing the concept of the telephone as in the pages of a foreign-language textbook, denoting that familiar instrument which once plugged in connects us to other voices, also connoted another meaning that made Galip shiver with excitement.

How could he enter the arcane world of secondary meanings and discover the mystery? He felt the thrill of being at the threshold of this realm, but he just couldn’t take the first step in. In Rüya’s detective novels, when the puzzle was solved at the end, while the second realm which had been under wraps was illuminated the first one would now sink into the darkness of oblivion. When around midnight, stuffing her face with the roasted chickpeas from Aladdin’s, Rüya announced, “The murderer turns out to be the retired colonel avenging himself for an insult!” Galip surmised that his wife had already forgotten all the details in the book rife with English butlers, cigarette lighters, dinner tables, porcelain cups, guns, and that she would only remember the new secret meaning of the world that these objects and persons signified. But, at the end of the horribly translated book, the reposited objects, with the help of the hardboiled detective, placed Rüya in another world. Such objects, however, could so far offer Galip no more than the hope for a new world. In an effort to solve the enigma, Galip carefully observed the junk dealer who had arranged these mysterious objects on the sheet, as if to read the meaning in the old guy’s face.

“How much for the telephone?”

“You a buyer?” said the junk dealer, initiating the bargaining procedure guardedly.

Galip was thrown by the unexpected question concerning his identity. A thought flashed through his mind: “See, I too am considered the signpost for something other than myself!” Still, the world he wanted to enter was not this one but another sphere that Jelal had spent his life creating. He felt that Jelal, by naming things and telling stories, had been building the walls and concealing the keys to this world where he had secreted himself. The dealer’s face lit up for a moment with the prospect of making a deal, then it reassumed its former dullness.

“What’s this for?” Galip said, pointing out a simple little lamp base.

“Table leg,” said the dealer, “but some people stick ’em on the ends of curtain cornices. Could make a doorknob too.”

When Galip got to the Atatürk Bridge, he was thinking, “From now on, I will only observe faces.” The brief brightness in the faces that went by on the bridge was for a moment aggrandized in his mind like the dilating question marks in photonovels translated from other languages, then, along with the question, the face was also nullified, having left only a slight trace. Even though he came close to making a connection between the view of the city from the bridge and the cumulative meaning the faces created in his mind, it was a misapprehension. Although it was possible to perceive the city’s old age, its misfortune, its lost splendor, its sorrow and pathos in the faces of the citizens, it was not the symptom of a specifically contrived secret but of a collective defeat, history, and complicity. In the wake of the tugboats, the cold leaden-blue waters of the Golden Horn took on a frightening brown hue.