The Black Book (35 page)

The phone had begun to ring three to four seconds after he opened the door, but Galip still felt apprehensive. What if there was a mechanical connection between the phone and the door, just like those alarm bells that ring ruthlessly in gangster films? The third time he heard the ring, he thought he might run smack into Jelal anxiously hurrying to get the phone in the dark apartment; on the fourth ring, he surmised that there was no one at home, on the fifth that there must be, reasoning that only someone who knew that the place was inhabited would keep ringing so insistently. On the sixth ring, Galip was groping around to locate the light switches, trying to remember the topography of this phantom-like flat in which he had last set foot fifteen years ago, and he was startled when he crashed into something. In the pitch dark, he made for the phone, running into other things and knocking them over. When he at last held the elusive receiver to his ear, his body had found a chair on its own and sat down.

“Hello?”

“So you finally got home!” said a voice he didn’t know at all.

“Yes.”

“Jelal Bey, I’ve been looking for you for days. Sorry to be disturbing you at this hour. But I’ve got to see you as soon as possible.”

“I can’t place your voice.”

“We met years ago at a Republic Day ball. I’d introduced myself to you, Jelal Bey, but I don’t suppose you’d remember it at this date. Later on, I wrote you a couple of letters under pseudonyms that I cannot now recall. One of them put forth a thesis that might bring to light the mystery behind Sultan Abdülhamit’s death. The other one concerned the university student conspiracy commonly known as the trunk murder. I was the one who intimated to you that there was a secret agent involved, and you, putting your sharp intelligence to work, looked into the matter and, having found out, brought it to light in your columns.”

“Yes.”

“Now I have another dossier at hand.”

“Leave it at the editorial offices.”

“But I know you haven’t been there for quite some time. Besides, I don’t know that I trust anyone at the paper where this urgent matter is concerned.”

“All right, in that case, leave it with the doorman.”

“I don’t have your address. The phone company won’t supply your address if all I have is the number. This phone must be under another name. There is no number for Jelal Salik anywhere in the book. There is, however, a listing for Jelalettin Rumi—which must be a pseudonym.”

“Didn’t whoever gave you my number also give out my address?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Who was it?”

“A friend we have in common. I’d rather tell you all about it when I see you. I’ve tried every conceivable ruse. I called your relatives. I talked to your dear aunt. I made trips to some places in Istanbul that I knew from reading your columns that you love—like the streets in Kurtuluş, Cihangir, the Palace Theater—hoping to run into you. Meanwhile, I found out that a team from British TV staying at the Pera Palas Hotel was also looking for you. Did you know that?”

“What’s this dossier about?”

“I’d rather not get into it on the phone. Let me have your address and I’ll be right there. Somewhere in Nişantaşı, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Galip said nonchalantly. “But these matters no longer interest me.”

“Come again?”

“Had you been reading my columns carefully, you’d have known that I’m no longer into this type of thing.”

“No, no, this is subject matter you’d be interested in. You may even want to share it with the British TV people. Go ahead and give me your address.”

“I’m sorry,” Galip said with such cheerfulness that it even astonished him, “but I no longer talk to literature buffs.”

He hung up calmly. When his hand went out instinctively in the dark, he found the switch on the desk lamp next to him and turned it on. The room was lit up with a dull orange light, leading Galip to name the bewilderment and panic that seized him as “the mirage,” which is how he would later remember it.

The room was the exact replica of Jelal’s digs twenty-five or thirty years ago. The furniture, curtains, lamps, their placement, the colors, shadows, and smells were exactly the same. Some of the new articles were simulations of the old ones, bent on tricking Galip into believing that he had not lived through the quarter of a century that had gone by. But when he looked more closely, Galip almost felt convinced that things were not playing tricks on him, and that his life since his childhood had melted away by magic and was gone. The furniture that suddenly emerged out of the dangerous darkness was not new. The spell that made things seem new was the way these objects, which he would’ve thought had grown old, fallen apart, and perhaps even ceased to exist like his own memories, had suddenly reappeared after so many years wearing the same guise as when he’d last seen them and yet had all but forgotten. It was as if the old tables, the faded curtains, the dirty ashtrays, and the tuckered-out armchairs had not succumbed to the fate and the fictions dictated by Galip’s life and memories but, after a certain date (the day Uncle Melih and his family had arrived from Izmir and moved into the flat), had rebelled against the fate conceived for them and found other means of realizing their own private worlds. Once more, Galip figured out apprehensively that everything had been arranged so that it was identical to the way it had been when Jelal and his mother had lived here forty years ago and then when, as a cub reporter more than thirty years ago, he began to live here alone.

Everything remained the same in the orange light where Galip had left them behind, hoping not to remember them: the same old walnut table with the feet that resembled lion claws, the way it stood the same distance from the windows hung with the same pistachio-colored curtains, the same human-shaped stain made by hair grease and hair-dressing gunk on the headrest of the armchair which was still upholstered by the same material from Sümerbank Textiles (the same ferocious greyhounds chasing the same hapless gazelles with the same blood thirst as thirty years ago in a forest of purple leaves), the patience of the English setter which seemed to have stepped out of an English flick sitting in the copper dish in the dusty curio cabinet to watch the same old world, the same way the nonworking watches, the cups, and the nail scissors stood on the radiator. “There are certain things that we fail to remember, but there are other things that we don’t even remember having failed to remember,” Jelal had written in one of his recent columns. “They ought to be retrieved!” Galip recalled how, after Rüya’s family moved in and Jelal was moved out of the flat, the stuff in here had gradually changed locations, got worn or been replaced, or vanished into a never-never land without leaving any traces in people’s memories. When the phone rang again he was certain, as he reached for the all-too-familiar receiver from where he sat in the “old” easy chair, still wearing his coat, that he could imitate Jelal’s voice without even being aware that he was doing it.

The same voice was on the phone. Heeding Galip’s request, this time he introduced himself by name instead of through his reminiscences: Mahir Ikinci. The name had no association to faces or persons in Galip’s mind.

“They are organizing a military coup. A small junta in the Army. It’s a religiously oriented group, a brand-new sect. They believe in the Messiah. They think the time has come. What’s more, they’ve been inspired by your stories.”

“I’ve had no dealings with such nonsense.”

“Yes, you have, Jelal Bey; yes, you have. You don’t remember it now, or don’t want to, having lost your memory, as you say, or else because you refuse to remember. Take a good look at your old pieces, read them well, and you will remember.”

“I won’t remember.”

“You will too. From what I know about you, I’d say you are not someone who can sit unfazed on his behind when he gets a tip about a military coup.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not myself, even.”

“I’ll be right over. I’ll get you to remember your past, your lost memories. At the end, you will agree with me and go at it hammer and tongs.”

“I would like to, but I won’t be seeing you.”

“But I will see you.”

“If you can get hold of my address. I don’t go out anymore.”

“Look here: the Istanbul phone book has three hundred thousand subscribers. Since I have an idea of what the first digit is, I can scan rapidly five thousand numbers every hour. This means that within five days I’ll have your address as well as that pseudonym I’m so curious about.”

“All in vain,” Galip said, trying to sound confident. “This happens to be an unlisted number.”

“You really have a thing for pseudonyms. I’ve been reading you for years. You’re a sucker for pseudonyms, pettifoggery, imposture. I bet you’d just as soon have fun making up a pseudonym as fill out an application to keep your number out of the phone book. I’ve already checked out some of the likely pseudonyms I bet you’d go for.”

“And what might they be?”

The guy ran off at the mouth making a list. After Galip hung up and unplugged the phone, he realized all these names he had listened to one by one were likely to be deleted from his memory without leaving a trace or any associations. He made a list of the names on a piece of paper he took out of his coat pocket. It was so odd and confounding for Galip to come up against the existence of another reader who was hooked on Jelal’s columns and remembered them even better than himself that his body seemed to have lost its reality. He sensed, although it was repellent, that he could be bonded to this diligent reader through a feeling of brotherhood. If only he could sit down with him and discuss Jelal’s old pieces, the chair where he sat in this surreal room would’ve achieved a more profound significance.

It was before Rüya and Uncle Melih and Aunt Suzan showed up, when he was six years old, that he began to slip out of Grandma’s to sneak up to Jelal’s bachelor pad—which his parents didn’t much condone—to listen to the Sunday afternoon soccer game on the radio together with him (Vasıf nodding as if he could hear). Galip used to sit in this very chair watching Jelal write the next installment of the series on wrestlers which a persnickety colleague of his had left unfinished, admiring the speed with which Jelal typed as he smoked a cigarette. When his parents allowed him to go up on cold winter evenings while Jelal was still living here with Uncle Melih’s family before he got himself kicked out, Galip really went to watch Aunt Suzan and the beautiful Rüya who was every bit as incredible as her mom, as he’d come to discover, rather than listen to Uncle Melih’s tales of Africa. It was in this chair that he sat across from Jelal who kept making light of Uncle Melih’s stories using his eyes and eyebrows. During the following months, when Jelal suddenly disappeared and the altercations between Grandma and Uncle Melih made Grandma cry, and the rest of them fought in Grandma’s apartment over flats, property, estate, and inheritance, it was here in this chair that Rüya sat dangling her legs when, somebody having said, “Send the kids upstairs,” the two of them were left alone among the silent objects, with Galip watching her with awe. That was twenty-five years ago.

Galip quietly sat in the chair for a long time. Then, in order to gather evidence concerning the location where Rüya and Jelal were hiding out, he began a painstaking search through the other rooms in the phantom apartment, where Jelal had re-created the memorabilia of his own childhood and youth. Yet after two hours of walking around the rooms and the hallways in the phantom apartment, and going through the closets with curiosity, more like an aficionado thrilled, enamored, and awed to be visiting the first museum devoted to his pet subject than the reluctant detective looking for his absconded wife’s tracks, these were the conclusions he came to after his initial search:

From the pair of coffee cups on the end table he had knocked over in the dark, Galip deduced that Jelal had people visit here. Since the fragile cups had been broken, tasting the thin layer of grounds in the bottom (Rüya took her coffee with a lot of sugar) had not yielded any conclusion. The date on the earliest edition of the
Milliyet
which had piled up behind the door indicated that Jelal had been to the flat on the day Rüya had disappeared. The text of the column entitled “The Day the Bosphorus Dries Up” had been corrected with a green ballpoint pen in Jelal’s usual angry scrawl and placed next to the Remington typewriter. Neither in the bedroom closet nor in the coat closet next to the door was there any evidence that Jelal had gone on a trip, or that he no longer lived here, or that he did. Considering his blue-striped pajamas, the fresh mud on his shoes, the navy-blue overcoat he wore during the current season, his cold-weather vests, the exorbitant quantity of underwear he owned (Jelal had confessed in one of his old columns that, like many a man who comes into money in middle age after going through childhood and youth in privation, he had contracted the disease of buying more undershirts and shorts than he could possibly use), the place looked like it belonged to someone who might momentarily return from work and immediately resume his usual life.

Perhaps it was difficult to tell to what extent the decor of the old place had been simulated by considering details like bedsheets and towels, but, obviously, the design in the other rooms was also dependent on the “phantom abode” theme carried out in the living room. So, what got reproduced was the same child’s blue bedroom walls that remained from Rüya’s childhood, and the skeleton of the replica of the bed that had once been covered under Jelal’s mother’s sewing materials, the dress patterns and imported European fabrics brought over by Şişli and Nişantaşı socialites along with fashion magazines and clipped photographs. If smells had pooled in some corners replete with their associative powers which could reproduce the past, it was easy to understand that what gave them totality was always the presence of some visual material on the scene. Galip came to the realization that smells can only come back to life in the presence of the objects that surround them when he approached the nifty daybed that had once been Rüya’s, and he smelled the scent of the old Puro soap mixed with the now defunct Yorgi Tomatis brand cologne once used by Uncle Melih. In reality, nowhere in the room was there the drawer in which pencils and coloring books were kept as well as the brightly illustrated books sent to Rüya from Izmir or bought in the Beyoğlu stores and at Aladdin’s, nor any soap around Rüya’s bed to give off the familiar smell, nor any fake bottles of Pe-Re-Ja brand cologne, nor any mint-flavored chewing gum.