The Black Book (39 page)

Galip reasoned that Jelal had spent more time on the column than it appeared, based on some notes Jelal had made in his journal and the map of Damascus in the box where he kept ticket stubs from old soccer games (Turkey 3–Hungary 1) and old movies (
Scarlet Street, Going Home
). On the map, the course of Rumi’s investigations in Damascus had been traced with a green ballpoint pen.

Long after it got dark, Galip found a map of Cairo and a 1934 City Directory of the Istanbul Municipality in a box where Jelal kept the odds and ends which he’d got hold of during the same time period when he had published a column devoted to the detective stories in the
Thousand and One Nights
(“Mercury Ali,” “The Clever Thief,” etc.). Just as he expected, a green ballpoint had marked arrows on the Cairo map, working in the
Thousand and One Nights
stories. He saw that the maps in the City Directory had also been marked with arrows, if not with the same pen then in the same green ink. Tracking down the adventures of the green arrows on the confusing maps in the Istanbul directory, he had an impression that he was seeing the map of his own passage throughout the city these past few days. In order to convince himself that he was seeing things, he reminded himself the green arrow had stopped at commercial buildings where he had never set foot, mosques he’d never entered, and steep streets he’d never climbed, but he had in fact stopped off at adjacent commercial buildings, mosques that were nearby, and streets that went up the same hills: Which was to say that all Istanbul, no matter how it was marked on the map, was teeming with folks who were on the same trip!

So, he put the maps of Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul side by side in the way Jelal had anticipated years ago in a column inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. To do this, he had to cut the bound pages of the City Directory with a razor blade he found in the bathroom on which was the hairy evidence that it had run across Jelal’s beard. When he first put the maps together, he couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the pieces of lines and signs that weren’t the same size. Then he pressed the maps over each other on the glass in the living-room door, just the way he and Rüya had done when they were children to trace a picture out of a magazine, and studied them against the light of the lamp on the other side of the door. The only thing that he could barely make out in the maps spread out on top of one other was the coincidental wrinkle-laden face of a terribly old person.

He stared at the face for such a long time that he began to think he had long been well acquainted with it. The feeling of familiarity and the quietness of the night gave Galip a sense of peace, a feeling of serenity that in turn inspired a sense of self-confidence, self-confidence of long standing that had been carefully prepared for—and that was preordained for someone else. Galip sincerely thought that Jelal was guiding him. Jelal had written extensively about faces, but all that came to Galip’s mind was some of his sentences concerning the inner peace Jelal felt looking at the faces of some female foreign movie stars. That’s how come he decided to take a look at the box of film criticism Jelal had written as a young man.

In his movie stuff, Jelal talked with pain and longing about some American movie stars’ faces as if these were translucent marble sculptures, or the silken surface of the invisible side of a planet, or deft tales from distant lands that are reminiscent of dreams. As he read these lines, Galip felt that the love interest that he and Jelal had in common was not so much Rüya and fiction but the harmony of this longing, reminiscent of barely audible strains of some pleasant music: He loved what he discovered, in concert with Jelal, reading maps, faces, and words; but he also feared it. He wanted to delve further into the pieces on film in order to apprehend the music, but he hesitated and stopped: Jelal never spoke about Turkish actors’ faces in the same vein; Turkish actors’ faces reminded Jelal of half-century-old telegrams in which the meaning, as well as the code, had been lost and forgotten.

Now he knew all too well why the optimism that had enveloped his whole body while he was eating his breakfast and settling down at the desk had abandoned him. Jelal’s image had changed totally in his mind after the eight hours reading, and he himself had also become someone else. In the morning when he had good faith in the world, naïvely thinking that by working patiently he could solve the basic mystery the world kept from him, he had felt no longing to be someone else at all. But now, when the world’s mysteries got away from him, when the objects and texts in this room he thought he knew were transformed into incomprehensible signs from an alien world and into the maps of faces he couldn’t identify, Galip wanted to break loose from the person who was stuck with this desperate and tiresome outlook. When he began reading the columns relating to some of Jelal’s recollections in order to find the final clue which might explain Jelal’s relationship to Rumi and the Mevlevi order, it was dinnertime in the city and in the windows the blue light from the TV sets had started to reflect on Teşvikiye Avenue.

Jelal had been interested in the Mevlevi order not only because he knew his readers would themselves be immersed in the subject, prompted by an incomprehensible sense of devotion, but also because his stepfather had been a Mevlevi. Unable to make ends meet as a dressmaker after she was divorced from Uncle Melih who took his own sweet time coming home from Europe and then North Africa, Jelal’s mother had married this man who attended a Mevlevi retreat next to a Byzantine cistern, in the district of Yavuz Sultan, and Galip had become aware of the fact through the man’s existence as a hunchback lawyer “who speaks through his nose” and goes to a secret ritual, described by Jelal with secular anger and Voltaire-like satire. Reading that during the time he lived under his stepfather’s roof Jelal earned money working as an usher at the movies, that he gave and took beatings in fights that often broke out in the dark crowded theaters, that he sold soda pop during the intermission, and that in order to increase the pop sales, he’d made a deal with the
çörek
maker getting him to put lots of salt and pepper in his braided buns, Galip identified with the usher, the brawling audience, the
çörek
maker, and finally—good reader that he was—with Jelal himself.

So, reading a piece containing Jelal’s reminiscences of the days after he left his job at the theater in Şehzadebaşı, working for a bookbinder whose shop smelled of glue and paper, a sentence that caught Galip’s eye seemed to be a prediction that had been preconceived in relation to his present situation. It was one of those mediocre sentences employed by enthusiastic autobiographers who invent for themselves a sad but praiseworthy past: “I read whatever I could get my hands on,” Jelal had written, and that’s when Galip realized that Jelal was not speaking about the days he spent at the binder’s shop but about Galip himself who read whatever he could lay his hands on concerning Jelal.

Before he went out at midnight, each time Galip thought of that sentence he considered it proof that Jelal knew what he, Galip, was up to at that very moment. So, he considered his past five days of ordeals not as his personal quest on Jelal and Rüya’s trail but as part of a game that Jelal (and perhaps also Rüya) had constructed for his benefit. Since this idea fell within the bounds of Jelal’s desire to exercise remote control over people tacitly—by setting up small traps, ambiguities, and fictions—Galip had a notion that his investigations in this living museum were signs not of his own freedom but of Jelal’s.

He wanted to get out of the place as soon as possible, not only because he could no longer bear this suffocating feeling or his eyes aching from so much reading but because he couldn’t find anything to eat in the kitchen. He took Jelal’s navy-blue topcoat out of the coat closet and put it on so that Ismail the doorman and his wife Kamer, if they were still up, would sleepily imagine that the topcoat and legs they observed exiting the building belonged to Jelal. He went down the stairs without turning on the light and saw that no light seeped out of the doorman’s ground-level window through which he could observe the outside door. Since he didn’t have a key for the outside door, he couldn’t secure it properly. He was stepping out on the sidewalk when a momentary shiver went through him: he imagined the person he’d been avoiding thinking about, the man on the phone, might just materialize out of some dark corner. He fantasized that it was not the dossier containing proof of the conspiracy for a new military coup that was in the hands of this man, who didn’t seem unfamiliar at all, but something more horrible and deadly. But there was no one in the street. He envisioned the man on the phone following him around in the street. No, he was not emulating anyone but himself. “I call it like it is,” he said to himself as he went by the police station. The cops on watch in front of the station, carrying machine guns, regarded him suspiciously out of sleepy eyes. In order to avoid reading the letters in the posters on the walls, on billboards with neon lights that sizzled, and in political graffiti, Galip looked down as he walked along. All the restaurants and the short-order counters in Nişantaşı were closed.

Much later, after walking for a long time under the buckeyes, cypresses, and plane trees along the sidewalks where the melting snow still dripped down the spouts making sad sounds, listening to his own footsteps and the racket from local coffeehouses, and after he had stuffed himself full of soup, chicken, and crumpets in syrup at a pudding shop in Karaköy, he bought fruit at an all-night greengrocer’s, bread and cheese at a short-order counter, and returned to the Heart-of-the-City Apartments.

Chapter Twenty-three

THE STORY OF THOSE WHO CANNOT TELL STORIES

“Aye!” (quoth the delighted reader) “this is sense, this is genius! This I understand and admire! I have thought the very same a hundred times myself!” In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him.

—
COLERIDGE
,
Essays on His Own Times

No, my most salient piece on deciphering the mystery in which our entire lives are buried, without our so much as being aware of it, is not the investigation in which I revealed, sixteen months ago to date, the incredible similarities in the maps of Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul. (Those who wish can edify themselves, by referring to that particular column, that the Darbal Mustakim, the Halili Market, and our Covered Bazaar are each in the shape of
M,
and discover the identity of the face that this
M
calls to mind.)

No, my most “profound” story is not the one I wrote once upon a time with similar enthusiasm about the two-hundred-and-twenty-year-old remorse experienced by poor Sheikh Mahmut, who sold the secrets of his order to a European spy in return for immortality. (Those who wish can check that particular column to find out how the Sheikh, in an effort to find a hero willing to relieve him of his immortality, tried to con warriors into assuming his identity as they lay wounded on battlefields bleeding to death.)

As I recall what I used to write about Beyoğlu thugs, poets who lose their memories, stories of magicians, female singers with double identities, and the mortally stricken lovelorn, I realize that I’ve always skipped over a subject, failing to hit it or skirting around it with a stiffness that’s strange, but which is of great significance to me today. But I am not the sole perpetrator! I’ve been writing for thirty years, and, if not quite as many, I’ve devoted nearly the same number of years to reading; but I have never come across any writer, neither in the East nor the West, who drew attention to the truth I am about to tell you.

So, as you read what I am about to write, please visualize the faces as I describe them. (Besides, what is reading but animating the writer’s words inside the mind’s silent cinema?) On your mind’s silver screen, project a sundries store in Eastern Anatolia where herbs, remedies, and notions are sold. On a cold winter afternoon when it gets dark early, seeing how there is not much action downtown, the barber across the street whose apprentice is minding the store, a retired old-timer, the barber’s younger brother, and a local customer who’s there more for the company than to do his shopping, have all gathered around the stove, making idle conversation. They’re talking of their army days, looking through newspapers, gossiping, and at times there is laughter too, but among them there’s someone who’s upset that he talks very little and has a hard time getting people to listen: the barber’s brother. He too has quite a few jokes and stories to tell, but although he’s aching for it, he just doesn’t have the gift of gab or the knack of making himself shine. The one time all afternoon he’s made an attempt to tell a story, the others interrupted him without even being conscious of it. Now, please visualize the expression on the barber’s brother’s face when his story is interrupted in the middle.

Next, please imagine an engagement party at the home of an Istanbul doctor’s family that has become Westernized but is not rich. At some point, several of the guests who have invaded the house gather casually in the room of the girl who’s getting engaged, around the bed piled with coats. Among them is a beautiful and charming girl and two fellows who are interested in her. One of the fellows is not much to look at, nor terribly bright, but he’s gregarious and talkative. Consequently, the older men in the room as well as the beautiful girl listen to his stories, pay him attention. Now, picture, if you will, the face of the other young man who’s brighter and more sensitive than the chatterbox but cannot get people to listen to him.

Now, please imagine three sisters, who have all been married within the past two years, having a get-together at their mother’s two months after the wedding of the youngest sister. In the home of a modest merchant where there’s the tick-tocking of a huge wall clock and the light clicks of an impatient canary, as the four women are all having their tea sitting in the gray afternoon light, the youngest, who has always been the most vivacious and talkative one, does such a marvelous job in telling about her two months of experimentation with marriage, she has such a way with words and such a sense of comedy, that the oldest and most beautiful sister wistfully considers the possibility, although she’s been through similar situations many times by now, that there is perhaps something missing in her husband and her life. Now, picture, if you please, this melancholy face.