The Black Book (49 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
“You know very well,” said Galip, “that ten to fifteen politically motivated murders are committed every day out on the street.”
“Those are not politically but spiritually motivated assassinations. Besides, what’s it to Jelal if pseudo-Sufis, pseudo-Marxists, and pseudo-fascists waste each other? No one is interested in him anymore. By hiding out, he’s put out an invitation for death, just so that we’re led to believe he’s someone who’s important enough to assassinate. During the heyday of the Democratic Party, we used to have this nice, polite, but yellow writer who has since passed away; he used pseudonyms to write letters to the press prosecutor every day, denouncing himself, so that he could get prosecuted and attract attention. If that weren’t enough, he’d claim that we were the ones who wrote the incriminating letters. You get it? Along with his memory, Mister Jelal has purloined his past, which was the only tie he had to his country. It is no wonder he can no longer write anything.”
“He was the one who sent me here,” Galip said. He produced the articles out of his pocket. “He asked me to hand in his new columns.”
“Let’s see them.”
While the old columnist read the three articles without taking off the dark glasses, Galip noticed that the volume in Arabic script that stood open on the desk was a translation of Chateaubriand’s
Mémoires d’outre-tombe.
The old writer gestured to summon a tall person who walked out of the editor’s office.
“Mister Jelal’s new columns,” he told him. “Still the same interest in showing off, still the same…”
“Let’s send them down to be typeset immediately,” the tall man said. “We’d been considering running an old column.”
“I’m going to be delivering his new pieces for a while,” Galip said.
“What’s the idea of disappearing?” said the tall man. “He has lots of people looking for him these days.”
“Apparently, the two of them put on disguises at night,” the old writer said, pointing toward Galip with his nose. After the tall man left smiling, he turned to Galip. “You go back in the haunted streets, don’t you? In mosques with broken minarets, ruins, vacant houses, abandoned dervish lodges, wearing strange costumes, masks, these glasses, looking for dirty deals, weird mysteries, and ghosts among swindlers and dope fiends, right? Mister Galip, my son, you’ve changed a great deal since I saw you last. Your face is pale; your eyes are sunk; you’ve become someone else. Istanbul nights are endless … A ghost whose guilty transgressions prevent sleep … Say what?”
“I’ll just take those glasses, sir, and run along.”
On personal style: writing necessarily begins by imitating other writing. Don’t children also begin speech by virtue of imitating others?
—
TAHIR-ÜL MEVLEVI
I looked in the mirror and read my face. The mirror was a tranquil ocean and my face sallow paper inscribed with an ink that was sea-green. Back then, whenever I had a blank look on my face, “My darling,” your mother used to say—your beautiful mother, that is to say, my aunt—“your face is white as a sheet.” I had a blank look because I was fearful of what was written on my face without me knowing it; I had a blank look because I feared not finding you where I took my leave of you—at the same place where I left you among old tables, tired chairs, faded lamps, newspapers, curtains, cigarettes. In winter, evening fell as quickly as the dark. Once it was dark and doors were closed and lights went on, I’d imagine the corner where you sat back behind our door: on different floors when we were young, behind the same door when we grew up.
Reader, dear reader, the reader who has understood that I’m talking about a girl who was related to me and lived under the same roof: when you read this, make sure to put yourself in my place and pick up on my signals. For I know when I talk about myself, I am also talking about you, and you too know that I am bringing my own recollections to bear when I tell your story.
I looked in the mirror and read my face. My face was the Rosetta stone I had deciphered in my dream. My face was a broken tombstone minus the carved turban that was once required on a proper Moslem headstone. My face was a mirror made of skin where the reader beheld himself; we breathed through the pores in unison: the two of us, you and I, our cigarette smoke thick in our living room full of the novels you devoured, the motor of the fridge droning woefully in the dark kitchen, light from the lampshade the color of a paperback cover and your skin falling on my guilty fingers and your long legs.
I was the resourceful and melancholic hero in the book you read; I was the explorer who in the company of his guide speeds along marble stones, tall columns and dark rocks, climbing up stairs that lead up the seven heavens replete with stars, toward those condemned to a fretful life underground; I was the hard-boiled detective who calls out to his sweetheart on the other end of the bridge across the abyss, “I am you!” and who, thanks to the writer’s nepotism, detects the trace of poison in the ashtray … And you, Rüya, my dream, impatiently and wordlessly, would turn the page. I committed murders of passion, I crossed the Euphrates River on my horse, I got buried under pyramids, I bumped off cardinals: “So tell me, what’s the book about?” You were a settled-down housewife and I the husband who comes home in the evening: “Oh, nothing.” As the last bus of the night went by in all its emptiness, the easy chairs we sat in jiggled across from each other. You held the paperback book, and I the newspaper I couldn’t manage to read, asking you: “If I were the hero, would you love me then?” “Don’t talk nonsense!” The books you read talked about night’s merciless silence; I knew all about the mercilessness of silence.
I thought to myself, her mother was right; my face has remained white: with five letters on it. On the large horse in the alphabet book it said
HORSE
, B for Branch, two D’s for Dad. Papa in French. Mom, uncle, aunt, kin. It turns out, there was no mountain called Kaf, nor a snake encircling it. I sped along the commas, stopped at periods, expressed surprise at exclamation marks! The world of books and maps was so amazing! The ranger called Tom Mix lived in Nevada. Here’s one about the Texas hero, Pecos Bill, in Boston; Black-Boy swashbuckles in Central Asia; Thousand and One Faces, Rummy, Roddy, Batman. Aladdin, please Aladdin, is the 125th issue of
Texas
out yet? Wait a minute, Grandma would say, snatching the comics out of our hands. Wait! If the last issue of that nasty comic book isn’t out yet, I’ll tell you a story myself. She’d tell it, her cigarette between her lips. The two of us, you and I, climbed Mount Kaf, plucked the apple off the tree, slid down the beanstalk, went down chimneys, went sleuthing. Besides us, Sherlock Holmes was the next best sleuth, then came White Feather who was Pecos Bill’s sidekick, then Hawk Mehmet’s friend Lame Ali. Reader, dear reader, are you tracking down my letters? I knew nothing about it, I had no idea, but it turns out my face was a map all along. What happened then? you asked, sitting in the chair across from Grandma, dangling your feet that didn’t quite reach the floor. And then what, Grandma? What then?
Then, much later, years later, when I was the husband who came home tired from work, I took out of my briefcase the magazine I’d just bought at Aladdin’s, and you snatched it and sat in the same chair, deliberately as always, dangling—my God!—your legs. I’d wear my usual blank look, asking myself fearfully: What goes on in her mind? What is the hidden mystery in the secret garden of her mind which is forbidden to me? Taking clues from your shoulder, where your long hair flowed down, and from the color-illustrated magazine, I’d attempt solving the secret that made you dangle your legs, that mystery in the garden of your mind: skyscrapers in New York, fireworks in Paris, handsome revolutionaries, determined millionaires (turn the page). Airplanes with swimming pools, superstars wearing pink ties, universal geniuses, the latest bulletins (turn the page). Hollywood starlets, rebellious singers, international princes and princesses (turn the page). Local news: two poets and three critics hold a discussion on the benefits of reading.
I’d still be unable to solve the mystery, but you, after many pages and hours, past the time when hungry packs of dogs went by our place late at night, you would have completed the crossword puzzle: Sumerian goddess of health: Bo; a valley in Italy: Po; symbol of tellurium: Te; a musical note: Re; a river that flows up: Alphabet, I think; a mountain that doesn’t exist in the valley of letters: Kaf; a magical word: Listen; theater of the mind: Rüya, a dream, my dream, my Rüya, whom I see before I sleep and dream of as I sleep; the handsome hero in the picture: you always came up with it, I’d never do. “Shall I get my hair cut?” you’d ask, raising your head from the magazine in the stillness of the night, half of your face in the light, the other half a dark mirror, but I’d never know whether you were asking me, or the handsome, famous hero in the center of the puzzle. For a moment, dear reader, I’d go blank again, very blank!
I could never convince you why I believed in a world without heroes. I could never convince you why those pitiful writers who invent the heroes are themselves no heroes. I could never convince you that the people whose photos you saw in the magazines are of a different breed. I could never convince you that you had to be content with an ordinary life. I could never convince you that it was necessary for me to have a place in that ordinary life.
Of all the monarchs of whom I have ever heard, the one who comes to my mind, nearest to the true spirit of God was the Caliph Haroun of Baghdad, who as you know had a taste for disguise.
—
ISAK DINESEN
, “The Deluge at Norderney,”
Seven Gothic Tales
When Galip came out of the
Milliyet
building wearing the dark glasses, he didn’t start out for his office but for the Covered Bazaar. Going past stores that sold tourist articles and walking across the courtyard at the Mosque of Divine-Radiance-of-the-Ottomans, he suddenly felt so sleepy that Istanbul appeared to be an entirely different city. The leather handbags, meerschaum pipes, coffee grinders he saw in the Covered Bazaar didn’t seem like stuff that belonged to a city that mirrored the denizens who’d lived there thousands of years; they were frightening signs of an incomprehensible country where millions of people had been temporarily exiled. “The odd thing is,” Galip thought to himself, getting lost in the Bazaar’s haphazard arcades, “having read the letters in my face, I can believe in all optimism that I can now be totally myself.”
In the row of slipper shops, he was ready to believe what had changed was not the city but himself; yet after reading the letters in his face, he’d become so convinced he comprehended the city’s mystery that he just couldn’t believe the city was still the one he had known. Looking in the window of a rug store, he experienced a feeling that he’d seen the rugs on display before, that he had stepped on them with his own muddy shoes and worn slippers, that he was well acquainted with the rug dealer who eyed him suspiciously as he sat sipping his coffee in front of the store, and that he knew, as he did his own life, the store’s history full of shell games and small-time swindles as well as the stories it could tell, which smelled like dust. He had the same experience looking in the showcases of a jeweler, and at the antique and shoe stores. After hastily skipping a couple more arcades, he imagined that he knew all the stuff sold in the Covered Bazaar down to the copper ewers and the balance scales with pans, and that he was familiar with all the salesclerks waiting for customers as well as all the people walking in the arcades. Istanbul was all too familiar; the city held no secrets from Galip.
Feeling at ease, he walked around the arcades as in a dream. For the first time in his life, the gewgaws Galip saw in the windows and the faces he came across seemed as strange as his dreams and, at the same time, as familiar and reassuring as a noisy family dinner. He went by the brilliantly lit jewelry store windows, thinking that the peace he felt was related to the secret signified by the letters he’d read on his face in terror, yet he didn’t want to think about the poor sad sack he was in his former life whom he’d left behind after reading the letters. What made the world a mysterious place was the presence of a second person one sheltered inside oneself, with whom one lived together like a twin. When, after going past the Cobblers’ Venue where idle salesclerks loafed in the doorways, Galip saw bright postcards of Istanbul displayed in the entrance of a small shop, he decided he’d left his twin behind long ago: these postcards were so inundated with the familiar, stale, and clichéd images of Istanbul that, studying the common and well-known scenes of Municipal Lines ferries docking at the Galata Bridge, chimneys of the Topkapı Palace, the Tower of Leander, and the Bosphorus Bridge, Galip felt assured that the city could hold no mystery from him. But he lost the feeling as soon as he entered the narrow streets of the Bedesten, the heart of the old market, where the bottle-green windows of the stores reflected each other. “Someone is following me,” he thought apprehensively.
There was no one in the vicinity to arouse his suspicion, but soon Galip was taken over by the premonition of an impending catastrophe. He walked briskly. At the Calpac-Makers’ Venue, he made a right, walked along the length of the street and left the bazaar. He was about to go through the secondhand bookstores at full steam but when he got to the Alif Bookstore, the name he’d never given a second thought to all these years suddenly seemed like a sign. What was surprising was not the fact that the store’s name was “alif,” which was the first letter in
Allah
and, according to the Hurufis, the origin of the alphabet and the universe, but that the letter “alif” above the door had been written in Latin letters as F. M. Üçüncü had prescribed. Trying to view this not as a meaningful sign but as a common occurrence, Galip caught sight of Master Sheikh Muammer’s store. The fact that the Zamani sheikh’s bookstore was closed—a store which had once been frequented by poor pitiful widows from remote neighborhoods and miserable American billionaires—struck Galip as the sign of a mystery still hidden in the city rather than as a consequence of commonplace facts like the venerable sheikh not wanting to go out on such a cold day or his being dead. “If I’m still seeing signs in the city,” he thought, going past piles and piles of translated detective novels and interpretations of the Koran which the book dealers left in front of the stores, “it means that I still haven’t learned what the letters on my face have taught me.” But it wasn’t the real reason: every time he thought about being followed, his legs speeded up on their own, and the city was transformed from a tranquil place full of familiar signs and objects into a dreadful realm rife with unknown dangers and mysteries. Galip realized that if he walked faster, he’d shake whoever was shadowing him and shed the disquieting feeling of mystery.
