The Black Book (51 page)

“Four months after the second column on toothpaste,” Galip began, “I did one more on the subject: What was that about?”

“You’d spoken about pretty little girls and boys giving their fathers, uncles, aunts, and stepbrothers ‘goodnight kisses’ before going to bed, their pretty mouths fragrant with minty toothpaste. Wasn’t much of a column, to say the least.”

“Other examples where I talked about Japanese goldfish?”

“Six years ago in an article where you longed for silence and death. A month later you brought back the goldfish when this time you said you sought order and harmony. You often compared aquariums to the TV sets in our houses. You provided us with information ripped off from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the catastrophes that befell the Wakin goldfish for interbreeding. Who translated the stuff for you? Your sister or your nephew?”

“What about the police station?”

“It reminds you of dark blue, darkness, birth certificates, the woes of being a citizen, rusty water pipes, black shoes, starless nights, scowling faces, the metaphysical feeling of motionlessness, misfortune, being a Turk, leaky roofs and, naturally, death.”

“Did the attar, your sundries man, know all that?”

“That and more.”

“And what did the attar ask you?”

“This man, who’d never seen a streetcar and probably would never see one, asked me right off what a horse-drawn Istanbul streetcar smelled like, as opposed to a horseless one. I told him that the real difference was beyond the smell of sweat and horses; it was the smell of motors, oil, and electricity. He asked me if Istanbul electricity had a distinct odor. You hadn’t mentioned it, but he’d read it between the lines. He asked me to describe the smell of newsprint hot off the presses. The answer was, according to your column in winter of 1958: a mixture of quinine, cellar dankness, sulphur, and wine; that is, a heady mixture. Apparently, newsprint loses its smell in the three days it takes to arrive in Kars. The attar’s most difficult question was one on the smell of lilacs. I couldn’t remember you singling out this flower. According to the attar, whose eyes twinkled like an old man recalling sweet memories, you had mentioned the smell of lilacs three times in twenty-five years: One time, in connection with the story of a strange prince who terrorized those around him while he waited to ascend to the throne, you’d said his sweetheart smelled like lilacs. Another time—and this bore repeating—inspired in all likelihood by the daughter of a close relative, you’d written about a little girl who went back to grade school at the end of summer vacation on a sunny but dolorous day in the fall, wearing a freshly ironed smock and a bright ribbon in her hair, saying that it was her
hair
that smelled like lilacs one year, and that her
head
smelled like lilacs the next. Was this a real-life recurrence or a case of the writer cribbing from himself?”

Galip was silent for a while. “I don’t remember,” he finally said, as if waking from a dream. “I remember contemplating the story about the prince, but I don’t remember writing it.”

“The attar remembered. Aside from having a well-developed sense of smell, he was also good at places. Taking off from your columns, not only had he imagined Istanbul as a glut of smells, he knew all the quarters of the city you haunted, loved, cherished cryptically, and deemed mysterious. But he had no idea how close or distant these quarters were to one another. At times I’ve kept an eye out for you at these locations I also know well, thanks to you, but I haven’t bothered to do so lately since your phone number tells me you’re holed up somewhere in the Nişantaşı or Şişli area. I know this will interest you: I told the attar to write to you. But it turns out his nephew who reads your columns aloud to him does not know how to write. The attar could neither read nor write, of course. You’d once written that recognizing the letters only stunted the memory. Shall I tell you how I finally managed drubbing the man, whose knowledge of your work came from listening to it, as our choo-choo train pulled into Erzurum?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Although he remembered all the abstract concepts in your work, he couldn’t visualize their significances at all. For example, he had no idea what the concept of plagiarism or literary appropriation meant. His nephew read him only your column in the paper, and he wasn’t at all curious about the rest. You’d think he imagined that all the writing in the world was done by one person simultaneously. I asked him why you kept harping on the poet Rumi. He had no answer. I asked him, concerning your 1961 column entitled “Mystery of Secret Writing,” how much of it was you and how much of it was Poe. He had an answer: he said all of it was you. I quizzed him on the dilemma of ‘the source of the story and the story of the source,’ which was the turning point in the controversy—the sundries man called it a scrap—you and Neşati got into concerning Bottfolio versus Ibn Zerhani. He said with conviction that the source of everything was letters. He had comprehended nothing. I trounced him.”

“In that scrap,” Galip said, “the argument I put forth to contradict Neşati rested on the notion that letters are the source for everything.”

“But that was Fazlallah’s notion, not Ibn Zerhani’s. After you wrote that
nazire
on ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ you were forced to grab onto Ibn Zerhani to save your bacon. I just happen to know just what you were up to when you wrote those pieces, which was nothing more than making Neşati look bad to his boss and get him kicked off his paper. Initially, after the debate on ‘Is it translation or plagiarism,’ you trapped Neşati, who was green with envy, by irritating him into calling it ‘plagiarism.’ Then you made him appear as if he put Turks down by implying that the East could not create anything original because his argument stemmed from the fact that you plagiarized from Ibn Zerhani and Ibn Zerhani from Bottfolio, and you suddenly went for defending our glorious history and ‘our culture’ and put your readers up to writing to his publisher. And when the miserable Turkish reader, who’s always vigilant for all kinds of New Crusades against the sort of perverts who claim that the ‘great Turkish architect’ Sinan was in fact an Armenian from Kayseri, didn’t lose a moment in deluging the publisher with letters against this degenerate, then poor Neşati, who was drunk with the pleasure of catching your plagiarism, lost his job and his column. He ended up being employed at the same paper as you, although as a lesser writer, where, I hear tell, he’s dug a well of gossip on you. Did you know that?”

“What have I written on wells?”

“That’s a subject that’s so clear and so endlessly extensive that quizzing a loyal reader like me on it isn’t cricket. I won’t mention the literary wells in courtly poetry, or the well where Rumi’s beloved Shams was dumped, or the wells with genies, witches, and ogres from the
Thousand and One Nights
to which you’ve always helped yourself freely, or air shafts in apartment buildings and the bottomless darkness where you tell us we lost our souls. You’ve belabored these themes. How about this? Fall of 1957, you wrote a careful, angry, and sorrowful piece on those sad concrete minarets (you didn’t have much quarrel with stonework minarets) that besiege our cities and our brand-new suburbs like forests of hostile lances. In the last few inconspicuous lines of this piece which went unnoticed—as it goes for all articles that go beyond daily politics and scandal—you mentioned a mosque in the slums with a squat minaret which had a dark and silent dry well in the yard infested with asymmetrical thorns and symmetrical ferns. I realized immediately that what you adroitly implied by your description of the actual well was that, instead of raising our eyes to the heights of concrete minarets, it behooves us to look down into our past’s dark dry wells teeming with snakes and souls, submerged in our collective unconscious. Ten years later, in an article inspired by the Cyclopes and your own pitiful past, you wrote that on an unfortunate night when you were alone, all alone, grappling with the ghosts of the sins on your conscience, it was not accidental but necessary that you had written, in describing the ‘eye’ that belonged to the guilt feelings that hounded you pitilessly for years, that this visual organ stood ‘like a dark well in the middle of the forehead.’”

Was the voice, which Galip imagined belonging to someone with a white collar, worn jacket, and a phantom face, forming these sentences impromptu by virtue of an overactive memory, or was it reading it off a prompter? Galip thought it over. The voice took Galip’s silence as a sign and gave a victorious laugh. Sharing the ends of the same phone cable which went by way of who knew what underground passages and below what hills teeming with Ottoman skulls and Byzantine coins, clinging like black ivy to the walls of old apartment buildings where the plaster was falling off, strung tight like clotheslines between rusty poles and along plane and chestnut trees, he whispered as if confiding a secret with brotherly love instilled by sharing the umbilical cord attached to the same mother: he had much love for Jelal; he had much respect for Jelal; he had much knowledge of Jelal. Jelal didn’t have any doubt on any of this anymore, did he?

“I wouldn’t know,” Galip said.

“In that case, let’s get rid of these black telephones between us,” said the voice. Because the bell on the phone which sometimes rang on its own accord alarmed rather than alerted; because the pitch-black receiver was heavy as a little dumbbell, and when dialed, it grumbled with the squeaky melody of the old turnstiles at the Karaköy–Kadıköy ferryboat dock; because sometimes it connected with numbers at random rather than the numbers dialed. “Get it, Mister Jelal? Give me your address and I’ll be right over.”

Galip hesitated at first like a teacher struck dumb by the wonders performed by a wonder student, and then—astonished that the man’s garden of memory seemed to have no bounds, astonished as well by the flowers that bloomed in the garden of his own memory, and aware of the trap he was gradually falling into—he asked:

“What about nylon stockings?”

“In a piece you wrote in 1958, two years after the time when you were obliged to publish your column not under your own name but under some hapless pseudonyms you came up with, on a hot summer day when you were stressed out with work and loneliness, watching a movie which was halfway through in a Beyoğlu movie theater (the Rüya) where you took refuge from the noonday sun, you wrote that you were startled by a sound you heard nearby through the laughter of Chicago gangsters dubbed into Turkish by pitiful Beyoğlu dubbers, the report of machine guns, and the crash of bottles and glass: somewhere not too far off the long fingernails of a woman were scratching her legs through her nylons. When the first feature was over and the houselights went on, you saw, sitting two rows in front of you, a beautiful stylish mother and her well-behaved eleven-year-old son talking to each other like chums. For a long while you observed their camaraderie, how they carefully listened to each other. In another piece two years later, you’d write that, watching the second feature, you were not listening to the clash of steel blades and storms on the high seas that roared out of the sound system but to the buzz produced by the restless hand with long fingernails traveling on legs that would feed Istanbul’s mosquitoes on summer nights, and that your mind was not on the pirates’ dirty deals on the screen, but on the friendship between the mother and the son. As you revealed in a column you wrote twelve years after that, your publisher had scolded you soon after the publication of the piece with the nylons: Had you no idea that it was dangerous, a very dangerous practice, to focus on the sexuality of a wife and mother? That the Turkish reader would not tolerate it? And that if you wished to survive as a columnist, you had to be careful what you said about married women as well as your writing style?”

“On style? Make it brief, please.”

“For you, style was life. Style, for you, was voice. Style was your thoughts. Style was your real persona you created within it, but this was not one, not two, but three personas…”

“These are?”

“The first voice is what you call ‘my simple persona’: the voice that you reveal to anyone, the one with which you sit down at family dinners and gossip through billows of smoke after dinner. You owe this persona the details of your everyday life. The second voice belongs to the person you wish to be: a mask that you appropriated from admirable personages who, having found no peace in this one, live in another world and are suffused with its mystery. You’d written that you would have holed up in a corner, unable to face life, waiting for death like many an unhappy person if it hadn’t been for your habit of whispering with this ‘hero’ whom you initially wanted to imitate and then become, if it hadn’t been for your habit of repeating, like a senile person reciting the refrains stuck in his mind, the acrostics, the puzzles, parodies, and banter that this hero whispered in your ear. I was in tears reading it. What took you—and me, naturally—into realms unavailable to the first two personas you call ‘the objective and subjective styles’ is the third voice: the dark persona, the dark style! I know even better than you what it was that you wrote on nights when you were too unhappy to be satisfied with imitation and masks; but you know better what it was that you perpetrated, brother mine! We’re meant to understand each other, find one another, and put on disguises together; give me your address.”

“Addresses?”

“Cities are composed of addresses, addresses of letters, just as faces of letters. On Monday, October 12, 1963, you described Kurtuluş, called Tatavla in the old days, an Armenian quarter, as one of your most beloved spots in Istanbul. I read it with pleasure.”

“Reading?”

“On one occasion, in February of 1962, should you require a date, during the tense days when you were preparing for a military coup that would save the nation from poverty, on one of the dark streets in Beyoğlu, you’d seen a gilt-framed large mirror being carried, goodness knows for what strange reason, from one nightclub where belly dancers and jugglers operate to another, which had first cracked, perhaps due to the cold, and then had burst into smithereens right before your eyes; that’s when you’d realized it wasn’t for nothing that the word in our language for the stuff that turns glass into mirror is the same as the word for ‘secret.’ After divulging this moment of insight in one of your columns, you’d said this: Reading is looking in the mirror; those who know the ‘secret’ behind the glass manage to go through the looking glass; and those who have no knowledge of letters will find nothing more in the world other than their own dull faces.”