Authors: Orhan Pamuk
The Black Book (53 page)
Much later, long after Galip had pulled the phone cord out of the jack and searched through Jelal’s notebooks, old costumes, closets, and worked like a somnambulist looking for his memories, lying in Jelal’s bed wearing his pajamas and listening to night noises in Nişantaşı, he understood once more, as he fell into a long and deep sleep, that the capital aspect of sleep was—aside from forgetting the heartbreaking distance between who a person was and who he believed he could someday become—peacefully scrambling together all that he’d heard and all that he hadn’t, all that he’d seen and all that he hadn’t, all that he knew and all that he did not.
THE STORY GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
The two of them being together,
Reflection of the reflection entered the mirror.
—
ŞEYH GALIP
I dreamed I had finally become the person I wished to be all these years. I was sleeping with the weariness of sorrow in the middle of the journey of our life we call a dream,
rüya,
in a dark wood of high-rises in a muddy city where the faces are even gloomier than the gloomy streets, when I came upon you. For the duration of this dream, or some other story, it seemed as if you’d love me even if I didn’t manage becoming someone else; it seemed as if it was necessary that I accept myself just as I am with the same resignation I feel looking at my passport picture; it seemed like it was useless struggling to be in someone else’s shoes. It seemed as if the dark streets and terrifying buildings which stooped over us parted as we walked by, that our passage gave meaning to shops and sidewalks along our way.
How many years has it been since you and I were startled to discover the magical game we would so often come across in our lives? It was the day before a religious holiday when our mothers led us to the children’s wear section at a clothing store (back in those wonderful times when we didn’t yet have to go to separate women’s and men’s departments); there, in a semilit corner of the store which was more boring than the most boring religion class, we found ourselves caught in between two full-length mirrors and observed how our reflections multiplied and got smaller and smaller as they went on into infinity.
Two years after that, we were making fun of the kids we knew who’d sent in their pictures to the page called “Friends of Animals Club” in
Children’s Week,
where each week we would read the columns on “Great Inventors” quietly to ourselves, when we noticed on the back cover the picture of a girl reading the magazine we were holding in our hands; and, when we examined the magazine the girl held in her hand, we realized the pictures had multiplied inside each other: the girl on the cover of the magazine that we held was holding the magazine on the cover of which the girl held the magazine on the cover of which the girl was holding the magazine who was the same redheaded girl and the same
Children’s Week
that got incrementally smaller and smaller.
Later, when we were even taller and had drifted away from each other, I saw the same thing on a jar of black-olive paste that had recently come on the market, which, since it didn’t get served in our flat, was available to me only at your breakfast table on Sunday mornings. The label on the jar, promos for which ran on the radio—“Wow, I see you’re having caviar!” “Oh no, it’s Exceptional Brand black-olive paste”—showed a perfect happy family where the mother, father, son, and daughter were sitting at their breakfast table. I showed you the jar that sat on the table pictured on the label of the jar, on the label of which was pictured yet another jar, and you realized that the pictures of jars of olive paste and the happy families got smaller and smaller inside each other; that was when we both knew the beginning of the fairy tale I am about to tell, but not how it ends.
The boy and the girl were cousins. They grew up in the same apartment building, climbed up the same staircase, gobbled together Turkish delights and coconut candy which bore the molded relief of a lion. They did their homework together, they came down with the same bug, they scared each other playing hide-and-seek. They were the same age. They went to the same school, the same movies, listened to the same radio shows, records, they read the same
Children’s Week
magazine, the same books, and went through the same closets and trunks where they found the same fezzes, the same silk covers, and the same boots. One day when their adult cousin whose stories they adored dropped by for a visit, they grabbed the book he was carrying and began reading it.
The book first amused the girl and the boy with its old words, highfalutin language and Persian expressions, then it bored them into throwing it down; and yet, thinking perhaps it had an illustration of a torture scene, a naked body, or a submarine, they riffled through the book curiously and ended up actually reading it. It turned out the book was terribly long. But near the beginning there was such a love scene between the hero and the heroine that the boy wished to be in the hero’s shoes. Love had been described so beautifully that the boy wanted to be in love like the hero in the book. So, when he realized he showed the same symptoms of love as the ones later on in the book which he’d fantasized about (impatience with food, inventing reasons to go see the girl, not being able to drink a whole glass of water even when thirsty), the boy realized he’d fallen in love with the girl at that magic moment they held the book together, each fingering the corners of opposing pages.
So what was this story they read fingering the corners of opposing pages? The story, which happened long ago, was about a boy and girl who’d been born into the same tribe. The girl and the boy, named Beauty and Love, who lived at the edge of a desert, were born on the same night, studied with the same teacher (Professor Madness), walked around the same fountain, and fell in love with each other. When the boy asked for the girl’s hand many years later, the elders of the tribe stipulated that he go to the Land of Hearts and bring back a certain alchemical formula. The boy who set out on the road met with a great many difficulties: he fell down a well and was enslaved by a painted witch; he got inebriated looking at the thousands of faces and images he saw in another well; he fell for the daughter of the Emperor of China because she resembled his beloved; he climbed out of the wells and got locked up in castles; he followed and was followed, struggled through winter, traveled great distances, went after clues and signs; he delved into the mystery of letters, telling and listening to stories. Finally, Poetry, who followed him in disguise and helped him get through his ordeals, said to him: “You are your beloved, and your beloved is you; do you still not understand?” That is when the boy in the story remembered how he fell in love with the girl reading the same book when they were studying with the same teacher.
The book
they
had read together told the story of a king called King Jubilant and a beautiful young man called Eternal with whom he had fallen in love; the bewildered king had no idea what was going on, but you’d already caught on that the lovers in this story would’ve fallen in love reading together a third love story. The lovers in that love story too would’ve fallen in love reading yet another love story in a book, and the lovers in that story would’ve fallen for one another reading still another love story.
Many years after we’d gone to the clothing store, read
Children’s Week
together, and studied the jar of black-olive paste, I’d discovered that our memories’ gardens also led into each other like these love stories, forming an infinite string of stories that were tied together like a series of doors to rooms that led into one another; that was when you’d run away from home and I’d taken up fiction and my own story. All love stories were sad, touching, pathetic, whether they were set in Damascus in the Arabian Desert, or in Khorosan on the steppes of Asia, or in Verona at the foot of the Alps, or in Baghdad on the River Tigris. Even more pathetic was how easily these stories stuck in one’s mind, making it very simple to identify with the most ingenuous, long-suffering, and sorrowful hero.
If someday someone (perhaps me) ends up writing our story, the ending of which I still cannot figure out, I don’t know if the reader can immediately identify with one of us as I’ve done reading those love stories, or if our story can stick in the reader’s mind, but I intend to do my homework since I’m aware that certain kinds of passages are always present which set the heroes and the stories apart from each other:
On a visit we paid together, you were listening carefully to a long story whose narrator sat close by in a room where the heavy air had turned blue with cigarette smoke, when sometime past midnight the expression in your face gradually began saying “I’m not here”; I loved you then. You were listlessly looking for a belt among your slips, your green sweaters, and your old nightgowns you couldn’t bring yourself to discard, when you became aware of the incredible mess that was revealed through your closet’s open door and a daunted expression appeared on your face; I loved you then. Back when you had a passing fancy to become an artist when you grew up, you were sitting with Grandpa at a table learning to draw a tree, and when Grandpa teased you gratuitously you didn’t get angry at him but laughed; I loved you then. You’d slammed the
dolmuş
door on the hem of your purple coat, when the five-lira piece fell out of your hand and rolled prettily defining a perfect arc into the grate in the gutter, and I loved the playfully surprised expression on your face; I loved you. On a brilliant April day, seeing how the hankie you’d put out on our tiny balcony to dry in the morning was still wet, you realized the bright sun had fooled you, and immediately afterwards you were listening to twittering in a vacant lot out back when your face took on a wistful look; I loved you then. I’d realized apprehensively how different your memory and recollections were than mine when I overheard you tell a third person about a movie we’d seen together, and I loved you then; I loved you. When you sneaked off into a corner to read some professor’s pearls of wisdom in a richly illustrated newspaper article, haranguing on intermarriage among close relatives, I didn’t care what it was that you read but loved seeing you read with your upper lip slightly pursed like some Tolstoyan character; I loved the way you checked yourself in the elevator mirror as if looking at someone else and then, for some reason, the way you anxiously rifled through your purse as if looking for something you’d just remembered; I loved the way you hurriedly slipped into the pair of high-heeled pumps you kept waiting side-by-side for hours, one on its side like a narrow sailboat and the other like a hunchbacked cat, and when you returned home hours later, I loved watching the skillful movements your hips, your legs and feet spontaneously performed before you abandoned the pair of muddied pumps to their asymmetrical retirement; I loved you when your melancholic thoughts went who knew where as you regarded the mound of cigarette butts and burned-out matches with their black heads bent forlornly in the ashtray; I loved you on our usual walks when we came across a scene or light so brand new that it seemed for a moment that the sun might have risen in the west that morning; it was not the street I loved but you. On a winter day when a sudden south wind cleared Istanbul of snow and dirty clouds, it wasn’t Mount Uludağ appearing in the horizon behind antennas, minarets, and the islands which you pointed out but you shivering with your head tucked into your shoulders that I loved; I loved your wistful gaze at the water vendor’s tired old horse pulling the heavy cart loaded with enameled containers; I loved the way you poked fun at people who say don’t hand out money to beggars because actually beggars happen to be quite rich, and the way you laughed joyously when you found a shortcut to get us out in the street before all the others who were slowly winding their way up through labyrinthine stairways out of the movie theater. After we ripped another page off the educational calendar with schedules for prayer, an activity which took us a day closer to our death, I loved your voice reading, seriously and sorrowfully as if reading the signs of our impending death, the suggested daily menu consisting of meat and chickpeas, pilav, pickles, and mixed fruit compote; and when you taught me patiently how one opens the tube of Eagle brand anchovy paste by first removing the flat perforated disk and then turning the cap all the way, I loved the way you recited from the label, “submitted with the respects of the manufacturer, Monsieur Trellidis”; I loved you anxiously when I noticed that your face on winter mornings was the same color as the pale white sky, or when in our childhood I watched you cross the street running wildly among the stream of vehicles that flowed down past our apartment house; I loved you when you observed carefully, and with a smile on your lips, the crow that landed on the coffin that was laid on the catafalque in the mosque courtyard; I loved you when you acted out our parents’ fights using your imitation radio-theater voice; I loved you when I held your face between my hands and I fearfully saw in your eyes where our lives were taking us; I hadn’t understood why you’d left your ring lying next to the vase in the first place, but when I saw it there again several days later, I loved you; I loved you when I realized that you had also joined the solemn festival with your jokes and inventiveness toward the end of prolonged lovemaking that was reminiscent of the slow flight of mythical birds; when you pointed out the perfect star in the heart of the apple you cut crosswise instead of top to bottom, I loved you; in the middle of the day when I found a strand of your hair on my desk and couldn’t figure out how it got there, and on a ride we took together when I realized how little alike our hands looked grasping the bar on the crowded municipal bus, side-by-side among all the other hands, I loved you as I loved my own body, as if I were looking for my absconded soul, as if I comprehended with pain and joy that I’d become someone else. I loved you. When that mysterious expression appeared on your face as you watched a train go by to an unknown destination, and when its exact dolorous replica reappeared at the hour when screaming flocks of crows flew insanely, and when the electricity suddenly went out in early evening and the darkness inside and the light outside slowly replaced each other, I loved you with all the helplessness, the pain and jealousy that gripped me whenever I saw your mysteriously dolorous face.
