Authors: Orhan Pamuk
The Black Book (58 page)
But what was most deeply disturbing at the pleasure palace were the new significances, the strange signs, the unknown worlds that appeared in the faces reflected in the mirror, the ones that belonged to the interminable multitudes on the bridges and in the streets, faces that appeared everywhere in the artist’s creation. Looking first at the painting and then at the mirror, the befuddled customer could perceive that someone’s visage (someone who appeared to be just an ordinary fellow or a happy-go-lucky guy wearing a melon hat) when reflected in the mirror was crawling with signs, with letters, that became transformed into a map or the traces of a missing story, giving certain viewers, who were now also contained in the mirror as they paced up and down among the velvet chairs, the impression that they were privy to a secret known only to an elite few. Everyone knew that such persons, whom the bordello girls treated like pashas, would not rest until they discovered the secret involving the painting and the mirror, and would be ready to set forth on all sorts of journeys, adventures, and free-for-alls for the sake of finding the solution to the enigma.
Many years later, long after the boss disappeared into the enigma of the Bosphorus and the pleasure palace fell into disrepute, the aging bordello girls took a look at the sorrow-laden visage of the police chief who’d dropped in, and they realized that he was one of the aforementioned restless souls. As it turned out, the chief had wanted to consult the mirror before reopening the case of the infamous Şişli Square Murder. But he discovered that during a brawl that broke out, more out of boredom than over a dispute involving women or money, the colossal mirror had come down on the rowdies and broken into smithereens. Thus, standing among shards of glass, the police chief, himself on the verge of retirement, could neither apprehend the perpetrator of the murder nor discover the secret of the mirror.
NOT THE STORYTELLER, THE STORY
My way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to inquire who is listening to me.
—
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
,
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
The voice on the phone had given Galip seven different numbers just before making the arrangement to meet in front of Aladdin’s store. Galip was so confident he’d reach Jelal and Rüya at one of those numbers that he could visualize the streets, the doorsteps, and the apartment where he’d once more get together with them. He knew that as soon as he saw them, he’d find the reasons Jelal and Rüya would give for hiding out completely logical and justifiable from beginning to end. He was certain Jelal and Rüya would say: “Galip, we’ve been looking for you, but you were neither home nor at the office. No one answered the phone. Where were you?”
Galip rose from the chair where he’d been sitting for hours, took off Jelal’s pajamas, washed, shaved, and got dressed. The letters he made out in his face as he looked in the mirror didn’t seem now like extensions of a mysterious plot or a crazy game, nor a visual error that might lead to uncertainty about his own identity. Like the bar of pink Lux soap endorsed by Silvana Mangano or the old razor blade in front of the mirror, the letters too were part of the real world.
He read his own sentences as if they were someone else’s in the piece which appeared in Jelal’s usual place in the copy of
Milliyet
that had been slipped under the door. Considering that they’d been published under Jelal’s picture, they had to be Jelal’s sentences. On the other hand, Galip also knew he’d written the sentences himself. The situation didn’t seem at all contradictory to him; on the contrary, it seemed no more than the extension of a known, comprehensible world. He imagined Jelal sitting in one of the apartments he had addresses for, reading someone else’s work in his own column, but he guessed that Jelal wouldn’t consider this as a personal attack on himself or an imposture. There was a good chance he wouldn’t even be able to figure out that it wasn’t one of his old pieces.
After feeding himself on bread, fish-roe spread, sliced tongue, and bananas, he wanted to strengthen his ties to the real world even more by bringing some order into business affairs of his that he’d neglected. He looked up a colleague with whom he collaborated on some political cases. The fellow had suddenly been called out of town, he was told. A certain case was progressing slowly, as usual, but in another a decision had been reached, and that the clients they represented had each been sentenced to six years for having harbored the founders of a clandestine Communist organization. When he remembered having glanced at the news item in the paper he’d just finished reading without connecting the story to himself, he got angry. He wasn’t quite clear why he felt angry, or against whom. As if it were the only natural thing to do, he called home. “If Rüya picks it up,” he thought, “I’m going to play a trick on her, too.” He was going to disguise his voice and say he was someone looking for Galip, but there was no answer.
He called İskender. He was going to tell him that he was about to get hold of Jelal and ask how much longer the British television people were going to be in town. “This is their last night,” İskender said. “They’re leaving for London early in the morning.” Galip explained he was about to track Jelal down, that Jelal wanted to see the Brits to set them straight on certain subjects; he too thought this was an important interview. “In that case, I’d better get in touch with them this evening,” İskender said. “They are also keen on it.” Galip said he was going to be “here for the time being” and read off the number on the receiver for İskender.
He decided to call Aunt Halé. It had occurred to him that his relatives might have gone to the police because they hadn’t heard from Jelal or Rüya. Or were all the family still waiting for his and Rüya’s return from the Izmir trip he made up and told Aunt Halé about, saying that Rüya was sitting in a cab, waiting for him to finish the phone call he is making from a grocery store? Or had Rüya stopped by and told them everything? In the meantime, had there been any word from Jelal? He dialed Aunt Halé’s number and, disguising his voice by lowering it, explained that he was a loyal reader and admirer who wanted to congratulate Jelal on today’s column. Aunt Halé’s sober response telling him no more than that Jelal wasn’t there and referring him to the newspaper offices did not provide him with any explanation. At two-twenty, he began to call, one by one, the seven numbers he’d written on the last page of
Les Caractères.
By the time he found out that of these seven numbers one belonged to a family he didn’t know at all, one to the sort of mouthy kid everyone knows, one to a brusque, shrill old geezer, one to a kebab shop, one to a know-it-all realtor who hadn’t been so much as curious about the people who previously had the same number, one to a seamstress who said she had had the same number for the last forty years, and the last to newlyweds who had got home late, it was seven in the evening. At some point during the time he struggled with the phone, he’d found ten snapshots in the bottom of a box full of postcards which he hadn’t been previously interested in going through at all.
This was an eleven-year-old Rüya curiously staring into the camera which had to have been in Jelal’s hands, taken on an excursion on the Bosphorus, at the café under the famed elm tree, with Uncle Melih wearing a coat and tie, beautiful Aunt Suzan who looked like Rüya when she was younger, and a weird sidekick of Jelal’s or else someone who could have been the imam at the Emirgan Mosque … Rüya in the strapped dress she wore the summer between second and third grades, and Vasıf, who is showing Aunt Halé’s then two-month-old kitten Coals the aquarium, with Mrs. Esma laughing with her eyes narrowed because of the cigarette between her lips and at the same time trying to shield herself from the camera by straightening her scarf although she isn’t quite sure she is in the camera’s field of vision … Rüya sleeping like a baby on Grandma’s bed, her knees pulled up to her stomach and her head stuck straight into the pillow, in the same pose Galip had seen her last seven days and ten hours ago, tired after stuffing herself on the communal Ramadan holiday lunch which she’s made it to unexpectedly on a winter’s day, although alone, during the first year of her first marriage when the revolutionary and unkempt Rüya didn’t have much truck with her mother, uncles, and aunts … The whole family and the doorman Ismail and his wife Kamer posing in front of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, looking into the camera while a beribboned Rüya on Jelal’s lap watches a street dog on the sidewalk who must be long dead … Aunt Suzan, Mrs. Esma, and Rüya observing the passage of De Gaulle, who doesn’t make it into the photograph other than the nose of his limo, through the crowd that has lined up on Teşvikiye Avenue along both sidewalks all the way from the girls’ lycée to Aladdin’s store … Rüya, sitting at her mother’s vanity covered with powder pots, tubes of Pertev’s cold cream, vials of rosewater and cologne, perfume atomizers, nail files and bobby pins, having stuck her head with its bobbed hair between the two side panels of the mirror becomes three, five, nine, seventeen, and thirty-three Rüyas … Fifteen-year-old Rüya in a printed cotton sleeveless dress, unaware that her picture is being snapped, leans over a newspaper on which sunshine spills through the window, doing the crossword puzzle, a bowl of roasted chickpeas next to her, wearing the expression on her face which makes Galip realize with fear that he’s being excluded, tugging her hair and chewing on the eraser of her pencil … Rüya five months ago at most, seeing that she’s wearing the Hittite Sun medallion Galip had given her on her last birthday, laughing happily in this very room where Galip had been pacing for hours, sitting in the chair in which Galip presently sat, next to the phone on which he’d just finished talking … Rüya pulling a long face at some country café Galip couldn’t place, saddened on account of parents’ fights that get terribly intense on excursions … Rüya, trying to look happy but wearing the wistful, dolorous smile the mystery of which her husband, looking at photographs, has never been able to fathom, on Kilyos beach where she went the year she graduated from high school, the ocean breaking behind her, her beautiful arm resting proprietorially on the carrier of a bicycle that’s not hers, wearing a bikini which exposes her appendicitis scar, the twin moles the size of lentils halfway between the scar and her navel, and the barely perceptible shadows of her rib cage on her silken skin, holding a magazine the title of which Galip couldn’t make out not because the photograph isn’t focused but because of the tears in his eyes.
Now Galip was weeping inside the mystery. It was as if he were someplace he knew but didn’t know he knew, as if he were immersed in a book he’d read before but which still excited him because he didn’t remember having read it. He knew that he had felt the sense of doom and deprivation before and yet, at the same time, that this pain was so powerful that it could be felt only once in a lifetime. He considered the pain of having been deceived, of his illusion and loss, too specific to happen to anyone else, yet he felt that it was the outcome of a trap someone had set up as if setting up a game of chess.
He didn’t wipe off the tears that fell on Rüya’s photographs, he had a hard time breathing through his nose, and he sat in his chair without moving. Friday-night noises on Nişantaşı Square came into the room; the sound of the tired motors on overloaded buses, car horns that got blown willy-nilly in the snarled traffic, whistles of the traffic cop hot under the collar, the ebb and flow of pop tunes from the loudspeakers set up by music shops at the arcade’s entrances, and the steady hum of the crowds on the sidewalks reverberated not only in the windowpanes but also ever so slightly in the objects in the room. As he focused on the reverberations in the room, Galip remembered that furniture and objects had their own private world that remained outside of the daily environment shared by everyone. “Getting deceived is getting deceived,” he said to himself. He repeated this expression so many times that the words were emptied of both meaning and pain as they were transformed into sounds and letters that signified nothing.
He constructed fantasies: He was not here in this room but with Rüya at their own place on a Friday night; and after getting a bite somewhere, they were going to the Palace Theater. Afterwards, they’d get night-owl editions of the morning papers and settle down back home with their papers and books. In another story he dreamed up, someone, a phantom-faced person, was saying: “I’ve known for years who you are, but you didn’t even recognize me.” When he remembered the phantom man who said this, he realized that this person had been keeping an eye on him all these years. Then, it also followed that the man had been watching not Galip but Rüya. Galip had secretly watched Rüya and Jelal once, and he was freaked out in a way he hadn’t expected. “It was as if I’d died and were watching life continue at a distance after my demise.” He sat down at Jelal’s desk and immediately wrote a column that began with this sentence and signed Jelal’s name to it. He was certain that someone was watching him. If not someone, at least an eye.
The noise of Nişantaşı Square was gradually being replaced by the roar of the TV sets in the buildings next door. He heard the signal music for the eight o’clock news, realizing that six million Istanbulites had gathered around their dining room tables to watch TV. He felt like whacking off. But he was distracted by the continual presence of the eye. He had such a strong desire to be himself, only himself, that he felt like smashing up all the stuff in the room and killing those who’d brought him to this pass. He was considering pulling the phone off the wall and tossing it out the window when the contraption rang.
It was İskender. He’d talked to the BBC-TV people; they were excited and were expecting Jelal tonight at the Pera Palas, in a hotel room that had been set up for the taping. Had Galip got hold of Jelal?
“Yes, yes, yes!” said Galip, surprised by his own fury. “Jelal’s ready. He has some important revelations to make. We’ll be at the Pera Palas at ten.”
