The Black Book (59 page)

After he hung up, he was seized by an excitement that vacillated between fear and happiness, calmness and anxiety, feelings of vengeance and the joy of brotherhood. Hastily, he searched through notebooks, papers, old articles, and news clippings, looking for something or other, but he didn’t know what he was looking for, either. Some sign that would prove the existence of the letters on his face? But the letters and their meaning were too obvious to necessitate any proof. Some logic to help him choose the stories he had to tell? But he wasn’t in any condition to trust in anything else but his own anger and excitement. Some example to reveal the beauty of the mystery? He knew the task required that he only tell his stories believing in what he said. He went through the cabinets, read quickly through the address books, he spelled out the “key sentences,” looked at the maps, quickly glanced through the mug shots. He was poking through the box of costumery when, suffering the damning regret for being late on purpose, at three minutes to nine he dashed out of the house.

At two minutes after nine, he’d ducked into the dark entrance of the building opposite Aladdin’s store, but nobody like his bald-headed interlocutor or the man’s wife was anywhere on the sidewalk across the street. Galip tried to visualize the bald man’s face, the way he told his story at the nightclub. He was angry at the man and the wife because the numbers they gave him turned out to be wrong: Who was deceiving who? Who was putting one over on who?

Only a small section of Aladdin’s well-lit store could be seen through the window that was chock-full of stuff. Galip could make out Aladdin’s head and body bending up and down among toy guns hanging on strings, rubber balls in net bags, orangutan and Frankenstein masks, boxes of parlor games,
rakı
and cordial bottles, sports and entertainment magazines in living color, and dolls in see-through boxes: he was counting the newspapers packed to be returned. There was no one else in the store. Aladdin’s wife who worked behind the counter during the day must now be home in the kitchen, waiting for her husband. Someone went in the store, and Aladdin stepped behind the counter; soon after, an elderly couple who made Galip’s heart skip showed up. Following the oddly dressed man who first went into the store, the elderly couple came out carrying a large bottle and walked off arm in arm; Galip knew instantly they weren’t the ones because they seemed all too self-absorbed. A gentleman in a fur-collared overcoat went in and he and Aladdin began to talk. Galip couldn’t help imagining their conversation.

Now there was no one that attracted attention, neither on the Nişantaşı Square sidewalk nor on the one next to the mosque, nor on the street off Ihlamur: only absentminded people, salespersons without overcoats walking by briskly, the lonely who were overly lost in the dark-blue night. For the moment, the streets and the sidewalks were deserted; Galip thought he could hear the hum of the neon light advertising the store across the street that sold sewing machines. There was no one around besides the cop with a machine gun in his hand, keeping watch in front of the station. Galip felt frightened looking at the branches of the chestnut tree on the trunk of which Aladdin attached illustrated magazines with underwear elastic and clothespins. It was a feeling of being under surveillance, of being found out or being in danger. Then there was a noise. A ’54 Dodge that came up Ihlamur and an old Skoda bus going up to Nişantaşı almost collided on the corner. When the bus braked hard and came to a stop, Galip observed the passengers pull themselves up and turn their heads toward the other side of the street. In the dim lights provided by the bus, not more than three feet from where he was standing, his eyes met the eyes in a tired face that didn’t show any interest in the event: a sixtyish, exhausted man; his eyes were odd, full of pain and sorrow. Had he come across this man before? A retired lawyer, or a teacher waiting to die? Perhaps both were thinking of similar things when they stared at each other daringly thanks to a chance moment city life had afforded them. Once the bus tore off, they parted perhaps never to see each other again. Through the purple exhaust fumes, Galip observed some sort of movement commence on the other sidewalk. A couple of young men stood in front of Aladdin’s store, lighting each other’s cigarettes: two university students waiting for a third before going on to the Friday-night movies. Aladdin’s store had become crowded, three people browsing through the magazines and a night watchman. An orange vendor with a huge mustache had arrived at the corner within an eyeblink, pushing his cart, but perhaps he’d been there for some time without Galip becoming aware of him. A couple walked up the sidewalk next to the mosque, carrying packages. Then Galip saw that a child was also being carried in the young father’s arms. At the same moment, the elderly Greek lady who was the proprietress of the small cake shop right next door turned off the lights inside the shop and wrapping herself in her worn coat went out in the street. Smiling politely at Galip, she made a racket pulling down the metal rolling shutters with a hook. Aladdin’s store and the sidewalks were suddenly deserted. The neighborhood lunatic from the upper district who imagined he was a famous soccer player came from the direction of the girls’ lycée, wearing a blue and yellow soccer uniform, and passed by slowly pushing a baby carriage; he sold newspapers out of the baby carriage at the entrance of the Pearl Theater at Pangaltı. As the wheels of the carriage turned they made music that Galip liked.

A light wind was blowing. Galip felt cold. It was twenty after nine. “I’ll wait for three more people to go by,” he thought. Now he could no longer see either Aladdin inside the store or the cop who should be in front of the station. The door to a narrow balcony in the apartment building across the street was opened, Galip saw the red tip of a lit cigarette; then the guy tossed the cigarette out and went in. Aside from the slight moisture on the sidewalk reflecting the metallic light from the neon lights and the billboards, there were bits of paper, refuse, cigarette butts, plastic bags … For a moment Galip felt the street he’d lived on since his childhood and which he’d observed with all its changing details, the neighborhood, and the chimneys of distant apartment buildings that were visible in the drab dark-blue of the night were as alien and as distant from him as the dinosaurs pictured in a children’s book. Then he felt like the man with X-ray vision who he’d always wanted to be in his childhood: the world’s secret meaning was visible to him. The letters in the billboards for the rug dealer, the restaurant, and the cake shop, the cakes in the display case, the croissants, sewing machines, and newspapers all really pointed to this secondary meaning, but the unfortunate people who beat the sidewalks like somnambulists, having forgotten the memories from the realm whose mystery was once known to them, eked out a living from the mere primary meaning that remained to them—like those who’ve forgotten about love, brotherhood, heroism and make do with what they see in the movies on the subject. He walked to Teşvikiye Square and took a cab.

As the taxi went by Aladdin’s store, Galip imagined the bald-headed man was also hiding in a dark corner, just as he himself had, waiting for Jelal. Was he just imagining it? Or had he seen a scary, oddly dressed shadow among the enchanted scary bodies of frozen mannequins lit by neon lights, sewing on the machines in the window of the store where sewing machines were being displayed? For a moment he wasn’t sure. At Nişantaşı Square, he stopped the cab and bought the night-owl edition of
Milliyet.
He read his own piece with surprise, playfulness, and curiosity as if he were reading Jelal, imagining at the same time Jelal reading someone else’s piece published under his own name and picture; but he couldn’t zero in on Jelal’s reaction. He felt anger rise inside him against Jelal and Rüya: “You’ll get what’s coming to you!” he felt like saying. But he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was in his mind that was coming to them: was it retribution or a reward? What’s more, somewhere in his mind he had an image of running into them at the Pera Palas. The cab was going up the crooked streets in Tarlabaşı, past dark hotels and miserable coffeehouses with bare walls brimming over with men, when Galip had a feeling all Istanbul was anticipating something. Then he was surprised by how dilapidated the cars, the buses, and the trucks were that he saw in the streets, as if he’d become aware of this for the first time.

The lobby of the Pera Palas Hotel was warm and bright. In the large reception room on the right, İskender was sitting on one of the old divans and had joined some tourists in watching some sort of a crowd. It was a domestic film crew shooting the hotel’s nineteenth-century decor to make a historical film. In the brightly lit room there was a feeling of fun, camaraderie, and cheer.

“Jelal isn’t here, he couldn’t come,” Galip began explaining to İskender. “Something very important came up. He’s been hiding out because of this mysterious business. He wanted me to do the interview in his place, again due to the same mystery. I’ve got the story down pat. I’ll stand in for him.”

“I don’t know if these people will go along with that!”

“Just tell them I’m Jelal Salik,” Galip said with rage which surprised even him.

“But why?”

“Because it’s the story that’s important, not the storyteller. We have a story to tell now.”

“They know you,” Iskender said. “You even told a story at the club that night.”

“Know me?” Galip said, sitting down. “You’re using the word loosely. They’ve seen me is all. What’s more, today I am someone else. They know neither the person they saw that time nor me whom they’ll be seeing now. I bet they think all Turks look alike.”

“Even if we tell them the man they saw that night was someone else,” said İskender, “they’d certainly expect Jelal Salik to be someone older in any case.”

“What do they know about Jelal?” Galip said. “Someone must have said, do an interview with such and such a famous columnist, he’d be super for your program on Turkey. And they would have written his name on a piece of paper. They’d probably not have asked his age or his description.”

Just then, they heard laughter in the corner where the historical film was being shot. They turned around where they sat on the divan and looked.

“What are they laughing at?” Galip said.

“I didn’t catch it,” İskender said, but he was smiling as if he had.

“None of us is himself,” said Galip, whispering as if he were imparting a secret. “None of us can be. Don’t you suspect that others might see you as someone else? Are you quite so certain that you are you? If you are, then are you certain that the person you are certain you are is you? What do these people want anyway? Isn’t the person they are looking for some foreigner whose stories will affect British viewers watching TV after supper, whose troubles will trouble them, whose sorrow will make them feel sad? I have just the story to fit the bill! No one need see my face even. They could keep my face in the dark during the shooting. A mysterious and well-known Turkish journalist—and don’t forget my being a Moslem which is most interesting—fearing the repressive government, politically motivated assassinations, and juntaists, grants the BBC an interview, provided that his identity is kept secret. Isn’t that even better?”

“Okay,” said İskender. “I’ll buzz them upstairs, they must be waiting.”

Galip watched the shooting at the other end of the large salon. A bearded and fezzed Ottoman pasha, wearing a crisp uniform resplendent with medals, orders, and sashes, was talking to his dutiful daughter who was listening to her darling father, yet her face wasn’t turned to him but to the busy camera that the waiters and bellboys observed in respectful silence.

“We have no help, no might, no hope!” the pasha was saying. “We have nothing! And everyone, but everyone—the whole world—is against the Turk! God knows, the government is probably being forced to relinquish this fort too…”

“But, my dearest father, regard what we still have…” the daughter started speaking, holding out the book in her hand for the benefit of the audience rather than her father, but Galip couldn’t make out what it was. When the take was repeated, he still didn’t get the book’s title, which made him more curious once he figured out it wasn’t the Koran.

Later, having ridden up on the old elevator to enter Room 212 where İskender took him, he had the same feeling of deficiency as when he couldn’t recall a name that he knew only too well.

All three British journalists he’d seen at the nightclub in Beyoğlu were in the room. The men had drinks of
rakı
in their hands while they attended to the camera and the lights. The woman looked up from the magazine she was reading.

“Our famous journalist, Jelal Salik, the columnist, is here in person,” İskender said in English which seemed stilted to Galip and which, good student that he was, was translated simultaneously into Turkish in his mind.

“Very pleased to meet you!” said the woman, with the two men chiming in together like a pair of twins in a comic book. “But haven’t we met you before?” added the woman.

“She says, but haven’t they met you before,” İskender said to Galip.

“Where?” Galip said to İskender.

İskender then told the woman that Galip had asked, “Where?”

“At that nightclub,” the woman said.

“I haven’t been in a nightclub in years, and I won’t be going anytime soon, either,” Galip said with conviction. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a nightclub in all my life. I find that sort of social intercourse, that kind of mob scene, anathema to my psychological health and the solitude that I need in order to pen my works. The intensity of my literary life which reaches tremendous proportions and the politically motivated murders and repression, which reach even more incredible proportions, have always kept me from that sort of life anyway. On the other hand, I am well aware that I have compatriots not only all over Istanbul but all over the country who think of themselves as Jelal Salik, who introduce themselves as Jelal Salik for very righteous and appropriate reasons. What is more, some nights when I go around incognito in the city, I’m startled to run into some of them in dives located in slum districts, somewhere in our dark, incomprehensible lives, in the center of the mystery; I’ve even made friends with these unhappy persons who are capable of being ‘me’ enough to terrify me. Istanbul is a grand place, an incomprehensible place.”