The Black Book (62 page)

The Scribe had written that aside from the objects that the Prince had removed from his sight by breaking some, by burning others, and by throwing away yet others, all through the ten years he had also gone for the throats of recollections that made him into someone else. The Prince used to say, “I am driven to distraction by suddenly finding in the middle of a train of thought, or of dreams, the simplest and most unimportant small detail from my past which has followed me like a merciless killer who wants to murder me or a lunatic who has been driven for years to exact some unfathomable revenge.” After all, it was a terrifying thing for a person who had to consider the lives of millions and millions of people after ascending the Ottoman throne to suddenly find in the middle of a train of thought a bowl of strawberries he’d eaten in his childhood or a stupid remark made by some inconsequential chief of harem. A sultan—nay, not only a sultan but anybody at all—whose duty it was to be himself, in possession of only his own thoughts, will, and resolution, had to go against the grain of haphazard and arbitrary memories which prevented him from becoming himself. On one occasion the Scribe had written, “For the purpose of going at the throats of all the memories that spoiled the purity of his thoughts and his own will, Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin had eliminated all sources of smell throughout the lodge, disposed of all his familiar clothing and furniture, eschewed any relationship with the anesthetizing art called music, shunned playing his white piano, and had all the rooms in the lodge painted white.”

“Yet, worst of all, more unbearable than the memories, objects, and books, are people,” the Prince would add after the Scribe read back what he’d dictated from where he lay on the sofa of which he had yet to divest himself. They came in all sorts: they dropped in at the most inopportune moments and inappropriate times, bearing disgusting gossip and worthless rumors. Trying to perform a good deed, they only managed to destroy a person’s peace of mind. Their affection was more engulfing than comforting. They kept talking just to prove they had something to say. They told you stories in order to convince you that they were interesting. Just so they could display their affection for you, they made you uncomfortable. Perhaps these were not important things, yet the Prince who was dying to be himself, who wanted to be alone with his own thoughts, sensed that he was unable to be himself for a protracted period each time he was paid a visit by these fools, these unnecessary, disaffected, common gossips. “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin was of the opinion that the greatest detriment to a man’s being himself is the people around him,” the Scribe had written at some point, and at another, “Man’s greatest pleasure is to make others look like himself.” He’d written that the Prince’s greatest fear was that the day he ascended the throne, he would have to establish relations with these people. “A man is affected by his pity for those who are pitiful, miserable, and wretched,” the Prince used to say. “We are affected because we end up becoming common and undistinguished ourselves in the company of those who are common and undistinguished,” he said. “We are also affected by those who have a distinctive personality and command our respect because we unconsciously begin emulating them and, when all things are considered, these last are the most dangerous of all,” said the Prince. “But be sure to write that I have sent them all away, the whole pack of them! Also write that I am not putting up a fight just for myself, in order that I may become myself, but for the liberation of millions of subjects.”

It was in the tenth year of the incredible life-and-death battle he waged in avoiding others’ influence, on an evening when he struggled against familiar things, scents that he loved, books that affected him, that as he was viewing through the louvers of the “Venetian” blinds the moonlit snow that covered the extensive gardens, the Prince suddenly understood that the battle he waged was in reality not his own battle but the battle of the millions of unfortunates who had staked their lot on the Ottoman Empire which was collapsing. As his Scribe put down in the journals perhaps tens thousand times during the last six years of the Prince’s life, “all peoples that are unable to be themselves, civilizations that imitate another, nations that find happiness in the stories that belong to others” were condemned to collapse, annihilation, and oblivion. So, on the sixteenth year of withdrawing to his lodge to await his ascension to the throne, during the days he realized he could only combat the stories he heard in his head by raising the voices of his own stories, he was about to engage him a scribe when the Prince understood that his personal and psychological struggle had been in reality a “historical life-and-death battle,” “the last stage of a bout that is observed only once in a thousand years which involves the dilemma of shedding or not shedding the shell,” “the most important historical standstill in a development which historians would appropriately evaluate centuries later as a turning point.”

Following the night when the snow-covered garden was illuminated by moonlight reminiscent of the vastness and fearfulness of infinite time, during the days when he had begun telling his story and discovery every morning to the elderly, loyal, and patient Scribe sitting at the mahogany desk, the Prince would eventually remember he had actually discovered “the most significant historical dimension” in his story many years ago: Hadn’t he observed with his own eyes, prior to secluding himself in his lodge, that Istanbul streets were changing with every passing day in imitation of an imaginary city in a nonexistent foreign country? Didn’t he know that the unfortunate underprivileged that crowded the streets transformed their garb by observing Occidental travelers and studying photographs of foreigners that fell in their hands? Hadn’t he heard that the sorry folk who gathered in the evening around the stove at coffeehouses in the slums, instead of telling each other their own traditional tales, read for each other’s edification the sort of garbage in the papers written by second-rate columnists who pinched material from
The Count of Monte Cristo
or
The Three Musketeers,
in which the names of the heroes had been Moslemized? What’s more, with the object of looking for pleasant pastimes, hadn’t he himself been in the habit of frequenting Armenian bibliopoles who published collected editions of this odious stuff? Before displaying the decisiveness and the will to seclude himself, had the Prince not felt that his own face had also been gradually losing its former mysterious meaning, just as it happened to the underprivileged, dragged as he was into banality along with the underprivileged, the pitiful, and the unfortunate? “He had, indeed!” wrote the Scribe in response to each question, cognizant of the fact that that was how the Prince wanted it. “Yes, the Prince felt his face was also changing.”

Before the end of his first two years working with the Scribe—he called what they were up to “working”—the Prince had the Scribe take down everything: from the various ship horns which he imitated in his childhood, and the Turkish delights he managed to gobble, down to the nightmares that he had and the books he read in his forty-seven years of life, from the clothes he liked best down to the ones he disliked the most, from all the illnesses he survived down to everything he knew in connection with animals; and, as he frequently expressed it, he had done it, “by evaluating each sentence, each word in the light of the immense truth he had discovered.” Every morning when the Scribe sat at the mahogany desk and the Prince took up his position either on the sofa across from the desk or else his pacing grounds around it, or on the twin staircases that went up to the floor above and down again, perhaps they both knew that the Prince had no new story to dictate. But they were both in search of this silence, since, as the Prince was wont to say, “It is only when a man has nothing left to tell that he has come close to being completely himself. Only when his narrations have come to an end, when he hears inside him a profound silence because reminiscences, books, stories, and memory itself have all shut down, only then can he hear his own true voice which will make him himself, rising, as it does, from the depths of his own soul and the infinite dark labyrinths of his own being.”

On one of the days when they awaited for the voice to rise slowly out of somewhere deep inside a bottomless well of tales, the Prince took up the subject of women and love which, since he considered these “the most dangerous subjects,” he had rarely touched upon until that particular occasion. For a period that took nearly six months, he spoke of his old flames, affairs that couldn’t be considered love, his “intimacy” with some of the harem women whom, aside from a couple of them, he remembered with pity and sorrow, and his wife.

The most horrible aspect of this kind of intimacy, according to the Prince, was that even a commonplace woman who had no special attributes could, unbeknownst to you, invade a considerable portion of your thoughts. During his first youth, his marriage, and the early part of his residence at the lodge after leaving his wife and children at his estate on the Bosphorus—that is, until he turned thirty-five—the Prince had not been too concerned about this situation since he had as yet formed no resolution to become “only himself” and “free of influence.” What is more, since this “miserable copycat culture” had taught him, as it did everyone else, that forgetting yourself through love for a woman, a boy, or God—that is, “dissolving into love”—was something to be proud of and esteemed, the Prince too, like the multitudes in the streets, had taken pride in being “in love.”

After secluding himself at the lodge, reading continuously for six years, and at last perceiving that the most important question in life was whether or not one could be oneself, the Prince had immediately resolved to be cautious where women were concerned. It was true that he felt incomplete without the presence of women. Yet it was also true that every woman he became intimate with would spoil his thoughts and take up residence in the middle of his dreams, which he now desired to have originate only within himself. He had thought for a while that it was possible to immunize himself against the poison called love by being intimate with as many women as possible, but since he approached it with the utilitarian notion of getting inured to love and getting himself sick on the intoxication of love, he hadn’t been too interested in these women. Later, he had begun to see mostly Lady Leyla with whom he didn’t believe he could fall in love, given that she was, as he had dictated to the Scribe, “the most nondescript, colorless, blameless, and harmless” among all the women he knew. “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin was able to lay his heart bare without fear, believing, as he did, that he would not fall in love with her,” the Scribe had written one night, now that they’d begun to work also at night. “Since she was the only woman with whom I could lay bare my heart, I immediately fell in love with her,” the Prince had added. “It was one of the most horrifying periods of my life.”

The Scribe had written about the days when the Prince and Lady Leyla met at the lodge and quarreled. Lady Leyla would take off by carriage from the mansion of her father, the Pasha, accompanied by her men, and after half a day’s travel would arrive at the lodge, and the two of them would sit down at the meal prepared for them, the likes of which they read about in French novels, and eat talking about poetry and music like the delicate, refined characters in the novels, and just after the meal when it was time for her to go back home, they’d set to a quarrel that upset the cooks, the manservants, and coachman who listened behind doors that were partly ajar. “There was no ostensible reason for our quarrels,” the Prince had explained on one occasion. “I was merely angry with her since it was on her account that I couldn’t manage to be myself, my thoughts lost their purity, I could no longer hear the voice that rose out of the depths of my being. This went on until she died as a result of a mishap for which I will never understand whether or not I was to be blamed.”

The Prince had dictated that after Lady Leyla’s death, he was grieved but liberated. The Scribe, who was always quiet, respectful, and attentive, had done something he’d never done in his six years with the Prince; that is, he had tried prying into this love and death by broaching the subject several times, but the Prince would only return to it on his own terms and in his own good time.

One night six months before his death, the Prince explained that if he still had not managed to become himself, so to speak, if he were unsuccessful at the end of the fifteen-year battle he had put up at the lodge, then Istanbul streets would also turn into the streets of an unfortunate city that could no longer “be itself,” and that the hapless people who walked on the squares, parks, and sidewalks of this city which imitated squares, parks, sidewalks in other cities could never achieve being themselves; and he was saying that he had knowledge of each and every street in his beloved Istanbul and, even though he had not stepped outside even once, beyond the garden at the lodge, had kept every streetlight and shop alive in his imagination, when he abandoned his usual angry voice and dictated hoarsely that, during the period when Lady Leyla came every day to the lodge in her carriage, he’d spent the major portion of his time imagining a horse-drawn carriage trailing through the city streets. “During the days when Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin struggled with becoming himself, he spent half the day imagining the route from Kuruçeşme to our lodge in a carriage drawn by two horses, one bay and the other black; and after their usual meal and the ensuing quarrel, he’d spend the rest of the day imagining the return trip that took the tearful Lady Leyla back to her Pasha father’s mansion in the carriage, going up and down streets that were mostly on the same route,” the Scribe had written in his usual painstaking, fastidious hand.

On another occasion, in order to suppress other voices and other stories he’d again begun to hear in his mind one hundred days prior to his death, the Prince was enumerating with anger all the personas he had carried around inside him all his life like a secondary soul, with or without his being aware of it, when he began quietly dictating that among all the personas, which he assumed like the different disguises some unhappy sultan was driven to assume every evening, he had affection for only one, the persona that loved a woman whose hair smelled like lilacs. Since the Scribe fastidiously read over and over again every line the Prince dictated to him, and since in his six years of service he had thus gradually come to know, acquire, and own the Prince’s past and his memory banks down to the last detail, the Scribe knew that the woman whose head smelled like lilacs was Lady Leyla because he remembered taking down on another occasion the story of a lover who couldn’t achieve becoming himself, this time on account of the smell of lilacs he couldn’t forget, when the woman whose head smelled of lilacs was killed due to an accident or mistake for which he would never be certain he was to blame.