The Black Book (17 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
Much later, as he napped under the blue-checkered quilt somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, he realized he’d left behind at the movie theater the detective novels which he’d bought for Rüya.
During that cycle of productivity in his life, his daily literary yield never numbered less than five pages.
—
ABDURRAHMAN ŞEREF
The incident I’m about to relate happened to me on a winter’s night. I was going through a melancholic period of my life: I’d already survived the first years as a journalist, which are the most difficult, but the things I had to endure in order to establish myself a little had already burned out my initial enthusiasm for the profession. On cold winter nights when I told myself “I made it after all!” I also knew that I’d been emptied out inside. That winter, I’d been stricken with the insomnia which was to follow me around the rest of my life; so some nights during the work week the night clerk and I would keep late hours at the paper, and I’d finish some articles which I couldn’t write during the workday hustle and bustle. The “Believe It or Not” column, a fad European newspapers and magazines had also entertained at that time, was made to order for my nocturnal labors. I’d turn the pages of one of those European papers that had already been clipped into bits and pieces, examine the pictures in the “Believe It or Not” section, and, inspired by the picture (I’ve always deemed learning a foreign language not only unnecessary but downright detrimental to my imagination), I’d expatiate on my impressions with a kind of artistic fervor.
On that winter’s night, having briefly glanced at the picture of a monster (one eye was above, the other below) in a French publication (an old copy of
L’Illustration
), I quickly worked up a piece on the subject of the Cyclops: having outlined the reincarnations of this doughty creature who scares young girls in the Dede Korkut legends, who is transformed into the perfidious Cyclops in Homer, who is the Dadjdjal himself in Bukhari’s
History of the Prophets,
who penetrates the harems of viziers in the
Thousand and One Nights,
who puts in a brief appearance wearing purple in the
Paradiso
just before Dante finds his sweetheart Beatrice (who seems so familiar to me), who waylays caravans in Rumi, and who assumes the shape of a Negress in William Beckford’s novel
Vathek,
which I really love, I speculated on what in the world that single eye like a dark well in the middle of the forehead resembled, why it startled us, why we had to fear and avoid it. And, carried away with my excitement, I added to my short “monograph” a couple of little stories that flowed out of my pen: one about the Cyclops Number One who was reputed to live in one of the slum districts around the Golden Horn and made his way goodness knows where through the muddy, oily, turbid water at night to meet up with Cyclops Number Two, either one and the same as the first, or else an aristocratic Cyclops (they called him “Lord”) who, upon removing his fur headgear at midnight at some posh Pera whorehouse, knocked many a working girl unconscious with fear.
I scribbled a note for the illustrator (“No mustache, please!”) who really fancied this sort of theme, and I left a little past midnight; I had no desire to go back to my cold and lonely flat, so I decided to take a walk through the streets of old Istanbul. As usual, I wasn’t pleased with myself, but I was pleased with my column and stories. If I fantasized the success of my piece while taking a long walk, I thought I might perhaps postpone the sensation of grief that clung to me like an incurable disease.
I walked through the backstreets, which got increasingly narrow and darker, crisscrossing each other in haphazard diagonals. Listening to my own footsteps, I walked between the dark houses that leaned into each other, their enclosed balconies bent out of shape and their windows pitch black. I walked through those forgotten streets where even the dog packs, sleepy night watchmen, dopeheads, and ghosts didn’t dare set foot.
When I was seized by a feeling that an eye was watching me from somewhere, I wasn’t alarmed at first. It would be a false sensation that stemmed from the piece I’d just written, I surmised, because there was no eye watching me either from the window of the crooked enclosed balcony, where I felt it was, or out of the darkness of the vacant lot. The presence that I sensed was nothing more than a vague illusion; I didn’t want to attach any importance to it. But in the stillness where nothing could be heard besides the whistles of the night watchmen and the ululations of dog packs fighting in distant quarters, the awareness that I was being watched slowly increased until it reached such an intensity that I could no longer be rid of the oppressive sensation by ignoring it.
An all-seeing, omnipresent eye now watched me without concealing itself. No, it had no relationship to the heroes of the stories I had made up that evening; unlike them, this one was not frightening, or hideous, or ridiculous, nor was it alien or inimical. It was even, yes, an acquaintance; the eye knew me and I knew it. We had known about each other for a long time, but acknowledging each other openly had required the particular sensation that had just overcome me in the middle of the night, the particular street I walked on, and the intensity of the scene in that street.
I won’t mention the name of this street in the hills behind the Golden Horn since it won’t mean much to readers who don’t know that part of Istanbul really well. All you have to imagine is a pallid cobblestone street, characterized by dark wooden houses (most of which I see still standing thirty years after the metaphysical incident that befell me) and the shadows of enclosed balconies, where the illumination from a single lamppost is obscured by crooked branches. The sidewalks were dirty and narrow. The wall of a small mosque stretched into a seemingly endless darkness. Where the street—or the perspective—came to a dark point, this ridiculous eye (what else can I call it?) awaited me. I imagine it has already become clear: the “eye” was waiting to help me gain access to the “metaphysical experiment” (which was more like a dream, I thought later) rather than to do me harm—say, to frighten, to strangle, to knife or kill.
Not a sound. Instantly, I knew that the whole experiment was related to what journalism had taken away from me, something to do with the emptiness that I felt inside. One has the most convincing nightmares when one is really tired. But this was not a nightmare; it was a sharper, clearer—even a mathematical—sensation. “I know I’m completely empty inside.” That was what I’d thought, and then, leaning up against the mosque wall: “It knows I’m completely empty inside.” It knew what I was thinking, knew all that I had done so far, but even these things were not important; the “eye” signaled something else, something that was all too obvious. I had created it, and it had created me! I thought maybe this idea would just dart through my mind, like one of those stupid words that sometimes appear at the tip of your pen and vanish, but it remained there. And the idea opened the door through which, like that English girl who followed a rabbit down his hole under the hedge, I entered a new world.
In the very beginning, I was the one who created the “eye” so that, obviously, it would see me and observe me. I didn’t want to be outside its gaze. I’d created myself under the gaze and the consciousness of this eye: I was pleased with its surveillance. My existence depended on my knowledge that I was being constantly observed—as if I’d cease to exist if the eye didn’t see me. The obvious truth was that, having forgotten that I was the one who created it, I felt grateful to the eye that made my existence possible. I wanted to comply with its commands! Only then would I be included in a more pleasant “existence”! But it was difficult to accomplish this, although the difficulty was not painful (life was like that), it was something familiar we’d come to accept as natural. The contemplative world I fell into while leaning up against the mosque wall was not a nightmare but a kind of happiness fabricated out of reminiscences and familiar images, like the imaginary paintings “produced” by nonexistent painters I invented which I had once described in the column called “Believe It or Not.”
Leaning up against the wall of the mosque and observing my own perception, I saw that I was in the center of this garden of happiness.
I knew instantly that what I saw in the center of my perception, or imagination, or illusion—whatever you want to call it—was not a being that resembled me; it was me, myself. That’s how I could understand that the gaze of the “eye” that I’d sensed moments before was my own gaze. I had become that “eye” and was now observing myself. Besides not being a weird or foreign sensation, it was not at all frightening. As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That’s how I had managed to pull myself together over the years, checking myself out from the outside. “Okay, everything is in its place,” I would say. Or, scanning myself, “Ugh, I don’t make it today,” I would say. “I don’t look enough like what I want to look like.” Or I said: “I look something like it, but I must try harder.” And after many years, observing myself, “All right! I look like what I want to look like at last!” I could say joyfully: “Yes, I’ve made it, I’ve become
him.
”
Who was this “him” anyway? First, I understood why “he,” whom I wanted to be so much like, appeared to me at this point of my journey to Wonderland: because, during my long walk through the night, I hadn’t been trying to imitate “him” or anybody else. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe for a moment that people can live without impersonation, without desiring to be someone else, but that night I was so tired, so empty, and the desire in me had hit such a low that
he
(who must be obeyed) and I had become “equals” at last. You can attest to our “relative” equality, seeing how I was neither afraid of him nor reluctant to get involved in the world of fantasy into which he had summoned me. I still lived under his eyes, but on that beautiful winter night I was also free. Even though it was a sensation that I’d earned through fatigue and defeat, instead of through willpower and victory, still this feeling of freedom and equality had paved the way for an informal familiarity between him and me. (This cordiality must be self-evident in my style.) For the first time in years, he divulged his secrets to me, and I understood him. Sure enough, I was talking to myself, but what is this kind of conversation but whispering like chums with a second person, or even a third person, we’ve buried deep inside?
My more attentive readers have long figured out the references I’ve used interchangeably, but let me reiterate them anyway: “He” was, of course, the “eye.” The eye was the person I wanted to be. I had first created not the “eye” but “him,” the person I wanted to become. And the “he” who I wanted to be had let loose that powerful, stultifying gaze on me across the distance between us. The “eye” that put limits on my freedom, the insouciant gaze that had me under total surveillance and passed judgment on me, stood hanging over my head like an accursed sun that wouldn’t let me off. Don’t assume that I am complaining. I was pleased with the brilliant scene that the “eye” presented to me.
Watching myself in this geometrical and fastidiously precise landscape (which was the pleasure of the thing, after all), I’d instantly perceived that I’d created “him” myself, but I had only a vague idea how I’d gone about it. There were some clues which revealed to me that I’d abstracted him out of my own life materials and experiences. He (whom I wanted to become) had been affected by the heroes of the comics I’d read in my childhood, the heavy-duty
littérateurs
whose photos I studied in foreign publications, or these posturing persons’ libraries, their desks, the sanctified haunts where they cogitated their “deep and meaningful” thoughts and in front of which they posed for the photographers. Sure I’d wanted to be like them too! But how much, though? In this metaphysical geography, I came across some disheartening clues as well, vis-à-vis my having created “him” out of the details of my own past: a wealthy and industrious neighbor whose virtues my mother extolled; the shadow of a Westernized pasha who’d pledged himself to the rescue of his homeland; the image of the hero in a book which had been read five times through from beginning to end; a teacher who punished us by giving us the silent treatment; a classmate who was so classy that, besides being able to afford to put on clean socks every day, he addressed his parents in the second person plural; the intelligent, resourceful, and witty protagonists in foreign films shown at Beyoğlu and Şehzadebaşı theaters—the way they handle their drink glasses, the way they are so humorous, so appropriately decisive, and so totally at ease with women, even with beautiful ones; famous writers, philosophers, scientists, discoverers, and inventors, whose life histories I read in the forewords to their books; a few military men; and the insomniac hero who saves the city from a catastrophic flood … All these persons put in appearances one by one, hailing me here and there like familiar districts on the map as I stood, way past midnight, leaning up against the wall of the mosque. Like a person who’s startled upon finding on a map the district and the street where he’s lived most of his life, I felt the same childish excitement at first. Then, I too sampled the same unsavory aftertaste as that person who’s looked at the map for the first time, who’s bound to be disappointed when he realizes that the buildings, the streets, the parks, the houses, all the places loaded with memories the recollections of which will haunt him for a lifetime, are shown perfunctorily on the great big map as tiny lines and dots which, compared to other lines and signs, look insignificant and meaningless.
I had reproduced him out of my memories and memorialized persons. This monstrosity, which was the collage of the crowd that I recollected one by one, existed as the soul of the “eye” that he’d turned loose on me, which had now become my own gaze. Within it, I now apprehended myself and my whole life. I lived my life, pleased to be under the scrutiny of this gaze, pulling myself together under its auspices, imitating “him,” trying to reach him through impersonation, assured that someday I would actually become him, or at least something like him. I lived not hopefully, but hoping for the hope of becoming someone else: him. Don’t let my readers assume that this “metaphysical experiment” constitutes some sort of awakening, an exemplary tale in the genre of “opening your eyes to reality.” In the Wonderland where I found myself, leaning up against the wall of the mosque, everything sparkled in the light of a scintillating geometry, purified of crime and sin, pleasure and punishment. I’d once dreamed of the full moon, hung up in the same midnight-blue sky above this very street and this very perspective, slowly transforming itself into the bright dial of a clock. The landscape I experienced now had the clarity, the transparence, the symmetry of that dream. I felt like going on observing at my leisure, recounting what seemed self-evident by pointing out the amusing variations one by one.