The Black Book (21 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
We should have met long ago.
—
TÜRKAN ŞORAY
, superstar of Turkish film
On the main drag, where Galip found himself after he left Rüya’s ex-husband’s place, he couldn’t find any transportation. From time to time, city buses roared by, inexorably determined not to slow down, let alone make a stop. He decided to walk all the way to the train station at Bakırköy. Slogging his way through the snow to the train station that looked like one of those dinky refrigerated cases at a corner grocery store, Galip had fantasies of running into Rüya, of things returning to normal, and of almost disregarding Rüya’s reasons for leaving, once these were understood to be clear and simple; but not even in the fantasies of resuming their life together could he find any way of telling Rüya about his interview with her ex-husband.
On the train, which left half an hour later, an old man told Galip the story of something that happened to him some forty years ago on a winter’s night that had been equally as cold. The old man’s brigade had put in a difficult winter at a village in Thrace during the years of dearth when the big war was expected to spread into our country. One morning, having received a coded order, they had mounted their horses, left the village, and ridden a whole day to reach the outskirts of Istanbul. But they hadn’t entered the city. Instead, they had waited for nightfall in the hills above the Golden Horn. Once activity in the city ceased, they had descended into the dark streets and, in the ghostly light of the masked streetlights, they had guided their horses quietly over the frozen cobblestones and handed them over to the slaughterhouse in Sütlüce. The noise of the train made it hard for Galip to make out the words and the syllables describing the scenes of carnage as the horses fell one by one, the bewildered animals with their guts spilled on the bloody stones, their internal organs hanging out like the springs of the gutted armchair, the rage of the butchers, the sad look in the faces of the animals waiting for their turn which resembled the expression in the cavalrymen’s faces as they sneaked out of town like criminals.
There was no transportation in front of Sirkeci Station, either. Galip considered for a moment walking up to the office building and spending the night in his office, but then he sensed that the taxi doing a U-turn would pick him up. Yet when the taxi stopped further down the sidewalk, a man carrying a briefcase, who seemed to have stepped out of some black-and-white film, yanked the door open and got in. The driver, after picking up his fare, also stopped for Galip, saying that he could drop him off at Galata Palace along with the “gentleman.”
When Galip got out of the taxi at Galata Palace, he regretted not having spoken with the man who looked like a character out of a black-and-white film. He contemplated the ferryboats docked at Karaköy Bridge, which were not in service yet fully lighted, imagining the conversation he could have struck up with the man. “Sir,” he could have said, “once upon a time many years ago, on a snowy night like this…” If only he had begun the story, he could have finished it with the same ease with which he began, and the man might have listened to Galip with the interest he anticipated.
A little down the road from the Atlas Theater, Galip was looking into the window of a women’s shoestore (Rüya wore a size seven shoe), when a small, skinny man approached him. He was carrying one of those imitation leather cases carried door to door by bill collectors from the municipal gas company. “Do you fancy the stars?” he said. He wore his jacket buttoned up to his neck like an overcoat. Galip surmised he had met up with a colleague of the man who set up his telescope at Taksim Square on cloudless nights, offering the curious a look at the stars for a hundred liras a shot, but the man pulled an album out of his case. He turned the pages of the album himself, giving Galip a look at his incredible photographs showing some of our famous movie stars, printed on good quality stock.
And yet, the photographs were not of the famous movie stars but of their look-alikes, wearing costumes and jewelry modeled after the stars’, who imitated their poses and gestures, such as the way they smoked their cigarettes or puckered up for a kiss. Pasted on each movie star’s page was the star’s name in bold print cut out of newspaper headlines and a color picture of her clipped from a magazine, and arranged all around it were many “attractive” poses of the impersonator striving to look like the original.
Aware of Galip’s lack of interest, the thin man with the case pulled him into a narrow, deserted street behind the New Angel Theater and proffered the album to him so that he could flip through it with his own hands. In the light of an odd little shop window where gloves, umbrellas, purses, and stockings were displayed on severed mannequin’s hands, arms, and legs dangling from the ceiling on strings, Galip carefully studied “Türkan Şoray” dancing in a gypsy outfit that swirled out into infinity or wearily lighting a cigarette, “Müjde Ar” peeling a banana, staring wantonly into the camera or laughing recklessly, and “Hülya Koçyiğit” wearing glasses to mend the bra she’d taken off, leaning into the sink to do the dishes, then weeping, troubled and disconsolate. The owner of the album, who had been studying Galip with the same attentiveness, suddenly ripped the album out of Galip’s hand with the resolve of a high-school teacher who has caught his student reading a forbidden book and stuffed it back into his case.
“Want me to take you to them?”
“Where do they hang out?”
“You look like a gentleman. Follow me.”
As they wended their way through back alleys, Galip was pestered to make a choice and obliged to divulge that he liked Türkan Şoray the best.
“In person,” said the man with the briefcase as if giving away a secret. “She’ll be tickled pink. She’ll get a real kick out of you.”
They went in the first floor of an old stone house next to the Beyoğlu police station that had the inscription
COMPANIONS
over the door. It smelled of dust and fabrics. In the semilit room, although there were no sewing machines or materials anywhere around, Galip nonetheless had an impulse to name the place The Companions’ Haberdashers. The brilliantly lit second room they entered through a tall white door reminded Galip that he ought to give the pimp his cut.
“Türkan!” said the man as he put the money in his pocket. “Türkan, look, İzzet is here asking for you.”
The two women playing cards tittered as they turned to look at Galip. In the room that called to mind an old, dilapidated stage set, there was that sleep-inducing lack of air that is endemic to those rooms where the stove isn’t well-ventilated, the smell of perfume is heavy, and the racket of domestic-pop music tiresome. Reclining on the sofa was a woman riffling through a humor magazine, who had assumed Rüya’s typical pose as she read detective novels (one leg on the back of the sofa), although she looked neither like a movie star nor like Rüya. One could tell “Müjde Ar” was Müjde Ar because her T-shirt said so. An older man who looked like a waiter had fallen asleep in front of a TV show on which a panel was discussing the significance of the conquest of Constantinopole in world history.
Galip thought the woman with the permed hair who was wearing blue jeans looked vaguely like an American movie star whose name escaped him, but he wasn’t sure whether the resemblance was intentionally cultivated. Another man who entered through the other door approached “Müjde Ar,” and with the seriousness of a drunk, swallowing the first two syllables, he concentrated on reading her name on her T-shirt like those people who believe what’s going on only when they read about it in the headlines.
Galip guessed the woman wearing a leopard print dress must be “Türkan Şoray”: not only was she approaching him, her walk had a modicum of grace. Perhaps she was the one who most looked like the original; she had pulled long blond hair over her right shoulder.
“May I smoke?” she said, smiling pleasantly. She placed an unfiltered cigarette between her lips. “Will you light it for me?”
As soon as Galip lit her cigarette with his lighter, an incredibly dense cloud of smoke formed around the woman’s head. When her head and her long-lashed eyes emerged out of the cloud like a saint’s head materializing in the mist, a strange silence seemed to overcome the loud music (as in romantic movies), making Galip think, for the first time in his life, that he could go to bed with a woman other than Rüya. Upstairs, in a room that was carefully appointed, the woman stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray that had the insignia of the Ak Bank, and she took another one out of her pack.
“May I smoke?” she said with the same voice and manner as before. She placed the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, smiling pleasantly but holding her head high. “Will you light it for me?”
Noticing that she leaned her head exactly in the same way as before toward an imaginary lighter, thereby exposing her cleavage, Galip figured that her lines and the gesture of lighting her cigarette must have come out of a Türkan Şoray movie, and that he himself was supposed to play the actor İzzet Günay who was the male lead in the same flick. When he lit her cigarette, the same incredibly dense cloud formed around the woman’s head, and the long-lashed black eyes once more emerged slowly out of the mist. How was she able to blow out so much smoke? He would’ve thought an effect like this could only be simulated in a studio.
“Why so quiet?” said the woman, smiling.
“I’m not quiet,” Galip said.
“You’re some piece of work, aren’t you?” the woman said, pretending to be simultaneously curious and angry. “Or are you too innocent for words?” She repeated the same lines once more. Her long earrings dangled on her bare shoulders.
The lobby photos stuck into her round vanity mirror reminded Galip that Türkan Şoray had worn the leopard print dress, which was cut way down to her buttocks in the back, when she played the nightclub doxy in the movie called
My Disorderly Babe
in which she shared the lead with İzzet Günay some twenty years ago; then he heard the woman say other lines that also came out of the Türkan Şoray movie: (
Hanging her head like a wistful, spoiled child, her hands suddenly flying out from where they were clasped under her chin
) “But I can’t go to sleep now! When I drink, I want to have fun!”; (
With the air of a kindly aunt worrying over a neighbor’s child
) “Stay with me, İzzet, stay until the bridge opens!”; (
With sudden exuberance
) “It was kismet that it happened with you, and today!”; (
In a ladylike manner
) “I am pleased to meet you, I am pleased to meet you, I am pleased to meet you…”
Galip took the chair next to the door, and the woman sat before the round vanity mirror that looked a lot like the original in the movie, brushing her long bleached blond hair. Stuck in the mirror, there was also a photo of this particular scene. The woman’s back was even more beautiful than the original. For an instant, she looked at Galip’s image in the mirror.
“We should have met long ago…”
“We did meet long ago,” Galip said, observing the woman’s face in the mirror. “We didn’t sit at the same desk at school, but on a warm spring day when the window was opened after a long class discussion, I watched your face reflected like this in the pane which the blackness of the chalkboard right behind it had turned into a mirror.”
“Hmmm … We should have met long ago.”
“We met long ago,” said Galip. “When we first met, your legs looked so thin and so delicate that I was afraid they would break. Your skin was rough when you were a kid, but as you got older, after we graduated from middle school, your complexion became rosy and incredibly fine. If they took us to the beach on hot summer days when we went crazy from playing indoors, coming back with ice-cream cones we bought at Tarabya, we would scratch letters with our long nails into the salt on each other’s arms. I loved the fuzz on your skinny arms. I loved the peachy color of your suntanned legs. I loved the way your hair spilled over your face when you reached for something on the shelf above my head.”
“We should have met long ago.”
“I used to love the strap marks left on your shoulders by the bathing suit you borrowed from your mother, the way you absentmindedly tugged at your hair when you were nervous, the way you caught between your middle finger and thumb a speck of tobacco left by your filterless cigarette on the tip of your tongue, the way your mouth fell open watching a movie, the way you unwittingly scarfed up the roasted garbanzos and nuts in the dish under your hand while you read a book, the way you kept losing your keys, the way you screwed up your eyes to see because you refused to accept you were nearsighted. When you narrowed your eyes on a distant point and absconded for parts unknown, I understood that you were thinking of something else, and I loved you apprehensively. Oh my God! I loved with fear and trepidation what I couldn’t know of your mind as much as I loved what I did know.”
Galip shut up when he saw a vague anxiety in Türkan Şoray’s face in the mirror. The woman lay down on the bed next to the vanity.
“Come to me now,” she said. “Nothing is worth it, nothing, you understand?” But Galip just sat there, unsure. “Or don’t you love your Türkan Şoray?” she added jealously, though Galip couldn’t decide for sure if it was real or make-believe.
“I do.”
“You loved the way I batted my eyelashes too, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“You used to love the sensuous way I went down the stairs in
Maşallah Beach,
the way I lit my cigarette in
My Disorderly Babe,
and the way I smoked through a cigarette holder in
Hell of a Girl.
Didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Then, come to me, my darling.”
“Let’s talk some more.”
“What?”
Galip was pensive.
“What’s your name? What do you do for a living?”
“I am a lawyer.”
“I used to have a lawyer,” the woman said. “He took all my money but he could not get this car that was registered to me out of my husband’s mitts. It’s my car, understand? Mine. Now some whore has got hold of it. A ’56 Chevrolet, fire-engine red. What’s a lawyer good for, I ask you, if he can’t get my car back? Can you get my husband to give me back my car?”