The Black Book (22 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
“I can,” said Galip.
“You can?” the woman said hopefully. “You can. You do it, and I will marry you. You’ll save me from the life I am leading, that is, the life of living in the movies. I am sick and tired of being a movie star. This retarded nation thinks a movie star is just a whore, not an artist. I am not a movie star, I am an artist. You understand?”
“Sure.”
“Will you marry me?” the woman said exuberantly. “If we were married, we could drive around in my car. Will you marry me? But you’d have to fall in love with me.”
“I will marry you.”
“No, no, you ask me … Ask me if I will marry you.”
“Türkan, will you marry me?”
“Not like that! Ask sincerely, with feeling, like in the movies! But first get on your feet. No one ever pops the question sitting down.”
Galip got on his feet as if he were going to sing the national anthem. “Türkan, will you, will you, marry me?”
“But I am not a virgin,” said the woman. “I had an accident.”
“What, riding a horse? Or sliding down the banister?”
“No, doing the ironing. You laugh, but only yesterday I heard that the Sultan wants your head. You married?”
“I am.”
“I always get stuck with the married guys anyway,” said the woman, her manner lifted out of
My Disorderly Babe.
“But it’s not important. What is important is the State Railways. Which team do you think will win the cup this year? How do you think things will end up? When do you think the military will put a stop to all this anarchy? You know, you’d look better if you got your hair cut.”
“Don’t make personal remarks,” said Galip. “It’s not polite.”
“What did I say now?” the woman said opening her eyes wide and blinking like Türkan Şoray to feign surprise. “I only asked if you married me, would you win back my car? No, no. I said if you get my car back, will you marry me. Here’s the license number: 34 JG 19 May 1919. Same day Atatürk hit the road in Samsun to liberate Anatolia. My darling ’56 Chevvy.”
“Tell me about it!” Galip said.
“Yes, but they’ll soon be knocking on the door. Your
visite
is just about up.”
“The Turkish expression is ‘paying your respects.’”
“Excuse me?”
“Money is no object,” Galip said.
“For me, neither,” said the woman. “The ’56 Chevvy was red as my nails, the same color exactly. I got a broken nail, don’t I? Maybe my Chevvy too hit something. Before that creep who’s supposed to be my husband presented my car to that whore, I used to drive it here every day. But these days I only get to see him in the street, I mean, the car. Sometimes I see it being driven around Taksim by some driver or other, and sometimes at the Karaköy ferry station with yet another cabby sitting in it, waiting for a fare. The broad is obsessed with the car; she has it painted a different color every other day. Sometimes, lo and behold, it’s been painted chestnut brown, next day it’s the color of coffee with cream, dripping with chrome and fitted with lights. The day after, it’s wreathed with flowers, with a doll sitting on the dashboard, and it’s become a pink bridal limousine! And then a week later, there it is painted black, six cops with black mustaches sitting in it, and wouldn’t you know it, now it’s a squad car! You can’t mistake it, seeing how it even says
POLICE
on it and everything. But, of course, the license plates are changed every time, so that I won’t catch on.”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “Both the cops and the drivers are that broad’s tricks, but that cuckold of a husband of mine doesn’t have a clue. He left me just like that one day. Has anyone left you just like that? What’s the date today?”
“The twelfth.”
“How time passes! Look how you make me talk a blue streak! Do you want something special by any chance? Go ahead, tell me, I’ve taken to you. You are a well-bred man, so how bad could it be? You have a lot of money on you? Are you really rich? Or just a greengrocer like İzzet? No, you’re a lawyer. Go ahead and tell me a riddle, Mr. Lawyer. All right, I will tell you one. What’s the difference between the Sultan and the Bosphorus Bridge?”
“Beats me.”
“Between Atatürk and Muhammad?”
“I give up.”
“You give up too easy!” the woman said. She rose from the vanity where she’d been watching herself and, giggling, she whispered the answers into Galip’s ear. Then she twined her arms around Galip’s neck. “Let’s get married,” she murmured. “Let’s go to Mount Kaf. Let’s belong to one another. Let’s become some other persons. Marry me, marry me, marry me.”
They kissed in the spirit of the game. Was there anything about this woman that was reminiscent of Rüya? There was not, but Galip was still pleased with himself. When they fell into bed, the woman did something that reminded him of Rüya, but she didn’t do it exactly like Rüya. Every time Rüya put her tongue in his mouth, Galip would be upset thinking that his wife had for a moment turned into someone else. But when the pretend Türkan Şoray stuck her tongue, which was larger and heavier than Rüya’s, into Galip’s mouth somewhat victoriously, but tenderly and playfully, he felt that it was not the woman in his arms who was different but it was he that had completely become someone else; and he was terribly aroused. Goaded by the woman’s sense of play, they rolled rough-and-tumble from one end of the bed to the other, first one on top and then the other, like in the totally unrealistic kissing scenes in domestic films. “You’re making me dizzy!” said the woman, making like she was really dizzy in imitation of a ghostly figure that was not present. When Galip realized that they could see themselves in the mirror on this end of the bed, he figured out why this tender rolling scene had been deemed necessary. The woman watched with pleasure the image of taking off her own clothes and then Galip’s in the mirror. As if watching a third person together, perhaps somewhat more congenially than the judges evaluating the contestants going through the compulsory movements in a gymnastic competition, they watched in the mirror the woman’s tricks, one after the other, to their hearts’ content. At a moment when Galip couldn’t see the mirror while they were bouncing on the quiet springs of the bed, the woman said, “We have both become other people.” She asked, “Who am I, who am I, who am I?” but Galip didn’t manage giving her the answer she wanted to hear: he’d let himself go completely. He heard the woman say, “Two times two make four,” murmuring “Listen, listen, listen!” and then barely audibly speaking about a sultan and his unfortunate crown prince as if she were telling a fairy tale, or a dream, using the special past tense for telling stories.
“If I am you, then you are me,” the woman said later as they put their clothes back on. “So what? What if you have become me, and I you?” She gave him a foxy smile. “How did you like your Türkan Şoray?”
“I liked her.”
“Then save me from the life, save me, take me away from here, marry me, let’s go somewhere else, let’s elope, get married, and begin a new life.”
From what film did this segment come, or from what game? Galip was not certain. Perhaps this was what the woman wanted. She told Galip that she did not believe he was married, seeing how she knew a lot about married men. If they really did get married, and if Galip managed getting the ’56 Chevvy liberated, the two of them would go on an outing on the Bosphorus; they’d get wafer
helva
at Emirgân, view the sea at Tarabya, and eat somewhere in Büyük Dere.
“I don’t care for Büyük Dere,” Galip said.
“In that case, you’re waiting for Him in vain,” said the woman. “He will never come.”
“I am in no hurry.”
“But I am,” the woman said stubbornly. “I am afraid of not recognizing Him when He comes. I am afraid I’ll be the last one to get to see Him. I am afraid of being the very last person.”
“Who is He?”
The woman smiled mysteriously. “Don’t you ever see any movies? Don’t you know the rules of the game? Do you suppose people who blab such things are allowed to remain alive in this country? I want to live.”
Someone began to knock on the door before she finished telling the story of a friend of hers who vanished mysteriously and was, in all likelihood, murdered and her body dumped in the Bosphorus. The woman fell silent. As he walked out the door, the woman whispered after him:
“We are all waiting for Him, all of us; we are all waiting for Him.”
I am crazy about mysterious things.
—
DOSTOEVSKY
We are all waiting for Him. We have been waiting for Him all these centuries. Some of us, weary of the crowds on the Galata Bridge, wait for Him as we dolorously watch the lead-colored waters of the Golden Horn; some of us wait as we throw a couple more sticks in a stove that just won’t heat a two-room flat at Surdibi; some of us wait as we climb a seemingly endless staircase up a certain Greek building on a back street in Cihangir; some of us wait in a podunk town in Anatolia as we do the crossword puzzle in an Istanbul paper to pass the time until we meet our friends at a tavern; some of us wait as we fantasize about boarding the airplanes mentioned and shown in the same newspaper, or about entering a well-lit room, or embracing beautiful bodies. We await Him as we sorrowfully walk on muddy sidewalks, in our hands paper bags that have been made out of newspapers read over at least a hundred times, or plastic bags that inundate the apples inside with a synthetic smell, or string market-bags that leave purplish marks on our fingers and palms. We are all waiting for Him at the movie theaters where we watch tough guys break bottles and windows on a Saturday night and the delightful adventures of world-class dolls; returning from whorehouses where we sleep with whores who only manage to make us feel even more lonely, or from taverns where our friends poke merciless fun at our small obsessions, or from the neighbors’ where we can’t get any pleasure out of listening to the radio theater because their noisy children cannot manage to go to bed, we wait for Him in the street. Some of us say that He will first appear in the darkest corners of the slums where urchins knock out the streetlights with their slingshots, while others say it will be in front of stores where sinful tradesmen sell tickets for the National Sweepstakes and Sports Lotto, and skin magazines, toys, tobacco, condoms, and stuff like that. Everyone says that no matter where He is first seen, be it at
köfte
shops where children are kept kneading hamburger twelve hours a day, or at the movie theaters where a thousand eyes burning with the same desire become a single eye, or on the green hills where angelically innocent shepherds fall under the spell of the graveyard cypresses, the fortunate person who first sees Him will recognize Him instantly, and it will be understood that the waiting, which has been as long as eternity and as short as an eye blink, is at an end, and that the hour of salvation is at hand.
The Koran is quite explicit on the subject only for those who can make out the “meaning” of the Arabic alphabet (as in the 97th verse of the sura called
Al-Isra,
or The Israelites, or the 23rd verse of
Al-Zumar,
or The Companies, where it is explained that the Koran is revealed
mutashabih
and
mathani:
“consistent in its various parts” and “repeated,” etc., etc.). According to Mutahhar Ibn Tahir from Jerusalem, who wrote three hundred years after the revelation of the Koran, in his book
Origins and History,
the only evidence on this subject is what he says concerning Muhammad’s “name, appearance, or else the guidance of someone whose work is consistent with mine,” or else, the depositions of the other witnesses who supplied the information for this particular hadith and others like it. And we also know that it is briefly noted in Ibn Batuta’s
Journeys
that the Shiites await His manifestation ceremonially in the underground passages below the shrine of
Hakim-al Wakt
(Sage of the Time) at Samarra. According to what Firuz Shah dictated to his scribe thirty years after that, there were thousands of unfortunates in the dusty yellow streets in Delhi who awaited Him and the mystery of the letters that He would reveal. We also know that yet another point is stressed once again during the same time period, in Ibn Khaldun’s
Introduction
where he considers each hadith concerning His appearance, which he selected by sifting through extreme Shiite sources: that He would slay Dadjdjal, or Satan, or, in keeping with the Christian concept and language, the Antichrist, who would appear together with Him on the Day of Judgment and Salvation.
The surprising thing was that none among those who awaited and dreamed of the Messiah found it possible to imagine His face: not my worthy reader Mehmet Yılmaz who has written to me concerning the vision he experienced in his house at a remote town in the Anatolian hinterland, not even Ibn Arabi who dreamed up the same vision seven hundred years before him and wrote about it in his
Phoenix,
not the philosopher al-Kindi who had a dream that He, along with all those He had saved, would conquer Constantinople from the Christians, and not the salesgirl who daydreamed about Him as she sat surrounded by bobbins, buttons, and nylon stockings in a dry-goods store on a backstreet of the Beyoğlu district in Istanbul where al-Kindi’s dream had eventually come true.
On the other hand, we are able to imagine Dadjdjal all too well: according to al-Bukhari’s
Prophets,
Dadjdjal is single-eyed and red-haired, according to
Pilgrimage
his identity is written on his face; Dadjdjal, who is supposed to be thick-necked according to Tayalisi, has red eyes and a heavy frame according to
Tawhid
by Reverend Nizamettin Bey who did his daydreaming in Istanbul. In the humor rag called
Karagöz,
which was read extensively in the hinterland during the years I was a cub reporter, there was a cartoon-strip romance concerning the derring-do of a Turkish warrior, in which Dadjdjal was represented as deformed and crooked-mouthed. Dadjdjal, who came up with incredible ruses in his battles against our warriors, who were known to make love to the beauties of Constantinople, which was as yet unconquered, had a broad forehead, a large nose, but no mustache (in keeping with the suggestions I sometimes gave the illustrators). In opposition to Dadjdjal, who stirs our powers of imagination so vividly, our only writer who was able to personify our long-awaited Messiah in all His glory was Dr. Ferit Kemal who wrote his
Le Grand Pacha
in French, and the fact that it could only be published in Paris in 1870 is considered, by some, a loss for our national literature.