The Black Book (36 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
It was difficult figuring out to what extent Jelal frequented or inhabited this place by studying the phantom decor. One could imagine that the number of the slim Gelincik or the thick Yeni Harman butts in the worn ashtrays that seemed placed here and there at random, or the cleanliness of the plates in the kitchen cabinets, or the relative freshness of the toothpaste on the end of the tube of Ipana which had been throttled at the neck with the same anger that had precipitated a column denouncing this same brand years ago were all part of the permanent fixtures under constant supervision in this museum arranged with a meticulousness that was sick. One might even go further and imagine that the dust in the globe lamps, the shadows that filtered through this dust to fall on the faded walls, and these shadows which were reminiscent of the faded shapes in the imagination of two Istanbul kids twenty-five years ago of African forests and Central Asian deserts, and the ghosts of the weasels and wolves in the witch and demon stories they heard from their aunt and grandmother were all part of the unique reproductions in this museum. (Galip mused, having, in the meantime, a hard time swallowing.) Consequently, it was impossible to deduce to what extent this place was lived in by examining marks left by the rain that had dried along balcony doors that hadn’t been shut all the way, or the gray dust balls that curled up like silk along the walls, or, under the weight of the initial footstep, the brittle squeak of the pieces of parquet which had given from all the central heating. The showy wall clock that was hung across from the kitchen door, a replica of which kept ticking and chiming away with the same joyousness at Cevdet Bey’s—who had old money, as Aunt Halé so often mentioned with pride—had been stopped with its hands at 9:35. The place made Galip think of the Atatürk museums, arranged with the same sick obsessiveness, with their clocks stopped at the hour of Atatürk’s death (9:05 a.m., November 10, 1938). But it didn’t occur to Galip what 9:35 it referred to or the hour of whose death.
After having suffered the ghostly weight of the past, which rode him silly thanks to the sense of vengeance and sorrow exacted by his thoughts of the original pieces of furniture, hapless and forlorn, that he had known twenty-five years before, which had been sold to a junk dealer when they’d run out of space and then had traveled jiggling around on the dealer’s horse cart in order to be forgotten in God knew what distant lands, Galip returned to the corridor to go through the papers in the glass-front elm cabinet that ran the length of the wide wall between the kitchen and the bathroom, which was the only piece of furniture that Galip considered “new” in the place. After conducting a search that didn’t last too long, he found these articles that had been arranged on the shelves with the same sick obsession:
Clippings of news stories and interviews from Jelal’s cub reporter period; clippings of all the articles written in praise or to the detriment of one Jelal Salik; all the columns and anecdotes Jelal had published under his pseudonyms; all the columns Jelal had published under his own name; all the columns of “Believe It or Not,” “Interpreting Your Horoscope,” “Today in Retrospect,” “Incredible Incidents,” “Interpreting Your Signature,” “Your Face, Your Personality,” “Puzzles and Crosswords,” and the like, all of which Jelal had researched and penned; clippings of all the interviews done on Jelal; rough drafts of columns that had not seen print for various reasons; special notes; tens of thousands of news stories and photographs he’d clipped and saved all these years; notebooks in which he’d jotted his dreams, his fantasies, details that must not be forgotten; pieces of reader mail by the thousands kept in dried fruit, candied chestnut, and shoe boxes; clippings of serial novels published under his pen name which he had either done in their entirety or picked up halfway through; copies of hundreds of letters Jelal had written; hundreds of weird magazines, pamphlets, books, brochures, and school and military service yearbooks; boxes of pictures of people that had been cut out of newspapers and magazines; pornographic photographs; pictures of odd animals and insects; two big boxes of articles and publications on Hurufism and the science of letters; stubs of old bus, soccer game, and movie tickets with signs, letters, and symbols drawn on them; photos that had been pasted into albums, or not; awards received from journalism associations; old Turkish and Czarist Russian currency; telephone and address books.
Upon finding the three address books, Galip returned to the chair in the living room and read through all the pages. He concluded, after forty minutes of research, that the people in the address books had figured in Jelal’s life during the fifties and the sixties, and that he was not going to be able to find Rüya and Jelal at any of the numbers where the addresses had been exchanged for those that belonged to houses that had most probably been torn down. Following a short investigation among the bits and pieces in the glass-front cabinet, he began reading Jelal’s columns from the early seventies and the letters he received during the same time period in order to find the letter allegedly sent by Mahir Ikinci that concerned the trunk murder.
Some people he knew from high school had been involved in the incident, so Galip had been interested in the politically motivated murder, referred to as the “trunk murder” in the news. The ingenious young people who had organized themselves into the political faction found responsible for the murder had unintentionally imitated one of Dostoevsky’s novels (
The Devils
) down to the last detail, and now as Galip went through the letters he remembered the couple of evenings when Jelal, who always maintained that in our country everything was in imitation of something else, had discussed the subject. Those were sunless, cold, and distasteful days, which were forgotten as they ought to be: Rüya was married to that “nice guy” whose name kept slipping Galip’s mind as he went back and forth between being impressed and feeling contemptuous. That was when Galip, defeated by his own curiosity which he always regretted later, listened to gossip and poked around, and ended up getting more political information than any cogent details concerning the newlyweds’ conjugal bliss or the lack thereof. One winter’s eve while Vasıf contentedly fed his Japanese fish (red
wakins
and
watonais
whose ruffled tail fins had degenerated from intermarriage within the family) and Aunt Halé did the crossword puzzle in
Milliyet
glancing up at the TV now and then, Grandma had just died staring at the cold ceiling in her cold room. Rüya had come to the funeral alone (“Better this way,” said Uncle Melih who openly despised his son-in-law whose background was provincial, thereby giving voice to Galip’s secret thoughts), wearing a faded coat and an even more faded kerchief, and had taken off soon after. One night when they got together in one of the flats after the funeral, Jelal had asked Galip if he had any information on the subject of the trunk murder but had been unable to find out what he was really curious to know: by any chance had any of the young people Galip said he knew read that book by the Russian author?
“All the murders,” Jelal had said that very night, “like all the books, are all imitations. That’s why I could never publish a book under my own name.” Next evening they’d gathered at the deceased’s flat again, and the two of them were having a late night tête-à-tête when Jelal had gone on, saying, “Even so, in the worst murders there is an original aspect that does not exist in the worst of books.” In the following years, Jelal would descend step by step deep into these speculations, which gave Galip a pleasure akin to going on a journey whenever he witnessed it. “So, the total travesties are not murders but books. Since they are concerned with imitations of imitations—exactly the kind of thing that thrills us the most—murders that explain books and books that explain murders appeal to a sensibility common to us all; it goes without saying that one can only bring down the bludgeon on the victim’s head if he can put himself in someone else’s place (since no one can bear to see himself as the murderer). Creativity mostly lies in anger, anger that renders us insensible, but anger can prod us into action only through methods that we have previously learned from others: knives, guns, poisons, narrative tricks, forms of fiction, verse meters, etc. When a notorious Public Enemy says, ‘Your Honor, I was not myself,’ he is only expressing this well-known fact: Murder, in all its details and ceremonies, is a business that one learns from others, that is, from legends, stories, recollections, newspapers—in short, from literature. The purest act of murder, a crime of passion committed by mistake, for example, is still an unconscious act of travesty, an imitation of literature. Should I write a column on the subject? What do you say?” He hadn’t written it.
Way past midnight, while Galip was busy reading the columns he’d taken out of the cabinet, first the lights in the living room went down like the footlights on a stage, then the motor in the fridge moaned with the sad weariness of an old, overloaded truck changing gears upgrade on a steep and muddy slope, and the place went pitch-dark. Like all Istanbulites who are accustomed to power failures, Galip sat for a long while in the chair without moving, the folder with the news clippings on his lap, entertaining the hope that “it will soon be back on.” He sat listening to the internal noises of the building he’d forgotten all these years, the clacking in the radiator, the silence of the walls, the parquet floor stretching out, the moaning in the taps and the plumbing, the muffled tick-tocks of the clock he couldn’t place, and the roar from the air shaft that gave him the willies. By the time he groped his way into Jelal’s bedroom, it was really late. He was putting on Jelal’s pajamas when he thought of the protagonist stretching out on his double’s bed in the historical novel by the sad writer he’d met last night at the nightclub. He got in bed but couldn’t fall asleep right away.
Our dreams are a second life.
—
GÉRARD DE NERVAL
,
Aurélia
You get into bed. You settle down among familiar things, sheets and blankets redolent with your own smells and memories, your head finds the familiar softness of your pillow, you turn on your side, pulling up your legs, you bend your neck forward, the cold side of the pillow cools your cheek: soon, very soon, you will fall asleep, and in the dark you will forget all, everything.
You will forget it all: the merciless power of your superiors, words that were heedlessly spoken, stupidities, work you didn’t get done on time, lack of consideration, disloyalty, injustice, indifference, people who blame you or will end up blaming you, your financial embarrassment, the fast flow of time, time that is heavy on your hands, people you miss, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your misery, the disasters, all the disasters; you will soon forget it all. You’re pleased that you will be forgetting. You wait.
Waiting with you are objects that surround you in the dark or the half-light: commonplace wardrobes that are all too familiar, drawers, radiators, tables, stools, chairs, closed curtains, the clothes you’ve taken off and tossed, your pack of cigarettes, the matches and your wallet in your coat pocket, your watch that you still hear ticking.
You are acquainted with the sounds you hear as you wait: a car going over the familiar pavement stones or over the water standing in the gutter, a door being closed somewhere nearby, the motor of an elderly refrigerator, dogs barking in the distance, the foghorn that can be heard all the way from the sea, the storefront shutter of the pudding shop suddenly getting rolled shut. The sounds, which are full of associations of sleep and dreaming as well as the memories of a renewed world of blissful oblivion, assure you that all is well, reminding you that soon you will forget them, along with the objects that surround you and your dear bed, and you will enter another realm. You are ready.
You are ready; it is as if you are taking leave of your body, your dear legs and hips, even your hands and arms. You are ready and so pleased to be ready, you no longer feel the necessity for your body and your limbs that are so close to you, and you know that you will forget them too as your eyes close.
A soft muscular movement makes you aware that under your eyelids your pupils are well shaded from light. Aware that all is well through the associations of familiar sounds and smells, it is as if your pupils present to you not the tenuous light in the room but the light in your mind which, as it gradually relaxes into repose, bursts into a fireworks display of colors: you see blue stains, blue lightning jolts, purple smoke, purple domes; shivering waves of dark blue, the shadows of lavender waterfalls, the meandering of magenta lava that flows out of the mouths of volcanoes, and the Prussian blue of the stars twinkling silently. You watch the colors in your mind as the colors and the shapes repeat each other quietly, appearing and disappearing, and they gradually change, manifesting memories and scenes that have been forgotten or else have never taken place.
But you’re still not asleep.
Isn’t it still too early to confess the truth? Recall the things you think when you sleep peacefully: No, not what you did today and what you’re going to do tomorrow, but think of those sweet moments that united you unconsciously to the oblivion of sleep: They’ve all been waiting for your return when you finally show up, making them happy; no, you don’t show up at all, you are on a train, which is running between two rows of snow-covered telegraph poles, with all the things you love most packed in your case; you come back with something smart and apropos, and they all realize their mistake and shut up, feeling some sort of admiration for you, albeit secretly; you embrace a beautiful body that you love and the body embraces you back; you return to an orchard you’ve been unable to forget where you pick ripe cherries off the boughs; it’s summer, it’s winter, it’s spring; it’s morning, a blue morning, a beautiful morning, a sunny morning, a properly delightful morning … But no, you cannot sleep.