The Black Book (37 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
In that case, do what I do: turn gently in your bed without disturbing your arms and legs in the slightest so that your head can find a cool spot on your pillow. That’s when you begin to think about Princess Maria Palaeologina who was sent from Byzantium seven hundred years ago to become the bride of Hulagu, the Khan of the Moguls. She made the trip from Constantinople all the way to Iran to marry Hulagu, but when Hulagu gave up the ghost even before she got there, she married instead his son Abaka who rose to the throne; she lived in the Mogul palace in Iran for fifteen years, and when her husband was murdered, she returned back to these hills where you presently wish to sleep peacefully. Well, put yourself in place of Princess Maria and imagine her sorrow when she set out on the road, then imagine the rest of her days upon her return, spent shut up in the church she had built on the shores of the Golden Horn. Think of the dwarves kept by the Sultana called Handan, the mother of Ahmet the First, who had a dwarf house built in Scutari for her dear friends so that she could make them happy; then, a galleon having been built for them with the support of the Sultan himself, these friends of hers had sailed away from Istanbul to a paradise the location of which couldn’t be found even on the map. Imagine the sorrow of Handan Sultana separated from her friends on the morn of the voyage, and the sorrow of the dwarves on board the galleon waving goodbye, as if you yourself were soon leaving Istanbul and your loved ones.
If all this does not put me to sleep, my dear readers, I imagine a troubled man walking up and down a railway platform in a desolate station in the middle of a desolate night, waiting for a train that does not arrive; when I figure out the man’s destination, it turns out that I’ve become that man. I think about the workers digging the underground passage at Silivri Gate which provided access to the Greeks who occupied the city seven hundred years ago. I imagine the bewilderment of the first fellow who stumbled on the secondary meaning of objects. I dream of a parallel universe within the manifested one, imagining my intoxication with new meanings in this new realm as the secondary meanings of things are gradually revealed to me. I think of the blissful confusion of the man who has lost his memory. I imagine being abandoned in a ghost town I don’t recognize at all; the neighborhoods once inhabited by millions, the streets, the mosques, the bridges, the ships are all completely deserted, and as I walk through the ghostly emptiness, I weep to remember my own past and my own hometown, walking slowly to my own neighborhood, my own house, to my own bed where I am trying to fall asleep. I think of myself as Jean-François Champollion, who rises out of his bed to decipher the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone, and having taken dead-end streets where he comes across exhausted remembrances, he stumbles around absentmindedly like a somnambulist through the dark passages of my memory banks. Imagining myself as Murat the Fourth putting on a disguise at night to check out personally how Prohibition is going, privately assured that I would come to no harm in the company of my armed guard also in disguise, I fondly observe the lives of my subjects idling around in mosques, in the occasional shops still open for business, and in the dens of lassitude concealed in passageways.
Then, at midnight, I’ve become a quilt maker’s apprentice, whispering the first and the last syllables of a cipher to the tradesmen in anticipation of one of the last Janissary rebellions in the nineteenth century. Or else I am the messenger from the seminary who awakens the dormant dervishes of an outlawed order out of their lethargy and silence.
If I am still not asleep, dear readers, then I become the unhappy lover seeking the replica of his sweetheart whose memory traces he keeps losing, and I open doors all over the city, looking for my own past and my sweetheart’s trail in every room where opium is smoked, in every company where stories are told, and in every house where songs are sung. If my memory, my power of imagination, and my bedraggled dreams have still not said uncle out of exhaustion, then in a blissfully vague moment between sleep and wakefulness, I enter the first familiar abode I come across, say, the home of a slight acquaintance or the uninhabited mansion of a close relative, and, opening door after door as if going through the forgotten corners of my memory, I find the last room, put out the candle, stretch out on the bed and, among the remote, alien, and outlandish things, I fall asleep.
How much longer do I seek you, house by house, door to door?
How much longer, corner to corner, street by street?
—
RUMI
When Galip awoke from a long sleep in the morning, feeling peaceful, the fifty-year-old light fixture hanging from the ceiling was still on, giving off light the color of old parchment. Still in Jelal’s pajamas, he turned off all the lights that had been left on, got the
Milliyet
that had already been slipped under the door, sat at Jelal’s desk, and began to read. Seeing the same error he’d come across in the column when he was at the newspaper offices on Saturday afternoon (“being yourselves” had been transcribed as “being ourselves”), he let his hand find its way into the drawer and locate a green ball-point pen, and began correcting the piece. When he was done, he remembered Jelal also sitting at this desk wearing the same blue-striped pajamas and smoking while he made corrections with the same pen.
He trusted the feeling that things were going well. He ate his breakfast optimistically like someone who having slept well begins the day confidently, feeling full of himself—as if there was no need for him to be anybody else, either.
After making coffee, he placed on the desk some boxes of columns, letters, and news clippings that he’d taken out of the hallway cabinet. He had no doubt that if he read the papers in front of him with faith and care, he’d find what he was looking for in the end.
Galip tapped into his prerequisite resources of patience and care, reading Jelal’s columns about the feral existence of the children who lived in the pontoons on the Galata Bridge, about monstrous orphanage directors who stuttered, about the aerial competition of winged multitalented persons who dived off Galata Tower and into the air as if diving into water, about the history of pederasty in the Levant and “modern” merchants engaged in this business. He hung on to the same goodwill and confidence reading the stories concerning the reminiscences of an auto mechanic in Beşiktaş who’d chauffeured the first Model T in Istanbul, the reasons why chiming clock towers needed to be put up in every neighborhood in “our city,” the historical significance of the Egyptian ban on assignation scenes between harem ladies and black slaves in the
Thousand and One Nights,
the benefits of being able to board old-style horse-drawn streetcars on the move, the reasons why parrots fled Istanbul while black crows infested it, causing the first fall of snow as a consequence.
As he read, he remembered the days when he first read these pieces; he took notes on pieces of paper, sometimes reading a sentence, a paragraph, or a word over again; and when he finished reading a column, he fondly pulled a fresh one out of the box.
Sunlight hit only the window ledges without coming into the room. The curtains were open. Water dripped off the tips of the icicles hanging down the eaves of the apartment building across the street and out of the snow-and dirt-filled gutters. A piece of bright blue sky showed in between the triangle of the roof, which was the color of red tiles and dirty snow, and the square of the tall chimney that blew lignite smoke through its dark teeth. When his eyes got tired from reading, Galip focused them on the space between this triangle and the square, observing the crows whose fleet wings cut across the blue, and then as he returned to the sheet of paper in front of him he realized that Jelal also looked up from his work whenever he was tired and looked at the same space to watch the flight of the same crows.
Much later, when the sun now shone on the drawn curtains of the dark windows in the apartment building opposite, Galip’s optimism began to give out. It was possible that things, words, meanings were all in their proper places, but the more Galip read, the more he was painfully aware that the profound reality that held them together was long gone. He was reading what Jelal had written on Messiahs, false prophets, pretenders to the throne, and what he said on the subject of the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and on the jeweler called Saladdin with whom “the great Sufi poet” became intimate after the death of Shams, and Çelebi Hüsameddin who took Saladdin’s place upon the latter’s death. Hoping to shake off the feeling of distaste that welled up inside him, he began to read through the “Believe It or Not” columns, but he was unable to divert himself with the story about the poet called Figani who was strapped on a donkey to be paraded all around Istanbul because he had written an insulting couplet about Sultan Ibrahim’s prime vizier, nor with the story about Sheikh Eflaki who married all his sisters in turn and had inadvertently brought about every one of their deaths. Reading the letters he took out of the other box, he realized, with the same astonishment as in his childhood, the great number and the diversity of people who had become interested in Jelal; and yet, the letters were not good for anything besides feeding the feeling of mistrust that increased in Galip’s heart, be they letters from people asking for money, or accusing each other, or disclosing the easy virtue of the wives of other columnists with whom he was engaged in controversy, or reporting on some secret sect’s conspiracy and the bribes taken by local monopoly directors, or proclaiming their intense love or hate.
He knew everything was connected to the gradual change of Jelal’s image that had been in his mind when he first sat down at the desk. Just as things and objects had been extensions of a comprehensible world in the morning, Jelal had been someone whose work he’d read for many years, whose unknown attributes he’d understood and identified at a distance as “unknown attributes.” In the afternoon, during the hours when the elevator began transporting a steady stream of sick or pregnant women to the gynecologist’s office below, and when Galip understood that Jelal’s image in his mind was turning in some strange way into a “deficient” image, he realized that the whole room and the things around him had also changed. Things did not seem at all friendly now; they were the threatening signs from a world which was not bound to yield its secrets easily.
Having come to understand that the transformation was closely connected to what Jelal had written on Rumi, he decided to pursue the subject directly. He soon located a considerable number of pieces Jelal had written about Rumi and began to read rapidly through them.
What attracted Jelal to the most influential mystical poet of all time was neither the poems in Persian written in Konya in the thirteenth century, nor the stock lines chosen out of these poems to provide examples for the virtues taught in the ethics courses in middle school. Jelal was no more interested in the “choice pearls” that ornamented the first page of many a mediocre writer’s book than he was in the Mevlevi whirling-dervish ceremonies with the bare feet and the skirts which the tourists and the postcard business were so crazy about. Rumi, who had been in the last seven hundred years the subject of volumes of commentary by the tens of thousands, and his order which had caught on after his death, concerned Jelal only as a locus of interest that a columnist ought to utilize and benefit from. What interested Jelal most about Rumi was his “sexual and mystical” intimacy with certain men.
When he was around forty, Rumi, who had taken over the position of spiritual leader—the sheikhood—in Konya after the death of his father, and who was loved and admired not only by his devoted disciples but by the whole town, had fallen under the spell of an itinerant dervish from Tabriz called Shams who possessed neither Rumi’s wisdom nor his values. According to Jelal, Rumi’s conduct was totally incomprehensible. The apologias that were penned by commentators for the next seven hundred years, with the object of making some sense of the relationship, also proved this. After Shams disappeared or was killed, Rumi, despite his other disciples’ reactions against it, had appointed as Shams’s successor a totally ignorant jewelry-store keeper who had nothing to recommend him. According to Jelal, this choice was a sign that Rumi was in sad shape rather than that he had found again the “extremely powerful mystical attraction” Shams of Tabriz supposedly provided, which all the commentators had undertaken to prove. In just the same way, after the death of this successor, the next successor Rumi elected as his “soul mate” was as devoid of attributes and brilliance as was the previous one.
According to Jelal, putting various handles on these three relationships that seemed totally incomprehensible with the object of making them comprehensible, as had been the practice for centuries—inventing for each successor unreal virtues they couldn’t possibly carry off and, what’s more, faking lineage, as some had done, that proved these men had descended from Muhammad or Ali—was to miss the point concerning Rumi’s most cogent attribute. On a Sunday afternoon that coincided with the memorial ceremony celebrated in Konya every year, Jelal had expounded on this attribute which he said was also reflected in Rumi’s work. Once more, Galip had the feeling that things around him had changed as he reread, twenty-two years later, the same piece which, like all religious writing, had bored him stiff in his childhood, and he remembered its publication only in conjunction with the Rumi stamp series that were out specially that year (the fifteen-kuruş ones were pale pink, the thirties forget-me-not blue, and the rare sixties Rüya was keen on were pistachio green).
According to Jelal, as commentators had related it thousands of times by placing the fact in the crowning spot in their books, it was true that Rumi had produced an effect on and was in turn affected by the itinerant dervish, Shams of Tabriz, the moment he saw him. But it didn’t happen because Rumi had intuited that this man was a sage, as it is commonly surmised, following the famous “dialogue” between them occasioned by the question posed by Shams of Tabriz. The conversation between them was based on an ordinary “parable on modesty,” variations of which can be read even in the most insipid Sufi books sold in mosque courtyards. If Rumi were the enlightened person that he was supposed to be, he wouldn’t have been influenced by such a commonplace parable; at most, he must’ve pretended he was impressed.