The Black Book (40 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
Have you done all the visualizing? So, do you see that, in some strange way, these faces resemble one another? Is there not something that makes the faces look alike, just as surely as there is an invisible thread that bonds these persons together in the depths of their souls? Don’t you think that there is more meaning and presence in the faces of the quiet ones, the ones who cannot do the narrative, who cannot get themselves heard, who don’t seem important, who are mutes, whose stories don’t arouse people’s curiosity, who think of the perfect comeback only later at home? It seems these faces are suffused with the letters that their stories are composed of, as if they carried the signs of silence, dejection, even defeat. You’ve managed to think of your own face in the context of these faces, haven’t you? What a legion we all are, how touching, how helpless!
But I have no desire to deceive you: I am not one of you. Someone who can pick up a pen, scribble something or other, and do all right in getting others to read the scribbling, has been cured, in some measure, of the ailment. Perhaps that’s why I have never come across a writer who is capable of adequately discussing this most significant human condition. Now that whenever I pick up a pen I am well aware there is only one single subject, from this day on I will only attempt penetrating the hidden poetry in a countenance, the terrifying mystery in a gaze. So be prepared.
The face is what one goes by, generally.
—
LEWIS CARROLL
,
Through the Looking Glass
On Tuesday morning when Galip sat down at the desk covered with newspaper columns, he wasn’t as optimistic as he had been the previous morning. Now that the image of Jelal had changed in his mind after the first day’s work, the goal of his investigations seemed unspecified. Since he had no recourse other than reading the columns and the notes he had removed from the hallway cabinet, and constructing hypotheses concerning Jelal and Rüya’s hideout, he had a feeling of contentment sitting down and reading that came from doing the only thing possible in face of disaster. Besides, sitting in a room full of happy childhood memories and reading Jelal’s work was a lot better than sitting in a dusty office in Sirkeci, reading through contracts drawn up in hopes of protecting tenants against belligerent landlords, and files on steel and rug dealers who’d given each other the shaft. Even if it was the result of a calamity, he felt the enthusiasm of a bureaucrat who’s been assigned a more interesting task at a better desk.
As he drank his second cup of coffee, it was with this enthusiasm that he reviewed all the clues at hand. He remembered that the column in the copy of
Milliyet
slipped under the door, entitled “Apologies and Satires,” had already been published once before years ago, so it stood to reason that Jelal had not submitted a new column on Sunday. This made it the sixth column the paper had republished: Only one or two more columns remained in the auxiliary file. This meant that if Jelal didn’t hurry and get a new piece, his column would soon go blank. Since he’d begun the day with Jelal’s column for the last twenty-five years, and Jelal had never defaulted on his column even once under the pretext of illness or time off, every time Galip contemplated the possibility of a blank column on page two, he felt the anxiety of anticipating a catastrophe that was fast approaching. It was a catastrophe that reminded him of the day the Bosphorus dries up.
So that he’d be sure to connect up with any possible clue that might come his way, he plugged in the phone he had disconnected the night he arrived at the flat. He reviewed his phone conversation with the man who introduced himself as Mahir Ikinci. What the man had said about the “trunk murder” and the military coup reminded Galip of some of Jelal’s old columns. He took those out of the box, and reading them carefully remembered some of Jelal’s bits and pieces on the Messiah. Finding the traces and dates of these bits, which had been sprinkled throughout various columns, took so much of his time that when he sat back down at the desk, he was as tired as if he had put in a whole day’s work.
During the early sixties, when Jelal was using his column in an effort to incite a military coup, he must have remembered one of the principles in his Rumi pieces: a columnist who wants to get a large number of readers to accept an idea must have the skill to restore and refloat the sediment of decaying concepts and rusty memories that lie asleep in the readers’ memory banks like the corpses of lost galleons that lie at the bottom of the Black Sea. Good reader that he was, Galip expected the sediment in his memory banks to get stirred up reading the stories Jelal had gleaned from historical sources with this end in mind, but it was only his imagination that got activated.
Reading about how the Twelfth Imam, as it is related in the
History of Weaponry,
would strike terror among the keepers of jewelry stores in the Covered Bazaar who employ rigged scales, how the Sheikh who was proclaimed as the Messiah by his own father had mounted attacks on forts leading Kurdish shepherds and master ironsmiths whom he’d attracted to his cause, and how a dishwasher’s aide who, after he dreamed of Muhammad going by in a white Cadillac convertible on the mucky paving stones in Beyoğlu, had proclaimed himself as the Messiah in order to incite whores, gypsies, pickpockets, cigarette boys, the shoeshine men, and the homeless against bigtime gangsters and pimps, Galip visualized what he read in the brick-red and dawn-orange hues of his own life and dreams. He came across stories that jogged his memory as well as his powers of imagination: he was reading about Hunter Ahmet, the pretender who, after he was done proclaiming himself crown prince and sultan, had also claimed to be the Prophet, when he remembered Jelal speculating one evening—as Rüya smiled on, regarding him as usual out of optimistic but sleepy eyes—over what might be involved in grooming an “Impostor Jelal” capable of stepping in to write his column (“Someone capable of acquiring my memory bank,” he had said, curiously enough). Galip was suddenly frightened, feeling that he was being dragged into a dangerous game that led to a deadly trap.
He went through the address books again, checking the names and addresses against those in the phone directory. He called a couple of numbers that didn’t jibe: the first one was a plastics concern in Laleli where they made dish-washing basins, pails, laundry baskets; and if the model for a mold was provided, within a week they could produce and deliver any sort of thing in any kind of color by the hundreds. A child answered the second call, and he told Galip that he lived there with his mom, dad, and granny; no, Dad wasn’t home, and before Mom could anxiously get hold of the receiver, a big brother, who hadn’t been mentioned before, butted in and said they didn’t give out their name to strangers. “Who’s this? Who’s this?” said the mom, careful and frightened. “Wrong number.”
By the time Galip was through reading what Jelal had scribbled on bus and theater tickets, it was already noon. On some of them, Jelal had painstakingly put down his opinions on certain films, and on others he’d written the actors’ names. Galip tried making sense of the names that had been underlined. There were names and words on some of the bus tickets as well: on one (a fifteen-
kuruş
ticket, which meant it was issued in the sixties), there was a face that had been formed by letters in the Latin alphabet. He read the letters on the ticket, some of the film criticism, some of the earlier interviews (Famous American movie star Mary Marlowe was in town yesterday!), rough drafts of crossword puzzles, some reader mail that he chose at random, and some news clippings about certain Beyoğlu murders that Jelal had planned to write on. Most of these murders seemed to be imitations of each other: only sharp kitchen knives had been used, all had been committed at midnight; they happened because the parties not only were drunk but also were given to the macho instinct, and they’d been written up with a tough-guy sensibility that reflected a morality that says “This is how those who get into shady business meet their end!” Jelal had made use of some newspaper items on “Exceptional Spots in Istanbul” (Cihangir, Taksim, Laleli, Kurtuluş) in some of his columns where he retold the stories of these murders. Looking at the series called “Firsts in Our History,” Galip remembered that the first book in the Latin alphabet had been published in Turkey by Kasim Bey, who owned the Education Library Press, in 1928. The same man had put out for many years the “Educational Calendar with Time Tables” that came in a block of pages; one tore off a page every day on which was printed—aside from daily menus that Rüya loved, aphorisms from Atatürk, or eminent Islamic personages, or foreign notables like Benjamin Franklin or Bottfolio, and nice jokes—a clock dial that showed the times for prayers on that day. When Galip saw that on some of the calendar pages that he had kept Jelal had fiddled with the clock hands on these dials, transforming them into round human faces with either long noses or long mustaches, he convinced himself that he had come across a new clue and made a note of it on a fresh piece of paper. While he ate his lunch (bread, cheese, and apples), he became strangely interested in examining the note he’d made.
On the last pages of a notebook, in which the résumés of two detective novels in translation (
The Golden Scarab
and
The Seventh Letter
) had been entered as well as the secret codes and keys taken out of books concerning German spies and the Maginot Line, he saw the shaky green trail of a ballpoint pen. These traces looked somewhat like the green ink trail on the maps of Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul, or sometimes like a face perhaps, sometimes like flowers, sometimes like the curves of a narrow river meandering gracefully on a plain. After being subjected to the asymmetrical and meaningless curves in the first four pages, Galip solved the mystery of the trails on the fifth page. He figured out that an ant had been placed in the middle of a blank page, then the haphazard trail of the harried insect had been traced by the ballpoint pen hard on its heels. In the middle of the fifth page, where the exhausted ant had made a trail going in circles indecisively, its dried corpse had been fixed by being pressed into the notebook. Wondering just how long ago the unhappy ant had been executed for its inability to provide any sort of answer, and whether this odd experiment had any connection to the Rumi pieces, Galip began to investigate. In the fourth volume of the
Mathnawi,
Rumi had related the story of an ant’s trek over his rough drafts: at first, the insect recognizes that there are narcissi and lilies inherent in Arabic letters, then that a pen has created this garden of words, then that a hand guides the pen, and then that an intelligence operates the hand, “and, finally,” Jelal had added in one of his pieces, “it perceived that there was another Intelligence guiding that intelligence.” Galip might have been able to establish a reasonable connection between the dates in the journal and the columns, but the very last page contained only the locations of some historic Istanbul fires, their dates, and the number of wood-frame mansions they had managed to turn into ashes.
He read Jelal’s piece on the tricks pulled by a secondhand book-monger’s apprentice who sold books door to door at the beginning of the century. The apprentice dealer, who went by rowboat to a different district each day to hit mansions that belonged to the wealthy, sold bargain books in his satchel to harem ladies, to shut-ins, to clerks who were buried under work, and to dreamy kids. But his real customers were minister-pashas who were virtually grounded in their ministries and their mansions, thanks to Sultan Abdülhamit’s proscription which he supervised through the agency of his spooks. Galip felt he was gradually becoming someone else, which was what he wanted, reading how the apprentice dealer taught the pashas (whom Jelal had designated “his readers”) by letting them in on Hurufi secrets that were necessary to decipher the messages he stuck into the texts of the books he sold. Once Galip understood that these secrets were nothing more than the signs and the key letters given at the end of a simplified version of an American novel that takes place on distant seas, which Jelal had presented to Rüya one Saturday noon when they were children, he knew for sure that he could become someone else through reading. That was when the phone rang; it was, of course, the same guy on the line.
“I’m pleased you hooked up the phone, Jelal Bey!” said the voice, which made Galip think it belonged to someone past middle age. “In view of the terrible developments that are imminent, I wouldn’t even want to think that someone like you was disconnected from the city and the nation.”
“What page are you on in the phone book?”
“I’m hard at it, but it’s going slower than I expected. Reading numbers for hours, a man gets to think stuff he never thinks about. I’m seeing magic formulas, symmetrical arrangements, repetitions, matrices, and shapes in the numerals. They slow me down.”
“And faces too?”
“Yes, but those faces of yours appear out of certain arrangements of numbers. The numbers don’t always speak, sometimes they are silent. Sometimes I’m under the impression that the fours are telling me something, arriving as they do at each other’s heels. They start out two by two, then they’ve gone and changed columns symmetrically and, what do you know, they’ve now become sixteen. Then, the sevens have taken over where they’ve left off, whispering to the tune of the same order. I want to believe that these are nonsensical coincidences, but look, doesn’t the fact that Timur Bayazid’s number is 140 22 40 remind you that the Battle of Ankara in 1402 was fought between Timur the Lame and Beyazid the Lightning Bolt? And that, following his victory, that barbarian Timur grabbed up Beyazid’s wife for his own harem? The phone book is alive with Istanbul and our history! I get drawn into it, missing out on getting to you. Yet I know that you are the only one who can stop this great conspiracy. Since you are the taut bowstring that activated their arrow, Jelal Bey, only you can stop the military coup!”