The Black Book (45 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
Like many a “work” of this sort, the publication or the near-publication of which is announced prematurely,
Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery
had managed to see publication only many years later, in 1967, in another town, Gördes—it surprised Galip that the place even had a printing press back then—as a book of two hundred and twenty-two pages. On the yellowed cover was a dark picture which had been printed from a poorly made plate with cheap ink: in the crude perspective drawing, a road bordered with chestnut trees stretched out to the vanishing point. Beside each tree were letters, terrifying, blood-curdling letters.
At first glance, it looked like one of those books written some years back by “idealist” military officers, in the genre of “Why Have We Not Caught Up with the West in the Past Two Hundred Years? How Do We Make Progress?” It began with the sort of dedication seen in books printed in some out-of-the-way town in Anatolia at the writer’s expense: “War College cadet! You are the one who will save this country!” But when Galip began turning the pages, he realized he was in the presence of an entirely different kind of “work.” He got up from the chair and went to Jelal’s desk; placing his elbows on either side of the book, he began to read attentively.
Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery
was comprised of three main sections, the first two appearing in the book’s title. The first section, “Mystery of Letters (that is, of
Huruf
),” began with the biography of Fazlallah, the founder of Hurufism. F. M. Üçüncü added a secular dimension to the story, introducing Fazlallah more as a rationalist, philosopher, mathematician, and linguist than as a Sufi and a mystic. As much as Fazlallah was a prophet, a messiah, a martyr and saint—or more than he was these—he was a subtle philosopher and a genius, but one “unique to us.” Attempting to explain his thought as Pantheism, or through Plotinus, Pythagoras, or the Cabala, as some Orientalists in the West had done, was nothing more than stabbing Fazlallah by using Western thought, which he had opposed all his life. Fazlallah was an unadulterated man of the East.
According to F. M. Üçüncü, East and West shared the two halves of the world: they were total opposites, rejecting, contradicting each other—like good and bad, black and white, angel and devil. Contrary to the optimistic assumptions of those who live in a dream world, it was not at all possible for the two realms to come to terms and live in peace. One or the other of the two had always dominated, one world playing the master and the other the slave. To illustrate this endless war of twins, the writer reviewed a progression of historical events loaded with special significance, starting with Alexander cutting the Gordian knot (“that is, the cipher,” the writer comments), the Crusades, the double meanings of the characters and numbers on the magic clock Haroun al-Rashid sent Charlemagne, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the Islamic victory in Andalusia (there was a whole page devoted to the number of columns in the Mosque in Cordova), the conquest of Byzantium and Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror who himself was a Hurufi, the collapse of the Khazars, and ending with the defeat of the Ottomans laying siege first to Doppio (
The White Castle
) and then to Venice.
According to F. M. Üçüncü, all these historical facts signified a salient point to which Fazlallah had made veiled allusions in his work. The periods during which either the East or the West dominated over its opposite number were not random but logical. Whichever realm was successful in seeing the world as an equivocal, mysterious place that swarmed with secrets “during the particular historic period” that realm got the better of the other and dominated it. Those who saw the world as a simple, unambiguous, un-mysterious place were condemned to defeat and its attendant result, which was slavery.
F. M. Üçüncü reserved the second section for a detailed discussion of the loss of mystery. No matter what it was, be it in reference to ancient Greek philosophy’s “idea,” Neoplatonic Christianity’s “Deity,” the Hindu’s “Nirvana,” Attar’s “simurgh,” Rumi’s “beloved,” the Hurufi’s “secret treasure,” Kant’s “noumenon,” or the culprit in a detective novel, mystery meant, each time, the “center” that remained hidden in the world. In which case, commented F. M. Üçüncü, observing a culture’s loss of the concept of “mystery,” one had to deduce that its ideas, being bereft of the “center,” had also gone out of kilter.
Galip went on to read lines he couldn’t get the hang of, related to the necessity for Rumi to have his “beloved” Shams of Tabriz murdered, his journey to Damascus to protect the mystery that he had “installed,” the insufficiency of his wanderings and searches through that city to support the idea of “mystery,” and the locales where Rumi stopped during his wanderings in order to relocate the “center” of his thoughts, which was going off-center. The writer maintained that committing the perfect murder, or disappearing without a trace, were good methods of reestablishing the lost mystery.
Later on, F. M. Üçüncü embarked upon the relationship of “letters and faces,” which was Hurufism’s most important topic. As Fazlallah had done in his
Book of Eternal Life,
he revealed that God, who was concealed, was manifest in human faces, he examined the lines in human faces at length, and he established the relationship between these lines and the Arabic characters. Following the pages of long, childlike discussions of lines in the poetry of Hurufi poets, such as Nesimi, Rafii, Misali, Ruhi of Baghdad, and Rose Baba, a certain logic was tabulated. During periods of felicity and success, all our faces had meaning, as did the inhabited world. We owed the meaning to the Hurufis, who saw mystery in the world and letters in our faces. Due to the disappearance of Hurufism, then, the letters in our faces, as well as the mystery in our world, had also disappeared. Our faces were, therefore, vacant; there was no longer any rationale to read anything in them; our eyebrows, our eyes, our noses, our gazes and expressions were empty, and our faces meaningless. Although Galip felt like getting up to look at himself in the mirror, he kept on reading carefully.
The horrifyingly dark results of the art of photography, as it got directed toward people as subjects, were related to this emptiness in our faces, just as was the odd topography seen in the faces of Turkish, Arab, and Indian movie stars that reminded one of the invisible face of the moon. That the throngs of people in the streets of Istanbul, Damascus, and Cairo were as alike as restless ghosts moaning at midnight; that the scowling faces of the men all wore the same mustaches; and that all the women wearing the same sort of head cloth always stared identically, were the consequences of this emptiness. Therefore, it was necessary to construct a new system of observing letters in the Latin alphabet which would imbue our vacant faces with a renewed meaning. The second section of the book was concluded with the good news that that very operation would be performed in the third section titled “Discovery of Mystery.”
Galip had taken a liking to F. M. Üçüncü, who used words with double meanings and displayed a childlike innocence playing with words. Something about him was reminiscent of Jelal.
Haroun al-Rashid would at times go around Baghdad in disguise, wishing to find out what his subjects thought about him and his rule. So, yet another night …
—
The Thousand and One Nights
A letter that sheds light on a dark juncture in our recent history known as the years of “democratization” fell into the hands of a reader who does not wish his name divulged or, with good reason, the coincidental, compelling, and treacherous circumstances under which the letter was obtained. I am publishing it in these columns as is, without touching the language (the idiom of a Pasha), written by our erstwhile military dictator to one of his sons, or daughters, who was apparently residing abroad.
“Six weeks ago, on that night in August, it was so hot and suffocating in the room where the founder of our Republic had died that one imagined all motion, thought, and time had developed rigor mortis in the terrible heat, and that not only had time come to a standstill for the ormulu clock which had been stopped to show always Atatürk’s moment of death at 9:05—a source of amusement for you children inasmuch as it was a source of confusion to your dear departed mother—but all the clocks in Dolmabahçe Palace, as well as those in all Istanbul, had stopped dead in their tracks. There was no motion at the windows overlooking the Bosphorus, where the curtains usually billowed, and it seemed as if the sentries along the waterfront were standing still as mannequins in the dark night not because I had issued the order but because time had come to a stop. Feeling that I might now undertake something I had wanted to do all these years without ever being able to take the decisive step, I put on the peasant’s attire I had in my closet. I slipped out of the palace through the Harem Door which was no longer in use, bolstering my courage by reminding myself that before me, in the past five hundred years, many a sultan, after sneaking out of this side door (as well as out the back doors of other palaces in Istanbul—Topkapı, Beylerbeyi, and Yıldız) and disappearing into the night in the city they longed for, had managed to return safe and sound.
“How Istanbul had changed! It was not only bullets that could not penetrate the windows of the bulletproof Chevrolet limousine, I soon discovered, but also real life in my beloved city! Once outside the palace walls, on my way afoot to Karaköy, I bought some
helva
from a vendor which had a burnt-sugar aftertaste. I stopped at outdoor cafés to talk to the men who sat playing backgammon and cards, listening to the radio. I observed prostitutes waiting for customers in pudding shops, and children panhandling by pointing at kebabs in restaurant windows. I went into mosque courtyards in an attempt to mingle with the crowds that came out of evening prayers, and I sat in family-style tea gardens in back quarters, drinking tea like everybody else and eating roasted seeds. In an alley paved with large flagstones, I saw a pair of young parents returning home from the neighbors’; the mother’s head was covered and the father carried their drowsing son on his shoulders: if you could have only seen the devotion with which she leaned into her husband’s arm! Tears welled up in my eyes.
“Nay, my concern was not for the happiness or unhappiness of my fellow citizens. Witnessing the real lives of my compatriots, broken and worn out as they were, had rekindled the sorrow and the fear that emerges from dreams, that feeling of having stepped outside of reality, even on this night of my freedom and fantasy. I tried to shake this fear and this sense of unreality by beholding Istanbul. My eyes teared again and again with sadness as I looked through the windows of pastry shops at those gathered inside or watched the crowds disembark from the Municipal Lines ferries with the pretty smokestacks which had made their final trip for the night.
“It was almost time for the curfew I had imposed. Hoping to enjoy the coolness of the water on my way back, I approached a boatman in Eminönü, telling him to take me on a fifty-
kuruş
rowboat ride to the opposite side and drop me off in Karaköy or Kabataş. ‘You have your brains for breakfast, fella?’ he said to me. ‘Don’t you know that this is the hour when our President-Pasha takes a ride on his powerboat? And that anyone he sees on the water is arrested and thrown into the dungeons?’ I took out a roll of pink banknotes—the ones with the portrait of me on them which, as I know very well, made my enemies’ tongues wag when they were first printed—and I offered them to him in the dark. ‘If we row out in your boat, would you show me the President-Pasha’s powerboat then?’ ‘Get under that tarp and don’t you dare move!’ he said, indicating the prow with the same hand he’d snatched the money with. ‘God save us!’ He began to row.
“I couldn’t say what direction we took in the dark. The Bosphorus? Into the Golden Horn? Or out to Marmara? The becalmed water was silent as a city in a blackout. From where I lay, I could smell the thin layer of fog misting over the water. There was the distant sound of a motor when the boatman whispered, ‘There he comes now! He comes down every night!’ Once our boat was hidden behind harbor pontoons encrusted with mussels, I couldn’t help looking into the searchlight that ran mercilessly over the city, the harbor, the water, and the mosques, revolving left and right as if interrogating the surroundings. Then I saw a large white craft approach slowly; on board was a row of bodyguards with life jackets and guns; above them the bridge, where a group of people stood, and on a platform even higher, all by himself, the False President-Pasha! In the half-light, I could only barely perceive him as he went by in his craft, even so, despite the darkness and the thin fog, I had been able to observe that his clothes were identical to mine. I asked the boatman to follow him, but it was in vain. Telling me that the hour of curfew was upon us, he dropped me off at Kabataş. The streets were almost deserted when I returned back to the palace without making a sound.
“I thought about him that night—my look-alike, the False Pasha—but not about who he was and what business he had on the water. I thought about him because through his mediation I could think about myself. In the morning, I issued an order to the commanders who enforced the martial law that the curfew be imposed one hour later, so that I would have more time to observe him. It was immediately announced on the radio, followed by my address to the nation. I also ordered that some of the detainees be set free in order to provide an atmosphere of relaxation, and it was done.
“Was Istanbul any gayer the following evening? Not at all! It went to show that my subjects’ interminable sadness does not arise out of political repression, as claimed by my superficial opponents, but is fed by a source that is deeper and cannot be denied. That evening they still smoked, ate roasted seeds and ice cream, drank coffee. And they were as sad and as lost in thought as before, listening to my address on coffeehouse radios announcing the shortened curfew. But they were so ‘real’! When I was among them, I felt the pain of a somnambulist who cannot wake up and rejoin reality. For some reason, the boatman in Eminönü was waiting for me. We set out at once.