The Black Book (46 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
“It was a rough and windy night this time; we had to wait for the False President-Pasha, who was late—as if some sign had given him cause to be apprehensive. Out on the water, away from Kabataş and tucked behind another pontoon, I was regarding the boat and then the False President-Pasha himself, when I thought to myself that he seemed to be real and that he was beautiful—if these two words can exist together: beautiful and real. Was that possible? Raised above the heads of the crowd on the bridge, he seemed to have fixed his eyes like two searchlights on Istanbul, the populace, and history. What did he see?
“I slipped a pack of pink banknotes into the boatman’s pocket, and he pulled on the oars. Rocking and bouncing in the waves, we caught up with them in Kasımpaşa near the boatyards, but we could only watch them from a distance. They got into black and navy limousines, among which was my Chevrolet, and vanished into the night in Galata. The boatman kept complaining that we were late, that the hour of curfew was at hand.
“When I stepped ashore after having rocked so long on the rough sea, at first I thought the irreal sensation I felt was a difficulty with getting my balance, but it was not. Walking late on streets deserted due to my curfew, I was gripped with such a feeling of irreality that an apparition I had thought belonged only in dreams appeared before my eyes. On the avenue between Fındıklı and Dolmabahçe, there was no one but packs of dogs—that is, aside from the roasted-corn vendor who was rapidly pushing his cart twenty paces ahead and who kept turning around to look at me. I surmised from his look that he was afraid of me and was trying to get away, and I wanted to tell him that what he ought to be really afraid of was hidden behind the rows of large chestnut trees on either side of the avenue. And yet, just as in a dream, I couldn’t tell it to him; and as it is in dreams, I was afraid because I couldn’t speak, or I couldn’t speak because I was afraid. I was afraid of what was behind the trees that flowed alongside of us as the roasted-corn vendor sped up on account of me having sped up; but I didn’t know what it was and, what was worse, I knew this was not a dream.
“Next morning, not wishing to experience the same terror again, I asked that the curfew be shortened even further and another group of detainees be set free. I didn’t make any explanations on the subject; the radio broadcast one of my previous addresses.
“Armed with the experience of age that nothing ever changes in life, I had a good idea that I would only see the same sights in the city streets. And I was not mistaken. Some outdoor movie theaters had extended their hours; that was all. The pink-dyed hands of the pink cotton candy vendors were still the same color, and so were the white faces of tourists from the West, who had dared to venture on the street thanks to their guides.
“I found my boatman waiting for me at the same place. I could say the same thing for the False Pasha, too. Soon after embarking on the water, we encountered him. The weather was as calm as it was on our first night out, but there was no hint of a fog. In the dark mirror of the sea, I could behold the Pasha standing in the same place high above the bridge, as clearly as I could see the domes and the city lights reflected there. He was real. What is more, he had also seen us, as could anyone on a night that was as well-lit as this.
“Our boat pulled up to the Kasımpaşa dock in his wake. I had quietly stepped ashore when his men, who looked more like nightclub goons than soldiers, jumped me and grabbed me by the arms: What was I doing here, at this hour? Anxiously, I tried explaining that there was still time before the curfew, I was a poor peasant staying at a hotel in Sirkeci, that I had ventured on a boat ride on my last night here before I returned to my village: I had no knowledge of the Pasha’s curfew … But the frightened boatman confessed everything to the President-Pasha who had approached us with his men. Even though he was in mufti, the Pasha looked more like me, and I looked more like a peasant. After hearing us out once more, he gave his orders: the boatman was free to leave, but I had to go with the Pasha.
“As we drove away from the harbor, the Pasha and I were alone on the backseat of the bulletproof Chevrolet. The sensation of our being alone with each other was increased, rather than diminished, by the presence of the driver who was as quiet as the limousine itself where he sat driving in the front seat, separated from us by a glass partition—a feature that was not available in my Chevrolet.
“‘We have both been waiting for this all these years!’ said the False Pasha, whose voice I didn’t think sounded at all like mine. ‘I waited knowing that I was waiting, and you waited without knowing it. But neither one of us knew we would meet like this.’
“He began to tell his story haltingly and halfheartedly, equipped with the serenity of being able finally to finish his story rather than with the excitement of being able to tell it at last. Apparently we were in the same class at War College. We had taken the same courses with the same teachers. We were both out on night training on the same cold nights in winter, both of us waited for water to come out of the tap in our stone barracks on the same hot summer days, and when we were given leave, together we went out on the town in Istanbul which we dearly loved. That was when he had an inkling that things would turn out as they had, although not exactly as it was now.
“Back then he had known that I would be more successful than him even as we competed secretly for the best grade in math, for twelve o’clock on the practice target, for being the most popular among the cadets, for the best record, and for being first in class, and that I would be the one who lived in the palace where the stopped clocks would confuse your dear departed mother. I reminded him that it must have indeed been a ‘secret’ competition; I neither remembered competing against a fellow cadet at the War College—as I have often advised you children—nor remembered him as a friend. He was not at all surprised. He had withdrawn from the competition anyway, having realized that I had too much self-confidence to be aware of our ‘secret’ competition; and that I had already gone beyond classmates and upperclassmen, beyond lieutenants and even captains; he had not wished to stand behind me as a pale imitation, nor to be the second-class shadow to success. He wanted to be ‘real,’ not a shadow. As he went on explaining, I kept looking out the window of the Chevrolet, which I had begun to think didn’t look too much like mine, and watching the deserted streets in Istanbul, glancing now and then at our knees and legs which remained motionless before us in identical positions.
“Later, he said that this coincidence had not figured in his calculations. One didn’t have to be an oracle to predict back then that our destitute nation would go under the yoke of yet another dictator forty years later, that Istanbul would be handed over to him, and that this dictator would be a career soldier about our age; nor to predict that the ‘soldier’ would end up being me. So, it was back at War College that he had imagined the future through simple reasoning. He would either be a ghostly shadow traveling back and forth between authenticity and nondescriptness like everyone else—between the damnation of the present and the fantasies of the past or the future in a phantom Istanbul where I’d become the President-Pasha—or he’d devote his life to finding a way of becoming ‘real.’ I remembered this nondescript cadet for the first time when he admitted that, in order to find his way, he had committed a crime serious enough to get himself expelled from the army, but not serious enough to land him in jail, describing how he had been successful in getting caught inspecting the night-watch corps, impersonating the Commander of the War College. After his expulsion, he’d gone into business. ‘Everyone knows how easy it is to become rich in our land,’ he said with pride. Antithetically, the reason there was so much poverty was that our people were taught not how to be rich but how to be poor. After a silence, he added that it was me who had taught him how to be authentic. ‘You!’ he said familiarly, stressing the word. ‘After all these years, I realized with astonishment that you are less real than I. You poor peasant!’
“There was a long, a very long, silence. Inside the garb that my aide had put together as an authentic peasant costume, I felt not so much ridiculous as inauthentic, being obliged as I was to take part in a fantasy in a way that was totally undesirable to me. It was during this silence that I understood that the fantasy had been built on the images of Istanbul I saw out of the limousine window flowing by like a slow-motion film: deserted streets, sidewalks, desolate squares. The hour of my curfew had arrived, making the city appear uninhabited.
“I now knew that what my vainglorious classmate had showed me was nothing but this dream city that I had created. We drove past wood-frame houses which seemed all the smaller and more lost under the huge chestnut trees, and past slums that had encroached upon graveyards, arriving at the threshold of the land of dreams. We went downhill on paved streets that had been relinquished to packs of quarreling dogs, up hard streets where streetlamps made it darker instead of shedding light. Going through phantom streets where fountains had gone dry, where the walls were in ruins and chimneys broken, viewing with a strange apprehension mosques that drowsed like storybook giants, driving past public squares where the pools were empty, the statuary neglected, and the clocks stopped, which made me believe that time was at a standstill not only in the Palace but in all Istanbul, I paid no attention to my imitator’s narrative of his success in business, nor to the stories he told thinking they were appropriate to the situation in which we found ourselves (the story of an old shepherd who caught his wife with her lover, as well as the tale in the
Thousand and One Nights
in which Haroun al-Rashid gets lost). Toward daybreak, the avenue that bears your last name and mine had become, like all the other avenues, streets, and public squares, an extension of a dream rather than a reality.
“He was narrating the dream that Rumi calls ‘The Contest of the Two Painters’ when toward morning I composed the proclamation (the same one our Western allies questioned you about behind the scenes) which I later had announced on the airwaves, concerning the lifting of the curfew and martial law. Trying to fall asleep in my own bed after that sleepless night, I daydreamed that the empty squares would be inhabited throughout the night, the stopped clocks would start running, and that an authentic life more real than phantoms and fantasies would ensue on bridges, at the foyers of movie theaters, and in coffeehouses where roasted seeds are consumed. I don’t know to what extent my dreams have come true, giving Istanbul a landscape in which I could be real, but I hear from my aides that freedom, as is always the case, inspires my opponents more than it does mere dreamers. Once again, they are beginning to organize in teahouses, in hotel rooms, and under bridges to hatch plots against us; already I hear that opportunists are plastering the palace walls with slogans the meaning of which cannot be deciphered; but none of this is important. The time when sultans went among the populace in disguise is long gone; it exists only in books.
“The other day I read in one of these books, Hammer’s
History of the Ottoman Empire,
that Selım the Grim went to Tabriz where he went around in disguise when he was a mere prince. He had quite a reputation as a great chess player, which occasioned Shah Ismail, who was a chess enthusiast, to invite the youth in dervish garb to the palace. After a lengthy game, Selım beat the Shah of Persia. Many years later, when Shah Ismail realized that the man who beat him in the game of chess was not a dervish but the Ottoman Emperor Selım the Grim, who would take the city of Tabriz from him after the Battle of Chalderan, I wondered if he remembered the moves in the game they had played. My vainglorious impersonator must surely remember all the moves in our game. By the way, the subscription to the chess journal,
King and Pawn,
must have run out; it’s no longer being sent, I am transferring funds to your account at the Embassy, so that you can get it renewed.”
… the section you are reading interprets the text of your face.
—
NIYAZI OF EGYPT
Before starting to read the third section in
Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery,
Galip made himself some strong coffee. He went into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, hoping it would keep him awake, and somehow managed to keep himself from looking in the mirror. When he sat down at Jelal’s desk with the coffee, he was as keen as a high-school kid getting ready to solve a math problem that had needed solving for quite some time.
According to F. M. Üçüncü, since it was on Turkish soil, in Anatolia, that the imminent advent of the Messiah who would save all the East was to take place, the first step in rediscovering the lost mystery was to firmly establish the correspondences between the lines on the human face and the twenty-nine letter Latin alphabet adopted by the Turkish language after 1928. To this end, extrapolating from obscure Hurufi treatises, Bektaşi poems, Anatolian folk art, phantom ruins of pristine Hurufi villages, figures drawn on dervish lodges and pasha’s mansions, and thousands of calligraphic inscriptions, he had illustrated with examples the “values” some sounds had received as they were being transposed from Arabic and Persian into Turkish; then, displaying a certitude that was awesome, he had identified and marked these letters individually on people’s photographs. When Galip looked at these faces in which, as the writer pointed out, you didn’t need to find the Latin letters in order to read the meaning clearly and precisely, he got the willies just as he had when he was looking at the photographs in Jelal’s cabinet. He was turning pages with some badly printed pictures—the captions said that they were of Fazlallah, his two successors, “the portrait of Rumi copied from a miniature,” and our gold-medalist Olympic wrestler Hamit Kaplan—when he came across a photo of Jelal taken in the late nineteen fifties which gave him a good turn. Letters had also been marked on this photograph, the placement of which, as it had been in others, was indicated by arrows. In this photograph of Jelal, taken when he was around thirty-five, F. M. Uçüncü had detected the letter
U
on the nose,
Z
around the eyes, and the letter
N
sideways on his entire face. Flipping quickly through the pages of the book, Galip saw that there were additional photos belonging to Hurufi masters, famous imams, persons who had had near-death experiences, and to American film actors who had “profoundly meaningful faces,” such as Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and Bette Davis, as well as to famous executioners and some of those Beyoğlu hoods whose adventures Jelal had related in his youth. Later, the writer divulged that each letter established by marking it on the face had two discrete meanings: the plain meaning as written and the secret meaning as derived from the face.