The Black Book (50 page)

At Beyazit Square, he turned into Tentmakers’ Avenue and then into Samovar Street since he liked the name. Then he took Narghile Street, which was parallel to it, and went on down to the Golden Horn; then, taking Brass Mortar Street, he backtracked up the hill. He went past plastics ateliers, soup kitchens, coppersmith and locksmith stores. “It goes to show I was meant to come across these shops as I begin my new life,” he thought with childlike innocence. He saw shops that sold pails, basins, beads, shiny sequins, uniforms for the police and the military. For a while, he walked toward Beyazit Tower, which he’d chosen as his destination, then he backtracked and, going past trucks, orange vendors, horse carts, old refrigerators, and political slogans on the walls of the university, he went all the way up to the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent. He went into the mosque courtyard and walked along beside the cypress trees; when his shoes got all muddy, he went out in the street by the seminary to walk past the unpainted wood-frame houses that leaned against each other. To his chagrin, he kept thinking that the stovepipes placed through the first-floor windows of the dilapidated houses poked out into the street
like
sawed-off shotguns or
like
rusty periscopes or else
like
the horrifying maws of cannons, but he didn’t want to relate anything to something else, and he didn’t want the word
like
to linger on in his mind.

In order to quit Youngblood Street, he took Dwarf Fountain Street, where his mind got stuck again on the street name, which led him to think it might be a sign. He concluded that the old stone-paved streets were rife with traps involving signs, and he went up to Prince Avenue. There he observed vendors hawking crisp sesame rings, minibus drivers having tea, and college kids eating pizza while they studied the showcases in front of a movie theater which had three features on its bill. Two were Bruce Lee karate flicks; the other, shown in torn posters and faded photographs, had Cüneyt Arkın playing a Seljuk march-lord who beat up Byzantine Greeks and slept with their women. Fearing he’d go blind if he stared into the actors’ orange faces in the publicity stills any longer, Galip took off. He went by the Prince Mosque, trying not to think of the Story of the Prince that sprang into his mind. He passed traffic signs rusting along the edges, jumbled graffiti, plastic signs just overhead that advertised filthy restaurants and hotels, posters advertising pop singers and detergent companies. Even though he was successful, with great difficulty, in taking his mind off the hidden significance of all these, he couldn’t help thinking, as he walked along beside the Aqueduct of Valens, about the red-bearded Byzantine priests in a movie he’d seen when he was very young; as he went by the famous Vefa fermented-beverage store, he couldn’t help remembering how Uncle Melih, drunk on the cordials he’d tossed down one holiday evening, had brought the whole family here in a taxi to treat them to drinks made of mildly fermented grains; and these images were immediately transformed into the signs of a mystery that remained in the past.

He was crossing Atatürk Boulevard almost at a run when he concluded once more that if he walked fast, very fast, he’d see the pictures and letters the city presented to him as he wanted them: not as aspects of a mystery but as they really were. He went into Weavers’ Street briskly and turned into Lumber Market Street, and for a long time he walked without registering the names of any streets, past trashy row houses with rusty balcony railings built interspersed with wood-frames, long-nosed ’50s model trucks, tires that had become toys, bent electric posts, sidewalks that had been torn up and abandoned, cats going through garbage pails, headscarved women smoking in windows, itinerant yogurt vendors, sewer diggers and quilt makers.

As he was going down Rug Dealers’ Avenue toward Homeland, he suddenly made a sharp left turn then changed sidewalks a couple of times; in the grocery store where he had a glass of yogurt drink, he considered that he must have learned the idea of “being followed” from the detective novels Rüya read, knowing full well that he could no more rid his mind of this idea than he could of the incomprehensible mystery that permeated the city. He turned into Pair-of-Doves Street, making another left at the next intersection, and he almost ran along Literate Man Street. Crossing Fevzi Pasha Avenue as the traffic light went red, he darted in between the minibuses. When he read the street sign and realized he was on Lion’s Den Street, he was momentarily terrified: if the mysterious hand whose presence he’d felt three days ago on the Galata Bridge were still placing signs all around the city, then the mystery that he knew existed must still be quite distant from him.

He went through the crowded marketplace, past fish stalls that sold mackerel, lamprey, and turbot, into the courtyard at the Mosque of the Conqueror where all streets converged. Aside from a black-bearded man who wore a black overcoat and walked like a crow in the snow, the spacious courtyard was deserted. There was no one in the small cemetery either. Mehmet the Conqueror’s tomb was locked up; looking in the windows, Galip listened to the city’s roar: the din of the marketplace, car horns, children’s voices in a distant schoolyard, sounds of hammering and running engines, the screeches of sparrows and crows in the courtyard trees, the racket of the minibuses and motorbikes, the banging of the doors and windows nearby, the noise of construction sites, houses, streets, trees, parks, the sea, ships, neighborhoods, the whole city. The man he longed to be, Mehmet the Conqueror, whose sarcophagus he viewed through the dusty windowpanes, had intuited with the aid of Hurufi tracts the mystery of the city he’d conquered five hundred years before Galip’s birth, and he’d undertaken to decipher slowly the realm in which every door, every chimney, every street, every aqueduct, every plane tree was the sign of something else beside itself.

“If only Hurufi tracts and the Hurufis themselves hadn’t been immolated as the result of a conspiracy,” Galip thought as he took Calligrapher İzzet Street to Mother Wit, “and if the Sultan had been able to attain the city’s mystery, what insight might he have come up with walking on the Byzantine streets he’d conquered if he were looking, as I am, at broken walls, centenarian plane trees, dusty roads, and empty lots?” When Galip arrived at the tobacco warehouses and the terrifying old buildings in Temperance, he gave himself the answer he’d known ever since he’d read the letters in his face: “He’d have known the city he’d seen for the first time as if he’d been through it thousands of times.” And the astonishing thing was that Istanbul still remained a newly conquered city. Galip had no sense that he’d ever seen or known the muddy streets before, the fractured sidewalks, broken walls, pitiful lead-colored trees, ramshackle cars and buses that were even worse, sad faces that looked alike, and dogs that were skin and bones.

He had realized by now that he wasn’t going to be able to shake the tail he didn’t know for sure was for real but he kept on walking, past manufacturing plants along the banks of the Golden Horn, empty industrial barrels, ruined Byzantine aqueducts, workmen who were eating bread and meatballs for lunch and playing soccer in the muddy fields, until the desire to see the city as a tranquil place full of familiar scenes became so strong that he tried imagining himself as someone else—as Mehmet the Conqueror. For quite a while, he walked hanging onto this childish fantasy, which seemed neither crazy nor ridiculous to him; then he remembered Jelal saying in one of his columns, written many years ago on some anniversary of the Conquest, that among the hundred and twenty-four rulers of Istanbul in the one thousand six hundred and fifty years from the first Constantine’s time to the present, Mehmet the Conqueror was the only emperor who had felt no need to go incognito in the middle of the night. “Our readers know the reasons all too well,” Jelal had written in the article Galip recalled as he bobbed along with the other passengers on the Sirkeci–Eyüp bus. He caught the bus to Taksim in Unkapanı, amazed that the person on his tail could change buses so fast: he felt the eye was even closer—on his neck. After once more changing buses in Taksim, he thought that if he talked to the old man next to him, he might be transformed into someone else, thereby getting rid of the shadow behind him.

“Do you suppose it’s going to continue snowing?” Galip said, looking out the window.

“Who knows,” said the old man who might have said more but Galip interrupted him.

“What does this snow signify?” Galip said. “What does it herald? Do you know the great Rumi’s story about the key? Last night I was granted a dream about the same thing. It was white everywhere, snow white, as white as this snow. Suddenly I awoke with a cold, ice-cold, sharp pain in my chest. I thought there was a snowball on my heart, a ball of ice, or a crystal ball, but it wasn’t: it was Poet Rumi’s diamond key that lay on my heart. I took it into my hand and rose from my bed, thinking it might open my bedroom door; it did. But I was in another room where, sleeping in the bed, there was someone who looked like me but was not me; he had a diamond key lying on his heart. Putting down the key that I held in my hand, I took the second key, opened the door out of this room, and entered yet another room. The same thing in that room too … and in the next room, and the next one that opened into the next. Images of myself, much handsomer than I am, with keys placed on their hearts. What’s more, I saw that there were others besides myself in the rooms, shadows like myself, ghostly somnambulists with keys in their hands. A bed in every room, and a dreaming man like me on every bed! That’s when I realized I was in the marketplace in Paradise. Here there was no commerce, no money, no tariffs; only faces and images. Whatever you liked, you simulated; you pulled on a face like a mask and began a new life. I knew the face I was looking for was in the last of the thousand and one rooms, yet the final key I had in my hand would not open the final door. That’s when I realized the ice-cold key I initially saw on my heart was the only key that would open the last door. Yet where was that key now, and in whose hand? I had no idea where among the thousand and one rooms was the room and bed I’d left, and so, beset by confounding regret and tears, I realized I was fated to rush from room to room and door to door along with the other hopeless creatures, exchanging one key for another, astonished by each sleeping face, until the very end of time…”

“Look,” the old man said. “Look!”

Galip shut up and looked through the dark glasses at the spot where the old man was pointing. On the sidewalk in front of the radio station, there was a dead body; a couple of people were ranting and raving around it, and a curious crowd had quickly congregated. And then, when they got caught in the snarled traffic, passengers who had seats on the bus, as well as those who stood hanging on, leaned toward the windows to observe the dead body in silent terror.

Even after traffic was cleared, the silence in the bus continued for quite some time. Galip got off across from the Palace Theater; he bought salted bonito, fish-roe spread, sliced tongue, bananas, and apples at the Ankara Market on Nişantaşı Corner and walked briskly toward the Heart-of-the-City Apartments. By now, he felt too much like someone else to wish to be someone else. He went down to the doorman’s flat right away; Ismail and Kamer were having a supper of chopped meat and potatoes with their little grandchildren, sitting at the dinner table covered with its blue oilcloth in a convivial family gathering that seemed so distant to Galip that it might have been a scene from centuries ago.

“Eat in good health,” Galip said and added after a pause: “You didn’t manage to deliver the envelope for Jelal.”

“We rang and rang,” the doorman’s wife said, “but he wasn’t home.”

“He’s upstairs now,” Galip said. “So where’s the envelope?”

“Jelal’s upstairs?” Ismail said. “If you’re going up, will you take him his electric bill?”

He’d risen from the table and was inspecting the bills on the television set, bringing them close to his shortsighted eyes one by one. It took Galip a moment to sneak the key he took out of his pocket on the nail on the shelf. They didn’t catch him doing it. He took the envelope and the bill, and he left.

“Tell Jelal not to worry,” Kamer called out after him with a gaiety that was suspect. “I’ve told no one!”

For the first time in years, Galip took some pleasure in riding the Heart-of-the-City Apartments’ old elevator; it still smelled of wood polish and machine oil, moaning like an old person suffering from lumbago as it started up. The mirror in which he and Rüya used to check their height against each other was still in place, but he avoided looking in his own face, fearful at that moment of succumbing once more to the terror brought on by the letters.

After going into the apartment, he’d just taken off his coat and jacket and had just hung them up when the phone rang. Before picking up the receiver, he ran into the bathroom to prepare himself for any eventuality and looked into the mirror for several seconds with desire, valor, and determination: No, it was not coincidental, the letters, everything, the whole universe and its mystery were all in place. “I know,” he reflected as he picked up the receiver, “I know.” He’d already known the voice on the phone would be the same one who heralded the military coup.

“Hello.”

“What should your name be this time?” Galip said. “There are so many pseudonyms around, I’m all confused.”

“An intelligent beginning,” the voice said; it possessed a self-confidence Galip hadn’t expected. “You give me a name, Mister Jelal.”

“Mehmet.”

“As in Mehmet the Conqueror?”

“Yes.”

“Good. This is Mehmet. I couldn’t find your name in the phone book. Let me have your address so I can come.”

“Why should I give you my address when I keep it a secret?”

“Because I am an ordinary citizen with good intentions who wants to bring a famous journalist the evidence of an impending military coup, that’s why.”

“You know too much about me to be an ordinary citizen,” Galip said.

“I met this fellow six years ago at the train station in Kars,” said the voice named Mehmet, “an ordinary citizen. He was an attar, a simple sundries-store owner, and just like the poet Farıd od-Dın Attar, eight hundred years before him, he was passing his years in one of those small shops that smelled of drugs and perfume. He was making a business trip to Erzurum. All through the trip we talked about you. He made comments about the meaning of your family name, Salik, ‘the traveler on the Sufi Road.’ He knew the significance of your having begun the first column you published under your own name with the word ‘listen,’ which translates the Persian word
bishnov
with which Rumi had begun his
Mathnawi.
When you wrote a piece in July of 1956 in which you likened life to serial novels and then, exactly a year later, one in which you likened serial novels to life, he was on to your cryptic symmetry and utilitarianism because he’d figured out from the style that it was you who had, under a pseudonym, resumed the series of pieces on wrestlers, the original writer having abandoned it on account of getting sore at the publisher. In another piece around the same time, which you began by saying that your male readers oughtn’t to cast scowls at beautiful women on the street but instead smile with affection like Europeans, he knew that the beautiful woman you described with affection, admiration, and tenderness was your stepmother, exemplifying the woman disaffected by such masculine scowls. In the piece where you satirized an extended family who lived in a dusty Istanbul apartment building, comparing them to unfortunate Japanese goldfish who lived in an aquarium, he knew that the aforementioned fish belonged to a deaf-mute uncle and also that the family was your family. This man who hadn’t set foot anywhere west of Erzurum, let alone visit Istanbul, knew all your unnamed relatives, the Nişantaşı flats you lived in, the streets, the police station at the corner, Aladdin’s store across from it, the Teşvikiye Mosque courtyard with the reflecting pool, autumn gardens, the Milk Company pudding shop, the linden and chestnut trees along the sidewalks, as well as he knew his own shop on the outskirts of Kars where he sold, like Aladdin, all sorts of odds and ends from perfume to shoelaces, from tobacco to needle and thread. He knew in the years when we still lacked a unified accent on our national air waves that only three weeks after you lampooned Ipana toothpaste’s Eleven Question Quiz on Radio Istanbul, in order to flatter you into shutting up, they’d made your name the answer to the two-thousand-lira question. Just as he’d expected, you hadn’t accepted this small bribe but had advised your readers in your next column not to use American-made toothpaste, and to rub their teeth with mint soap made at home with their own hygienic hands. You wouldn’t know, of course, that our well-intentioned attar had rubbed his teeth, which would later fall out one by one, with the hokey formula you gave out. On the other hand, the sundries man and I even put together a quiz game called ‘Subject: our columnist Jelal Salik’ which took up the rest of the train trip. I was hard put defeating this man whose main fear was missing his stop at Erzurum. Yes, he was an ordinary citizen, one who’d gone to seed quickly, one who didn’t have enough money to get his teeth fixed, whose only pleasure, aside from your columns, was spending time in his garden with the various birds he kept in cages and telling stories about birds. Get it, Mister Jelal? An ordinary citizen is also capable of knowing you, so don’t you dare sell him short! But I happen to know you even better than the ordinary citizen. That’s why we’ll be at it all night, talking.”