The Black Book (57 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
“Here comes the corpse of Shams of Tabriz again, huh? Tossed down the well.”
“… the concrete that they support, the steel, all the apartments, the doors, the elderly doormen, the parquet floors where the cracks in between turn black like dirty fingernails, the troubled mothers, the angry fathers, the refrigerator doors that won’t stay shut, the sisters, the half sisters…”
“Do you get to play Shams of Tabriz? Or the Dadjdjal? The Messiah?”
“… the cousin who’s married the half sister, the hydraulic elevator, the mirror in the elevator…”
“Enough already, you’ve already written all that.”
“… the secret corners the children discover to play in, the bedspreads saved for trousseaus, the length of silk that grandfather’s grandfather bought from a Chinese merchant when he was the governor of Damascus which no one has been able to bring herself to cut…”
“You’re handing me a line, right?”
“… consider the very mystery of our lives. Consider the sharp straight razor called ‘the cipher,’ which old-time executioners used to lop the heads off their hanged victims’ bodies in order to display them on pedestals as a deterrent. Consider the vision of the retired colonel who renamed chess pieces, calling the king ‘mother,’ the queen ‘father,’ the rook ‘uncle,’ the knight ‘aunt,’ and the pawns ‘jackals’ and not ‘children.’”
“You know, after you betrayed us, I saw you only once in all those years, masquerading as Mehmet the Conqueror, perhaps, in a strange Hurufi getup.”
“Consider the immutable serenity of the man who on an ordinary evening sits down at the table to solve enigmas in divan poems, and crossword puzzles in the paper. Consider that everything in the room, aside from the papers and letters lit by the lamp on the table, remains in the dark, all the ashtrays, the curtains, clocks, time, memories, pain, sorrow, deception, anger, defeat—ah, defeat! Consider that you can only compare the freedom from gravity you feel while you are in the mysterious vacuum created by the movements down and across of a crossword puzzle’s letters to the unappeasable fascination with going incognito.”
“Look here, friend,” said the voice on the other end of the line, assuming a know-how tone which surprised Galip, “let’s put aside for now all the fascinations and the games, as well as the letters and their twins; we’ve gone past all that, we’re beyond that stuff. Yes, I tried setting you up, but it didn’t work. You already know it, but let me spell it out for you. Not only was your name not in the phone book; there never was a military coup or any file on it! We love you, we think about you all the time, both of us are your admirers, real fans. Our lives were always devoted to you and will remain so. Let us now forget all that needs to be forgotten. Tonight, Emine and I can come and see you. We’ll pretend nothing has happened, we’ll talk as if nothing ever had. You can go on and on for hours just as you’ve been doing. Please, say yes! Trust us, I’ll do anything you want, bring you anything you wish!”
Galip thought it over for quite a while. Then he said, “Let’s hear these telephone numbers and addresses you’ve got on me!”
“Sure enough, but I won’t be able to erase them out of my mind.”
“Just go ahead and give them to me.”
When the man went to get his book, his wife got on the phone.
“Trust him,” she said in a whisper. “He’s really contrite this time, in all sincerity. He loves you very much. He was going to do something crazy, but he’s already given it up. He’ll take it all out on me; he won’t go after you; he’s a coward, I guarantee it. I thank God for having put everything right. Tonight I’ll wear the blue-checkered skirt that you liked so much. My darling, we’ll do whatever you want, both him and me! Let me just tell you this, though: Not only does he try to emulate you in the Hurufi Mehmet the Conqueror costume but he also tries to read the letters on the faces of your whole family…” She fell silent as her husband’s footsteps approached.
When the husband got back on the phone, Galip began to write down the phone numbers and addresses, which he had the voice on the other end of the line repeat many times, in the last page of a book (
Les Caractères,
La Bruyère) he pulled out of the shelf next to him. He planned to tell them that he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to see them, that he didn’t have much time to waste on persistent readers. He was thinking of something else. Much later, recalling approximately all that happened that night, he’d say, “I think I was curious. I was curious to take a look at the pair from a distance. Perhaps my motivation was being able to tell Jelal and Rüya, after having located them through these phone numbers and addresses, not only this incredible story and the phone conversations but also what this strange husband and wife looked like, how they walked, what they were wearing.”
“I won’t give my home address,” he said. “But we could meet somewhere else. Nine o’clock tonight, say, in front of Aladdin’s store.”
Even this bit pleased the husband and wife so much that Galip was made uncomfortable by the gratitude on the other end of the line. Would Jelal Bey prefer that they bring an almond cake or else petit fours from the Lifespan Cake Shop? Seeing how they’d be sitting down for a long chat, how about nuts and stuff and a large bottle of cognac?
When the weary husband cried, “I’ll bring along my photograph collection, the mug shots, and the pictures of the high-school girls too!” and gave a frightening laugh, Galip realized an open bottle of cognac must have been sitting between the husband and wife for quite a while. They repeated the time and the place of the meeting enthusiastically and hung up.
I appropriated the mystery from the
Mathnawi.
—
ŞEYH GALIP
The grandest of all dens of iniquity, not only in Istanbul and all of Turkey but in all the Balkans and the Middle East, was opened in the summer of 1952, on the first Saturday in June to be exact, on one of the narrow streets off the red-light district in Beyoğlu which go up to the British Consulate. The happy occasion fell on the same date as the outcome of a hotly contested painting competition that had lasted six months. The famous Beyoğlu mobster who owned the place, a fellow who would eventually become legendary by virtue of having disappeared into the waters of the Bosphorus in his Cadillac, had set his heart on getting scenes of Istanbul painted on the walls of his establishment’s spacious lobby.
The mobster hadn’t commissioned these paintings in order to become a patron of this art form, which remained terribly undeveloped in our culture thanks to the prohibition against it in Islam (I mean painting, not prostitution), but for the purpose of supplying his distinguished clients, who came to his pleasure palace from all sectors in the city and the country, with the enchantments of Istanbul along with music, drugs, alcohol, and girls. When our mobster was turned down by academic painters who would only accept commissions for bank buildings (armed as these painters are with protractors and triangles in order to represent our village damsels in the shape of rhomboids in imitation of Western cubist art), he’d called for the artisans, sign painters, and craftsmen who ornament the ceilings of provincial mansions, the walls of outdoor movie theaters, and gussy up vans, carts, and snake-swallower’s tents at local fairs. And when the only two artisans to come forth after many months both claimed, as do real artists, to be the better craftsman, our racketeer, taking his cue from bank presidents, put up a large sum of prize money and set up a contest between the competing artisans for the “Best Painting of Istanbul,” offering the two ambitious contestants opposite walls in the lobby of his pleasure palace.
Right off, the two artists, being suspicious of each other, had put up a thick curtain between them. One hundred and eighty days later, on the night the pleasure palace was inaugurated, the same patched curtain was still in place in the lobby, now full of gilt chairs upholstered in crimson waled velvet, Holbein rugs, silver candelabras, crystal vases, portraits of Atatürk, porcelain plates, and stands inlaid with mother-of-pearl. When the boss pulled the sackcloth curtain aside for the distinguished crowd among whom even the governor was present in his official capacity (after all, the joint was formally registered as the Preservation of Classical Turkish Arts Club), the guests beheld a splendid view of Istanbul on one wall and on the wall directly opposite it a mirror that made the painting, in the light of the silver candelabras, appear even finer, more brilliant, and more attractive than the original.
Naturally, the prize went to the artist who’d installed the mirror. Yet for years afterward many of the customers who found themselves in the clutches of the vice joint were so bewitched by the incredible images on the walls that, experiencing various delights in either masterpiece, they’d walk up and down between the two walls, viewing both works for hours on end, trying to figure out the mystery of the pleasure they felt.
The scrawny, miserable mongrel eyeing the lunch stand in a market scene on the first wall was transformed into a sad but cunning beast when you looked at the reflection in the mirror opposite, yet when you went back to the painting on the first wall, you perceived not only the dog’s cunningness, which must have been there all along in the original, but also a suggestion of movement that aroused your further suspicions; crossing the room once more for a confirming glance in the mirror, you saw strange stirrings that might explain the nature of that movement, and now, completely bewildered, you found it difficult to hold yourself back from running over to look again at the original painting on the first wall.
A nervous old customer had once detected that the dry fountain in the painting, located on the square that hooked up with the street patrolled by the sad dog, ran like crazy in the mirror. When he went back to the painting again, flustered like an absentminded dotard who suddenly remembers that he’s left the water tap on back home, he realized that the fountain was in fact dry; yet, when he witnessed water gush even more abundantly in the mirror this time, he sought to share his revelation with the women who worked there, but meeting with indifference on their part, for they were sick and tired of hearing about the mirror’s tricks, he pulled back into his solitary life, the essence of which is, and has always been, not being understood.
Yet in fact the women who worked for the joint were not indifferent; on snowy winter nights when they lolled around telling each other the same old fairy tales, they made use of the painting’s tricks, and those of the mirror opposite it, as an amusing touchstone to gauge the personalities of their clients. There were the hasty, insensitive, anxious ones who did not notice in the slightest the mysterious discrepancies between the painting and its reflection. These were men who either kept going on and on about their own problems or else expected to get pronto the only thing men want from bordello girls whom they can’t even tell apart. There were others who were totally wise to the play between the mirror and the painting but didn’t make anything of it; these were men who’d already been through too much to be perturbed by anything, fearless men who were to be feared. Then there were others who bedeviled the B-girls, the waiters, and the gangsters with their apprehensions, and who, as if they were suffering from some obsession with symmetry, childishly demanded that the discrepancy between the painting and the mirror be corrected as soon as possible. These were tightfisted, penurious individuals who could never let go of the world either drinking or making love; being stuck on bringing order into everything made them poor lovers and miserable friends.
Some time later, when the inmates of the pleasure palace had become inured to the dalliance of the mirror with the painting, the police chief, who frequently honored the joint with the kindness of his protective wings rather than the powers of his purse, came face-to-face in the mirror with a shady looking baldheaded fellow who was depicted toting a gun in a dark alley; that’s when he had a hunch that this was the very perpetrator of the infamous “Şişli Square Murder” and, asserting that the artist who’d installed the mirror on the wall knew the mystery surrounding the murder, he’d launched an investigation into the artist’s identity.
On another occasion, one sticky humid night in summer when the filthy water running down the sidewalks couldn’t make it to the grate on the street corner before turning into steam, the son of a land baron, who’d left his father’s Mercedes parked in front of a
NO PARKING
sign, seeing in the mirror the image of a good homemaker who wove rugs in her home in the slums, had concluded that she was the love of his life he’d been looking for; yet when he turned to the painting, he was only confronted by one of those sad colorless girls who inhabit his father’s villages.
As far as the boss was concerned—himself slated to discover the other world within this one by driving his Cadillac into the waters of the Bosphorus as if it were his stallion—all the pleasant jokes, the pleasant coincidences, and the world’s mystery were tricks perpetrated neither by the painting nor the mirror; customers high on drugs and booze, flying on clouds of woe and melancholy, rediscovered the golden age in their imaginations and, full of the joy of solving the mystery of that lost world, they confused the enigmas in their minds with the replica before their eyes. Despite his hardnosed realism, the famous gangster had been observed on Sunday mornings cheerfully joining in a game of “find the seven differences between the two pictures” with the children of the B-girls, the girls and boys waiting for their weary mothers to take them to the kids’ matinee in Beyoğlu.
But the differences, the significances, and the mind-boggling transformations on the two walls were not merely seven, but endless. The representation of Istanbul on the first wall, although its technique was reminiscent of scenes painted on horse carts and on tents at local fairs, fetched up, in the mirror’s treatment of its subject matter, unnerving associations with dark and creepy engravings. The mirror opposite showed the large bird floating in one corner of the fresco on the opposite wall as if it were beating its wings languorously like a mythic creature; the unpainted façades of ancient wood-frame mansions in the fresco were transformed in the mirror into terrifying faces; fairgrounds and merry-go-rounds became livelier and more colorful in the mirror; old-fashioned streetcars, horse carts, minarets, bridges, murderers, pudding shops, parks, seaside cafés, Municipal Lines ferryboats, inscriptions, trunks were all transformed into signs of a realm that was altogether different. A black book the artist had prankishly stuck into the hand of a blind beggar turned into a two-part book in the mirror, a book with two meanings and two stories; yet, looking at the painting, one realized the book was of uniform consistency and that its mystery was lost in itself. Our domestic movie star with the red lips, bedroom eyes, and long lashes, whom the artist had depicted on the wall in the manner of fairground art, was transformed in the mirror into the poverty-stricken, big-breasted national mother figure; then, casting another clouded glance back to the first wall, you recognized with horror and pleasure that the mother figure wasn’t who she appeared to be but your wedded wife you’d been sleeping with all these years.