The Black Book (6 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
“No, not here, didn’t come,” his dad was saying. “Who am I speaking to? Thank you … I am the uncle … no, unfortunately, isn’t among us this evening.”
Somebody’s looking for Rüya, Galip thought.
“Somebody’s looking for Jelal,” his dad said after he hung up. He seemed pleased. “An older woman, a fan, a gentlewoman who loved his column in the paper; she wanted to get in touch with him, asked for his address, phone number.”
“Which column was it?” Galip asked.
“You know something, Halé,” his dad said, “the odd thing was, her voice sounded just like yours.”
“Nothing more natural than my voice sounding like an older woman’s,” said Aunt Halé. Her lung-colored neck suddenly shot up like a goose’s. “But my voice is nothing like hers!”
“What isn’t it like?”
“That person you thought was a gentlewoman called this morning too,” Aunt Halé said. “More likely, rather than a gentlewoman’s, her voice was like a witch trying to sound like a gentlewoman. Perhaps even a man trying to sound like a mature woman.”
So where had the older gentlewoman found this phone number, Galip’s dad wanted to know. Had Halé inquired?
“Nope,” said Aunt Halé, “I didn’t think it was necessary. Since the day he began washing our dirty laundry in his column as if he were writing about wrestlers or something, I am never surprised by anything about Jelal, so I thought maybe he had given out our phone number in another column lampooning us, just to provide his readers with extra entertainment. Besides, as I think how our dear departed parents worried over him, I’ve come to understand now that the only thing about Jelal that could still shock me would be to learn why he’s hated us all these years—but not his giving out our number to keep his readers entertained.”
“He hates because he’s a Communist,” Uncle Melih said, lighting up victoriously, having overcome his cough. “When it finally hit them on the head that they’d never be able to seduce the labor force or this nation, the Communists tried seducing the military to stage a Janissary-style Bolshevik revolution. So, he let his column become a tool for this dream that stinks of blood and vengeance.”
“No,” said Aunt Halé, “that’s going too far.”
“Rüya told me, I know,” Uncle Melih said. He laughed but didn’t cough. “He took up studying French on his own because he fell for the promise he’d be appointed either the minister of foreign affairs or else the ambassador to Paris in this
à la Turca
Bolshevik-Janissary order. In the beginning, I was even pleased that my son who hadn’t managed to learn a foreign tongue, having wasted all his time in his youth with the riffraff, had at last found a reason to learn French. But when he got out of hand, I wouldn’t let Rüya see him.”
“None of this ever happened, Melih,” Aunt Suzan said. “Rüya and Jelal always saw each other, sought each other out, loved each other as if they were full sister and brother, as if they had the same mother.”
“Sure it happened, but I was too late,” Uncle Melih said. “When he couldn’t seduce the Turkish nation or the army, he seduced his sister. That’s how Rüya turned into an anarchist. If my son Galip here hadn’t pulled her out of that hotbed of guerrilla thugs, that nest of vermin, Rüya wouldn’t be at home in her bed now but who knows where.”
Galip stared at his nails as he imagined them all imagining Poor Rüya in her sickbed and wondered if Uncle Melih would add anything new to the list of offenses he enumerated every two to three months.
“Rüya could’ve even ended up in jail, seeing how she’s not as cautious as Jelal,” Uncle Melih said and, paying no attention to the “God forbid!”s, he gave in to the excitement of his list as he recounted: “Then, going along with Jelal, Rüya might have gotten mixed up with those thugs. Poor Rüya might have become involved with those gangsters of Beyoğlu, the heroin traffickers, the casino hoodlums, cocaine-snorting White Russians, all the dissolute gangs he penetrated under the guise of getting interviews. We might have had to look for our daughter among Englishmen who come seeking nasty pleasures, homosexuals who’re keen on the wrestlers and articles about wrestling, American bimbos who turn up for bath orgies, con artists, local movie stars who couldn’t even be whores in Europe let alone act in films, ex-officers who’ve been kicked out of the army for insubordination or embezzlement, masculinized singers who have cracked their voices on syphilis, slum beauties who pass themselves off as society women. Tell her to take some Istreptomisin,” he finished, mangling the name of a wonder drug.
“What?” said Galip.
“Best antibiotic against the flu, taken along with ‘Bekozime Fort.’ Every six hours. What time is it? Do you suppose she’s awake?”
Aunt Suzan said Rüya was probably asleep right now. Galip thought the same thing that everybody else was thinking: Rüya asleep in her bed.
“No way!” said Mrs. Esma. She was gathering up with care the sorry tablecloth which, due to a bad habit passed on by Grandpa despite Grandma’s disapproval, they used like a napkin to wipe their mouths on. “No, I’m not having my Jelal dumped on in this house. My Jelal has become a celebrity.”
According to Uncle Melih, his fifty-five-year-old son, because he was of the same opinion concerning his own importance, didn’t bother looking up his seventy-five-year-old father. He wouldn’t divulge which Istanbul apartment he was staying in to prevent not only his father but everybody in the family from reaching him, including Aunt Halé who was always the first to forgive him; he unplugged his phones on top of keeping the numbers secret. Galip was afraid that a few drops of false tears might appear in Uncle Melih’s eyes, not out of sorrow but out of habit. But instead of that, something else he was afraid of came to pass: Uncle Melih reiterated once more, not taking into account the twenty-two-year age difference, that he had always wished for a son like Galip for real, instead of Jelal: sane, mature, quiet as Galip.
Twenty-two years ago (that is, when Jelal was his age), when Galip was embarrassingly tall and his hands and arms perpetrated even more embarrassing clumsinesses, when he first heard these words and imagined they could come true, he thought it might be possible to sit down to dinner with Aunt Suzan, Uncle Melih, and Rüya every night, escaping those colorless and tasteless dinners that were eaten with Mom and Dad where everybody looked at a vanishing point beyond the walls that surrounded the dinner table at straight angles (Mom: There’s cold vegetables left over from lunch, want some? Galip: Naah, don’t want any. Mom: You? Dad: Me what?). Besides, other things occurred to him which made his head spin: when he went upstairs on Sundays to play with Rüya (“Secret Passage,” “Didn’t See”), his beautiful Aunt Suzan whom he spied in her blue nightgown, although on rare occasions, would become his mother (much better); Uncle Melih whose African and legal stories he adored, his father (much better); and Rüya, since they were the same age, his twin sister (it was there that his mind stopped with indecision as he scrutinized frightening conclusions).
After the table was cleared, Galip said TV people from the BBC had been looking for Jelal but hadn’t managed to find him. But this comment didn’t reignite the gossip he expected concerning all of Jelal’s addresses and the phone numbers he kept secret from everyone and the diverse gabble that went on about the many flats all over Istanbul and how they could be located. Somebody said it was snowing. So, rising from the table, before they sank into their accustomed easy chairs, they looked out in between the dark chill of the drapes they parted with the backs of their hands, on to the backstreet where a light snow had settled. Silent, clean new snow. (A replica of the scene Jelal fetched up more for parody than for sharing with his readers the nostalgia of “old Ramadan nights”!) Galip followed Vasıf who retired to his own room.
Vasıf sat on the big bed, Galip across from him. Vasıf dangled his hands on his shoulders and then ran them over his white hair: Rüya? Galip struck his fist into his chest and did a coughing fit: She’s sick with a cough. Then he put his reclining head down on a pillow he formed by folding his arms together: She’s lying down. Vasıf brought out a large cardboard box from under his bed: a selection of the newspaper and magazine clippings he’d collected for the last fifty years, perhaps the best ones. Galip sat down next to him. As if Rüya were sitting on the other side, as if they were laughing together at the ones she pointed out, they examined the photos they pulled out of the box at random: the soapy grin of the famous soccer player who, twenty years ago, had lathered up for a shaving cream commercial and who had died of a brain hemorrhage after countering a corner shot with his head; the corpse of General Kassem, the leader of Iraq, resting in his bloody uniform after a military coup; a re-creation of the famous Şişli Square Murder (“The jealous colonel, discovering after his retirement that he’d been cuckolded for twenty years, guns down the lecherous journalist along with his young wife in the car he’d been tracking for days,” Rüya would say in her radio-theater voice); and as Prime Minister Menderes saves the life of the camel to be sacrificed to him, behind him the reporter Jelal and the camel look elsewhere. Galip was about to get up to go home when his attention was drawn by two of Jelal’s columns he just happened to pull out of Vasıf’s box automatically: “Aladdin’s Store” and “The Executioner and the Weeping Face.” Preparing reading material for a night that was sure to be spent sleepless! He didn’t have to mime too much for Vasıf to let him borrow the columns. The folks, too, were understanding when he didn’t drink the coffee Mrs. Esma brought: obviously the expression of “my wife is sick at home” had penetrated his face deeply. He was standing in the threshold with the door open. Even Uncle Melih said, “Sure, he should go home”; Aunt Halé was bent over her cat Coals who’d returned from the snowy street; more voices inside kept calling out: “Tell her, get well; tell her to get well; take Rüya our love; take our love to Rüya!”
On the way back, Galip ran into the bespectacled tailor who was pulling the shutters down on his storefront. They hailed each other in the light of the streetlight on which little icicles hung, and they continued to walk together. “I’m late,” the tailor said, perhaps to break the profound silence of the snow. “The wife is home, waiting.” “Cold,” Galip responded. Listening to the snow crunch under their feet, they walked together until they got to Galip’s apartment building at the corner, and upstairs in the corner window the dim bedside light in the bedroom came into view. At times snow fell, and at times, darkness.
The lights in the living room were off as they had been when Galip left, and the lights in the hallway were still on. As soon as he entered, Galip put the teakettle on the burner, took off his overcoat and jacket, hung them up, and went into the bedroom where he changed his wet socks in the dim light. He sat down at the dining table and read once more the goodbye letter Rüya had written and left for him. Written with the green ballpoint pen, the letter was shorter than he remembered: Nineteen words.
If I have any fault it is digression.
—
BYRON PASHA
I am a “picturesque” writer. I’ve looked it up but I still don’t quite have the meaning; I just happen to like the word’s effect. I always dreamed I’d be writing about different things: knights on chargers, two armies on a dark plain preparing to attack on a foggy morning three centuries ago, unfortunates who on winter nights tell one another love stories in taverns, the never-ending adventures of lovers who vanish into obscure cities tracking down a mystery. But God saddled me with this column where I must tell other kinds of stories, and with you, my readers. We’ve learned to bear with each other.
If the garden of my memory hadn’t begun to dry up, perhaps I wouldn’t bellyache about my lot; but as soon as I take pen in hand what I see before my eyes are your expectant faces, my readers, and the traces of my memories take a powder in the desolate garden. To be confronted with the trace instead of the memory itself is like looking through tears at the indentations on the armchair left there by your lover who has abandoned you and will never return.
So I decided to give it straight to Aladdin. Tipped off that I intended to write about him in the paper but wanted to interview him first, he opened his black eyes wide and said, “But wouldn’t it bring me a lot of grief?”
I assured him it wouldn’t. I told him about the importance his store had for us in Nişantaşı. I told him how the thousand—nay, the ten thousand—kinds of articles he sold there remained alive in our memories color by color, smell by smell. I told him how children sick at home awaited impatiently in bed for their mothers to return from Aladdin’s store with presents: a toy (lead soldier), or a book (
Red Kid
), or a spaghetti-western photonovel (the seventeenth issue, in which Kinova, who’d been scalped, comes back to life and goes after the Redskins). I told him how thousands of students in the neighborhood schools couldn’t wait for the last bell, that bell which had already gone off in their heads, to get to his store after school for chocolate-covered
gaufrette
bars in which came photos of soccer players (Metin of Galatasaray), or wrestlers (Hamit Kaplan), or else movie stars (Jerry Lewis). I told him about the girls who stopped by for little bottles of nail-polish remover to take the pale polish off their fingernails before showing up for classes at the Night Crafts School—the same girls who’d later remember their first star-crossed loves, although stuck now with children and grandchildren in the insipid kitchens of insipid marriages, and dream of Aladdin’s store like a distant fairy tale.
We’d already arrived at my place and sat down across from each other. I told Aladdin the stories of the green ballpoint pen I bought at his store years ago and the badly translated detective novel. The heroine of the second story, whom I loved dearly and for whom I’d bought the novel, had been sentenced from then on to do nothing with her life but read detective novels. I told him how the twosome—one a patriotic army officer and the other a journalist—who were planning a conspiracy (the coup that would change the flow not only of our history but of the history of the East) had met at Aladdin’s store just prior to the first historic assembly. I also told him that, during the evening hour when this momentous meeting took place, Aladdin, unaware of what was up, stood behind the counter which was piled with books and boxes that towered up to the ceiling, wetted his fingers with his spittle, and counted the newspapers and magazines to be returned in the morning.