The Black Book (64 page)

When he arrived at the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, he felt fatigue that was unusual for him. Jelal’s flat, which simulated the past so faithfully, seemed as heartbreaking, surprising, and familiar as home seems to a soldier returning from years of war and adventure. How distant was the past! Although it hadn’t been quite four hours since he had left it. The past was as inviting as sleep. Like a guilty child, an innocent child, imagining that he would dream of newspaper columns in the lamplight, photographs, mystery, Rüya, and what it was that he was seeking, he got in Jelal’s bed and fell asleep.

When he woke up, he thought: Saturday morning. But it was, in fact, Saturday noon. A day free of the office and court hearings. Without putting on the slippers, he went and got the
Milliyet
that had been slipped under the door: Jelal Salik has been murdered. The headline appeared above the masthead. They had printed a picture of the body before it was covered under newspapers. They’d devoted the whole page to him and had got quotes from the prime minister and other officials as well as from celebrities. They’d put the piece coded “come home,” which Galip had written, in a frame and printed it as the “final column.” They’d printed a recent picture of Jelal which looked nice. According to the mavens, the bullets had been meant for democracy, freedom of speech, peace, each and every good thing that people mention every chance they get. Measures had been taken to apprehend the perpetrator.

He was sitting and smoking at the desk that overflowed with paper and news clippings. He sat in his pajamas and smoked for a long time. When the doorbell rang, he had a feeling he’d been smoking the same cigarette for the last hour. It was Kamer. She just stood there at first with the key in her hand, looking at Galip as if she’d seen a ghost, then she came in and had hardly made it into the easy chair by the phone before she burst out crying. Everyone had thought Galip was also dead. Everyone had been worried about them for days now. As soon as she read the news in the morning papers, she’d set out running to Aunt Halé’s. She’d seen the crowd congregated in front of Aladdin’s store. That’s when she realized it was morning before Rüya’s body had been discovered in there. It was when Aladdin opened the store, it seems, that he’d come upon Rüya’s body lying among the dolls, as if sleeping.

*   *   *

Reader, dear reader, at this point in my book, allow me to intervene at least once before I send these lines to the typesetter, given that I’ve been meticulously trying—that is, exerting much well-meaning effort that perhaps you yourself might have observed—to keep the narrator separate from the protagonist, although not entirely successfully, as well as the newspaper columns from the pages where the action is depicted. There are pages in some books which penetrate us so deeply that we can never forget them, not on account of the writer’s skill but because “the stories seem to flow on their own” as if “they have written themselves.” Those pages don’t remain in our minds, our hearts—or whatever you want to call it—as prodigious creations of a master craftsman but as tender, heartbreaking, and tearful moments that we shall remember for many years like the periods of heaven or hell in our own lives, or like both, or more like something beyond either. So, you see, had I been a top-notch wordsmith instead of the johnny-come-lately columnist that I am, I’d assume with assurance that this is one of those pages in my work called
Rüya and Galip
which might accompany my sensitive and intelligent readers for many years to come. But I don’t possess that sort of assurance; I happen to be a realist when it comes to my talent and my work. That’s why I wish to leave you, the reader, alone on this page with your own recollections. Best way of going about it might be for me to suggest that the printer cover the pages that follow with black printing ink. So that you might use your own imagination to create what I cannot do justice to with my prose. So that I might depict the color of the black dream I’ve embarked on at the point where I interrupted my story, I remind you of the silence in my mind as I tell you what happened next like a somnambulist. Consider, then, the following pages, the black pages, as the memoirs of a somnambulist.

*   *   *

It seems Kamer ran from Aladdin’s store all the way to Aunt Halé’s. There everyone was weeping, they were under the impression that Galip too was dead. Kamer had finally divulged Jelal’s secret: She’d told them that Jelal had been hiding out in the flat on the top floor of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments for years, and so had Rüya and Galip for the last week. That’s when everybody thought once again that Galip was also dead as well as Rüya. Later, when Kamer returned to the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, Ismail had told her, “Go upstairs and take a look!” When she’d come upstairs with the key, Kamer was gripped by a strange fear before opening the door, which was followed by a premonition that Galip was alive. She had on a pistachio-colored skirt Galip had often seen her wear and a soiled apron.

Later, when he went over, Galip saw that Aunt Halé was wearing a dress made of material with the same pistachio-green background on which purple flowers were blooming. Was it mere chance, or a reminder that the world, like the gardens of remembrance, was magical? Galip told his mother, his dad, Uncle Melih, Aunt Suzan, and everyone else who listened with tears, that he and Rüya had been back from Izmir for the last five days and that they’d spent a great portion of their time, sometimes even overnight, with Jelal at the Heart-of-the-City Apartments: Jelal had bought the top-floor flat years ago but had kept it from everyone. He was hiding out from some people who’d been threatening him.

Late in the afternoon, Galip was giving out the same story to the agent from the National Bureau of Investigation and the prosecutor who wanted to take his deposition, when he brought up the voice on the phone and went on at great length about it. But he couldn’t draw the pair, who sat there listening with a know-it-all manner, into his story. He felt helpless, like someone who could neither escape his fantasies nor get anyone involved in them. There was a protracted and deep silence in his mind.

Toward evening he found himself in Vasıf’s silent room. Perhaps because it was the only room where no weeping was being done, he could still observe in there the unspoiled signs of a happy family life which now belonged to the past: the Japanese goldfish, degenerated “due to marrying in the family,” were gliding peacefully in the aquarium. Coals, Aunt Halé’s cat, had stretched out on the edge of the rug and was absentmindedly scrutinizing Vasıf. Vasıf sat on the edge of his bed examining a pile of papers he had in his hands. These were telegrams of condolence sent by hundreds of people from the prime minister down to the most unpretentious reader. Galip observed Vasıf wearing the same surprised and playful expression that appeared on his face when he sat between Galip and Rüya on the same corner of the bed, looking through old news clips. The room was lit by the same weak, low light as it was whenever they met here before the evening meal Grandma, and later Aunt Halé, used to prepare for them. The somniferous light from the low-watt naked bulb, in unerring and definite conjunction with the faded old furniture and wallpaper, reminded Galip of the sorrow associated with the sadness of his life with Rüya which pervaded him like an incurable disease. That sadness and grief had turned into a good memory now. Galip had Vasıf get up from where he sat. He turned off the light. And without removing his clothes he stretched out on the bed, like a child who feels like weeping before going to sleep, and he slept for twelve whole hours.

The next day at the funeral, which was held at the Teşvikiye Mosque, Galip had a moment with the editor-in-chief; he explained that Jelal still had boxes of unpublished pieces, that although he’d turned in only a few new columns last week, he’d been working incessantly; not only had he polished off some of the columns in rough draft he had in his bottom drawer, he’d playfully turned out new pieces on many a novel subject which he had never previously taken in hand. The editor-in-chief said that he wanted to run these pieces for sure in Jelal’s usual space. So, this was how the road was paved for Galip to continue a literary career that would go on for years in what had been Jelal’s space. When the congregation came out of the Teşvikiye Mosque and proceeded to Nişantaşı Square where the hearse was waiting, Galip saw Aladdin looking on absentmindedly from his store entrance. He held in his hand a doll he was about to wrap up in a piece of newspaper.

It was on the night after Galip took his initial batch of Jelal’s new pieces over to the
Milliyet
editorial offices that he first dreamed of Rüya in conjunction with this doll. He’d handed in Jelal’s work and listened to words of sympathy and theories on the murder from friends and foes, including the old columnist Neşati, then retreated into Jelal’s office and begun reading the last five days’ papers which had piled up on the desk. Among all the lachrymose and overly laudatory obituaries and the articles describing similar murders in our recent history—where the inclination was to lay the blame on the Armenians, the Turkish mafia (Galip felt like editing it in green ink to read “Beyoğlu hoods”), Communists, contraband cigarette traffickers, Greeks, religious fundamentalists, right-wingers, Russians, the Nakşibendi order—Galip’s attention was attracted by a piece done by a young journalist concerning the modus operandi of the murder. The piece, which had come out in
Cumhuriyet
the day of the funeral, was short and clear, but written in a style that was more than a little rhetorical, the protagonists had not been cited by name but by their designations, which had been capitalized.

The Famous Columnist and his Sister had left the columnist’s place in Nişantaşı at seven o’clock Friday evening and gone to the Palace Theater. The movie, which was
Coming Home,
let out at nine twenty-five; the Columnist and the Sister (married to a young Lawyer)—(this was the first time Galip had ever seen himself mentioned in a paper, even if it was in parentheses)—had been in the crowd that came out of the theater. Snow, which had been the order of the day in Istanbul for the last ten days, had subsided, but it was still cold. They had gone past Governor’s Road and taken Emlak up to Teşvikiye Avenue. It was when they were right in front of the police station, at nine thirty-five, that death had met up with them. The Killer, who had used a Kırıkkale make gun of the sort issued to retired military personnel, had in all probability aimed at the Famous Columnist but managed to get them both. Perhaps because the trigger was stiff, of the five bullets spent three had hit the Columnist, one the Sister, and one the Teşvikiye Mosque wall. The Columnist had died on the spot since one of the bullets had hit him in the heart. Another bullet had shattered the pen in the left pocket of his jacket—all the journalists had gone wild over this coincidental image—which was the reason why the Columnist’s white shirt had been stained more with green ink than with blood. The Sister, wounded badly in her left lung, had managed to get to the attar store across the street which was the same distance from the murder site as the police station. The reporter, as if he were a detective who had a key scene on film rewound and played over and over, had described how the Sister had slowly walked into the attar store known as Aladdin’s, and how the Storekeeper hadn’t seen her go in, having been prevented by the trunk of the large chestnut tree behind which he had taken cover. The Sister enters the store, walking very slowly, and collapses among the dolls in the corner. The article began to sound to Galip like the account of a ballet being performed under strobe lights. But then the film suddenly went on fast forward and became absurd: the Storekeeper, who had been busy at closing time taking down the papers he had pinned up on the trunk of the chestnut, gets alarmed hearing the shots, and not having noticed the Sister go into the store, rolls down the shutters and leaves the scene in a sweat to beat it home fast.

Even though the lights had been on all night in the store known as Aladdin’s, neither the police investigating in the vicinity nor anyone else had thought of going in to discover the young woman dying in agony inside. In the same vein, the authorities considered it odd that let alone not intervene, the policeman on duty on the opposite sidewalk had not even been aware that a second person was involved in the shooting.

The Killer had gotten away. A citizen had volunteered to inform the authorities that he had been out to Aladdin’s to get a lottery ticket when he had seen, just moments before the incident, a frightening apparition wearing a strange outfit and strange cape appropriate for historical films (“looked something like Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror”) and, what’s more, he had been wildly telling his wife and sister-in-law all about it even before he read about the incident in the papers. The young journalist had finished his article wishing with the wish that this last clue would not also fall victim to dereliction and ineptitude as had the young woman who was found in the morning lying dead among the dolls.

That night Galip dreamed of Rüya among the dolls sold at Aladdin’s store. She wasn’t dead. She was waiting for Galip and breathing lightly in the dark in synch with the other dolls, winking at him, but Galip was late, he just couldn’t get to the store no matter what; all he could do was look through his tears, watching out of the window in the Heart-of-the-City Apartments the light from Aladdin’s window reflecting on the snow-covered sidewalk.

One sunny morning in early February, Galip’s father told him that Uncle Melih had received a response to the inquiry he made at the Şişli Land Deeds Office, and that it had been determined that Jelal owned another flat somewhere in the back streets of Nişantaşı.

The flat Uncle Melih and Galip went to with a hunchback locksmith in tow was on one of Nişantaşı’s old streets, on the top floor of one of those three- or four-story buildings where the façade is blackened with soot and smoke, and the paint has peeled off in pieces like the skin of an incurable patient; it was on a street paved with rectangular stone and with sidewalks that had potholes, which had always made Galip wonder, whenever he was on a street like this, why rich people would have ever wanted to live in places that were this miserable, or, conversely, why people who lived in miserable places like this would have ever been considered rich. The locksmith didn’t need to sweat it, easily opening the worn lock in the door on which there was no name.