The Black Book (66 page)

Perhaps they already knew what I knew or didn’t know, but because they wanted to be done with it as soon as possible, they wanted to kill off Jelal’s lost, dark mystery, the mystery obscured by the black tar and colorless dregs of our lives, before we had a chance to discover it, or to cut off any doubt budding not only in my mind but in the minds of newspaper readers and compatriots everywhere before it grew and gave off shoots.

Sometimes one of the hardboiled spooks who thought enough was enough already, or a general that I met for the first time, or the skinny prosecutor I got to know some months ago would attempt to narrate a full-blown story like the unconvincing detective who unfolds with the ease of a magician the concealed significances of all the clues and the details for the benefit of the readers of mystery novels. While a scene reminiscent of the last pages of Rüya’s mystery novels developed, the other functionaries present listened on, taking notes on paper in front of them that said State Supply Office—just like schoolteachers judging the intramural debates, listening with patience and pride to their best students’ pearls of wisdom: The killer was a pawn sent by foreign powers who wanted to “destabilize” our society; the Bektaşi and the Nakşibendi orders who realized their secrets had been made the subject of derision, as well as some poets who wrote classical verse that involved acrostics along with some present-day bards—voluntary Hurufis every one of them—had become the unwitting representatives for the foreign powers in the plot to push us into anarchy or a kind of apocalypse. No, this murder presented no political implications. In order to figure this out, all one had to do was remember that the murdered journalist had been writing nonpolitical nonsense concerning his own private obsessions which he penned in an outmoded manner and a prose style that was unreadable and much too long. The murderer had to be either the Beyoğlu hood who was affronted thinking he was being lampooned by the exaggerated legends Jelal wrote about him, or some other gunman that he had hired. On one of those nights when college kids who turned themselves in for the sake of making a name for themselves were put to torture to change their minds about confessing to the murder, or when innocent people picked up at the mosque were forced into making a confession, a false-toothed professor of Classical Ottoman Literature—he and an NBI big cheese had spent their childhood together in old Istanbul backyards and streets overlooked by trellised balconies—after making a short but boring introduction to Hurufism and the ancient art of word games which was interrupted by jokes, had listened to the story I told unwillingly and then, putting on airs like a slum-district gypsy fortune-teller, explained that “the incidents could very well be placed into the framework of Şeyh Galip’s
Beauty and Love
without too much difficulty.” During that period, a two-man committee had been busy at the fort, examining informants’ letters which had been written to the newspapers and the authorities in the heat of the general frenzy brought on by the promise of the award money; so no attention was paid to the literary solution presented by the professor who pointed out two-hundred-year-old problems in poetry.

It was around the same time when they concluded that the killer was a barber who’d been turned in. After showing me the small thin man in his sixties, and seeing how I still couldn’t make an identification, they stopped summoning me to the mad festivals of life and death, mystery and power, that went on at the fort. The newspapers were busy for an entire week with the barber’s story down to the last detail; he had initially denied the crime, then confessed to it, then denied it again only to confess once more. Jelal Salik had first mentioned this man years ago in his column titled “I Must be Myself.” In that piece, and in others that followed it, he’d written that the barber had come to the paper and put to him questions that would illuminate the profound mystery concerning the East, ourselves and our existence, and that the columnist had responded to the questions by cracking jokes. The barber had been enraged seeing that these jokes, which he considered slander heaped on him in the presence of witnesses, had been brought up not once but repeatedly in the columns. Upon seeing the initial column printed yet again under the very same headline twenty-two years later, only to slander him once more, the barber, prodded by certain figures around him, had decided to get even with the columnist. As to the identities of the provocateurs, not only were they never discovered but their very existence was denied by the barber who characterized his work as “an individual act of terrorism,” using language he’d picked up from the police. Not too long after the papers printed the man’s tired and beat-up face scoured of any meaning or letters, he was tried and sentenced and then, one morning at an hour when only woebegone packs of dogs wandered through the streets of Istanbul unwary of the martial law curfew, was hanged in order to demonstrate the efficiency of this speedy justice by the speedy execution of the sentence.

Back then, I was busy working on stories I recalled or researched on the subject of Mount Kaf and also listening groggily to theories put forth by people who came to see me at my office for the purpose of shedding light on the “events,” but not providing much help. That was the state I was in when listening to the obsessive student from the school of theology who’d figured out from his writings that Jelal had been the Dadjdjal and, explaining at great length and substantiating it by pointing out the letters in the news clippings that were rife with references to executioners, he reasoned that if he had come to this conclusion, so could the killer, who by killing him emulated the Messiah, that is, Him. I also listened to the Nişantaşı tailor who disclosed that he’d been sewing historical costumes for Jelal. Like someone who barely recalls a movie he’s seen years ago, I had a hard time even remembering that the tailor was the same one I’d seen working late in his store on the snowy night that Rüya had vanished. I displayed the same reaction to my old friend Saim the archivist who turned up to get the nitty-gritty on just how extensive the NBI archives were, and also to bring the good news that the innocent student had been sprung from jail now that Mehmet Yılmaz had finally been caught. While Saim held forth on “I Must be Myself,” referring to the headline of the column assumed to give the motive for the murder, I was so far from being myself that I was becoming a stranger to this black book, as well as to Galip.

There was one period when I devoted myself exclusively to the law and my cases. During another period, I let things slide, looking up old friends and going out to restaurants and taverns with new acquaintances. Sometimes I noticed the clouds over Istanbul take on an incredible shade of yellow or ash; at other times I tried convincing myself that the sky over the city was the same old sky. I’d rise from the desk past midnight, having easily knocked off two or three pieces for that week, as Jelal used to during his productive periods, and I’d sit in the chair next to the phone and stretch my legs out on the footstool, waiting for the things around me to gradually get transformed into things from another world, signs from another universe. It was then that I sensed somewhere deep in my memory a recollection stir like a shadow, and as the shadow advanced through a gate in the garden of remembrance that opened into another garden, only to continue through a second and then a third and fourth gate, I felt all through this familiar process the gates of my own personality open and close as I was being transformed into another person who could become involved and happy with that shadow; it was then that I’d catch myself before I began to speak with that other person’s voice.

I kept my life under some sort of control, although not too strictly, so as not to come up against a remembrance of Rüya when I wasn’t up to it, carefully avoiding grief I was afraid might descend on me unexpectedly anywhere anytime. When I was at Aunt Halé’s for supper three or four times a week, I helped Vasıf feed the Japanese goldfish, but I never sat on the edge of the bed with him to look at the news clippings he brought out. (Even so, that was how I chanced upon Edward G. Robinson’s photo in the paper, printed above Jelal’s column, and discovered that there was something of a family resemblance between the two of them—more like distant relatives.) Whenever it got very late and either my dad or Aunt Suzan suggested that I go home before I was any later, as if Rüya were waiting for me in her sickbed, “You’re right,” I’d tell them, “I better leave before it’s time for curfew.”

Yet I wouldn’t take the route that went by Aladdin’s store, the one Rüya and I used to take, but would walk through backstreets the roundabout way both to our place and to the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, and would again change my course trying to avoid going into the streets Jelal and Rüya walked through after leaving the Palace Theater, finding myself in Istanbul’s strange dark alleys, walking along unfamiliar walls, streetlights, letters, mosque courtyards, and buildings with terrifying faces and windows with curtains pulled shut like blind eyes. Walking along past these dark and dead signs changed me so much into another person that, when I arrived on the sidewalk in front of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments a little before the onset of curfew and I saw the rag still tied on the top floor balcony grillwork, I’d easily take it as the signal that Rüya was home waiting for me.

After walking through the dark deserted streets, seeing the signal Rüya left for me on the grillwork, I’d remember what we talked about at length, the third year of our marriage in the middle of a snowy night, like a pair of old friends who’ve carried on for years without needling each other, without letting the conversation drop in Rüya’s bottomless well of indifference, and without being aware of the profound silence that appeared between us like a phantom. We had imagined, at my instigation and with Rüya’s relish in her own powers of imagination, a day we’d spend together when we turned seventy-three.

When we were seventy-three, we’d go up to Beyoğlu together on a winter’s day. We’d buy each other presents with the money we’d been saving: a sweater or a pair of gloves. We’d be wearing our heavy old overcoats that smelled like us and which we’d come to like. We’d be window-shopping absentmindedly without looking for anything in particular, talking to each other. We’d be swearing hatefully, complaining about things that kept changing, talking idly about how clothes, store windows, and people used to be so much better and nicer in the old days. While we went through the rigmarole, we’d be conscious that we behaved like this because we were too old to expect much from the future, but we still would carry on without changing any of our behavior. We’d buy a few pounds of marrons glacées making sure they were weighed and packaged right. Then somewhere in the backstreets of Beyoğlu we’d come across an old bookstore which we’d never seen before and, amazed and overjoyed, we’d congratulate each other. Inside, there would be mysteries sold reasonably which Rüya hadn’t read before or didn’t remember reading. While we poked around for novels, we’d get growled at by an elderly cat stalking around the piles of books, and the sensitive saleslady would smile at us. We’d stop at a pudding shop, pleased with the packages of books we’d come by so cheaply which would take care of Rüya’s mystery habit for the next couple of months at least, and while having our tea, we’d have a small altercation. We’d fight because we were seventy-three, and knew that we’d spent our seventy-three years in vain, which was something that happened to all people as it would to us. We’d open the packages upon returning home, we’d take our clothes off without being shy, and we’d put our white, flabby old bodies to work making love at length, accompanied with lots of marrons glacées and sticky syrup. The pale color of our tired old bodies would be the same semitransparent cream color of our childhood skin when we first met sixty-six years ago. Rüya, whose imagination was always more vivid than mine, had said that we’d stop in the middle of this insane lovemaking to have a smoke and a good cry. I was the one who brought the subject up because I had a hunch Rüya would come to love me when we were seventy-three when she was in no condition to yearn for different lives. Whereas Istanbul, as my readers have noticed, would keep on living in its misery.

I still come across something of hers sometimes in one of Jelal’s old boxes, or among the stuff in my office, in some room, or at Aunt Halé’s, which hasn’t been disposed of due to my having overlooked it in some strange way. The purple button from the flowered dress she was wearing when I first saw her, a pair of those “modern” eyeglass frames with the pointy corners, the kind that began appearing in the sixties on the faces of sound and able women in European magazines, which Rüya had managed wearing for six months before she cast them off; the small black hairpins one of which she held between her lips while she fastened the other in her hair using both hands; the tail-shaped lid she’d been unhappy about having mislaid for years, which went on a hollow wood duck where she kept her needle and thread; the homework assignment for literature class on the mythical bird called simurgh that lived on Mount Kaf, which had been copied right out of the encyclopedia and got left in Uncle Melih’s legal files; strands of her hair stuck on Aunt Suzan’s hairbrush; a shopping list made out for me (smoked bonito, a
Silver Screen
magazine, butane for the lighter, Bonibon chocolates with hazelnuts); a picture of a tree drawn with Grandpa’s help; the horse in the alphabet book; an odd sock from the green pair I’d seen her wear riding a rented bicycle nineteen years ago.

Before I left one of these articles gently, respectfully, and meticulously in one of the garbage cans in front of some apartment building in Nişantaşı and ran off, I’d carry them around in my grubby pockets for a couple of days, sometimes a week, and even—all right, okay—a couple of months; and even after giving them up painfully, I’d fantasize that these mournful objects would one day return to me along with their memories, just like the articles that came back from the dark void in the apartment building.

Today all that I have of Rüya is merely this text, these dark, black, pitch-black pages. Sometimes when I remember one of the stories in these pages, say the story of the executioner or the first time we heard Jelal tell the tale called “Rüya and Galip” on a snowy winter’s night, I end up recalling some other story in which the only way to be oneself is by becoming another or by losing one’s way in another’s tales; and the tales I want to put together in the black book remind me of a third or fourth tale, just like our love stories and memory gardens that open into one another, and I am thrilled to remember the story of a lover who becomes someone else upon getting lost in the streets of Istanbul, or the story of the man looking for the lost mystery and meaning in his own face, which make me embrace with increasing ardor my newly found work which is nothing more than retelling these old, very old—ancient—tales, ending up with me coming to the end of my book. At the end, Galip hurries to meet the newspaper deadline, writing the last of Jelal’s stories which, when you come right down to it, aren’t the hottest thing in print anymore. Then toward morning he aches remembering Rüya and gets up from the desk to gaze at the city sleeping in darkness. I remember Rüya and, getting up from the desk, I gaze at the city’s darkness. We remember Rüya and gaze at Istanbul’s darkness. And, in the middle of the night, we are seized by the sorrow and the thrill that get me anytime between sleep and wakefulness when I think I’ve come across Rüya’s trace on the blue-checkered quilt. After all, nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.