The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  “That’s so interesting,” said Meserret Hanım. “So the pasha was arrested because of a love diary. Who is this pasha? Where is he now?”

  “The pasha is imprisoned inside a gilt-framed painting,” I said. “The painting is in an old-fashioned salon decorated especially for old people. The salon is in Tunalı Hilmi Avenue, in a special place that shelters the Night People who have fled their homes.”

  Meserret Hanım whispered, “Enchanting, astonishing! Is there really a salon for the Night People?”

  “Yes. It’s on the first floor of an old apartment building in Tunalı. Four old men who are on the verge of losing their memory are holed up there right now.”

  The Black Rose of Halfeti said, “If you ask me, not a single one of them has lost his memory. They just can’t find the way to Kızılay or Cebeci and places like that.”

  “They can’t find the street?” asked Meserret Hanım.

  “Well, of course they can’t. They’re old men who’ve spent all these years at home, growing old. Life has changed. Now they get the streets mixed up, but they all ran away from home,” I said.

  “Unbelievable things,” said Meserret Hanım. “The pasha . . .”

  “The pasha is incarcerated in a painting hanging on the wall of that salon.”

  “Come on,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti. “Let’s go in the dream. You come too,” she said to Meserret Hanım. “We’ll be back in twenty-five minutes. You won’t be bored. The pasha’s wonderful to talk to. He’s seen and done it all.”

  “Come on, then,” I said. “Let’s go into the pasha’s dream. We’ll try to come back early to the hotel, right? It’s very hot today. I want to relax a little.”

  “You’ll relax, you’ll relax,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti. “Sleep until noon tomorrow. It really is very hot.”

  Meserret Hanım asked in astonishment, “Are we going to enter the pasha’s dream?”

  “We will, right now,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti.

  All of a sudden we found ourselves inside that passageway I knew so well.

  “Come on,” I said to Meserret Hanım. “Let’s go that way. We’ll go inside through the curtain.”

  The woman on duty asked:

  “Are there three of you? That’s rather a lot for a dream. You can’t stay inside for very long. When the light turns green go in one by one. Don’t make any sudden movements, don’t get rambunctious in there.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  The green light went on.

  The Black Rose of Halfeti went first, parting the curtain a little and slipping inside.

  THE PASHA

  I said to Meserret Hanım:

  “You go in now. I’ll follow you in.”

  I parted the curtain behind her and went inside.

  The pasha was staying in a little room. The walls were painted white. There was a nice clean bed made up in one corner of the room with a bedspread on it. On the left side there was a little window in the wall. The room where the pasha lived was a plain, spare room for one person. He himself was sitting in the corner. When he saw us he stood up.

  “Come in, come, please,” he said. “What a lovely surprise! Three lovely women have come to visit me!”

  The pasha gave the armchair to Meserret Hanım. The Black Rose of Halfeti and I sat down on the bed.

  Suddenly I realized that the little window looked out on the Night Salon set up for the old men.

  The pasha saw me staring at it.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s actually the place where I observe the salon from the gilt frame.”

  “That’s so fascinating, Pasha,” I said. “So you always follow those old men and the world of the Night Salon from this window?”

  “Yes,” said the pasha. “You could say that I’m in there with them. This world of old people . . . lives lived long ago.”

  “What is this ‘Night Salon’?” asked Meserret Hanım with interest.

  “It’s a nostalgic salon decorated in the style of the 1970s that was set up in Tunalı Hilmi for old men who’ve escaped from home,” I said. “There are four men there now, and each one’s story is more interesting than the next.”

  “Did they run away from home?”

  “Yes. It’s a way of fighting back against senility and holding on to life,” I said.

  “That’s so interesting,” Meserret Hanım murmured. “Well, fine, but don’t the people back home worry about them?”

  “Some of them they’re hysterically looking for and others, well, I just don’t know,” I said.

  “There are even some people who are happy to see them go,” said the pasha. “Life is a lonely trip . . .”

  I nodded my head.

  Meserret Hanım slowly went over to the open window and looked into the salon.

  Excited voices immediately rose up from the Night Salon.

  “There’s a blonde in the painting!” Hıfzi Bey shouted. “It’s just incredible!”

  “Hello!” said Meserret Hanım.

  The old men all shouted together: “Hello!” Then a great wave of excitement spread through the salon.

  The old men moved their armchairs over to the wall. They were staring at Meserret Hanım.

  Meserret Hanım suddenly burst out into song.

  It was an old melody called “There’s Another Chance.”

  The general said, “I love this song,” and sighed. “I can’t offer you anything here,” he added. “I’m a prisoner. If it were the old days, I would treat you the way I wanted, to my heart’s content.”

  “Oh Pasha, that’s not a problem. Please don’t even think of it.”

  “I’m going on television tomorrow night,” said the pasha. “On Uğur Dündar’s program.”

  “We know, Pasha.”

  “Will you wear a uniform?”

  “I will,” said the pasha.

  Meserret Hanım was finishing up her song.

  There’s another chance

  Do you say that it’s only to die?

  So what do you say, my dear

  You’re worth my whole life.

  The song was over.

  The old men in the Night Salon were in a state of complete excitement. They were on their feet, applauding Meserret Hanım.

  Meserret Hanım withdrew back into the room, waving goodbye to them.

  “Pasha, there’s a journal. A diary,” I said.

  “Yes, there’s a diary,” said the pasha.

  “They’re supposed to talk about that diary on the program tomorrow . . .”

  “Yes, Uğur Bey and I are going to talk about that diary on the program,” said the pasha.

  “Do you have the diary, Pasha?”

  “No, they took it away from me,” said the pasha.

  “You wrote about your love in the diary, Pasha . . . that’s what they say.”

  The pasha looked into my eyes.

  “Yes, that diary was a message I left for the woman I love,” he said. “I wrote everything in that diary, the things I couldn’t say to her when we were together, the things I might have forgotten to say, everything,” he explained.

  “So you loved her that much, Pasha?” I asked.

  “I loved her very much,” said the pasha. “It’s difficult for a soldier to express these emotions. But I wrote them down. I wrote everything in the diary.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked with interest.

  “The journal was discovered and I was arrested,” said the pasha.

  “Why on earth were you arrested because of a love diary?”

  The pasha chuckled.

  “Not everyone can understand love,” he said. “And in the days in which we live, who could possibly understand the love of a general? They thought about the book in a different way. It was misunderstood.”

  “My God,” I said.

  What the pasha said was truly confusing.

  A red light above our heads started to flash on and off.

  “It’s time to leave the dream,”
the Black Rose of Halfeti whispered. “Come on.”

  She slowly stood up from where she was sitting on the bed in the corner. Meserret Hanım and I got ready as well.

  “We’ll watch you tomorrow night, Pasha,” I said.

  “I’ll explain everything on the program,” the pasha said.

  I wondered who the woman he loved was. I hadn’t had time to ask. A short while later we found ourselves in the passageway.

  “I cannot believe what I am experiencing,” said Meserret Hanım. “Everything is really very amazing.”

  A little later I dropped her off at her hotel room and then threw myself down on my bed.

  The Black Rose of Halfeti was preparing to leave.

  “Who was the pasha’s lover?” I asked in curiosity.

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” she said.

  She slowly opened the door and left the room.

  THE PALACE OF KING DARIUS

  We had all gathered on the terrace of King Darius’s palace.

  Meserret Hanım was sitting at the head of the group, and a slave would occasionally fan her with a dried palm frond.

  The Black Rose of Halfeti had come with the Spanish director Luis Buñuel. They were sitting to one side holding hands. I noticed that Buñuel seemed somehow younger. He was smoking a thin cigarette as he looked out over the plain of Mesopotamia. Who knew what he was thinking?

  King Darius was sitting across from the television screen. I looked for Silvia Pinal, but I didn’t see her.

  Another slave was serving sherbet and fruit.

  King Darius bent down to my ear. “I’m going to hook up one of those coolers in the palace,” he said. “The weather is very hot. We get exhausted for nothing. I wish we had gotten one that day . . .”

  “I’ll buy it from Mardin Arçelik tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll come and connect it right away.”

  Uğur Dündar’s Arena program was about to start.

  The remote was in King Darius’s hand. After he ran through some of the channels, he turned on Arena.

  Uğur Dündar appeared on the screen. As always, his tie and the handkerchief in his pocket were very elegant. Buñuel looked at him from where he was sat with interest.

  Uğur Dündar said:

  “Lieutenant General Gökdeniz Pasha will be here with you, ladies and gentlemen. In just a little while we’ll have a live connection with him. As Gökdeniz Pasha is locked up in a cell, they’ll connect him from where he is. We’ll talk with him about the famous “love diary” that caused him to be condemned to imprisonment in a cell. As we know, this love diary found under his pillow had extraordinary repercussions and occasioned various analyses. In the end, it was turned over to a judge in order to resolve the romance that was discovered in this very controversial document, and the pasha was arrested and placed in prison.”

  The pasha appeared on the screen.

  “Welcome, Pasha!” said Uğur Dündar. “You’ve been in prison for quite a long time. The love diary found under your pillow has given rise to a lot of speculation. In fact, the matter is so confused that even the High Council of Judges and district attorneys couldn’t figure out what was written there. Everyone has a different opinion about what was written. Your diary has really become like a work of Shakespeare’s. What do you have to say to us on this subject?”

  The pasha said:

  “I send my greetings to all the viewers from here. In addition, I send my greetings to the friends in the Night Salon who are watching us at this moment. Uğur Bey, my diary recounts a love, a passion. A kind of journal. There’s longing there, hope, the pain of love, jealousy, obsession, who knows, even perversion. It’s a document written for myself and the woman I love. Of course, when you start to seek military clues in it, a meaningless and difficult document emerges. I don’t know why they looked at it like that. That’s the true story.”

  “Fine, sir,” said Uğur Dündar. “So then there’s no password, no plan, no murder plot in what’s written there, as was alleged . . . ?”

  “A murder plot?” muttered the pasha. “I love her so much, that there were times I did think of murdering her. Her and myself. Like the House of Hapsburg. Like Rudolph von Hapsburg. It was so strange. Archduke Rudolph shot Marie Vetsera, the woman he was madly in love with, at the chateau at Mayerling, then he killed himself. That’s depression.”

  Buñuel was listening with rapt attention to what the pasha was saying, once in a while asking the Black Rose of Halfeti a question in a subdued voice, and the girl would then explain something to him.

  “So, there were times you shared the same emotions and anguish as Archduke Rudolph von Hapsburg, Pasha?” Uğur Dündar said.

  “Yes,” said the pasha. “But I didn’t do anything. I expressed my love in the diary.”

  “And this book caused you all kinds of trouble . . . ?”

  “Don’t even ask,” said the pasha.

  Uğur Dündar continued:

  “Thank you very much, Pasha, for coming on the show. You didn’t let us down.”

  A commercial came on.

  “Really amazing,” said Meserret Hanım. “What devotion this pasha had! The man is wasting away in a cell. Who is the woman?”

  “He doesn’t say.”

  “It’s a strange thing,” said King Darius. “A tangled mess.”

  They brought new sherbets. Each of us took a sip from our sherbet.

  A light wind sprang up.

  A CONVERSATION WITH LUIS BUÑUEL

  I had returned to my room in the Zinciriye Hotel. Meserret Hanım was in the room next door. We had agreed to meet for breakfast and then gone our separate ways.

  Before Meserret Hanım went into her room, she commented:

  “That Arena program was fabulous! Aşık Pasha and what he said were just extraordinary!”

  “Good night . . .”

  Meserret Hanım went into her room. I heard her lock the door behind her.

  I went into my room.

  I turned on the lamp and was just about to fling myself down on the couch with the silk pillows when I suddenly saw Luis Buñuel. He was sitting in the armchair next to the window whose curtains were drawn.

  He stood up when he saw me.

  “I hope the hour isn’t too late for you,” he said.

  “No, Don Luis,” I replied.

  “Please be seated. I lost sight of you when you left the palace.”

  “I walked in the ruins for a while,” I said. “It’s enchanting there in the moonlight.

  “What can I offer you?”

  “Thank you. I don’t drink at this hour,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about dreams. A short talk.”

  “That’s wonderful. Let’s talk.”

  “You only know about the dreams of the middle and upper classes,” said Buñuel. “Because you’re around them. For example, have you ever tried to get into the dreams of impoverished people? Of someone completely different?”

  “Don Luis,” I said. “I went into the dreams of a few people I know, plus an old man and yours. To be more exact, I accompanied the Black Rose of Halfeti. I don’t know very much about dreams.”

  “Who knows?” muttered Buñuel. “Maybe the dreams of forlorn wretches are completely different . . .”

  “I don’t know, maybe they are.”

  “The dreams of sick people,” said Buñuel.

  “Yes, the dreams of sick people . . . It could be interesting. Who knows what dreams they see?”

  “I’d like to go into a dream like that,” said Buñuel. “You know, to live there, to see what that world is like. What goes on in a world like that? What happens behind the scenes? I can understand people best from their dreams.”

  “I know,” I murmured.

  I looked at him in admiration. It was obvious that the subject of a new film was forming in his mind.

  “Would you come with me tonight into a dream like that?” Buñuel asked.

  “Of course I would,” I said with excitement. “Whose dream wi
ll we go into?”

  He slowly bent down to my ear. “Your dream,” he said. “If you permit it.”

  I was completely taken aback.

  “My dream?”

  “Yes, your dream. I want to go into your subconscious tonight.”

  “But,” I said. “It’s like Mardin . . . Here, all these people, the different kinds of dreams, everything is my dream, Don Luis. As though they were all made from my dreams . . . King Darius, that magnificent palace, the Mesopotamia I observe from the Seyr-i Mardin . . .”

  “A part,” said Buñuel. “These are just a part of your dreams. That’s right . . . but not all.”

  “Are you going to come into my dream tonight?”

  I was very excited.

  “How are you going to do it?”

  “Go to sleep,” said Buñuel. “Fall into a nice sleep. Then I’ll gradually come into your dream.”

  My eyes were slowly closing. My eyelids felt heavy.

  I softly buried my head in the silk pillows.

  THE DREAM

  I opened my eyes a little. There was a flash of light in my left eye. I lifted my head off the pillow in fear. A light like a waterfall flashed in the front of my eye again.

  I was afraid. Trembling. I got up from the couch. It was as though there were tiny flies flying around in a cloud of air inside my eye. I tried to brush them away with my hands. They wouldn’t go away. The flies I couldn’t get rid of were cells whose shadows fell on my retina, clumps of protein. The back of my eye had torn.

  I started to cry. Buñuel slowly came over to me.

  “Don’t cry,” he said in a tender voice.

  “I’m afraid. Very afraid, Don Luis,” I said. “I’m slowly going blind.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Buñuel. “I know you’re very scared.”

  “It’s like a nightmare,” I said. “I only have one eye, Don Luis. If I lose it, I’ll never see the world again. That’s death. Darkness . . . I’m very afraid, Don Luis. I’m in a nightmare. But it’s a real nightmare. There’s a danger of retinal degeneration in my left eye. A rip in the retina. I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “How did it happen?” asked Buñuel.

  “I had an operation abroad,” I said. “It was three months ago. The world was all clear and sparkling again. It was incredible! A person who hasn’t lost his sight couldn’t understand what I mean . . . I couldn’t believe this shining world.