by Orhan Pamuk
Galip had read Rüya’s name for the first time on one of the postcards that Grandma stuck into the frame of the mirror on the buffet where the liqueur sets were kept. It hadn’t surprised him that Rüya meant “dream”; but later, when they began figuring out the secondary meanings of names, they were astonished to find in a dictionary of Ottoman Turkish that Galip meant “victor” and Jelal “fury.” But that Rüya meant “dream” was so commonplace, it wasn’t surprising in the least. What was uncommon was the way Rüya’s baby and childhood pictures were placed among the row of images which went around the large mirror like a second frame (and which angered Grandpa from time to time) of churches, bridges, oceans, towers, ships, mosques, deserts, pyramids, hotels, parks, and animals. In those days, rather than being interested in his uncle’s daughter (called a “cousin” in the new usage) who was supposed to be the same age as him, Galip was more interested in his “Chieftain” Aunt Suzan who looked into the camera sadly as she parted the black-and-white cave of the mosquito netting to expose her daughter Rüya sleeping inside the scary, sleepy cave that stirred the imagination. He had understood later that it was this beauty, as Rüya’s photographs went around the apartments, that momentarily silenced the women in the compound as well as the men. Back then, most of the discussions centered around just when Uncle Melih and family would return to Istanbul and on which floor they’d live. For one thing, heeding Grandma’s entreaties, Jelal had returned to the compound and moved back into the attic apartment when he could no longer abide living in the spider-filled house in Aksaray after the untimely death of his mother who’d remarried a lawyer and died of some disease each doctor called by a different name. On behalf of the newspaper for which he came to write columns under an assumed name, he’d report on soccer games with the intent of ferreting out fixed matches, describe extravagantly the mysterious and well-crafted murders perpetrated by the thugs in the bars, nightclubs, and whorehouses in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, devised crossword puzzles in which the number of black squares always exceeded the white, took over the serial on wrestlers because the real writer who was stoned on opium wine couldn’t come up with the next installment; and from time to time, he would write columns like “Discerning Your Personality through Your Handwriting,” “Interpreting Your Dreams,” “Your Face, Your Personality,” “Your Horoscope Today” (according to friends and relations he’d first started sending encoded messages when he sent them to his sweethearts through these horoscope columns), stacks of the “Believe It or Not” series, and do film criticism on new American movies which he took in free on his own time. Given his industriousness, and if he continued living in the attic apartment by himself, it was thought he’d even save enough of the money he made as a journalist to get himself married. Later, when Galip observed one morning that the timeless pavement stones between the tram tracks had been covered under some senseless asphalt, he thought the jinx Grandpa talked about was connected to this odd congestion in the apartment compound, or to being out of place, or something else similarly indefinite and frightening. So when Uncle Melih, as if to demonstrate his resentment at his not being taken seriously, suddenly showed up in Istanbul with his beautiful wife and beautiful daughter, he moved, of course, right into his son Jelal’s apartment.
When Galip was late to school on the spring morning after Uncle Melih and his new family arrived, he had dreamed that he was late to school. He and a beautiful girl with blue hair, whose identity he couldn’t make out, were riding on a public bus which took them away from school where the last pages of the alphabet book were to be studied. When he woke up, he realized not only was he late, his dad was also late for work. And at the breakfast table, on which an hour’s sunlight fell and whose blue-and-white cloth reminded him of a chessboard, Mom and Dad were discussing the people who moved into the attic apartment as if talking about the mice that commandeered the compound’s air shaft or about the ghosts and jinns who hung out with Mrs. Esma, the maid. Galip, who was ashamed to go to school now that he was late, didn’t want to think why he was late any more than to wonder who the people were who moved in upstairs. He went up to Grandma and Grandpa’s flat where everything was repeated all the time, but the barber was already asking about the people up in the attic while he shaved Grandpa, who looked none too happy. The postcards which were usually stuck in the frame of the mirror were now scattered, odd and foreign articles had appeared here and there—and a new scent to which he’d eventually become addicted. Suddenly he felt a faintness, an apprehension, and a longing: What was it like, living in the countries he saw on tinted postcards? What was it like, knowing the beautiful aunt whose pictures he’d seen? He longed to grow up and become a man! When he announced he wanted his hair cut, Grandma was pleased, but the barber, being insensitive like most blabbermouths, sat him on a stool he placed on the dining table rather than in Grandpa’s armchair. On top of that, the blue-and-white checkered cloth which he took off Grandpa and tied around Galip’s neck was so big that, as if it weren’t enough that it almost choked him, it fell below his kneecaps much like a skirt on a girl.
Much later after their first meeting, 19 years 19 months and 19 days after (according to Galip’s calculations), looking at his wife’s head buried in the pillow some mornings, Galip would register that the blue quilt on Rüya and the blue cloth the barber took off Grandpa and tied around Galip’s neck gave him the same willies; yet he never mentioned anything about it to his wife, perhaps because he knew Rüya would not have the quilt recovered for a reason so vague.
Thinking the morning paper might have already been slipped under the door, Galip rose out of the bed with his habitually careful, feather-light movements, but rather than go to the door, his feet took him first to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. The teakettle was neither in the kitchen nor in the living room. Given that the copper ashtray was full to the rim with cigarette stubs, Rüya must’ve been up all night reading or not reading a new detective novel. He found the teakettle in the bathroom: there just wasn’t enough water pressure to run that scary contraption called a “chauffebain,” so bath water was heated in the same teakettle, a second one not having managed to get itself purchased. Before making love, much like Grandma and Grandpa, and like Mom and Dad, they too sometimes heated water, quietly and impatiently.
Grandma, who’d been charged with ingratitude after one of those fights that began with “quit smoking,” had once reminded Grandpa that she had never gotten out of bed after him, not once. Vasıf had stared. Galip listened, wondering what Grandma meant. Later, Jelal had pronounced on the subject also, but not in the same sense as Grandma: “Women not allowing the sun to rise on them,” he’d written, “as well as getting out of bed before the men, is customary among peasant folk.” After reading the conclusion of the column in which Grandma and Grandpa’s morning routines had been described pretty factually (the ashes on the quilt, the toothbrushes in the same glass of water as the false teeth, the habitual quick perusal of the obituaries), Grandma had said, “So, now we’re peasant folk!” “Should’ve made him eat lentil soup for breakfast so he’d know what it is to be a peasant!” Grandpa had responded.
As Galip rinsed the cups, looked for clean knives, forks, and plates, took out of the fridge that smelled of spiced pastrami the cheese and olives which looked like plastic food, and shaved with the water he heated in the teakettle, he contemplated making a noise loud enough to wake Rüya, but he didn’t manage to. So he read the sleepy contents of the ink-scented paper which he pulled out from under the door and spread out next to his plate. He thought of other things as he drank his unsteeped tea and ate the stale bread and the thyme-flavored olives: This evening he’d either go to Jelal’s or to the movies at the Palace Theater. He glanced at Jelal’s column, decided to read it when he got back from the movies that night, but at the insistence of his eye he couldn’t help reading one sentence; he rose from the table leaving the paper spread out, put on his coat, was at the door but went back inside. Hands stuck in his pockets f
ull of tobacco, change, and used tickets, for a while he watched his wife carefully, respectfully, quietly. He turned, pulled the door lightly behind him, and left.
The stairs, mopped in the morning, smelled of wet dust and dirt. Outside, it was a cold and muddy day darkened by the coal and fuel-oil clouds that billowed out of the chimneys in Nişantaşı. Breathing puffs of damp vapor into the cold air, he walked by piles of garbage on the ground and got into the long line at the dolmuş stop.
On the opposite sidewalk some old guy who wore his jacket for an overcoat with the collar pulled up was choosing his pastry at the vendor’s cart, separating the meat buns from the cheese. Galip suddenly got out of the line and ran. He turned the corner, picked up a copy of Milliyet for which he paid the news vendor who’d set himself up in a doorway, folded and tucked it under his arm. Once he’d heard Jelal mimic derisively an older female reader: “Ah, Jelal Bey, we love your columns so much, sometimes Muharrem and I get too impatient and end up buying two copies of Milliyet.” Then they all laughed at the impersonation together, Galip, Rüya, and Jelal. After a long wait, having been soaked in the dirty rain that began as a drizzle, having gotten on the dolmuş push and shove, and having satisfied himself that no conversation would ensue on the dolmuş, which smelled of wet cloth and cigarettes, Galip folded the newspaper down to the size of the column on the second page with the care and pleasure of a true addict, glanced out of the window momentarily, and began reading Jelal’s column for that day.
Chapter Two
THE DAY THE BOSPHORUS DRIES UP
Nothing can be as astounding as life—except writing.
—IBN ZERHANI
Are you aware that the Bosphorus is regressing? I doubt that you are. These days, when we’re so busy murdering each other with the insouciant boisterousness of children on a lark, which one amongst us reads anything informative about the world? We give even our columnists half-hearted readings as we elbow each other on ferryboat landings, fall into each other’s laps on bus platforms, or as we sit on dolmuşes where the newsprint shivers uncontrollably. I got wind of the news in a French geological journal.
The Black Sea is warming up, it turns out, as the Mediterranean cools down. That’s why sea water has begun to flood into the immense caves that gape open on the ocean floor and, as a result of similar tectonic movements, the basins of the Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Bosphorus are rising. A fisherman we last interviewed on the shores of the Bosphorus, after describing how his boat went aground in the same deep waters where he once set anchor, put to us this question: Does our prime minister give a damn?
I don’t know. All I know is the implications of this fast developing situation for the near future. Obviously, a short time from now, the paradise we call the Bosphorus will turn into a pitch-black swamp in which the mud-caked skeletons of galleons will gleam like the luminous teeth of ghosts. It isn’t hard to imagine that this swamp, after a hot summer, will dry up in places and turn mucky like the bed of a modest stream that irrigates a small town, or even that the slopes of the basin fed abundantly by gurgling sewage that flows through thousands of huge tiles will go to daisies and weeds. A new life will begin in this deep and wild valley in which the Tower of Leander will jut out like an actual and terrifying tower on the rock where it stands.
I am talking about new districts which will be built, under the noses of the municipal cops rushing about with citation books in their hands, on the mire of the lacuna once called “The Bosphorus”: about shantytowns, stalls, bars, cabarets, pleasure palaces, amusement parks with merry-go-rounds, casinos, about mosques, dervish tekkes and nests of Marxist factions, about fly-by-night plastics workshops and sweatshops that manufacture nylon stockings. Observed in the midst of the apocalyptic chaos will be carcasses of ships that remain from the old Municipal Goodworks Lines listing on their sides, and fields of jellyfish and soda-pop caps. On the last day when the waters suddenly recede, among the American transatlantics gone to ground and Ionic columns covered with seaweed, there will be Celtic and Ligurian skeletons open-mouthed in supplication to gods whose identities are no longer known. Amidst mussel-encrusted Byzantine treasures, forks and knives made of silver and tin, thousand-year-old barrels of wine, soda-pop bottles, carcasses of pointy-prowed galleys, I can image a civilization whose energy needs for their antiquated stoves and lights will be derived from a dilapidated Romanian tanker propelled into a mire-pit. But what we must prepare ourselves for in this accursed pit fed by the waterfalls of all of Istanbul’s green sewage is a new kind of plague that will break out thanks to hordes of rats who will have discovered a paradise among the gurgling prehistoric underground gases, dried-up bogs, the carcasses of dolphins, the turbot, and the swordfish. Be forewarned about what I know: the catastrophes that happen in this pestilent place quarantined behind barbed wire will affect us all.
On the balconies where we once watched the moonlight that made the silken waters of the Bosphorus shimmer like silver, we will henceforth watch the glow of the bluish smoke of burning corpses which could not get buried. Sitting at the tables where we once drank rakı, breathing the overpowering cool of the flowering Judas trees and the honeysuckle bushes that grow on the shores of the Bosphorus, we will taste the acrid and moldy smell of rotting corpses burning in our gullets. No longer shall we hear the songs of the spring birds and the fast flowing waters of the Bosphorus where fishermen line up on the wharves, now it will be the screams of those who, fearing death, go at each other with the swords, knives, rusty scimitars, handguns, and shotguns that they’ve got hold of, weapons dumped into the water to frustrate a thousand years of unwarranted searches and seizures. Natives of Istanbul who live in boroughs that were once by the seaside will no longer open their bus windows wide to breathe in the smell of seaweed as they return home dog weary; on the contrary, to prevent the smell of mud and rotten corpses from seeping in, they’ll be stuffing rags and newspapers around the municipal bus windows through which they watch the horrible darkness below that is lit by flames. At the seaside cafés where we get together along with vendors of balloons and wafer helva, henceforth we will not be watching naval illuminations but the blood-red glimmer of naval mines blowing up in the hands of curious children. Beachcombers who earn their livelihood collecting tin cans and Byzantine coins that stormy seas belch up on the sand will now have to pick up coffee grinders that floods once pulled out of wooden houses along the boroughs on the waterfront and dumped in the depths of the Bosphorus, cuckoo clocks in which the cuckoos are covered with moss, and black pianos encrusted with mussels. And that’s when, one day, I shall sneak through the barbed wire into this new hell in order to locate a certain Black Cadillac.
The Black Cadillac was the trophy car of a Beyoğlu hood (I can’t bring myself to call him a “gangster”) whose adventures I followed thirty years ago when I was a cub reporter, and who was the patron of the den of iniquity in the foyer of which were the two paintings of Istanbul I greatly admired. There were only two other cars just like it in Istanbul, one belonged to Dağdelen of the railroad fortune and the other to the tobacco king, Maruf. Our hood (who was made into a legend by us newsmen, and the story of whose last hours we serialized for an entire week), having been cornered by the police at midnight, drove the Cadillac and his moll into the dark waters of the Bosphorus at Undertow Point because, according to some, he was high on hash, or else he did it on purpose like a desperado riding his horse over a precipice. I can already figure out the location of the Black Cadillac which the divers couldn’t find despite the search that went on for a week, and which the papers and the readers soon forgot.
It should be there, in the deepest part of the new valley once called the Bosphorus, below a muddy precipice marked by seven-hundred-year-old shoes and boots, their pairs missing, in which crabs have made their nests, and camel bones, and bottles containing love letters written to unknown lovers; back behind slopes covered with forests of sponge and mussels among which gleam diamonds, earrings, soda-pop caps, and go
lden bracelets; a little way past the heroin lab quickly installed in the dead hull of a boat, beyond the sandbar where oysters and whelks are fed by pails and pails of blood from nags and asses that have been ground into contraband sausages.
