The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  That was eighteen years ago. But at eight in the evening when all the stores had been zipped up, except the florist’s, the nuts ’n dried fruits store, and Aladdin’s, a light slushy snow fell through the air dirty with car exhaust, furnace soot, and the smell of coal and sulphur, and Galip had a feeling, when he saw the old lights in the apartments, that the memories connected with this building and the flats went beyond eighteen years. It wasn’t the width of the street, or the name of the new building (which none of them had ever used) that was important, nor the location; it was as if they’d lived in flats above and below each other since time immemorial. Climbing the stairs that always smelled the same (according to the analysis in Jelal’s column which had brought on such a furor, the smell was a mixture of apartment-building well stench, wet cement, mold, frying fat, and onions), he hurried through the scenes and images that he anticipated with the routine and impatience of a reader riffling through a book that he’s read many times:

  Seeing how it’s eight o’clock, I will see Uncle Melih sitting in Grandpa’s old chair rereading the newspapers that he himself brought down, as if he hadn’t already read them upstairs, as if “the same news might conceivably be interpreted differently downstairs than it was upstairs,” or as if “I might as well take a last look before Vasıf scissors these into bits.” I will think that the unfortunate slipper flapping all day long at the tip of my uncle’s agitated foot is painfully calling out to me with the unrelenting irritation and impatience of childhood, “I am bored, gotta do something; I am bored, gotta do something.” I will hear Mrs. Esma, chased out of the kitchen so that Aunt Halé can fry up the puff pastry to her heart’s content without interference from anyone, setting the table with the unfiltered Bafra (which don’t hold a candle to the old Yeni Harmans) dangling from her lip, asking the room in general, as if she didn’t already know the answer and the others knew what she didn’t, “How many for supper tonight?” I will register the silence from Aunt Suzan and Uncle Melih who sit with the radio between them and Mom and Dad across, just as Grandma and Grandpa used to; and a while later, Aunt Suzan will turn hopefully toward Mrs. Esma and say, “Is Jelal coming tonight, Mrs. Esma?” and Uncle Melih with his customary, “He will never pull his wits together, never”; and Dad, with the pride and pleasure of being the more responsible and balanced brother and being able to defend his nephew against Uncle Melih, will announce with delight that he’d read one of Jelal’s latest newspaper columns. Then, to add to the pleasure of defending his nephew against his older brother the pleasure of showing off in front of me, I will hear Dad venture a few words of praise and appropriate “positive” criticism on Jelal’s essay concerning some national problem or some life crisis, which would have immediately incurred Jelal’s ridicule were he within earshot. And I’ll see Mom nod in agreement (Mom, at least, you stay out of it!) and join Dad (since she considers it her duty to defend Jelal against Uncle Melih’s ire by saying, “But he’s basically a good sort”). Unable to help myself, I will hear myself ask uselessly, “Have you seen today’s column?” knowing full well that they could never in a hundred years get the same pleasure nor the meaning out of Jelal’s essays that I so enjoyed. Then I will hear Uncle Melih say, despite holding the newspaper open perhaps to the page with Jelal’s column that very minute, “What day is it today?” or, “They’re having him write every day now, are they? No, I didn’t see it!”; and Dad will say, “I don’t approve of him using foul language against the prime minister though,” and Mom, “One ought to respect a writer’s person even if one doesn’t respect his opinions,” putting out one of those ambiguous sentences that don’t reveal whether it’s the prime minister, Dad, or Jelal she’s defending. Encouraged by the ambiguity of the moment, Aunt Suzan will bring up the subject of cigarettes and tobacco by saying, “What he thinks of Immortality, Atheism, and Tobacco reminds me of the French.” And I will leave the room as the old altercation heats up between Uncle Melih and Mrs. Esma who, still undecided as to how many people to set the table for, spreads the tablecloth like a large sheet on a bed, holding one end and flipping up the other, watching it fall nice and easy through the cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth: “See how your cigarette smoke exacerbates my asthma, Mrs. Esma!” “Then, you quit smoking yourself first, Mr. Melih!” In the kitchen, inside a cloud that smells of dough, melted white cheese, and frying fat, looking like a witch brewing up a magic potion in a cauldron all by herself (her head is covered so her hair won’t get greasy), Aunt Halé who’s been frying up the puff böreks will say “Don’t let anyone else see it,” and quickly pop in my mouth one of those piping-hot puffs as if to bribe me to get special attention, love, or even a kiss, and she’ll ask “Too hot?” as tears of pain roll down my eyes, and I won’t even be able to say, “Too hot!” I will leave the scene and enter the room where Grandpa and Grandma spent nights of insomnia wrapped up in the blue quilt on which Grandma gave Rüya and me drawing, math, and reading lessons, and where Vasıf moved with his precious goldfish after their death, and I will see Vasıf and Rüya. They’ll be watching the goldfish or looking through Vasıf’s collection of newspaper and magazine clippings. I will join them and as always, as if to conceal the fact that Vasıf is deaf and dumb, Rüya and I won’t talk for a while and then, as we did in our childhood, using the hand and arm gestures we invented for ourselves, we will enact for Vasıf a scene from the old film we saw on TV recently. Or, neither of us having seen any films to reenact these last few weeks, we will play out in full detail, as if we’d just seen it, a scene from The Phantom of the Opera which has always turned Vasıf on. A little later, because Vasıf, who has more empathy than anyone, has turned aside or moved closer to his precious fish, Rüya and I will gaze at each other, and then I will say to you whom I haven’t seen since this morning and with whom I haven’t talked face-to-face since last night, “How are you?” and you, as always, will answer: “Oh, all right,” and I will pause and think over carefully the intentional and unintentional implications of your response and to hide the emptiness of my train of thought; this time, perhaps, as if I didn’t already know that instead of starting to translate the mystery novel you said you’d do some day, you’d spent the day lolling about turning the pages of old mysteries none of which I’ve ever been able to read, I will ask, “What did you do today?” I will ask you, “Rüya, what did you do today?”

  * * *

  In another of his columns, Jelal had written that the stairwells of backstreet apartment buildings smelled of sleep, garlic, mold, lye, coal, and frying fat, putting forth a somewhat different formula. Before ringing the bell, Galip thought: I’ll ask Rüya if she was the one who rang three times this evening.

  Aunt Halé opened the door and asked, “What! Where’s Rüya then?”

  “Hasn’t she shown up?” Galip said. “Did you call her?”

  “I did, but no one answered,” said Aunt Halé. “So I supposed you’d let her know.”

  “Perhaps she’s upstairs, at her father’s,” Galip said.

  “Your uncle and company are downstairs already,” Aunt Halé said.

  They fell silent for a while.

  “She must be at home,” Galip ventured. “I’ll run home and get her.”

  “Your phone never answered,” Aunt Halé said, but Galip was already headed back down the stairs.

  “All right, but be quick about it,” Aunt Halé said. “Mrs. Esma is already frying up your puff böreks.”

  As the cold wind that drove the wet snow flipped open his nine-year-old overcoat (the subject of another one of Jelal’s columns), Galip hurried along. He had calculated long ago that if he didn’t take the main street but walked along backstreets, went by the closed grocery stores, the bespectacled tailor who was still working, the doormen’s flats, and the dim neons for Coca-Cola and nylons, it would take twelve minutes to reach his apartment from his aunt and uncle’s building. If he returned via the same streets and the same sidewalks (the tailor was putting new thread through his needle, the
same material still on the same knee), the round trip took twenty-six minutes total.

  When he returned, Galip told Aunt Suzan who opened the door and the others as they sat down to dinner that Rüya was sick with a cold and, having taken too many antibiotics (she swallowed everything she found in the drawers), that she had fallen into a stupefied sleep. Although she had heard the phone ring, she had been too groggy to answer, had no appetite, and sent everyone her love from her sickbed. He knew his words would stir the imagination of those at the table (Poor Rüya in her sickbed), and he had also guessed that he would stir up a verbal phenomenon: recounted and revealed were the names of the antibiotics sold over the counter at the drugstores, the penicillins, the cough syrups and the lozenges, the vasodilators and the painkillers taken for the flu and, as if talking about cream topping for dessert, the name brand vitamins that must be taken along with these, Turkicized by being pronounced with extra vowels stuck in between the consonants, along with directions as to how to take the medications. Another time, this festival of creative pronunciation and amateur medicine might have provided Galip with the same pleasure as reading a good poem. But the image of Rüya in her sickbed was on his mind and, later on, he could no longer discern how pure or how manufactured were the images that he’d fetched up. Sick Rüya’s foot sticking out of the quilt or her bobby pins scattered in the bed were presumably real images, but the image of her hair spread out on the pillow, for example, or the boxes of medicine, the water glass, the pitcher, and the books on the nightstand came from somewhere else (the movies, or the badly translated novels she read the way she devoured the pistachios she bought at Aladdin’s), images that were learned and imitated. Later, when Galip gave short answers to their “affectionate” questions, at least he made a special effort to distinguish, with the attentiveness of a mystery-novel detective which he wanted to acquire and to emulate, the pure images of Rüya from the secondhand.

  Yes (as they all sat down to dinner), Rüya would be asleep now. No, she wasn’t hungry, so there was no need for Aunt Suzan to go and make her some soup. And she had said she didn’t want that doctor whose breath smelled like garlic and whose bag stank like a tannery. No, she hadn’t managed to see the dentist this month either. True, lately Rüya went out hardly at all and spent her time cooped up in the apartment. But no, she hadn’t gone out at all today. Did you happen to see her out in the street? Must be that she had gone out briefly but didn’t tell Galip; no, she had actually. So, just where did you run into her? She must’ve gone out to the notions counter at the fabric shop to buy some purple buttons and passed by the mosque. Of course, she had told him; she must’ve caught a chill out in this terrible cold. She was coughing and smoking, a whole pack; yes, her face was white as a sheet. Oh, no, Galip hadn’t realized just how white his own face was, too; nor did he know when he and Rüya would stop leading such unhealthy lives.

  Coat. Buttons. Teakettle. Later on, after this family inquisition, Galip hadn’t worried too much why these three words had popped into his head. In one of Jelal’s columns, which had been penned with an anger of baroque proportions, he’d written that the subconscious didn’t originate with us but came out of the pompous novels of the Western world and their movie heroes whom we never quite learned to imitate (just then, Jelal had seen Suddenly Last Summer, in which Elizabeth Taylor would never comprehend the “dark spot” in Montgomery Clift’s mind). When Galip discovered that Jelal had built his private life into a library and a museum, he came to understand that, under the influence of what he had previously read in abridged translations of psychology books replete with pornographic details, Jelal had written a great deal that explained everything, even our miserable lives, in terms of this frightening and incomprehensible subconscious he called darkness.

  He was about to change the subject, starting with the preamble of “In Jelal’s column today…” but scared off by habit, he suddenly blurted out the other thing that came to his mind: “Aunt Halé, I forgot to stop at Aladdin’s store.” They were sprinkling the walnut meats which had been pounded in the mortar left over from the family candy store of long ago on the pumpkin dessert that Mrs. Esma brought in as carefully as if it were an orange baby in its crib. A quarter of a century before, Galip and Rüya had discovered that, struck on the rim with the flat end of a spoon, the mortar would produce a sound like a church bell: Ding-Dong! “Stop it with that thing already, ding-ding, like a Christian sexton.” God, how difficult it was to swallow! There weren’t enough nutmeats to go around, so Aunt Halé deftly passed up her turn with the purple bowl (I don’t care for any), but she did glance at the bottom of the empty bowl after everybody was through. Suddenly, she started cursing out an old commercial rival she considered responsible not only for this particular curtailment but for all the shortage of money: she was going to file a complaint against him at the police station. In reality, they were all spooked by the police station as if it were a dark navy-blue ghost. After Jelal wrote in one of his columns that the dark spot in our unconscious minds was, in fact, the police station, it was a cop from the station who had subpoenaed him to appear at the prosecutor’s office to give a deposition.

  The phone rang, and Galip’s dad answered with a serious air. They’re calling from the cop house, Galip thought. Since his dad, as he spoke on the phone, stared at the surroundings (as a consolation, the wallpaper was the same as in the Heart-of-the-City Apartments: green buttons scattered among the leaves of ivy) with the same noncommittal expression with which he stared at those who were seated at the table (Uncle Melih was having paroxysms of coughing, deaf Vasıf seemed to be listening to the phone conversation, and Galip’s mother’s hair after being dyed and redyed had finally become the same color as beautiful Aunt Suzan’s), Galip too, like everybody else, as he heard half of the conversation, tried to make out who it was on the other end.

  “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 st
inks 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.