The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  “What?” said Galip.

  “Best antibiotic against the flu, taken along with ‘Bekozime Fort.’ Every six hours. What time is it? Do you suppose she’s awake?”

  Aunt Suzan said Rüya was probably asleep right now. Galip thought the same thing that everybody else was thinking: Rüya asleep in her bed.

  “No way!” said Mrs. Esma. She was gathering up with care the sorry tablecloth which, due to a bad habit passed on by Grandpa despite Grandma’s disapproval, they used like a napkin to wipe their mouths on. “No, I’m not having my Jelal dumped on in this house. My Jelal has become a celebrity.”

  According to Uncle Melih, his fifty-five-year-old son, because he was of the same opinion concerning his own importance, didn’t bother looking up his seventy-five-year-old father. He wouldn’t divulge which Istanbul apartment he was staying in to prevent not only his father but everybody in the family from reaching him, including Aunt Halé who was always the first to forgive him; he unplugged his phones on top of keeping the numbers secret. Galip was afraid that a few drops of false tears might appear in Uncle Melih’s eyes, not out of sorrow but out of habit. But instead of that, something else he was afraid of came to pass: Uncle Melih reiterated once more, not taking into account the twenty-two-year age difference, that he had always wished for a son like Galip for real, instead of Jelal: sane, mature, quiet as Galip.

  Twenty-two years ago (that is, when Jelal was his age), when Galip was embarrassingly tall and his hands and arms perpetrated even more embarrassing clumsinesses, when he first heard these words and imagined they could come true, he thought it might be possible to sit down to dinner with Aunt Suzan, Uncle Melih, and Rüya every night, escaping those colorless and tasteless dinners that were eaten with Mom and Dad where everybody looked at a vanishing point beyond the walls that surrounded the dinner table at straight angles (Mom: There’s cold vegetables left over from lunch, want some? Galip: Naah, don’t want any. Mom: You? Dad: Me what?). Besides, other things occurred to him which made his head spin: when he went upstairs on Sundays to play with Rüya (“Secret Passage,” “Didn’t See”), his beautiful Aunt Suzan whom he spied in her blue nightgown, although on rare occasions, would become his mother (much better); Uncle Melih whose African and legal stories he adored, his father (much better); and Rüya, since they were the same age, his twin sister (it was there that his mind stopped with indecision as he scrutinized frightening conclusions).

  After the table was cleared, Galip said TV people from the BBC had been looking for Jelal but hadn’t managed to find him. But this comment didn’t reignite the gossip he expected concerning all of Jelal’s addresses and the phone numbers he kept secret from everyone and the diverse gabble that went on about the many flats all over Istanbul and how they could be located. Somebody said it was snowing. So, rising from the table, before they sank into their accustomed easy chairs, they looked out in between the dark chill of the drapes they parted with the backs of their hands, on to the backstreet where a light snow had settled. Silent, clean new snow. (A replica of the scene Jelal fetched up more for parody than for sharing with his readers the nostalgia of “old Ramadan nights”!) Galip followed Vasıf who retired to his own room.

  Vasıf sat on the big bed, Galip across from him. Vasıf dangled his hands on his shoulders and then ran them over his white hair: Rüya? Galip struck his fist into his chest and did a coughing fit: She’s sick with a cough. Then he put his reclining head down on a pillow he formed by folding his arms together: She’s lying down. Vasıf brought out a large cardboard box from under his bed: a selection of the newspaper and magazine clippings he’d collected for the last fifty years, perhaps the best ones. Galip sat down next to him. As if Rüya were sitting on the other side, as if they were laughing together at the ones she pointed out, they examined the photos they pulled out of the box at random: the soapy grin of the famous soccer player who, twenty years ago, had lathered up for a shaving cream commercial and who had died of a brain hemorrhage after countering a corner shot with his head; the corpse of General Kassem, the leader of Iraq, resting in his bloody uniform after a military coup; a re-creation of the famous Şişli Square Murder (“The jealous colonel, discovering after his retirement that he’d been cuckolded for twenty years, guns down the lecherous journalist along with his young wife in the car he’d been tracking for days,” Rüya would say in her radio-theater voice); and as Prime Minister Menderes saves the life of the camel to be sacrificed to him, behind him the reporter Jelal and the camel look elsewhere. Galip was about to get up to go home when his attention was drawn by two of Jelal’s columns he just happened to pull out of Vasıf’s box automatically: “Aladdin’s Store” and “The Executioner and the Weeping Face.” Preparing reading material for a night that was sure to be spent sleepless! He didn’t have to mime too much for Vasıf to let him borrow the columns. The folks, too, were understanding when he didn’t drink the coffee Mrs. Esma brought: obviously the expression of “my wife is sick at home” had penetrated his face deeply. He was standing in the threshold with the door open. Even Uncle Melih said, “Sure, he should go home”; Aunt Halé was bent over her cat Coals who’d returned from the snowy street; more voices inside kept calling out: “Tell her, get well; tell her to get well; take Rüya our love; take our love to Rüya!”

  On the way back, Galip ran into the bespectacled tailor who was pulling the shutters down on his storefront. They hailed each other in the light of the streetlight on which little icicles hung, and they continued to walk together. “I’m late,” the tailor said, perhaps to break the profound silence of the snow. “The wife is home, waiting.” “Cold,” Galip responded. Listening to the snow crunch under their feet, they walked together until they got to Galip’s apartment building at the corner, and upstairs in the corner window the dim bedside light in the bedroom came into view. At times snow fell, and at times, darkness.

  The lights in the living room were off as they had been when Galip left, and the lights in the hallway were still on. As soon as he entered, Galip put the teakettle on the burner, took off his overcoat and jacket, hung them up, and went into the bedroom where he changed his wet socks in the dim light. He sat down at the dining table and read once more the goodbye letter Rüya had written and left for him. Written with the green ballpoint pen, the letter was shorter than he remembered: Nineteen words.

  Chapter Four

  ALADDIN’S STORE

  If I have any fault it is digression.

  —BYRON PASHA

  I am a “picturesque” writer. I’ve looked it up but I still don’t quite have the meaning; I just happen to like the word’s effect. I always dreamed I’d be writing about different things: knights on chargers, two armies on a dark plain preparing to attack on a foggy morning three centuries ago, unfortunates who on winter nights tell one another love stories in taverns, the never-ending adventures of lovers who vanish into obscure cities tracking down a mystery. But God saddled me with this column where I must tell other kinds of stories, and with you, my readers. We’ve learned to bear with each other.

  If the garden of my memory hadn’t begun to dry up, perhaps I wouldn’t bellyache about my lot; but as soon as I take pen in hand what I see before my eyes are your expectant faces, my readers, and the traces of my memories take a powder in the desolate garden. To be confronted with the trace instead of the memory itself is like looking through tears at the indentations on the armchair left there by your lover who has abandoned you and will never return.

  So I decided to give it straight to Aladdin. Tipped off that I intended to write about him in the paper but wanted to interview him first, he opened his black eyes wide and said, “But wouldn’t it bring me a lot of grief?”

  I assured him it wouldn’t. I told him about the importance his store had for us in Nişantaşı. I told him how the thousand—nay, the ten thousand—kinds of articles he sold there remained alive in our memories color by color, smell by smell. I told him how children sick at home awaited impatiently in bed
for their mothers to return from Aladdin’s store with presents: a toy (lead soldier), or a book (Red Kid), or a spaghetti-western photonovel (the seventeenth issue, in which Kinova, who’d been scalped, comes back to life and goes after the Redskins). I told him how thousands of students in the neighborhood schools couldn’t wait for the last bell, that bell which had already gone off in their heads, to get to his store after school for chocolate-covered gaufrette bars in which came photos of soccer players (Metin of Galatasaray), or wrestlers (Hamit Kaplan), or else movie stars (Jerry Lewis). I told him about the girls who stopped by for little bottles of nail-polish remover to take the pale polish off their fingernails before showing up for classes at the Night Crafts School—the same girls who’d later remember their first star-crossed loves, although stuck now with children and grandchildren in the insipid kitchens of insipid marriages, and dream of Aladdin’s store like a distant fairy tale.

  We’d already arrived at my place and sat down across from each other. I told Aladdin the stories of the green ballpoint pen I bought at his store years ago and the badly translated detective novel. The heroine of the second story, whom I loved dearly and for whom I’d bought the novel, had been sentenced from then on to do nothing with her life but read detective novels. I told him how the twosome—one a patriotic army officer and the other a journalist—who were planning a conspiracy (the coup that would change the flow not only of our history but of the history of the East) had met at Aladdin’s store just prior to the first historic assembly. I also told him that, during the evening hour when this momentous meeting took place, Aladdin, unaware of what was up, stood behind the counter which was piled with books and boxes that towered up to the ceiling, wetted his fingers with his spittle, and counted the newspapers and magazines to be returned in the morning.

  On the subject of the skin magazines which he displayed in his store window and strung all the way around the large chestnut tree across from his doorway, I confided that in the dreams of the lonely men who passed by absentmindedly on his sidewalk, the local and foreign playmates who’d bared all for the camera would make whoopee that night like the insatiable slave girls and the sultans’ wives in the Thousand and One Nights tales. And, since we were on the subject of the Thousand and One Nights, I informed him that the tale which bore his name was never told in any of the Nights but that when the book was first published in the West a hundred and fifty years ago, it appeared among the pages due to a sleight of hand perpetrated by one Antoine Galland. And I explained that the story was never actually told to Galland by Scheherazade but by a Christian scholar from Aleppo called Youhenna Diab, and that the story was probably Turkish in origin, and that, more likely than not, it took place in Istanbul as indicated by the details about coffee. But, I went on, if truth be known, it was impossible to know what was what as to the origins of any story any more than the origins of any life. I explained this was true because I forgot everything, everything. In truth, I was old, miserable, cranky, alone, and I wanted to die. What drowned one in a flood of sorrow was the noise of the traffic around Nişantaşı Square and the sound of the music on the radio. I told him how, after a life of telling stories, I wanted to hear from Aladdin before I died about everything that I’d forgotten, and be told each and every story about the bottles of cologne in the store, the revenue stamps, the illustrations on match boxes, nylon stockings, postcards, the photographs of movie stars, the annals of sexology, the hairpins, and the books on ritual prayer.

  Like all real persons who find themselves snatched into fictions, Aladdin had a superreal presence that challenged the world’s boundaries and a simple logic that stretched the rules. He conceded that he was pleased the press showed an interest in his store. For the last thirty years, he’d been keeping shop fourteen hours a day at that corner store which was busy as a beehive; and on Sundays, while everybody listened to the soccer game on the radio, he took a nap at home between two-thirty and four-thirty in the afternoon. His real name was something else but his customers didn’t know about it. As for newspapers, he only read the popular Hürriyet. He pointed out that no political meeting could ever take place in his store, seeing how the Teşvikiye police station was right across from it; besides, he was not interested in politics at all. It wasn’t true that he counted the magazines spitting on his fingers; nor was his store a place out of legends and fairy tales. He was sick of people’s goofs. Some poor geezers too, mistaking the plastic toy watches in the window for the real article, would go into a buying frenzy hoping to scoop up merchandise on the cheap. Then, there were those who played the Paper Horse Race or the National Lottery, and when they didn’t win, they got angry and started a ruckus, thinking Aladdin fixed these games when, in fact, they’d picked the tickets with their very own hands. Take the woman, for example, whose nylons sprung a run, or the mother of the kid who ate domestic chocolates and broke out all over, or the reader who didn’t care for the political views of the newspaper he bought, they all were down on Aladdin who didn’t make the stuff, after all, but only sold it. Aladdin was not responsible for the coffee-colored shoe polish that came in the package instead of coffee. Aladdin was not responsible for the domestic battery which, after only one song from Emel Sayın’s sultry voice, shook itself empty and gummed up the transistor radio. Aladdin was not responsible for the compass which, instead of always pointing to the North as it should, pointed to the Teşvikiye police station. Aladdin was not responsible for the packet of Bafra cigarettes that contained the love-and-marriage proposal put in there by a romantic factory girl; but even so, the painter’s assistant had rushed with bells on to kiss Aladdin’s hand and ask him for the girl’s name and address, as well as asking him to be the best man.

  His store was in what was considered “the best” location in Istanbul, but his customers always, but always, knocked him for a loop. He was amazed that the coat ’n tie set still hadn’t caught on to waiting for their turn; sometimes he couldn’t help chewing out some people who ought to know better. He had given up selling bus tickets, for example, because of the handful who always rushed in just as the bus was turning the corner, and yelling like Mongolian soldiers on a looting spree, “Ticket, give me a ticket and make it quick!” they made a mess of the store. He’d known old marrieds who got into spats picking lottery tickets, painted ladies who sniffed thirty different brands before choosing a single bar of soap, retired army officers who came in to buy a whistle and ended up blowing on every whistle in the box, one by one. But he’d become used to it. He no longer cared. No longer was he offended by the housewife who grumbled because he didn’t stock a back issue of a photonovel from ten years ago, by the fat gent who licked a stamp to check out the flavor, and by the butcher’s wife who returned the crepe-paper carnation the next day, good and angry because the artificial flower didn’t have any scent.

  He’d built up the store tooth and nail. For years he had bound the Texas and Tom Mix comics himself, with his own hands; he was the one who opened shop and swept it while the city slept; he himself had fastened the newspapers and the magazines on the door and on the chestnut tree; he’d put the trendiest goods in the store window; and, to satisfy his customers’ demands, he’d traversed the whole of Istanbul for years, inch by inch, store by store, to procure the oddest of merchandise (like the toy ballerinas who pirouetted as the magnetized mirror was brought close; the tricolored shoelaces; the plaster-of-Paris statuettes of Atatürk which had blue lightbulbs behind the pupils; the pencil sharpeners in the shape of Dutch windmills; the signs that said FOR RENT or IN THE NAME OF ALLAH THE COMPASSIONATE, THE MERCIFUL; the pine-flavored bubblegum which came with pictures of birds numbered from one to a hundred; the pink backgammon dice which could only be found at the Covered Bazaar; the transfer pictures of Tarzan and Admiral Barbarossa; the gadgets which were shoehorns on one end and bottle openers on the other; and the soccer hoods in the colors of the teams—he himself had worn a blue one the last ten years). He hadn’t yet said “nay” even to the most unreasonable
demands (Do you carry rose-scented blue ink? Do you have any of those rings that sing?), reasoning that if something were being asked for, then it must have a prototype. He’d make a note in his book, saying “We’ll have it in here by tomorrow,” and he’d search the city, store by store, like a traveler questing after a mystery, until he landed his quarry. There’d been times he’d made easy money peddling photonovels which sold like mad, or else cowboy comics, or photos of domestic movie stars whose faces said blah; and then there’d been cold, bitchy, nothing-doing days when coffee and cigarettes ended up on the black market and people had to line up in cues. When you looked out of your store window, you wouldn’t think people who flowed down the sidewalk were “this way and that way,” but … but people were “something else.”

  People who each seemed to march to a different drum suddenly all wanted musical cigarette boxes as if they were going out of style, or they all went ape over Japanese fountain pens no larger than your little finger; then they’d lose interest the next month, and they all wanted pistol-shaped cigarette lighters so bad that Aladdin had a time and a half keeping the lighters in stock. Then there’d be a fad for plastic cigarette holders, and, for the next six months, they’d all be watching the tar build up on the plastic with the obsession of a mad scientist. Then, abandoning that, all of them, the leftist and the conservative, the God-fearing and the godless, they all purchased at Aladdin’s the rosaries that came in all colors and all shapes, and they went to town fingering the beads. Before the bead storm was over and Aladdin could return the leftover rosaries, a dream fad would surface, and they’d line up at the door to get the little booklet interpreting dreams. Some American film would hit and all the punks had to have dark glasses; an item in the papers, and all the women had to have lip gloss; or the men had to have beanies for their heads as if they were imams. All in all, fads spread unchartered like the Black Death. Otherwise, why else had thousands, tens of thousands of people been inspired, all at the same moment, to place the same wooden sailboat on their radios, their radiators, in the rear window of their cars, in their rooms, on their desks, and on their workbenches? How else would you explain the phenomenon of moms and dads, kids and old folks, all goaded with some inexplicable desire to acquire and tack up on their walls and doors the poster of the waif with European features and a huge tear dripping out of his eye? This nation, these people … they’re really … really … “Strange,” I said, completing his sentence. It was my task now, not Aladdin’s, to find words like “incomprehensible,” or even “terrifying.” For a while we fell silent.