by Orhan Pamuk
Galip was well aware that the garden in this clandestine world that swarmed with uncanny plants and terrifying flowers was closed to him totally, just like the uncharted depths of Rüya’s memory. That forbidden zone was the common subject and the goal of all detergent commercials, of photonovels, of the latest information translated from foreign publications, of most radio programs, and of the colorful supplements that came in the Sunday papers; but it was still beyond everybody’s ken and more mysterious and enigmatic than anybody knew. Sometimes when he wondered uninspiredly why and how the paper scissors, for example, had been placed next to the copper bowl that sat on the radiator in the hallway, or when out on a Sunday excursion they ran into some woman he hadn’t seen in years but with whom he knew Rüya had kept in constant touch, Galip was momentarily startled and forestalled by the clue he’d come across, the sign that emerged from a realm forbidden to him, as if he were brought face-to-face with the secrets of a widespread sect that had been pushed underground but which no longer needed to be hidden. The frightening thing was not only the contagiousness of the mysteries, like the mysteries of an outlawed cult, spreading among those generic persons called “housewives,” but the pretense that no such enigma ever existed, nor any esoteric rites, no shared misdemeanors, no rapture or history, as if their behavior didn’t rise out of a sense of secrecy but out of an inner desire. Like the confidences kept by harem eunuchs, locked and with the key thrown away, the mystery was both attractive and repulsive: since its existence was known, perhaps it wasn’t dreadful like a nightmare, but since it had never been described and named although handed down through the centuries, it was a pathetic mystery because it could never be a source of pride, assurance, or victory. Sometimes Galip thought this realm was some kind of curse, like a curse that hounds the members of a family for hundreds of years; yet, having witnessed many a woman quit her job all of a sudden and return back to the accursed region voluntarily under the pretext of marriage, motherhood, or some other murky reason, he had come to understand it was some kind of gravitational pull of the cult. So much so that, observing certain women who’d gone through hell to be rid of the curse and become somebody, he thought he detected symptoms of the desire to return to the secret rites, the enchanting moments they’d left behind, and back to the dark, silken zone he’d never understand.
Sometimes when Rüya laughed at one of his stupid jokes or puns so hard that it surprised him, or when she cooperated with his joy in running his clumsy hands through the dark forest of her mink-colored hair, that is, free of all the rituals learned from picture magazines, in a moment of true closeness between husband and wife free of all the past and the future, suddenly Galip would feel a desire to ask his wife a question concerning that mysterious realm, to ask her what she’d done at home that day, at a particular hour, aside from the laundry, the dishes, the detective novels, and going out (the doctor had said they’d be unable to have children, and Rüya hadn’t shown much interest in working); but the chasm that might open between them following that question was so frightening and the knowledge targeted so alien to the vocabulary of the common language between them that he could not question Rüya but held her in his arms while his face went blank for a moment, completely vacant. “You’ve vacated your face again!” she’d say. Blithely fetching up the words that her mom said when he was a child, she’d repeat: “Your face is white as a sheet!”
After the call to morning prayer, Galip dozed off sitting up in his chair in the living room. In his dream where the Japanese goldfish in the aquarium swayed drowsily in a liquid that was as green as the ink in a ballpoint pen, Rüya, Galip, and Vasıf spoke about a mistake that had been made and, later, it was understood that Vasıf was not the one who was deaf and dumb, it was Galip. Still, they didn’t get too upset: after all, things would soon be all right.
Upon waking, Galip sat down at the table and, as he imagined Rüya had done about nineteen or twenty hours ago, he looked for a clean sheet of paper on the table. And when he didn’t come across any paper—just as Rüya hadn’t—he began writing on the back of Rüya’s letter, making a list of all the people and the places that had gone through his mind overnight. It was an unnerving list that grew longer as he wrote and forced him to write as it grew, giving Galip a sensation that he was imitating a protagonist in some detective novel: Rüya’s old flames, her “zany” girlfriends, the chums she occasionally mentioned, her sometime “political” allies, and the friends they had in common who shouldn’t be confided in, Galip decided, not until he actually found Rüya. As he jotted down their names made up of particular vowels and consonants, the strokes that went up and down, as their faces and figures cumulatively gained meaning and double entendres, they waved gleefully at Galip, the inexperienced detective, winking treacherously and transmitting false leads. Soon after the garbagemen went by banging the larger cans on the gate of the truck, Galip stuck the list, to stop himself from lengthening it, in the inside pocket of the coat he’d wear that day.
Galip turned off all the lights in the apartment, which at daybreak was illuminated only with the blue light of snow. In an effort to foil the suspicions of the nosy doorman, he put out the trash can, but only after he had checked through the contents once more. He made tea, slipped a fresh blade in his razor and shaved, put on clean but unpressed underwear and shirt, and straightened out the rooms he’d ransacked all night. He drank his tea and read in the Milliyet, which the doorman had slid under the door as he got dressed, Jelal’s column in which he mentioned the subject of an “eye” he’d encountered walking around in the slums, years ago, at midnight. Galip remembered having read the article, which had already been published some time back, but still he felt the terror of the same “eye” trained on him. That’s when the phone rang.
It must be Rüya! Galip thought. By the time he picked up the receiver, he even had the movie theater picked where they’d go together that evening: the Palace Theater. But he didn’t hesitate at all coming up with a story to throw off Aunt Suzan, the disappointing voice on the line: Yes, yes, Rüya’s fever had gone down; not only had she slept well, she’d even had a dream; sure, she’d like to speak to her mom; just one moment. “Rüya!” Galip shouted down the hallway, “Rüya, your mom’s on the phone!” He imagined Rüya getting out of bed, yawning and stretching languorously as she looked around for her slippers; then he put a different reel in his mind’s projector: solicitous husband Galip goes down the hallway to call his wife to the phone, only to find her in bed sleeping like a baby. He even faked “effects” walking up and down the hallway to flesh out the second film and produce a believable ambience for Aunt Suzan. He returned to the phone. “She’s gone back to sleep, Aunt Suzan. Her eyes were crusted with fever goop. Seems she washed her face and got back in bed and dozed off again.” “Tell her to drink plenty of orange juice,” said Aunt Suzan, painstakingly telling him where in Nişantaşı the most reasonable blood oranges could be purchased. “We might go to the Palace Theater tonight,” Galip said confidently. “Just so she doesn’t catch another chill,” Aunt Suzan said and, perhaps worried that she might be interfering too much, she changed the subject completely: “Did you know that your voice sounds just like Jelal’s on the phone? Or do you have a cold too? Make sure you don’t catch Rüya’s bug.” Then they hung up at the same moment, gently, not so much out of fear of awakening Rüya but as if not to hurt the receivers, moved by the same feelings of respect, tenderness, and silence.
Soon after hanging up and starting in again on Jelal’s old article, somewhere between the persona he’d assumed moments ago, the eyeballing of the aforementioned “eye,” and his own foggy thoughts, Galip suddenly decided: “Of course, Rüya has returned to her ex-husband!” He was amazed at himself for not seeing the obvious all night, obscured as it was by his runaway imagination. It was with the same decisiveness that he proceeded to call Jelal, to inform him on the conclusion of the mental torment he’d gone through: “I’m leaving now to go and find them. When I find Rüya wi
th her first husband—which shouldn’t take too long—I’m afraid I may not be able to convince her to return home. Only you’d know how to cajole her to come back home (“to me,” he meant to say but couldn’t get it out), so what should I say to get her to come back?” “First, get ahold of yourself,” Jelal would say sincerely. “Just when did Rüya leave? Steady now. Let’s think this thing through together. Come over, come to the newsroom.”
But Jelal was neither at his place nor at the newsroom, not yet. As he went out the door, Galip envisioned leaving the phone off the hook, but he didn’t. Just in case Aunt Suzan said, “I called and called, but it was always busy,” he’d have been able to say, “Rüya failed to replace the receiver properly. You know how absentminded she is, how she forgets things.”
Chapter Six
MASTER BEDII’S CHILDREN
… sighs rising and trembling through the timeless air.
—DANTE, The Inferno, Canto IV
Ever since we recklessly invited the problems of the populace into our column, no matter what the origin, class, or creed, we have been inundated with reader mail, and some of the letters are doozies. Some readers, who’ve caught on to the fact that their material too can be articulated at last, don’t even bother to write it all down but dash to our press offices personally and tell us their stories until they’re blue in the face. Still others, aware of our skepticism concerning the fishy escapades and the gruesome details they have offered up, whisk us away from our desk, in an effort to justify themselves and their stories, and lead us to the murky and mystifying obscurities in our culture which have never been investigated or written about. This is how we got wind of the morbid history of Turkish mannequin making which, it turns out, was forced underground.
For centuries, our culture wasn’t even aware of the art of mannequin making aside from some “folkloric” phenomena which smell of dung and villages, such as the scarecrow. The first artisan to take it up, the patron saint of mannequin making, was Master Bedii who created the necessary mannequins for the Naval Museum—our first—founded under Sultan Abdülhamit’s edict and the patronage of the Honorable Osman Jelalettin, one of the crown princes at the time. Master Bedii is also responsible for the esoteric history of his craft. According to eyewitness accounts, the guests at the museum’s opening were astounded to see our two-fisted corsairs and our strapping valiants who routed Italian and Spanish galleons on the Mediterranean some three hundred years ago erect in all their glory, bristling with handlebar mustaches, and placed in between the royal launches and the men-of-war. Master Bedii used wood, plaster, wax, sheepskin, camelskin, and doeskin, as well as human hair and beard for his materials to create his original prodigies. When the contemporary narrow-minded Sheikh of Islam came face-to-face with these miraculous creatures which had been executed with great artistic skill, he threw a fit: since imitating Allah’s creatures perfectly was to engage in a kind of competition with Him, the mannequins were removed from the museum and banisters were placed in between the ships-of-war.
Prohibition, which occurs very frequently in our history of never-ending Westernization, did not snuff out Master Bedii’s spontaneously ignited fire of craftsmanship. Not only was he busy making new mannequins in his house, he also attempted to come to an understanding with the authorities to place his masterpieces, which he called his “children,” into a museum once more, or at least in some other place where they could be exhibited. When he failed to get the support he needed, he soured on the authorities and the administration but not on his art. He continued to produce mannequins in the basement of his house, which he’d turned into a workshop. Later on, he moved away from old Istanbul into the Christian quarter in Galata, primarily as a precaution against his neighbors’ allegations of “witchcraft, perversion, and heresy.” Moreover, he could no longer fit all of his “children,” whose numbers steadily increased, into a modest Moslem domicile.
In this curious house in Kuledibi (where I was taken), Master Bedii continued his fastidious work with passion and faith, and he also taught his son the craft he’d mastered on his own. After twenty years of steady work, he noticed that those famous haberdashers in Beyoğlu began to place mannequins in their store windows when, during the excitement of the initial wave of Westernization in the early years of our Republic, gentlemen discarded their fezzes in favor of panama hats and ladies peeled off their veils and slipped on high-heeled shoes. When Master Bedii first saw those imported mannequins, he thought that the moment of victory he’d anticipated for years had arrived, and he bolted out of his underground workshop into the street. But it was in the flashy streets of commerce and entertainment in Beyoğlu where he met up with a new disappointment which would, until the day he died, exile him to a life of darkness lived underground.
The owners of the grand department stores who’d seen examples of the work Master Bedii presented, and the purveyors of ready-made suits, skirts, outfits, stockings, topcoats, hats, as well as the window dressers who came to his cellar workshop, all rejected him one by one. Apparently, the mannequins he made didn’t look like the models from the West who taught us style; instead, they resembled our own people. “The customer,” one of the storeowners said, “doesn’t want the topcoat shown on the back of a mustachioed, bowlegged, dark and skinny citizen who’s seen every day by the tens of thousands in the streets; he wants to slip into a jacket worn by a new and beautiful person from a distant and unfamiliar land, so that putting on the jacket he can believe he, too, has changed and turned into someone else.” A hardboiled window dresser, after being dazzled by Master Bedii’s masterpieces, explained that in the interests of his own livelihood, he unfortunately could not place these “authentic Turks, these real citizens” in his windows: Turks nowadays didn’t want to be “Turks” anymore but something else. That’s how come they’d instigated a code of proper attire, shaved their beards, reformed their tongues and their alphabet. A more laconic storeowner pointed out that his customers did not buy an outfit but, in truth, bought a dream. What they really wanted to purchase was the dream of being like the “others” who wore the same outfit.
Master Bedii didn’t even consider making mannequins that would be consistent with such notions. He realized he could never compete with those curiously postured mannequins imported from Europe with their constantly modified toothpaste smiles. So he returned to his own dark workshop where he’d abandoned his own true dreams. In the next fifteen years, until his death, he made over one hundred and fifty new mannequins, each a masterpiece of art, transforming his uncanny domestic dreams into manifestations that were like flesh and bone. His son, who’d come all the way to our newsroom to take us to his father’s underground workshop, showed us these mannequins one by one, explaining that our “essence,” that which makes us “us,” was reposited in these peculiar dusty masterpieces.
We stood in the basement of the cold and dark house, where we had come after a descent down a muddy slope below the huge Galata Tower and after walking on a filthy sidewalk with crooked stairs. We were surrounded by mannequins struggling to wiggle and fidget, as if they were trying to do something in order to live. In the half-light of the cellar, hidden in the shadows, hundreds of faces with expressive eyes stared at us and at each other. Some were seated, some were speaking, some were busy eating, some laughing, some in prayer, and some seemed to defy the life outside with their “existence” which, at that moment, seemed unbearable. It was obvious: these mannequins possessed an élan that could not be perceived in the crowds on the Galata Bridge, let alone in the store windows in Beyoğlu or the Mahmut Paşa bazaar. Life flowed like light through the skin of this wiggling and fidgeting, breathless crowd of mannequins. I was mesmerized. I remember approaching one of the mannequins next to me with awe and yearning. I remember touching this being (avuncular, sunk deep into his own troubles), wanting to engage this thing, to help myself to his vital force and acquire the secret of his reality, of his world. But the unyielding skin was as cold and horrifying as the ro
om itself.
“My father used to say,” the son of the mannequin maker explained with pride, “that, above all, we must pay attention to the gestures that make us who we are.” After long and exhausting hours of work, he and his father would emerge out of the darkness of Kuledibi into the world, where they’d take a table with a view at the pimps’ café in Taksim, order their tea, and observe the “gestures” of the crowd in the square. In those years his father believed that a nation’s lifestyle, history, technology, culture, art, and literature could change, but there was no chance that the gestures could be altered. As the son went on explaining, he delineated the details in the stance of a cab driver lighting his cigarette; he described how and why the arms of a Beyoğlu thug stood away from his body as he walked sideways down the street like a crab; and he pointed out the chin of a roasted-garbanzo vendor’s apprentice, laughing like the rest of us with his mouth wide open. He revealed the horror in a woman’s downcast gaze, who walked alone on the street with a net shopping bag in her hand, and he explained why our people always look down while walking in the city and look up at the sky when in the country. He kept on pointing out again and again the gestures of the mannequins, their postures, and the essence that was “us” in those stances, as they waited for the hour of eternity when they’d be animated at last. What’s more, you just knew these wondrous creatures could very well wear and model beautiful clothes too.
