The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  But looking at these mannequins, these sad creatures, you still sensed something that compelled you back outside to a life that was well-lighted. How do I say it? It was a kind of terror—gruesome, grievous, and dark! When the son blurted out, “Eventually, my father stopped observing even the most ordinary of movements,” I had the feeling that I’d already guessed this awful truth. The father and son began to notice that those movements I tried to describe as “gestures,” be they nose wiping or belly laughing, walking or casting unfriendly looks, shaking hands or uncorking a bottle, all those ordinary movements had changed and lost their authenticity. At first, observing the crowds from the pimps’ café, they couldn’t figure out who the man in the street modeled himself after, given that he saw nobody other than himself and those who looked so much like him. The gestures which he and his father called “mankind’s greatest treasure,” the small body movements people performed in their everyday lives, changed slowly and congruously, vanished as if under the orders of an invisible “chief,” only to be replaced by a slew of movements modeled after some indiscernible original. Some time later, as the father and son worked on a line of mannequin children, it all became clear to them: “Those damn movies!” cried the son.

  The man in the street began to lose his authenticity because of those damn movies that came in canisters from the West and played by the hour in the cinemas. Abandoning their own, our people began to adopt other people’s gestures with an unaccountable speed. I won’t go into the son’s justifications of his father’s rage, which he portrayed in great detail, concerning these new, pretentious, and incomprehensible movements. He sketched in, line by line, all those fine manners and the violent behaviors that have annihilated our own crude innocence: bursting into laughter or opening a window or banging a door shut; holding a teacup or putting on a jacket; all those acquired and inappropriate gestures—the nodding, the polite coughing, the shows of anger, the winking, the shadowboxing, raising the eyebrows and rolling the eyes—all learned from the movies. His father didn’t even want to see these impure, crossbred movements anymore. Afraid of the influence of these false movements which threatened his “children’s” innocence, he decided not to leave his workshop. He shut himself into the cellar of his house, proclaiming that he’d already discovered for some time “the meaning that has to unfold and the essence of the mystery.”

  As I viewed the masterworks Master Bedii had created in the last fifteen years of his life, I perceived, with the terror of a “wolf child” who discovers his true identity after many years, what this vague essence might be: among this crowd of mannequins who eyed me, who moved toward me, among the uncles, aunts, friends, relatives, acquaintances, among the grocers and the laborers, my likeness also existed. Even I was present in that moth-eaten, abject darkness. Almost covered by a layer of leaden dust, the mannequins of my compatriots (among whom were Beyoğlu gangsters as well as seamstresses, Cevdet Bey whose wealth was legendary, Salahattin Bey the encyclopedist, the firefighters and the singular dwarves, old beggars and pregnant women) reminded me of the gods who had suffered the loss of their innocence as well as the loss of their awesome shadows exaggerated in the dim light; of penitents who consume themselves for not being someone else; of the unfortunates who kill one another because they cannot fall into bed and make love. They too, like me, like us, had perhaps discovered the mystery one day in a past as far away as a remnant of paradise, but they’d forgotten the secret meaning of their vague existence which they’d tumbled into by chance. We suffered from memory loss, we were doubled over, but still we insisted on being ourselves. The gestures which made us ourselves, the way we wiped our noses, scratched our heads, stepped upstairs, our looks of sadness and defeat, were in fact punishment for our insistence on being ourselves. When his son characterized Master Bedii by saying, “My father never lost hope that some day mankind would achieve the felicity of not having to imitate others,” I’d been thinking that this crowd of mannequins was also dying to get out of this bleak and dusty dungeon as soon as possible and, like myself, emerge on the face of the earth, to observe other people under the sun, to imitate them, and live happily ever after like ourselves by trying to become someone else.

  That desire, as I learned later, wasn’t all that unrealistic! One day a shopkeeper, whose hobby was to attract attention through curiosities, bought some of the “merchandise” at the workshop, perhaps because he knew he could get them on the cheap. But the gestures and the stances of the mannequins that he bought and displayed so much resembled the customers and the crowd that flowed by his store window, they were so ordinary, so real, and so much “of us,” that nobody paid them any attention. So the skinflint shopkeeper sawed them into pieces, and when the totality that gave meaning to their gestures vanished, the arms, the legs, the feet were utilized for years in the tiny window of the tiny shop where umbrellas, gloves, boots, and shoes were displayed for the benefit of the crowds in Beyoğlu.

  Chapter Seven

  THE LETTERS IN MOUNT KAF

  “Must a name mean something?”

  —LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking Glass

  Stepping out into the anomalous bright white that coated the routine gray of Nişantaşı, Galip realized it had snowed through his sleepless night harder than he’d imagined. The crowd on the sidewalk didn’t seem quite aware of the sharp, semitransparent icicles that pointed down from the eaves of the buildings. In Nişantaşı Square, Galip entered the City Bank—which Rüya called the Sooty Bank, referring to the dust, smoke, car exhaust, and the dirty blue fumes that gushed out of the neighborhood’s chimneys—and found out that Rüya hadn’t withdrawn any appreciable amount from their joint account within the last few days, that the heat in the bank building was off, and that everybody was pleased with the small National Lottery prize which had befallen one of the bank tellers with the atrociously made-up faces. He walked past the florist’s fogged window, past the arcades where the tea boys ventured with trays of morning tea, past the Şişli Progressive High where he and Rüya went to school, under the wraith-like chestnut tree hung with ice, and into Aladdin’s store. Aladdin had pulled over his head the blue hood that Jelal mentioned in his article nine years ago. He was busy blowing his nose.

  “What’s wrong, Aladdin? You sick or something?”

  “Caught myself a cold.”

  Enunciating the titles precisely, Galip asked for one copy of each of the leftist political periodicals for which Rüya’s ex-husband used to write articles and some of which were okay by Galip. Aladdin, wearing a look first of childish fear and then of suspicion that could never be construed as hostile, said that only university students read such magazines. “What would you want with them?”

  “Do the crosswords,” Galip said.

  Aladdin laughed pointedly to make it clear that he got the joke. “But brother, these things don’t run any crosswords!” he said ruefully, like a true crossword addict. “These two are new on the stands, you want them too?”

  “Sure,” Galip said. He whispered like an old man picking up some dirty magazines: “Wrap them up, will you?”

  On the Eminönü bus, he noticed the package getting curiously heavier; then, with the same odd feeling, he got the impression that an eye was watching him. But it wasn’t an eye that belonged to the throng on the bus; the passengers swayed as if on a small steamboat on the high seas and stared out distractedly at the snowy streets and the crowds milling outside. That’s when he realized Aladdin had wrapped the political magazines in an old copy of Milliyet. On the corner of one of the folds, Jelal stared out at him from his photograph in its usual place at the head of his column. The unaccountable thing was that the photograph of Jelal, which was the same every morning, now gave Galip a completely different look. Jelal appeared to say, “I’m on to you and I’ve got an eye on you!” Galip placed his finger on the “eye” that read his soul, but he still felt its presence under his finger the whole time he was on the bus.

  He phoned Jelal as soon as he g
ot to the office but couldn’t get him. Carefully he put away the old newspaper and started reading the leftist magazines he’d unwrapped. At first, the magazines brought back the feelings of excitement, tension, and expectation that Galip had long forgotten; they reminded him of the intimations of the day of liberation, victory, and judgment which he had given up on a long time ago but didn’t know just when. But after long bouts of making calls to Rüya’s old friends, whose numbers he’d scribbled on the back of her letter, the memories of his left-wing days seemed as alluring and incredible as the films he’d seen in his childhood at open-air cinemas set up back behind the walls of mosques and outdoor cafés. When he watched those black-and-white Yeşilçam Films, critical of their weak plots, Galip used to think that either he didn’t get the whole picture, or else he was being drawn into a world that was unintentionally transformed into a fairy tale, replete with rich but heartless fathers, the penniless Goody-Two-Shoes, the cooks, the butlers, the beggars, and the cars with the fins (the DeSoto, Rüya would remember, had the same license plates as in a previous movie), and just as he scoffed at the audience weeping in the chairs all around him, yes, yes, at that very moment—careful now!—as a result of some hocus-pocus he couldn’t make out, he’d suddenly find himself in tears, sharing the sorrows of pale and pathetic altruists on the screen and the torments of resolute but selfless heroes. So as to be better informed about the black-and-white fairy-tale world of the small leftist factions where he’d once found Rüya with her ex-husband, he phoned an old friend who kept all the back issues of all the political journals.

  “You’re still collecting periodicals, aren’t you?” Galip said with conviction. “I have a client who’s in real trouble. Do you think I could use your archives for a while to work up his defense?”

  “Sure enough,” said Saim with his usual goodwill, pleased to be sought after for his “archives.” He’d be looking for Galip around eight-thirty tonight.

  Galip worked in the office until it got dark. He called Jelal a couple more times but couldn’t get him. After each conversation, the secretary informed him that Jelal Bey either hadn’t come in “yet” or else had “just” gone out. Galip had the uneasy feeling that he was still being watched by Jelal’s “eye” in the newspaper he’d stuck in one of the shelves left over from Uncle Melih’s days. Indeed, he felt the tangible presence of Jelal as he listened to the story of an altercation that ensued among the heirs to a small store in the Covered Bazaar, told by an excessively obese mother-son team who kept interrupting each other, and as he tried to explain to a traffic cop, who wore shades and wanted to sue the government for giving him short shrift on his retirement benefits, that according to the laws prevailing in the land the two years he had spent in the loony bin could not be counted as employment.

  He phoned Rüya’s friends one by one. For each call, he came up with fresh and diverse pretexts. He asked her high-school chum Macide for the phone number of Gül, whose name, meaning “rose,” had once entranced him; he needed to get in touch with her in the interests of a case. He was told by the gracious maid of the gracious household that Gül with the pretty name, whom Macide didn’t like, had given birth the day before yesterday to her third and fourth children simultaneously at the Gülbahçe (Rose Garden!) hospital, and that if he rushed he still had time to view the darling twins, who’d been named Hüsün and Aşk (Beauty and Love), through the plate glass nursery window. Figen promised she’d return What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky’s), as well as the Raymond Chandler, and wished Rüya a speedy recovery. As for Behiye, no, Galip was mistaken, she had no uncle who was an agent at the Narcotics Bureau; and no, Galip was sure of it, there was not a hint in her voice that she knew anything of Rüya’s whereabouts. What amazed Semih was how Galip had gotten wind of the underground textile mill: yes, they had indeed put together a crew of engineers and technicians to start a project to actualize the first Turkish-made zipper; but no, since he was not apprised of the trafficking in bobbins reported in the papers recently, he was unable to provide any legal information. He could only send Rüya his most heartfelt regards (which Galip could well believe).

  He altered his voice when he made his calls, or he assumed other identities—a school principal, a theater manager, a building superintendent—but none of it helped him to track Rüya down. Süleyman, who sold medical encyclopedias door to door which he imported from England, where they had been published forty years ago, explained in all sincerity to the middle-school principal Galip impersonated who had him called to the phone that never mind having a daughter named Rüya in middle school, he didn’t even have any children. Likewise, Ilyas, who freighted coal from the Black Sea coast on his father’s barge, protested that he couldn’t possibly have left his dream log behind at the Rüya Theater since he had not been to the movies in months nor did he own such a notebook; and the lift importer Asim explained that his company could not be held responsible for the hitch at the Rüya Building elevator because he’d never heard of a building or a street called Rüya; when they said the word rüya neither man displayed any hint of anxiety or guilt, they both spoke with all the innocence of sincerity. Tank, who manufactured rat poison at his father’s chemical plant by day and who wrote poetry relating to the alchemy of death at night, accepted with pleasure some law students’ invitation to speak on the theme of “dreams and the enigmas of dreams” as seen in his poems, and he promised to meet his new friends in front of the old pimps’ café at Taksim. As for Kemal and Bülent, they were both on excursions into Anatolia. One had gone after the memoirs of a seamstress from Izmir who some fifty years ago, after dancing the waltz with Atatürk surrounded by much applause and lots of journalists, had immediately sat down at her pedal-model Singer and dashed off a pair of European-style trousers. And the other was traversing the whole of Eastern Anatolia on muleback, village by village, coffeehouse by coffeehouse, to unload magical backgammon dice that had been carved out of the thousand-year-old thighbone of the avuncular personage known to the Christians as Santa Claus.

  On top of having to relinquish the rest of the names on his list to wrong numbers and bleeps on the phone lines, which were at their worst on the days it snowed or rained, nowhere in the pages of the political journals he read all day—looking through the names of those who’d changed factions, or confessed, or who underwent torture and were killed, or were given jail sentences, or were killed in a scuffle and given funerals, those whose letters the editors answered or returned or published, or the names and assumed names of those who drew political cartoons, wrote poetry, or worked in the editorial cadres—did he come across Rüya’s ex-husband’s name or pen name.

  As evening descended, he stayed stuck in his chair, sad and motionless. Outside the window a curious crow gave him sideways glances; he could hear the din of the Friday evening crowd in the street. Galip slowly settled into a blissful and magnetic sleep. When he woke up much later the room was completely dark, but he still felt the crow’s eye watching him just like Jelal’s “eye” in the newspaper. Still sitting in the dark, he slid the drawers in slowly, felt for his overcoat and put it on, and left the office. All the hallway lights had been turned off in the building. The apprentice in the tea room was busy cleaning the urinals.

  He felt really cold as he crossed the snow-covered Galata Bridge: a stiff wind came down the Bosphorus. He stopped off at a pudding shop in Karaköy which had marble tabletops. He turned away from the mirrors that reflected each other and had some vermicelli chicken soup and potted eggs. On the only wall in the pudding shop that wasn’t hung with mirrors, there was the view of a mountain inspired by postcards and Pan American Airways calendars. The brilliant white peak of the mountain, seen through the pines and behind the mirror-like lake, looked more like Mount Kaf, where Galip and Rüya had so often taken magic trips in their childhood, than like any of the Postcard Alps which had inspired it.

  On the short trip up to Beyoğlu on the funicular, Galip was drawn into an altercation with an old man he didn’t
know: was it because the cable had snapped that day that the cars had been derailed and bolted into Karaköy Square, breaking through walls and the glass frame like unbridled horses mad with joy? Or was it because the engineer was drunk? Turns out the drunk engineer was the anonymous geezer’s fellow townsman from Trabzon. In Cihangir, not far from the crowded streets of Taksim and Beyoğlu, nobody was out in the streets. Saim’s wife, who came to the door, was pleased but in a hurry to get back; she and Saim had apparently been watching the same TV program cabbies and doormen would watch together in a basement coffeehouse.

  The program, “Things We Left Behind,” was a diatribe lamenting the passing of the old mosques, fountains, and caravanserais built by the Ottomans in the Balkans into the hands of Yugoslavians, Albanians, and Greeks. Saim and his wife seemed oblivious to Galip, who watched the images of forlorn mosques on the tube—like some neighbor boy who’d come in to see the soccer game—from the fake rococo armchair the springs of which had sprung long ago. Saim looked like that wrestler with Olympic medals who’d gone to his eternal rest but whose pictures still graced the walls of greengrocery stores. His wife resembled a cute, fat mouse. There was a dust-colored table in the room and a dust-colored lamp; a grandfather who looked more like the wife than like Saim (could her name be Remziye? Galip wondered wearily) was hung up on the wall inside a gilt frame; there they all were: the calendar from an insurance company, the ashtray from a bank, the cordial set, the silver candy dish, the buffet with the coffee cups. And there were the two walls of dust, paper, and periodicals, Saim’s “library archive”: the reason for Galip’s presence there in the first place.

  Saim had created this library, referred to as “the archive of our revolution” by the sarcastic university crowd even ten years ago, out of his own indecision, which he once owned up to in an uncharacteristic confessional moment. It was an indecision born not from the choice “between the two classes” but from that between political factions.