The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  When Galip heard a child’s voice first (Mom, the door!) and then a woman’s voice which was in no way anything like his wife’s, his sweetheart for twenty years and his friend for more than that, he knew how stupid he’d been to come here to find Rüya. For a moment he thought he’d beat it, but the door was already open. Galip recognized the ex-husband immediately, but the ex didn’t recognize Galip. He was of an average age and of average height; he was just like what Galip had imagined and was also someone Galip would never imagine again.

  While the ex-husband got his eyes accustomed to the darkness of the dangerous world outside, and Galip waited to grant the man enough time to recognize him, the inquisitive heads of first the wife, next a child, next another child, appeared one by one: “Who is it, Dad?” Dad, already stuck for an answer, was bewildered for the moment. And Galip, having decided this was his chance to escape without having to go inside, gave his account all in one breath.

  He was sorry he was disturbing them in the middle of the night, but he was in a real tight spot; he was here at their home, where he’d come again for a friendly visit some other time (with Rüya even), to get information on an extremely pressing problem concerning a person, or a name. He was defending a university student accused of a murder he hadn’t committed. No, it wasn’t as if there weren’t a dead party, but the real murderer who went around the city like a ghost was at one time …

  As soon as he got all his story out, Galip was whisked inside; once he removed his shoes, he was presented with a pair of slippers too small for his feet, a cup of coffee was pressed into his hand, and he was told the tea was being brewed. Galip mentioned again the name of the person in question (making up a completely different name to avoid any coincidence), then Rüya’s ex-husband took over. Galip had a feeling the stories would anesthetize him, and the more the man went on narrating, the more difficult it would be to get out the door. Later, he’d remember how he thought that resting there a minute, he could find out something about Rüya, or a few clues at least, but it was more like a terminal patient deluding himself as he went under before surgery. Two hours later, when at last he got to the door he thought would never open again, what he learned listening to the ex-husband, whose stories had cascaded like waters overflowing a dam unimpeded, were these facts:

  We thought we knew a lot of things, but we knew nothing.

  We knew, for example, that most of the Jews in Eastern Europe and America were descendants of the Jewish Khazar Kingdom which existed between the Volga and the Caucasus a thousand years ago. We also knew that the Khazars were really a Turkish tribe who’d accepted Judaism. But what we didn’t know was that the Turks were as much Jews as the Jews were Turks. How very interesting it was! To observe these two sibling peoples undulate through migrations for the last twenty centuries, as if dancing together to the rhythm of a secret music, without ever uniting but always tangential, condemned to each other like a pair of hopeless twins.

  Once the map was brought in, Galip awoke from the anesthetic of the stories, got up, moved his muscles which had slackened in the heat, and looked in amazement at the arrows marked in green ballpoint on the storybook planet spread on the table.

  The host was now considering that historical symmetry as an unassailable fact; we had to prepare ourselves for an eventual misery that would last as long as our present happiness, etc., etc.

  Initially, a new state would be set up on the Straits of Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. This time, they would not bring in new settlers to populate this new country, as was the case a thousand years ago; they would transform the old inhabitants into a “new people” that could serve their purposes. It wasn’t even necessary to read Ibn Khaldun to surmise they’d have to detach our memories and turn us into wretches existing out of time, without a past, without a history. It was a known fact that students were given lavender liquids to drink in order to destroy our national consciousness (“Take note of the name of the color,” said Mom, who was listening to her husband attentively) at the gloomy missionary schools settled on the hills of the Bosphorus and the backstreets in Beyoğlu. Later, this reckless method, due to the chemical considerations, was deemed too dangerous by the “humanitarian component” of the Western Bloc, and “a kinder, gentler,” but more durable solution had been applied through their “movie-music” method.

  There was no doubt that the movie method utilizing the iconographic faces of beautiful women, the symmetric and powerful music of church organs, the visual repetitions that were reminiscent of hymns, and the eye-catching, brilliant depictions of booze, guns, planes, and clothes had proved to be more radical and conclusive than the methodology tried out by missionaries in Africa and Latin America. (Galip wondered who else had heard these long sentences obviously constructed beforehand: neighbors in the district? co-workers? anonymous passengers on the dolmuş? the mother-in-law?) Soon after movie theaters in Şehzadebaşı and Beyoğlu first went into operation, hundreds of people had virtually gone blind. The cries of those who rebelled, having perceived the horrifying thing being perpetrated on them, had been silenced by the police and the head doctors. Nowadays, they could only alleviate the same inner reactions seen in some kids whose eyes had been blinded by these new images by doling out free glasses through National Health. Yet incidents happened now that couldn’t be so easily smoothed over. When he saw a sixteen-year-old boy put futile bullets through a movie poster a couple of districts away, he’d immediately understood why. And somebody else, who’d been caught at the foyer of a movie theater carrying a couple of cans of gasoline, had demanded his eyes back from the bouncers who were roughing him up. Yes, he wanted his eyes back, eyes which had once seen the old images. And the newspapers had reported on the shepherd boy from Malatya who’d been induced to develop such an addiction to the movies within one week that he lost his memory, everything he knew including his way back home. Had Mr. Galip seen it by any chance? There were not enough days in the week to go through all the stories about people who couldn’t resume their former lives and had become bums because they coveted the streets, the clothes, the women they saw on the silver screen. People who identified with the characters on the screen were so numerous that not only were they not considered “sick” or “felonious,” but our new masters made them partners in their enterprises. We’d all been blinded! All of us! All of us!

  The host, Rüya’s ex-husband, now wanted to know: Was any administrator in the government aware of the parallel between the rise of the movie theaters and the fall of Istanbul? He wanted to know: Was it mere chance that whorehouses and the movie theaters operated on the same streets? He further wanted to know: Why were movie theaters so dark, so thoroughly and cruelly black?

  Ten years ago, here in this house, he and Ms. Rüya had tried living under pseudonyms and false identities, all for the sake of a cause they believed in deep in their hearts. (Galip kept glancing at his fingernails.) They translated into our “tongue” manifestos in the language of a country where they’d never been, trying to make the texts sound like that language; they wrote political predictions in this new language which they’d gleaned from persons they’d never seen, and they typed and duplicated these to inform people they would never meet. In fact, they only wanted, naturally, to be someone else. How happy it made them to find out that someone they met took their pseudonyms for real. Sometimes one of them would forget the weariness of the hours spent working at the battery factory, or writing all those articles, or stuffing all the manifestos into envelopes, and would stare and stare at the new identification cards they got their mitts on. In their youthful enthusiasm and optimism, they got such a kick out of saying, “I have changed! I am a totally different person!” that they jumped at the chance to egg each other on to say these words. Thanks to their new identities they read meanings in a world they hadn’t been able to see before: the world was a brand-new encyclopedia which could be read from the beginning to the end; the more you read it the more the encyclopedia changed, and so did you; so much so t
hat once they finished reading it, they went back to read again the encyclopedia-world beginning with volume one, and they went into a trance, inebriated with the umpteen new identities they found within the pages. (As the host got lost within the pages of the encyclopedia metaphor in the rest of his lecture, Galip noted the volumes of the Treasury of Knowledge one of the newspapers gave away as a supplement, fascicle by fascicle, which was being kept in one of the shelves of the buffet.) Now years later, however, he had understood that this vicious circle was a kind of diversion contrived by “them”: it was deluded optimism to think that we could return to the happiness of our original identity after we turned into someone else, then another, and yet another. They had understood, somewhere in the middle of the road, that the husband and wife had lost their way among the signs, letters, manifestos, photos, faces, guns to which they could no longer assign meanings. At that time this house had stood all by itself on this barren hill. One evening Rüya had stuffed a couple of things into her small bag and gone back to her family, back to her old home and life where she thought it was safe.

  The host (whose goggling eyes reminded Galip at times of Bugs Bunny) got up to walk up and down whenever the force of his own words overwhelmed him, making Galip’s sleepy head spin, as he explained why he’d decided that we had to return to the beginning of things, way back to the origins, in order to nullify “their” games. Mr. Galip could see it for himself: this house was exactly like a dwelling for a “petit bourgeois” or a “middle-class person,” or a “traditional citizen.” There were old easy chairs slipcovered with printed cotton, drapes made out of a synthetic material, enamel dinner plates with butterflies on the rims, an ugly “buffet” where they kept the candy dish that only came out for guests during holidays and the cordial set that was never used, the faded rugs beaten to a pulp. He was aware that his wife was not an educated, stunning woman like Rüya: she was more like his own mom, plain, simple, harmless (here the wife gave Galip, then her husband a smile the meaning of which Galip couldn’t decipher), and she was his cousin, his uncle’s daughter. Their children, too, were just like them. Had he been alive and never changed, this was the life his own father would’ve set up. He’d chosen this life intentionally; lived it consciously, insisted on his own “true” identity, thereby thwarting a thousand-year-old conspiracy by refusing to be someone other than himself.

  All the objects in this room Mr. Galip might suppose were here by chance had been in fact arranged in accordance with the same purpose. The wall clock had been specially selected because a house like this needed the ticking of this sort of wall clock. Since the TV was always on at this time in houses like this, it was left on as if it were a streetlight, and the hand-crocheted doily was laid on the television because sets that belonged to this kind of family had to have this sort of doily. Everything was the end result of a carefully thought out plan: the disorder on the table, the old newspapers tossed aside once the coupons were clipped, the drop of jam on the side of the gift box of chocolates which had been put to use as a sewing box, and even things he hadn’t devised himself directly, like the teacup handle broken off by the children which had resembled an ear, the laundry being dried next to the frightful coal-burning stove. Sometimes he stopped to observe, as if watching a movie, the things he talked about with his wife and children, the way they all sat in their chairs at the table, and he was delighted with the awareness that their conversations and movements were exactly like those of the kind of family they were. If happiness was to live consciously the life one desired, then he was happy. What’s more, he was even happier that through this implementation of happiness, he’d frustrated the thousand-year-old conspiracy.

  In an effort to turn the last remarks into the closing statement, Galip got up saying it was snowing again and stumbled toward the door, feeling he might pass out despite all the tea and coffee. The host stuck himself between Galip and his coat, and he continued:

  He felt sorry that Mr. Galip had to go back to Istanbul where all this disintegration had started. Istanbul was the touchstone: let alone live there, even setting one foot in Istanbul was to surrender, to admit defeat. That frightful city now roiled with the images that we once only saw in the movies. Hopeless crowds, dilapidated cars, bridges that slowly sank into the water, piles of tin cans, highways made out of potholes, incomprehensible large letters, illegible posters, meaningless torn panels, graffiti with the paint half washed away, pictures of bottles and cigarettes, minarets devoid of calls to prayer, mounds of rubble, dust, mud, etc., etc. Nothing could be expected from such wreckage. If a revitalization could take place—the host was convinced of the existence of others like himself who also resisted with all their being—he was certain it could only begin here, in these communities belittled as “the concrete shantytowns” only because these were the places where our most precious essence was still being preserved. He was proud to be the founder, the torchbearer of such a community and he invited Galip to join, even now as he spoke. He could spend the night, they could even debate a little.

  Galip had put on his coat, said goodbye to the mom who was quiet and to the children in a stupor, opened the door and stepped out. The host surveyed the snow carefully for a while, then he enunciated the word “white” in a manner that also appealed to Galip. The host had come to know a sheikh who wore only white and, after meeting him, had a dream that was all white. In a pure white dream, he sat with Muhammad in the backseat of a pure white Cadillac. In the front seat were the driver, whose face he couldn’t see, and Muhammad’s grandchildren dressed in white, Hasan and Hüseyin. As the white Cadillac went through Beyoğlu, full of posters, ads, movies, and whorehouses, the grandchildren turned around to make disgusted faces for their grandfather’s approval.

  Galip tried going down the snow-covered stairs, but his host continued: It wasn’t as if he put too much stock in dreams. He’d learned to read some of the holy signs, that’s all. He wished both Mr. Galip and Rüya could make use of what he’d learned, others certainly helped themselves to it.

  It amused him to hear the prime minister now repeat verbatim his own political solutions, his “global analyses” that he’d published under a pseudonym some three years ago when he was in the thick of an active political life. You may be sure “these men” had in their service a wide net of intelligence agencies which scoured the smallest of publications in the land, sending the information “up” when necessary. Not too long ago, his eye had caught an article by Jelal Salik who seemed to have also got hold of the same material through the same channels, but his was a hopeless case: the man searched in vain for the wrong solution to a dead cause in a column where he sold himself.

  It was interesting that the ideas of a true believer were being utilized by the prime minister and a famous columnist, ideas they got hold of somehow, when others assumed he was completely depleted and didn’t even bother ringing his doorbell. For a while, he’d considered informing the press about the audacious plagiarism perpetrated by these two esteemed personages, proving how they lifted some expressions and even some sentences word for word out of an article in a splinter-group journal which nobody ever read; but the conditions weren’t ripe yet for such an ambush. He knew as he knew his own name that it was necessary to wait patiently, that someday these people too would be on his doorstep. Mr. Galip’s visit, under the pretext of a pseudonym that wasn’t convincing at all, all the way to a distant suburb on a snowy night, had to be a sign. He wanted Mr. Galip to know how well he read these signs and to ask him quietly (when Galip finally made it down to the snowy street) these last questions:

  Might Mr. Galip possibly give his revisionist history a chance? In case he had trouble finding his way back to the main street by himself, might the host accompany him there? In the same vein, when might Galip visit again? Very well, then, might he send Rüya his best regards?

  Chapter Twelve

  THE KISS

  The habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroës’ catalogue
of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory.

  —COLERIDGE, Biographia Literaria

  He asked me to give you his regards two weeks ago, to be exact. “I sure will,” I said, but by the time I got in the car I’d already managed to forget, not the regards but the man who sent them. I haven’t lost any sleep over it, though. In my opinion, any smart husband ought to push those men who send his wife their regards out of his memory. After all, you never know, do you? Especially if your wife happens to be a housewife, that unfortunate person whose circle consists of relatives and shopkeepers, and who has no way of knowing any man besides her tedious husband her entire life. Should someone send her his regards, she might be inclined to think about this gentle individual; she has the time. When you come right down to it, men of this sort are truly urbane. But since when did we acquire such customs anyway? In the good old days, a gentleman might at most send his regards to an impersonal, nebulous harem. Oldtime streetcars were better too.

  Even those readers who know that I am not married, have never been married, and on account of my profession will never be married, probably suspect by now that this column, beginning with the opening sentence, is a puzzle that I have devised for them. Just who is this woman whom I address so intimately? Hocus-pocus! Your aging columnist is about to harp on the slow loss of his memory, inviting you to smell the last fading roses in the garden, if you get my meaning. But stand back, so that we can easily pull off our garden-variety sleight of hand without giving away the trick.