The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  “Where do they hang out?”

  “You look like a gentleman. Follow me.”

  As they wended their way through back alleys, Galip was pestered to make a choice and obliged to divulge that he liked Türkan Şoray the best.

  “In person,” said the man with the briefcase as if giving away a secret. “She’ll be tickled pink. She’ll get a real kick out of you.”

  They went in the first floor of an old stone house next to the Beyoğlu police station that had the inscription COMPANIONS over the door. It smelled of dust and fabrics. In the semilit room, although there were no sewing machines or materials anywhere around, Galip nonetheless had an impulse to name the place The Companions’ Haberdashers. The brilliantly lit second room they entered through a tall white door reminded Galip that he ought to give the pimp his cut.

  “Türkan!” said the man as he put the money in his pocket. “Türkan, look, İzzet is here asking for you.”

  The two women playing cards tittered as they turned to look at Galip. In the room that called to mind an old, dilapidated stage set, there was that sleep-inducing lack of air that is endemic to those rooms where the stove isn’t well-ventilated, the smell of perfume is heavy, and the racket of domestic-pop music tiresome. Reclining on the sofa was a woman riffling through a humor magazine, who had assumed Rüya’s typical pose as she read detective novels (one leg on the back of the sofa), although she looked neither like a movie star nor like Rüya. One could tell “Müjde Ar” was Müjde Ar because her T-shirt said so. An older man who looked like a waiter had fallen asleep in front of a TV show on which a panel was discussing the significance of the conquest of Constantinopole in world history.

  Galip thought the woman with the permed hair who was wearing blue jeans looked vaguely like an American movie star whose name escaped him, but he wasn’t sure whether the resemblance was intentionally cultivated. Another man who entered through the other door approached “Müjde Ar,” and with the seriousness of a drunk, swallowing the first two syllables, he concentrated on reading her name on her T-shirt like those people who believe what’s going on only when they read about it in the headlines.

  Galip guessed the woman wearing a leopard print dress must be “Türkan Şoray”: not only was she approaching him, her walk had a modicum of grace. Perhaps she was the one who most looked like the original; she had pulled long blond hair over her right shoulder.

  “May I smoke?” she said, smiling pleasantly. She placed an unfiltered cigarette between her lips. “Will you light it for me?”

  As soon as Galip lit her cigarette with his lighter, an incredibly dense cloud of smoke formed around the woman’s head. When her head and her long-lashed eyes emerged out of the cloud like a saint’s head materializing in the mist, a strange silence seemed to overcome the loud music (as in romantic movies), making Galip think, for the first time in his life, that he could go to bed with a woman other than Rüya. Upstairs, in a room that was carefully appointed, the woman stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray that had the insignia of the Ak Bank, and she took another one out of her pack.

  “May I smoke?” she said with the same voice and manner as before. She placed the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, smiling pleasantly but holding her head high. “Will you light it for me?”

  Noticing that she leaned her head exactly in the same way as before toward an imaginary lighter, thereby exposing her cleavage, Galip figured that her lines and the gesture of lighting her cigarette must have come out of a Türkan Şoray movie, and that he himself was supposed to play the actor İzzet Günay who was the male lead in the same flick. When he lit her cigarette, the same incredibly dense cloud formed around the woman’s head, and the long-lashed black eyes once more emerged slowly out of the mist. How was she able to blow out so much smoke? He would’ve thought an effect like this could only be simulated in a studio.

  “Why so quiet?” said the woman, smiling.

  “I’m not quiet,” Galip said.

  “You’re some piece of work, aren’t you?” the woman said, pretending to be simultaneously curious and angry. “Or are you too innocent for words?” She repeated the same lines once more. Her long earrings dangled on her bare shoulders.

  The lobby photos stuck into her round vanity mirror reminded Galip that Türkan Şoray had worn the leopard print dress, which was cut way down to her buttocks in the back, when she played the nightclub doxy in the movie called My Disorderly Babe in which she shared the lead with İzzet Günay some twenty years ago; then he heard the woman say other lines that also came out of the Türkan Şoray movie: (Hanging her head like a wistful, spoiled child, her hands suddenly flying out from where they were clasped under her chin) “But I can’t go to sleep now! When I drink, I want to have fun!”; (With the air of a kindly aunt worrying over a neighbor’s child) “Stay with me, İzzet, stay until the bridge opens!”; (With sudden exuberance) “It was kismet that it happened with you, and today!”; (In a ladylike manner) “I am pleased to meet you, I am pleased to meet you, I am pleased to meet you…”

  Galip took the chair next to the door, and the woman sat before the round vanity mirror that looked a lot like the original in the movie, brushing her long bleached blond hair. Stuck in the mirror, there was also a photo of this particular scene. The woman’s back was even more beautiful than the original. For an instant, she looked at Galip’s image in the mirror.

  “We should have met long ago…”

  “We did meet long ago,” Galip said, observing the woman’s face in the mirror. “We didn’t sit at the same desk at school, but on a warm spring day when the window was opened after a long class discussion, I watched your face reflected like this in the pane which the blackness of the chalkboard right behind it had turned into a mirror.”

  “Hmmm … We should have met long ago.”

  “We met long ago,” said Galip. “When we first met, your legs looked so thin and so delicate that I was afraid they would break. Your skin was rough when you were a kid, but as you got older, after we graduated from middle school, your complexion became rosy and incredibly fine. If they took us to the beach on hot summer days when we went crazy from playing indoors, coming back with ice-cream cones we bought at Tarabya, we would scratch letters with our long nails into the salt on each other’s arms. I loved the fuzz on your skinny arms. I loved the peachy color of your suntanned legs. I loved the way your hair spilled over your face when you reached for something on the shelf above my head.”

  “We should have met long ago.”

  “I used to love the strap marks left on your shoulders by the bathing suit you borrowed from your mother, the way you absentmindedly tugged at your hair when you were nervous, the way you caught between your middle finger and thumb a speck of tobacco left by your filterless cigarette on the tip of your tongue, the way your mouth fell open watching a movie, the way you unwittingly scarfed up the roasted garbanzos and nuts in the dish under your hand while you read a book, the way you kept losing your keys, the way you screwed up your eyes to see because you refused to accept you were nearsighted. When you narrowed your eyes on a distant point and absconded for parts unknown, I understood that you were thinking of something else, and I loved you apprehensively. Oh my God! I loved with fear and trepidation what I couldn’t know of your mind as much as I loved what I did know.”

  Galip shut up when he saw a vague anxiety in Türkan Şoray’s face in the mirror. The woman lay down on the bed next to the vanity.

  “Come to me now,” she said. “Nothing is worth it, nothing, you understand?” But Galip just sat there, unsure. “Or don’t you love your Türkan Şoray?” she added jealously, though Galip couldn’t decide for sure if it was real or make-believe.

  “I do.”

  “You loved the way I batted my eyelashes too, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “You used to love the sensuous way I went down the stairs in Maşallah Beach, the way I lit my cigarette in My Disorderly Babe, and the way I smoked through a
cigarette holder in Hell of a Girl. Didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Then, come to me, my darling.”

  “Let’s talk some more.”

  “What?”

  Galip was pensive.

  “What’s your name? What do you do for a living?”

  “I am a lawyer.”

  “I used to have a lawyer,” the woman said. “He took all my money but he could not get this car that was registered to me out of my husband’s mitts. It’s my car, understand? Mine. Now some whore has got hold of it. A ’56 Chevrolet, fire-engine red. What’s a lawyer good for, I ask you, if he can’t get my car back? Can you get my husband to give me back my car?”

  “I can,” said Galip.

  “You can?” the woman said hopefully. “You can. You do it, and I will marry you. You’ll save me from the life I am leading, that is, the life of living in the movies. I am sick and tired of being a movie star. This retarded nation thinks a movie star is just a whore, not an artist. I am not a movie star, I am an artist. You understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Will you marry me?” the woman said exuberantly. “If we were married, we could drive around in my car. Will you marry me? But you’d have to fall in love with me.”

  “I will marry you.”

  “No, no, you ask me … Ask me if I will marry you.”

  “Türkan, will you marry me?”

  “Not like that! Ask sincerely, with feeling, like in the movies! But first get on your feet. No one ever pops the question sitting down.”

  Galip got on his feet as if he were going to sing the national anthem. “Türkan, will you, will you, marry me?”

  “But I am not a virgin,” said the woman. “I had an accident.”

  “What, riding a horse? Or sliding down the banister?”

  “No, doing the ironing. You laugh, but only yesterday I heard that the Sultan wants your head. You married?”

  “I am.”

  “I always get stuck with the married guys anyway,” said the woman, her manner lifted out of My Disorderly Babe. “But it’s not important. What is important is the State Railways. Which team do you think will win the cup this year? How do you think things will end up? When do you think the military will put a stop to all this anarchy? You know, you’d look better if you got your hair cut.”

  “Don’t make personal remarks,” said Galip. “It’s not polite.”

  “What did I say now?” the woman said opening her eyes wide and blinking like Türkan Şoray to feign surprise. “I only asked if you married me, would you win back my car? No, no. I said if you get my car back, will you marry me. Here’s the license number: 34 JG 19 May 1919. Same day Atatürk hit the road in Samsun to liberate Anatolia. My darling ’56 Chevvy.”

  “Tell me about it!” Galip said.

  “Yes, but they’ll soon be knocking on the door. Your visite is just about up.”

  “The Turkish expression is ‘paying your respects.’”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Money is no object,” Galip said.

  “For me, neither,” said the woman. “The ’56 Chevvy was red as my nails, the same color exactly. I got a broken nail, don’t I? Maybe my Chevvy too hit something. Before that creep who’s supposed to be my husband presented my car to that whore, I used to drive it here every day. But these days I only get to see him in the street, I mean, the car. Sometimes I see it being driven around Taksim by some driver or other, and sometimes at the Karaköy ferry station with yet another cabby sitting in it, waiting for a fare. The broad is obsessed with the car; she has it painted a different color every other day. Sometimes, lo and behold, it’s been painted chestnut brown, next day it’s the color of coffee with cream, dripping with chrome and fitted with lights. The day after, it’s wreathed with flowers, with a doll sitting on the dashboard, and it’s become a pink bridal limousine! And then a week later, there it is painted black, six cops with black mustaches sitting in it, and wouldn’t you know it, now it’s a squad car! You can’t mistake it, seeing how it even says POLICE on it and everything. But, of course, the license plates are changed every time, so that I won’t catch on.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course,” the woman said. “Both the cops and the drivers are that broad’s tricks, but that cuckold of a husband of mine doesn’t have a clue. He left me just like that one day. Has anyone left you just like that? What’s the date today?”

  “The twelfth.”

  “How time passes! Look how you make me talk a blue streak! Do you want something special by any chance? Go ahead, tell me, I’ve taken to you. You are a well-bred man, so how bad could it be? You have a lot of money on you? Are you really rich? Or just a greengrocer like İzzet? No, you’re a lawyer. Go ahead and tell me a riddle, Mr. Lawyer. All right, I will tell you one. What’s the difference between the Sultan and the Bosphorus Bridge?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Between Atatürk and Muhammad?”

  “I give up.”

  “You give up too easy!” the woman said. She rose from the vanity where she’d been watching herself and, giggling, she whispered the answers into Galip’s ear. Then she twined her arms around Galip’s neck. “Let’s get married,” she murmured. “Let’s go to Mount Kaf. Let’s belong to one another. Let’s become some other persons. Marry me, marry me, marry me.”

  They kissed in the spirit of the game. Was there anything about this woman that was reminiscent of Rüya? There was not, but Galip was still pleased with himself. When they fell into bed, the woman did something that reminded him of Rüya, but she didn’t do it exactly like Rüya. Every time Rüya put her tongue in his mouth, Galip would be upset thinking that his wife had for a moment turned into someone else. But when the pretend Türkan Şoray stuck her tongue, which was larger and heavier than Rüya’s, into Galip’s mouth somewhat victoriously, but tenderly and playfully, he felt that it was not the woman in his arms who was different but it was he that had completely become someone else; and he was terribly aroused. Goaded by the woman’s sense of play, they rolled rough-and-tumble from one end of the bed to the other, first one on top and then the other, like in the totally unrealistic kissing scenes in domestic films. “You’re making me dizzy!” said the woman, making like she was really dizzy in imitation of a ghostly figure that was not present. When Galip realized that they could see themselves in the mirror on this end of the bed, he figured out why this tender rolling scene had been deemed necessary. The woman watched with pleasure the image of taking off her own clothes and then Galip’s in the mirror. As if watching a third person together, perhaps somewhat more congenially than the judges evaluating the contestants going through the compulsory movements in a gymnastic competition, they watched in the mirror the woman’s tricks, one after the other, to their hearts’ content. At a moment when Galip couldn’t see the mirror while they were bouncing on the quiet springs of the bed, the woman said, “We have both become other people.” She asked, “Who am I, who am I, who am I?” but Galip didn’t manage giving her the answer she wanted to hear: he’d let himself go completely. He heard the woman say, “Two times two make four,” murmuring “Listen, listen, listen!” and then barely audibly speaking about a sultan and his unfortunate crown prince as if she were telling a fairy tale, or a dream, using the special past tense for telling stories.

  “If I am you, then you are me,” the woman said later as they put their clothes back on. “So what? What if you have become me, and I you?” She gave him a foxy smile. “How did you like your Türkan Şoray?”

  “I liked her.”

  “Then save me from the life, save me, take me away from here, marry me, let’s go somewhere else, let’s elope, get married, and begin a new life.”

  From what film did this segment come, or from what game? Galip was not certain. Perhaps this was what the woman wanted. She told Galip that she did not believe he was married, seeing how she knew a lot about married men. If they really did get married, and if Galip managed ge
tting the ’56 Chevvy liberated, the two of them would go on an outing on the Bosphorus; they’d get wafer helva at Emirgân, view the sea at Tarabya, and eat somewhere in Büyük Dere.

  “I don’t care for Büyük Dere,” Galip said.

  “In that case, you’re waiting for Him in vain,” said the woman. “He will never come.”

  “I am in no hurry.”

  “But I am,” the woman said stubbornly. “I am afraid of not recognizing Him when He comes. I am afraid I’ll be the last one to get to see Him. I am afraid of being the very last person.”

  “Who is He?”

  The woman smiled mysteriously. “Don’t you ever see any movies? Don’t you know the rules of the game? Do you suppose people who blab such things are allowed to remain alive in this country? I want to live.”

  Someone began to knock on the door before she finished telling the story of a friend of hers who vanished mysteriously and was, in all likelihood, murdered and her body dumped in the Bosphorus. The woman fell silent. As he walked out the door, the woman whispered after him:

  “We are all waiting for Him, all of us; we are all waiting for Him.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  WE ARE ALL WAITING FOR HIM

  I am crazy about mysterious things.

  —DOSTOEVSKY

  We are all waiting for Him. We have been waiting for Him all these centuries. Some of us, weary of the crowds on the Galata Bridge, wait for Him as we dolorously watch the lead-colored waters of the Golden Horn; some of us wait as we throw a couple more sticks in a stove that just won’t heat a two-room flat at Surdibi; some of us wait as we climb a seemingly endless staircase up a certain Greek building on a back street in Cihangir; some of us wait in a podunk town in Anatolia as we do the crossword puzzle in an Istanbul paper to pass the time until we meet our friends at a tavern; some of us wait as we fantasize about boarding the airplanes mentioned and shown in the same newspaper, or about entering a well-lit room, or embracing beautiful bodies. We await Him as we sorrowfully walk on muddy sidewalks, in our hands paper bags that have been made out of newspapers read over at least a hundred times, or plastic bags that inundate the apples inside with a synthetic smell, or string market-bags that leave purplish marks on our fingers and palms. We are all waiting for Him at the movie theaters where we watch tough guys break bottles and windows on a Saturday night and the delightful adventures of world-class dolls; returning from whorehouses where we sleep with whores who only manage to make us feel even more lonely, or from taverns where our friends poke merciless fun at our small obsessions, or from the neighbors’ where we can’t get any pleasure out of listening to the radio theater because their noisy children cannot manage to go to bed, we wait for Him in the street. Some of us say that He will first appear in the darkest corners of the slums where urchins knock out the streetlights with their slingshots, while others say it will be in front of stores where sinful tradesmen sell tickets for the National Sweepstakes and Sports Lotto, and skin magazines, toys, tobacco, condoms, and stuff like that. Everyone says that no matter where He is first seen, be it at köfte shops where children are kept kneading hamburger twelve hours a day, or at the movie theaters where a thousand eyes burning with the same desire become a single eye, or on the green hills where angelically innocent shepherds fall under the spell of the graveyard cypresses, the fortunate person who first sees Him will recognize Him instantly, and it will be understood that the waiting, which has been as long as eternity and as short as an eye blink, is at an end, and that the hour of salvation is at hand.