by Orhan Pamuk
Chapter Fifteen
LOVE TALES ON A SNOWY NIGHT
… idle men and the like, who seek stories and fairy tales …
—RUMI
The next time he saw the man with whom he’d shared the cab, the one who looked like a character from a black-and-white film, Galip had just left Türkan Şoray’s look-alike’s room. He was standing in front of the Beyoğlu police station, unable to decide which way to go, when a squad car with its flashing blue light suddenly came around the corner and pulled to a stop at the curb. He at once recognized the man who came out of the rear door, which was flung open in a hurry; the man’s face had exchanged the look of black-and-white films for the vivid dark blue colors that befit the night and crime. An officer preceded him out of the car, a second officer followed. One of them carried the man’s briefcase. In the brilliant light that flooded the façade of the police station, safeguarding it against unexpected attacks, a dark red bloodstain appeared at the corner of the man’s mouth, but he did not wipe it off. He walked with resignation, his head down like someone who’d owned up to his crime, but he also seemed to be terribly pleased with himself. When he caught sight of Galip standing in front of the station steps, he gave him a satisfied look for a moment that was odd and scary.
“Good evening, sir!”
“Good evening,” Galip said diffidently.
“Who’s he?” said one of the cops, pointing at Galip.
Galip couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation as they pushed and shoved the man into the station house.
When he got to the main drag, it was a little after midnight; there still were people on the snowy sidewalks. “On one of the streets parallel to the British Consulate,” Galip thought to himself, “there’s supposed to be an all-night place frequented not only by the nouveau riche who arrive from Anatolia to throw their money around, but by the intellectuals as well!” It was Rüya who gleaned this kind of information from artsy magazines which mention such places using language that’s supposed to be sarcastic.
In front of the old building that once housed the Tokatliyan Hotel, Galip ran into İskender. His breath betrayed the fact that he’d had plenty of rakı: he’d picked up the BBC television crew at the Pera Palas Hotel, given them the thousand-and-one-nights tour of Istanbul (dogs on garbage patrol, dope and rug dealers, potbellied belly dancers, nightclub hooligans, etc.), then he’d taken them to a club on one of the back streets. There, an odd-looking man with a briefcase had started a squabble over an incomprehensible word, not with his party but with some others; the cops had arrived and nabbed the man, one of the patrons had climbed out of a window to escape; then people around the place had come to sit at their table, and so, it had shaped up to be a fun evening which Galip could join in if he wished. Galip walked up and down Beyoğlu with İskender who was out looking for unfiltered cigarettes, then accompanied him into the club, which had a sign, NIGHTCLUB, on the door.
Galip was met with noise, merriment, and indifference. One of the British journalists, a good-looking woman, was telling a story. The classical Turkish music ensemble had stopped playing, the magician had begun his number by taking boxes out of boxes out of boxes. His assistant had bow legs and, just below her navel, the scar of a C-section. Galip mused that the woman didn’t seem capable of giving birth to any child other than the sleepy rabbit she held in her hands. After performing the Vanishing Radio Trick cribbed from Zati Sungur, the legendary Turkish illusionist, the magician once more began taking boxes out of more boxes, losing the audience.
As the beautiful Englishwoman who sat at the other end of the table told her story, İskender translated it into Turkish. Galip listened to the story, optimistically assuming that he could figure out the gist of it from the woman’s expressive face, although he’d missed the beginning. The rest of the story revealed that a woman (Galip thought it must be the same woman who was telling the story) had tried to convince a man, who had known and loved her since she was nine, to believe in a self-evident truth, a distinct sign on a Byzantine coin found by a diver, but that the man could not see anything besides his love for the woman, that his eyes were blind to the magic that they both beheld, and that all he could do was write poems inspired by the ardor of his love. “So, on account of a Byzantine coin a diver found on the ocean floor,” İskender said, rendering the woman’s story into Turkish, “the two cousins were married at last. But whereas the woman’s life was changed completely through her belief in the magical face she saw on the coin, the man didn’t get any of it.” For this reason, the woman was supposed to have spent the rest of her days alone, shut up in a tower. (Galip imagined the woman had left the guy in the lurch.) When it was understood that the tale had come to an end, the “humane” silence respectful of “human sentiments” affected by the listeners who sat at the long table struck Galip as stupid. Perhaps he couldn’t expect everyone to be as pleased as he was because a beautiful woman had dumped some dumb guy, but although he’d heard only half of it, the bathetic ending of the story (with all of them entering the idiotic and pretentious silence that follows such highfalutin language) was patently ridiculous. The whole scene was ridiculous, aside from the woman’s beauty. Galip thought he might downgrade the storyteller’s charms to merely attractive but not beautiful.
Galip caught İskender’s drift that the tall man who started yet another story was a writer whose name he’d previously heard bandied about. The bespectacled writer warned his audience that since his account concerned another writer, the identity of the protagonist must not be confused with his own. Observing the odd way the writer smiled as he spoke, his countenance somewhat embarrassed and somewhat currying favor with the company, Galip could not nail down the writer’s motivation.
According to the narrative, this guy wrote stories and novels (which he showed no one, or, if he did, he would not publish) cooped up in his house for many a year. He had surrendered himself so obsessively to his profession (which could not even be called a profession back then), it had become a kind of habit. It wasn’t because he was a misanthrope, or because he was critical of others’ lives that he was not seen in company, but because he could not drag himself away from his desk where he wrote behind closed doors. Having spent so much of his life at his desk, the writer’s “social skills” were so atrophied that when he stepped out once in a blue moon, he was totally bewildered by social intercourse and retreated to a corner where he waited for the hour he could return to his desk. After spending more than fourteen hours working, he would get into bed toward dawn as the calls to early prayer were repeated on the minarets and echoed against the hills, and he would dream of his sweetheart whom he saw only once a year, and then only accidentally. Yet he did not dream of this woman with the passion or the sexual desire that other people talk about, but with yearning for an imaginary companion, the only antidote for his loneliness.
Some years later, as it turned out, this writer, who admitted to knowing about love only through books and not being all that crazy about sex either, ended up marrying an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Much like the publication of his work, which also happened around then, his marriage did not manage to change his life. He still spent fourteen hours a day at his desk, slowly constructing sentences for his stories just as patiently as he had before, and imagining details for new work as he stared at the blank sheets of paper on his desk. The only change in his life happened to be the correspondence he felt between the dreams his silent and beautiful wife was dreaming when he came to bed just before dawn and the daydreams he habitually constructed as he listened to the call to morning prayer. Now, when he lay down to daydream next to his wife, the writer had a sense that there was a connection between his and his wife’s dreams, not unlike the harmony unconsciously established in their breathing that was reminiscent of notes going up and down in a modest piece of music. The writer was pleased with his new life, and it wasn’t difficult for him to fall asleep next to someone after so many years of solitude; he liked listening to his bea
utiful wife’s breathing as he fetched up his own dreams, liked believing that their dreams were indeed tangled together.
When his wife left him on a winter’s day without giving a substantial excuse, the writer was in for some bad times. He just could not come up with any dreams as in the old days when he lay in bed listening to the summons to early prayer. The tales which he had so easily constructed and which had culminated in peaceful sleep before and during his marriage could no longer achieve the level of “credibility” or “brilliance” that he desired. Aside from not being content with the novel he was writing, there seemed to be an inadequacy and indecisiveness that would not surrender its secret in his dreams and left the writer stranded, at a dead end. When his wife first left him, his daydreams were in such an abysmal state that he could not fall asleep even after the summons to early prayer, nor until long after the first birds sang in the trees, the seagulls left the rooftops where they collectively spent the night, the garbage truck went by and then the first municipal bus. What’s worse, the deficiency in his dreams and sleep also dogged him in the pages he attempted to write. The writer was aware that he could not put any snap into the simplest of sentences, not even if he wrote it over twenty times.
The writer struggled to beat the depression that invaded his whole world; he put himself under strict discipline, forcing himself to remember all his erstwhile dreams in turn so that he might, perchance, rediscover their harmony. After many weeks, having finally succeeded in falling asleep peacefully while he listened to the call to prayer, he woke up, went to his desk like a somnambulist, and realized that his depression was over when he began writing sentences with the attendant beauty and vividness that he had so desired; he was also aware of the small trick he had unconsciously invented in order to achieve this end.
The person whose wife had left him, that is, the writer who could no longer invent tales to his heart’s content, began imagining his old self, the self that did not share his bed with anyone, whose dreams were not entangled in any beautiful woman’s dreams. He conjured up the persona he had abandoned with such force and intensity that he became the persona he envisioned and was thereby able to fall into a peaceful sleep dreaming that person’s dreams. Since he was soon able to adjust to this double life, he no longer had to force himself to dream or to write. Having assumed the identity of his former self, he became someone else when he wrote, filling the ashtray with the same butts, having coffee in the same coffeecup, sleeping peacefully at the same time, in the same bed, as his own ghost.
When one day his wife returned to him (“home,” as the woman put it), again without giving any substantial excuse, the writer was once more in for some bad times, which didn’t sit well with him. The same uncertainty that had cropped up in his dreams when he had initially been forsaken pervaded his entire existence once more. After having the devil of a time falling asleep, he would be awakened by nightmares, restlessly going back and forth between his old self and the new, wavering between the two, aimless as a drunk who cannot find his way back home. After one sleepless morning, he got up with his pillow in his hand and went to his workroom that smelled of dust and papers, and there curled up on the small sofa beside his desk and papers and fell fast asleep. From that time on, the writer no longer lay next to his silent and mysterious wife, entangled in her dreams, but slept there, next to his desk and his papers. As soon as he got up, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, he sat at his desk and was at ease writing stories that seemed to be the continuation of his dreams; but now he had another problem that scared him stiff.
Before his wife had left him, he’d written a novel on the subject of a pair of look-alikes who had exchanged lives, a book that was considered by his readers to be “historical.” When the writer played the role of his old self so that he could sleep and write, he became the author of the aforementioned novel and, since he could experience neither his own future nor that of his ghost, he found himself writing again the same old story about the “look-alikes” with all the same enthusiasm as before! After a while, this world, in which everything imitated everything else—where all the stories and the people were simultaneously themselves and their own imitations, and where all stories alluded to other stories—began to look so real to the writer that, thinking no one would swallow stories that had been written with such “obvious” realism, he decided to seek out an irreal world which might provide him with pleasure in writing of it and his readers with pleasure in falling for it. To this end, while his beautiful, mysterious wife quietly slept in the bed, the writer haunted dark streets in the city at midnight, districts where streetlights had been smashed, underground passages inherited from Byzantium, taverns, nightclubs, and opium dens where pathetic people hang out. What he had seen up to now had taught him that life in “our city” was as real as it was in an imagined world: this fact alone confirmed that the universe was indeed a book. He was so stuck on reading this book of life, gadding about here and there, walking the streets for hours where the city offered him each day new pages in which to read faces, signs, and stories, that he was now afraid that he’d return neither to his beautiful wife fast asleep in her bed, nor to the story that he’d left half told.
Since the writer’s story dealt with loneliness rather than love, and told about storytelling rather than telling a story, it left the audience cold. Galip thought they must be particularly curious as to why the writer’s wife had left him, seeing how everyone knows something about getting dumped inexplicably.
The next storyteller, who Galip thought must be one of the house B-girls, repeated several times that hers was a true story and wanted to be assured that “our tourist friends” got the point; she wanted her story to serve as an example not only for Turkey but for the entire world. It all began at this very club, not too long ago. Two cousins met each other here after many years and rekindled their childhood passion. Since the woman was a party girl and the guy a fancy man (“in other words,” the woman said for the benefit of the tourists, “a pimp”) there was no question of “honor” that might lead a guy in situations like this to take advantage of the girl, to “waste” her. Back then, there was peace and quiet in the nightclub, as in the country; young people weren’t gunning for one another in the streets, but kissing and hugging and sending each other packages of real candy during the holidays rather than bombs. The girl and the boy were happy. The girl’s father had suddenly died, so the young couple were able to live under the same roof, although they slept in separate beds, chafing for the day they would marry.
On their wedding day, while the girl and her fellow Beyoğlu party girls were busy getting all dolled up, putting on makeup and perfumes, the guy got his nuptial-day shave and strolled out on the main drag where he was captivated by a woman who was gorgeous beyond belief. The woman, who instantly robbed him of his reason, took him to her room in the Pera Palas Hotel where, after they made copious love, the luckless woman divulged that she was the bastard daughter of the Shah of Iran, sired on the Queen of England. She had come to Turkey to instigate the first phase of her master plan of revenge against her parents who’d abandoned the fruit of their one-night stand. What she wanted from the young man was for him to get hold of a map, half of which was being held by the National Bureau of Security and the other half by the Secret Police.
Inflamed by passion, the young man begged for her permission to leave and hurried off to the hall where the wedding was to take place; the guests had already drifted away but the girl was still weeping in the corner. He consoled her first and then confessed that he’d been recruited in the interests of a “national cause.” They put off their nuptials, and they sent out word to all the party girls, belly dancers, madams, and Sulukule gypsies that each and every cop who’d fallen prey to the dens of iniquity throughout Istanbul was to be pumped for information. When they finally got hold of the two halves of the map and put it together, the girl also put it together that her cousin had pulled a fast one on her, as well as on all the industrious working
girls in Istanbul: he was really in love with the daughter of the Queen of England and the Shah of Iran. She hid the map in the left cup of her bra and holed up in a room where she exiled herself in her sorrow, at a brothel in Kuledibi frequented only by the cheapest whores and the worst perverts.
The shrewish princess ordered the boy cousin to go through Istanbul with a fine-tooth comb and get that map. As he conducted the search, he finally understood that he loved, not the instigator of the hunt, but the hunted one, not just any woman but the beloved, not the princess but his childhood love. He finally tracked her down to the brothel in Kuledibi, and when he observed through a peephole in a mirror his childhood love do an “innocent girl” number on a rich guy with a bow tie, he broke in and saved the girl. A huge mole appeared on his eye, the same eye he’d fitted to the peephole and thereby broken his heart (from watching his half-naked sweetheart joyfully playing the flute), and it would not go away. The identical mark of love also appeared under the girl’s left breast. When they got the police to raid the virago’s room at the Pera Palas to apprehend her, in her dresser drawers they found butt-naked photos of thousands of innocent young men who’d been enticed by the man-eating princess into having their pictures taken in various positions for her “political” blackmail collection. There were also mug shots of terrorists, manifestos stamped with the hammer and sickle, various political books and pamphlets, the will of the last sultan, who was a “queer,” and the master plan to carve up Turkey, which had been marked by the Byzantine Cross. The Secret Police knew all too well that it was this broad who was responsible for importing into the country the plague of terrorism, as if it were the French plague of syphilis, but since her collection contained innumerable photos of the members of the police force, wearing only their birthday suits and their “nightsticks,” her involvement was covered up, for fear that some journalists might get hold of the photos. The only news seen fit to print was the notice concerning the cousins’ nuptials, along with their wedding picture. The B-girl pulled out of her purse the notice she’d personally clipped from the newspaper, in which she herself could be seen wearing her snazzy coat with the fox collar and the same pearl earrings she wore this very minute, and she wanted it passed around the table.
