by Orhan Pamuk
Silence ensued.
“In middle school,” the woman went on, driving past the Palace Theater they were just talking about, “at recess, while she laughed at jokes told by the sort of boys who run the combs they take out of their back pockets through their wetted hair and hang their key chains on their belt buckles, I used to imagine it was not Rüya that you watched out of the corner of your eye, without looking up from the book on your desk, but me. On winter mornings, I used to imagine myself as the carefree girl, instead of Rüya, who crossed the street without looking, since you were there with her. Some Saturday afternoons when I saw you walk to the Taksim dolmuş stop with an uncle who made you two smile, I used to imagine you and I were being taken to Beyoğlu.”
“How long did this game go on?” Galip said, turning on the car radio.
“It wasn’t a game,” said the woman, and as she took the intersection without slowing down, she added, “I’m not making a turn into your street.”
“I remember this music,” Galip said, glancing at the street he lived on as if looking at a postcard from a distant town. “Trini Lopez used to sing it.”
Neither in the windows nor in the curtains was there a sign that Rüya had returned home. Galip didn’t know what else to do with his hands but fiddle with the radio dial. A well-modulated, kindly male voice was giving pointers on rat control in our barns. “Didn’t you get married?” asked Galip as the car turned into one of the backstreets in Nişantaşı.
“I am a widow,” said Belkis. “My husband died.”
“I just don’t remember you from school,” Galip said, being pointlessly unkind. “I recall another face that looked like you. A shy and very cute Jewish girl, Meri Tavaşi, her dad owned Vogue Hosiery; at New Year’s, some boys and even some teachers used to ask her for Vogue calendars that had pictures of girls putting on their stockings, and she’d dutifully bring them to school, embarrassed and abashed.”
“Nihat and I were happy during the first years of our marriage,” said the woman, telling her story after a brief silence. “He was delicate, quiet, and smoked too much. On Sundays he looked through the papers, listened to the game on the radio, and tried playing the flute that he’d acquired around that time. He drank, but very little, yet his face was very often sadder than the sorriest drunk’s. For a while he complained about a headache with embarrassment. Turns out he had been patiently growing a huge tumor in one corner of his brain. You know, there are some quietly stubborn children who won’t give up what they’ve got in their fists no matter how hard you try? Well, he protected the tumor in his brain just like those children. Just like those kids who smile for an instant when they finally give up the bead in their fists he gave me that same pleased smile as he was being wheeled in for brain surgery where he died quietly.”
They entered a building, which was a dead ringer for the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, not too far from Aunt Halé’s on a corner Galip didn’t go by very often but knew as well as the street he himself lived on.
“I knew that he took some sort of revenge on me by dying,” the woman continued on the dilapidated elevator. “He had realized that as much as I was an imitation of Rüya, he had to become an imitation of you. Some evenings when I overdid the cognac, I couldn’t keep myself from going on and on, telling him about you and Rüya.”
They fell silent and entered her place, and after settling down among furnishings that looked much like those at home, Galip said anxiously, “I remember Nihat from our class.”
“Would you say that he looked like you?”
Galip forced himself to extract a couple of scenes out of the depths of his memory: Galip and Nihat standing there with notes in their hands from their parents asking to be excused while the gym teacher accuses them of being lardasses; on a warm spring day, Galip and Nihat drink water, sticking their mouths on the faucets in the putrid student latrine. He was fat, clumsy, and none too bright. Galip could not feel any closeness for his look-alike he couldn’t quite remember despite all his goodwill.
“Yes,” said Galip. “Nihat looked a bit like me.”
“He didn’t look like you in the slightest,” Belkis said. For a moment her eyes had the same dangerous gleam in them as when Galip first noticed her. “I know he didn’t look at all like you. But we were in the same class. And I had managed to make him look at me the way you looked at Rüya. During lunch break when Rüya and I smoked with the other boys in the Milk Company pudding shop, I’d see him out on the sidewalk, glancing anxiously in the shop where he knew I was with the cool crowd. And on those sad fall evenings when night comes early, looking at the naked trees in the pale light that came from the apartment buildings, I knew that he would think of me the same way you thought of Rüya when you looked at those trees.”
When they sat down to breakfast, there was bright sunlight shining into the room in between the curtains that remained drawn.
“I know how difficult it is to be oneself,” Belkis said, bringing up the subject suddenly, as people do when they have been contemplating the same thing for a long time. “But I realized it only after I was thirty. Before that, if you asked me, the problem seemed like a mere desire to be like someone else or a case of simple jealousy. Lying on my back, sleepless, watching the shadows on the ceiling at midnight, I wanted to stand in for someone else so bad that I believed I could slip out of my skin like a hand slipping out of a glove and, through the vehemence of my wish, I could wrap myself into someone else’s skin and begin a new life. Sometimes, thinking about this other person, the pain of not being able to live my life as hers was so intense that, as I sat in a movie theater or watched self-absorbed people in a crowded bazaar, tears would pour out of my eyes.”
The woman passed her knife absentmindedly over the thin slice of bread hardened from being toasted too much as if she were buttering it, although there was no butter on the knife.
“After all these years, I still cannot figure out why anyone would want to live someone else’s life rather than her own,” the woman went on. “I cannot even say why I wanted to be Rüya rather than this or that person. All I can say is that for years I thought it was a disease that must be kept a secret. I was ashamed of my disease, of my soul that had contracted the disease, and of my body that had been condemned to carry the disease around. I thought my life was an imitation of what ought to be my ‘real life,’ and that, like all fake things, it was pitiful and shameful. Back then, I had no other recourse than imitating my ‘original’ to dispel my unhappiness. For a while, I even fantasized about changing schools, neighborhoods, and my circle of friends, but I knew that going away would not result in anything but thinking about you all the more. On a rainy autumn day, in the afternoon, when I felt like doing nothing, I’d sit in an easy chair for hours, watching the raindrops on the window pane. I’d think of the two of you: Rüya and Galip. I’d consider the clues such as I had, imagining what Rüya and Galip might be up to right about now, so much so that, after a couple of hours of it, I’d begin to believe that the person sitting in the chair in the dark room was not me but Rüya, and I began to derive a terrific delight from these horrible thoughts.”
Since the woman was able to smile amiably as if she were relating a pleasant story about a mere acquaintance while she went in and out of the kitchen to bring more toast or tea, Galip listened to what she had to say without feeling uneasy.
“The disease raged on until my husband died. Perhaps it still rages on, but I no longer experience it as a disease. During those days of loneliness and regret following my husband’s death, I came to the conclusion that there was no way one could be oneself. Back in those days, prompted by a massive feeling of regret which is another version of the disease, I was burning up with the desire to live through my life with Nihat again, all of it, identically, only this time as myself. In the middle of the one night when I became aware that regret would ruin the rest of my life, this weird thought went through my mind: I was going to spend the second half of my life as someone else who reg
retted that she couldn’t manage being herself, just like I had spent the first half not being myself because I’d wanted to be someone else. The notion seemed so ridiculous to me that the horror and the sorrow that I saw as my past and my future instantly metamorphosed into a destiny I shared with everyone else, which I didn’t wish to dwell on too much. I had at last learned a piece of knowledge that could never be forgotten: no one could ever be himself. I knew full well that the old fellow that I saw as someone sunk deep in his own troubles waiting in line at the bus stop was in fact keeping alive the ghost of some ‘real’ person whose shoes he had wished to step into many years ago. I knew that the hale and hearty mom who took her kid out sunning in the park had sacrificed herself to become the copy of another mother who took her child to the park. I knew that melancholics walking slowly out of movie houses, or unfortunates fidgeting in crowded streets and noisy coffeeshops were all being haunted day and night by the ghosts of their originals that they wanted to emulate.”
They sat smoking at the breakfast table. The more the woman went on, and the warmer the room got, the more Galip felt an irresistible feeling of sleepiness wrap itself gradually around his body; it was like the feeling of innocence that can be experienced only in one’s dreams. When he asked if he could take a nap on the sofa next to the radiator, Belkis began telling him the story of the Prince, which she thought was “related to all this stuff.”
Yes, long ago there lived a prince who had discovered that the most crucial problem in life was to be oneself, or not to be oneself, but as soon as Galip began animating the story’s details in his imagination, he initially felt that he was being transformed into someone else, and then into someone who fell asleep.
Chapter Eighteen
THE DARK VOID
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables
I went to see the building one afternoon after many years. I’d walked along that perpetually crowded street so very often, on those same sidewalks where during their midday break necktied but slovenly high-school students toting their school bags shove each other around, and where husbands pass on their way home from work and housewives from their get-togethers, but I’d never gone back after all these years just to look at that building again, the apartment building which had once meant so much to me.
It was an evening in winter. Darkness had fallen early and smoke from the chimneys had descended on the narrow avenue like a foggy night. Lights were on in two floors only: dim, dispirited lights in two business offices where people worked late. Otherwise, the façade of the building was in total darkness. Dark curtains had been closed in dark apartments; the windows were as empty and frightening as the eyes of a blind person. What I saw was a cold, insipid, and unprepossessing sight when compared to its past. One could not even imagine that once an extended family had lived here, on top of each other, in each other’s hair, and in a hubbub.
I enjoyed the rack and ruin which had pervaded the building like the punishment for the sins of youth. I knew that I was seized by this feeling only because I could never get my share of sinful bliss, and that seeing the decay gave me a taste of revenge, but at that moment I had something else on my mind: “I wonder what happened to the mystery hidden in the pit which became the air shaft. And what happened to the pit as well as what was inside it?”
I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors. It seethed with bats, poisonous snakes, rats, and scorpions like a well in a tale of fantasy. I had a feeling it was the very pit described in Şeyh Galip’s Beauty and Love and mentioned in Rumi’s Mathnawi. It so happened that sometimes when a pail was lowered into the pit, its rope was cut, and sometimes they said that there was a black ogre down there who was as big as a house. Don’t you kids go anywhere near it! we were told. One time when the doorman was dangled down from a rope that was tied to his belt, he returned from the zero-gravity journey he made into the infinite darkness of time with tears in his eyes and lungs blackened with cigarette tar for all eternity. I was aware of the fact that the desert witch who guarded the pit could also assume the shape of the doorman’s moonfaced wife, and that the pit was closely related to a secret that lay deep in the inhabitants’ memories. They were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about the pit, its memories and secrets as well as what it contained, like instinctive animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace. One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered that the pit had been covered over. It was then that I understood with horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this dark well the air shaft.
In reality, the new space the inhabitants called the air shaft in disgust and disgruntlement (unlike other Istanbulites who termed this kind of space a light well), was neither an air shaft nor a light well. When the place was first built, there were vacant lots on either side; it was not one of the ugly apartment buildings which later lined the street like a solid dirty wall. When the lot next to it was sold to a builder, the kitchen windows, the windows of the narrow and long inner corridor, and the windows of the little room that was used for different purposes on each floor (storage room, maid’s room, nursery, poor relation’s room, ironing room, a distant aunt’s room), all of which had a view of the mosque and the tram tracks, the girls’ lycée, Aladdin’s store, and the pit now faced the windows of the tall row-house style apartment building next door, only three yards away. That was how a lightless and oppressive space without a breath of air, which was reminiscent of an infinite well, was formed in between the dirty nondescript concrete walls and the windows that reflected each other and the floors below.
Soon pigeons discovered this space, which within a short time developed its own gloomy, old and heavy smell. They built roosts for their constantly increasing population on concrete ledges, on windowsills that broke off of their own accord, in the elbows of downspouts inaccessible to human hands—which in time became places that no one would want to touch—where they deposited their profusion of droppings. At times insolent seagulls, who are harbingers not only of meteorological catastrophe but also of other nebulous nastinesses, would join them, and so would black crows who lost their bearing at midnight and smashed into the windows in the dark well. One sometimes came across the corpses of these winged creatures, which the mice had picked to shreds on the obscured floor, as one ventured into the doorman’s airless low-ceilinged apartment, bending over in order to get through a low iron door that was reminiscent of cell doors (creaked like a dungeon door, too). Other things could be found on the repulsive basement floor that was encrusted with dirt a lot worse than manure: shells of pigeon eggs stolen by mice who went up the spouts to the upper stories, unlucky forks and odd socks that had slipped from flower-print tablecloths and sleepy bedsheets shaken out the windows and fallen into the petroleum-colored void, knives, dust cloths, cigarette butts, shards of glass and lightbulbs and mirrors, rusty bed springs, armless pink dolls that still batted their plastic eyelashes hopelessly yet stubbornly, pages of some compromising magazine and newsprint that had carefully been torn into tiny pieces, busted balls, soiled children’s underpants, horrifying photographs that had been ripped to shreds …
At times the doorman went from flat to flat showing one of these objects, which he held up by the corner in disgust as if he were taking around a criminal for identification, but the inhabitants in the building would not own up to any suspect articles that returned unexpectedly out of the slime of the nether world: “Not ou
rs,” they’d say. “Fell down there, did it?”
It was a place they wanted to escape from like a fear they wanted to consign to oblivion and yet were unable to. They mentioned the place as if talking about some ugly, contagious disease: the void was a cesspool they themselves could, if they were not careful, accidentally fall into like the unfortunate objects swallowed up by it; it was a nest of evil that had been slyly insinuated into their lives. No doubt, the children were sick so often because this place gave them germs, those germs that were constantly discussed in the newspapers, as well as giving them the fear of ghosts and of death, which they began talking about at an early age. The strange odors that came in the windows and at times surrounded the building like free-floating terror also originated from that place; one could very well imagine that the whammies and the jinxes, too, seeped in from the dark gap between the buildings. Like the heavy dark-blue smoke in the gap, the catastrophes that befell the inhabitants (bankruptcy, debt, runaway dads, incest, divorce, infidelity, jealousy, death) were also connected in their minds to the history of this dark void: like the pages of books they didn’t want to remember which got jumbled together in their memory banks.
But, thank God, there is always someone who’s willing to go through the forbidden pages of such books to find treasures. Children (ah, children!), shivering with fear in the corridor where the light was kept off in order to save on electricity, slipped through the deliberately drawn curtains to press their foreheads curiously on the windows overlooking the dark void. Back in the days when all the cooking was done in Grandpa’s flat, the maid would yell into the dark void that dinner was on the table for the benefit of the inhabitants below (and in the next flat), and when the mother and son duo exiled to the attic apartment was not invited, they’d leave their kitchen window open to keep an eye on the subterfuges and the food prepared below. Some nights a deaf mute would stare into the dark void until his grandmother caught him at it. The servant girl daydreamed in her tiny room, staring into that place as she sorrowed along with the downspouts on rainy days, and so did the young man who would return victoriously to the building where a family which subsequently collapsed could not manage to survive.
