The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  Let us take a cursory look at the treasures they saw: the images of women and girls on the foggy kitchen windows but whose voices could not be heard; the back of a ghostly shadow slowly bending and rising in prayer; the leg of an elderly woman resting next to an illustrated magazine on a bed where the quilt has not been turned down (if one stays put, one will see a hand flip the pages and languorously scratch the leg); the forehead pressed on the cold windowpane that belongs to the young man who has decided that he will one day return victoriously to the bottomless pit and discover the secret concealed by the inhabitants. (The same young man watching his own reflection would sometimes see, reflected in the window opposite his from the flat below, his enchantingly beautiful stepmother who was in a reverie like himself.) Let us also add that these images are framed by the heads and bodies of pigeons crouched in the darkness, that the frame is dark blue, that slight movements of the curtains, lights that momentarily go on and off, and rooms that are well lighted will make bright orange tracks on the windows and in the sad and guilty memories transformed into these images: We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let’s do some dreaming. Have yourselves a very good Sunday, my dear readers.

  Chapter Nineteen

  SIGNS OF THE CITY

  Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is “Who in the world am I?”

  —LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland

  When Galip woke up, he saw that Belkis had changed her clothes and was now wearing a petroleum-colored skirt which reminded him that he was in a strange place with a strange woman. She had also completely changed her face and her hair. She’d combed her hair back like Ava Gardner’s in 55 Days at Peking, and she had painted her lips the same Supertechnirama Red as in the film. Looking at her new face, Galip suddenly thought that people had been taking him in for quite some time.

  Not long after, Galip had already removed the newspaper in the pocket of his overcoat, which the woman had fastidiously slipped on a hanger and put in the closet, and had spread the paper on the breakfast table, which had been cleared with the same fastidiousness. When he reread Jelal’s column, the notes he’d previously made in the margins and the words and syllables he had underlined seemed silly to him. It was so obvious the marked words were not the ones which would reveal the secret in the piece that Galip entertained the passing thought that the secret did not exist: it seemed as if the sentences he was reading signified themselves and, at the same time, something else. So much so that every sentence regarding the hero in Jelal’s Sunday column, who could not communicate to mankind an incredible discovery he had made on account of having lost his memory, seemed like it was a sentence that came out of another story concerning some other human condition known and understood by everyone. This was so clear and so true that there was no necessity to rewrite and to rearrange certain letters, syllables, and words he had chosen. In order to decipher the “hidden” meaning in the piece, all that was needed was merely to read the piece in good faith. As his eyes traveled from word to word, Galip believed that he was studying the City’s and Life’s secrets, as well as seeking the location and the significance of the place where Rüya and Jelal were hiding out; but each time he raised his head from the text and saw Belkis’s new face, he lost his good faith. He hoped he could keep his optimism intact and tried for a while to start from scratch rereading the text, but he could not clearly discern the secret meaning that he thought might become apparent to him. He felt the thrill of almost discovering the mystery concerning existence and the world, but whenever he tried thinking through the secret he was looking for by spelling it out, the face of the woman who watched him from her corner appeared in front of his eyes. After a while, having decided that he might be able to get close to the secret through the intellect, not through faith and intuition, he began making fresh notes in the margins and marking entirely different syllables and words. He had lost himself in his task when Belkis approached the table.

  “Jelal Salik’s column,” she said. “I’m aware that he’s your uncle. Do you know why his underground mannequin looked so creepy last night?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Galip. “But he’s not my uncle, he’s my uncle’s son.”

  “Because the mannequin looked so much like him,” Belkis said. “Sometimes when I went up to Nişantaşı in hopes of running into you, I’d see him instead wearing the same outfit.”

  “That’s the raincoat he wore years ago,” Galip said. “He used to wear it a lot back then.”

  “He still wears it, going around Nişantaşı like a ghost,” said Belkis. “What are those notes you’re taking in the margins?”

  “They are not about the column,” Galip said, folding the newspaper. “They concern a polar explorer who gets lost. Because he is lost, someone else steps in and gets lost in his place. The first missing person, the mystery of whose loss is deepened by the loss of the second person, apparently goes on to live in a godforsaken town under a different name, but it seems he gets himself killed one day.”

  When Galip got through telling his story, he realized that he’d have to tell it again. As he told it again, he felt great anger against all the people who forced him to tell a story over and over again. He felt like saying: “Why can’t everyone be himself so that no one needs to tell any stories!” He’d gotten to his feet while he was retelling the story, and now he slipped the folded newspaper back into the pocket of his old overcoat.

  “Are you leaving?” Belkis asked timidly.

  “I haven’t finished my story yet,” Galip said with irritation.

  As he finished telling the story, Galip had a feeling that there was a mask on the woman’s face. If he pulled away the mask with the Supertechnirama Red lips from the woman’s face, the total meaning would be clearly visible on the countenance underneath it, but he couldn’t figure out what that meaning might be. It was as if he were playing the game of “Why Are We Here?” he played in his childhood when he was bored out of his skull. Consequently, he was able to tell his story, as he did in his childhood, focusing on something else while playing the game. For a moment he thought the reason why Jelal was so attractive to women was because he could tell a story while he simultaneously thought about other things; but then, Belkis did not look like a woman who was listening to one of Jelal’s stories.

  “Doesn’t Rüya ever wonder where you are?” Belkis said.

  “No, she doesn’t,” said Galip. “I’ve been known to go home past midnight lots of times. On account of missing politicos, or swindlers who take out loans under false names. I’ve been gone until morning many a time, having had to deal with mysterious tenants who vanish without paying the rent, or unhappy bigamists who remarry using false identifications.”

  “But it’s past noon,” Belkis said. “If I were Rüya waiting for you at home, I’d wish you’d call soon as you could.”

  “I don’t want to call.”

  “If it were me waiting for you, I’d be worried sick,” Belkis went on. “I’d be at the window, listening for the phone to ring. I’d be unhappier still, thinking that you didn’t call in spite of the fact that you knew I was worried and unhappy. Come on, give her a ring. Tell her you’re here, with me.”

  When the woman brought the receiver to him as if it were a toy, Galip called home. There was no answer.

  “Nobody’s home.”

  “Where could she be?” said the woman playfully.

  “Don’t know,” said Galip.

  He opened up the newspaper again and turned back to Jelal’s column. He read the text again and again, so many times and for such a long time that the words lost their meaning and turned into mere shapes composed of letters. A while later, Galip thought he could write this piece himself, that he could write like Jelal. Before long he took his coat out of the closet and put it on, folded the paper carefully, and put the column, which he’d ripped
out of it, into his pocket.

  “You leaving?” said Belkis. “Don’t go.”

  In the taxi he finally managed to flag down, Galip took a final look at the familiar street, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to forget Belkis’s face insisting that he not go; he wished the woman could have stayed in his mind wearing another face, inhabiting another story. He thought of instructing the driver, “Such and such street and step on it,” as in Rüya’s detective novels, but merely said he was going to the Galata Bridge.

  As he was walking across the bridge, lost in the Sunday crowd, he was seized by a feeling that the solution to the secret he had been blindly searching for all these years, without ever realizing until just now that it was what he sought, was immediately at hand. Somewhere in a dark corner of his mind, as in a dream, he was aware that this feeling was a misapprehension, but the two sensations existed together in Galip’s mind without disturbing him in the least. He observed conscripts out on a pass, people out fishing, families with children hurrying to catch the boat. They all inhabited the secret Galip was working on, but they were not aware of it. When, in a moment, Galip solved it, they would all become aware of this fact which had for many years been impressed deeply on their lives—including the father out for a Sunday visit along with his sneakered son and the infant he was carrying, and the mother and daughter who both wore scarves sitting on a bus that went by.

  He was on the bridge, walking on the Sea of Marmara side, when he began making for people as if he were going to run into them: the meaning in their faces which had been missing, stale, or used up for many years seemed to light up for a moment. While they tried figuring out who the reckless person was, Galip looked into their eyes and their faces as if reading their secret.

  Most wore old jackets and overcoats, worn and faded. Walking along, they considered the whole world as ordinary as the sidewalk they were on, but they did not have a real foothold on this world. They were preoccupied; yet if they were provoked a little, a kind of curiosity that connected them to a profound meaning in their past surfaced from the depths of their memory banks and appeared, for a moment, on the masklike expressions on their faces. “I wish I could bother them!” Galip thought. “I wish I could tell them the story of the Prince.” The story he had in mind was now brand-new; he felt he had lived through the story himself and remembered it.

  Most people on the bridge were carrying plastic bags. He stared at the bags, which had paper sacks, bits of metal, plastic, or newspapers sticking out of them, as if he were seeing plastic bags for the first time, and he assiduously read what was written on them. He was heartened for a moment, having sensed that the words and the letters on the bags signified the “other” or the “real” reality. But just as the meaning in the faces that went by him faded following the moment of brightness, the words and syllables on the plastic bags, after being momentarily suffused with a new meaning, also vanished in turn. Still, Galip kept on reading for quite some time: “… Pudding Shop … Ata Village … Turkmanufac … Dried fruits … it is the hour of … Palaces…”

  On a bag that belonged to an old guy who was out fishing, he saw the picture of a stork instead of letters and realized that pictures could be read just as well as letters. He saw a bag with the faces of a pair of happy parents and their son and daughter who regarded the world with hope, on another bag there were a pair of fish, on others were pictures of shoes, maps of Turkey, silhouettes of buildings, cigarette packs, black cats, roosters, horseshoes, minarets, baklava, trees. Obviously they were all signs of a mystery. But what was the mystery? He saw an owl on the bag sitting next to an old woman who sold bird feed for the pigeons in front of the New Mosque. When he realized that this owl was either the same owl as the one in the imprint on the detective novels that Rüya read or its cunningly concealed twin, Galip clearly felt the presence of a “hand” that secretly brought order to things. There it was, another trick perpetrated by the “hand” which must be tipped and exposed; the owl had a secret significance but nobody besides Galip gave two hoots. Even though they were in it up to their ears, buried deep in the secret that had been lost!

  So that he could examine the owl more closely, Galip bought a cup of corn from the old bat who looked like a witch, and he scattered the feed for the pigeons. Instantly, a black and ugly mass of pigeons closed in on the feed like an umbrella of wings. The owl on the bag was the very same owl as the one on Rüya’s detective novels. Galip was angry with a pair of parents who were proudly and blithely watching their daughter feed the pigeons because they were unaware of this owl, of this obvious truth, of other signs, of any sign whatsoever, of anything at all. They didn’t have a clue, not even a hint of suspicion. They were oblivious. He imagined he was the protagonist of the detective novel he imagined Rüya was reading, waiting for him to come home. The puzzle that had to be solved was between himself and that covert hand which itself remained hidden in spite of having arranged everything masterfully, pointing to a significance that was top secret.

  When he himself happened to be in the vicinity of the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent, it was enough for him to see an apprentice carrying a framed picture of the same mosque made out of tiny beads to conclude that if words, letters, pictures on the plastic bags were signs, so were what they signified. The loud colors in the picture were more real than the mosque itself. Not only were inscriptions, faces, pictures the pieces in the game played by the hidden hand, but so was everything. As soon as he understood this, he realized that the district known as Dungeon Door, where he was walking through a jumble of streets, also had a special significance that nobody was aware of. Patient like someone nearing the end of a crossword puzzle, he felt that everything was about to fall into place.

  He sensed that the garden shears he saw in jerry-built stores and on crooked sidewalks in the neighborhood, the screwdrivers ornamented with stars, the NO PARKING signs, the tomato-paste tins, the calendars on the walls of cheap restaurants, the Byzantine aqueduct hung with plexiglass letters, the ponderous padlocks on roll-down store shutters, were all signs of the secret meaning. If he wished, he could read these articles and signs as if reading human faces. That was how, having realized that pliers were the sign for “attentiveness,” bottled olives for “patience,” and the contented driver in the billboard advertising tires for “approaching the goal,” he decided he was approaching his goal with attentiveness and patience. Yet all around him were signs which were much more formidable to fathom: telephone wires, a circumcisor’s signboard, traffic signs, detergent boxes, shovels without handles, illegible political slogans, pieces of shattered icicles on the sidewalks, numbers on doors pertaining to the municipal electric services, traffic arrows, pieces of blank paper … They might perhaps be clarified shortly, yet everything was completely messed up, wearisome, and noisy. On the other hand, the protagonists in Rüya’s detective novels lived in a snug and equanimous world determined by a requisite number of clues that the author had presented them.

  Even so, the Mosque of Ahi Çelebi consoled him, serving as the sign of a comprehensible fiction. Many years ago, Jelal had written about a dream in which he saw himself in this little mosque in the company of Muhammad and some of the saints. When he’d gone to consult an oracle in the Kasımpaşa district to get his dream interpreted, he was told he would keep writing until the very end of his life. He would have such a career of writing and imagining that he would remember his life as a long journey even if he never stirred out of his house. Galip had figured out much later that the article was an adaptation of a well-known piece by Evliya Çelebi, the historical travel writer.

  He went by the Fruit Market, thinking, “Therefore, the first time I read it, the story presented one meaning, then a completely different meaning after the second reading.” He had no doubt that the third and fourth readings of Jelal’s column would each time reveal yet other meanings: Jelal’s stories, even if they signified something else each time, gave Galip the impression that he was on target, going through a se
ries of doors just like the puzzles in children’s magazines. Absentmindedly walking through the jumble of streets in the Market, Galip wished he could instantly be someplace where he could go through all of Jelal’s columns once more.

  Just outside the Market, he saw a junk dealer. The dealer had spread a large bedsheet on the sidewalk and put out a series of objects that enthralled Galip, who’d come out of the racket and stench of the marketplace without having arrived at any sort of conclusion: a couple of pipe elbows, old records, a pair of black shoes, a lamp base, a broken pair of pliers, a black telephone, two bedsprings, a mother-of-pearl cigarette holder, a wall clock that wasn’t running, White Russian banknotes, a brass faucet, a figurine carrying quivers which depicted a Roman goddess (Diana?), a picture frame, an old radio, a couple of doorknobs, a candy dish.

  Galip named all of them, deliberately enunciating the words, as he examined each one carefully. He felt that what actually made objects enchanting did not reside in the objects themselves but in the way they were being displayed. The elderly dealer had arranged these articles, which could be seen in any junk dealer’s display, four down and four across on the bedsheet, as if it were a great big checkerboard. The objects were equidistant from each other like checkers on a board with the requisite sixty-four squares; they did not touch each other, yet the acuity and the simplicity in their arrangement seemed to be not accidental but deliberate. So much so that Galip immediately thought of vocabulary tests in foreign-language textbooks; on those pages too he’d seen the pictures of sixteen objects, all lined up just like this, which he’d named with nouns in the new language. Galip felt like saying, with similar enthusiasm, “pipe, record, shoe, pliers…”