by Orhan Pamuk
But what scared him was the definite feeling that the objects had other meanings as well. While he stared at the brass faucet, he thought it signified “brass faucet” as in the vocabulary exercise, but he was excited to sense that the faucet could just as well signify something else. The black telephone on the sheet, in addition to representing the concept of the telephone as in the pages of a foreign-language textbook, denoting that familiar instrument which once plugged in connects us to other voices, also connoted another meaning that made Galip shiver with excitement.
How could he enter the arcane world of secondary meanings and discover the mystery? He felt the thrill of being at the threshold of this realm, but he just couldn’t take the first step in. In Rüya’s detective novels, when the puzzle was solved at the end, while the second realm which had been under wraps was illuminated the first one would now sink into the darkness of oblivion. When around midnight, stuffing her face with the roasted chickpeas from Aladdin’s, Rüya announced, “The murderer turns out to be the retired colonel avenging himself for an insult!” Galip surmised that his wife had already forgotten all the details in the book rife with English butlers, cigarette lighters, dinner tables, porcelain cups, guns, and that she would only remember the new secret meaning of the world that these objects and persons signified. But, at the end of the horribly translated book, the reposited objects, with the help of the hardboiled detective, placed Rüya in another world. Such objects, however, could so far offer Galip no more than the hope for a new world. In an effort to solve the enigma, Galip carefully observed the junk dealer who had arranged these mysterious objects on the sheet, as if to read the meaning in the old guy’s face.
“How much for the telephone?”
“You a buyer?” said the junk dealer, initiating the bargaining procedure guardedly.
Galip was thrown by the unexpected question concerning his identity. A thought flashed through his mind: “See, I too am considered the signpost for something other than myself!” Still, the world he wanted to enter was not this one but another sphere that Jelal had spent his life creating. He felt that Jelal, by naming things and telling stories, had been building the walls and concealing the keys to this world where he had secreted himself. The dealer’s face lit up for a moment with the prospect of making a deal, then it reassumed its former dullness.
“What’s this for?” Galip said, pointing out a simple little lamp base.
“Table leg,” said the dealer, “but some people stick ’em on the ends of curtain cornices. Could make a doorknob too.”
When Galip got to the Atatürk Bridge, he was thinking, “From now on, I will only observe faces.” The brief brightness in the faces that went by on the bridge was for a moment aggrandized in his mind like the dilating question marks in photonovels translated from other languages, then, along with the question, the face was also nullified, having left only a slight trace. Even though he came close to making a connection between the view of the city from the bridge and the cumulative meaning the faces created in his mind, it was a misapprehension. Although it was possible to perceive the city’s old age, its misfortune, its lost splendor, its sorrow and pathos in the faces of the citizens, it was not the symptom of a specifically contrived secret but of a collective defeat, history, and complicity. In the wake of the tugboats, the cold leaden-blue waters of the Golden Horn took on a frightening brown hue.
By the time he entered a coffeehouse on a backstreet behind the so-called subway, Galip had observed seventy-three new faces. He sat down at a table, pleased with what he had seen. After ordering his tea, he took the page of newsprint out of his coat pocket and began automatically rereading Jelal’s column. The words, the sentences, and the letters were no longer fresh, yet, as he read them, Galip felt that some ideas that had not previously occurred to him were being verified: although these ideas did not emerge out of Jelal’s article but were Galip’s own, in some odd way Jelal’s article included them too. When he became aware of the parallels between his own ideas and Jelal’s, Galip felt the same sort of inner peace as in his childhood when he was sure at times that he had succeeded in impersonating someone he wanted to emulate.
On the table, there was a piece of paper that had been shaped into a cone. The sunflower-seed hulls scattered next to it indicated that some vendor had sold the seeds in this paper cone to persons who’d sat at this table prior to Galip. Looking at the edges of the paper, Galip realized that it had been torn out of a school notebook. He read the painstaking child’s handwriting on the other side: “September 6, 1972. Unit 12. Homework: Our home, our garden. There are four trees in our garden. Two poplars, a large willow and a small willow. My father built a wall around our garden using stones and wire fencing. A house is a shelter that protects people from the cold in the winter and the heat in the summer. Home is a place that safeguards us against harm. Our house has 1 door, 6 windows, 2 chimneys.” Underneath the text, drawn with colored pencils, there was an illustration of the house inside a walled garden. The roof tiles had initially been drawn individually, then the whole roof had been impatiently scratched over in red. Galip felt his sense of inner peace increase when he realized that the number of doors, windows, trees, and chimneys verified those in the essay.
It was with this feeling of peace that he turned the unused side of the page over and began to write rapidly. He had no doubt the words he wrote in between the lines in the paper signified certain facts that became real just like the words that the kid had written. It was as if he had lost his words and his tongue for many years and had now retrieved them thanks to this page of homework. He made a list of all the clues, which he wrote in small letters; and when he came to the end of the page, he thought, “It was all so easy!” Then he thought, “Just to make sure that Jelal and I think alike, I have to see many more faces.”
After drinking his tea while watching the faces in the coffeehouse, he went back out into the cold. On one of the streets behind Galata Palace Lycée, he saw an elderly woman wearing a kerchief who walked along talking to herself. He read that all lives are similar in the face of a little girl who stooped down to emerge from under the half-closed shutter of a grocery store. On the face of a young girl in a faded dress, who walked staring at her rubber shoes that kept slipping on the ice, it was written that she knew the nature of anxiety.
When Galip went in and sat down in another coffeehouse, he took the page of homework out of his pocket and quickly began reading it as if reading Jelal’s column. He was well aware now that he could locate Jelal if he acquired Jelal’s memory bank by reading his work over and over. That meant, in order to get the memory, he first had to discover the repository where Jelal’s complete works were hidden. It was having read the homework so many times that had made it possible for him to figure out that such a museum had to be a “home”: “A place that safeguards us against harm.” As he kept reading the homework, he felt deep inside himself the innocence of the kid who could dauntlessly name all objects, so much so that he thought he could easily come up with the location of the place where Rüya and Jelal were waiting for him. But sitting at the table, he was unable to do much more than write in new clues on the other side of the homework every time he went into a tizzy with the realization.
By the time he was out on the street once again, Galip had eliminated some of the clues and given prominence to others: They could not be outside of the city since Jelal could not live anywhere but in Istanbul. They couldn’t be on the Anatolian side, across the Bosphorus, seeing how it wasn’t “historical” enough to suit him. Rüya and Jelal couldn’t have holed up at a mutual friend’s since they didn’t have such a friend. Rüya couldn’t be at one of her friends’ either because Jelal would never be caught dead going to such a place. They couldn’t stay in those hotel rooms devoid of memories, even though they were brother and sister, because a man and a woman together would look fishy.
In the next coffeehouse, he was sure that he was at least on the right track. He wanted to walk to Tak
sim through the backstreets in Beyoğlu, toward Nişantaşı, Şişli, and the very heart of his own past. He remembered Jelal expounding in one of his pieces on the names of Istanbul streets. He noticed the photo on the wall of a late-lamented wrestler about whom Jelal had written at length. It was a black-and-white photo, the kind that came as the centerfold of the old Life magazines which got framed and graced the walls of many a barber, haberdasher, and greengrocer. Galip was studying the expression in the face of the Olympic medalist, who had his hands planted on his hips and smiled modestly at the camera, when he remembered that the man had died in a traffic accident. That’s why the accident that took place seventeen years ago and the modest expression in the wrestler’s face were fused together in his mind, as had happened so many times before, and Galip couldn’t help but think the traffic accident was some sort of sign.
It went to show that moments of coincidence were necessary which would fuse the facts with the imagination, creating the signs of an entirely different story. “Incidentally,” Galip reflected when he had come out of the coffeehouse and was walking toward Taksim on one of the backstreets, “looking at the tired old horse in front of that cart next to the curb on Hasnun Galip Street, I need to consult the recollection of the large horse that I’d seen in my alphabet book when Grandma was teaching me to read and write. In turn, the large alphabet horse under which it said HORSE reminds me of Jelal who lived alone during the same years in the attic apartment in the building on Teşvikiye Avenue, and of the apartment itself which Jelal had furnished in accordance with his taste and memories. Then, I am led to think that the apartment could be a sign of the hold Jelal has on my own life.”
But years had gone by since Jelal had vacated the flat. Galip came to a halt, thinking he might also be screwing up interpreting the signs. He had no doubt that he’d be lost in the city if he came to think his senses were misleading him. Fictions were what kept him aloft, tales that his senses stumbled on, groping like a blindman to locate and recognize objects. He was still on his feet only because he had managed to construct a story out of the signs and images as he went all over the city. He was sure that the people and the world around him also managed to abide on the strength of stories.
When he went into yet another coffeehouse to sit down, hanging on to his optimism, Galip was able to review “his situation.” The words in the list of clues seemed as simple and comprehensible as the words in the homework on the other side of the page. On the black-and-white TV in the far corner of the room, a soccer game was in progress on a snowy field. The marking lines on the field and the muddy soccer ball were black. Aside from those who played cards on the bare tables, everyone watched this black soccer ball.
Walking out of the coffeehouse, Galip thought the mystery he was seeking was as clear as the black-and-white soccer match. All that was necessary was to keep looking at faces and manifestations and going wherever his feet took him. Istanbul was chock-full of coffeehouses; a person could walk the entire city, stopping at some coffeehouse every couple of hundred yards.
He suddenly found himself in the crowd that came out of a movie house near Taksim. The faces of the people who walked out absentmindedly, staring at their feet, their hands in their pockets, or walking arm in arm up the steps into the street, were loaded with such suggestive meaning that Galip thought even his own nightmarish story was not all that significant. In the faces of the moviegoers was the serenity of those who, having immersed themselves in some fiction up to their ears, have managed to forget their own sorrow. They were simultaneously in this miserable street and also in the tale where they wished to be. Their memory banks which had long been bankrupted by dolor and defeat were now replenished by a profound story which had fully and gently soothed their recollections of pain. “They are under the impression that they are someone else!” Galip thought longingly. For a moment he wished he too had seen the same movie as the crowd and could disappear and become someone else. He could see that these people, as they looked into ordinary store windows, were returning to the boring world of familiar and recognizable things. “They go easy on themselves!” Galip thought.
On the other hand, to become someone else, you needed to use all your determination. By the time Galip ended up at Taksim Square, he was resolved to jog his whole willpower to this end. “I am someone else!” he told himself. It was a pleasant feeling, altering not only the frozen sidewalks under his feet, and the square surrounded by billboards for Coca-Cola and canned food, but also his own person from head to toe. Repeating the sentence with resolution, one could make oneself believe the whole world had been transformed, but going that far wasn’t all that necessary. “I am someone else,” Galip said to himself. He listened with pleasure to the music suffused with the memories and the sorrows of a person he didn’t wish to name, rising inside him like a new life. Taksim Square, one of the basic landmarks of his life, with buses circling around it like overgrown turkeys, slow trolleys like absentminded lobsters, and obscure areas resolved to remain in the dark, was gradually transformed within the music and turned into the gussied-up “modern” square in an impoverished, hopeless country where Galip had set foot for the first time. The snow-covered Statue of the Republic, the grand Ionic Stairway that led nowhere, and the “Opera” House which Galip had been pleased to watch going up in a blaze ten years ago had also become transformed into the actual pieces that belonged to the imaginary country they were meant to signify. Among the agitated crowds at the bus stops, or the people who elbowed their way into transports, Galip could not see any mysterious faces, not even a plastic bag which could be a sign for a parallel universe under wraps.
So, without feeling any need to go into coffeehouses, he made his way from Harbiye straight to Nişantaşı. Much later, when he believed that he had found the place he was looking for, he would remain uncertain as to the identity he had assumed along the way. “I had not yet totally convinced myself by then of having become Jelal,” he would reason later on, surrounded by the old pieces, old notebooks, and newspaper clippings that illuminated Jelal’s past in its entirety. “I hadn’t yet totally left myself behind then.” He had regarded what he saw like a tourist who, on account of his plane having been delayed, was spending half a day at some city he had never imagined himself visiting: The statue of Atatürk signified that there had been a prominent military hero in this country’s past; the crowds jammed into the muddy but brightly lit movie theater entrances signaled that the populace, bored on a Sunday afternoon, distracted themselves watching dreams imported from other countries; the salesmen in sandwich and pastry shops looking out the store windows into the street holding their knives meant that their sad dreams and memories were fading out; and the dark, bare trees in the middle of the avenue were the sign of a national sorrow that became darker as it descended in the afternoon. “My God, what is there to do in this city, on this avenue, at this hour?” Galip had murmured only to remember that he had picked up this invocation from one of Jelal’s old pieces which he’d clipped and saved.
It had become dark by the time he got to Nişantaşı. The smell of engine exhaust intensified by traffic jams on winter evenings and the smoke from the chimneys of the apartment buildings pervaded the narrow sidewalks. Galip calmly inhaled the pungent smell which he thought was strangely particular to this quarter. On Nişantaşı Corner, the desire to be someone else arose so strongly in him that he imagined he could apprehend the façades of apartment buildings, storefronts, bank billboards, and neon signs as completely different and novel things. The feeling of lightness and adventure that transformed the quarter where he’d lived for so many years into someplace else altogether penetrated deep inside Galip as if it would never leave him again.
Instead of crossing the street to his own place, he turned left on Teşvikiye Avenue. Galip was so pleased with the feeling that permeated his whole body, and the possibilities offered by the personality he’d assumed were so attractive, that he filled his eyes with new sights like a patient released from
the hospital where he’d been sick for years within four walls. “So, the display window of the pudding shop looked all along like the well-lit showcase of a jewelry store,” he felt like saying. “So, the street was quite narrow and the sidewalks all crooked!”
In his childhood, too, it so happened that he used to watch objectively his second self who left his own body and soul behind. “Now he’s going by the Ottoman Bank,” Galip thought, as if he were tracking down the alternative identity he used to assume in his childhood; “Now he’s going by the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, without even giving it a glance, where he lived for years with his mom, dad, and grandparents. Now he stops to look in the window of the pharmacy where the son of the woman who gave shots sits at the cash register. Now he goes by the police station without any trepidation, and now he fondly regards the mannequins placed among the Singer sewing machines as if they were old friends. Now he walks like a goal-oriented, determined person toward the mystery, toward the heart of a plot that has been schemed painstakingly for so many years.”
He crossed to the other side of the street and doubled back, only to cross the street once more and walk under the precious few linden trees, billboards, and balconies all the way to the mosque. By going a little farther up or down the street each time, he enlarged his “field of research,” and each time he carefully observed and recorded in his memory the details he hadn’t been able to perceive before on account of his hapless former personality: In Aladdin’s display window, among the piles of old newspapers, toy guns, and nylon stockings, there happened to be a switchblade; the traffic arrow indicating the obligatory direction into Teşvikiye Avenue pointed instead to the Heart-of-the-City Apartments; despite the cold weather, the crusts of bread that had been left for pigeons and cats on the low walls around the mosque had become moldy; some of the words in the political slogans scrawled along the portals of the girls’ lycée had double meanings; out of his photo on the wall in a classroom where the lights had been left on, Atatürk was looking at the Heart-of-the-City Apartments through dusty windowpanes; the hand of someone with strange sensibilities had pinned safety pins on the rosebuds in the florist’s window. The snazzy mannequins in the window of a new leather apparel shop were also staring at the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, at the top floor where once Jelal had lived and later Rüya with her parents.
