by Orhan Pamuk
Galip joined the mannequins in staring at the top floor for quite some time. It seemed reasonable to Galip that Jelal and Rüya could be up there, on the top floor that the mannequins’ gazes pointed to, feeling as he did like a fake hero modeled after those in the translated detective novels, which he heard about from Rüya, who had also been conceived in foreign lands, as were the mannequins themselves. He practically fled the premises and walked toward the mosque.
But he had to use all his power to do it. It was as if his legs refused to take him away from the Heart-of-the-City Apartments but wanted to go in the building immediately, run up the stairs to the top floor, and show him something upon arriving at that dark and scary place. Galip did not wish to dwell on the particulars of this image. While he walked away from the place using all his strength, he had a feeling that the sidewalks, the shops, the letters on the billboards, and the traffic signs went back to indicating their former significations. As soon as it hit him that the two of them were up there, he had an instant premonition of disaster and was frightened out of his skull. When he arrived at Aladdin’s corner, he couldn’t figure out if his fear intensified because he was near the police station or because he realized the traffic arrow no longer pointed at the Heart-of-the-City Apartments. He was so tired and confused, he needed to sit down somewhere so he could do a little thinking.
He went into the long-standing diner on the corner by the Teşvikiye—Eminönü dolmuş stop and asked for tea and a börek. Seeing how Jelal was so stuck on his own personal history and his eroding memory, what could be more natural than his renting or buying the flat where he had spent his youth and childhood? That way he’d be returning victoriously to the place he was kicked out of, while those who gave him the boot were broke and rotting in a dusty apartment on one of the unfashionable streets. Galip thought it was totally in character for Jelal to keep his victory from the family, aside from Rüya, and to cover his tracks in spite of living on the main avenue.
For the next few minutes, he turned his attention to a family that showed up at the counter: mom, dad, daughter, and son making do with supper at the diner after taking in their Sunday afternoon movie. The parents were the same age as Galip. From time to time the father buried himself in the newspaper which he’d produced out of his coat pocket; the mother used her eyebrows to supervise the fights that erupted between the kids, her hand traveling continuously between her small handbag and the table to produce things for the other three with the speed and dexterity of a magician pulling strange objects out of a hat: a hankie for the boy’s runny nose, a red pill for the father’s palm, a bobby pin for the girl’s hair, a cigarette lighter for the father, who was reading Jelal’s column, the same hankie for the boy’s nose, etc.
By the time Galip was done with his börek and tea, he had remembered that the father had been a classmate of his in middle school and high school. As he was going out the door, he heeded an inner urge to divulge this fact to the father, and as he became aware of a frightful burn scar on the man’s throat and right cheek, he recalled that the mother had been the loudmouth whiz kid who was also in the same class when he and Rüya attended Şişli Progressive High. The two children saw their chance to get even with each other while the adults went through the obligatory reminiscing and asking after each other, and Rüya, who completed the symmetry with the other, similar marriage, was also remembered with affection. Galip told them they didn’t have any children; Rüya waited for him at home reading detective novels; they were going to the Palace Theater in the evening, where he had gone to get tickets ahead of time, and on the way he had run into another one of their classmates, Belkis: Belkis, you know. Brown hair, medium height.
The tedious couple left no room for doubt, making their tedious point: “But there was no one in our class called Belkis!” Apparently they were in the habit of looking through their yearbook now and then, recalling everyone in turn with special anecdotes and reminiscences; that’s why they were so damn sure.
Out of the diner into the cold, Galip rapidly made for Nişantaşı Square. He had made up his mind that Rüya and Jelal would go to see the 7:15 Sunday evening show at the Palace, so he ran all the way to the theater; but they were not to be seen anywhere on the sidewalk or at the entrance. While he waited for them, he saw the photo of the woman in the film he’d seen yesterday, and he felt the desire to be with that woman in her world rise inside him once more.
They did not appear, and he wandered around for a time looking into display windows and reading the faces of the people who went by on the sidewalks; when he arrived in front of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments again, it was quite late. By eight o’clock every evening, the bluish light from the TV sets would be flickering in the windows of all the buildings with the exception of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments. Galip was carefully studying the blank windows in the building when he noticed a dark-blue piece of cloth tied on the iron grill of the balcony on the top floor. When the whole family lived here thirty years ago, the same kind of dark-blue cloth tied to the same iron grill used to be a signal for the water-man, who purveyed water in enameled containers loaded on his horse cart. From the position of the blue cloth he could figure out which flats were out of drinking water and brought the water up accordingly.
Galip decided that the cloth must be a signal too, and this presented to his mind different notions of how to read it. It might be a signal to tell him that Jelal and Rüya were there, or it might be a sign of Jelal’s nostalgic research into some details out of his past. At eight-thirty, he left his spot on the sidewalk and returned home.
The light cast by the lamps in the living room where he and Rüya sat together once, and not so very long ago, smoking and reading their books and papers, was unbearably full of memories and unbearably sad, like the pictures of a lost paradise that end up on the travel pages of the newspapers. Nowhere was there a sign that Rüya had come home or had stopped by: the familiar scents and shadows wanly greeted the tired husband returning to his nest. Abandoning these silent objects to the sad light of the lamps, Galip went into the dark hallway and then the dark bedroom. He took off his coat, groped for the bed, and fell into it on his back. The light from the living room and the streetlamps that seeped in through the hallway left shadows like thin-faced devils on the ceiling. He could not sleep.
Not long after getting out of bed, Galip knew exactly what he was going to do. He checked the TV programs in the paper, studied the films and the times they were being shown at the neighboring theaters, in spite of the fact that the show times never varied; he took a last glance at Jelal’s column; he went to the fridge and lifted out a few olives and a piece of feta cheese from the first signs of spoilage in their containers, found some crusts of bread, and ate. He stuffed random pages of newspaper into a largish envelope that he found in Rüya’s closet, and writing Jelal’s name on it took it along. By ten-fifteen, he was out of the house and across the street from the Heart-of-the-City Apartments again, this time on a spot further down the sidewalk.
Presently the stairway lights went on and Ismail, who’d been the building’s doorman for the longest time, took out the garbage cans and began, his cigarette dangling from his mouth, to empty them into the large barrel next to the chestnut tree. Galip crossed over.
“Ismail, hello there. I’m here to leave this envelope for Jelal.”
“It’s you, Galip!” the man said with the joy and anxiety of a high-school principal who recognizes an old student many years later. “But Jelal is not here.”
“I just happen to know he is here, but I’m not about to let anyone else in on it,” Galip said, entering the building resolutely. “Don’t you tell anyone, either. He gave me instructions, saying, leave the envelope with Ismail downstairs.”
Galip went down the stairs that had the same old stench of natural gas and fried fat and entered the doorman’s flat. Ismail’s wife, Kamer, was sitting in the same old armchair and watching a TV set that stood on the same stand that had once carried the r
adio.
“Kamer, look who’s here,” Galip said.
“Well, I’ll be…” said the woman, getting up to kiss him. “You all don’t remember us anymore.”
“How could we forget you?”
“You go past the building, but none of you ever thinks of stopping by!”
“I brought this for Jelal!” said Galip, pointing at the envelope.
“Was it Ismail who told you?”
“No, Jelal told me himself,” said Galip. “I definitely know he’s here, but don’t tell anyone else.”
“We’re keeping our mouths shut, aren’t we,” said the woman. “He gave us strict orders.”
“I know,” Galip said. “Are they upstairs now?”
“We don’t know anything at all. He comes and goes in the middle of the night when we’re sleeping. We only hear him. We take out his trash and deliver his paper. Sometimes the papers pile up, there under the door for days.”
“I’m not going upstairs,” Galip said. He scanned the flat as if picking out a place to leave the envelope: the dinner table covered with the same old blue-checkered oilcloth, the same faded curtains that shut out the view of legs going by and muddy automobile tires; the sewing basket, the iron, the candy dish, gas cooking plate, sooty radiators … On the nail pounded into the edge of the shelf above the radiator, Galip saw the key, hanging in its usual place.
“Let me make you some tea,” she said. “Take a seat on the edge of the bed.” She kept an eye on the tube. “What’s Rüya up to? Why are you two still without a kid?”
On the screen, which the woman couldn’t help but watch now, there appeared a young woman who was slightly reminiscent of Rüya. Her indeterminately colored hair was ruffled, her complexion was light, her gaze had the calmness of the childlike look Rüya affected. She was blithely applying her lipstick.
“Pretty woman,” Galip said quietly.
“Rüya is even prettier,” said Kamer, also quietly.
They watched respectfully, with an apprehensive kind of admiration. Galip skillfully snatched the key off the nail and put it in his pocket, slipping it next to the page of homework full of clues. The woman was none the wiser.
Through the small curtained window that faced on the street, Galip caught a glimpse of Ismail coming back into the building with the empty trash cans. When the power kicked in on the elevator, the picture on the tube got fuzzy for a moment, which gave Galip the chance to say goodbye. He went up the stairs and noisily made for the door. He opened the door and did not go out, but banged the door shut. Without making a sound, he walked back to the staircase, then tiptoed two flights up, unable to control his jitters. He sat down on the steps between the second and third floors, waiting for Ismail, who was returning the trash cans to the upper floors, to go down on the elevator. The lights in the stairwell went out suddenly. “The time-switch!” Galip murmured; in his childhood he had associated the name with magical journeys on a time machine. The lights went back on. While the doorman took the elevator down, Galip began slowly going up the stairs. On the door to the flat where he had once lived with his mom and dad, a lawyer had put up his brass nameplate. At the entrance to his grandparents’ flat, he saw a gynecologist’s shingle and an empty trash can. He climbed to the top floor.
On Jelal’s door there was neither a sign nor a name. Galip rang the doorbell routinely like an assiduous bill collector from municipal gas. He was ringing the bell a second time when the lights in the stairway went out again. There was no light at all showing under the door. His hand searched for the key in the bottomless well of his pocket while he rang the bell for the third and fourth times, and his finger was still pushing the bell when he found the key. “They are hiding in one of the rooms in there,” he reasoned. “They are sitting across from each other in two armchairs and waiting quietly!” At first he couldn’t fit the key in the lock; he was about to pronounce it the wrong key when the key clicked into place with an odd felicitousness that was surprising—like an addled memory that in a moment of lucidity becomes aware of both its own dotage and the haphazard order in the world. Galip became aware first of the darkness into which the door opened, and then of a phone beginning to ring in the dark flat.
Part Two
Chapter Twenty
THE PHANTOM ABODE
He felt as dreary as an empty house …
—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary
The phone had begun to ring three to four seconds after he opened the door, but Galip still felt apprehensive. What if there was a mechanical connection between the phone and the door, just like those alarm bells that ring ruthlessly in gangster films? The third time he heard the ring, he thought he might run smack into Jelal anxiously hurrying to get the phone in the dark apartment; on the fourth ring, he surmised that there was no one at home, on the fifth that there must be, reasoning that only someone who knew that the place was inhabited would keep ringing so insistently. On the sixth ring, Galip was groping around to locate the light switches, trying to remember the topography of this phantom-like flat in which he had last set foot fifteen years ago, and he was startled when he crashed into something. In the pitch dark, he made for the phone, running into other things and knocking them over. When he at last held the elusive receiver to his ear, his body had found a chair on its own and sat down.
“Hello?”
“So you finally got home!” said a voice he didn’t know at all.
“Yes.”
“Jelal Bey, I’ve been looking for you for days. Sorry to be disturbing you at this hour. But I’ve got to see you as soon as possible.”
“I can’t place your voice.”
“We met years ago at a Republic Day ball. I’d introduced myself to you, Jelal Bey, but I don’t suppose you’d remember it at this date. Later on, I wrote you a couple of letters under pseudonyms that I cannot now recall. One of them put forth a thesis that might bring to light the mystery behind Sultan Abdülhamit’s death. The other one concerned the university student conspiracy commonly known as the trunk murder. I was the one who intimated to you that there was a secret agent involved, and you, putting your sharp intelligence to work, looked into the matter and, having found out, brought it to light in your columns.”
“Yes.”
“Now I have another dossier at hand.”
“Leave it at the editorial offices.”
“But I know you haven’t been there for quite some time. Besides, I don’t know that I trust anyone at the paper where this urgent matter is concerned.”
“All right, in that case, leave it with the doorman.”
“I don’t have your address. The phone company won’t supply your address if all I have is the number. This phone must be under another name. There is no number for Jelal Salik anywhere in the book. There is, however, a listing for Jelalettin Rumi—which must be a pseudonym.”
“Didn’t whoever gave you my number also give out my address?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Who was it?”
“A friend we have in common. I’d rather tell you all about it when I see you. I’ve tried every conceivable ruse. I called your relatives. I talked to your dear aunt. I made trips to some places in Istanbul that I knew from reading your columns that you love—like the streets in Kurtuluş, Cihangir, the Palace Theater—hoping to run into you. Meanwhile, I found out that a team from British TV staying at the Pera Palas Hotel was also looking for you. Did you know that?”
“What’s this dossier about?”
“I’d rather not get into it on the phone. Let me have your address and I’ll be right there. Somewhere in Nişantaşı, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Galip said nonchalantly. “But these matters no longer interest me.”
“Come again?”
“Had you been reading my columns carefully, you’d have known that I’m no longer into this type of thing.”
“No, no, this is subject matter you’d be interested in. You may even want to share it with the British TV people. G
o ahead and give me your address.”
“I’m sorry,” Galip said with such cheerfulness that it even astonished him, “but I no longer talk to literature buffs.”
He hung up calmly. When his hand went out instinctively in the dark, he found the switch on the desk lamp next to him and turned it on. The room was lit up with a dull orange light, leading Galip to name the bewilderment and panic that seized him as “the mirage,” which is how he would later remember it.
The room was the exact replica of Jelal’s digs twenty-five or thirty years ago. The furniture, curtains, lamps, their placement, the colors, shadows, and smells were exactly the same. Some of the new articles were simulations of the old ones, bent on tricking Galip into believing that he had not lived through the quarter of a century that had gone by. But when he looked more closely, Galip almost felt convinced that things were not playing tricks on him, and that his life since his childhood had melted away by magic and was gone. The furniture that suddenly emerged out of the dangerous darkness was not new. The spell that made things seem new was the way these objects, which he would’ve thought had grown old, fallen apart, and perhaps even ceased to exist like his own memories, had suddenly reappeared after so many years wearing the same guise as when he’d last seen them and yet had all but forgotten. It was as if the old tables, the faded curtains, the dirty ashtrays, and the tuckered-out armchairs had not succumbed to the fate and the fictions dictated by Galip’s life and memories but, after a certain date (the day Uncle Melih and his family had arrived from Izmir and moved into the flat), had rebelled against the fate conceived for them and found other means of realizing their own private worlds. Once more, Galip figured out apprehensively that everything had been arranged so that it was identical to the way it had been when Jelal and his mother had lived here forty years ago and then when, as a cub reporter more than thirty years ago, he began to live here alone.
