The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  In his movie stuff, Jelal talked with pain and longing about some American movie stars’ faces as if these were translucent marble sculptures, or the silken surface of the invisible side of a planet, or deft tales from distant lands that are reminiscent of dreams. As he read these lines, Galip felt that the love interest that he and Jelal had in common was not so much Rüya and fiction but the harmony of this longing, reminiscent of barely audible strains of some pleasant music: He loved what he discovered, in concert with Jelal, reading maps, faces, and words; but he also feared it. He wanted to delve further into the pieces on film in order to apprehend the music, but he hesitated and stopped: Jelal never spoke about Turkish actors’ faces in the same vein; Turkish actors’ faces reminded Jelal of half-century-old telegrams in which the meaning, as well as the code, had been lost and forgotten.

  Now he knew all too well why the optimism that had enveloped his whole body while he was eating his breakfast and settling down at the desk had abandoned him. Jelal’s image had changed totally in his mind after the eight hours reading, and he himself had also become someone else. In the morning when he had good faith in the world, naïvely thinking that by working patiently he could solve the basic mystery the world kept from him, he had felt no longing to be someone else at all. But now, when the world’s mysteries got away from him, when the objects and texts in this room he thought he knew were transformed into incomprehensible signs from an alien world and into the maps of faces he couldn’t identify, Galip wanted to break loose from the person who was stuck with this desperate and tiresome outlook. When he began reading the columns relating to some of Jelal’s recollections in order to find the final clue which might explain Jelal’s relationship to Rumi and the Mevlevi order, it was dinnertime in the city and in the windows the blue light from the TV sets had started to reflect on Teşvikiye Avenue.

  Jelal had been interested in the Mevlevi order not only because he knew his readers would themselves be immersed in the subject, prompted by an incomprehensible sense of devotion, but also because his stepfather had been a Mevlevi. Unable to make ends meet as a dressmaker after she was divorced from Uncle Melih who took his own sweet time coming home from Europe and then North Africa, Jelal’s mother had married this man who attended a Mevlevi retreat next to a Byzantine cistern, in the district of Yavuz Sultan, and Galip had become aware of the fact through the man’s existence as a hunchback lawyer “who speaks through his nose” and goes to a secret ritual, described by Jelal with secular anger and Voltaire-like satire. Reading that during the time he lived under his stepfather’s roof Jelal earned money working as an usher at the movies, that he gave and took beatings in fights that often broke out in the dark crowded theaters, that he sold soda pop during the intermission, and that in order to increase the pop sales, he’d made a deal with the çörek maker getting him to put lots of salt and pepper in his braided buns, Galip identified with the usher, the brawling audience, the çörek maker, and finally—good reader that he was—with Jelal himself.

  So, reading a piece containing Jelal’s reminiscences of the days after he left his job at the theater in Şehzadebaşı, working for a bookbinder whose shop smelled of glue and paper, a sentence that caught Galip’s eye seemed to be a prediction that had been preconceived in relation to his present situation. It was one of those mediocre sentences employed by enthusiastic autobiographers who invent for themselves a sad but praiseworthy past: “I read whatever I could get my hands on,” Jelal had written, and that’s when Galip realized that Jelal was not speaking about the days he spent at the binder’s shop but about Galip himself who read whatever he could lay his hands on concerning Jelal.

  Before he went out at midnight, each time Galip thought of that sentence he considered it proof that Jelal knew what he, Galip, was up to at that very moment. So, he considered his past five days of ordeals not as his personal quest on Jelal and Rüya’s trail but as part of a game that Jelal (and perhaps also Rüya) had constructed for his benefit. Since this idea fell within the bounds of Jelal’s desire to exercise remote control over people tacitly—by setting up small traps, ambiguities, and fictions—Galip had a notion that his investigations in this living museum were signs not of his own freedom but of Jelal’s.

  He wanted to get out of the place as soon as possible, not only because he could no longer bear this suffocating feeling or his eyes aching from so much reading but because he couldn’t find anything to eat in the kitchen. He took Jelal’s navy-blue topcoat out of the coat closet and put it on so that Ismail the doorman and his wife Kamer, if they were still up, would sleepily imagine that the topcoat and legs they observed exiting the building belonged to Jelal. He went down the stairs without turning on the light and saw that no light seeped out of the doorman’s ground-level window through which he could observe the outside door. Since he didn’t have a key for the outside door, he couldn’t secure it properly. He was stepping out on the sidewalk when a momentary shiver went through him: he imagined the person he’d been avoiding thinking about, the man on the phone, might just materialize out of some dark corner. He fantasized that it was not the dossier containing proof of the conspiracy for a new military coup that was in the hands of this man, who didn’t seem unfamiliar at all, but something more horrible and deadly. But there was no one in the street. He envisioned the man on the phone following him around in the street. No, he was not emulating anyone but himself. “I call it like it is,” he said to himself as he went by the police station. The cops on watch in front of the station, carrying machine guns, regarded him suspiciously out of sleepy eyes. In order to avoid reading the letters in the posters on the walls, on billboards with neon lights that sizzled, and in political graffiti, Galip looked down as he walked along. All the restaurants and the short-order counters in Nişantaşı were closed.

  Much later, after walking for a long time under the buckeyes, cypresses, and plane trees along the sidewalks where the melting snow still dripped down the spouts making sad sounds, listening to his own footsteps and the racket from local coffeehouses, and after he had stuffed himself full of soup, chicken, and crumpets in syrup at a pudding shop in Karaköy, he bought fruit at an all-night greengrocer’s, bread and cheese at a short-order counter, and returned to the Heart-of-the-City Apartments.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE STORY OF THOSE WHO CANNOT TELL STORIES

  “Aye!” (quoth the delighted reader) “this is sense, this is genius! This I understand and admire! I have thought the very same a hundred times myself!” In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him.

  —COLERIDGE, Essays on His Own Times

  No, my most salient piece on deciphering the mystery in which our entire lives are buried, without our so much as being aware of it, is not the investigation in which I revealed, sixteen months ago to date, the incredible similarities in the maps of Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul. (Those who wish can edify themselves, by referring to that particular column, that the Darbal Mustakim, the Halili Market, and our Covered Bazaar are each in the shape of M, and discover the identity of the face that this M calls to mind.)

  No, my most “profound” story is not the one I wrote once upon a time with similar enthusiasm about the two-hundred-and-twenty-year-old remorse experienced by poor Sheikh Mahmut, who sold the secrets of his order to a European spy in return for immortality. (Those who wish can check that particular column to find out how the Sheikh, in an effort to find a hero willing to relieve him of his immortality, tried to con warriors into assuming his identity as they lay wounded on battlefields bleeding to death.)

  As I recall what I used to write about Beyoğlu thugs, poets who lose their memories, stories of magicians, female singers with double identities, and the mortally stricken lovelorn, I realize that I’ve always skipped over a subject, failing to hit it or skirting around it with a stiffness that’s strange, but which is of great significance to me today. But I am not the sole perpetrator! I’ve been writing for thirty
years, and, if not quite as many, I’ve devoted nearly the same number of years to reading; but I have never come across any writer, neither in the East nor the West, who drew attention to the truth I am about to tell you.

  So, as you read what I am about to write, please visualize the faces as I describe them. (Besides, what is reading but animating the writer’s words inside the mind’s silent cinema?) On your mind’s silver screen, project a sundries store in Eastern Anatolia where herbs, remedies, and notions are sold. On a cold winter afternoon when it gets dark early, seeing how there is not much action downtown, the barber across the street whose apprentice is minding the store, a retired old-timer, the barber’s younger brother, and a local customer who’s there more for the company than to do his shopping, have all gathered around the stove, making idle conversation. They’re talking of their army days, looking through newspapers, gossiping, and at times there is laughter too, but among them there’s someone who’s upset that he talks very little and has a hard time getting people to listen: the barber’s brother. He too has quite a few jokes and stories to tell, but although he’s aching for it, he just doesn’t have the gift of gab or the knack of making himself shine. The one time all afternoon he’s made an attempt to tell a story, the others interrupted him without even being conscious of it. Now, please visualize the expression on the barber’s brother’s face when his story is interrupted in the middle.

  Next, please imagine an engagement party at the home of an Istanbul doctor’s family that has become Westernized but is not rich. At some point, several of the guests who have invaded the house gather casually in the room of the girl who’s getting engaged, around the bed piled with coats. Among them is a beautiful and charming girl and two fellows who are interested in her. One of the fellows is not much to look at, nor terribly bright, but he’s gregarious and talkative. Consequently, the older men in the room as well as the beautiful girl listen to his stories, pay him attention. Now, picture, if you will, the face of the other young man who’s brighter and more sensitive than the chatterbox but cannot get people to listen to him.

  Now, please imagine three sisters, who have all been married within the past two years, having a get-together at their mother’s two months after the wedding of the youngest sister. In the home of a modest merchant where there’s the tick-tocking of a huge wall clock and the light clicks of an impatient canary, as the four women are all having their tea sitting in the gray afternoon light, the youngest, who has always been the most vivacious and talkative one, does such a marvelous job in telling about her two months of experimentation with marriage, she has such a way with words and such a sense of comedy, that the oldest and most beautiful sister wistfully considers the possibility, although she’s been through similar situations many times by now, that there is perhaps something missing in her husband and her life. Now, picture, if you please, this melancholy face.

  Have you done all the visualizing? So, do you see that, in some strange way, these faces resemble one another? Is there not something that makes the faces look alike, just as surely as there is an invisible thread that bonds these persons together in the depths of their souls? Don’t you think that there is more meaning and presence in the faces of the quiet ones, the ones who cannot do the narrative, who cannot get themselves heard, who don’t seem important, who are mutes, whose stories don’t arouse people’s curiosity, who think of the perfect comeback only later at home? It seems these faces are suffused with the letters that their stories are composed of, as if they carried the signs of silence, dejection, even defeat. You’ve managed to think of your own face in the context of these faces, haven’t you? What a legion we all are, how touching, how helpless!

  But I have no desire to deceive you: I am not one of you. Someone who can pick up a pen, scribble something or other, and do all right in getting others to read the scribbling, has been cured, in some measure, of the ailment. Perhaps that’s why I have never come across a writer who is capable of adequately discussing this most significant human condition. Now that whenever I pick up a pen I am well aware there is only one single subject, from this day on I will only attempt penetrating the hidden poetry in a countenance, the terrifying mystery in a gaze. So be prepared.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  RIDDLES IN FACES

  The face is what one goes by, generally.

  —LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking Glass

  On Tuesday morning when Galip sat down at the desk covered with newspaper columns, he wasn’t as optimistic as he had been the previous morning. Now that the image of Jelal had changed in his mind after the first day’s work, the goal of his investigations seemed unspecified. Since he had no recourse other than reading the columns and the notes he had removed from the hallway cabinet, and constructing hypotheses concerning Jelal and Rüya’s hideout, he had a feeling of contentment sitting down and reading that came from doing the only thing possible in face of disaster. Besides, sitting in a room full of happy childhood memories and reading Jelal’s work was a lot better than sitting in a dusty office in Sirkeci, reading through contracts drawn up in hopes of protecting tenants against belligerent landlords, and files on steel and rug dealers who’d given each other the shaft. Even if it was the result of a calamity, he felt the enthusiasm of a bureaucrat who’s been assigned a more interesting task at a better desk.

  As he drank his second cup of coffee, it was with this enthusiasm that he reviewed all the clues at hand. He remembered that the column in the copy of Milliyet slipped under the door, entitled “Apologies and Satires,” had already been published once before years ago, so it stood to reason that Jelal had not submitted a new column on Sunday. This made it the sixth column the paper had republished: Only one or two more columns remained in the auxiliary file. This meant that if Jelal didn’t hurry and get a new piece, his column would soon go blank. Since he’d begun the day with Jelal’s column for the last twenty-five years, and Jelal had never defaulted on his column even once under the pretext of illness or time off, every time Galip contemplated the possibility of a blank column on page two, he felt the anxiety of anticipating a catastrophe that was fast approaching. It was a catastrophe that reminded him of the day the Bosphorus dries up.

  So that he’d be sure to connect up with any possible clue that might come his way, he plugged in the phone he had disconnected the night he arrived at the flat. He reviewed his phone conversation with the man who introduced himself as Mahir Ikinci. What the man had said about the “trunk murder” and the military coup reminded Galip of some of Jelal’s old columns. He took those out of the box, and reading them carefully remembered some of Jelal’s bits and pieces on the Messiah. Finding the traces and dates of these bits, which had been sprinkled throughout various columns, took so much of his time that when he sat back down at the desk, he was as tired as if he had put in a whole day’s work.

  During the early sixties, when Jelal was using his column in an effort to incite a military coup, he must have remembered one of the principles in his Rumi pieces: a columnist who wants to get a large number of readers to accept an idea must have the skill to restore and refloat the sediment of decaying concepts and rusty memories that lie asleep in the readers’ memory banks like the corpses of lost galleons that lie at the bottom of the Black Sea. Good reader that he was, Galip expected the sediment in his memory banks to get stirred up reading the stories Jelal had gleaned from historical sources with this end in mind, but it was only his imagination that got activated.

  Reading about how the Twelfth Imam, as it is related in the History of Weaponry, would strike terror among the keepers of jewelry stores in the Covered Bazaar who employ rigged scales, how the Sheikh who was proclaimed as the Messiah by his own father had mounted attacks on forts leading Kurdish shepherds and master ironsmiths whom he’d attracted to his cause, and how a dishwasher’s aide who, after he dreamed of Muhammad going by in a white Cadillac convertible on the mucky paving stones in Beyoğlu, had proclaimed himself as the Messiah in order to in
cite whores, gypsies, pickpockets, cigarette boys, the shoeshine men, and the homeless against bigtime gangsters and pimps, Galip visualized what he read in the brick-red and dawn-orange hues of his own life and dreams. He came across stories that jogged his memory as well as his powers of imagination: he was reading about Hunter Ahmet, the pretender who, after he was done proclaiming himself crown prince and sultan, had also claimed to be the Prophet, when he remembered Jelal speculating one evening—as Rüya smiled on, regarding him as usual out of optimistic but sleepy eyes—over what might be involved in grooming an “Impostor Jelal” capable of stepping in to write his column (“Someone capable of acquiring my memory bank,” he had said, curiously enough). Galip was suddenly frightened, feeling that he was being dragged into a dangerous game that led to a deadly trap.

  He went through the address books again, checking the names and addresses against those in the phone directory. He called a couple of numbers that didn’t jibe: the first one was a plastics concern in Laleli where they made dish-washing basins, pails, laundry baskets; and if the model for a mold was provided, within a week they could produce and deliver any sort of thing in any kind of color by the hundreds. A child answered the second call, and he told Galip that he lived there with his mom, dad, and granny; no, Dad wasn’t home, and before Mom could anxiously get hold of the receiver, a big brother, who hadn’t been mentioned before, butted in and said they didn’t give out their name to strangers. “Who’s this? Who’s this?” said the mom, careful and frightened. “Wrong number.”