by Orhan Pamuk
In the morning, following a night spent riding on horseback during which the incessant sobbing that came from the sack had turned into an exasperating music, the executioner found the world so changed that he had a hard time believing his own identity. Pine and plane trees, muddy roads, village fountains where people scattered away in terror when they saw him, all came out of a world he did not know. At noon, in a town whose existence he hadn’t been aware of, he had a tough time even recognizing the food he gobbled down out of an animal instinct. When he stretched out under a tree somewhere out of town, so that he could rest his horse, he realized the thing that he had once assumed was the sky was really a strange blue dome he neither had any knowledge of nor had ever seen before. He got back on the horse when the sun began to set, but he had still six days’ journey to make. He had finally understood that he was never going to arrive in Istanbul unless he could perform the magic procedure that would restore his familiar world by stopping the sobbing in the sack, and changing the expression on the weeping face.
After dark, when he chanced upon a well in a village where he heard dogs barking, he dismounted. He removed the mohair sack from the horse, he untied the strings, and carefully he lifted the head by the hair out of the honey. He drew pails of water out of the well and washed the head with care as if washing a newborn babe. After drying the head with a piece of cloth, starting with its hair down to its ear canals, he took a look at the face in the light of the full moon: it was weeping. No alteration; the same unbearable and unforgettable expression of helplessness persisted on it.
He placed the head on the wall that circled the well, went to his horse to get some tools of his trade: a pair of special knives and some blunt steel rods for torture. He began with a knife trying to change the mouth gradually by twisting loose the skin from the bone around it. After working like the dickens, he made a mess of the lips but managed to give the mouth something of a smile, albeit crooked and ambiguous. Then he attempted the more delicate operation of opening the eyelids that had been squeezed shut with pain. After the protracted and exhausting effort of giving the whole face a smiling expression, he was tired, but he was relaxed at last. Even so, he was pleased to see the purple mark his fist left on Abdi Pasha’s chin just before he’d strangled the man. Childishly pleased to have set things right, he ran and put his tools back in place.
When he turned around, the head was no longer where he left it. At first, he thought the smiling head was playing a trick on him. But when he realized the head had slipped down the well, he had no compunctions running to the nearest house and knocking on the door to wake the people inside. It was enough for the elderly father and the young son to take a look at the executioner for them to comply fearfully with his orders. All three worked until morning to take the head out of the well, which wasn’t all that deep. Just as the day began to break, the son, who had been dangled down the well on the greased noose tied to his waist, was brought back up, screaming with horror and holding the head by the hair. The head was a mess but it no longer wept. The executioner calmly dried the head, plunged it back into the honey-filled sack, gladly took off from the village of the father and son, into whose palms he had slipped a couple of coins, and proceeded westward.
The sun was rising and birds were twittering in the spring-flowering trees when the executioner knew, suffused with excitement and a joy of living that was as wide as the sky, that the world had returned back to its familiar old self. There was no sobbing in the sack any longer. Before noon, he got off his horse beside a lake below some hills that were covered with pine trees and lay down blissfully for the deep and untroubled sleep he’d been yearning for all this time. But before falling asleep, he’d risen joyfully from his place to walk to the edge of the lake; observing his own reflection in the water, he had realized once again that all was right with the world.
When he arrived in Istanbul five days later, while witnesses who knew Abdi Pasha well could not identify the head that came out of the mohair sack, claiming that the smiling expression on the face was not anything like the Pasha’s at all, the executioner recognized in it his own glad face which he had contentedly seen reflected in the lake. He knew it was no use answering the accusations that he had been bribed by Abdi Pasha to stick in the sack the head of someone else, say, one that belonged to an innocent shepherd he’d murdered which he’d manhandled, disfiguring the face so that the substitution would not be detected: he had already observed the arrival of another executioner who would sever his own head.
Rumor spread quickly that an innocent shepherd’s head had been cut off instead of Abdi Pasha’s—so quickly, in fact, that the second executioner sent to Erzurum to take his head was anticipated by Abdi Pasha, who was sitting pretty in his garrison, and was himself executed. That’s how the insurrection called the Abdi Pasha Revolt started, which lasted twenty years and cost six thousand five hundred heads, although some said the letters they read in the Pasha’s face gave him away as an impostor.
Chapter Twenty-six
MYSTERY OF LETTERS AND LOSS OF MYSTERY
A hundred thousand secrets will be known
When that unveiled, surprising face is shown.
—ATTAR, The Conference of the Birds
By dinnertime in the city, when traffic at Nişantaşı Square was unsnarled and the irascible whistles from the cop at the corner had ceased, Galip had been staring at photographs for such a long time that he was depleted of all the pain and sorrow that the faces of his compatriots might have inspired in him; he had no more tears in his eyes. He was also too exhausted to feel any elation, joy, or excitement the faces might fetch up; it was as if he no longer expected anything from life. Looking at the photographs, he only felt the indifference of someone who had lost his entire memory, his hopes, and his future; there was the hint of a silence in a corner of his mind which felt like it might slowly expand to envelop his whole body. Even while drinking his stale tea and eating the bread and feta cheese he brought from the kitchen, he kept looking at the photographs now scattered with bread crumbs. The incredible ambitious bustle of the city had calmed down and night noises had begun. Now he could hear the fridge motor, the sound of the shutters being lowered on a store at the end of the street, and the laughter in the vicinity of Aladdin’s store. At times he paid attention to the staccato of high heels rapidly clicking along the sidewalks, and at other times he was oblivious to the silence, when he looked at some visage in a photograph with fear or terror, or with an astonishment which exhausted him.
That’s when he began thinking about the relationship between the mystery of letters and the meaning in faces, more with the desire of emulating the sleuths in Rüya’s detective novels than with any hope of solving the enigma of the scribbles Jelal had made on the faces in the photographs. “All that’s required to be like the heroes of detective novels who are constantly seeing clues in things,” Galip thought wearily, “is to believe that the objects in the periphery are keeping some secret from you.” Taking the box with the books, treatises, clippings from papers and magazines, and the thousands of photos and pictures connected with Hurufism out of the cabinet in the hallway, he went to work.
He came across faces that had been constructed with letters in the Arabic alphabet, eyes out of wâws and ‘ayns, the eyebrows of zâys and râs, and noses of alifs; Jelal had marked the letters one by one with the fastidiousness of a good-natured student learning the old alphabet. On the pages of a lithographed book he saw weeping eyes made of wâws and jîms, the dot in the jîms forming the teardrops that fell down the page. He observed in an old unretouched black-and-white photograph that the same letters could easily be read in the eyes, eyebrows, lips, and noses; under the photograph, Jelal had written the Bektaşi master’s name in legible letters. He saw inscriptions of “Ah, sigh of love!” and galleons rocking in storms, lightning bolts that came down from the sky in the shape of eyes, expressions of terror, visages tangled in tree branches—all fashioned of letters—and beards that were each
a different letter. He saw pale faces whose eyes had been dug out of the photograph, innocents around whose lips signs of guilt had been worked in letters, and sinners whose terrifying destinies had been tucked in the lines on their foreheads. He noted the absentminded expressions on hanged bandits’ and prime ministers’ faces, their eyes on the ground where their feet did not reach, wearing their white robes of execution and the record of their sentences hanging on their chests; and he saw the faded color photos sent by those who’d read in a famous movie star’s painted eyes that she was a whore, and photos of wannabes and look-alikes of sultans, pashas, Rudolph Valentino, and Mussolini on which they themselves had inscribed letters. He came upon the signs of secret word games that Jelal had discovered in long letters from readers who had deciphered the message Jelal put out for them in a column pointing out the special meaning and the placement of the letter “h” as in the last letter of Allah, and from those who explicated the symmetries he delineated in the words “morning,” “face,” “sun” for a whole week, month, and year, and from those who maintained that monkeying with letters was no better than worshipping idols. He saw pictures of the founder of Hurufism, Fazlallah of Astarabad, copied from old miniatures on which letters in both Latin and Arabic alphabets had been intruded; the letters and words written on the pictures of soccer players and movie actors that came with the chocolate wafers and the colored bubble gum hard as the sole of your shoe that were sold at Aladdin’s; and the photos of murderers, sinners, and Sufi masters that his readers had sent Jelal. He saw the pictures of “fellow citizens” by the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, which swarmed with letters; he saw photographs of a thousand compatriots sent to Jelal from all parts of Anatolia in the last thirty years, from dusty little towns, from distant burgs where the soil cracks under the sun in summer and where on account of heavy snow for four months in winter nobody visits aside from hungry wolves, from smugglers’ villages on the Syrian border where half of the men go lame from having stepped on mines, from villages where they’ve been waiting to get a road for the last forty years, from bars and casinos in big cities, from slaughterhouses set up in caves, from drug and cigarette traffickers’ dens and from stationmaster’s offices at desolate railroad stations, from the lobbies of hotels where cattle drovers spend the night and from whorehouses in Soğukoluk. He saw the thousands of pictures taken with old Leicas by street photographers who set up their cameras with tripods and evil-eye beads next to government offices, municipal buildings, and the folding tables where petition writers type out documents for the illiterate, and, disappearing under black sheets like alchemists or fortune-tellers, work the pumps and bellows, the black lens cover, the chemically treated glass plates. It wasn’t hard to imagine these fellow citizens as they looked into the camera, gripped by a vague apprehension of death and the wish for immortality. Galip could see immediately that this deep wish was related to the collapse, death, and defeat whose signs he had come to recognize in faces and on maps. It was as if years of happiness followed by a great defeat had been covered over with the dust and ash spewed out by an exploding volcano, and Galip now had to decipher and read in hundreds of compromised signs the lost secret meaning of deeply buried recollections.
The information on the backs of the photographs revealed that some of them had been sent to the “Your Face, Your Personality” column that Jelal had taken over in the early fifties along with puzzles, movie reviews, and “Believe It or Not.” Others had arrived in response to Jelal’s summons (We’d like to see our readers’ photographs and publish some of them in these columns), and still others in response to some letters whose contents Galip couldn’t quite make out. They had looked into the camera as if remembering something from their distant past, or as if watching a greenish lightning bolt flash and strike over an indistinct land mass on the horizon, as if their eyes were accustomed to observing their own destinies gradually sink into a dark swamp, as if they were amnesiacs who have no doubt that they will never regain their memory. Feeling the silence in the expressions in the photographs take over his mind, Galip sensed clearly why Jelal might have been inscribing all these letters on pictures, clippings, faces, and expressions; but when he wanted to use the reason as a key to the story of his own life’s links to Jelal’s and Rüya’s, of leaving this phantom abode, of his own future, he immediately became subdued like the faces he saw in the photographs; his mind, which was supposed to make connections between events, merely vanished into the fog of meanings stuck in between letters and faces. This is how he began to approach the terror which he’d read in faces and into which he’d gradually enter.
He read in lithographed books and treatises full of spelling errors about the life of Fazlallah, the founder and prophet of the Hurufi sect, who was born in 1339 in Khorosan, in a town called Astarabad which is near the Caspian Sea. When he was eighteen, he took up Sufism, went on pilgrimage, and became a disciple to a master called Sheikh Hasan. As Galip read about how Fazlallah increased his experience traveling from town to town in Azerbaijan and Iran and what he discussed with masters in Tabriz, Shirvan, and Baku, he felt an irrepressible desire “to begin a new life,” as that gets described in this kind of inspirational book. The predictions Fazlallah made concerning his own destiny and his death, which later came true, seemed to Galip like ordinary events that might befall someone who wanted to begin living the new life he desired. Initially, Fazlallah had become known for his dream interpretations. On one occasion, he’d dreamed of a pair of hudhud birds, of Prophet Solomon, and himself, and as the birds on the tree under which Solomon and Fazlallah slept watched, the dreams of the two men had merged, and so, the two hudhud birds on the tree had also merged into one bird. On another occasion, he’d dreamed of a dervish who’d come to visit him in a cave where he’d secluded himself, and then later, when the same dervish actually came to visit, Fazlallah learned that the dervish had dreamed of him; when they leafed through a book together in the cave, they saw their own faces in the letters, and when they looked up at each other, they saw the letters of the book in each other’s faces.
According to Fazlallah, since everything that crossed over from nothingness into the material world produced a sound, sound was the demarcation line between Being and Nothingness: striking “the most soundless” objects against each other was enough for us to discern this. The most developed form of sound was, of course, the “word,” the exalted thing called “speech,” the magic known as “words” which were made up of Letters. The origin of Being, its Meaning, and the material aspect of God were distinguishable in Letters that were clearly written in the faces of men. We were all born with the native characteristic of two brow lines, four eyelash lines, and one hairline—seven strokes in all. At puberty, with the addition of the late-blooming nose dividing our faces, this figure was increased to fourteen, and doubled again when we took into account the imaginary and real numbers which were even more poetic, which all went to show that the twenty-eight letters of the language Muhammad spoke were not accidental in bringing the Koran into existence. When Galip read that in order to jack up the count to thirty-two, which was the number of letters in Persian (the language Fazlallah spoke and wrote his Book of Eternal Life in), it was necessary to examine the hair and chin lines more attentively, divide them down the middle—thereby finding two more lines, times two which made four—he realized why the hair had been parted in the middle (as actors in American films had done to their brilliantined hair in the thirties) in some of the photographs he’d found in the boxes. All this was so straightforward that, momentarily pleased with its childlike simplicity, Galip felt he understood once again what it was that attracted Jelal to these letter games.
Fazlallah proclaimed himself to be the deliverer, the prophet: the Messiah of the Jews, the Saviour whose second coming is anticipated by the Christians, the Mahdi whom Muhammad has heralded—the long-awaited figure, in short, who appeared in Jelal’s piece about “Him.” Surrounding himself in Ispahan with seven believers, Fazlal
lah began promoting his faith. It gave Galip a feeling of inner peace to read that Fazlallah went from town to town preaching that the world was not a place that yielded up its secrets right off, that it swarmed with secrets, and that in order to penetrate these secrets it was necessary to comprehend the mystery of letters. For Galip, it seemed now to be clearly proved that his world also swarmed with secrets, as he had always anticipated and desired. He sensed that the inner peace he felt was related to the simplicity of this demonstration; if it was true that the world was a place swarming with secrets, then it was also true that the coffee cup on the table, the ashtray, the letter opener, even his own hand that rested like a hesitant crab next to the letter opener, all pointed to and were a part of the existence of a hidden world. Rüya was in this world. Galip was at its threshold. Soon, the secret of letters would let him in.
That’s why he had to read more carefully. He read of Fazlallah’s life and death once more. He understood that Fazlallah had dreamed of his own death and had approached his death as if in a dream. He had been accused of heresy for worshipping letters, mankind, and idols instead of God, for proclaiming himself as the Messiah, and for believing his own fantasies, which he claimed to be the secret and invisible meaning of the Koran, instead of its real and visible significance. He was caught, tried, and hanged.
