The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  Was the voice, which Galip imagined belonging to someone with a white collar, worn jacket, and a phantom face, forming these sentences impromptu by virtue of an overactive memory, or was it reading it off a prompter? Galip thought it over. The voice took Galip’s silence as a sign and gave a victorious laugh. Sharing the ends of the same phone cable which went by way of who knew what underground passages and below what hills teeming with Ottoman skulls and Byzantine coins, clinging like black ivy to the walls of old apartment buildings where the plaster was falling off, strung tight like clotheslines between rusty poles and along plane and chestnut trees, he whispered as if confiding a secret with brotherly love instilled by sharing the umbilical cord attached to the same mother: he had much love for Jelal; he had much respect for Jelal; he had much knowledge of Jelal. Jelal didn’t have any doubt on any of this anymore, did he?

  “I wouldn’t know,” Galip said.

  “In that case, let’s get rid of these black telephones between us,” said the voice. Because the bell on the phone which sometimes rang on its own accord alarmed rather than alerted; because the pitch-black receiver was heavy as a little dumbbell, and when dialed, it grumbled with the squeaky melody of the old turnstiles at the Karaköy–Kadıköy ferryboat dock; because sometimes it connected with numbers at random rather than the numbers dialed. “Get it, Mister Jelal? Give me your address and I’ll be right over.”

  Galip hesitated at first like a teacher struck dumb by the wonders performed by a wonder student, and then—astonished that the man’s garden of memory seemed to have no bounds, astonished as well by the flowers that bloomed in the garden of his own memory, and aware of the trap he was gradually falling into—he asked:

  “What about nylon stockings?”

  “In a piece you wrote in 1958, two years after the time when you were obliged to publish your column not under your own name but under some hapless pseudonyms you came up with, on a hot summer day when you were stressed out with work and loneliness, watching a movie which was halfway through in a Beyoğlu movie theater (the Rüya) where you took refuge from the noonday sun, you wrote that you were startled by a sound you heard nearby through the laughter of Chicago gangsters dubbed into Turkish by pitiful Beyoğlu dubbers, the report of machine guns, and the crash of bottles and glass: somewhere not too far off the long fingernails of a woman were scratching her legs through her nylons. When the first feature was over and the houselights went on, you saw, sitting two rows in front of you, a beautiful stylish mother and her well-behaved eleven-year-old son talking to each other like chums. For a long while you observed their camaraderie, how they carefully listened to each other. In another piece two years later, you’d write that, watching the second feature, you were not listening to the clash of steel blades and storms on the high seas that roared out of the sound system but to the buzz produced by the restless hand with long fingernails traveling on legs that would feed Istanbul’s mosquitoes on summer nights, and that your mind was not on the pirates’ dirty deals on the screen, but on the friendship between the mother and the son. As you revealed in a column you wrote twelve years after that, your publisher had scolded you soon after the publication of the piece with the nylons: Had you no idea that it was dangerous, a very dangerous practice, to focus on the sexuality of a wife and mother? That the Turkish reader would not tolerate it? And that if you wished to survive as a columnist, you had to be careful what you said about married women as well as your writing style?”

  “On style? Make it brief, please.”

  “For you, style was life. Style, for you, was voice. Style was your thoughts. Style was your real persona you created within it, but this was not one, not two, but three personas…”

  “These are?”

  “The first voice is what you call ‘my simple persona’: the voice that you reveal to anyone, the one with which you sit down at family dinners and gossip through billows of smoke after dinner. You owe this persona the details of your everyday life. The second voice belongs to the person you wish to be: a mask that you appropriated from admirable personages who, having found no peace in this one, live in another world and are suffused with its mystery. You’d written that you would have holed up in a corner, unable to face life, waiting for death like many an unhappy person if it hadn’t been for your habit of whispering with this ‘hero’ whom you initially wanted to imitate and then become, if it hadn’t been for your habit of repeating, like a senile person reciting the refrains stuck in his mind, the acrostics, the puzzles, parodies, and banter that this hero whispered in your ear. I was in tears reading it. What took you—and me, naturally—into realms unavailable to the first two personas you call ‘the objective and subjective styles’ is the third voice: the dark persona, the dark style! I know even better than you what it was that you wrote on nights when you were too unhappy to be satisfied with imitation and masks; but you know better what it was that you perpetrated, brother mine! We’re meant to understand each other, find one another, and put on disguises together; give me your address.”

  “Addresses?”

  “Cities are composed of addresses, addresses of letters, just as faces of letters. On Monday, October 12, 1963, you described Kurtuluş, called Tatavla in the old days, an Armenian quarter, as one of your most beloved spots in Istanbul. I read it with pleasure.”

  “Reading?”

  “On one occasion, in February of 1962, should you require a date, during the tense days when you were preparing for a military coup that would save the nation from poverty, on one of the dark streets in Beyoğlu, you’d seen a gilt-framed large mirror being carried, goodness knows for what strange reason, from one nightclub where belly dancers and jugglers operate to another, which had first cracked, perhaps due to the cold, and then had burst into smithereens right before your eyes; that’s when you’d realized it wasn’t for nothing that the word in our language for the stuff that turns glass into mirror is the same as the word for ‘secret.’ After divulging this moment of insight in one of your columns, you’d said this: Reading is looking in the mirror; those who know the ‘secret’ behind the glass manage to go through the looking glass; and those who have no knowledge of letters will find nothing more in the world other than their own dull faces.”

  “What’s the secret?”

  “I’m the only one besides you who knows the secret. You know very well it’s not something that can be discussed over the phone. Give me your address.”

  “What’s the secret?”

  “Don’t you realize a reader has to devote his whole life to you to get to the secret? That’s what I’ve done. Shaking with the cold in unheated state libraries, an overcoat on my back, hat on my head, and woolen gloves on my hands, I’ve read everything I suspected you might’ve written, the stuff you knocked off when you didn’t publish under your own name, the serials you wrote passing for someone else, the puzzles, the portraits, the politically and emotionally charged interviews, just to figure out what that secret might be. Given that you have produced without fail eight pages a day on the average, in thirty-some years your output would be a hundred thousand pages, or three hundred volumes, each three-hundred-thirty-three pages. This nation ought to erect your statue just for that!”

  “Yours too, for having read it all,” Galip said. “What about statues?”

  “On one of my Anatolian trips, in a small town the name of which I’ve forgotten, I was waiting in the town square park until it was time for my bus when a youngish person sat beside me and we began to talk. We started by mentioning the statue of Atatürk pointing at the bus terminal as if the only viable thing to do in this pitiful town was to leave it. Then, at my instigation, we talked about a column of yours on the subject of Atatürk statues which number over ten thousand throughout our country. You’d written that on the day of the apocalypse, when lightning and lightning bolts tore through the dark sky and quakes moved the firmament, all those terrifying Atatürk statues would come to life. According to what you wrote, some of the statues w
earing pigeon droppings and European garb, some in the field marshal’s uniform and decorations, some riding rearing stallions with large male organs, some in top hats and phantom-like capes, they would all start moving slowly in place; then they would get down from their bases which are covered under flowers and wreaths, and around which dusty old buses and horse carts have circled for years, and where soldiers whose uniforms smell of sweat and high-school girls whose uniforms smell of mothballs have gathered to sing the national anthem, and all these statues would vanish into the dark. The obsessive young man had read the piece where you described the night of the apocalypse when the ground quaked and the sky was rent, how our poor citizens listening to the roar outside through their closed windows would hearken with abject fear to the sounds of bronze and marble boots and hooves on the slum sidewalks; and the young man had become so overwhelmed that he had immediately written you a letter impatiently inquiring when the day of the apocalypse would come. If what he said was true, then you’d sent him a short answer asking him for a document-size photo; and after you got it, you’d given him the secret ‘omen of the impending Day.’ Don’t get me wrong, the secret you gave the young man was not ‘The Secret.’ Disappointed after waiting for years at the park where the pool had gone dry and the grass had become patchy, the young man had divulged to me your secret that must have been, perforce, personal. You’d explained to him the secondary meanings of some letters and told him to consider a sentence he’d someday run across in your writing as a sign. Reading that sentence, our young man would decipher the encoded column and get to work.”

  “What was the sentence?”

  “‘My entire life was full of these sorts of horrible memories.’ There, that was the sentence. I can’t figure out if he’d made it up or if you’d actually written it to him, but the coincidence is that, these days when you complain that your memory has been stunted or even completely erased, I’ve read this sentence, as well as others, in an old piece that’s recently been rerun. Give me your address and I’ll give you an instant explanation of what it means.”

  “What about other sentences?”

  “Give me your address! Give it. I happen to know that you aren’t curious about any other sentences or stories. You’ve given up on this country so thoroughly that you’re not curious about anything. Your screws are getting loose from loneliness in that rat’s nest where you’re hiding out hatefully, without friends, comrades, anybody … Give me your address so that I can tell you in just which secondhand bookstore you might find students from the Religious High School who trade your autographed pictures, and wrestling umpires who fancy young boys. Give me your address so I can show you the etchings depicting eighteen Ottoman sultans who had assignations in secret places around Istanbul with their own harem wives whom they had masquerading as European whores. Did you know that in high-class haberdasheries and whorehouses in Paris this disease which requires wearing lots of dressy clothes and jewelry is called ‘the Turk’s disease’? Did you know of the etching that shows Mahmut the Second, who copulated in disguise on some dark street in Istanbul, wearing on his naked legs the boots Napoleon wore on his campaign to Egypt? And that his favorite wife, Bezm-i Alem, the Queen Mother—that is, the grandmother of the prince whose story you like so much and the godmother of an Ottoman ship—is shown in the same picture nonchalantly wearing a diamond-and-ruby cross?”

  “What about crosses?” Galip said with some sort of joy, aware that he was getting some pleasure in life for the first time since his wife left him six days and four hours ago.

  “I know it was no coincidence that under your January 18, 1958, column, right below your lines harping on Egyptian geometry, Arab algebra, and Syriac Neoplatonism in order to prove that the cross as a form was the opposite of the crescent—its repudiation and negation—appeared the news concerning the marriage of Edward G. Robinson, whom I really love as the ‘cigar-chomping tough guy of the cinema and the stage,’ to the New York clothes designer Jane Adler, showing a photograph of the newlyweds under the shadow of a crucifix. Give me your address. A week later, you’d proposed that instilling a phobia for the cross and zealotry for the crescent in our children resulted in stunting them into adults incapable of deciphering Hollywood’s magical faces, leading them to sexual disorientation such as imagining all moonfaced women to be either mothers or aunts; and in order to prove your point, you’d claimed that if state boarding schools for the poor were to be raided on the nights after the kids studied the Crusades in history class, hundreds of them would be discovered having peed in their beds. These are just bits and pieces; give me your address, and I’ll bring you all the stories about crosses that you want, all the stuff I came across in provincial newspapers, scratching around in libraries for your work. ‘Having escaped the gallows when the oiled noose around his neck snapped, a convict tells about the crosses he saw on his short trip to Hell upon returning from the realm of the dead.’ The Erciyaş Post, Kayseri, 1962. ‘Our edicor-in-chief has wired che Presidenc, poincing ouc chac using this symbol inscead of che obviously cross-shaped leccer is more in keeping wich curkish culcure.’ Green Konya, Konya, 1951. If you give me your address I’ll rush you many more … I’m not suggesting that these are material for your writing; I know that you hate columnists who regard life as grist for the mill. I can bring the stuff that sits in boxes in front of me right over; we’d read it together, laughing and weeping. Come on, give me the address, I’ll bring you stories serialized in İskenderun papers about local men who could only stop stuttering when they were telling hookers at nightclubs how much they hated their fathers. Give me your address and I’ll bring you love and death predictions made by a waiter who was not only illiterate, he couldn’t even speak proper Turkish, let alone Persian, but who could recite Omar Khayyam’s undiscovered poems on account of their souls being twins; give me your address. I’ll bring you the dreams of a journalist-printer from Bayburt who, upon finding out he was losing his memory, serialized on the last page of his newspaper everything he knew as well as his life and memories. In the last dream where faded roses, fallen leaves, and the dry well in the extensive garden are described, I know that you will find your own story, brother mine! I know you take blood-thinning medication to keep your memory from drying up, and that you spend hours everyday lying down with your feet up on the wall in order to force the blood into your brain, pulling out your recollections one by one out of that dry and dismal well. ‘March 16, 1957,’ you say to yourself, your head blood-red from hanging down the side of the sofa or a bed … ‘On March 16, 1957,’ you force yourself to remember, ‘I was having lunch with colleagues at the City Grill, when I spoke about the masks that jealousy compels us to wear!’ Then, ‘Yes, yes,’ you say, pushing yourself, ‘in May of 1962, after an incredible bout of love at noon, waking up in a house on a backstreet in Kurtuluş, I told the naked woman lying beside me that the large beauty spots on her skin looked like my stepmother’s.’ Then you’re gripped by a doubt that you will later call ‘merciless’: Had you said it to her? Or was it to that ivory-skinned woman in the stone house where the interminable noise of Beşiktaş Market came in through the windows that didn’t close snugly? Or to the misty-eyed woman who, daring to return home late to her husband and children, left the one-room house overlooking Cihangir Park where the trees were naked, and trekked all the way to Beyoğlu, just because she loved you so much, to get you the lighter which, as you would later write, you didn’t know why you demanded so capriciously? Give me your address and I’ll bring you the latest European drug called Mnemonics which opens slam-bam brain vessels clogged with nicotine and horrible memories, taking us back instantly to our lives in the paradise which we have lost. After you start taking twenty drops of the lavender liquid in your tea in the morning, not ten as instructed in the package insert, you will remember a lot of your memories which you’d forgotten forever, and which you had even forgotten that you’d forgotten, as if finding your childhood’s colored pencils, combs, and lavender-colored ma
rbles which suddenly turn up behind an old cupboard. If you let me have your address, you will remember your column, as well as why you wrote it, regarding maps that can be read on all our faces, teeming with signs of compelling locations in the city where we live. If you give me your address, you will remember why you were forced to tell in your column Rumi’s story about the competition between two ambitious painters. If you give me your address, you will remember why you wrote that incomprehensible column saying that there can be no hopeless solitude since even when we are the loneliest, the women of our daydreams keep us company; what’s more, that these women who are always intuitively aware of our fantasies wait for us, look for us, and some of them even find us. Give me your address, and let me remind you of what you cannot remember; brother mine, you are now slowly losing the Heaven and Hell that you’ve lived and dreamed. Give me your address, I’ll hurry and save you before your memory sinks into oblivion’s bottomless well. I know everything about you, I’ve read all that you’ve written: there’s no one besides me who can re-create that world so that you can write those magical texts again which glide like predatory eagles over the country by day, and like cunning ghosts at night. When I come to you, you will resume writing pieces which kindle the hearts of young men reading in coffeehouses in the most forlorn places in Anatolia, which make tears flow like rain down the cheeks of primary-school teachers and the students they teach in the boondocks, which awaken the joy of living in young mothers who live on backstreets in small towns reading photonovels and waiting for death. Give me your address: We’ll talk all night and you will regain your tender love for this land and for this people, as well as for your lost past. Think of the downtrodden who write you letters from snow-covered mountain towns where the mail cart stops only once every two weeks; think of the bewildered who write you asking your advice before leaving their fiancées, before going on pilgrimage, before casting their votes in general elections; think of the unhappy students who read you sitting in the last row in geography class, the pitiful dispatch clerks glancing at your column sitting in a desk in some obscure corner while they wait for their retirement, the hapless who’d have nothing to talk about besides what’s on the radio, were it not for your columns. Think of all those reading you at unsheltered bus stops, in the sad, dirty foyers of movie theaters, in remote train stations. They’re all waiting for you to perform a miracle, all of them! You have no choice but to provide them with their miracle. Give me your address; two heads are better than one at this. Write, telling them the day of redemption is at hand, telling them the days of waiting in line with plastic cans in their hands to get water at the neighborhood fountain will soon be over, telling them it’s possible for runaway high-school girls to avoid Galata whorehouses and become movie stars, telling them post-miracle National Lottery tickets will all carry prizes, telling them when husbands come home dead drunk they won’t beat their wives, telling them extra carriages will be put on the commuter trains following the day of the miracle, telling them that bands will play in all town squares as in those in Europe; write that one day everyone will be a famous hero, and that one day, soon, aside from everyone getting to sleep with any woman he wants including his own mother, everyone will be able to resume considering—magically—the woman with whom he has slept an angelic virgin and a sister. Write and tell them the code of the secret documents unraveling the historic mystery which has led us into misery for centuries has finally been cracked; tell them that a popular movement networked all over Anatolia is about to take action, and that the homos, priests, bankers, and whores who’ve organized the international conspiracy condemning us to poverty, and their local collaborators, have been named. Point out their enemies to them, so they can be comforted by knowing who to blame for their desperate lot; let them sense what they can do to rid themselves of their foes, so they can imagine, even as they tremble with rage and sorrow, that one of these days they can accomplish something great; explain it thoroughly to them that the cause of their lifelong misery is these repulsive enemies, so they can feel the peace of mind that comes from dumping their sins on others. Brother mine, I know your pen is mighty enough to realize not only all these dreams but even more unbelievable tales and the most unlikely miracles. You will bring the dreams to life with wonderful words and incredible recollections that you’ll pull out of the bottomless well of your memory. If our attar from Kars has been able to know the colors of the streets where you spent your childhood, it’s only because he could perceive these dreams in between your lines; give him back his dreams. Once upon a time you’d written lines that sent chills down the spines of the unfortunate people in this land, making their hair stand on end, stirring their memories and giving them a taste of the marvelous times to come by reminding them of festival days of yore with their swings and merry-go-rounds. Give me your address and you can do it again. In this wretched country, what can someone like you do besides write? I know you write out of helplessness because you are unable to do anything else. Ah, how often I’ve contemplated your helpless moments! You felt excruciated seeing pictures of pashas and fruit hanging in green groceries; you felt saddened seeing fierce-eyed but pitiful brothers playing cards in coffeehouses with decks pasty from sweat. Whenever I saw a mother and son get in line in front of the State Meat and Fish Foundation at the crack of dawn hoping to do their shopping on the cheap, or whenever my train went by small clearings in the morning where workers’ markets had been set up, or whenever my eye caught fathers who sat on Sunday afternoons with their wives and children in treeless parks without a blade of green, smoking and waiting for the end of the eternal hour of boredom, I often wondered what you thought about these people. Had you seen all the scenes I observed? I knew you would’ve written their stories on white paper that absorbed the ink when you returned home to your tiny room in the evening to sit at your timeworn desk which was totally appropriate to this pitiful, forgotten land. I’d imagine your head bending over the paper and conjure up the image of you rising from your desk around midnight feeling sick at heart to open the refrigerator, as you had once written, and look in absentmindedly without touching or seeing anything, and then how you walked around the rooms and the desk like a somnambulist. Ah, my brother, you were alone, you were pitiful, you were sad. How I loved you! I thought of you, only you, when I read all you’d written all these years. Please, give me your address; at least give me an answer. I’ll tell you how I saw letters that were stuck like large dead spiders on the faces of some cadets from the War College whom I’d come across on the Yalova boat, and when I got those robust cadets alone in the filthy head on board how they were beset by a sweet childlike dread. I’ll tell you how the blind lottery-man who, after drinking a shot of rakı, had his tavern companions read the letters he got from you that he carried in his pocket, proudly pointing out the mystery in between the lines which you’d divulged to him, and how he had his son read him Milliyet every morning to find the sentence which would clinch the mystery. His letters carried the stamp of the Teşvikiye Post Office. Hello, are you listening to me? At least, say something; let me know you’re there. Oh my God! I hear you breathe, I hear your breathing. Listen: I’ve taken great pains composing these sentences, so listen carefully: When you wrote that the narrow smokestacks on old harbor ferryboats letting out melancholic trails of smoke seemed so delicate and breakable, I understood you. When you wrote that you suddenly couldn’t breathe at provincial weddings where women danced with women and the men with the men, I understood you. When you wrote that the depression you felt walking along past wasted wood-frame houses in the slums turned into tears when you returned home, I understood you. About that movie featuring Hercules, Samson, or Roman history which you saw at the sort of theater where small children sell secondhand Texas and Tom Mix comics at the door, when you wrote that you were so confounded by the silence that fell over the theater pulsating with men as soon as a third-class American movie star with a dolorous face and long legs put in an appearance on the screen that you wanted t
o die, I understood you. How about that? Do you understand me? Answer me, you wretch! I am that incredible reader any writer would consider himself lucky for running across even if only once in his lifetime! Give me your address and I’ll bring you photos of high-school girls who adore you, all hundred and twenty-seven of them, some with their addresses on the back and others with their adulation as quoted in their journals. Thirty-two of them wear glasses, eleven have braces on their teeth, six have long swanlike necks, twenty-four of them sport ponytails just as you fancy. They’re all crazy about you, they think you’re to die for. I swear it. Give me your address and I’ll bring you a list of women each of whom was wholeheartedly convinced that you meant her in a conversational column you wrote in the early sixties, saying, ‘Listen to the radio last night? Well, listening to “Lovers’ Hour,” I myself could only think of one thing.’ You have as many admirers in high-society circles as you do among army wives and infatuated highstrung students in their provincial or white-collar homes. Did you know that? If you let me have your address, I’d bring you photos of women in disguise, masquerading not only for those sad society balls but in their daily private lives. You’d once written, rightly so, that we have no private lives, that we don’t even have any real comprehension of the concept of ‘private life’ which we appropriated from translated novels and foreign publications, but if you could just see these photos taken in high-heeled boots and devil’s masks, well … Oh, come on, give me that address, I beg you. I’ll quick bring you my incredible collection of human faces I’ve been saving up for the last twenty years. I have pictures of jealous lovers taken immediately after they’ve destroyed each other’s faces with nitric acid. I have bewildered-looking mug shots of bearded or clean-shaven fundamentalists caught conducting secret rites for which they’d painted Arabic letters on their faces, of Kurdish rebels where the letters on their faces had been burned away by napalm, execution photos of rapists who get hanged hush-hush in provincial towns which I got by bribing my way into their official files. Contrary to the depictions in cartoons, when the greased noose snaps the neck, the tongue doesn’t stick out. But the letters become more legible. Now I know what secret compulsion drove you to write in an old column that you preferred old-style executions and executioners. Just as I know you go in for ciphers, acrostics, cryptograms, I also know you walk among us in the middle of the night wearing just the sort of costume to reestablish the lost mystery. I’m onto what shenanigans you pull on the lawyer husband to get your half sister alone and trash everything all night for the sake of telling the simplest story that makes us who we are. In response to lawyers’ wives who wrote angry letters about your bits ridiculing lawyers, when you said the lawyer in question didn’t happen to be their husband, I knew you were telling the truth. It’s high time you gave me your address. I know all the individual significances of those dogs, skulls, horses, and witches whooping it up in your dreams, and I also know which love missives you were inspired into writing by the tiny pictures of women, guns, skulls, soccer players, flags, flowers that cab drivers stick in the corner of their rearview mirrors. I know quite a lot of the code sentences you dole out to your pitiful admirers just to get rid of them; and I also know you never part with the notebook in which those key sentences are written, nor with your historical costumes…”