by Orhan Pamuk
Even though the lights had been on all night in the store known as Aladdin’s, neither the police investigating in the vicinity nor anyone else had thought of going in to discover the young woman dying in agony inside. In the same vein, the authorities considered it odd that let alone not intervene, the policeman on duty on the opposite sidewalk had not even been aware that a second person was involved in the shooting.
The Killer had gotten away. A citizen had volunteered to inform the authorities that he had been out to Aladdin’s to get a lottery ticket when he had seen, just moments before the incident, a frightening apparition wearing a strange outfit and strange cape appropriate for historical films (“looked something like Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror”) and, what’s more, he had been wildly telling his wife and sister-in-law all about it even before he read about the incident in the papers. The young journalist had finished his article wishing with the wish that this last clue would not also fall victim to dereliction and ineptitude as had the young woman who was found in the morning lying dead among the dolls.
That night Galip dreamed of Rüya among the dolls sold at Aladdin’s store. She wasn’t dead. She was waiting for Galip and breathing lightly in the dark in synch with the other dolls, winking at him, but Galip was late, he just couldn’t get to the store no matter what; all he could do was look through his tears, watching out of the window in the Heart-of-the-City Apartments the light from Aladdin’s window reflecting on the snow-covered sidewalk.
One sunny morning in early February, Galip’s father told him that Uncle Melih had received a response to the inquiry he made at the Şişli Land Deeds Office, and that it had been determined that Jelal owned another flat somewhere in the back streets of Nişantaşı.
The flat Uncle Melih and Galip went to with a hunchback locksmith in tow was on one of Nişantaşı’s old streets, on the top floor of one of those three- or four-story buildings where the façade is blackened with soot and smoke, and the paint has peeled off in pieces like the skin of an incurable patient; it was on a street paved with rectangular stone and with sidewalks that had potholes, which had always made Galip wonder, whenever he was on a street like this, why rich people would have ever wanted to live in places that were this miserable, or, conversely, why people who lived in miserable places like this would have ever been considered rich. The locksmith didn’t need to sweat it, easily opening the worn lock in the door on which there was no name.
In the back, there were two narrow bedrooms with a bed in each. Up front, they saw a small living room, which was on the street and got sunlight, with a dining table standing in the middle; there were a pair of easy chairs across from each other at the table on which were news clips concerning recent murders, photos, movie and sports magazines, new issues of children’s comics from Galip’s childhood such as Tom Mix and Texas, detective novels, and piles of paper and newsprint. The pistachio shells mounded on the large copper ashtray proved to Galip without leaving any doubt in his mind that Rüya had indeed been sitting at this table.
In the room that had to be Jelal’s Galip came across packs of memory: boosting medication called Mnemonics, vasodilators, aspirin, and match boxes. What he saw in Rüya’s room reminded him that his wife hadn’t taken very much with her when she left home: some makeup, her slippers, her lucky key chain that held no keys, and her mirror-backed hairbrush. Galip took such a long look at these articles sitting on the Thonet chair next to the bed in the sparsely furnished room with its bare walls that for a moment he slipped out of the enchantment of illusion, feeling that he had caught on to the secondary meaning the objects signaled to him, to the repressed mystery which was hidden in the world. “They came here to tell each other stories,” he thought when he went back to Uncle Melih who was still out of breath after climbing the stairs. The way the papers were placed on the table revealed that Rüya had begun to write down the stories Jelal had been dictating, and that Jelal had sat in the chair on the left where Uncle Melih was now sitting and Rüya had sat and listened to him in the other one that was vacant. Galip pocketed Jelal’s stories, which would later come in handy doing the pieces for Milliyet, and gave the explanation Uncle Melih felt he was entitled to without getting too pushy:
Jelal had long been suffering from a terrible memory disease which was discovered by the famous English physician, Dr. Cole Ridge, but for which he’d been unable to find a cure. Jelal had hid out in all these apartments in order to keep his affliction a secret from everyone, constantly asking for Rüya and Galip’s help. To this end, Rüya sometimes spent the night and sometimes Galip, listening to Jelal’s stories and sometimes even transcribing them, in order to help him recall and reconstruct his past. When it snowed outside, Jelal kept telling them his countless stories by the hour.
Uncle Melih fell silent as if he understood everything all too well. Then he wept. He lit a cigarette. He had a light wheezing attack. He said Jelal had always been subject to wrongheadedness. He had developed this odd obsession to get even with the whole family on account of having been kicked out of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments and the bad treatment he and his mother got when his father remarried. Yet his father had loved him at least as much as he did Rüya. Now he had no children left anymore. Well, no, Galip was his only son now.
Tears. Silence. The internal noises of an unfamiliar place. Galip felt like telling Uncle Melih to go and get his bottle of rakı at the corner store and go on home. Instead, he asked himself a question that he would not consider again, the same question which those readers who wish to put it to themselves would do best to skip (one paragraph):
On account of what stories, recollections, fairy tales blooming in the garden of remembrance had Rüya and Jelal felt it necessary to exclude Galip? Was it because Galip didn’t know how to tell stories? Was it because he wasn’t as hip and fun as they were? Was it because he didn’t catch on to some stories at all? Was it because he spoiled their fun by his excessive admiration of Jelal? Was it because they fled from the stubborn sadness that he seemed to put out like a contagious disease?
Galip noted that Rüya had slipped a plastic yogurt bowl under the radiator’s leaking valve, just the way she had done it at home.
Toward the end of summer, Galip vacated the apartment he and Rüya had rented—what with the furniture seeming to wince with terrible pain, he couldn’t stand being around unbearable memories that involved Rüya—and moved into Jelal’s place in the Heart-of-the-City Apartments. Just as he had been unable to look at Rüya’s body, he hadn’t wanted to see their stuff his father sold or gave away. He could no longer entertain fantasies of resuming their lives together, as if going on with a book they’d been interrupted reading halfway through, as he optimistically did in his dreams where Rüya turned up again from someplace or other, just as she had done after her first marriage. Hot, sultry summer days seemed endlessly long.
At the end of the summer, there was a military coup. A new government, composed of cautious patriots who hadn’t sunk into the cesspool called politics, announced that all the perpetrators of past politically motivated murders would be apprehended. In response, journalists who didn’t have much to report on account of the censorship, pointed out in nice, polite language that even the “Jelal Salik Murder” had yet to be solved. One of the papers, not for some reason Milliyet for which Jelal wrote but some other one, promised a sizable reward to any informer who was instrumental in getting the killer caught. The money was enough to buy a truck, or a small flour mill, or a grocery store that would bring in a steady income every month for a lifetime. This was what created the impetus and excitement to bring the mystery of the “Jelal Salik Murder” into light. Martial law commandants in provincial towns had also gone all out in an effort to solve it, so as not to miss their last chance at becoming celebrities.
* * *
My prose style probably betrays it to you that it is me again who’s narrating all that transpired. It was during those days when the chestnut trees began leafing out once more that I was conv
erted from a melancholic person into an angry one. The angry person I was being transformed into didn’t pay much attention to the trial balloons provincial reporters passed on to Istanbul with the claim that “the investigation is being conducted under wraps.” One week he read that the killer had been caught in some mountain town he’d previously heard mentioned in connection to an accident that left a bus load of soccer players and their fans crushed in the bottom of a ravine just outside of town; the next week the suspect was supposedly apprehended in a seaside town gazing longingly at the skyline of the neighboring country which had paid him sacks of dough for committing the crime. Since the news not only encouraged citizens who wouldn’t have dared otherwise to think of turning stool pigeons, but also spurred on sundry martial law commandants into industrious competition with their successful colleagues, at the start of the summer there was a glut of news claiming that “the killer has been caught.” It was during this period that security officials began hauling me out in the middle of the night to their central bureau in the city with the object of getting “information” and “a positive identification.”
In addition to imposing the curfew, the authorities now turned the power off from midnight to morning, since the city couldn’t afford to run the generators all night, and so our nights in Istanbul became as dark as in those distant small towns where they’re big on their religion and their graveyards. Beleaguered as we were in a milieu where a terrifying darkness reigns and illegal butchers furiously slaughter old horses execution-style, the life of all of us in the city and in the entire nation had been cut down the middle into opposing factions as if with a knife. Around midnight I’d slowly emerge from the smoke rising from my desk where I’d written my latest column with inspiration and creativity that was worthy of Jelal’s talents, and I’d go down the dark stairs of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments and out on the deserted sidewalk and wait for the police car that would take me to the Bureau of National Investigation built on the heights of Beşiktaş, which looked like a fort surrounded by a high wall. The city lay deserted and motionless, but the fort was hopping, full of action and glitter.
They’d bring out mug shots of sleep-deprived young men with dreamy expressions, deep purple circles under their eyes, and disheveled hair. Some of their eyes were reminiscent of the water-carrier’s black-eyed son who used to come in with his dad and whose camera gaze committed to memory all the furniture in Uncle Melih’s apartment by the time they finished refilling the water tank. Others recalled the pimply nonchalant “friend of a friend of mine’s older brother” who came up to Rüya, not giving two hoots if her male cousin was with her or not, during the five-minute intermission at the movies where we went together when Rüya ate with relish her frozen Penguin bar; others, the salesboy who was the same age as us whose sleepy eyes watched the schoolkids go home through the half-open door of the old haberdashery store, some others—and this was the most horrible—were reminiscent of no one, had no association to anyone or anything at all. Looking at these vacant faces posed against police department walls that were unpainted, dirty, and stained with who knows what, was frightening. When I was about to make out through the fog of my recollections a vague shadow which neither gave itself away completely nor remained entirely indefinite, that is, when I was stumped, the hardboiled agents who stood over me would encourage me, supplying me with provocative information concerning the identity of the phantom expression in the mug shot: this kid had been picked up at a right-wing coffeehouse in Sivas, thanks to a tip, and was responsible for four previous killings; this other one whose mustache hadn’t quite come in yet had published a long piece in a journal partisan to Enver Hoxha which identified Jelal as a life-size target; this one with the buttons on his jacket missing was being transferred from Malatya to Istanbul—he was a teacher, but he had persisted in telling his nine-year-old students that Jelal had to be slain for blaspheming against a great religious figure, on account of the piece he’d written on Rumi fifteen years ago; this timid, middle-aged fellow who looked like a family man was a drunk who had held forth at a Beyoğlu tavern on the subject of disinfecting our land of all the microbes, inspiring the citizen at the next table, whose mind was on the reward money offered by the newspaper, to report him to the Beyoğlu Precinct, saying the guy had also mentioned Jelal’s name among the microbes. Did Mr. Galip know the hungover drunk, these deadbeats lost in daydreams, these cranks, these wretches? Had Mr. Galip seen in Jelal’s company in recent years any one of these visionary or guilty faces whose photos were presented to him one by one?
In midsummer when the new five-thousand-lira notes came out with Rumi’s image engraved on them, I read in the papers the obituary of a retired colonel whose name was Fatih Mehmet Üçüncü. During the same hot July nights the imperative midnight visits began to escalate and the mug shots placed before me to multiply. I saw faces that were sadder and more mournful, terrifying, and incredible than those in Jelal’s modest collection: bicycle repairmen, archaeology students, serging machine operators, gas station attendants, grocery stock boys, extras at Yeşilçam Films, coffeehouse owners, authors of religious treatises, bus ticket-takers, park attendants, nightclub thugs, young accountants, encyclopedia salesmen … They’d all been through torture, roughed up, and given small or large beatings; they’d all looked into the camera with an expression that said, “I am not here” or “I happen to be someone else anyway,” obscuring the fear and sorrow on their faces, as if to forget that lost mystery that settled in the bottom of their memory banks, but the existence of which they’d forgotten, and which they didn’t miss since it was forgotten, that secret knowledge they wanted to lose in the bottomless well to make sure it would never come back.
Since I no longer want to go back to the predetermined moves I made totally unconsciously, in order to see what pieces are in which places in this old endgame that seems to me (and to my readers) to be a foregone conclusion, I thought I’d not bring in anything about the letters I saw in the faces in the photographs. But during one of those endless nights at the fort (or should I call it “the castle”?) when I rejected with the same certainty all the faces that had been presented to me, the NBI agent who was, as I learned later, a staff colonel asked me a question. “The letters,” he said, “can you also make out any letters?” Then he added with seasoned professionalism: “We too know how difficult it is for a man to be himself in this land. But won’t you help us out a little?”
One night I’d listened to a chubby major’s inferences concerning the belief in the Messiah that still existed among remnants of the Sufi orders in Anatolia which he invoked not as the conclusions of secret intelligence work but as if giving voice to his own dark and tasteless childhood memories: During his clandestine trips into Anatolia Jelal had tried to make contact with these “reactionary dregs” and was successful in meeting a bunch of these somnambulists either at a car mechanic’s in the outskirts of Konya or else at a quilt maker’s home in Sivas, and he’d told them he would indicate the signals for the Day of Judgment in his columns, all they had to do was wait. The pieces in which he mentioned Cyclopes, the day that the Bosphorus dries up, sultans and pashas in disguise all teemed with these very signals.
When one of the diligent officers, who divulged that he had finally broken the code, said in all seriousness that the acrostic formed by the initial letters of the paragraphs in the piece called “The Kiss” was the key to the enigma, I felt like saying, “I’ve known that.” And when they presented me with the significance in the title of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s book, Discovery of Mystery, where he narrates his own life and struggles, and the man’s photographs taken in dark city streets during the years of his exile in Bursa, I also felt like saying “I know,” being quite cognizant of what they were trying to point out. When they had a good old time laughing that Jelal was looking for someone who would kill him in order to “establish” some sort of lost mystery, or, in their words, because “his screws were loose” and he had lapses of memory, or when
I came across in the photographs put before me a face that looked like one of those lost, dolorous, mournful persons in the photos I found in the depths of Jelal’s elmwood cabinet, again I felt like saying, “Don’t I know it!” I wanted to tell them that I knew the identity of the beloved he summons in the piece on the Bosphorus’s receding waters, the phantom wife he calls out to in the piece on kissing, the heroes he meets in the twilight of sleep. I still felt like saying, “I know,” although I felt skeptical about anything they said, like when they remembered with great amusement that the scalper, whom Jelal mentioned in one of his columns going crazy with love for the pale Greek girl in a movie ticket booth, was in fact a plainclothes cop on their staff, or when I said after staring at it long and hard that I didn’t recognize yet another face that had lost its integrity, secrets, and meaning due to torture, beating, and sleeplessness, besides being disconcerted by the presence of the magic two-way mirror through which we could see him but he couldn’t see us, and they resorted to explaining to me that Jelal’s stuff on faces and maps was in fact an old garden-variety scam that made use of a cheap tactic to make his readers happy by suckering them into thinking he’d send them some sort of a secret, a keepsake, a sign of something held in common.
Perhaps they already knew what I knew or didn’t know, but because they wanted to be done with it as soon as possible, they wanted to kill off Jelal’s lost, dark mystery, the mystery obscured by the black tar and colorless dregs of our lives, before we had a chance to discover it, or to cut off any doubt budding not only in my mind but in the minds of newspaper readers and compatriots everywhere before it grew and gave off shoots.
Sometimes one of the hardboiled spooks who thought enough was enough already, or a general that I met for the first time, or the skinny prosecutor I got to know some months ago would attempt to narrate a full-blown story like the unconvincing detective who unfolds with the ease of a magician the concealed significances of all the clues and the details for the benefit of the readers of mystery novels. While a scene reminiscent of the last pages of Rüya’s mystery novels developed, the other functionaries present listened on, taking notes on paper in front of them that said State Supply Office—just like schoolteachers judging the intramural debates, listening with patience and pride to their best students’ pearls of wisdom: The killer was a pawn sent by foreign powers who wanted to “destabilize” our society; the Bektaşi and the Nakşibendi orders who realized their secrets had been made the subject of derision, as well as some poets who wrote classical verse that involved acrostics along with some present-day bards—voluntary Hurufis every one of them—had become the unwitting representatives for the foreign powers in the plot to push us into anarchy or a kind of apocalypse. No, this murder presented no political implications. In order to figure this out, all one had to do was remember that the murdered journalist had been writing nonpolitical nonsense concerning his own private obsessions which he penned in an outmoded manner and a prose style that was unreadable and much too long. The murderer had to be either the Beyoğlu hood who was affronted thinking he was being lampooned by the exaggerated legends Jelal wrote about him, or some other gunman that he had hired. On one of those nights when college kids who turned themselves in for the sake of making a name for themselves were put to torture to change their minds about confessing to the murder, or when innocent people picked up at the mosque were forced into making a confession, a false-toothed professor of Classical Ottoman Literature—he and an NBI big cheese had spent their childhood together in old Istanbul backyards and streets overlooked by trellised balconies—after making a short but boring introduction to Hurufism and the ancient art of word games which was interrupted by jokes, had listened to the story I told unwillingly and then, putting on airs like a slum-district gypsy fortune-teller, explained that “the incidents could very well be placed into the framework of Şeyh Galip’s Beauty and Love without too much difficulty.” During that period, a two-man committee had been busy at the fort, examining informants’ letters which had been written to the newspapers and the authorities in the heat of the general frenzy brought on by the promise of the award money; so no attention was paid to the literary solution presented by the professor who pointed out two-hundred-year-old problems in poetry.
