The Black Book Read online

  Writing on paper gave him an impression that he resembled the heroes of all those detective novels he’d projected; consequently, he felt as if he was approaching the entrance of a door that was suggestive of Rüya, a new world, and the new person he wanted to become. The world glimpsed through the door was a world where the sensation of being followed was serenely accepted. If a person believed that he was being followed, then he must at least believe he was someone capable of sitting down at his desk and making a list of all the clues necessary to find another person who had vanished. Galip knew he was nothing like a hero in a detective novel, but presuming that he resembled that person, or being “like him,” somewhat lightened the oppression of the objects and the stories that beset him. Some time later when the young waiter, whose hair was parted in the middle with an astonishing symmetry, served the meal he’d ordered brought in from the restaurant, Galip’s world so closely approximated the world of the detective novels that, now that he had filled sheets of paper with clues, the dish of pilav topped with gyros and the carrot salad which sat on the dirty tray no longer seemed the same old stuff he always ate but had become unusual fare that he was seeing for the first time.

  The phone rang in the middle of his meal. He picked it up like someone who was expecting the call: wrong number. After he finished eating and got rid of the tray, he called his own apartment in Nişantaşı. He let the phone ring a long time, imagining Rüya, who’d returned home tired, getting out of bed, but he wasn’t surprised when no one answered, either. He dialed Aunt Halé’s number.

  Hoping to forestall new questions from his aunt, Galip ran through explanations in one breath: Their phone was out of order and that’s why they couldn’t get in touch; Rüya had recovered that same night, she was right as rain, nothing the matter with her at all, there she was in her purple coat, pleased with herself, sitting in the ’56 Chevvy taxicab, waiting for Galip; they were about to take off on a trip to Izmir, to see an old friend who was seriously ill; the boat would sail shortly, Galip was calling from a grocery store on the way; he thanked the grocer who let him use the phone when the store was really jumping; goodbye, Aunt, goodbye! But Aunt Halé still managed to ask: Did they make sure the door was locked, had Rüya taken along her green sweater?

  When Saim called, Galip had been wondering if a person could change significantly by staring at the map of a city where he’d never set foot. Saim said he had continued researching in his archives after Galip left in the morning and had come across some clues that might be useful: this Mehmet Yılmaz who was responsible for the old lady’s death, yes, he was possibly still alive, didn’t go under the names of either Ahmet Kaçar or Haldun Kara as they had previously supposed, but went around town like a ghost calling himself Muammer Ergener which didn’t smack of a pseudonym at all. When he came across this name in a publication that espoused totally “opposing views,” Saim was not surprised; what surprised him was that another person, who went under the name of Salih Gölbaşı, had used the same prose style and made the same spelling errors in two pieces sharply criticizing a couple of Jelal’s columns. After reasoning through that the first and the last name both rhymed with Rüya’s ex-husband’s first and last names, besides being made up of the same consonants, he saw the person’s name now listed in a small educational publication called The Hour of Labor as the editor-in-chief; so Saim had secured for Galip the address of the editorial offices, which were on the western outskirts of the city: Refet Bey Street, No. 13, Sunny Heights, Sinan Paşa, Bakırköy.

  Following the phone conversation, Galip located the map of the Sinan Paşa District in the City Directory. He was amazed: the Sunny Heights development covered the whole area of the barren hill where Rüya had moved into a squatter’s shack with her ex-husband, twelve years ago when they were first married, so that the husband could conduct his “studies” on laborers. Galip examined the map and figured out that the hill that he had once visited had been subdivided into streets each named after a hero of the War of Independence. In one corner, there was a square indicated by the green of a small park, the minaret of a mosque, and the tiny oblong of a statue of Atatürk. This was a realm that Galip wouldn’t have dreamed of in a thousand years.

  He called up the paper and was informed that Jelal hadn’t arrived yet, then he phoned İskender. He told İskender that he’d located Jelal, that he’d told him British TV wanted to interview him, that Jelal didn’t seem opposed to the idea, but that he was too busy at this particular time. And while he ran through his story, he could hear a little girl crying on the other end, not too far away from the telephone. İskender told him that the British would be in Istanbul for six more days at least. They’d been hearing good things about Jelal, so he was sure they’d wait; if Galip wished, he could look them up at the Pera Palas Hotel himself.

  He put the lunch tray in front of the door and left the building; as he walked down the hill toward the sea, he noticed that the sky was a paler color than he’d ever seen it before. It seemed about to snow down ashes, and yet the Saturday crowd would probably act as if that were par for the course. Perhaps that was why people walked along the muddy streets looking at their feet; they were hoping to get used to the idea. He sensed that the detective novels under his arm calmed him down. Perhaps it was thanks to their having been written in distant, magical countries and translated into “our tongue” by unhappy housewives who regretted not continuing the training they began in one of the foreign-language high schools that now everybody could go about his business as usual, so that the peddlers in faded suits who refill lighters at the entrances to business buildings, the hunchbacked men who look like old colorless rags, and the silent passengers at the dolmuş stops could all keep on breathing their usual breaths.

  He got on the bus in Eminönü and off at Harbiye, not far from the apartment, where he saw the crowd in front of the Palace Theater. The crowd was waiting for the 2:45 Saturday afternoon movie. Twenty years ago, amidst an identical trenchcoated and pimpled crowd of students, Galip too would come to this matinee with Rüya and her other schoolmates; he’d descend the stairs, which were covered with sawdust then as they were now, examine the tinted stills of the coming attractions lit by tiny bulbs, and, quietly patient, he’d watch to see just who Rüya was talking to. The previous showing seemed never to end, the doors never to open, and the moment he and Rüya would sit side-by-side when the lights went out never seemed to come. Today, when he found there were still tickets available for the 2:45 show, Galip was gripped by a sense of freedom. Inside the theater, the air left over from the previous audience was hot and close. Galip knew he’d fall asleep as soon as the lights went off and the ads came on.

  The moment he awoke, he sat up in his seat. On the screen was a beautiful woman, a real beauty, who was as troubled as she was beautiful. Then came a scene of a wide and tranquil river, a farmhouse, an American farm set in dense greenery. Then, the troubled beautiful girl began talking to a middle-aged man Galip had never seen before in any movie. He could see the deep trouble that beset their lives in their faces and in their gestures, which were as slow and placid as their speech. It was beyond mere understanding: he knew. Life was full of trouble, pain, deep misery which made our faces alike, pain that just as we got used to it surpassed itself with new pain that was much worse. Even when miseries arrived suddenly, we knew that they had always been on the way; we’d readied ourselves, but still, when trouble beset us like a nightmare, we found ourselves seized by a kind of loneliness, a hopeless and addictive loneliness, and imagined that sharing it with others would make us happy. For a moment Galip felt that his trouble and the trouble of the woman on the screen were the same—maybe it wasn’t trouble they had in common but a world, an orderly world where you never expected too much, which never turned away from you, which summoned you to be humble. Galip felt so close to the woman that it was as if he were watching himself as he watched her fetch water out of a well, take a trip in an old Ford pickup, talk to the child in her lap as she was g
etting him ready for bed. What made him want to embrace her was not the woman’s beauty, her artlessness, or her forthright attitude, it was the belief that he lived in her world: were he able to embrace her, the slender woman with light brown hair could have shared his belief. Galip felt as if he were watching the movie all by himself, as if what he saw could be seen by no one else. Soon, though, when a fight broke out in the sultry town divided by a wide asphalt road, and a male who was the “strong and dominant type” took matters in hand, Galip knew that he was about to lose the partnership he shared with the woman. He read the subtitles word by word; he could feel the fidgeting humanity in the theater. He rose and walked home under the snow that fell slowly from a sky that was nearly dark.

  Much later, as he napped under the blue-checkered quilt somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, he realized he’d left behind at the movie theater the detective novels which he’d bought for Rüya.

  Chapter Ten

  THE EYE

  During that cycle of productivity in his life, his daily literary yield never numbered less than five pages.

  —ABDURRAHMAN ŞEREF

  The incident I’m about to relate happened to me on a winter’s night. I was going through a melancholic period of my life: I’d already survived the first years as a journalist, which are the most difficult, but the things I had to endure in order to establish myself a little had already burned out my initial enthusiasm for the profession. On cold winter nights when I told myself “I made it after all!” I also knew that I’d been emptied out inside. That winter, I’d been stricken with the insomnia which was to follow me around the rest of my life; so some nights during the work week the night clerk and I would keep late hours at the paper, and I’d finish some articles which I couldn’t write during the workday hustle and bustle. The “Believe It or Not” column, a fad European newspapers and magazines had also entertained at that time, was made to order for my nocturnal labors. I’d turn the pages of one of those European papers that had already been clipped into bits and pieces, examine the pictures in the “Believe It or Not” section, and, inspired by the picture (I’ve always deemed learning a foreign language not only unnecessary but downright detrimental to my imagination), I’d expatiate on my impressions with a kind of artistic fervor.

  On that winter’s night, having briefly glanced at the picture of a monster (one eye was above, the other below) in a French publication (an old copy of L’Illustration), I quickly worked up a piece on the subject of the Cyclops: having outlined the reincarnations of this doughty creature who scares young girls in the Dede Korkut legends, who is transformed into the perfidious Cyclops in Homer, who is the Dadjdjal himself in Bukhari’s History of the Prophets, who penetrates the harems of viziers in the Thousand and One Nights, who puts in a brief appearance wearing purple in the Paradiso just before Dante finds his sweetheart Beatrice (who seems so familiar to me), who waylays caravans in Rumi, and who assumes the shape of a Negress in William Beckford’s novel Vathek, which I really love, I speculated on what in the world that single eye like a dark well in the middle of the forehead resembled, why it startled us, why we had to fear and avoid it. And, carried away with my excitement, I added to my short “monograph” a couple of little stories that flowed out of my pen: one about the Cyclops Number One who was reputed to live in one of the slum districts around the Golden Horn and made his way goodness knows where through the muddy, oily, turbid water at night to meet up with Cyclops Number Two, either one and the same as the first, or else an aristocratic Cyclops (they called him “Lord”) who, upon removing his fur headgear at midnight at some posh Pera whorehouse, knocked many a working girl unconscious with fear.

  I scribbled a note for the illustrator (“No mustache, please!”) who really fancied this sort of theme, and I left a little past midnight; I had no desire to go back to my cold and lonely flat, so I decided to take a walk through the streets of old Istanbul. As usual, I wasn’t pleased with myself, but I was pleased with my column and stories. If I fantasized the success of my piece while taking a long walk, I thought I might perhaps postpone the sensation of grief that clung to me like an incurable disease.

  I walked through the backstreets, which got increasingly narrow and darker, crisscrossing each other in haphazard diagonals. Listening to my own footsteps, I walked between the dark houses that leaned into each other, their enclosed balconies bent out of shape and their windows pitch black. I walked through those forgotten streets where even the dog packs, sleepy night watchmen, dopeheads, and ghosts didn’t dare set foot.

  When I was seized by a feeling that an eye was watching me from somewhere, I wasn’t alarmed at first. It would be a false sensation that stemmed from the piece I’d just written, I surmised, because there was no eye watching me either from the window of the crooked enclosed balcony, where I felt it was, or out of the darkness of the vacant lot. The presence that I sensed was nothing more than a vague illusion; I didn’t want to attach any importance to it. But in the stillness where nothing could be heard besides the whistles of the night watchmen and the ululations of dog packs fighting in distant quarters, the awareness that I was being watched slowly increased until it reached such an intensity that I could no longer be rid of the oppressive sensation by ignoring it.

  An all-seeing, omnipresent eye now watched me without concealing itself. No, it had no relationship to the heroes of the stories I had made up that evening; unlike them, this one was not frightening, or hideous, or ridiculous, nor was it alien or inimical. It was even, yes, an acquaintance; the eye knew me and I knew it. We had known about each other for a long time, but acknowledging each other openly had required the particular sensation that had just overcome me in the middle of the night, the particular street I walked on, and the intensity of the scene in that street.

  I won’t mention the name of this street in the hills behind the Golden Horn since it won’t mean much to readers who don’t know that part of Istanbul really well. All you have to imagine is a pallid cobblestone street, characterized by dark wooden houses (most of which I see still standing thirty years after the metaphysical incident that befell me) and the shadows of enclosed balconies, where the illumination from a single lamppost is obscured by crooked branches. The sidewalks were dirty and narrow. The wall of a small mosque stretched into a seemingly endless darkness. Where the street—or the perspective—came to a dark point, this ridiculous eye (what else can I call it?) awaited me. I imagine it has already become clear: the “eye” was waiting to help me gain access to the “metaphysical experiment” (which was more like a dream, I thought later) rather than to do me harm—say, to frighten, to strangle, to knife or kill.

  Not a sound. Instantly, I knew that the whole experiment was related to what journalism had taken away from me, something to do with the emptiness that I felt inside. One has the most convincing nightmares when one is really tired. But this was not a nightmare; it was a sharper, clearer—even a mathematical—sensation. “I know I’m completely empty inside.” That was what I’d thought, and then, leaning up against the mosque wall: “It knows I’m completely empty inside.” It knew what I was thinking, knew all that I had done so far, but even these things were not important; the “eye” signaled something else, something that was all too obvious. I had created it, and it had created me! I thought maybe this idea would just dart through my mind, like one of those stupid words that sometimes appear at the tip of your pen and vanish, but it remained there. And the idea opened the door through which, like that English girl who followed a rabbit down his hole under the hedge, I entered a new world.

  In the very beginning, I was the one who created the “eye” so that, obviously, it would see me and observe me. I didn’t want to be outside its gaze. I’d created myself under the gaze and the consciousness of this eye: I was pleased with its surveillance. My existence depended on my knowledge that I was being constantly observed—as if I’d cease to exist if the eye didn’t see me. The obvious truth was that, having forgotten that I was
the one who created it, I felt grateful to the eye that made my existence possible. I wanted to comply with its commands! Only then would I be included in a more pleasant “existence”! But it was difficult to accomplish this, although the difficulty was not painful (life was like that), it was something familiar we’d come to accept as natural. The contemplative world I fell into while leaning up against the mosque wall was not a nightmare but a kind of happiness fabricated out of reminiscences and familiar images, like the imaginary paintings “produced” by nonexistent painters I invented which I had once described in the column called “Believe It or Not.”

  Leaning up against the wall of the mosque and observing my own perception, I saw that I was in the center of this garden of happiness.

  I knew instantly that what I saw in the center of my perception, or imagination, or illusion—whatever you want to call it—was not a being that resembled me; it was me, myself. That’s how I could understand that the gaze of the “eye” that I’d sensed moments before was my own gaze. I had become that “eye” and was now observing myself. Besides not being a weird or foreign sensation, it was not at all frightening. As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That’s how I had managed to pull myself together over the years, checking myself out from the outside. “Okay, everything is in its place,” I would say. Or, scanning myself, “Ugh, I don’t make it today,” I would say. “I don’t look enough like what I want to look like.” Or I said: “I look something like it, but I must try harder.” And after many years, observing myself, “All right! I look like what I want to look like at last!” I could say joyfully: “Yes, I’ve made it, I’ve become him.”