The Black Book Read online

  Everything remained the same in the orange light where Galip had left them behind, hoping not to remember them: the same old walnut table with the feet that resembled lion claws, the way it stood the same distance from the windows hung with the same pistachio-colored curtains, the same human-shaped stain made by hair grease and hair-dressing gunk on the headrest of the armchair which was still upholstered by the same material from Sümerbank Textiles (the same ferocious greyhounds chasing the same hapless gazelles with the same blood thirst as thirty years ago in a forest of purple leaves), the patience of the English setter which seemed to have stepped out of an English flick sitting in the copper dish in the dusty curio cabinet to watch the same old world, the same way the nonworking watches, the cups, and the nail scissors stood on the radiator. “There are certain things that we fail to remember, but there are other things that we don’t even remember having failed to remember,” Jelal had written in one of his recent columns. “They ought to be retrieved!” Galip recalled how, after Rüya’s family moved in and Jelal was moved out of the flat, the stuff in here had gradually changed locations, got worn or been replaced, or vanished into a never-never land without leaving any traces in people’s memories. When the phone rang again he was certain, as he reached for the all-too-familiar receiver from where he sat in the “old” easy chair, still wearing his coat, that he could imitate Jelal’s voice without even being aware that he was doing it.

  The same voice was on the phone. Heeding Galip’s request, this time he introduced himself by name instead of through his reminiscences: Mahir Ikinci. The name had no association to faces or persons in Galip’s mind.

  “They are organizing a military coup. A small junta in the Army. It’s a religiously oriented group, a brand-new sect. They believe in the Messiah. They think the time has come. What’s more, they’ve been inspired by your stories.”

  “I’ve had no dealings with such nonsense.”

  “Yes, you have, Jelal Bey; yes, you have. You don’t remember it now, or don’t want to, having lost your memory, as you say, or else because you refuse to remember. Take a good look at your old pieces, read them well, and you will remember.”

  “I won’t remember.”

  “You will too. From what I know about you, I’d say you are not someone who can sit unfazed on his behind when he gets a tip about a military coup.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m not myself, even.”

  “I’ll be right over. I’ll get you to remember your past, your lost memories. At the end, you will agree with me and go at it hammer and tongs.”

  “I would like to, but I won’t be seeing you.”

  “But I will see you.”

  “If you can get hold of my address. I don’t go out anymore.”

  “Look here: the Istanbul phone book has three hundred thousand subscribers. Since I have an idea of what the first digit is, I can scan rapidly five thousand numbers every hour. This means that within five days I’ll have your address as well as that pseudonym I’m so curious about.”

  “All in vain,” Galip said, trying to sound confident. “This happens to be an unlisted number.”

  “You really have a thing for pseudonyms. I’ve been reading you for years. You’re a sucker for pseudonyms, pettifoggery, imposture. I bet you’d just as soon have fun making up a pseudonym as fill out an application to keep your number out of the phone book. I’ve already checked out some of the likely pseudonyms I bet you’d go for.”

  “And what might they be?”

  The guy ran off at the mouth making a list. After Galip hung up and unplugged the phone, he realized all these names he had listened to one by one were likely to be deleted from his memory without leaving a trace or any associations. He made a list of the names on a piece of paper he took out of his coat pocket. It was so odd and confounding for Galip to come up against the existence of another reader who was hooked on Jelal’s columns and remembered them even better than himself that his body seemed to have lost its reality. He sensed, although it was repellent, that he could be bonded to this diligent reader through a feeling of brotherhood. If only he could sit down with him and discuss Jelal’s old pieces, the chair where he sat in this surreal room would’ve achieved a more profound significance.

  It was before Rüya and Uncle Melih and Aunt Suzan showed up, when he was six years old, that he began to slip out of Grandma’s to sneak up to Jelal’s bachelor pad—which his parents didn’t much condone—to listen to the Sunday afternoon soccer game on the radio together with him (Vasıf nodding as if he could hear). Galip used to sit in this very chair watching Jelal write the next installment of the series on wrestlers which a persnickety colleague of his had left unfinished, admiring the speed with which Jelal typed as he smoked a cigarette. When his parents allowed him to go up on cold winter evenings while Jelal was still living here with Uncle Melih’s family before he got himself kicked out, Galip really went to watch Aunt Suzan and the beautiful Rüya who was every bit as incredible as her mom, as he’d come to discover, rather than listen to Uncle Melih’s tales of Africa. It was in this chair that he sat across from Jelal who kept making light of Uncle Melih’s stories using his eyes and eyebrows. During the following months, when Jelal suddenly disappeared and the altercations between Grandma and Uncle Melih made Grandma cry, and the rest of them fought in Grandma’s apartment over flats, property, estate, and inheritance, it was here in this chair that Rüya sat dangling her legs when, somebody having said, “Send the kids upstairs,” the two of them were left alone among the silent objects, with Galip watching her with awe. That was twenty-five years ago.

  Galip quietly sat in the chair for a long time. Then, in order to gather evidence concerning the location where Rüya and Jelal were hiding out, he began a painstaking search through the other rooms in the phantom apartment, where Jelal had re-created the memorabilia of his own childhood and youth. Yet after two hours of walking around the rooms and the hallways in the phantom apartment, and going through the closets with curiosity, more like an aficionado thrilled, enamored, and awed to be visiting the first museum devoted to his pet subject than the reluctant detective looking for his absconded wife’s tracks, these were the conclusions he came to after his initial search:

  From the pair of coffee cups on the end table he had knocked over in the dark, Galip deduced that Jelal had people visit here. Since the fragile cups had been broken, tasting the thin layer of grounds in the bottom (Rüya took her coffee with a lot of sugar) had not yielded any conclusion. The date on the earliest edition of the Milliyet which had piled up behind the door indicated that Jelal had been to the flat on the day Rüya had disappeared. The text of the column entitled “The Day the Bosphorus Dries Up” had been corrected with a green ballpoint pen in Jelal’s usual angry scrawl and placed next to the Remington typewriter. Neither in the bedroom closet nor in the coat closet next to the door was there any evidence that Jelal had gone on a trip, or that he no longer lived here, or that he did. Considering his blue-striped pajamas, the fresh mud on his shoes, the navy-blue overcoat he wore during the current season, his cold-weather vests, the exorbitant quantity of underwear he owned (Jelal had confessed in one of his old columns that, like many a man who comes into money in middle age after going through childhood and youth in privation, he had contracted the disease of buying more undershirts and shorts than he could possibly use), the place looked like it belonged to someone who might momentarily return from work and immediately resume his usual life.

  Perhaps it was difficult to tell to what extent the decor of the old place had been simulated by considering details like bedsheets and towels, but, obviously, the design in the other rooms was also dependent on the “phantom abode” theme carried out in the living room. So, what got reproduced was the same child’s blue bedroom walls that remained from Rüya’s childhood, and the skeleton of the replica of the bed that had once been covered under Jelal’s mother’s sewing materials, the dress patterns and imported European fabrics brought over by Şişli a
nd Nişantaşı socialites along with fashion magazines and clipped photographs. If smells had pooled in some corners replete with their associative powers which could reproduce the past, it was easy to understand that what gave them totality was always the presence of some visual material on the scene. Galip came to the realization that smells can only come back to life in the presence of the objects that surround them when he approached the nifty daybed that had once been Rüya’s, and he smelled the scent of the old Puro soap mixed with the now defunct Yorgi Tomatis brand cologne once used by Uncle Melih. In reality, nowhere in the room was there the drawer in which pencils and coloring books were kept as well as the brightly illustrated books sent to Rüya from Izmir or bought in the Beyoğlu stores and at Aladdin’s, nor any soap around Rüya’s bed to give off the familiar smell, nor any fake bottles of Pe-Re-Ja brand cologne, nor any mint-flavored chewing gum.

  It was difficult figuring out to what extent Jelal frequented or inhabited this place by studying the phantom decor. One could imagine that the number of the slim Gelincik or the thick Yeni Harman butts in the worn ashtrays that seemed placed here and there at random, or the cleanliness of the plates in the kitchen cabinets, or the relative freshness of the toothpaste on the end of the tube of Ipana which had been throttled at the neck with the same anger that had precipitated a column denouncing this same brand years ago were all part of the permanent fixtures under constant supervision in this museum arranged with a meticulousness that was sick. One might even go further and imagine that the dust in the globe lamps, the shadows that filtered through this dust to fall on the faded walls, and these shadows which were reminiscent of the faded shapes in the imagination of two Istanbul kids twenty-five years ago of African forests and Central Asian deserts, and the ghosts of the weasels and wolves in the witch and demon stories they heard from their aunt and grandmother were all part of the unique reproductions in this museum. (Galip mused, having, in the meantime, a hard time swallowing.) Consequently, it was impossible to deduce to what extent this place was lived in by examining marks left by the rain that had dried along balcony doors that hadn’t been shut all the way, or the gray dust balls that curled up like silk along the walls, or, under the weight of the initial footstep, the brittle squeak of the pieces of parquet which had given from all the central heating. The showy wall clock that was hung across from the kitchen door, a replica of which kept ticking and chiming away with the same joyousness at Cevdet Bey’s—who had old money, as Aunt Halé so often mentioned with pride—had been stopped with its hands at 9:35. The place made Galip think of the Atatürk museums, arranged with the same sick obsessiveness, with their clocks stopped at the hour of Atatürk’s death (9:05 a.m., November 10, 1938). But it didn’t occur to Galip what 9:35 it referred to or the hour of whose death.

  After having suffered the ghostly weight of the past, which rode him silly thanks to the sense of vengeance and sorrow exacted by his thoughts of the original pieces of furniture, hapless and forlorn, that he had known twenty-five years before, which had been sold to a junk dealer when they’d run out of space and then had traveled jiggling around on the dealer’s horse cart in order to be forgotten in God knew what distant lands, Galip returned to the corridor to go through the papers in the glass-front elm cabinet that ran the length of the wide wall between the kitchen and the bathroom, which was the only piece of furniture that Galip considered “new” in the place. After conducting a search that didn’t last too long, he found these articles that had been arranged on the shelves with the same sick obsession:

  Clippings of news stories and interviews from Jelal’s cub reporter period; clippings of all the articles written in praise or to the detriment of one Jelal Salik; all the columns and anecdotes Jelal had published under his pseudonyms; all the columns Jelal had published under his own name; all the columns of “Believe It or Not,” “Interpreting Your Horoscope,” “Today in Retrospect,” “Incredible Incidents,” “Interpreting Your Signature,” “Your Face, Your Personality,” “Puzzles and Crosswords,” and the like, all of which Jelal had researched and penned; clippings of all the interviews done on Jelal; rough drafts of columns that had not seen print for various reasons; special notes; tens of thousands of news stories and photographs he’d clipped and saved all these years; notebooks in which he’d jotted his dreams, his fantasies, details that must not be forgotten; pieces of reader mail by the thousands kept in dried fruit, candied chestnut, and shoe boxes; clippings of serial novels published under his pen name which he had either done in their entirety or picked up halfway through; copies of hundreds of letters Jelal had written; hundreds of weird magazines, pamphlets, books, brochures, and school and military service yearbooks; boxes of pictures of people that had been cut out of newspapers and magazines; pornographic photographs; pictures of odd animals and insects; two big boxes of articles and publications on Hurufism and the science of letters; stubs of old bus, soccer game, and movie tickets with signs, letters, and symbols drawn on them; photos that had been pasted into albums, or not; awards received from journalism associations; old Turkish and Czarist Russian currency; telephone and address books.

  Upon finding the three address books, Galip returned to the chair in the living room and read through all the pages. He concluded, after forty minutes of research, that the people in the address books had figured in Jelal’s life during the fifties and the sixties, and that he was not going to be able to find Rüya and Jelal at any of the numbers where the addresses had been exchanged for those that belonged to houses that had most probably been torn down. Following a short investigation among the bits and pieces in the glass-front cabinet, he began reading Jelal’s columns from the early seventies and the letters he received during the same time period in order to find the letter allegedly sent by Mahir Ikinci that concerned the trunk murder.

  Some people he knew from high school had been involved in the incident, so Galip had been interested in the politically motivated murder, referred to as the “trunk murder” in the news. The ingenious young people who had organized themselves into the political faction found responsible for the murder had unintentionally imitated one of Dostoevsky’s novels (The Devils) down to the last detail, and now as Galip went through the letters he remembered the couple of evenings when Jelal, who always maintained that in our country everything was in imitation of something else, had discussed the subject. Those were sunless, cold, and distasteful days, which were forgotten as they ought to be: Rüya was married to that “nice guy” whose name kept slipping Galip’s mind as he went back and forth between being impressed and feeling contemptuous. That was when Galip, defeated by his own curiosity which he always regretted later, listened to gossip and poked around, and ended up getting more political information than any cogent details concerning the newlyweds’ conjugal bliss or the lack thereof. One winter’s eve while Vasıf contentedly fed his Japanese fish (red wakins and watonais whose ruffled tail fins had degenerated from intermarriage within the family) and Aunt Halé did the crossword puzzle in Milliyet glancing up at the TV now and then, Grandma had just died staring at the cold ceiling in her cold room. Rüya had come to the funeral alone (“Better this way,” said Uncle Melih who openly despised his son-in-law whose background was provincial, thereby giving voice to Galip’s secret thoughts), wearing a faded coat and an even more faded kerchief, and had taken off soon after. One night when they got together in one of the flats after the funeral, Jelal had asked Galip if he had any information on the subject of the trunk murder but had been unable to find out what he was really curious to know: by any chance had any of the young people Galip said he knew read that book by the Russian author?

  “All the murders,” Jelal had said that very night, “like all the books, are all imitations. That’s why I could never publish a book under my own name.” Next evening they’d gathered at the deceased’s flat again, and the two of them were having a late night tête-à-tête when Jelal had gone on, saying, “Even so, in the worst murders there is an original aspec
t that does not exist in the worst of books.” In the following years, Jelal would descend step by step deep into these speculations, which gave Galip a pleasure akin to going on a journey whenever he witnessed it. “So, the total travesties are not murders but books. Since they are concerned with imitations of imitations—exactly the kind of thing that thrills us the most—murders that explain books and books that explain murders appeal to a sensibility common to us all; it goes without saying that one can only bring down the bludgeon on the victim’s head if he can put himself in someone else’s place (since no one can bear to see himself as the murderer). Creativity mostly lies in anger, anger that renders us insensible, but anger can prod us into action only through methods that we have previously learned from others: knives, guns, poisons, narrative tricks, forms of fiction, verse meters, etc. When a notorious Public Enemy says, ‘Your Honor, I was not myself,’ he is only expressing this well-known fact: Murder, in all its details and ceremonies, is a business that one learns from others, that is, from legends, stories, recollections, newspapers—in short, from literature. The purest act of murder, a crime of passion committed by mistake, for example, is still an unconscious act of travesty, an imitation of literature. Should I write a column on the subject? What do you say?” He hadn’t written it.