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  Way past midnight, while Galip was busy reading the columns he’d taken out of the cabinet, first the lights in the living room went down like the footlights on a stage, then the motor in the fridge moaned with the sad weariness of an old, overloaded truck changing gears upgrade on a steep and muddy slope, and the place went pitch-dark. Like all Istanbulites who are accustomed to power failures, Galip sat for a long while in the chair without moving, the folder with the news clippings on his lap, entertaining the hope that “it will soon be back on.” He sat listening to the internal noises of the building he’d forgotten all these years, the clacking in the radiator, the silence of the walls, the parquet floor stretching out, the moaning in the taps and the plumbing, the muffled tick-tocks of the clock he couldn’t place, and the roar from the air shaft that gave him the willies. By the time he groped his way into Jelal’s bedroom, it was really late. He was putting on Jelal’s pajamas when he thought of the protagonist stretching out on his double’s bed in the historical novel by the sad writer he’d met last night at the nightclub. He got in bed but couldn’t fall asleep right away.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ARE YOU UNABLE TO SLEEP?

  Our dreams are a second life.

  —GÉRARD DE NERVAL, Aurélia

  You get into bed. You settle down among familiar things, sheets and blankets redolent with your own smells and memories, your head finds the familiar softness of your pillow, you turn on your side, pulling up your legs, you bend your neck forward, the cold side of the pillow cools your cheek: soon, very soon, you will fall asleep, and in the dark you will forget all, everything.

  You will forget it all: the merciless power of your superiors, words that were heedlessly spoken, stupidities, work you didn’t get done on time, lack of consideration, disloyalty, injustice, indifference, people who blame you or will end up blaming you, your financial embarrassment, the fast flow of time, time that is heavy on your hands, people you miss, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your misery, the disasters, all the disasters; you will soon forget it all. You’re pleased that you will be forgetting. You wait.

  Waiting with you are objects that surround you in the dark or the half-light: commonplace wardrobes that are all too familiar, drawers, radiators, tables, stools, chairs, closed curtains, the clothes you’ve taken off and tossed, your pack of cigarettes, the matches and your wallet in your coat pocket, your watch that you still hear ticking.

  You are acquainted with the sounds you hear as you wait: a car going over the familiar pavement stones or over the water standing in the gutter, a door being closed somewhere nearby, the motor of an elderly refrigerator, dogs barking in the distance, the foghorn that can be heard all the way from the sea, the storefront shutter of the pudding shop suddenly getting rolled shut. The sounds, which are full of associations of sleep and dreaming as well as the memories of a renewed world of blissful oblivion, assure you that all is well, reminding you that soon you will forget them, along with the objects that surround you and your dear bed, and you will enter another realm. You are ready.

  You are ready; it is as if you are taking leave of your body, your dear legs and hips, even your hands and arms. You are ready and so pleased to be ready, you no longer feel the necessity for your body and your limbs that are so close to you, and you know that you will forget them too as your eyes close.

  A soft muscular movement makes you aware that under your eyelids your pupils are well shaded from light. Aware that all is well through the associations of familiar sounds and smells, it is as if your pupils present to you not the tenuous light in the room but the light in your mind which, as it gradually relaxes into repose, bursts into a fireworks display of colors: you see blue stains, blue lightning jolts, purple smoke, purple domes; shivering waves of dark blue, the shadows of lavender waterfalls, the meandering of magenta lava that flows out of the mouths of volcanoes, and the Prussian blue of the stars twinkling silently. You watch the colors in your mind as the colors and the shapes repeat each other quietly, appearing and disappearing, and they gradually change, manifesting memories and scenes that have been forgotten or else have never taken place.

  But you’re still not asleep.

  Isn’t it still too early to confess the truth? Recall the things you think when you sleep peacefully: No, not what you did today and what you’re going to do tomorrow, but think of those sweet moments that united you unconsciously to the oblivion of sleep: They’ve all been waiting for your return when you finally show up, making them happy; no, you don’t show up at all, you are on a train, which is running between two rows of snow-covered telegraph poles, with all the things you love most packed in your case; you come back with something smart and apropos, and they all realize their mistake and shut up, feeling some sort of admiration for you, albeit secretly; you embrace a beautiful body that you love and the body embraces you back; you return to an orchard you’ve been unable to forget where you pick ripe cherries off the boughs; it’s summer, it’s winter, it’s spring; it’s morning, a blue morning, a beautiful morning, a sunny morning, a properly delightful morning … But no, you cannot sleep.

  In that case, do what I do: turn gently in your bed without disturbing your arms and legs in the slightest so that your head can find a cool spot on your pillow. That’s when you begin to think about Princess Maria Palaeologina who was sent from Byzantium seven hundred years ago to become the bride of Hulagu, the Khan of the Moguls. She made the trip from Constantinople all the way to Iran to marry Hulagu, but when Hulagu gave up the ghost even before she got there, she married instead his son Abaka who rose to the throne; she lived in the Mogul palace in Iran for fifteen years, and when her husband was murdered, she returned back to these hills where you presently wish to sleep peacefully. Well, put yourself in place of Princess Maria and imagine her sorrow when she set out on the road, then imagine the rest of her days upon her return, spent shut up in the church she had built on the shores of the Golden Horn. Think of the dwarves kept by the Sultana called Handan, the mother of Ahmet the First, who had a dwarf house built in Scutari for her dear friends so that she could make them happy; then, a galleon having been built for them with the support of the Sultan himself, these friends of hers had sailed away from Istanbul to a paradise the location of which couldn’t be found even on the map. Imagine the sorrow of Handan Sultana separated from her friends on the morn of the voyage, and the sorrow of the dwarves on board the galleon waving goodbye, as if you yourself were soon leaving Istanbul and your loved ones.

  If all this does not put me to sleep, my dear readers, I imagine a troubled man walking up and down a railway platform in a desolate station in the middle of a desolate night, waiting for a train that does not arrive; when I figure out the man’s destination, it turns out that I’ve become that man. I think about the workers digging the underground passage at Silivri Gate which provided access to the Greeks who occupied the city seven hundred years ago. I imagine the bewilderment of the first fellow who stumbled on the secondary meaning of objects. I dream of a parallel universe within the manifested one, imagining my intoxication with new meanings in this new realm as the secondary meanings of things are gradually revealed to me. I think of the blissful confusion of the man who has lost his memory. I imagine being abandoned in a ghost town I don’t recognize at all; the neighborhoods once inhabited by millions, the streets, the mosques, the bridges, the ships are all completely deserted, and as I walk through the ghostly emptiness, I weep to remember my own past and my own hometown, walking slowly to my own neighborhood, my own house, to my own bed where I am trying to fall asleep. I think of myself as Jean-François Champollion, who rises out of his bed to decipher the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone, and having taken dead-end streets where he comes across exhausted remembrances, he stumbles around absentmindedly like a somnambulist through the dark passages of my memory banks. Imagining myself as Murat the Fourth putting on a disguise at night to check out personally how Prohibition is going, privately as
sured that I would come to no harm in the company of my armed guard also in disguise, I fondly observe the lives of my subjects idling around in mosques, in the occasional shops still open for business, and in the dens of lassitude concealed in passageways.

  Then, at midnight, I’ve become a quilt maker’s apprentice, whispering the first and the last syllables of a cipher to the tradesmen in anticipation of one of the last Janissary rebellions in the nineteenth century. Or else I am the messenger from the seminary who awakens the dormant dervishes of an outlawed order out of their lethargy and silence.

  If I am still not asleep, dear readers, then I become the unhappy lover seeking the replica of his sweetheart whose memory traces he keeps losing, and I open doors all over the city, looking for my own past and my sweetheart’s trail in every room where opium is smoked, in every company where stories are told, and in every house where songs are sung. If my memory, my power of imagination, and my bedraggled dreams have still not said uncle out of exhaustion, then in a blissfully vague moment between sleep and wakefulness, I enter the first familiar abode I come across, say, the home of a slight acquaintance or the uninhabited mansion of a close relative, and, opening door after door as if going through the forgotten corners of my memory, I find the last room, put out the candle, stretch out on the bed and, among the remote, alien, and outlandish things, I fall asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  WHO KILLED SHAMS OF TABRIZ?

  How much longer do I seek you, house by house, door to door?

  How much longer, corner to corner, street by street?

  —RUMI

  When Galip awoke from a long sleep in the morning, feeling peaceful, the fifty-year-old light fixture hanging from the ceiling was still on, giving off light the color of old parchment. Still in Jelal’s pajamas, he turned off all the lights that had been left on, got the Milliyet that had already been slipped under the door, sat at Jelal’s desk, and began to read. Seeing the same error he’d come across in the column when he was at the newspaper offices on Saturday afternoon (“being yourselves” had been transcribed as “being ourselves”), he let his hand find its way into the drawer and locate a green ball-point pen, and began correcting the piece. When he was done, he remembered Jelal also sitting at this desk wearing the same blue-striped pajamas and smoking while he made corrections with the same pen.

  He trusted the feeling that things were going well. He ate his breakfast optimistically like someone who having slept well begins the day confidently, feeling full of himself—as if there was no need for him to be anybody else, either.

  After making coffee, he placed on the desk some boxes of columns, letters, and news clippings that he’d taken out of the hallway cabinet. He had no doubt that if he read the papers in front of him with faith and care, he’d find what he was looking for in the end.

  Galip tapped into his prerequisite resources of patience and care, reading Jelal’s columns about the feral existence of the children who lived in the pontoons on the Galata Bridge, about monstrous orphanage directors who stuttered, about the aerial competition of winged multitalented persons who dived off Galata Tower and into the air as if diving into water, about the history of pederasty in the Levant and “modern” merchants engaged in this business. He hung on to the same goodwill and confidence reading the stories concerning the reminiscences of an auto mechanic in Beşiktaş who’d chauffeured the first Model T in Istanbul, the reasons why chiming clock towers needed to be put up in every neighborhood in “our city,” the historical significance of the Egyptian ban on assignation scenes between harem ladies and black slaves in the Thousand and One Nights, the benefits of being able to board old-style horse-drawn streetcars on the move, the reasons why parrots fled Istanbul while black crows infested it, causing the first fall of snow as a consequence.

  As he read, he remembered the days when he first read these pieces; he took notes on pieces of paper, sometimes reading a sentence, a paragraph, or a word over again; and when he finished reading a column, he fondly pulled a fresh one out of the box.

  Sunlight hit only the window ledges without coming into the room. The curtains were open. Water dripped off the tips of the icicles hanging down the eaves of the apartment building across the street and out of the snow-and dirt-filled gutters. A piece of bright blue sky showed in between the triangle of the roof, which was the color of red tiles and dirty snow, and the square of the tall chimney that blew lignite smoke through its dark teeth. When his eyes got tired from reading, Galip focused them on the space between this triangle and the square, observing the crows whose fleet wings cut across the blue, and then as he returned to the sheet of paper in front of him he realized that Jelal also looked up from his work whenever he was tired and looked at the same space to watch the flight of the same crows.

  Much later, when the sun now shone on the drawn curtains of the dark windows in the apartment building opposite, Galip’s optimism began to give out. It was possible that things, words, meanings were all in their proper places, but the more Galip read, the more he was painfully aware that the profound reality that held them together was long gone. He was reading what Jelal had written on Messiahs, false prophets, pretenders to the throne, and what he said on the subject of the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and on the jeweler called Saladdin with whom “the great Sufi poet” became intimate after the death of Shams, and Çelebi Hüsameddin who took Saladdin’s place upon the latter’s death. Hoping to shake off the feeling of distaste that welled up inside him, he began to read through the “Believe It or Not” columns, but he was unable to divert himself with the story about the poet called Figani who was strapped on a donkey to be paraded all around Istanbul because he had written an insulting couplet about Sultan Ibrahim’s prime vizier, nor with the story about Sheikh Eflaki who married all his sisters in turn and had inadvertently brought about every one of their deaths. Reading the letters he took out of the other box, he realized, with the same astonishment as in his childhood, the great number and the diversity of people who had become interested in Jelal; and yet, the letters were not good for anything besides feeding the feeling of mistrust that increased in Galip’s heart, be they letters from people asking for money, or accusing each other, or disclosing the easy virtue of the wives of other columnists with whom he was engaged in controversy, or reporting on some secret sect’s conspiracy and the bribes taken by local monopoly directors, or proclaiming their intense love or hate.

  He knew everything was connected to the gradual change of Jelal’s image that had been in his mind when he first sat down at the desk. Just as things and objects had been extensions of a comprehensible world in the morning, Jelal had been someone whose work he’d read for many years, whose unknown attributes he’d understood and identified at a distance as “unknown attributes.” In the afternoon, during the hours when the elevator began transporting a steady stream of sick or pregnant women to the gynecologist’s office below, and when Galip understood that Jelal’s image in his mind was turning in some strange way into a “deficient” image, he realized that the whole room and the things around him had also changed. Things did not seem at all friendly now; they were the threatening signs from a world which was not bound to yield its secrets easily.

  Having come to understand that the transformation was closely connected to what Jelal had written on Rumi, he decided to pursue the subject directly. He soon located a considerable number of pieces Jelal had written about Rumi and began to read rapidly through them.

  What attracted Jelal to the most influential mystical poet of all time was neither the poems in Persian written in Konya in the thirteenth century, nor the stock lines chosen out of these poems to provide examples for the virtues taught in the ethics courses in middle school. Jelal was no more interested in the “choice pearls” that ornamented the first page of many a mediocre writer’s book than he was in the Mevlevi whirling-dervish ceremonies with the bare feet and the skirts which the tourists and the postcard business were so cra
zy about. Rumi, who had been in the last seven hundred years the subject of volumes of commentary by the tens of thousands, and his order which had caught on after his death, concerned Jelal only as a locus of interest that a columnist ought to utilize and benefit from. What interested Jelal most about Rumi was his “sexual and mystical” intimacy with certain men.

  When he was around forty, Rumi, who had taken over the position of spiritual leader—the sheikhood—in Konya after the death of his father, and who was loved and admired not only by his devoted disciples but by the whole town, had fallen under the spell of an itinerant dervish from Tabriz called Shams who possessed neither Rumi’s wisdom nor his values. According to Jelal, Rumi’s conduct was totally incomprehensible. The apologias that were penned by commentators for the next seven hundred years, with the object of making some sense of the relationship, also proved this. After Shams disappeared or was killed, Rumi, despite his other disciples’ reactions against it, had appointed as Shams’s successor a totally ignorant jewelry-store keeper who had nothing to recommend him. According to Jelal, this choice was a sign that Rumi was in sad shape rather than that he had found again the “extremely powerful mystical attraction” Shams of Tabriz supposedly provided, which all the commentators had undertaken to prove. In just the same way, after the death of this successor, the next successor Rumi elected as his “soul mate” was as devoid of attributes and brilliance as was the previous one.

  According to Jelal, putting various handles on these three relationships that seemed totally incomprehensible with the object of making them comprehensible, as had been the practice for centuries—inventing for each successor unreal virtues they couldn’t possibly carry off and, what’s more, faking lineage, as some had done, that proved these men had descended from Muhammad or Ali—was to miss the point concerning Rumi’s most cogent attribute. On a Sunday afternoon that coincided with the memorial ceremony celebrated in Konya every year, Jelal had expounded on this attribute which he said was also reflected in Rumi’s work. Once more, Galip had the feeling that things around him had changed as he reread, twenty-two years later, the same piece which, like all religious writing, had bored him stiff in his childhood, and he remembered its publication only in conjunction with the Rumi stamp series that were out specially that year (the fifteen-kuruş ones were pale pink, the thirties forget-me-not blue, and the rare sixties Rüya was keen on were pistachio green).