The Black Book Read online

  As I search for the car in the stillness of this noxious darkness, listening to the horns of the cars that go by on what used to be called the Shoreway but which is now more like a mountain road, I shall meet up with palace intriguers who are still doubled up in the sacks within which they were drowned, the skeletons of Orthodox priests still hanging onto their crosses and staffs and wearing balls and chains on their ankles. When I see the bluish smoke that comes out of the periscope being used as a stovepipe on the British submarine (which was supposed to torpedo the SS Gülcemal carrying our troops from Tophane harbor to the Dardanelles, but instead itself sank to the bottom, diving into moss-covered rocks, its propeller tangled in some fishing nets), I shall understand that it’s our citizens now who are comfortable in their new home (built in the shipyards of Liverpool), drinking their evening tea out of China cups, sitting in the velvet officer’s chairs once occupied by bleached English skeletons gulping for air. In the gloaming, a little way off, there will be the rusty anchor of a battleship that belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm, and a pearlized television screen will wink at me. I shall observe the remnants of a looted Genoan treasure, a short-barreled cannon stuffed with mud, the idols and images of fallen and forgotten states and peoples, a brass chandelier with blown-out bulbs standing on its tip. Descending further down, sloughing through the mire and rocks, I shall see the skeletons of galley-slaves sitting patiently chained at their oars as they observe the stars. Maybe I won’t pay enough attention to the necklaces, the eyeglasses, and the umbrellas that droop from trees of seaweed, but for a moment I shall look assiduously and fearfully at the Crusader knights mounted with all their arms, armor, and equipment on magnificent skeletons of horses that are still stubbornly standing. And I shall register with fear that the barnacle-covered skeletons of the Crusaders, replete with their emblems and their armament, are guarding the Black Cadillac.

  Slowly and cautiously, as if asking for the Crusaders’ permission, I shall respectfully approach the Black Cadillac, barely lit from time to time by a phosphorescent light the source of which is not distinguishable. I shall try the handles on the doors of the Cadillac but the vehicle, covered entirely with mussels and sea urchins, won’t permit me entrance; the greenish windows will be too stuck to move. That’s when, taking my ballpoint pen out of my pocket, using the butt end, I shall slowly scrape off the pistachio-green layer of moss that covers one of the windows.

  At midnight, when I strike a match in this horrific and spellbinding darkness, I shall observe the embracing skeletons of the hood and his moll kissing in the front seat, her braceleted slim arms and ringed fingers around his, in the metallic light of the gorgeous steering wheel that still shines like the Crusaders’ armor, and the meters, dials, and clocks dripping with chrome. Not only will their jaws be clasped together, their skulls, too, will have welded together in an eternal kiss.

  Then, not striking another match, as I turn back toward the city lights, thinking that this is the best possible way to meet death at the moment of disaster, I will call out in pain to an absent lover: My soul, my beauty, my dolorous one, the day of disaster is at hand, come to me no matter where you are, mayhap in an office thick with cigarette smoke, or in the onion-scented kitchen of a house redolent with the smell of laundry, or in a messy blue bedroom, no matter where you are, it’s time, come to me; now is the time for us to wait for death, embracing each other with all our might in the stillness of a dark room where the curtains are closed, hoping to lose sight of the awesome catastrophe that is fast approaching.

  Chapter Three

  GIVE MY REGARDS TO RÜYA

  My grandfather had named them “the family.”

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  On the morning of the day his wife was to leave him, Galip climbed the steps that went up to the building where his office was located on Babıali in the old city, the paper he’d been reading tucked under his arm, thinking of the green ballpoint pen that he dropped into the depths of the Bosphorus years ago during one of those boating excursions their mothers took them on when he and Rüya had the mumps. That night he realized, as he examined the farewell letter Rüya left for him, that the green ballpoint on the table with which the letter had been written was identical to the one that fell in the water. Twenty-six years ago Jelal had loaned him the pen that slipped away, noticing how Galip hankered after it. On learning of the pen’s loss, and after asking and hearing where it fell out of the boat into the sea, Jelal had said, “It can’t really be considered lost because we know what part of the Bosphorus it fell into.” Galip was astonished that Jelal hadn’t brought up this lost pen when he wrote of taking a ballpoint pen out of his pocket to scrape away the pistachio-colored moss off the windows of the Black Cadillac, in his column about the Day of Disaster, the details of which Galip had been reading just before he entered his office. After all, the coincidence of details dating back years ago, centuries ago—like his imagining the Byzantine coins stamped with Olympus and the caps of Olympus soda-pop bottles in the mire of the Valley of Bosphorus—was the sort of observation which delighted Jelal and which he worked into his column every chance he got. Of course, that is, if his memory hadn’t deteriorated as he claimed during one of their last interviews. “As the garden of memory grows arid,” Jelal had said on one of the last evenings they were together, “a man dotes on the last trees and roses that remain. Just so they won’t wither away, I water and take care of them all day long. I remember, I remember so that I won’t forget.”

  Galip had heard from Jelal how, the year after Uncle Melih went to Paris, when Vasıf turned up with an aquarium in his arms, Father and Grandfather had gone to Uncle Melih’s law offices on Babıali and trudged up to Nişantaşı all his files and furniture on a horse cart and stored everything in the attic. Years later, after Uncle Melih and his beautiful new wife and Rüya had returned from Morocco, after bankrupting the dried fig venture he went into with his father-in-law in Izmir, after getting barred from the drug and the confectionery stores so that he wouldn’t ruin family businesses as well, and after he decided to get back into law, he had the same furniture moved to his new offices, hoping to impress his clientele. Later still, one night when Jelal was remembering things past, alternating between anger and laughter, he told Galip and Rüya that one of the porters who’d carried the furniture up to the attic twenty-two years ago had been the same one who had later moved the refrigerator and the piano, having developed expertise in moving tricky articles in the intervening years, which had only managed to turn him bald.

  Twenty-one years after Vasıf had carefully studied the same porter to whom he’d given a glass of water, the reason why the office and the old furniture had gone to Galip was explained differently: according to Galip’s father, Uncle Melih grappled not with the opponents of his clients but with the clients themselves; according to Galip’s mother, having become paralyzed and senile, Uncle Melih couldn’t tell his court records and law briefs from restaurant menus and ferryboat schedules; according to Rüya, her darling dad had already guessed what would happen between his daughter and his nephew, and that was why he’d been willing to hand over his law offices to Galip, who was still only his nephew, not yet his son-in-law. So now Galip had the naked-pated portraits of some Western jurisprudents whose fames as well as their names had long been forgotten, the fezzed pictures of teachers who had taught at the law school half a century ago, and the dossiers of lawsuits where the judges, the plaintiffs, and the defendants were long dead, the desk where Jelal studied in the evenings and where his mother traced dress patterns in the morning, and on one corner of this desk, the husky black telephone which, more than a tool of communication, looked like an unwieldy and feckless contraption of war.

  The bell on the phone, which sometimes rang of its own accord, was startling. The pitch-dark receiver was as heavy as a little dumbbell and when dialed, it grumbled with the squeaky melody of the old turnstiles at the Karaköy–Kadıköy ferryboat dock. Sometimes it connected with numbers at random, rat
her than the numbers dialed.

  When he dialed his home number and Rüya actually answered, he was surprised: “Are you awake?” He was pleased that Rüya no longer roamed in the enclosed garden of her own memory but in a world known to everyone. He visualized the table on which the phone stood, the messy room, Rüya’s stance. “Have you read the paper I left on the table? Jelal seems to have written some fun stuff.” “I haven’t,” Rüya said. “What time is it?” “You went to bed late, didn’t you?” Galip said. “You got your own breakfast,” Rüya said. “I couldn’t bear to wake you,” said Galip. “Whatever were you dreaming?” “I saw a cockroach in the hallway late at night,” Rüya said with the flat voice of a radio announcer warning sailors of a loose mine sighted in the Black Sea, but she then went on anxiously: “Between the kitchen door and the radiator in the hallway … at two o’clock … a big one.” Silence. “Shall I hop on a taxi and come home?” Galip said. “The house is scarier when the drapes are closed,” said Rüya. “Want to go to the movies tonight,” Galip said, “at the Palace? We could stop by at Jelal’s on the way back.” Rüya yawned. “I’m sleepy.” “Go to sleep,” said Galip. They both fell silent. Galip heard Rüya yawn faintly once more before he hung up.

  In the days that followed, when Galip had to remember this phone conversation again and again, he couldn’t decide how much of their verbal exchange he had actually heard. Let alone the faint yawn. Seeing how he remembered with suspicion the revised versions of what Rüya had said, “It was as if it weren’t Rüya I was speaking to but someone else,” he thought and imagined that this someone had duped him. Later on, he came to think that Rüya had said what he heard, but after that phone conversation, it wasn’t Rüya but he himself who had slowly begun to turn into someone else. He kept reconstructing what he thought he heard or remembered through his new persona. In those days when he listened even to his own voice as if it were someone else’s, Galip understood very well how two persons on two ends of a phone line speaking to each other could turn into two entirely different persons. But at first, going for a simpler explanation, he’d blamed it all on the old telephone: all day, the clumsy thing had kept ringing, making him pick up the receiver.

  After speaking to Rüya, Galip had first called a tenant who had brought a lawsuit against his landlord. Then he got a wrong number. In the time before İskender called, he got two other wrong numbers. Then he reached someone who knew he was “related to Jelal Bey” and asked for Jelal’s phone number. After the calls from a father who wanted to save his son who was in jail for political reasons and an ironmonger who wanted to know why the judge had to be bribed before the verdict, İskender called because he, too, wanted to reach Jelal.

  İskender hadn’t spoken to Galip since they were classmates in high school, and he quickly ran through all that had happened in the intervening fifteen years, congratulating him on his marriage to Rüya, maintaining like many others that he too had known “that’s what would happen in the end.” Now he was the producer for an advertising agency. He wanted to put Jelal in touch with people from the BBC who were doing a program on Turkey. “They want to do a live interview with a columnist like Jelal who, for thirty years, has been involved with what goes on in Turkey.” He explained in unnecessary detail how the TV crew had already talked to politicians, businessmen, and labor organizers, but insisted on seeing Jelal whom they found most interesting. “Not to worry,” Galip said, “I’ll get him for you in no time.” He was pleased to have found a reason for calling Jelal. “I think the people at the newspaper have been putting me off for the last couple of days,” said İskender; “that’s why I resorted to calling you. For the last two days Jelal hasn’t been at the paper. Something must be going on.” It was a known fact that Jelal would sometimes disappear for several days into one of his hideouts in Istanbul, the locations and phone numbers of which he kept from everyone, but Galip had no doubt that he’d get hold of him. “Not to worry,” he said again. “I’ll get him for you in no time.”

  He was unable to get him. All day, every time he called the apartment or the Milliyet newspaper offices, he fantasized changing his voice and talking to Jelal under someone else’s guise. (He had planned to say, using the same voice from the radio plays, as on those evenings when Rüya, Jelal, and Galip sat around, imitating readers and admirers: “Of course, I’m on to you, brother!”) But each time he called the paper, the same secretary gave him the same answer, “Jelal Bey isn’t in yet.” As he grappled with the phone all day, Galip had the pleasure of hearing his voice fool someone just once.

  Late in the afternoon he called Aunt Halé thinking she would know Jelal’s whereabouts, and she invited him to dinner. “Galip and Rüya are coming too,” she said, again mistaking Galip’s voice for Jelal’s. “What’s the difference?” Aunt Halé said when she realized her mistake. “You are all my negligent kids, the lot of you are the same. I was about to call you too.” After chewing him out for his failure to keep in touch, using the same tone of voice as when she scolded her cat Coals for scratching the furniture, she told him to stop at Aladdin’s store on his way to dinner and pick up some food for Vasıf’s goldfish: the fish wouldn’t eat anything but food imported from Europe, and Aladdin would sell the stuff only to steady customers.

  “Did you read his column today?” Galip asked.

  “Whose, Aladdin’s?” his aunt said with her habitual obduracy. “Nah! We buy Milliyet so that your uncle can do the crosswords and Vasıf might cut out articles to amuse himself. Not to read Jelal’s column and rue the condition to which our nephew has sunk.”

  “In that case you might call and invite Rüya yourself,” Galip said. “I really don’t have the time.”

  “Don’t you forget now!” Aunt Halé said, reminding him of his errand and the time set for dinner. Then she went through the permanent guest list for the family get-together, which was as unvaried as the dinner menu, naming each like a radio announcer deliberately calling the names of players already set for a soccer match as if to entice the listeners: “Your mother, your Aunt Suzan, your Uncle Melih, Jelal if he shows up, and of course your father; Coals and Vasıf, and your Aunt Halé.” She didn’t laugh her croupy laugh to punctuate the teams. And after she said, “I’m making puff böreks for you,” she hung up.

  As Galip gazed vacantly at the phone which began ringing as soon as he hung up, he remembered the old story of Aunt Halé’s plans for marriage which had gone sour at the last minute but, for some reason, he couldn’t remember the prospective groom’s odd name which he had in his mind only moments ago. So that his mind wouldn’t get accustomed to slacking off, he told himself: “I am not going to pick up the phone until I remember the name that’s at the tip of my tongue.” The phone rang seven times before it stopped. When it started again, Galip was thinking of the visit—a year before Rüya’s folks moved to Istanbul—that the prospective groom had made to ask for Aunt Halé’s hand, his uncle and older brother in tow. The phone fell silent once more, and when next it rang, it was dark and the furniture in the office had become hazy. Galip still couldn’t remember the name but he recalled with trepidation the strange shoes the man had worn that day. The man had an Aleppo boil on his face. “Are these people Arabs?” Grandpa had wanted to know. “Halé, you really want to marry this Arab, or what? And just where did he meet you?” By coincidence, that’s how! Around seven in the evening, just before Galip left the vacated business building, examining under the streetlights the dossier of a client who wanted to change his name, he came up with the odd name. As he walked to the Nişantaşı dolmuş stop he thought that the world was just too extensive to fit into any one memory bank, and as he walked to the apartment building in Nişantaşı, that mankind extracted meaning out of coincidences …

  The building was on one of the backstreets of Nişantaşı. Aunt Halé lived with Vasıf and Mrs. Esma in one apartment, and Uncle Melih and Aunt Suzan lived in another (formerly with Rüya too). Perhaps others wouldn’t call it a backstreet, seeing how it wa
s only a five-minute walk and three streets down from the main street, Aladdin’s store, and the police station at the corner. But the relatives who now lived in apartments on this backstreet had watched it get transformed at a distance, without paying much attention, from muddy fields into irrigated vegetable gardens, into cobblestones, and later into pavement; for them the heart of Nişantaşı could never be a street less interesting than the main street on which they had constructed their own apartment building. Lining up the symmetry of their psychic world as well as the geographical one, they had long before established in their minds the Heart-of-the-City Apartments in its central position, even when they already had an inkling that they’d end up selling it flat by flat, leaving the building Aunt Halé said “commanded all Nişantaşı,” and resorting to renting shabby apartments elsewhere. Even in the early days when they had moved into this derelict building only in an unhappy and remote corner of their minds, they never failed to bring up the word “backstreet,” perhaps to exaggerate the calamity that befell them so as to blame each other, as if to take advantage of an opportunity that must not be missed. Three years before his death, the first day he moved out of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments to his backstreet flat, when Mehmet Sabit Bey (Grandpa) sat in his gimpy-legged armchair which was now placed at a new angle to the window in the new flat, overlooking the street, but at the same old angle (as in the old place) to the heavy stand that carried the radio, he had said, inspired somewhat by the skinny nag that had pulled the horse cart that transported the furniture: “So, we get off the horse to ride the ass. Well then, good luck!” Then he’d turned on the radio on which the dog figurine, sleeping on its crocheted doily, had already been placed.