The Black Book Read online

Page 39


  “I’ll just take those glasses, sir, and run along.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I TURNED OUT TO BE THE HERO

  On personal style: writing necessarily begins by imitating other writing. Don’t children also begin speech by virtue of imitating others?

  —TAHIR-ÜL MEVLEVI

  I looked in the mirror and read my face. The mirror was a tranquil ocean and my face sallow paper inscribed with an ink that was sea-green. Back then, whenever I had a blank look on my face, “My darling,” your mother used to say—your beautiful mother, that is to say, my aunt—“your face is white as a sheet.” I had a blank look because I was fearful of what was written on my face without me knowing it; I had a blank look because I feared not finding you where I took my leave of you—at the same place where I left you among old tables, tired chairs, faded lamps, newspapers, curtains, cigarettes. In winter, evening fell as quickly as the dark. Once it was dark and doors were closed and lights went on, I’d imagine the corner where you sat back behind our door: on different floors when we were young, behind the same door when we grew up.

  Reader, dear reader, the reader who has understood that I’m talking about a girl who was related to me and lived under the same roof: when you read this, make sure to put yourself in my place and pick up on my signals. For I know when I talk about myself, I am also talking about you, and you too know that I am bringing my own recollections to bear when I tell your story.

  I looked in the mirror and read my face. My face was the Rosetta stone I had deciphered in my dream. My face was a broken tombstone minus the carved turban that was once required on a proper Moslem headstone. My face was a mirror made of skin where the reader beheld himself; we breathed through the pores in unison: the two of us, you and I, our cigarette smoke thick in our living room full of the novels you devoured, the motor of the fridge droning woefully in the dark kitchen, light from the lampshade the color of a paperback cover and your skin falling on my guilty fingers and your long legs.

  I was the resourceful and melancholic hero in the book you read; I was the explorer who in the company of his guide speeds along marble stones, tall columns and dark rocks, climbing up stairs that lead up the seven heavens replete with stars, toward those condemned to a fretful life underground; I was the hard-boiled detective who calls out to his sweetheart on the other end of the bridge across the abyss, “I am you!” and who, thanks to the writer’s nepotism, detects the trace of poison in the ashtray … And you, Rüya, my dream, impatiently and wordlessly, would turn the page. I committed murders of passion, I crossed the Euphrates River on my horse, I got buried under pyramids, I bumped off cardinals: “So tell me, what’s the book about?” You were a settled-down housewife and I the husband who comes home in the evening: “Oh, nothing.” As the last bus of the night went by in all its emptiness, the easy chairs we sat in jiggled across from each other. You held the paperback book, and I the newspaper I couldn’t manage to read, asking you: “If I were the hero, would you love me then?” “Don’t talk nonsense!” The books you read talked about night’s merciless silence; I knew all about the mercilessness of silence.

  I thought to myself, her mother was right; my face has remained white: with five letters on it. On the large horse in the alphabet book it said HORSE, B for Branch, two D’s for Dad. Papa in French. Mom, uncle, aunt, kin. It turns out, there was no mountain called Kaf, nor a snake encircling it. I sped along the commas, stopped at periods, expressed surprise at exclamation marks! The world of books and maps was so amazing! The ranger called Tom Mix lived in Nevada. Here’s one about the Texas hero, Pecos Bill, in Boston; Black-Boy swashbuckles in Central Asia; Thousand and One Faces, Rummy, Roddy, Batman. Aladdin, please Aladdin, is the 125th issue of Texas out yet? Wait a minute, Grandma would say, snatching the comics out of our hands. Wait! If the last issue of that nasty comic book isn’t out yet, I’ll tell you a story myself. She’d tell it, her cigarette between her lips. The two of us, you and I, climbed Mount Kaf, plucked the apple off the tree, slid down the beanstalk, went down chimneys, went sleuthing. Besides us, Sherlock Holmes was the next best sleuth, then came White Feather who was Pecos Bill’s sidekick, then Hawk Mehmet’s friend Lame Ali. Reader, dear reader, are you tracking down my letters? I knew nothing about it, I had no idea, but it turns out my face was a map all along. What happened then? you asked, sitting in the chair across from Grandma, dangling your feet that didn’t quite reach the floor. And then what, Grandma? What then?

  Then, much later, years later, when I was the husband who came home tired from work, I took out of my briefcase the magazine I’d just bought at Aladdin’s, and you snatched it and sat in the same chair, deliberately as always, dangling—my God!—your legs. I’d wear my usual blank look, asking myself fearfully: What goes on in her mind? What is the hidden mystery in the secret garden of her mind which is forbidden to me? Taking clues from your shoulder, where your long hair flowed down, and from the color-illustrated magazine, I’d attempt solving the secret that made you dangle your legs, that mystery in the garden of your mind: skyscrapers in New York, fireworks in Paris, handsome revolutionaries, determined millionaires (turn the page). Airplanes with swimming pools, superstars wearing pink ties, universal geniuses, the latest bulletins (turn the page). Hollywood starlets, rebellious singers, international princes and princesses (turn the page). Local news: two poets and three critics hold a discussion on the benefits of reading.

  I’d still be unable to solve the mystery, but you, after many pages and hours, past the time when hungry packs of dogs went by our place late at night, you would have completed the crossword puzzle: Sumerian goddess of health: Bo; a valley in Italy: Po; symbol of tellurium: Te; a musical note: Re; a river that flows up: Alphabet, I think; a mountain that doesn’t exist in the valley of letters: Kaf; a magical word: Listen; theater of the mind: Rüya, a dream, my dream, my Rüya, whom I see before I sleep and dream of as I sleep; the handsome hero in the picture: you always came up with it, I’d never do. “Shall I get my hair cut?” you’d ask, raising your head from the magazine in the stillness of the night, half of your face in the light, the other half a dark mirror, but I’d never know whether you were asking me, or the handsome, famous hero in the center of the puzzle. For a moment, dear reader, I’d go blank again, very blank!

  I could never convince you why I believed in a world without heroes. I could never convince you why those pitiful writers who invent the heroes are themselves no heroes. I could never convince you that the people whose photos you saw in the magazines are of a different breed. I could never convince you that you had to be content with an ordinary life. I could never convince you that it was necessary for me to have a place in that ordinary life.

  Chapter Thirty

  BROTHER MINE

  Of all the monarchs of whom I have ever heard, the one who comes to my mind, nearest to the true spirit of God was the Caliph Haroun of Baghdad, who as you know had a taste for disguise.

  —ISAK DINESEN, “The Deluge at Norderney,” Seven Gothic Tales

  When Galip came out of the Milliyet building wearing the dark glasses, he didn’t start out for his office but for the Covered Bazaar. Going past stores that sold tourist articles and walking across the courtyard at the Mosque of Divine-Radiance-of-the-Ottomans, he suddenly felt so sleepy that Istanbul appeared to be an entirely different city. The leather handbags, meerschaum pipes, coffee grinders he saw in the Covered Bazaar didn’t seem like stuff that belonged to a city that mirrored the denizens who’d lived there thousands of years; they were frightening signs of an incomprehensible country where millions of people had been temporarily exiled. “The odd thing is,” Galip thought to himself, getting lost in the Bazaar’s haphazard arcades, “having read the letters in my face, I can believe in all optimism that I can now be totally myself.”

  In the row of slipper shops, he was ready to believe what had changed was not the city but himself; yet after reading the letters in his face, he’d become so convinced he c
omprehended the city’s mystery that he just couldn’t believe the city was still the one he had known. Looking in the window of a rug store, he experienced a feeling that he’d seen the rugs on display before, that he had stepped on them with his own muddy shoes and worn slippers, that he was well acquainted with the rug dealer who eyed him suspiciously as he sat sipping his coffee in front of the store, and that he knew, as he did his own life, the store’s history full of shell games and small-time swindles as well as the stories it could tell, which smelled like dust. He had the same experience looking in the showcases of a jeweler, and at the antique and shoe stores. After hastily skipping a couple more arcades, he imagined that he knew all the stuff sold in the Covered Bazaar down to the copper ewers and the balance scales with pans, and that he was familiar with all the salesclerks waiting for customers as well as all the people walking in the arcades. Istanbul was all too familiar; the city held no secrets from Galip.

  Feeling at ease, he walked around the arcades as in a dream. For the first time in his life, the gewgaws Galip saw in the windows and the faces he came across seemed as strange as his dreams and, at the same time, as familiar and reassuring as a noisy family dinner. He went by the brilliantly lit jewelry store windows, thinking that the peace he felt was related to the secret signified by the letters he’d read on his face in terror, yet he didn’t want to think about the poor sad sack he was in his former life whom he’d left behind after reading the letters. What made the world a mysterious place was the presence of a second person one sheltered inside oneself, with whom one lived together like a twin. When, after going past the Cobblers’ Venue where idle salesclerks loafed in the doorways, Galip saw bright postcards of Istanbul displayed in the entrance of a small shop, he decided he’d left his twin behind long ago: these postcards were so inundated with the familiar, stale, and clichéd images of Istanbul that, studying the common and well-known scenes of Municipal Lines ferries docking at the Galata Bridge, chimneys of the Topkapı Palace, the Tower of Leander, and the Bosphorus Bridge, Galip felt assured that the city could hold no mystery from him. But he lost the feeling as soon as he entered the narrow streets of the Bedesten, the heart of the old market, where the bottle-green windows of the stores reflected each other. “Someone is following me,” he thought apprehensively.

  There was no one in the vicinity to arouse his suspicion, but soon Galip was taken over by the premonition of an impending catastrophe. He walked briskly. At the Calpac-Makers’ Venue, he made a right, walked along the length of the street and left the bazaar. He was about to go through the secondhand bookstores at full steam but when he got to the Alif Bookstore, the name he’d never given a second thought to all these years suddenly seemed like a sign. What was surprising was not the fact that the store’s name was “alif,” which was the first letter in Allah and, according to the Hurufis, the origin of the alphabet and the universe, but that the letter “alif” above the door had been written in Latin letters as F. M. Üçüncü had prescribed. Trying to view this not as a meaningful sign but as a common occurrence, Galip caught sight of Master Sheikh Muammer’s store. The fact that the Zamani sheikh’s bookstore was closed—a store which had once been frequented by poor pitiful widows from remote neighborhoods and miserable American billionaires—struck Galip as the sign of a mystery still hidden in the city rather than as a consequence of commonplace facts like the venerable sheikh not wanting to go out on such a cold day or his being dead. “If I’m still seeing signs in the city,” he thought, going past piles and piles of translated detective novels and interpretations of the Koran which the book dealers left in front of the stores, “it means that I still haven’t learned what the letters on my face have taught me.” But it wasn’t the real reason: every time he thought about being followed, his legs speeded up on their own, and the city was transformed from a tranquil place full of familiar signs and objects into a dreadful realm rife with unknown dangers and mysteries. Galip realized that if he walked faster, he’d shake whoever was shadowing him and shed the disquieting feeling of mystery.

  At Beyazit Square, he turned into Tentmakers’ Avenue and then into Samovar Street since he liked the name. Then he took Narghile Street, which was parallel to it, and went on down to the Golden Horn; then, taking Brass Mortar Street, he backtracked up the hill. He went past plastics ateliers, soup kitchens, coppersmith and locksmith stores. “It goes to show I was meant to come across these shops as I begin my new life,” he thought with childlike innocence. He saw shops that sold pails, basins, beads, shiny sequins, uniforms for the police and the military. For a while, he walked toward Beyazit Tower, which he’d chosen as his destination, then he backtracked and, going past trucks, orange vendors, horse carts, old refrigerators, and political slogans on the walls of the university, he went all the way up to the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent. He went into the mosque courtyard and walked along beside the cypress trees; when his shoes got all muddy, he went out in the street by the seminary to walk past the unpainted wood-frame houses that leaned against each other. To his chagrin, he kept thinking that the stovepipes placed through the first-floor windows of the dilapidated houses poked out into the street like sawed-off shotguns or like rusty periscopes or else like the horrifying maws of cannons, but he didn’t want to relate anything to something else, and he didn’t want the word like to linger on in his mind.

  In order to quit Youngblood Street, he took Dwarf Fountain Street, where his mind got stuck again on the street name, which led him to think it might be a sign. He concluded that the old stone-paved streets were rife with traps involving signs, and he went up to Prince Avenue. There he observed vendors hawking crisp sesame rings, minibus drivers having tea, and college kids eating pizza while they studied the showcases in front of a movie theater which had three features on its bill. Two were Bruce Lee karate flicks; the other, shown in torn posters and faded photographs, had Cüneyt Arkın playing a Seljuk march-lord who beat up Byzantine Greeks and slept with their women. Fearing he’d go blind if he stared into the actors’ orange faces in the publicity stills any longer, Galip took off. He went by the Prince Mosque, trying not to think of the Story of the Prince that sprang into his mind. He passed traffic signs rusting along the edges, jumbled graffiti, plastic signs just overhead that advertised filthy restaurants and hotels, posters advertising pop singers and detergent companies. Even though he was successful, with great difficulty, in taking his mind off the hidden significance of all these, he couldn’t help thinking, as he walked along beside the Aqueduct of Valens, about the red-bearded Byzantine priests in a movie he’d seen when he was very young; as he went by the famous Vefa fermented-beverage store, he couldn’t help remembering how Uncle Melih, drunk on the cordials he’d tossed down one holiday evening, had brought the whole family here in a taxi to treat them to drinks made of mildly fermented grains; and these images were immediately transformed into the signs of a mystery that remained in the past.

  He was crossing Atatürk Boulevard almost at a run when he concluded once more that if he walked fast, very fast, he’d see the pictures and letters the city presented to him as he wanted them: not as aspects of a mystery but as they really were. He went into Weavers’ Street briskly and turned into Lumber Market Street, and for a long time he walked without registering the names of any streets, past trashy row houses with rusty balcony railings built interspersed with wood-frames, long-nosed ’50s model trucks, tires that had become toys, bent electric posts, sidewalks that had been torn up and abandoned, cats going through garbage pails, headscarved women smoking in windows, itinerant yogurt vendors, sewer diggers and quilt makers.

  As he was going down Rug Dealers’ Avenue toward Homeland, he suddenly made a sharp left turn then changed sidewalks a couple of times; in the grocery store where he had a glass of yogurt drink, he considered that he must have learned the idea of “being followed” from the detective novels Rüya read, knowing full well that he could no more rid his mind of this idea than he could of the incomprehensible m
ystery that permeated the city. He turned into Pair-of-Doves Street, making another left at the next intersection, and he almost ran along Literate Man Street. Crossing Fevzi Pasha Avenue as the traffic light went red, he darted in between the minibuses. When he read the street sign and realized he was on Lion’s Den Street, he was momentarily terrified: if the mysterious hand whose presence he’d felt three days ago on the Galata Bridge were still placing signs all around the city, then the mystery that he knew existed must still be quite distant from him.

  He went through the crowded marketplace, past fish stalls that sold mackerel, lamprey, and turbot, into the courtyard at the Mosque of the Conqueror where all streets converged. Aside from a black-bearded man who wore a black overcoat and walked like a crow in the snow, the spacious courtyard was deserted. There was no one in the small cemetery either. Mehmet the Conqueror’s tomb was locked up; looking in the windows, Galip listened to the city’s roar: the din of the marketplace, car horns, children’s voices in a distant schoolyard, sounds of hammering and running engines, the screeches of sparrows and crows in the courtyard trees, the racket of the minibuses and motorbikes, the banging of the doors and windows nearby, the noise of construction sites, houses, streets, trees, parks, the sea, ships, neighborhoods, the whole city. The man he longed to be, Mehmet the Conqueror, whose sarcophagus he viewed through the dusty windowpanes, had intuited with the aid of Hurufi tracts the mystery of the city he’d conquered five hundred years before Galip’s birth, and he’d undertaken to decipher slowly the realm in which every door, every chimney, every street, every aqueduct, every plane tree was the sign of something else beside itself.

  “If only Hurufi tracts and the Hurufis themselves hadn’t been immolated as the result of a conspiracy,” Galip thought as he took Calligrapher İzzet Street to Mother Wit, “and if the Sultan had been able to attain the city’s mystery, what insight might he have come up with walking on the Byzantine streets he’d conquered if he were looking, as I am, at broken walls, centenarian plane trees, dusty roads, and empty lots?” When Galip arrived at the tobacco warehouses and the terrifying old buildings in Temperance, he gave himself the answer he’d known ever since he’d read the letters in his face: “He’d have known the city he’d seen for the first time as if he’d been through it thousands of times.” And the astonishing thing was that Istanbul still remained a newly conquered city. Galip had no sense that he’d ever seen or known the muddy streets before, the fractured sidewalks, broken walls, pitiful lead-colored trees, ramshackle cars and buses that were even worse, sad faces that looked alike, and dogs that were skin and bones.