The Black Book Read online

  After all, anyone who spent his life waiting to ascend the throne of an empire was condemned to madness; anyone who witnessed his brothers go mad living in wait for their dream had no choice other than going mad, since he too was already caught on the horns of the dilemma of whether to go mad or not to go mad; a person went mad not because he wanted to but because he made it into a problem by trying to avoid going mad; any prince-in-waiting who contemplated even once how his ancestors and forefathers immediately upon ascending the throne had their younger brothers killed by strangling could no longer live without going mad; given that he was obliged to know the history of the realm he was to rule, and given that he could read in any old history book that his ancestor Mehmet the Third, upon becoming the Sultan, had his nineteen brothers executed one by one, some among whom were still at mother’s breast, madness was the sentence imposed on any prince who had little choice but to read accounts of sultans putting their kid brothers to death; besides, at some point of the intolerable waiting period which was bound to terminate in getting poisoned, strangled, or murdered under the guise of suicide, madness, since it meant “I give up,” was the way out as well the most deep-seated secret wish for all heirs apparent who anticipated ascension as if anticipating death; going crazy was the best chance for escaping from the Sultan’s informers who kept him under surveillance, from plots and snares laid by lowlife politicians who sneaked through the network of informers to get to the prince, as well as from his own intolerable dreams of ascending the throne; every time an heir apparent took a look at the map of the empire he dreamed of ruling, he had no choice but to get on the verge of madness upon realizing how far-flung, how boundless, and how vastly large were the countries for which he would soon be responsible and which he was to rule all on his own—yes, on his own alone; any heir apparent who had no apprehension of this boundlessness, and no comprehension of the immensity of the empire he would one day have to be responsible for, had to be considered already mad. Right at this point, of the reasons for going mad that he’d been enumerating, Honorable Prince Osman Jelalettin would say, “If I am today a more sensible person than all those fools, lunatics, and retards who have ruled the Ottoman Empire, then it is due to my comprehension of this maddening boundlessness! Contemplating the boundlessness of the responsibility I would one day shoulder did not drive me mad like those other wimps, weak sisters, and wretches. On the contrary, contemplating it carefully brought me to my senses. It was because I took care to bring this apprehension under control, through my own willpower and resolution, that I discovered that the most important question in life was whether or not one could be oneself.”

  As soon as he went up from fifth place to third in line of succession, he’d given himself over to reading. He thought it behooved a prince who didn’t consider getting on the throne something of a miracle to develop himself, and he optimistically believed that this could be achieved through reading. He extracted “useful ideas” from the books he read arduously as if devouring the pages, hoping to believe in dreams he grasped at obsessively in order to fulfill these ideas within a short time in the future of a happier Ottoman Empire, as well as hang onto his sanity, for the sake of which he had moved to this hunting lodge where he would live for the next twenty-two years and three months, having left his wife and children, as well as his previous habits and things, at his waterfront estate on the Bosphorus, since he wished to rid himself of everything that reminded him of his erstwhile foolish and childlike life. The hunting lodge was situated on a hill that would get covered one hundred years later under pavement over which streetcar rails were laid, terrifying dark apartment buildings built under the influence of various styles from the West, boys’ and girls’ lycée buildings, a police station, a mosque, haberdashery, florist, rug store, and cleaners. Over the high wall put up so that the Sultan might keep his hazardous brother under better surveillance, as well as protect the Prince from the foolishness of the world outside, large chestnut and plane trees could be seen which would end up sporting, a century later, black telephone cables wound around their branches and nudie magazines pinned on their trunks. The only sound heard in the lodge, aside from the screams from flocks of ravens that wouldn’t depart from the hill even after all the centuries, was the noise of military drills and music that came from the barracks on the opposite hills on days when wind blew from land to sea. The Prince had dictated innumerable times that the first six years he spent at the lodge were the happiest period in his life.

  “For I was only engaged in reading during that period,” the Prince used to say. “I only dreamed about what I read. During those six years, I lived only with the ideas and voices of the writers that I read.” Then he’d add, “Still, all through those six years, I was unable to be myself at all. I was not myself, and perhaps that was the reason why I managed to be happy. Yet, a Sultan is not in the business of being happy but being himself!” he’d dictate every time he remembered those six happy years with pain and longing; then he would repeat the other sentence he’d already had his Scribe take down maybe a thousand times: “Everybody but everybody is in the business of being himself, not just sultans.”

  The Prince had dictated that on an evening toward the end of those six years he’d clearly become aware of the perception which he called his life’s discovery and its goal. “On one of those happy evenings, I was imagining myself on the Ottoman throne, as I so often did, giving some fool an irate scolding in the course of trying to solve a matter of state. I’d just rebuked the fool in my imagination by saying ‘as Voltaire also states,’ when I froze up, having suddenly became aware of the strait I was in. It was as if the person I imagined as the thirty-fifth sultan on the Ottoman throne was not me, but Voltaire; as if it was not me but a Voltaire impersonator. It was at that moment that I realized the horror of a sultan’s being not himself but someone else—a sultan, that is, who would be determining the lives of millions and millions of subjects and administer lands that seemed boundless on the map.”

  Later on, the Prince had related other stories concerning the moment when he became aware of this perception, but the Scribe knew full well that the moment of enlightenment always turned on the same quandary: Was it right for a sultan, who’d be determining the course of millions of people’s lives, to entertain in his mind other people’s sentences? Didn’t it behoove a prince who would someday rule one of the world’s greatest empires to act only according to his own will? Should a person who kept other people’s thoughts in his head like so many nightmares be considered a sultan, or a shadow?

  “After I comprehended it was necessary that I be not someone else but myself, not a shadow but a true sultan, I realized I had to be liberated from all the books I’d read not only during those six years but in the course of my entire life,” the Prince would say when he began to narrate his account of the next ten years of his existence. “It was necessary for me to free myself from all those books, all those writers, all those stories, all those voices if I wanted to be myself and not someone else. It took ten years of my life.”

  So, the Prince began to dictate to his Scribe how he liberated himself one by one from all the books that had influenced him. The Scribe would put down that the Prince had burned all the volumes of Voltaire in the lodge because the more the Prince read this writer the more he fell under the impression that he was an intelligent, atheistic, and jocose Frenchman with a ready wit, rather than himself. Then the Scribe would write that volumes of Schopenhauer had been removed from the lodge since the Prince had identified himself with someone who contemplated his own will by the hour and for days on end, which meant that the pessimistic person with whom he identified would end up not being the Prince who’d someday ascend the Ottoman throne but, in essence, the German philosopher. The volumes of Rousseau which had been acquired at great expense had also been removed from the lodge, after first being torn into shreds, since they turned the Prince into a savage trying to apprehend himself red-handed. “I had all the French thinkers put t
o the fire—Deltour, De Passet, Morelli who gave an account of the world as a rational place, and Brichot who maintained the contrary—because when I read them I didn’t see myself as the future sultan but as an argumentative and derisive professor who attempted to disqualify the absurd observations put forth by thinkers who were his precursors,” the Prince used to say. He had the Thousand and One Nights burned since sultans who went around in disguise, with whom he identified on account of this book, were no longer the sort of sultans it behooved the Prince to become. He had Macbeth burned, given that he was made to feel each time he read it like a weakling and a coward who was ready to get blood on his hands for the sake of the crown and, what’s worse, to derive a poetic pride from it, instead of being ashamed of being this person. He had Rumi’s Mathnawi removed from the lodge because every time he was distracted by the stories in this utterly disorganized book, he identified himself with some dervish saint who optimistically believed that disorganized narratives were the essence of life. “I burned Şeyh Galip because I regarded myself as a melancholic lover whenever I read him,” the Prince would explain. “I had Bottfolio burned because by reading him I regarded myself as an Occidental who wants to be Oriental, and Ibn Zerhani because reading him made me regard myself as an Oriental who wants to be Occidental. I wanted to regard myself neither as Oriental nor Occidental, nor obsessive, nor mad, nor adventuresome, nor somebody that comes out of some book.” And, concluding these words, the Prince would obsessively take up the refrain the Scribe had written down repeatedly innumerable times into so many journals all these six years: “I wanted to be just myself; I wanted to be just myself; I wanted to be just myself.”

  Yet he knew this was no easy task. After ridding himself of a set of books, and finally of the voices that for years kept repeating the fictions in them, the silence in his mind would seem so intolerable to the Prince that he’d reluctantly send one of his men to town to get some new books. After reading as if devouring them, the books that he tore out of the packages, he would initially make fun of the authors; then he would immolate the books with anger and ceremony, and yet, since he kept on hearing the voices and imitating the authors, he would send his man out to Babıali where the foreign language bookmongers awaited him with bated breath, thinking that he might rid himself of these voices by reading yet other books, although he was painfully aware that it was a case of the hair of the dog that bit him. “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin, after resolving to become himself, battled against these books for ten whole years,” the Scribe had written one day, but the Prince had corrected him by saying, “Not battled against, write ‘went for their throats’!” It was only after ten years of going for the throats of the voices heard broadcast in these books that he had come to understand he could only become himself by raising his voice against those books’ voices, and had gone ahead and engaged himself a scribe.

  “During these ten years, not only had Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin gone for the throats of these books and fictions but for the throat of anything that prevented him from becoming himself,” the Prince would add, shouting down from the top of the stairs; and the Scribe would write the sentence along with the other sentences that followed it, which the Prince would dictate with equal zeal and with the same conviction and excitement that he had when he first spoke them, although he had repeated them thousands of times. The Scribe had written that during these ten years the Prince had gone for the throats not only of the books but of things in his surroundings that influenced him quite as much as did the books, given that all the furniture—the tables, chairs, stands—took a man outside his inner discourse by virtue of providing him with the necessary or unnecessary means of his comfort or discomfort; given that his eye caught ashtrays or candelabras which made the Prince unable to concentrate on an idea that would allow him to become himself; given that the Prince was drawn into undesirable psychological states by all the paintings on the walls, the vases on the stands, the billowing pillows on the sofas; given that all those clocks, bowls, pens, and antique chairs were loaded with memories and associations that prevented the Prince from becoming himself.

  The Scribe had written that aside from the objects that the Prince had removed from his sight by breaking some, by burning others, and by throwing away yet others, all through the ten years he had also gone for the throats of recollections that made him into someone else. The Prince used to say, “I am driven to distraction by suddenly finding in the middle of a train of thought, or of dreams, the simplest and most unimportant small detail from my past which has followed me like a merciless killer who wants to murder me or a lunatic who has been driven for years to exact some unfathomable revenge.” After all, it was a terrifying thing for a person who had to consider the lives of millions and millions of people after ascending the Ottoman throne to suddenly find in the middle of a train of thought a bowl of strawberries he’d eaten in his childhood or a stupid remark made by some inconsequential chief of harem. A sultan—nay, not only a sultan but anybody at all—whose duty it was to be himself, in possession of only his own thoughts, will, and resolution, had to go against the grain of haphazard and arbitrary memories which prevented him from becoming himself. On one occasion the Scribe had written, “For the purpose of going at the throats of all the memories that spoiled the purity of his thoughts and his own will, Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin had eliminated all sources of smell throughout the lodge, disposed of all his familiar clothing and furniture, eschewed any relationship with the anesthetizing art called music, shunned playing his white piano, and had all the rooms in the lodge painted white.”

  “Yet, worst of all, more unbearable than the memories, objects, and books, are people,” the Prince would add after the Scribe read back what he’d dictated from where he lay on the sofa of which he had yet to divest himself. They came in all sorts: they dropped in at the most inopportune moments and inappropriate times, bearing disgusting gossip and worthless rumors. Trying to perform a good deed, they only managed to destroy a person’s peace of mind. Their affection was more engulfing than comforting. They kept talking just to prove they had something to say. They told you stories in order to convince you that they were interesting. Just so they could display their affection for you, they made you uncomfortable. Perhaps these were not important things, yet the Prince who was dying to be himself, who wanted to be alone with his own thoughts, sensed that he was unable to be himself for a protracted period each time he was paid a visit by these fools, these unnecessary, disaffected, common gossips. “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin was of the opinion that the greatest detriment to a man’s being himself is the people around him,” the Scribe had written at some point, and at another, “Man’s greatest pleasure is to make others look like himself.” He’d written that the Prince’s greatest fear was that the day he ascended the throne, he would have to establish relations with these people. “A man is affected by his pity for those who are pitiful, miserable, and wretched,” the Prince used to say. “We are affected because we end up becoming common and undistinguished ourselves in the company of those who are common and undistinguished,” he said. “We are also affected by those who have a distinctive personality and command our respect because we unconsciously begin emulating them and, when all things are considered, these last are the most dangerous of all,” said the Prince. “But be sure to write that I have sent them all away, the whole pack of them! Also write that I am not putting up a fight just for myself, in order that I may become myself, but for the liberation of millions of subjects.”

  It was in the tenth year of the incredible life-and-death battle he waged in avoiding others’ influence, on an evening when he struggled against familiar things, scents that he loved, books that affected him, that as he was viewing through the louvers of the “Venetian” blinds the moonlit snow that covered the extensive gardens, the Prince suddenly understood that the battle he waged was in reality not his own battle but the battle of the millions of unfortunates who had staked their lot on
the Ottoman Empire which was collapsing. As his Scribe put down in the journals perhaps tens thousand times during the last six years of the Prince’s life, “all peoples that are unable to be themselves, civilizations that imitate another, nations that find happiness in the stories that belong to others” were condemned to collapse, annihilation, and oblivion. So, on the sixteenth year of withdrawing to his lodge to await his ascension to the throne, during the days he realized he could only combat the stories he heard in his head by raising the voices of his own stories, he was about to engage him a scribe when the Prince understood that his personal and psychological struggle had been in reality a “historical life-and-death battle,” “the last stage of a bout that is observed only once in a thousand years which involves the dilemma of shedding or not shedding the shell,” “the most important historical standstill in a development which historians would appropriately evaluate centuries later as a turning point.”