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  31. C: “Then” is a word that belongs only to those who don’t know the writer’s art.

  32. B: Whatever smacks of art in a column does not belong in the column; whatever it is that’s in the column, it is not art.

  33. C: Don’t adulate the intelligence of anyone who rapes poetry to satisfy his lust for art. (Tweaking B’s poetic aspirations.)

  34. A: Write easy; you’ll get read easily.

  35. C: Write hard; you’ll get read easily.

  36. B: If you write hard, you’ll get ulcers.

  37. A: If you get ulcers, you’ll become an artist. (Seeing how one of them spoke affably to another for the first time, they all chortled at this point; they laughed together.)

  38. B: Get old quick.

  39. C: Yes, get old as fast as you can. How else will you be able to write a good autumnal piece?

  40. A: The three big themes are, of course, death, love, and music.

  41. C: But you’ve got to decide on the subject of love: what it is.

  42. B: Search for love.

  (I might remind my readers that long silences, stillnesses, and sulks intervene.)

  43. C: Conceal love; you are, after all, a writer!

  44. B: Love is a quest.

  45. C: Conceal yourself, so that they assume you have something to hide.

  46. A: Make them guess you have a secret, and the women will love you.

  47. C: Every woman is a mirror. (Here, breaking out another bottle, they offered me some rakı, too.)

  48. B: Remember us well. (Of course, I will, sir! I said and I have, as my more attentive readers will attest, written many of my pieces minding them and their stories.)

  49. A: Get out on the street, study faces; there’s a topic for you.

  50. C: Let them imagine you know an historical enigma; too bad, though, you can’t write in that vein. (Here, C told another story, the story where the lover says “I am Thou” to his beloved—which I will transpose into another piece at a later date—and I felt the presence of the mystery that brought to the same table three writers who’d insulted each other for half a century.)

  51. A: And don’t you ever forget that the whole world hates Turks.

  52. B: As a nation we love our generals, our childhood, and our mothers; do likewise.

  53. A: Do not use epigraphs; they will only kill the mystery in the piece!

  54. B: If it’s to die, then go ahead, kill the mystery; kill the false prophet too who pushes mystery!

  55. C: If you must use epigraphs, don’t extract any out of books that come from the West where neither the writers nor the heroes resemble us, and definitely not any out of books you haven’t read; after all, that’s the very eschatology of the Dadjdjal.

  56. A: Remember, you are both Satan and the Angel, both the Dadjdjal and Him too—readers have a way of growing weary of someone who’s all good or all bad.

  57. B: But should the reader figure out that he’s been had, that he’s been fooled by the Dadjdjal in His guise, that what ostensibly seemed to be his savior was the Dadjdjal all along, he just might strike you dead in a dark alley, take my word for it!

  58. A: That’s right, that’s why you must keep the mystery concealed. Don’t you ever sell out the secrets of the trade!

  59. C: The mystery is love, and don’t you forget it. The key word is love.

  60. B: No, no, the key word is written on our faces. Look and listen.

  61. A: It’s love, it’s love, it’s love, love!

  62. B: Don’t be fainthearted about plagiarism either; the secret of our two-bit efforts in reading and writing is, after all, hidden in the mirror of mysticism, as are the rest of our secrets. Do you know Rumi’s story, “The Contest of the Two Painters”? He too lifted the story from somewhere else, but he himself … (I know the story, sir, I said.)

  63. C: When you too grow old and ask the question whether a man can be himself, you’ll also be asking yourself if you comprehend the mystery at all, and don’t you forget it! (I haven’t forgotten.)

  64. B: And don’t forget worn-out buses, books written in haste, those who endure, and those who don’t comprehend as well as those who do!

  * * *

  A song was being played somewhere in the station, perhaps in that very restaurant, the lyrics descanting on love, pain, and the emptiness of life; that’s when they became oblivious of me; remembering that they were all elderly Scheherazades sporting mustachios, they began telling each other stories in friendship, in brotherhood, and sorrow. Here are some of them:

  The tragicomic story about the unfortunate columnist whose lifelong passion had been expounding on Muhammad’s journey into the Seven Heavens, who went into a depression upon finding out that Dante had taken the same trip; the story about a crazy and perverted sultan and his sister who behaved like vegetable-garden scarecrows in their childhood; the story about the writer whose dream life dried up when his wife ran off; the story about the reader who began imagining that he was both Proust and Albertine; the story about the columnist who disguised himself as Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  Chapter Nine

  SOMEBODY’S FOLLOWING ME

  At times snow fell, and at times, darkness.

  —ŞEYH GALIP

  Galip was to recall all day, as if it were the sole detail left over from a vile nightmare, the gutted armchair he saw as he descended the step-down sidewalks along the ancient streets in Cihangir on his way down to Karaköy after he left his archivist friend Saim’s house in the morning. The armchair had been abandoned in front of the closed shutters of one of those shops for wallpaper, or vinyl upholstery, or carpentry, or plaster-of-Paris ceilings, back behind the steep streets in Tophane where Jelal once stalked the trail of busy opium traffickers. The varnish had completely flaked off the arms and the legs, the seatcover had been gashed like wounded skin, and, underneath, the rusty springs had spilled out hopelessly like the greenish intestines of a cavalry horse whose belly had been slashed.

  The square in Karaköy was forsaken although it was past eight o’clock. Galip was beginning to associate the deserted street where he saw the armchair and now this forsaken square with a cataclysm for which everybody else had already read the signs. It was as if some impending disaster was the reason why ships scheduled to sail had been roped to one another, why people had made themselves scarce at the docks, and why the street peddlers, the instant photographers, and the beggars with disfigured faces who worked the Galata Bridge had all decided to take a vacation on the last day of their lives. Leaning over the railing, Galip contemplated the murky water and remembered it was on this end of the bridge that swarms of children would once dive for the coins Christian tourists tossed into the Golden Horn, then wondered why, when Jelal had imagined the day the Bosphorus dries up, he had made no mention of these thick coins which, years later, would end up signifying things other than themselves.

  Once in his office upstairs in the building, he settled down to read Jelal’s column for the day. He noticed it wasn’t a new piece but one that had already been printed some time back. This could be taken as a sign that Jelal hadn’t offered any new columns to his editors in quite a while, as well as the hidden signal for something totally different. The central question in the piece, “Do you have difficulty being yourself,” and Jelal’s barber protagonist who posed it, did not perhaps refer to the surface meanings in what Jelal had written but pointed to other meanings in the world outside it.

  Galip remembered Jelal lecturing him on this subject some time ago: “Most people,” Jelal had said, “don’t perceive the essential characteristics of a substance, given that these characteristics are right under their noses, but they recognize and acknowledge the secondary qualities which attract attention by virtue of being on the surface. That’s why I don’t openly reveal what I intend to expose, but I drop it in as if it were merely an aside. Naturally, the spot where I stash the meaning is not too obscure a corner—my gambit is a hide-and-seek that’s n
o more than child’s play—but they will believe it right off the bat, like children, if they find it there themselves: that’s how come I do it. Besides, what’s worse, the newspaper gets tossed aside before the intended meaning and its contingent allusions, which require a little patience and intelligence to discover, can be perceived in the main body of the piece.”

  Heeding an inner urge, Galip tossed the newspaper aside and took off for the Milliyet offices to see Jelal. He knew that Jelal was more likely to make it down to the paper on the weekend when the place was less crowded, so he figured he’d find Jelal alone in his room. He walked up the steep hill, planning to tell Jelal that Rüya was slightly under the weather. Then he’d tell him the story of a client who’d been left helpless because his wife left him. How would Jelal respond to such a story? A well-loved wife, going against all that is best in our traditions and culture, suddenly abandons a fine fellow who’s upstanding, industrious, well-balanced, well-tempered, and well off. What did such a thing imply? The indication of what secret and hidden significance? The mark of what apocalypse? Jelal would listen carefully to the particulars Galip narrated and then he’d put it together; the more Jelal explained, the more the world would make sense, transforming the “hidden” realities right under our noses into the rich fare of an astonishing story that we already knew but didn’t know that we knew, thereby making life more bearable. Galip noticed the glistening branches of the wet trees in the Iranian Consulate garden, and he thought that, rather than live in his own world, he’d prefer living in a world described lovingly by Jelal.

  He didn’t find Jelal in his room. His desk was neat, the ashtray empty, and there was no teacup. Galip sat in the purple chair he always sat in and began to wait. He was convinced that he’d soon hear Jelal laugh in one of the other rooms.

  By the time he lost the conviction, he’d managed to remember a lot: his first visit to the newspaper, unbeknownst to the family, under the pretext of getting an invitation to a radio quiz show, when he’d brought along a classmate who’d later fall in love with Rüya (“He would’ve taken us on a tour of the printing press too,” Galip had said with embarrassment on the way back, “but he didn’t have the time.” “Did you take a look at the photos of all those women on his desk?” said his schoolmate), and the first time he and Rüya had come up and Jelal had taken them through the printing rooms (“Do you want to grow up to be a journalist too, little lady?” the old printer had asked Rüya and, on the way back, Rüya had put the same question to Galip), and how he used to think this was a room out of the Thousand and One Nights, full of marvelous stories, lives, and dreams constructed on paper that he couldn’t imagine himself.

  He began going through Jelal’s desk in a hurry to find new papers and new stories, and perchance to forget, to forget; he came across unopened reader mail, half-bitten pencils, newspaper clippings in various sizes (a story about the murder committed by a jealous husband marked in green ballpoint pen), mug shots cut out of foreign publications, portraits, Jelal’s handwritten notes on scraps of paper (Do not forget: the story of the crown prince), empty ink bottles, matches, a repulsive necktie, crude popular books on shamanism, Hurufism, and improving your memory, a bottle of sleeping pills, vasodilating medications, buttons, a watch that had stopped, scissors, photos that had come in reader mail that had been opened (one showed Jelal with a bald army officer and in another, a couple of oil wrestlers and a pleasant Kangal sheep dog looked good-naturedly into the camera at some country café), colored pencils, combs, cigarette holders, and ballpoints in many colors …

  He found two folders tucked in the blotter on the desk, one marked “In Print” and the other “Backlog.” The folder for the columns “In Print” contained the typescripts of the pieces printed over the last six days as well as the Sunday column which was yet to be published. The Sunday piece, which had to be in the paper tomorrow morning, must have already been set, illustrated, and put back into the folder.

  He found only three pieces in the folder marked “Backlog.” All three had already been published many years ago. A fourth piece to be published on Monday may be somewhere downstairs on a typesetter’s table, so the spares would suffice only for three or four more days after Sunday. Could this mean that Jelal had gone on a trip or taken a vacation without informing anyone? But Jelal never stirred outside of Istanbul.

  Galip entered the large editorial room and his feet took him to a table where two elderly persons were confabulating. One, known by his pen name of Neşati, was an angry old-timer who’d embarked years ago on an intense war of words with Jelal. Nowadays the paper gave him a less prominent column than Jelal’s, one read by fewer people, where he wrote memoirs driven by a furious sense of righteousness.

  “Jelal hasn’t been around these last few days,” he said, frowning with the bulldog face that appeared in the photo above his column. “What relation are you to him anyway?”

  When the second journalist inquired why he was looking for Jelal, Galip was about to track down the fellow’s identity in the messy files of his memory bank. This guy, who always wore dark glasses and didn’t take any wooden nickels, was the Sherlock Holmes of the magazine section. He knew in just which posh madam’s house which elegant movie star—they all put on the airs of aristocratic Ottoman ladies—had once turned tricks at what date on what backstreet in Beyoğlu. He knew, for example, that the prodigious singer brought to Istanbul under the guise of an Argentine countess who had been discovered rope dancing in a French provincial town was, in reality, a poor Moslem woman from Algiers.

  “So, you’re a relative,” said the magazine writer; “I’d understood that Jelal had nobody close to him other than his dear departed mom.”

  “Phooey!” said the old polemicist. “If it hadn’t been for those relatives of his, would Jelal be where he is today? He had a brother-in-law, for example, who gave him a leg up. The same fellow who taught him to write, a sincerely religious man whom Jelal eventually betrayed. The brother-in-law belonged to a Nakşi sect that carried on their secret rites in an abandoned soap factory in Kumkapı. He’d partake in the rites, during which a slew of chains, olive presses, candles, and soap molds were also used, then he’d sit down by the week and report to the National Bureau of Investigation inside information on the activities of the sect. The fellow kept trying to prove that the disciples of the religious order he snitched on for the military were not, in reality, engaged in anything harmful to the government. He’d share his intelligence reports with Jelal, hoping the literature buff might read and learn, get a taste for good prose. In those years when Jelal bent his views according to a wind that blew from the left, he availed himself pitilessly of the style of those reports, which was woven with similes and metaphors lifted straight from Attar, Abu Khorosani, Ibn Arabi, and the translations of Bottfolio. Sure, some people see in his similes new bridges that span to our past culture—although they all hinge on the same stereotyped origin; they cannot know that the inventor of these pastiches is someone else entirely. The ingenious brother-in-law with many talents whose existence Jelal would rather forget was also a true jack-of-all-trades: he manufactured mirrored scissors which made barbers’ lives easier, developed a circumcision device that does away with the grave mistakes that ruin the future of many a boy, and invented gallows which were painless on account of being fitted with a chain instead of a greased noose and the sliding platform instead of a chair. In the years when Jelal felt he needed the affection of his dear older sister and the brother-in-law, he used to introduce the inventions exuberantly in his so-called ‘Believe It or Not’ column.”

  “Pardon me, but you’ve got it all wrong,” countered the magazine writer. “During the years he ran the ‘Believe It or Not’ column, Jelal was completely on his own. Let me put to you a scene I didn’t get secondhand but saw with my own two eyes.”

  It was a scene right out of a schlock Yeşilçam movie depicting the poor and lonesome years of a deserving kid who’ll eventually make good. On a New Year’s Eve
, in their shabby house in the poor district, the cub reporter Jelal tells his mother that the well-off branch of the family has invited him to a New Year’s Eve entertainment at their place in Nişantaşı. There he’ll spend a noisy and fun evening with his uncles’ and aunts’ cheerful daughters and boisterous sons and end up at goodness knows which hot spot around town. The mother, who happens to be a seamstress, relishes imagining her son’s pleasure and has a surprise in store for him: just for tonight, she has quietly fixed his father’s old jacket to fit him. Jelal puts on the jacket, which fits him perfectly (the scene jerks the tears right out of the mother’s eyes: “You look exactly like your dad”), and the happy mother is relieved to hear that a fellow journalist has also been invited to the entertainment. When the journalist, who’s the witness of our story, and Jelal go down the cold and dark stairs of the wooden house and out into the muddy street, he learns that neither Jelal’s relations nor anybody else has invited poor Jelal to any New Year’s Eve entertainment. What’s more, Jelal is on duty at the newspaper so that he might earn the money to pay for the surgery his mother needs because she’s going blind from sewing in candlelight.

  Following the silence after the story was over, Galip pointed out that some of the details didn’t jibe with Jelal’s life, but they didn’t much pay attention to his explanations. Sure, they could be mistaken as to the degree of the relationships and how far back the dates went; if Jelal’s father was still alive (Are you absolutely sure of that, sir?), they might have substituted the father for the grandfather, or the older sister for the aunt, but they were not about to make too big a deal of their inaccuracies. They had Galip sit down at the table, offered him a cigarette, asked him a question but didn’t listen to his reply (How did you say you’re related to him again?), then they started pulling reminiscences out of the bag like pieces they’d placed on an imaginary chessboard.