The Black Book Read online

  —AHMET RASIM

  The storytellers did not disperse when they came out of the nightclub but stood around under the flakes of snow that fell sporadically, staring at each other in anticipation of some new entertainment which was not as yet determined, riveted to the scene like people who have witnessed a fire, or a shooting, just in case it breaks out again. “But it’s not the sort of place that’s open to everyone, İskender Bey,” said the bald guy, who’d already donned a huge fedora. “They cannot possibly accommodate a crowd this large. I’d like to take only the Brits. They might as well get an eyeful of yet another aspect of our country.” Then he turned to Galip. “Of course, you too may come along…” They took off toward Tepebaşı, joined by two more who could not be gotten rid of like the others, a woman who was an antiques dealer and a middle-aged architect with a mustache stiff as a brush.

  They were going past the American Consulate when the man with the fedora asked, “Were you ever in Jelal Bey’s apartments in Nişantaşı and in Şişli?” “What for?” said Galip, scrutinizing the man’s face which he did not find expressive. “It’s just that İskender Bey said you are Jelal Salik’s nephew. Don’t you ever look him up? Wouldn’t it be dandy if he were the one to acquaint the Brits with the situation in our country? Look, at last the world shows some interest in us!” “For sure,” said Galip. “Do you happen to have his addresses?” the fedora hat said. “No,” Galip said, “he gives his addresses out to no one.” “Is it true that he uses those apartments for trysts with women?” “No,” Galip said. “Forgive me,” said the man; “it’s just gossip. Tongues will wag! You can’t shut people up. Especially about someone who is a legend in his own time like Jelal Bey. I know him well.” “That so?” “Yes, it is. Once he had me come up to one of his places in Nişantaşı.” “Where was it?” Galip asked. “The place is long gone,” the man said, “a two-story stone house where he complained one afternoon about being lonely. He told me to look him up whenever I felt like it.” “But he wants to be left alone,” Galip said. “Perhaps you don’t know him very well,” said the man. “A voice inside me tells me he needs my help. You sure you don’t know his address at all?” “Not at all,” Galip said, “but it’s not for nothing that people identify with him.” “An extraordinary personality!” the fedora hat said, summarizing the situation. That’s how they embarked on a discussion of Jelal’s latest pieces.

  When they heard a night watchman’s whistle, which was more appropriate to a slum than one of the well-lit streets that led to the subway, they all turned and looked at the snowy sidewalks in the narrow street lit by purple neon, and when they turned into one of the streets that went up to the Galata Tower, Galip had the sensation that the upper stories of the buildings on either side of the street drew together slowly like the curtains at a movie theater. The red lights on top of the Tower were lit to indicate that it was going to snow tomorrow. It was two in the morning. Somewhere close by, the metal roll-down shutter of a store made a great deal of noise as it was lowered.

  Skirting the Tower, they entered an alley Galip had never seen before and walked along a dark sidewalk where a sheet of ice had formed. The man with the fedora knocked on the dilapidated door of a small two-story house. A bit later, a light went on above, a window opened, and a blue-tinged head poked out. “It’s me, open the door,” said the man with the fedora. “We have some visitors from England.” He turned around to cast an embarrassed smile at the Brits.

  A pale, unshaven, thirtyish fellow opened the door, which said MARS MANNEQUIN ATELIER. His face was sleepy. He wore black slacks and a blue-striped pajama top. After shaking hands with all the visitors, the man, who wore a mysterious expression as if they were all brothers in a secret cause, took them into a brightly lit room that smelled of paint and was full of boxes, molds, tins, and various mannequin parts. Handing out some pamphlets he produced, he began a speech that was delivered in a monotone.

  “Our establishment is the oldest mannequin-making enterprise in all the Middle East and the Balkans. The stage we have arrived at after one hundred years of history is an indicator of the Turkish achievement concerning modernization and industrialization. Today not only are arms, legs, hips produced in our country one hundred percent…”

  “Mr. Cebbar,” said the bald man with exasperation, “our friends have not come to take a look around here but to see, under your guidance, the levels below, the underground, the unfortunates, our history, and the things that make us ‘us.’”

  When the guide turned a knob angrily, the hundreds of arms, legs, heads, bodies in the fair-sized room were plunged into darkness, and a bare lightbulb went on in a small landing that opened to a stairway. The group started to walk down the iron staircase when a dank smell that rose from below made Galip stop. Mr. Cebbar came up to Galip with an ease that seemed surprising.

  “Have no fear, you will find here what you are looking for!” he said in a know-it-all manner. “I was sent by Him. He has no desire at all for you to stray on the wrong paths and get lost.”

  Was he speaking these ambiguous words for the benefit of the others as well? In the first room they descended into, the guide introduced the mannequins they saw there: “My father’s early work.” In the next room they viewed in the light of a bare bulb some mannequins representing Ottoman seamen, corsairs, scribes, as well as a bunch of peasants sitting cross-legged around a meal on a tablecloth spread out on the floor, and the guide murmured something or other. It was in yet another room, where they saw the mannequins of a washerwoman, a beheaded atheist, and an executioner carrying the tools of his trade, that Galip first understood the guide’s utterances.

  “One hundred years ago, when my grandfather created his first works of art, he had no other concept in his head aside from this simple thought that anybody should be able to get through his head: the mannequins displayed in the store windows ought to represent our own people. That’s what my grandfather thought. But he was forestalled by the unfortunate victims of a historical and international plot cooked up two hundred years ago.”

  They saw hundreds of mannequins as they went down more stairs, passing through more rooms which opened on to more steps that led down to where a single electric cable carrying naked lightbulbs wound around overhead like a clothesline.

  They saw the mannequin of Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmak who during his thirty years as the chief of staff, fearing that the citizens might collaborate with the enemy, had conceived of blowing up all the bridges in the country, of pulling down all the minarets in order to rob the Russians of landmarks, and of evacuating Istanbul and proclaiming it a ghost town, thereby turning the city into a labyrinth where an occupying enemy would be lost. They saw the mannequins of peasants from the Konya region who, having intermarried for so long, look exactly alike—mothers, fathers, daughters, grandfathers, uncles, and all. They saw itinerant junk dealers who go door to door collecting the old stuff that makes us, without our being conscious of it, who we are. They saw film actors who could not be themselves playing movie heroes who could not be themselves, because they could neither be themselves nor anyone else, and they saw the Turkish superstars and actors who simply play themselves. They saw the poor bewildered souls who dedicate their entire lives to translations and adaptations in order to bring home Western arts and sciences, and they saw the dreamers who die and whose grave sites are obliterated before any of their dreams come true, who have worked their entire lives with magnifying glass in hand in order to turn the jumble of streets in Istanbul into the linden-lined streets of Berlin, or the boulevards of Paris radiating outward like a star, or the bridged avenues of St. Petersburg, imagining modern sidewalks where our generals too, like their European counterparts, could take their dogs out on leashes for an evening crap. They saw members of the secret service who are forced into early retirement because where torture is concerned they want to be true to local and traditional procedures rather than the new international methods, and peddlers who, their wares on a yoke across their
shoulders, sell their fermented cereal, bonito, and yogurt in the neighborhoods. They saw a group entitled “Scenes from the Coffeehouse,” which the guide described as “a line launched by my grandfather and developed by my father, and which I took over.” Among them were the unemployed whose heads were sunk into their shoulders, and the lucky ones who could happily manage to forget themselves, together with the century in which they lived, during a game of backgammon or checkers, and compatriots who stared at the vanishing point on the horizon as if trying to remember the reason for their existence which had somehow got lost while they drank their tea and smoked their cheap cigarettes, or those who had withdrawn into themselves, or having failed to withdraw, abused the cards, the dice, or each other.

  “The magnitude of the international powers that be finally hit my grandfather on his deathbed,” their guide explained. “Historical forces which are against letting our nation be itself, in an effort to deprive us of our daily gestures which are our most precious treasure, had my grandfather thrown out of the stores in Beyoğlu and the display windows on İstiklâl Avenue. When my father understood that my dying grandfather had left him the underground, yes, the underground, as a prospect, he hadn’t yet recognized the fact that Istanbul has always been an underground city throughout its history. He came to realize it by living through it and by coming across passageways as he excavated the mud for more chambers in which to place his mannequins.”

  Going down the stairs that connected to these passageways, through the landings and chambers that were more like caverns, they beheld the mannequins of wretches by the hundreds. In the light of the bare bulbs, the mannequins sometimes reminded Galip of our long-suffering countrymen who, covered under the dust and mud of ages, wait at some forgotten bus stop for a bus that will never arrive, and who sometimes gave him the illusion that all the unfortunates in the streets of Istanbul must be each other’s brothers. He saw bingo men with their draw sacks. He saw snotty, stressed-out university students. He saw apprentice nut roasters, bird fanciers, and treasure seekers. He saw those who have read Dante in order to prove that all Western art and thought has been appropriated from the East, and those who have drawn maps in order to prove that the objects called minarets are in fact signal posts erected by extraterrestrials, and he saw the mannequins of theological-school students who, having been struck by a high-tension cable, were jolted into a collective blue funk which enabled them to recite daily events that had happened some two hundred years back. In the muddy chambers, he saw mannequins who had been teamed into groups of mountebanks, impersonators, sinners, and imposters. He saw couples who were unhappily married, ghosts who were restless, and war dead who had bolted their sepulchres. He saw mysterious persons who had letters written on their faces and foreheads, sages who had divulged the mystery in these letters, and even famous personages of our day who were the successors to those sages.

  In one corner, among the contemporary Turkish artists and scribblers, even a mannequin of Jelal was present, wearing the raincoat he used to wear twenty years ago. As they went by this mannequin, the guide mentioned that this was a writer for whom his father had such great expectations that he’d revealed to him the mystery of letters, which the writer had used for his own sleazy ends, having sold out for cheap success. The piece that Jelal had written twenty years ago on the subject of the guide’s father and grandfather had been framed and hung around the mannequin’s neck like an edict of execution. Galip’s lungs felt full of the irritating smell of mold and dampness that oozed off the walls in the muddy chambers, which had been excavated, as is the case for many a shopkeeper, without a permit from the city. All the while, the guide was giving an account of how his father, betrayed time and again, had put all his hopes on the mystery of letters which he had learned of in his trips to Anatolia, and how the underground passages, which made Istanbul what it was, had gradually disclosed to him, while he was busy modeling his mannequins, the mystery that he represented in the faces of the mannequins of the unfortunate. Galip remained stuck for quite a while in front of Jelal’s corpulent mannequin, which had a huge torso, a gentle expression, and tiny hands. “You are the reason why I could never be myself,” he felt like saying. “You are the reason I believed in all these fictions which managed to turn me into you.” He studied Jelal’s mannequin for a long time, like a son examining attentively a good photo of his father many years after it was taken. He remembered that the material for the trousers had been bought at discount from a distant relative’s store in Sirkeci, that Jelal really liked the raincoat which he thought made him look like the sleuths in English detective novels, that the seams in corners of his pockets were ripped away because he so often stuck his hands in his pockets forcefully, that these past few years there had no longer been any razor cuts visible under his lower lip and on his Adam’s apple, and that Jelal still used the fountain pen he kept in the pocket of his jacket. Galip loved him and yet feared him; he wanted to be in Jelal’s shoes and yet he wanted to get away from him; he was looking for him and yet he wanted to put him out of his mind. He got hold of Jelal’s jacket by the lapels as if to demand that he be told the meaning of his life, which he couldn’t decipher by himself—the secret that Jelal knew but kept from him, the mystery of the parallel universe, and the escape clause in the game that had begun as a joke but turned into a nightmare. In the distance, he heard the guide’s voice, which had an undertone of excitement as well as of habit and routine.

  “Using his knowledge of letters, my father imparted to the faces of his mannequins meanings that cannot be seen any longer either in our streets or in our houses, working at such a pace that we ran out of room in the underground chambers that we had dug and had to dig further. That was when we began to come across passageways which connected us to the history of the underground, and this fact cannot be explained away as mere coincidence. My father saw clearly that from then on our history could only take place underground, that the life below gave a clear warning of the final collapse above, that each of the passages that eventually connected to our house, these pathways that teemed with skeletons, provided us with a historical opportunity that could give life and meaning to the faces of true compatriots which only we could now create.”

  When Galip let go of the lapels of Jelal’s mannequin, it slowly rocked on its feet from side to side like a lead soldier. Galip backed off and lit a cigarette, thinking that he would not be able to forget, ever, this weird, horrific, ridiculous image of his mentor. He didn’t feel at all like descending along with the others down to the brink of the underground city which would, one day, teem with mannequins as it did with skeletons.

  When they had descended, the guide showed his guests the maw of the underground passage that ended on this side of the Golden Horn, one which the Byzantines, fearing that Attila might attack, had tunneled under the Horn one thousand, five hundred and thirty-six years ago; and he went on indignantly to tell the story of the skeletons he said they’d be able to see if they entered from this end carrying a light—and their tables and chairs as well, obscured under spider’s webs, where the skeletons had guarded the treasures hidden away from Latin invaders seven hundred and seventy-five years ago. While he listened, Galip kept thinking that he’d already read about all this long ago in one of Jelal’s pieces concerning the puzzle which these images and stories signified. As the guide was explaining how his father, having read the powerful signs of an absolute collapse, had decided to go underground, he mentioned that each incarnation of Istanbul (a.k.a. Byzantium, Vizant, Nova Roma, Anthusa, Tsargrad, Miklagrad, Constantinopole, Cospoli, Istin-Polin) had its historical origin in the inevitable and necessary passageways and tunnels below in which the previous civilization had sought refuge, which in turn had created the incredible double-level construct below the city—but, as the guide explained with considerable heat, the civilization below had always managed to wreak vengeance on the one above for having pushed it under. Galip remembered one of Jelal’s pieces in which he had mentioned tha
t apartment buildings were the extension of this underground civilization. The guide, his voice now tinged with anger, went on to tell how, in order to join the colossal collapse foretold by the underground, to become a part of that irresistible doomsday, his father had wanted to see his mannequins populate all these passages, these underground corridors chock-full of treasures and infested with rats, skeletons, spiders—how the dream of celebrating this colossal collapse had brought new meaning to his father’s life, and how the guide himself had followed in his father’s footsteps, creating letters and their meaning in the faces of his masterworks.

  As he listened, Galip was ready to believe that this guide bought a copy of Milliyet at the crack of dawn just in order to read Jelal’s column with the greed, jealousy, hate, and anger that he now displayed. Galip became convinced that the guide had carefully read Jelal’s latest column when the fellow remarked that those who had the nerve for it could certainly venture into an incredible passage, hung with gold necklaces and bracelets, where they would see the skeletons of Byzantines, whom the siege of the Abbasites had scared into going underground, and the timeless skeletons of Jews holding each other in fear of the Crusaders. There were the skeletons of Genoans, Amalfians, and Pisans who escaped the city when the Byzantines were decimating the Italian population that had numbered more than six thousand, and the six-hundred-year-old skeletons of those who had fled from the Black Death—which had arrived on board a ship from the Sea of Azov—and sat leaning against each other at tables which had been brought underground during the siege of the Avars, all of them waiting patiently for the Day of Judgment. Listening restlessly to the fellow go on and on, Galip wondered how he had found the same kind of patience that had been granted Jelal. The guide pointed out that passageways extended from Saint Sophia to Saint Irene, and from there to Pantocrator, which then had to be dug out all the way to this end when they ran out of room, all in order to hide from the Ottomans who sacked Byzantium. And then he went on to say that two hundred years later those who beat it down here, trying to avoid Murat the Fourth’s ban on coffee, tobacco, and opium, were slowly covered under a silky layer of dust that fell on them like snow while they waited for the mannequins to show them the way to salvation, holding onto their coffee grinders, their coffeepots and their waterpipes, their long tobacco pipes, their tobacco and opium pouches. Galip imagined the same silky layer of dust would one day cover Jelal’s skeleton. The guide informed them that, aside from the skeleton of Ahmet the Third’s heir apparent, who had been forced after a failed palace conspiracy to go underground in the same passages where Jews had taken refuge when they were kicked out of Byzantium seven hundred years ago, and the skeleton of the Georgian slave girl who escaped the seraglio with her lover, they would be able to see contemporary counterfeiters holding wet banknotes which they check for accuracy of color, or else, because there is no dressing room at the little theater, the Moslem Lady Macbeth who is forced to go one flight below to sit at her dressing-table mirror and dip her hands into a barrel of contraband water-buffalo blood, dying them a red so true to life that its like has never been seen on another stage in the entire world, or else our young chemists distilling prime-grade heroin in glass globes which they are zealous to export to America on rusty Bulgarian ships. Galip had the feeling that he could read all this in Jelal’s face as well as in one of his pieces.