The Black Book Read online

  “Six weeks ago, on that night in August, it was so hot and suffocating in the room where the founder of our Republic had died that one imagined all motion, thought, and time had developed rigor mortis in the terrible heat, and that not only had time come to a standstill for the ormulu clock which had been stopped to show always Atatürk’s moment of death at 9:05—a source of amusement for you children inasmuch as it was a source of confusion to your dear departed mother—but all the clocks in Dolmabahçe Palace, as well as those in all Istanbul, had stopped dead in their tracks. There was no motion at the windows overlooking the Bosphorus, where the curtains usually billowed, and it seemed as if the sentries along the waterfront were standing still as mannequins in the dark night not because I had issued the order but because time had come to a stop. Feeling that I might now undertake something I had wanted to do all these years without ever being able to take the decisive step, I put on the peasant’s attire I had in my closet. I slipped out of the palace through the Harem Door which was no longer in use, bolstering my courage by reminding myself that before me, in the past five hundred years, many a sultan, after sneaking out of this side door (as well as out the back doors of other palaces in Istanbul—Topkapı, Beylerbeyi, and Yıldız) and disappearing into the night in the city they longed for, had managed to return safe and sound.

  “How Istanbul had changed! It was not only bullets that could not penetrate the windows of the bulletproof Chevrolet limousine, I soon discovered, but also real life in my beloved city! Once outside the palace walls, on my way afoot to Karaköy, I bought some helva from a vendor which had a burnt-sugar aftertaste. I stopped at outdoor cafés to talk to the men who sat playing backgammon and cards, listening to the radio. I observed prostitutes waiting for customers in pudding shops, and children panhandling by pointing at kebabs in restaurant windows. I went into mosque courtyards in an attempt to mingle with the crowds that came out of evening prayers, and I sat in family-style tea gardens in back quarters, drinking tea like everybody else and eating roasted seeds. In an alley paved with large flagstones, I saw a pair of young parents returning home from the neighbors’; the mother’s head was covered and the father carried their drowsing son on his shoulders: if you could have only seen the devotion with which she leaned into her husband’s arm! Tears welled up in my eyes.

  “Nay, my concern was not for the happiness or unhappiness of my fellow citizens. Witnessing the real lives of my compatriots, broken and worn out as they were, had rekindled the sorrow and the fear that emerges from dreams, that feeling of having stepped outside of reality, even on this night of my freedom and fantasy. I tried to shake this fear and this sense of unreality by beholding Istanbul. My eyes teared again and again with sadness as I looked through the windows of pastry shops at those gathered inside or watched the crowds disembark from the Municipal Lines ferries with the pretty smokestacks which had made their final trip for the night.

  “It was almost time for the curfew I had imposed. Hoping to enjoy the coolness of the water on my way back, I approached a boatman in Eminönü, telling him to take me on a fifty-kuruş rowboat ride to the opposite side and drop me off in Karaköy or Kabataş. ‘You have your brains for breakfast, fella?’ he said to me. ‘Don’t you know that this is the hour when our President-Pasha takes a ride on his powerboat? And that anyone he sees on the water is arrested and thrown into the dungeons?’ I took out a roll of pink banknotes—the ones with the portrait of me on them which, as I know very well, made my enemies’ tongues wag when they were first printed—and I offered them to him in the dark. ‘If we row out in your boat, would you show me the President-Pasha’s powerboat then?’ ‘Get under that tarp and don’t you dare move!’ he said, indicating the prow with the same hand he’d snatched the money with. ‘God save us!’ He began to row.

  “I couldn’t say what direction we took in the dark. The Bosphorus? Into the Golden Horn? Or out to Marmara? The becalmed water was silent as a city in a blackout. From where I lay, I could smell the thin layer of fog misting over the water. There was the distant sound of a motor when the boatman whispered, ‘There he comes now! He comes down every night!’ Once our boat was hidden behind harbor pontoons encrusted with mussels, I couldn’t help looking into the searchlight that ran mercilessly over the city, the harbor, the water, and the mosques, revolving left and right as if interrogating the surroundings. Then I saw a large white craft approach slowly; on board was a row of bodyguards with life jackets and guns; above them the bridge, where a group of people stood, and on a platform even higher, all by himself, the False President-Pasha! In the half-light, I could only barely perceive him as he went by in his craft, even so, despite the darkness and the thin fog, I had been able to observe that his clothes were identical to mine. I asked the boatman to follow him, but it was in vain. Telling me that the hour of curfew was upon us, he dropped me off at Kabataş. The streets were almost deserted when I returned back to the palace without making a sound.

  “I thought about him that night—my look-alike, the False Pasha—but not about who he was and what business he had on the water. I thought about him because through his mediation I could think about myself. In the morning, I issued an order to the commanders who enforced the martial law that the curfew be imposed one hour later, so that I would have more time to observe him. It was immediately announced on the radio, followed by my address to the nation. I also ordered that some of the detainees be set free in order to provide an atmosphere of relaxation, and it was done.

  “Was Istanbul any gayer the following evening? Not at all! It went to show that my subjects’ interminable sadness does not arise out of political repression, as claimed by my superficial opponents, but is fed by a source that is deeper and cannot be denied. That evening they still smoked, ate roasted seeds and ice cream, drank coffee. And they were as sad and as lost in thought as before, listening to my address on coffeehouse radios announcing the shortened curfew. But they were so ‘real’! When I was among them, I felt the pain of a somnambulist who cannot wake up and rejoin reality. For some reason, the boatman in Eminönü was waiting for me. We set out at once.

  “It was a rough and windy night this time; we had to wait for the False President-Pasha, who was late—as if some sign had given him cause to be apprehensive. Out on the water, away from Kabataş and tucked behind another pontoon, I was regarding the boat and then the False President-Pasha himself, when I thought to myself that he seemed to be real and that he was beautiful—if these two words can exist together: beautiful and real. Was that possible? Raised above the heads of the crowd on the bridge, he seemed to have fixed his eyes like two searchlights on Istanbul, the populace, and history. What did he see?

  “I slipped a pack of pink banknotes into the boatman’s pocket, and he pulled on the oars. Rocking and bouncing in the waves, we caught up with them in Kasımpaşa near the boatyards, but we could only watch them from a distance. They got into black and navy limousines, among which was my Chevrolet, and vanished into the night in Galata. The boatman kept complaining that we were late, that the hour of curfew was at hand.

  “When I stepped ashore after having rocked so long on the rough sea, at first I thought the irreal sensation I felt was a difficulty with getting my balance, but it was not. Walking late on streets deserted due to my curfew, I was gripped with such a feeling of irreality that an apparition I had thought belonged only in dreams appeared before my eyes. On the avenue between Fındıklı and Dolmabahçe, there was no one but packs of dogs—that is, aside from the roasted-corn vendor who was rapidly pushing his cart twenty paces ahead and who kept turning around to look at me. I surmised from his look that he was afraid of me and was trying to get away, and I wanted to tell him that what he ought to be really afraid of was hidden behind the rows of large chestnut trees on either side of the avenue. And yet, just as in a dream, I couldn’t tell it to him; and as it is in dreams, I was afraid because I couldn’t speak, or I couldn’t speak because I was afraid. I was afraid of what was behind th
e trees that flowed alongside of us as the roasted-corn vendor sped up on account of me having sped up; but I didn’t know what it was and, what was worse, I knew this was not a dream.

  “Next morning, not wishing to experience the same terror again, I asked that the curfew be shortened even further and another group of detainees be set free. I didn’t make any explanations on the subject; the radio broadcast one of my previous addresses.

  “Armed with the experience of age that nothing ever changes in life, I had a good idea that I would only see the same sights in the city streets. And I was not mistaken. Some outdoor movie theaters had extended their hours; that was all. The pink-dyed hands of the pink cotton candy vendors were still the same color, and so were the white faces of tourists from the West, who had dared to venture on the street thanks to their guides.

  “I found my boatman waiting for me at the same place. I could say the same thing for the False Pasha, too. Soon after embarking on the water, we encountered him. The weather was as calm as it was on our first night out, but there was no hint of a fog. In the dark mirror of the sea, I could behold the Pasha standing in the same place high above the bridge, as clearly as I could see the domes and the city lights reflected there. He was real. What is more, he had also seen us, as could anyone on a night that was as well-lit as this.

  “Our boat pulled up to the Kasımpaşa dock in his wake. I had quietly stepped ashore when his men, who looked more like nightclub goons than soldiers, jumped me and grabbed me by the arms: What was I doing here, at this hour? Anxiously, I tried explaining that there was still time before the curfew, I was a poor peasant staying at a hotel in Sirkeci, that I had ventured on a boat ride on my last night here before I returned to my village: I had no knowledge of the Pasha’s curfew … But the frightened boatman confessed everything to the President-Pasha who had approached us with his men. Even though he was in mufti, the Pasha looked more like me, and I looked more like a peasant. After hearing us out once more, he gave his orders: the boatman was free to leave, but I had to go with the Pasha.

  “As we drove away from the harbor, the Pasha and I were alone on the backseat of the bulletproof Chevrolet. The sensation of our being alone with each other was increased, rather than diminished, by the presence of the driver who was as quiet as the limousine itself where he sat driving in the front seat, separated from us by a glass partition—a feature that was not available in my Chevrolet.

  “‘We have both been waiting for this all these years!’ said the False Pasha, whose voice I didn’t think sounded at all like mine. ‘I waited knowing that I was waiting, and you waited without knowing it. But neither one of us knew we would meet like this.’

  “He began to tell his story haltingly and halfheartedly, equipped with the serenity of being able finally to finish his story rather than with the excitement of being able to tell it at last. Apparently we were in the same class at War College. We had taken the same courses with the same teachers. We were both out on night training on the same cold nights in winter, both of us waited for water to come out of the tap in our stone barracks on the same hot summer days, and when we were given leave, together we went out on the town in Istanbul which we dearly loved. That was when he had an inkling that things would turn out as they had, although not exactly as it was now.

  “Back then he had known that I would be more successful than him even as we competed secretly for the best grade in math, for twelve o’clock on the practice target, for being the most popular among the cadets, for the best record, and for being first in class, and that I would be the one who lived in the palace where the stopped clocks would confuse your dear departed mother. I reminded him that it must have indeed been a ‘secret’ competition; I neither remembered competing against a fellow cadet at the War College—as I have often advised you children—nor remembered him as a friend. He was not at all surprised. He had withdrawn from the competition anyway, having realized that I had too much self-confidence to be aware of our ‘secret’ competition; and that I had already gone beyond classmates and upperclassmen, beyond lieutenants and even captains; he had not wished to stand behind me as a pale imitation, nor to be the second-class shadow to success. He wanted to be ‘real,’ not a shadow. As he went on explaining, I kept looking out the window of the Chevrolet, which I had begun to think didn’t look too much like mine, and watching the deserted streets in Istanbul, glancing now and then at our knees and legs which remained motionless before us in identical positions.

  “Later, he said that this coincidence had not figured in his calculations. One didn’t have to be an oracle to predict back then that our destitute nation would go under the yoke of yet another dictator forty years later, that Istanbul would be handed over to him, and that this dictator would be a career soldier about our age; nor to predict that the ‘soldier’ would end up being me. So, it was back at War College that he had imagined the future through simple reasoning. He would either be a ghostly shadow traveling back and forth between authenticity and nondescriptness like everyone else—between the damnation of the present and the fantasies of the past or the future in a phantom Istanbul where I’d become the President-Pasha—or he’d devote his life to finding a way of becoming ‘real.’ I remembered this nondescript cadet for the first time when he admitted that, in order to find his way, he had committed a crime serious enough to get himself expelled from the army, but not serious enough to land him in jail, describing how he had been successful in getting caught inspecting the night-watch corps, impersonating the Commander of the War College. After his expulsion, he’d gone into business. ‘Everyone knows how easy it is to become rich in our land,’ he said with pride. Antithetically, the reason there was so much poverty was that our people were taught not how to be rich but how to be poor. After a silence, he added that it was me who had taught him how to be authentic. ‘You!’ he said familiarly, stressing the word. ‘After all these years, I realized with astonishment that you are less real than I. You poor peasant!’

  “There was a long, a very long, silence. Inside the garb that my aide had put together as an authentic peasant costume, I felt not so much ridiculous as inauthentic, being obliged as I was to take part in a fantasy in a way that was totally undesirable to me. It was during this silence that I understood that the fantasy had been built on the images of Istanbul I saw out of the limousine window flowing by like a slow-motion film: deserted streets, sidewalks, desolate squares. The hour of my curfew had arrived, making the city appear uninhabited.

  “I now knew that what my vainglorious classmate had showed me was nothing but this dream city that I had created. We drove past wood-frame houses which seemed all the smaller and more lost under the huge chestnut trees, and past slums that had encroached upon graveyards, arriving at the threshold of the land of dreams. We went downhill on paved streets that had been relinquished to packs of quarreling dogs, up hard streets where streetlamps made it darker instead of shedding light. Going through phantom streets where fountains had gone dry, where the walls were in ruins and chimneys broken, viewing with a strange apprehension mosques that drowsed like storybook giants, driving past public squares where the pools were empty, the statuary neglected, and the clocks stopped, which made me believe that time was at a standstill not only in the Palace but in all Istanbul, I paid no attention to my imitator’s narrative of his success in business, nor to the stories he told thinking they were appropriate to the situation in which we found ourselves (the story of an old shepherd who caught his wife with her lover, as well as the tale in the Thousand and One Nights in which Haroun al-Rashid gets lost). Toward daybreak, the avenue that bears your last name and mine had become, like all the other avenues, streets, and public squares, an extension of a dream rather than a reality.

  “He was narrating the dream that Rumi calls ‘The Contest of the Two Painters’ when toward morning I composed the proclamation (the same one our Western allies questioned you about behind the scenes) which I later had announced on the airwaves, concerning th
e lifting of the curfew and martial law. Trying to fall asleep in my own bed after that sleepless night, I daydreamed that the empty squares would be inhabited throughout the night, the stopped clocks would start running, and that an authentic life more real than phantoms and fantasies would ensue on bridges, at the foyers of movie theaters, and in coffeehouses where roasted seeds are consumed. I don’t know to what extent my dreams have come true, giving Istanbul a landscape in which I could be real, but I hear from my aides that freedom, as is always the case, inspires my opponents more than it does mere dreamers. Once again, they are beginning to organize in teahouses, in hotel rooms, and under bridges to hatch plots against us; already I hear that opportunists are plastering the palace walls with slogans the meaning of which cannot be deciphered; but none of this is important. The time when sultans went among the populace in disguise is long gone; it exists only in books.

  “The other day I read in one of these books, Hammer’s History of the Ottoman Empire, that Selım the Grim went to Tabriz where he went around in disguise when he was a mere prince. He had quite a reputation as a great chess player, which occasioned Shah Ismail, who was a chess enthusiast, to invite the youth in dervish garb to the palace. After a lengthy game, Selım beat the Shah of Persia. Many years later, when Shah Ismail realized that the man who beat him in the game of chess was not a dervish but the Ottoman Emperor Selım the Grim, who would take the city of Tabriz from him after the Battle of Chalderan, I wondered if he remembered the moves in the game they had played. My vainglorious impersonator must surely remember all the moves in our game. By the way, the subscription to the chess journal, King and Pawn, must have run out; it’s no longer being sent, I am transferring funds to your account at the Embassy, so that you can get it renewed.”