The Black Book Read online

  He had realized by now that he wasn’t going to be able to shake the tail he didn’t know for sure was for real but he kept on walking, past manufacturing plants along the banks of the Golden Horn, empty industrial barrels, ruined Byzantine aqueducts, workmen who were eating bread and meatballs for lunch and playing soccer in the muddy fields, until the desire to see the city as a tranquil place full of familiar scenes became so strong that he tried imagining himself as someone else—as Mehmet the Conqueror. For quite a while, he walked hanging onto this childish fantasy, which seemed neither crazy nor ridiculous to him; then he remembered Jelal saying in one of his columns, written many years ago on some anniversary of the Conquest, that among the hundred and twenty-four rulers of Istanbul in the one thousand six hundred and fifty years from the first Constantine’s time to the present, Mehmet the Conqueror was the only emperor who had felt no need to go incognito in the middle of the night. “Our readers know the reasons all too well,” Jelal had written in the article Galip recalled as he bobbed along with the other passengers on the Sirkeci–Eyüp bus. He caught the bus to Taksim in Unkapanı, amazed that the person on his tail could change buses so fast: he felt the eye was even closer—on his neck. After once more changing buses in Taksim, he thought that if he talked to the old man next to him, he might be transformed into someone else, thereby getting rid of the shadow behind him.

  “Do you suppose it’s going to continue snowing?” Galip said, looking out the window.

  “Who knows,” said the old man who might have said more but Galip interrupted him.

  “What does this snow signify?” Galip said. “What does it herald? Do you know the great Rumi’s story about the key? Last night I was granted a dream about the same thing. It was white everywhere, snow white, as white as this snow. Suddenly I awoke with a cold, ice-cold, sharp pain in my chest. I thought there was a snowball on my heart, a ball of ice, or a crystal ball, but it wasn’t: it was Poet Rumi’s diamond key that lay on my heart. I took it into my hand and rose from my bed, thinking it might open my bedroom door; it did. But I was in another room where, sleeping in the bed, there was someone who looked like me but was not me; he had a diamond key lying on his heart. Putting down the key that I held in my hand, I took the second key, opened the door out of this room, and entered yet another room. The same thing in that room too … and in the next room, and the next one that opened into the next. Images of myself, much handsomer than I am, with keys placed on their hearts. What’s more, I saw that there were others besides myself in the rooms, shadows like myself, ghostly somnambulists with keys in their hands. A bed in every room, and a dreaming man like me on every bed! That’s when I realized I was in the marketplace in Paradise. Here there was no commerce, no money, no tariffs; only faces and images. Whatever you liked, you simulated; you pulled on a face like a mask and began a new life. I knew the face I was looking for was in the last of the thousand and one rooms, yet the final key I had in my hand would not open the final door. That’s when I realized the ice-cold key I initially saw on my heart was the only key that would open the last door. Yet where was that key now, and in whose hand? I had no idea where among the thousand and one rooms was the room and bed I’d left, and so, beset by confounding regret and tears, I realized I was fated to rush from room to room and door to door along with the other hopeless creatures, exchanging one key for another, astonished by each sleeping face, until the very end of time…”

  “Look,” the old man said. “Look!”

  Galip shut up and looked through the dark glasses at the spot where the old man was pointing. On the sidewalk in front of the radio station, there was a dead body; a couple of people were ranting and raving around it, and a curious crowd had quickly congregated. And then, when they got caught in the snarled traffic, passengers who had seats on the bus, as well as those who stood hanging on, leaned toward the windows to observe the dead body in silent terror.

  Even after traffic was cleared, the silence in the bus continued for quite some time. Galip got off across from the Palace Theater; he bought salted bonito, fish-roe spread, sliced tongue, bananas, and apples at the Ankara Market on Nişantaşı Corner and walked briskly toward the Heart-of-the-City Apartments. By now, he felt too much like someone else to wish to be someone else. He went down to the doorman’s flat right away; Ismail and Kamer were having a supper of chopped meat and potatoes with their little grandchildren, sitting at the dinner table covered with its blue oilcloth in a convivial family gathering that seemed so distant to Galip that it might have been a scene from centuries ago.

  “Eat in good health,” Galip said and added after a pause: “You didn’t manage to deliver the envelope for Jelal.”

  “We rang and rang,” the doorman’s wife said, “but he wasn’t home.”

  “He’s upstairs now,” Galip said. “So where’s the envelope?”

  “Jelal’s upstairs?” Ismail said. “If you’re going up, will you take him his electric bill?”

  He’d risen from the table and was inspecting the bills on the television set, bringing them close to his shortsighted eyes one by one. It took Galip a moment to sneak the key he took out of his pocket on the nail on the shelf. They didn’t catch him doing it. He took the envelope and the bill, and he left.

  “Tell Jelal not to worry,” Kamer called out after him with a gaiety that was suspect. “I’ve told no one!”

  For the first time in years, Galip took some pleasure in riding the Heart-of-the-City Apartments’ old elevator; it still smelled of wood polish and machine oil, moaning like an old person suffering from lumbago as it started up. The mirror in which he and Rüya used to check their height against each other was still in place, but he avoided looking in his own face, fearful at that moment of succumbing once more to the terror brought on by the letters.

  After going into the apartment, he’d just taken off his coat and jacket and had just hung them up when the phone rang. Before picking up the receiver, he ran into the bathroom to prepare himself for any eventuality and looked into the mirror for several seconds with desire, valor, and determination: No, it was not coincidental, the letters, everything, the whole universe and its mystery were all in place. “I know,” he reflected as he picked up the receiver, “I know.” He’d already known the voice on the phone would be the same one who heralded the military coup.

  “Hello.”

  “What should your name be this time?” Galip said. “There are so many pseudonyms around, I’m all confused.”

  “An intelligent beginning,” the voice said; it possessed a self-confidence Galip hadn’t expected. “You give me a name, Mister Jelal.”

  “Mehmet.”

  “As in Mehmet the Conqueror?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. This is Mehmet. I couldn’t find your name in the phone book. Let me have your address so I can come.”

  “Why should I give you my address when I keep it a secret?”

  “Because I am an ordinary citizen with good intentions who wants to bring a famous journalist the evidence of an impending military coup, that’s why.”

  “You know too much about me to be an ordinary citizen,” Galip said.

  “I met this fellow six years ago at the train station in Kars,” said the voice named Mehmet, “an ordinary citizen. He was an attar, a simple sundries-store owner, and just like the poet Farıd od-Dın Attar, eight hundred years before him, he was passing his years in one of those small shops that smelled of drugs and perfume. He was making a business trip to Erzurum. All through the trip we talked about you. He made comments about the meaning of your family name, Salik, ‘the traveler on the Sufi Road.’ He knew the significance of your having begun the first column you published under your own name with the word ‘listen,’ which translates the Persian word bishnov with which Rumi had begun his Mathnawi. When you wrote a piece in July of 1956 in which you likened life to serial novels and then, exactly a year later, one in which you likened serial novels to life, he was on to your cryptic symmetry a
nd utilitarianism because he’d figured out from the style that it was you who had, under a pseudonym, resumed the series of pieces on wrestlers, the original writer having abandoned it on account of getting sore at the publisher. In another piece around the same time, which you began by saying that your male readers oughtn’t to cast scowls at beautiful women on the street but instead smile with affection like Europeans, he knew that the beautiful woman you described with affection, admiration, and tenderness was your stepmother, exemplifying the woman disaffected by such masculine scowls. In the piece where you satirized an extended family who lived in a dusty Istanbul apartment building, comparing them to unfortunate Japanese goldfish who lived in an aquarium, he knew that the aforementioned fish belonged to a deaf-mute uncle and also that the family was your family. This man who hadn’t set foot anywhere west of Erzurum, let alone visit Istanbul, knew all your unnamed relatives, the Nişantaşı flats you lived in, the streets, the police station at the corner, Aladdin’s store across from it, the Teşvikiye Mosque courtyard with the reflecting pool, autumn gardens, the Milk Company pudding shop, the linden and chestnut trees along the sidewalks, as well as he knew his own shop on the outskirts of Kars where he sold, like Aladdin, all sorts of odds and ends from perfume to shoelaces, from tobacco to needle and thread. He knew in the years when we still lacked a unified accent on our national air waves that only three weeks after you lampooned Ipana toothpaste’s Eleven Question Quiz on Radio Istanbul, in order to flatter you into shutting up, they’d made your name the answer to the two-thousand-lira question. Just as he’d expected, you hadn’t accepted this small bribe but had advised your readers in your next column not to use American-made toothpaste, and to rub their teeth with mint soap made at home with their own hygienic hands. You wouldn’t know, of course, that our well-intentioned attar had rubbed his teeth, which would later fall out one by one, with the hokey formula you gave out. On the other hand, the sundries man and I even put together a quiz game called ‘Subject: our columnist Jelal Salik’ which took up the rest of the train trip. I was hard put defeating this man whose main fear was missing his stop at Erzurum. Yes, he was an ordinary citizen, one who’d gone to seed quickly, one who didn’t have enough money to get his teeth fixed, whose only pleasure, aside from your columns, was spending time in his garden with the various birds he kept in cages and telling stories about birds. Get it, Mister Jelal? An ordinary citizen is also capable of knowing you, so don’t you dare sell him short! But I happen to know you even better than the ordinary citizen. That’s why we’ll be at it all night, talking.”

  “Four months after the second column on toothpaste,” Galip began, “I did one more on the subject: What was that about?”

  “You’d spoken about pretty little girls and boys giving their fathers, uncles, aunts, and stepbrothers ‘goodnight kisses’ before going to bed, their pretty mouths fragrant with minty toothpaste. Wasn’t much of a column, to say the least.”

  “Other examples where I talked about Japanese goldfish?”

  “Six years ago in an article where you longed for silence and death. A month later you brought back the goldfish when this time you said you sought order and harmony. You often compared aquariums to the TV sets in our houses. You provided us with information ripped off from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the catastrophes that befell the Wakin goldfish for interbreeding. Who translated the stuff for you? Your sister or your nephew?”

  “What about the police station?”

  “It reminds you of dark blue, darkness, birth certificates, the woes of being a citizen, rusty water pipes, black shoes, starless nights, scowling faces, the metaphysical feeling of motionlessness, misfortune, being a Turk, leaky roofs and, naturally, death.”

  “Did the attar, your sundries man, know all that?”

  “That and more.”

  “And what did the attar ask you?”

  “This man, who’d never seen a streetcar and probably would never see one, asked me right off what a horse-drawn Istanbul streetcar smelled like, as opposed to a horseless one. I told him that the real difference was beyond the smell of sweat and horses; it was the smell of motors, oil, and electricity. He asked me if Istanbul electricity had a distinct odor. You hadn’t mentioned it, but he’d read it between the lines. He asked me to describe the smell of newsprint hot off the presses. The answer was, according to your column in winter of 1958: a mixture of quinine, cellar dankness, sulphur, and wine; that is, a heady mixture. Apparently, newsprint loses its smell in the three days it takes to arrive in Kars. The attar’s most difficult question was one on the smell of lilacs. I couldn’t remember you singling out this flower. According to the attar, whose eyes twinkled like an old man recalling sweet memories, you had mentioned the smell of lilacs three times in twenty-five years: One time, in connection with the story of a strange prince who terrorized those around him while he waited to ascend to the throne, you’d said his sweetheart smelled like lilacs. Another time—and this bore repeating—inspired in all likelihood by the daughter of a close relative, you’d written about a little girl who went back to grade school at the end of summer vacation on a sunny but dolorous day in the fall, wearing a freshly ironed smock and a bright ribbon in her hair, saying that it was her hair that smelled like lilacs one year, and that her head smelled like lilacs the next. Was this a real-life recurrence or a case of the writer cribbing from himself?”

  Galip was silent for a while. “I don’t remember,” he finally said, as if waking from a dream. “I remember contemplating the story about the prince, but I don’t remember writing it.”

  “The attar remembered. Aside from having a well-developed sense of smell, he was also good at places. Taking off from your columns, not only had he imagined Istanbul as a glut of smells, he knew all the quarters of the city you haunted, loved, cherished cryptically, and deemed mysterious. But he had no idea how close or distant these quarters were to one another. At times I’ve kept an eye out for you at these locations I also know well, thanks to you, but I haven’t bothered to do so lately since your phone number tells me you’re holed up somewhere in the Nişantaşı or Şişli area. I know this will interest you: I told the attar to write to you. But it turns out his nephew who reads your columns aloud to him does not know how to write. The attar could neither read nor write, of course. You’d once written that recognizing the letters only stunted the memory. Shall I tell you how I finally managed drubbing the man, whose knowledge of your work came from listening to it, as our choo-choo train pulled into Erzurum?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Although he remembered all the abstract concepts in your work, he couldn’t visualize their significances at all. For example, he had no idea what the concept of plagiarism or literary appropriation meant. His nephew read him only your column in the paper, and he wasn’t at all curious about the rest. You’d think he imagined that all the writing in the world was done by one person simultaneously. I asked him why you kept harping on the poet Rumi. He had no answer. I asked him, concerning your 1961 column entitled “Mystery of Secret Writing,” how much of it was you and how much of it was Poe. He had an answer: he said all of it was you. I quizzed him on the dilemma of ‘the source of the story and the story of the source,’ which was the turning point in the controversy—the sundries man called it a scrap—you and Neşati got into concerning Bottfolio versus Ibn Zerhani. He said with conviction that the source of everything was letters. He had comprehended nothing. I trounced him.”

  “In that scrap,” Galip said, “the argument I put forth to contradict Neşati rested on the notion that letters are the source for everything.”

  “But that was Fazlallah’s notion, not Ibn Zerhani’s. After you wrote that nazire on ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ you were forced to grab onto Ibn Zerhani to save your bacon. I just happen to know just what you were up to when you wrote those pieces, which was nothing more than making Neşati look bad to his boss and get him kicked off his paper. Initially, after the debate on ‘Is it trans
lation or plagiarism,’ you trapped Neşati, who was green with envy, by irritating him into calling it ‘plagiarism.’ Then you made him appear as if he put Turks down by implying that the East could not create anything original because his argument stemmed from the fact that you plagiarized from Ibn Zerhani and Ibn Zerhani from Bottfolio, and you suddenly went for defending our glorious history and ‘our culture’ and put your readers up to writing to his publisher. And when the miserable Turkish reader, who’s always vigilant for all kinds of New Crusades against the sort of perverts who claim that the ‘great Turkish architect’ Sinan was in fact an Armenian from Kayseri, didn’t lose a moment in deluging the publisher with letters against this degenerate, then poor Neşati, who was drunk with the pleasure of catching your plagiarism, lost his job and his column. He ended up being employed at the same paper as you, although as a lesser writer, where, I hear tell, he’s dug a well of gossip on you. Did you know that?”

  “What have I written on wells?”

  “That’s a subject that’s so clear and so endlessly extensive that quizzing a loyal reader like me on it isn’t cricket. I won’t mention the literary wells in courtly poetry, or the well where Rumi’s beloved Shams was dumped, or the wells with genies, witches, and ogres from the Thousand and One Nights to which you’ve always helped yourself freely, or air shafts in apartment buildings and the bottomless darkness where you tell us we lost our souls. You’ve belabored these themes. How about this? Fall of 1957, you wrote a careful, angry, and sorrowful piece on those sad concrete minarets (you didn’t have much quarrel with stonework minarets) that besiege our cities and our brand-new suburbs like forests of hostile lances. In the last few inconspicuous lines of this piece which went unnoticed—as it goes for all articles that go beyond daily politics and scandal—you mentioned a mosque in the slums with a squat minaret which had a dark and silent dry well in the yard infested with asymmetrical thorns and symmetrical ferns. I realized immediately that what you adroitly implied by your description of the actual well was that, instead of raising our eyes to the heights of concrete minarets, it behooves us to look down into our past’s dark dry wells teeming with snakes and souls, submerged in our collective unconscious. Ten years later, in an article inspired by the Cyclopes and your own pitiful past, you wrote that on an unfortunate night when you were alone, all alone, grappling with the ghosts of the sins on your conscience, it was not accidental but necessary that you had written, in describing the ‘eye’ that belonged to the guilt feelings that hounded you pitilessly for years, that this visual organ stood ‘like a dark well in the middle of the forehead.’”