The Black Book Read online

  Many years after we’d gone to the clothing store, read Children’s Week together, and studied the jar of black-olive paste, I’d discovered that our memories’ gardens also led into each other like these love stories, forming an infinite string of stories that were tied together like a series of doors to rooms that led into one another; that was when you’d run away from home and I’d taken up fiction and my own story. All love stories were sad, touching, pathetic, whether they were set in Damascus in the Arabian Desert, or in Khorosan on the steppes of Asia, or in Verona at the foot of the Alps, or in Baghdad on the River Tigris. Even more pathetic was how easily these stories stuck in one’s mind, making it very simple to identify with the most ingenuous, long-suffering, and sorrowful hero.

  If someday someone (perhaps me) ends up writing our story, the ending of which I still cannot figure out, I don’t know if the reader can immediately identify with one of us as I’ve done reading those love stories, or if our story can stick in the reader’s mind, but I intend to do my homework since I’m aware that certain kinds of passages are always present which set the heroes and the stories apart from each other:

  On a visit we paid together, you were listening carefully to a long story whose narrator sat close by in a room where the heavy air had turned blue with cigarette smoke, when sometime past midnight the expression in your face gradually began saying “I’m not here”; I loved you then. You were listlessly looking for a belt among your slips, your green sweaters, and your old nightgowns you couldn’t bring yourself to discard, when you became aware of the incredible mess that was revealed through your closet’s open door and a daunted expression appeared on your face; I loved you then. Back when you had a passing fancy to become an artist when you grew up, you were sitting with Grandpa at a table learning to draw a tree, and when Grandpa teased you gratuitously you didn’t get angry at him but laughed; I loved you then. You’d slammed the dolmuş door on the hem of your purple coat, when the five-lira piece fell out of your hand and rolled prettily defining a perfect arc into the grate in the gutter, and I loved the playfully surprised expression on your face; I loved you. On a brilliant April day, seeing how the hankie you’d put out on our tiny balcony to dry in the morning was still wet, you realized the bright sun had fooled you, and immediately afterwards you were listening to twittering in a vacant lot out back when your face took on a wistful look; I loved you then. I’d realized apprehensively how different your memory and recollections were than mine when I overheard you tell a third person about a movie we’d seen together, and I loved you then; I loved you. When you sneaked off into a corner to read some professor’s pearls of wisdom in a richly illustrated newspaper article, haranguing on intermarriage among close relatives, I didn’t care what it was that you read but loved seeing you read with your upper lip slightly pursed like some Tolstoyan character; I loved the way you checked yourself in the elevator mirror as if looking at someone else and then, for some reason, the way you anxiously rifled through your purse as if looking for something you’d just remembered; I loved the way you hurriedly slipped into the pair of high-heeled pumps you kept waiting side-by-side for hours, one on its side like a narrow sailboat and the other like a hunchbacked cat, and when you returned home hours later, I loved watching the skillful movements your hips, your legs and feet spontaneously performed before you abandoned the pair of muddied pumps to their asymmetrical retirement; I loved you when your melancholic thoughts went who knew where as you regarded the mound of cigarette butts and burned-out matches with their black heads bent forlornly in the ashtray; I loved you on our usual walks when we came across a scene or light so brand new that it seemed for a moment that the sun might have risen in the west that morning; it was not the street I loved but you. On a winter day when a sudden south wind cleared Istanbul of snow and dirty clouds, it wasn’t Mount Uludağ appearing in the horizon behind antennas, minarets, and the islands which you pointed out but you shivering with your head tucked into your shoulders that I loved; I loved your wistful gaze at the water vendor’s tired old horse pulling the heavy cart loaded with enameled containers; I loved the way you poked fun at people who say don’t hand out money to beggars because actually beggars happen to be quite rich, and the way you laughed joyously when you found a shortcut to get us out in the street before all the others who were slowly winding their way up through labyrinthine stairways out of the movie theater. After we ripped another page off the educational calendar with schedules for prayer, an activity which took us a day closer to our death, I loved your voice reading, seriously and sorrowfully as if reading the signs of our impending death, the suggested daily menu consisting of meat and chickpeas, pilav, pickles, and mixed fruit compote; and when you taught me patiently how one opens the tube of Eagle brand anchovy paste by first removing the flat perforated disk and then turning the cap all the way, I loved the way you recited from the label, “submitted with the respects of the manufacturer, Monsieur Trellidis”; I loved you anxiously when I noticed that your face on winter mornings was the same color as the pale white sky, or when in our childhood I watched you cross the street running wildly among the stream of vehicles that flowed down past our apartment house; I loved you when you observed carefully, and with a smile on your lips, the crow that landed on the coffin that was laid on the catafalque in the mosque courtyard; I loved you when you acted out our parents’ fights using your imitation radio-theater voice; I loved you when I held your face between my hands and I fearfully saw in your eyes where our lives were taking us; I hadn’t understood why you’d left your ring lying next to the vase in the first place, but when I saw it there again several days later, I loved you; I loved you when I realized that you had also joined the solemn festival with your jokes and inventiveness toward the end of prolonged lovemaking that was reminiscent of the slow flight of mythical birds; when you pointed out the perfect star in the heart of the apple you cut crosswise instead of top to bottom, I loved you; in the middle of the day when I found a strand of your hair on my desk and couldn’t figure out how it got there, and on a ride we took together when I realized how little alike our hands looked grasping the bar on the crowded municipal bus, side-by-side among all the other hands, I loved you as I loved my own body, as if I were looking for my absconded soul, as if I comprehended with pain and joy that I’d become someone else. I loved you. When that mysterious expression appeared on your face as you watched a train go by to an unknown destination, and when its exact dolorous replica reappeared at the hour when screaming flocks of crows flew insanely, and when the electricity suddenly went out in early evening and the darkness inside and the light outside slowly replaced each other, I loved you with all the helplessness, the pain and jealousy that gripped me whenever I saw your mysteriously dolorous face.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I AM NOT A MENTAL CASE, JUST ONE OF YOUR LOYAL READERS

  I made your person my mirror.

  —SÜLEYMAN ÇELEBI

  Galip woke, if it could be called waking, at seven in the morning after having gone to sleep the previous night for the first time in two days. As he would later remember when he tried comprehending all that had happened and all that had gone through his mind during the period between the time he got up at four in the morning and the time he went back to sleep after listening to the call to morning prayer to wake up again an hour later, he was experiencing “the wonders of the mythic land between sleep and wakefulness” that Jelal so often mentioned in his writing.

  Like people who wake up in the middle of a deep sleep after a long period of sleeplessness and exhaustion, and many a worn-out unfortunate who finds himself waking in a bed other than his own, when he woke at four he had trouble remembering the bed, the room, the apartment, and how he got there, but he didn’t press himself too much to come out of his memory’s enchanting bewilderment.

  So when Galip saw Jelal’s box of disguise paraphernalia next to the desk where he’d left it before going to bed, he began taking out the familiar objects inside it
without registering any surprise: a melon hat, sultan’s turbans, caftans, canes, boots, stained silk shirts, fake beards that came in various sizes and colors, wigs, pocket watches, eyeglass frames, headgear, fezzes, silk cummerbunds, daggers, Janissary decorations, wristbands, a pile of other odds and ends that are available at Mr. Erol’s famous shop in Beyoğlu which supplies costumes and equipment to Turkish filmmakers who make historic films. Then, as if remembering a recollection that had been pushed into a corner in his mind, Galip tried visualizing Jelal going around Beyoğlu at night masquerading in these costumes. But like the blue-tinged roofs, modest streets, and phantom-like persons in the dream he’d been having just moments ago, which were still stirring in his mind, the scenes of going incognito seemed to Galip like one of the myths of “the land between sleep and wakefulness”: wonders that were neither mysterious nor real, neither comprehensible nor totally incomprehensible. In his dream he had tried locating an address which existed in districts of Damascus and Istanbul, as well as in the outskirts of the Fort of Kars, and he found what he was looking for as easily as coming up with the simpler words in the crossword puzzles in newspaper magazine supplements.

  Since Galip was still under the spell of the dream, when he saw the large book of names and addresses on the desk he was gripped by an impression of coincidence which made him feel joyous, as if he’d come across signs left there by a hidden hand or intimations of a sportive god who played hide-and-seek like a child. Pleased to be living in such a world, he grinned as he read the addresses in the book and the sentences across from them. Who knew how many fans and enthusiasts all over Istanbul and Anatolia awaited the day when they’d come across these sentences in Jelal’s columns; some of them might’ve already done so. Galip tried remembering through the fog of sleep and dreams. Had he ever seen these sentences before in Jelal’s work? Had he read them years ago? Even if he didn’t remember having read some of the sentences, he knew he’d heard them straight out of Jelal’s mouth—such as, “What makes the marvelous is its peculiar way of being ordinary; what makes the ordinary is its peculiar way of being marvelous.”

  And even if he couldn’t place some of the sentences in Jelal’s work or discourse, he remembered noticing them in other places, such as Şeyh Galip’s admonition written two centuries ago in connection with the school years of the two children named Beauty and Love.

  “Mystery is sovereign, so treat it gently with respect.”

  There were still others he couldn’t remember seeing in Jelal’s work or anyplace else, yet they felt familiar, as if he’d read them both in Jelal and elsewhere. Such as the sentence that would be the signal for a Fahrettin Dalkıran who resided on Serencebey in Beşiktaş. “The gentleman, being someone with enough sense to imagine that his twin sister, whom he’d been dying to meet all these years, could only appear to him in the guise of death on the Day of Judgment and liberation—which for many people fetches up images of themselves beating their teachers to an inch of their lives, or to put it more simply, of taking pleasure in bumping off their fathers—had made himself scarce for quite some time and hadn’t stirred out of his place, the location of which was known to no one.” Who might “the gentleman” be?

  Just as it began to grow light, Galip had an impulse to plug in the telephone; he washed, helped himself to whatever was in the fridge, and soon after the call to morning prayer went back to Jelal’s bed. As he was about to fall asleep, in the realm closer to dreams than to daydreams, in the state between sleep and wakefulness, he and Rüya were children taking a boatride on the Bosphorus. There were no aunts, no mothers, nor any boatmen anywhere around: being all alone with Rüya made Galip feel insecure.

  The phone was ringing when he woke up. By the time he reached it, he’d made up his mind that it must be the usual voice on the phone and not Rüya. He was startled to hear a woman’s voice.

  “Jelal? Jelal, is that you?”

  Not a young voice and certainly not at all familiar.

  “Yes.”

  “Darling, darling, where have you been? For days I’ve been calling and calling, trying to find you, ah!”

  The last syllable became a sob, the sob turned into weeping.

  “I can’t place your voice,” Galip said.

  “Can’t place my voice!” said the woman, imitating Galip’s voice. “He tells me he can’t place my voice. He’s so formal with me.” After a pause, she laid down her cards like a player confident of her hand, somewhat conspiratorial and somewhat haughty: “This is Emine.”

  Her name had no associations for Galip.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? That’s all you have to say?”

  “After so many years…” Galip murmured.

  “Darling, at last, after so many, many years. Can you imagine how I felt reading you call out to me in your column? I’d been waiting for the day for twenty years. Can you imagine how I felt reading the sentence I’d been anticipating for twenty years? I wanted to shout it out for all the world to hear. I almost went crazy; I had a time containing myself; I wept. As you know, they retired Mehmet for getting involved in all that revolution business. But he’s out and about, always busy with stuff. Soon as he left, I hit the street. I ran all the way to Kurtuluş. But there was nothing, but nothing, left on our street. Everything had changed, all torn down, nothing left standing. Our place was nowhere to be found. I began crying right in the middle of the street. People took pity on me and gave me a glass of water. I returned home at once, packed my suitcase, and left before Mehmet got home. My darling, my Jelal, now tell me how I find you? For the last seven days, I’ve been on the road, staying in hotel rooms and with distant relatives, feeling unwanted and unable to hide my shame. I called the paper so many times only to hear them say “We don’t know.” I called your relatives, the same answer. I called this number, no answer. I took nothing with me aside from a few small things, I don’t want anything. I hear Mehmet has been looking for me like a madman. I left him a short letter that explained nothing. He has no idea why I left. No one does, I haven’t told anything to anyone. I didn’t divulge our love, the pride of my life, to anyone, my darling. What’s going to happen now? I’m afraid. I am on my own now. I have no responsibilities anymore. You no longer have to fret that your plump bunny has to return home to her husband before supper. The kids have grown up, one is in Germany, the other in the army. My time, my life, everything that belongs to me, are all yours. I’ll do your ironing for you, I’ll straighten your desk, your dear writings; I’ll change your pillowcases; I never saw you anywhere but in that bare love nest where we met; I’m so curious about your real place, your things, your books. Where are you, my darling? How am I to find you? How come you didn’t signal your address in secret code in your column? Give me your address. You too kept thinking back, didn’t you, thinking back all these years? We will be alone once more, in the afternoon, back in our one-room stone house, sunlight pouring through the linden leaves on our faces, tea glasses, and our hands that knew each other so well. But Jelal, that house no longer exists! It’s been torn down, vanished; no Armenians either, nor any old-style shops … Were you aware of that? Or did you want me to go there and cry my eyes out? How come you didn’t mention it in your column? You can write anything, you could’ve written this too. It’s high time you talked to me! Say something after twenty years! Do your hands still sweat when you’re embarrassed? Does a childlike expression still appear on your face when you sleep? Tell me. Call me ‘my darling’… How am I to see you?”

  “My dear lady,” Galip said carefully. “Dear lady, I’ve forgotten everything. There must be some mistake, I haven’t submitted anything to the paper for days. They’ve been running my old columns from twenty or thirty years ago. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “I had no intention of sending you or anyone else encoded sentences or anything. I no longer write. The editors have been reprinting my old columns one more time. That sentence must have been in a twenty-year-old piece.”
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  “That’s a lie!” the woman shouted. “It’s a lie. You do too love me. You loved me madly. You always talked about me in your writing. When you wrote about the most beautiful spots in Istanbul, you described the street on which stood the house where you made love to me; you described our Kurtuluş, our tiny spot, not some commonplace bachelor’s pad. What you saw in the garden were our linden trees. When you mentioned Rumi’s moonfaced beauty, you weren’t writing purple prose but describing your own moonfaced one: me … You mentioned my cherry lips, the crescents of my eyebrows … it was me who inspired you with all that. When the Americans went to the moon, I knew you weren’t just writing about the dark spots on the face of the moon but about the beauty spots on my cheeks. My darling, don’t you ever deny it again! ‘The terrifying unfathomableness of dark wells’ was a reference to my eyes, for which I thank you; it made me weep at the time. When you said, ‘I returned to that apartment,’ you naturally meant our little house, but not wanting to have anybody guess our forbidden secret trysts, I know that you were forced to describe a certain six-story apartment building in Nişantaşı with an elevator. We got together at that house in Kurtuluş eighteen years ago. Exactly five times. Please don’t deny it, I know you love me.”

  “My dear lady, as you have said, it all happened long ago,” Galip said. “I no longer remember anything. I gradually forget everything.”

  “My darling Jelal, this couldn’t be you. I just can’t believe it. Are you being kept hostage there, is someone making you say these things? Are you alone? Just tell me the truth, tell me you’ve loved me all these years, that will be enough. I waited for eighteen years, I can wait for another eighteen. Just once, tell me you love me just once. All right, tell me at least that you loved me back then. Say I loved you back then, and I’ll hang up for all eternity.”