The Black Book Read online

  “I loved you.”

  “Call me darling…”

  “Darling.”

  “Oh, no, not like that; say it sincerely!”

  “Dear lady, please! Let bygones be bygones. I’ve aged, perhaps you too are no longer young yourself. I’m not the person in your imagination. I beg you, let’s go ahead and forget this unpleasant joke played on us through carelessness due to a publishing error.”

  “Oh, my God! What’s going to happen to me now?”

  “Go back home to your husband. If he loves you, he’ll forgive you. Make up some story, he’ll believe it if he loves you. Return home without delay, before you break your faithful husband’s heart.”

  “I wish I could see you once more after eighteen years.”

  “Lady, I’m not the man I was eighteen years ago.”

  “Yes, you are too that man. I read what you write. I know all about you. My mind has been on you so much, so very much. Tell me: the day of Salvation is at hand, isn’t it? Who’s the savior? I too am waiting for Him. I know He is you. A lot of others know it too. The whole mystery resides in you. You won’t be arriving on a white horse but in a white Cadillac. Everyone is having this same dream. My Jelal, how I’ve loved you. Let me see you just once, even if at a distance. I could stand off and watch you in a park, say, the park in Maçka. Come to Maçka Park at five.”

  “My dear lady, I apologize for hanging up. But before I do, please forgive this aged recluse for presuming on your undeserved love and requesting something of you. Tell me, please, how’d you get hold of my phone number? Do you have any of my addresses? These are very important to me.”

  “If I tell you, will you let me see you just once?”

  Pause.

  “I will,” Galip said.

  “But you will have to give me your address first,” the woman said cunningly. “To put it plainly, I no longer trust you after eighteen years.”

  Galip thought it over. He could hear the woman breathing nervously like a tired steam engine—he had a feeling it might even be two women—as well as the sound of a radio in the background, the sort of music that reminded Galip of the last years of Grandma and Grandpa and their cigarettes rather than the love, abandonment, and pain of the “Turkish folk music” on the radio. Galip tried imagining a room with a large old radio sitting in one corner, and in the other, a weeping, breathless older woman in a worn armchair holding a telephone receiver, but all that he could visualize was the room two floors below where Grandma and Grandpa once sat smoking: it was there that he and Rüya used to play “Didn’t See.”

  After the pause, Galip had started saying, “The addresses…” when the woman shouted with all her might: “Don’t, don’t tell them! He’s listening in! He’s here too. He’s making me talk. Jelal, darling, don’t give your address, he’s going to find and kill you. Ah … oh … ah!”

  After hearing the last moans Galip heard strange, horrible metallic sounds and unintelligible clattering in the receiver which he pressed hard on his ear; he imagined a scuffle. Then there was a huge ruckus: it was either a gunshot or else the receiver that was being fought over had fallen down. It was immediately followed by silence, but it wasn’t a real silence either; Galip could hear Behiye Aksoy singing “Philanderer, philanderer, you philanderer!” on the radio that was still playing in the background, as well as the sobs of the woman crying in another far corner. Although there was heavy breathing on the line, whoever had got hold of the receiver wasn’t saying anything. These audio effects went on for a very long time. Another song came on the radio; the breathing and the woman’s monotonous sobbing persisted.

  “Hello!” Galip said, unnerved. “Hello! Hello?”

  “Me, it’s me,” a man’s voice said finally; it was the same voice he’d been listening to for days, the usual voice. He spoke maturely, coolheadedly, even as if to mollify Galip and close an unpleasant subject. “Emine confessed everything yesterday. I found her and brought her back. Mister, you make me sick! I’ll put you in your grave!” Then, like an umpire proclaiming the end of a dull game that has gone on much too long and turned everyone off, he added in an impartial voice: “I’m going to kill you.”

  There was a silence.

  “Perhaps you could hear me out,” Galip said out of professional habit. “The column was published by mistake. It happens to be an old column.”

  “Give it a rest,” said Mehmet. What was his family name? “I’ve heard it already, I’m done hearing all the stories. That’s not why I’m going to kill you, even though you also deserve death for that extra. You know why I’m going to kill you?” But he wasn’t expecting an answer from Jelal—or Galip; he already seemed to have the answer down pat. Galip listened out of habit. “Not because you betrayed the military action that would have made something of this lazy country, not for ridiculing afterwards the undaunted officers and other stalwart people who were driven from pillar to post, having embarked on patriotic work only to fall into disgrace thanks to you, and not for having insidious and ignominious daydreams sitting in your easy chair while they took their lives into their hands embarking on the adventure your writing provoked them into, presenting to you their plans for the coup and their homes with respect and admiration, not even for having been able to carry out your dreams insidiously among these modest patriotic people whom you conned into taking you into their homes, and not for having seduced my poor wife—I’ll be brief—who was having a breakdown during the days when we were all swept away by revolutionary zeal, no. I will kill you for having seduced all of us, the whole country, and for having conned us with your ignominious dreams, your absurd apprehensions, your heedless lies under the guise of cute antics, suggestive refinements, hard-hitting prose, and for having been able to palm it off year after year on the whole nation and especially on yours truly. I know what’s what now. Time that others knew it too. Remember the sundries man, the attar, whose story you listened to mockingly? Well, I will also be avenging this man whom you’ve shrugged off with a laugh. While I was covering the city inch by inch this whole week, looking for your trail, I figured out that this is the only course of action: This nation and I must forget all that we have learned. You were the one who wrote that we eventually abandon all our writers, after the first fall following their funerals, to their eternal sleep in the bottomless well of oblivion.”

  “I agree with everything wholeheartedly,” Galip said. “I’d told you I’m going to give up this business completely once I write the last few bits, just to get rid of the last crumbs in my memory that keeps emptying itself out, hadn’t I? By the way, what did you think of today’s column?”

  “You rotten bastard, have you no sense of responsibility? Any idea about devotion? Honesty? Altruism? Don’t these words remind you of anything other than pulling your readers’ legs or putting out an amusing message for some boob who’s been seduced? You know what brotherhood means?”

  Galip was about to say, “I do!” not to defend Jelal but because the question appealed to him. But Mehmet on the other end of the line—which Mehmet was this Muhammad?—was swearing a blue streak executed with massive and pathetic zeal.

  “Shut up!” he said, having finally exhausted his swear words. “Enough!” Galip realized he was speaking to his wife who was still weeping in one corner in the ensuing silence. He heard the woman’s voice explain something and the radio being turned off.

  “You knew she’s my cousin, so you wrote smart-aleck articles belittling family romance,” continued the voice claiming to be Mehmet. “Even though you know full well half the young people in this country marry their aunts’ sons, the other half their uncles’ daughters, you nonchalantly penned scandalous pieces mocking marriage between close relatives. No, Mister Jelal, I didn’t marry her because I had no opportunity to meet another girl in my life, nor because I feared women who aren’t my relatives, nor because I was unable to believe that any woman aside from my mother or my aunts and their daughters could either love me sincerely or patiently pu
t up with me; I married this woman because I loved her. Can you imagine what it is like to love a girl who’s been your playmate since your childhood? Can you imagine what it is like to love only one woman all your life? For fifty years, I loved this woman who’s now weeping on your behalf. I loved her since my childhood, do you understand? I still love her. You have any idea what love means? You have any idea what it is like to look longingly at someone who complements you like the awareness of your own body in a dream? You have any idea what love is? Have these words ever served you other than as material for the disgraceful literary sleights of hand you produce for your retarded readers who’re all too ready to believe your fairy tales? I pity you. I despise you. I feel sorry for you. What else have you done with your life aside from turning a phrase and diddling with words? Answer me!”

  “My dear friend,” Galip said, “it’s my profession.”

  “His profession!” cried the voice on the other end. “You seduced, deceived, degraded us all! I used to believe in you so much, I agreed with your pompous essays which proved mercilessly that my whole life was nothing but a parade of misery, a series of stupidities and delusions, a hell of nightmares, and a masterpiece of mediocrity based on pitifulness, pettiness, and vulgarity. What’s more, instead of realizing I was being debased and despised, I used to be proud of having met someone who possessed such lofty ideas and a mighty pen, and of having talked to him and once served with him in the military coup whose boat was stove in the moment it was launched. You damn crook, I admired you so much that when you pointed out not only my cowardice as the author of all the misery in my life, but this nation’s cowardice as a whole, I used to wonder what error in my ways had made cowardice a way of life, imagining you, who I now know to be a bigger coward than I, as the paragon of valor. I worshipped you so much that I read every one of your columns, even those discussing the remembrances of your youth which were no different from anyone else’s, but you wouldn’t know that since you weren’t interested in the slightest in the rest of us. I read those columns on the smell of fried onions in the dark stairwell of the apartment building where you spent your childhood; I read the ones on your dreams with ghosts and witches as well as the nonsense concerning your metaphysical experiments; not only did I read them, hundreds of times, to detect the miracle they might contain but I had my wife read them, and after discussing them for hours in the evening I used to imagine that the only thing worth believing was the secret meaning signified therein and ended up convincing myself that I understood the secret meaning, which turns out to be devoid of meaning.”

  “I never wanted to foster that kind of admiration,” Galip ventured to say.

  “What a lie! You spent your literary career looking to sucker in people like me. You wrote back, you asked for their pictures, you examined their handwriting, you pretended to divulge secrets, sentences, magic words…”

  “All in the interest of the revolution, the Day of Judgment, the coming of the Messiah, the hour of liberation…”

  “And then what? What happens when you give it up?”

  “Well, at least the readership could believe in something after all.”

  “They believed in you and that’s what turned you on … Listen, I admired you so greatly that when I read a particularly brilliant essay of yours I’d jump up and down in my chair, tears pouring down my eyes; I couldn’t sit still but paced up and down in the room and out in the street, dreaming of you. And that is not all, I thought so much about you that, after a certain point, the distinction between our two persons would disappear in the mist and smoke of my imagination. No, I was never too far gone to imagine I was the author of the work. Remember, I am not a mental case, just one of your loyal readers. But it seemed to me as if I had some share, in some strange fashion, in ways too complicated to be readily demonstrated, in the creation of your brilliant sentences, your clever inventions and ideas. As if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be hatching those ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the stuff you cribbed from me, stealing without even once considering to ask for my permission. I am not speaking of all that Hurufism has inspired in me, nor about my discoveries at the end of my book which I had such difficulty publishing. They were yours anyway. What I’m trying to explain is the feeling of having thought the same thing conjointly, the feeling as if I too had my share in your success. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” Galip said. “I’d also written something along the same lines.”

  “Yes, in that notorious piece that was run again due to a mishap, but you don’t really understand me; if you had, you’d have immediately joined in. That’s why I’m going to kill you, exactly why! For feigning to understand although you never have, for having the temerity to insinuate yourself into our souls and showing up in our dreams at night, even though you have never been with any of us. All those years when I read all your work as if devouring it, having convinced myself that I too had a share in those brilliant pieces, I used to try recalling that in happier times when we were friends we had talked about, or might have talked about, and come up with something similar. I was so involved in thinking about this and dreaming about you that whenever I came across one of your fans, the incredible praise spoken about you seemed to be about me; it was as if I were as famous as you. The gossip about your mysterious secret life seemed to prove that I was not just another person but someone who had become partially infected by your godlike thrall, as if I too were a legendary figure like you. I’d get all worked up; on account of you, I’d become someone else. During the initial years, whenever I overheard a couple of citizens discuss you over their paper on the Municipal Lines ferry, I had an urge to shout out with all my might, ‘I happen to know Jelal Salik, and quite well, too!’ and to divulge secrets you and I shared in common, taking pleasure in their surprise and admiration. Later on, this urge became even stronger; should I happen to come across a couple of people reading or talking about you, I immediately wanted to announce, ‘Gentlemen, you are very close to Jelal Salik, so close, in fact that I happen to be Jelal Salik himself!’ The idea seemed so intoxicating and cataclysmic that every time I thought of speaking out, my heart began to pound, drops of sweat stood on my forehead, and I came close to passing out imagining the admiration in those astonished people’s faces. The reason I never shouted out that sentence victoriously and joyfully was not because I thought it was silly or exaggerated, but because it was enough that it flashed across my mind. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I do.”

  “I used to read what you wrote victoriously, feeling that I was as intelligent as you. They weren’t applauding only you but also me, I was sure of it. We were together, far from the crowds. I understood you all too well. Like you, I too now hated those crowds who went to the movies, soccer games, fairs, and festivals. You thought they’d never amount to anything, coming up, as they do, with the same old stupidities and falling for the same old stories; not only were they the victims in their most heartbreaking tear-jerking moment of misery and destitution when they seemed at their most innocent, they were at the same time also the culprits or at least collaborators in crime. I am sick and tired of their false saviors, their most recent prime ministers and their latest stupidities, their military coups, their democracy, their torture, their movies. That’s why I loved you. As I thrilled to think every time I finished reading another piece of your work, I’d say, gripped by an entirely new excitement, tears streaming down my eyes, ‘That’s why I love Jelal Salik!’ Until yesterday when I sang like a mockingbird, proving to you that I remembered all your old pieces text and paragraph, would you have ever imagined that you’d have such a reader as me?”

  “Perhaps, somewhat…”

  “Listen, in that case … In a remote point of my own pitiful life, during a tasteless, commonplace moment of our ignominious world when one of my fingers was mashed by a dolmuş door slammed on it by some crude beast, having to endure a worthless wise guy while I was trying to put together the ne
cessary papers with the object of securing a small increment on my retirement pay—that is, smack dab in the middle of my destitution—I’d suddenly get hold of this thought as if grabbing onto a life buoy: ‘What would Jelal Salik have done in this situation? What would he have said? I wonder if I’m acting like him?’ Last twenty years, the question became like a sickness. Getting in the circle to dance the halay with the other guests just to be accommodating at a relative’s wedding, or laughing with pleasure upon winning the round of gin rummy at the neighborhood coffeehouse where I go to kill time playing cards, it would suddenly occur to me: ‘Would Jelal do this?’ This was enough to ruin my whole evening, my whole life. I spent my entire life asking myself, What would Jelal Salik do now, What’s Jelal Salik doing now, What’s Jelal Salik thinking of now. If that were all, it would be fine and dandy. As if that weren’t enough, another question would hook into my mind: ‘I wonder what Jelal Salik thinks about me?’ When I reasoned that you would never ever remember me, nor think of me, that I would never even cross your mind, the question would take another form: ‘What would Jelal Salik think of me if he saw me now?’ What would Jelal Salik say if he saw me still in my pajamas after breakfast, smoking away? What would Jelal Salik think if he’d witnessed me scold the creep who bothered the miniskirted married lady who sat next to him on the ferryboat? How would Jelal Salik feel if he knew I clip all his columns and file them in ONKA brand binders? What would Jelal Salik say if he came to know all my thoughts about him and about life?”

  “My dear reader and friend,” Galip said, “tell me, why haven’t you looked me up all these years?”

  “Can you imagine I didn’t think of it? I was scared. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t afraid of being misunderstood, of being unable to help myself toadying up which goes with the territory, of brownnosing you as if your most ordinary statements were great marvels, or imagining that’s what you wanted, of laughing out of place in a way that was not all right with you. I’d gone much beyond all the possible scenarios I’d imagined a thousand times.”