The Black Book Read online

  Later, I figured out that Aladdin and his customers had a bond through which to communicate the words he himself couldn’t nail down, say, for the little celluloid geese that nodded, or for the old-fashioned chocolates that were shaped like bottles and contained sour-cherry liquor as well as a sour cherry, or else the place in Istanbul you could get the cheapest wood strips for your kite. He favored equally both the little girl who came in with her grandma for one of those chiming hoops and the pimply youth who attempted, retiring to a dark corner of the store, to make rapid love to the nude in the French magazine he snatched when no one was looking. He also loved the bank teller with spectacles on her nose who bought in the evening the novel revealing the lives of the Rich and the Famous in Hollywood, and having digested it overnight, wanted to return it in the morning, saying, “It turns out I already had it in my collection”; and he loved the old guy who put in a special request to have the poster of the girl reading the Koran wrapped in plain newsprint. Even so, his was a conditional love. He could sympathize somewhat with the mother-daughter team who spread out the pattern sheets in fashion magazines all over the store in an effort to cut their material right then and there, and even with the boys who got their toy tanks into battle only to get them broken in fistfights even before they got out of the store. On the other hand, he got a feeling that signs were being sent him from a world that he neither knew nor understood when people asked him for pencil flashlights or for key chains with plastic skulls. What mystery prompted the man who came into the store on a snowy winter day and insisted on buying a “Summer Scape” instead of the “Winter Scape” being used for student home projects? Just as he was about to close shop one night, two shady individuals had come in and fondled the dolls with the movable arms (which came in all sizes and with their own ready-made wardrobes), holding them carefully, tenderly, and skillfully like doctors holding live babies; then watching the pink creatures open and close their eyes as if enchanted, they’d had Aladdin wrap up a doll for them along with a bottle of rakı before they disappeared into the dark night, giving Aladdin the willies. After many such incidents, Aladdin had dreams of the dolls he sold in boxes and plastic bags, hallucinating that after the store was closed at night, the dolls started to open and close their eyes very slowly while their hair grew and grew. Perhaps he was about to ask me what it all meant, but suddenly he let himself fall into the same abject and brooding silence that comes over our countrymen when they feel they’ve talked too much, occupied the world too much with their own troubles. Certain that it wouldn’t be disturbed too soon now, we kept the silence together.

  Some time later, as Aladdin left wearing an apologetic look, he said it was all up to me now, and he was sure I’d do my best. Someday I might just do my best and write something good about those dolls and our dreams.

  Chapter Five

  PERFECTLY CHILDISH

  People separate for a reason. They tell you their reason. They give you a chance to reply. They do not run away like that. No, it is perfectly childish.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  Rüya had written the nineteen-word farewell letter with the green ballpoint pen that Galip wanted kept right next to the phone. The pen was nowhere to be found; considering he couldn’t locate it in his subsequent searches throughout the apartment, Galip surmised that Rüya had written the letter the minute before she went out the door and, thinking the pen might come in handy, popped it into her purse. The fat fountain pen she used lovingly once in a blue moon to fuss over a letter (which she would never finish; if she did, she would hardly ever stick it into an envelope, and if she did, she would never mail it) rested in its usual place: the drawer in the bedroom.

  Desperate to find the notebook from which she’d torn the piece of paper, Galip wasted chunks of time. He checked the pages against the letter, riffling through the notebooks in the drawers of the old bureau where, heeding Rüya and Jelal’s advice, he’d set up a museum dedicated to his personal history: the grade-school math workbook where the price of eggs was calculated at six pennies per dozen; the compulsory prayer notebook kept for religion class with swastikas and caricatures of the cross-eyed religion teacher drawn on the last few pages; and the Turkish Lit. notebook which had sketches of skirts in the margins along with the names of international celebrities, handsome local sports figures, and pop stars (“There may be a question on Beauty and Love on the exam”).

  Later—after going through the same drawers that were so disappointing, getting to the bottoms of boxes that sadly revealed the same reminiscences, and searching for the last time Rüya’s pockets, where the self-same scents seemed to conspire against Galip, persuading him that nothing had changed—when he glanced at the old bureau again, sometime after the call to prayer at dawn, he finally chanced upon the school notebook out of which Rüya had torn the sheet. A page had been ripped hastily and recklessly from the middle of one he’d already looked through but without paying careful attention to the pictures and the notes (“The administration’s plunder of our national forests was what provoked the army into the coup of May 27th”; “The hydra’s cross section resembles the blue vase in Grandma’s sideboard”). It was yet another detail that yielded no conclusion other than Rüya’s reckless haste, other than the details he’d accumulated all night long, the small discoveries, the reminiscences that piled atop one another like falling dominoes.

  A reminiscence: Years ago in middle school, when Galip and Rüya sat at the same desk, the hideous history teacher they suffered patiently and good-naturedly would all of a sudden pop a quiz, “Take out papers and pens!” But in the stillness that fell over the fearful classroom unprepared for a test, she couldn’t tolerate hearing the sound of pages getting torn out of notebooks. “Don’t rip the pages out of your notebooks!” her shrill voice would screech. “I want loose sheets! Those who rip up their notebooks and destroy this nation’s property aren’t Turks, but degenerates! I’ll hand them zeros!” And she would too!

  A small discovery: In the still of the night, shamelessly disturbed only by the refrigerator which switched on and off at gratuitous intervals, in the bottom of Rüya’s closet that he’d already gone through umpteen times, stuck between the dark green pumps she hadn’t taken along, Galip came across a detective novel in translation. There were hundreds of them in the apartment and he was about to toss it when, flipping through the pages of the black book with the imprint of a small but treacherous owl with huge eyes, and having learned in one night to go through everything in the bottoms of closets and the corners of drawers, his hand found, as if on its own, the photo clipped out of a glossy magazine: a good-looking naked man. Galip instinctively compared the guy’s size with his own, looked at the man-tool in the photo, which was flaccid, and thought: She must’ve cut it out of some magazine she got at Aladdin’s.

  Reminiscence: Rüya was sure Galip would never touch her books; she knew he couldn’t stand detective novels, which was all she had. Galip couldn’t bring himself to spend any time in the artificial world of the whodunit where the English were super-English and the fat superfat, where the subjects and the objects including the criminal and the victim didn’t behave like themselves but like devices, or rather were forced by the writer to act like them. (Kills time! Rüya used to say as she scarfed up the novel, along with the nuts’n’tachios also bought at Aladdin’s.) Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective novel worth reading would be one in which the writer himself didn’t know the identity of the murderer. Only then would the objects and the characters not turn into herrings and red herrings devised by the omniscient writer. By virtue of representing their correspondences in reality, they would exist as themselves in the book, instead of as figments of the novelist’s imagination. Rüya, who was a better reader of novels than Galip, had inquired how in the world the surfeit of details in such a novel as he proposed could be kept under control. The details in the detective novel were put there, apparently, to foreshadow the outcome.

  Details: Before she left, R
üya had sprayed the hell out of the bathroom, the kitchen, and the hallway with the can of bug bomb on which a huge black beetle and three smaller cockroaches served to terrify the consumer. (It still stank in there.) She’d turned on the so-called chauffe-bain without thinking (needless, since Thursday was central hot-water day in the building), she’d skimmed through Milliyet (it was wrinkled) and worked through some of the crossword puzzle using the pencil she took along: mausoleum, gap, luna, force, improvisation, pious, mystery, listen. She’d had breakfast (tea, feta, bread) and hadn’t done the dishes. She’d smoked two cigarettes in the bedroom, four in the living room. She’d taken some of her winter clothes, and some cosmetics which she claimed were bad for her skin, her slippers, the batch of novels she’d been reading, her lucky key chain with no keys which ordinarily dangled from the handle of her drawer, the pearl necklace that was her only jewelry, and her mirror-backed hairbrush. She’d worn the winter coat which was the color of her hair. She must’ve put the stuff into the old medium-size suitcase she borrowed from her dad (the one Uncle Melih brought back from the Barbary Coast) in case it might come in handy for the trip they never took. She’d closed most of the cupboards (by kicking them in), she’d slid in the drawers, put her paraphernalia back in their places. And she’d written the goodbye letter at one blow, without any hesitation. There were no torn-up rough drafts in the trash nor in the ash cans.

  Perhaps it wasn’t even a goodbye letter. Rüya had said nothing about returning, but she hadn’t said anything about not returning either. It was as if she were leaving the apartment, not Galip. She’d even put in a five-word proposal to draft him as an accomplice, “Handle Mom and the others,” a role he’d accepted right away. Not only was he pleased that she hadn’t put the blame for her leaving clearly on Galip, he was pleased to be Rüya’s accomplice, when all was said and done, to be her partner in crime. In return for this partnership, Rüya had made Galip a four-word promise: “Will keep in touch.” But she’d failed to keep in touch all night long.

  Instead, the radiator pipes kept in touch all night long with various moans, sighs, and burbles. Snow fell at intervals. The boza man hawked his fermented beverage once but didn’t return. Rüya’s green signature and Galip stared at each other for hours. The objects and the shadows in the rooms assumed a new character; the place seemed to have become another place. Galip thought of saying, “A spider! So that’s what the fixture hanging in here looked like all these years!” He wanted to fall asleep, perchance to catch a good dream; but he couldn’t sleep. All night, he launched new forays into the apartment at orderly intervals, disregarding his former searches. (He had looked into the box in the wardrobe, hadn’t he; he had, he probably had; probably hadn’t; no, he had not; and now he had to go through everything all over again.) He was holding either the memory-laden buckle of Rüya’s belt or else the empty case of her long-lost sunglasses when, conceding how aimless his efforts were, he put whatever he had in his hand meticulously back into its original place like a diligent researcher taking inventory at a museum. (Those storybook detectives, they were so damned unconvincing, with the writer whispering clues in the detective’s ear—what an optimist, to think a smart reader could be taken in!) The phantom legs of a somnambulist kept taking him to the kitchen where he went through the fridge without taking anything out; then he found himself back in the living room sitting in his favorite chair only to initiate the same old search ritual all over again.

  On the night he was abandoned, as he sat alone now in the chair in which for all three years of their marriage he’d watched Rüya across from him reading impatiently and nervously her detective novels, Galip kept fetching up the same image of her dangling her legs, twisting her hair, turning the pages with pleasure and passion, sighing deeply from time to time. What was on his mind was not the feelings of worthlessness, defeat, and loneliness (My face is not symmetrical, my hands are clumsy, I am too wishy-washy, my voice is too weak!) which had surfaced when, in high school, he witnessed Rüya at pastry and pudding shops where cockroaches strolled nonchalantly on the tables, hanging out with pimply guys who sprouted hair above their upper lips and began smoking before Galip did. No, not that. Nor was it the image when, three years after high school, he’d gone up to their flat one Saturday afternoon (“I’m here to see if you have any blue labels”) and seen Rüya glance at her watch and dangle her legs impatiently as Aunt Suzan sat at her dilapidated dressing table putting on makeup. It wasn’t even the image of Rüya looking pale and tired as he’d never seen her before, when he learned she had consummated a marriage which was not merely political to a young politico considered valiant and devoted by those around him, who already signed his own name to the first political analyses published in The Dawn of Labor. What was really before Galip’s eyes all night was the picture of a slice of life he’d missed, an opportunity, a bit of fun: snow falling into the light streaming out of Aladdin’s store that glimmered faintly on the white sidewalk.

  It was a Friday evening when they were in the third grade; that is, a year and a half after Rüya’s folks moved into the attic apartment. As darkness fell, and the winter eve’s roar of automobiles and streetcars reverberated on Nişantaşı Square, they’d just started to play a new game they’d invented: “I’ve Vanished,” a game combining the rules of “Secret Passage” and “Didn’t See.” One of the two “vanished” into a corner in their grandparents’, uncles’, or fathers’ apartments, and the other searched until the vanished one was found. A fairly simple game, and since it was against the rules to turn on the lights, and there was no time limit, it hearkened to the imagination and the patience of the seeker. When it was his turn to “vanish,” Galip had hid himself on top of the wardrobe in Grandma’s bedroom (stepping first on the arm of the chair then, carefully, on the back) and convinced that Rüya would never find him up there, he’d fantasized her moves in the dark. He’d put himself in Rüya’s shoes who was yearning for him so that he might better empathize with Rüya’s emotions, excruciated by his absence! Rüya must be near tears; Rüya must be bored to death; Rüya must be begging tearfully that he come out, come out, wherever he was! Then, having waited as long as the eternity of childhood, he suddenly slipped off the top of the wardrobe impatiently, not yet aware that the game was already over because of impatience, and once his eyes got used to the dim lights, it was now Galip himself who began searching for Rüya through the apartment building. His searches through the flats completed, an odd and ghostly feeling came over him, an intimation of failure, and he’d resorted to questioning Grandma. “Good grief, you’re dusty all over!” said Grandma, who sat across from him. “Where have you been? They’ve all been looking for you!” Then she added, “Jelal showed up. He and Rüya went to Aladdin’s store.” Galip had run to the window at once, to that cold, dark, ink-blue window. It was snowing outside, a slow and pathetic snow that summoned you out; a light streamed out of Aladdin’s store, through the toys, the picture books, balls, yo-yos, the colored bottles. A light that was the color of Rüya’s complexion glimmered faintly on the snowy sidewalk.

  All through that long night, each time Galip recalled this twenty-four-year-old image, he felt the same impatience rise up in him with all the unpleasantness of a pot of milk that suddenly boils over. Where was that slice of life he’d missed out on? Now he heard the endless and derisive tick-tock of the grandfather clock that had awaited Grandma and Grandpa’s time eternal in the hallway, the same clock that when they were first married, he had removed from Aunt Halé’s apartment, eager to keep alive the myths and memories of their shared childhood, and placed with zeal and perseverance against the wall of his own nest of happiness. All through the three years of their married life, it had always been Rüya who seemed disgruntled to be missing the fun and games of some other unapprehended life, not Galip.

  Galip went to work every morning and returned home in the evening on the bus or the dolmuş, grappling with unidentified elbows and legs in the impersonal crowd that wore such a dark
face on its return. All through the day he’d keep finding reasons, flimsy enough for Rüya to raise an eyebrow, to call her from the office. Once he returned to the warmth of his home, he’d approximate, without missing the mark by much, what Rüya had been up to that day by taking an inventory of the ashtrays, the number of the butts and the brands. In a moment of happiness (an exception) or a moment of suspicion, aping the husbands in films that came from the West, as he’d contemplated doing last night, if he came out and asked his wife what she’d done that day, they’d both feel the discomfort of entering an indefinite and slippery realm that was never clearly explained in the movies, neither in those from the East nor from the West. It was after he got married that Galip stumbled on that secret, mysterious, and slippery zone in the life of the anonymous personage referred to in the statistics and among the bureaucrats as “a housewife” (the woman with detergents and children bore no relation to Rüya in Galip’s mind).