The Black Book
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
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Contents
1. The First Time Galip Saw Rüya
2.
The Day the Bosphorus Dries Up
11. We Lost Our Memories at the Movies
15. Love Tales on a Snowy Night
22. Who Killed Shams of Tabriz?
23.
The Story of Those Who Cannot Tell Stories
25.
The Executioner and the Weeping Face
26. Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery
28. The Discovery of the Mystery
29.
I Turned Out to Be the Hero
31.
The Story Goes through the Looking Glass
32. I Am Not a Mental Case, Just One of Your Loyal Readers
34. Not the Storyteller, the Story
To Aylin
According to what Ibn Arabi relates as an accomplished fact, a sainted friend of his, whom spirits elevated up to the heavens, on one occasion arrived on Mount Kaf, which circumscribes the world, and observed that the mountain itself was circumscribed by a serpent. Now, it is a well-known fact that there is no such mountain which circumscribes the earth, nor such a serpent.
—
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ISLAM
Do not use epigraphs; they will only kill the mystery in the piece!
—
ADLI
Go ahead, kill the mystery; kill the false prophet too who pushes mystery!
—
BAHTI
Rüya slept on her stomach in the sweet and warm darkness under the blue-checkered quilt which covered the entire bed with its undulating, shadowy valleys and soft blue hills. The first sounds of the winter morning penetrated the room: carts passing by sporadically and old buses, the salep maker, who was in cahoots with the pastry man, banging his copper jugs up and down on the sidewalk, the whistle of the shill at the
dolmuş
stop. The navy-blue drapes leached out the leaden winter light that came into the room. Galip, languid with sleep, studied his wife’s head which poked out of the quilt: Rüya’s chin was buried in the down pillow. In the curve of her brow there was something surreal that brought on anxious curiosity about the wondrous events that took place inside her head. “Memory,” Jelal had written in one of his columns, “is a garden.” Then Galip had thought: Gardens of Rüya, Gardens of Dreaming. Don’t think, don’t think! If you do, you will suffer jealousy. But Galip couldn’t help thinking as he studied his wife’s brow.
He wanted to explore in full sunlight the willows, the acacias, the climbing roses in the enclosed garden of Rüya’s tranquil sleep. Shamefully apprehensive of the faces he met there: You here too? Well, then hello! Along with the unsavory memories he expected, registering with curiosity and anguish the unexpected male shadows: Beg your pardon, fella, but just when and where did you meet my wife? Why, three years ago at your place; in the pages of a foreign fashion magazine bought at Aladdin’s store; at the middle school you both attended; at the foyer of the movie theater where you two stood holding hands … No, no, perhaps Rüya’s head was not this crowded and this cruel; perhaps, in the only sunny corner of her dark garden of memory, Rüya and Galip might have, just now, embarked on a boatride.
A few months after Rüya’s folks moved to Istanbul, Galip and Rüya had both come down with the mumps. In those days either Galip’s mom, or Rüya’s beautiful mother Aunt Suzan, or both, leading Galip and Rüya by the hand, would take them on buses that jiggled along the cobbled streets to Bebek or to Tarabya where they’d go on boatrides. Those days, it was the germs that were redoubtable, not the medications; it was believed that clean Bosphorus air could alleviate the mumps. Mornings, the water was calm, the rowboat white, the boatman always the same and matey. Mothers or aunts would always sit astern and Rüya and Galip side-by-side in the bow, hiding behind the boatman whose back rose and fell as he rowed. Under their thin ankles and feet that looked alike stuck out over the water, the sea flowed by slowly—the seaweed, rainbows of spilled diesel oil, semitransparent pebbles, and the still legible pieces of newspaper which they checked out for Jelal’s column.
The first time Galip saw Rüya, a few months before getting the mumps, he was sitting on a stool placed on the dining table for the barber to cut his hair. Those days, the tall barber with the Douglas Fairbanks mustache used to come to the house five days a week to shave Grandpa. That was at the time when the lines for coffee got longer in front of both the Arab’s and Aladdin’s store, when nylons were sold by traffickers, when Chevvies slowly began to proliferate in Istanbul, and when Galip started grade school and carefully read Jelal’s column which he wrote under the pseudonym of “Selım Kaçmaz” on the second page of
Milliyet
five times a week, but not the time when he first learned to read; Grandma had taught him to read two years before all that. They sat at one corner of the dining table and Grandma, blowing the smoke of the Bafra cigarette that was never absent from her lips, making her grandson’s eyes water, hoarsely divulged the great magic of how letters joined up with each other, and the unusually large horse in the alphabet book became bluer and more lifelike. The horse under which it said
HORSE
was larger than the bony horses that belonged to the lame watercarrier’s and thievish ragman’s horse carts. Galip used to wish he could pour a magic potion on this healthy alphabet-book horse that would bring it alive, but later, when he wasn’t allowed to start school at the second-grade level but had to go through again the same alphabet book with the horse, he realized it was a silly wish.
Had Grandpa really been able to go out and get the magic potion he promised to bring in a pomegranate-colored vial, Galip would’ve poured the liquid on the dusty copies of
L’Illustration
full of First World War zeppelins, mortars, and muddy corpses, on the postcards Uncle Melih sent from Paris and Algiers, on the picture of the orangutan nursing its baby that Vasıf had cut out of
Dünya,
and on the faces of the weird people Jelal clipped out of the papers. But Grandpa didn’t go out anymore, not even to the barber’s. He was home all day. Even so, he dressed up just as he did in those days when he had gone out to the store: his old English jacket with wide lapels which was gray like the stubble that grew on his face on Sundays, drop trousers, cuff links, and a narrow tie that Dad called “the bureaucrat’s cravat.” Mom said
“cravate,”
never “cravat”: her family had been better off than his in the old days. Then Mom and Dad would talk about Grandpa as if they were talking about those old, peeling wood-frame houses another one of which collapsed daily; and later, forgetting about Grandpa, if their voices rose up against each other, they’d turn to Galip: “You go upstairs and play now.” “Shall I take the elevator?” “Don’t let him take the elevator by himself!” “Don’t take the elevator by yourself!” “Shall I play with Vasıf?” “No, he gets mad!”
Actually, he didn’t get mad at all. Vasıf was deaf and mute, but he understood that I was only playing “Secret Passage,” and not making fun of him, as I crept on the floor dragging myself under the beds to the end of the cave, as if to reach the depth of darkness in the apartment building, like a soldier who proceeds with feline caution in the tunnel he’s dug into the enemy trenches; but all the others, aside from Rüya who arrived later, had no notion of how it was. Sometimes Vasıf and I stood at the window together watching the streetcar tracks. One window in the concrete bay of the concrete apartment building looked on the mosque which was one end of the earth, the other window on the girls’ lycée which was the other end; in between were the police station, the large chestnut tree, the streetcorner, and Aladdin’s store which buzzed with business. As we watched the customers go in and out of the store, pointing out cars to each other, Vasıf could get excited and produce a fearsome snarling noise as if he were fighting the devil in his sleep, plunging me into abject terror. Then, just behind us, seated in his gimpy armchair across from Grandma where they both smoked like a couple of chimneys, Grandpa would comment to Grandma who didn’t listen, “Vasıf scared the devil out of Galip again,” and then, more out of habit than curiosity, he’d ask us: “So, how many cars did you count?” But neither paid any attention to the detailed account I gave on the numbers of Dodges, the Packards, the DeSotos, and the new Chevrolets.
Grandma and Grandpa talked right through the Turkish and Western music, the news, the commercials for banks, cologne, and the state lottery, as they listened to the radio which was on from morning to night, and on top of which slept the figurine of a thick-coated and self-confident dog that didn’t look like a Turkish dog. Often they complained about the cigarettes between their fingers as if talking about a toothache they’d become accustomed to because it never ceased, blaming each other for their failure to quit; and if one commenced to cough as if drowning, the other proclaimed being in the right, first with victory and merriment, then with anxiety and anger. But sooner or later, one of them would get good and mad: “Lay off, for God’s sake! My cigarettes are the only pleasure I’ve got!” Then, something read in the paper would get dragged in: “Apparently, they’re good for the nerves.” Then maybe they would fall silent for a bit, but the silence during which the tick-tock of the wall clock in the hallway could be heard never lasted very long. While they rustled the newspaper in their hands and played bezique in the afternoon, they kept right on talking; and when the others in the building showed up for dinner and to listen to the radio together, having finished reading Jelal’s column, Grandpa would say, “Maybe if he were allowed to sign his own name to his column, he’d pull his wits together.” “A grown man too!” Grandma would sigh and with a sincere expression of curiosity on her face as if she were asking for the first time the same question she always asked: “So, does he write so badly because they won’t let him sign his name to his column? Or is it because he writes so badly that they won’t let him sign his name?” “At least, very few people know it’s us that he’s disgracing,” Grandpa would say, opting for the consolation they both resorted to from time to time, “since he isn’t allowed to sign his own name.” “Nobody’s any the wiser,” Grandma would respond with a demeanor the sincerity of which didn’t convince Galip. “Who says he’s talking about us in those columns anyway?” Later—when Jelal received hundreds of letters from his readers every week and republished the earlier columns, this time under his own illustrious name, having changed the pieces only a little here and there because, according to some claims, his imagination had dried up, or because he couldn’t find time from womanizing and politics, or because of simple laziness—Grandpa would repeat the same sentence he’d repeated hundreds of times before, affecting the boredom and the somewhat obvious pretensions of a two-bit stage actor, “Just who doesn’t know, for God’s sake? Everybody and his brother knows that the bit about the apartment building is all about this place!” and Grandma would shut up.
