The Black Book (11 page)

On top of having to relinquish the rest of the names on his list to wrong numbers and bleeps on the phone lines, which were at their worst on the days it snowed or rained, nowhere in the pages of the political journals he read all day—looking through the names of those who’d changed factions, or confessed, or who underwent torture and were killed, or were given jail sentences, or were killed in a scuffle and given funerals, those whose letters the editors answered or returned or published, or the names and assumed names of those who drew political cartoons, wrote poetry, or worked in the editorial cadres—did he come across Rüya’s ex-husband’s name or pen name.

As evening descended, he stayed stuck in his chair, sad and motionless. Outside the window a curious crow gave him sideways glances; he could hear the din of the Friday evening crowd in the street. Galip slowly settled into a blissful and magnetic sleep. When he woke up much later the room was completely dark, but he still felt the crow’s eye watching him just like Jelal’s “eye” in the newspaper. Still sitting in the dark, he slid the drawers in slowly, felt for his overcoat and put it on, and left the office. All the hallway lights had been turned off in the building. The apprentice in the tea room was busy cleaning the urinals.

He felt really cold as he crossed the snow-covered Galata Bridge: a stiff wind came down the Bosphorus. He stopped off at a pudding shop in Karaköy which had marble tabletops. He turned away from the mirrors that reflected each other and had some vermicelli chicken soup and potted eggs. On the only wall in the pudding shop that wasn’t hung with mirrors, there was the view of a mountain inspired by postcards and Pan American Airways calendars. The brilliant white peak of the mountain, seen through the pines and behind the mirror-like lake, looked more like Mount Kaf, where Galip and Rüya had so often taken magic trips in their childhood, than like any of the Postcard Alps which had inspired it.

On the short trip up to Beyoğlu on the funicular, Galip was drawn into an altercation with an old man he didn’t know: was it because the cable had snapped that day that the cars had been derailed and bolted into Karaköy Square, breaking through walls and the glass frame like unbridled horses mad with joy? Or was it because the engineer was drunk? Turns out the drunk engineer was the anonymous geezer’s fellow townsman from Trabzon. In Cihangir, not far from the crowded streets of Taksim and Beyoğlu, nobody was out in the streets. Saim’s wife, who came to the door, was pleased but in a hurry to get back; she and Saim had apparently been watching the same TV program cabbies and doormen would watch together in a basement coffeehouse.

The program, “Things We Left Behind,” was a diatribe lamenting the passing of the old mosques, fountains, and caravanserais built by the Ottomans in the Balkans into the hands of Yugoslavians, Albanians, and Greeks. Saim and his wife seemed oblivious to Galip, who watched the images of forlorn mosques on the tube—like some neighbor boy who’d come in to see the soccer game—from the fake rococo armchair the springs of which had sprung long ago. Saim looked like that wrestler with Olympic medals who’d gone to his eternal rest but whose pictures still graced the walls of greengrocery stores. His wife resembled a cute, fat mouse. There was a dust-colored table in the room and a dust-colored lamp; a grandfather who looked more like the wife than like Saim (could her name be Remziye? Galip wondered wearily) was hung up on the wall inside a gilt frame; there they all were: the calendar from an insurance company, the ashtray from a bank, the cordial set, the silver candy dish, the buffet with the coffee cups. And there were the two walls of dust, paper, and periodicals, Saim’s “library archive”: the reason for Galip’s presence there in the first place.

Saim had created this library, referred to as “the archive of our revolution” by the sarcastic university crowd even ten years ago, out of his own indecision, which he once owned up to in an uncharacteristic confessional moment. It was an indecision born not from the choice “between the two classes” but from that between political factions.

Saim used to show up at all the political meetings, the “forums,” running from university to university and canteen to canteen, listening to everyone and his brother, in pursuit of “all opinions, all convictions,” but hesitant to ask too many questions; he’d get hold of all kinds of leftist circulars (Pardon me, but do you happen to have the report handed out by the “eliminators” at the School of Technology yesterday?), including all the white papers, the propaganda brochures, the handbills, and he’d read like mad. When he no longer had the time to read everything, but still couldn’t settle on a “political line,” he must have started accumulating what he couldn’t read. Later on, when reading and coming to a resolution ceased to be big concerns for him, his goal was to build a dam in order to prevent this “river of documents,” which had gathered affluence, from flowing along uselessly (the metaphor originated with Saim who was a construction engineer), and it was to this end that Saim had generously dedicated the rest of his life.

With the TV program over, the set turned off, and polite conversation got through, the husband and wife cast quizzical glances at Galip in the ensuing silence, requiring that he tell his story immediately: His defendant was a student who’d been accused of a political crime he hadn’t committed. No, it wasn’t like there was no dead party. It followed a bungled bank robbery planned by three bungling kids, and as they tried to make it to the getaway car which was a stolen taxi, one of them had accidentally bumped into a little old lady, bumping her off. Seems the poor dear lady fell and hit her head on the sidewalk and died on the spot (“Wouldn’t you know it!” said Saim’s wife). The only one they caught on the scene, carrying a gun, was a quiet boy who came from a “good family.” Naturally, he tried to withhold the names of comrades whom he admired too much and, what’s more amazing, he was successful in keeping his mouth shut despite the torture he underwent; but the bad news, according to Galip’s subsequent investigations, was that he ended up quietly assuming the responsibility for the little old lady’s death. The real perpetrator, a student of archaeology named Mehmet Yilmaz, was gunned down three weeks later by unidentified persons as he wrote ciphered slogans on a factory wall in a new squatters’ district behind Umraniye. Under the circumstances, it could be expected that the kid from the good family would divulge the name of the real perpetrator, but not only did the police not believe that the dead Mehmet Yilmaz was the real Mehmet Yilmaz but the leaders of the faction who were behind the bank robbery, taking an unexpected stance, claimed that Mehmet Yilmaz was still in their ranks and, what’s more, that he continued to write articles for their publication with all his former resolve.

Now that he’d taken on the case, more for the sake of the father, who was a wealthy, well-meaning man, than for the boy in the big house, Galip wanted: 1) to make sure that the “Mehmet Yilmaz” was not the real Mehmet Yilmaz by going through his articles; 2) to discover who in fact was writing the articles under the guise of the dead Mehmet Yilmaz by checking out articles written under other assumed names; 3) as Saim and his wife must have already surmised, seeing how this odd happenstance had been arranged by the cadre in which Rüya’s ex-husband once figured, he wanted to glance through the activities of this political splinter group over the last six months; and 4) he was determined to make a serious inquiry into ghostwriters who assumed the identity of dead writers, and into the mystery of missing persons in general.

They embarked immediately upon the research, which now excited Saim. In the first couple of hours, while they drank tea and gobbled up slices of cake served by the wife whose name Galip finally recalled (Rukiyé), they looked through the publications only for the names and the assumed names of the contributors. Then they augmented the list with the pen names of those who made confessions, those who were dead, and those who worked for the periodicals. Soon their heads were reeling with the enigma of a semisecret world which was impermanent, built on death notices, threats, confessions, bombs, errors of typesetting, poems, and slogans.

They came across assumed names that were no secret, names derived from these assumed names, names that were portions of the derivative names. They deciphered acrostics, letter codes that were less than perfect, and semitransparent anagrams which might have been intentional or entirely accidental. Rukiyé sat at one end of the table where Saim and Galip were sitting. The atmosphere in the room had assumed the same impatient but somewhat customary sadness of people listening to the radio on New Year’s Eve while playing bingo or the Paper Horse Race, rather than the effort to clear a young man falsely accused of murder, or to track down a woman who was missing. Between the open curtains, one could see the snow flurries outside.

With the same satisfaction as that of a patient teacher who waits to witness the successful maturation of a bright new student he’s discovered, they delighted in tracking down the assumed names’ adventures, their zigzags through the magazines, their ups and their downs. At times when they saw the photograph of one among them who had been arrested, put to torture, given a sentence, or had disappeared, they fell silent with a sorrow that curtailed their excitement; then, stumbling across some new wordplay, a new coincidence, or something erratic, they returned once more to the life of letters.

According to Saim, never mind the imaginary nature of the names and the heroes that they came across in the publications, even the demonstrations, the meetings, the secret councils, the congresses of underground parties, and the bank robberies organized by these names had never taken place. As an extreme example of what he was saying, he pulled out the account of a popular uprising some twenty years ago in the town of Little Çeruh, situated between Erzincan and Kemah in Eastern Anatolia: during the insurrection, for which one of the publications had provided a definite date, a provisional government had been established, a pink stamp bearing a dove had been issued, the provincial governor had been brained by a falling vase, a daily paper composed entirely of poems had been published, opticians and pharmacies had handed out free eyeglasses to cross-eyed persons, firewood was obtained for the stove at the elementary school, and, just as the bridge to connect the town to civilization was about to be built, Atatürkist forces of government arrived, taking the matter in hand, and, before the cows had a chance to finish munching up the stinky prayer rugs that covered the dirt floor in the mosque, they’d strung up the rebels on the oak tree in the middle of the town square. In reality—as Saim pointed out the enigma in the logograms and the maps—on top of there being no town called Çeruh, Little or Otherwise, the names of those who took part in the insurrection that arose like the legendary bird were all false. The false names got buried under poetry with rhymes or word repetitions, but there was one instance when they came upon a clue concerning Mehmet Yilmaz (the reference was to a murder committed in Umraniye during the same period that Galip had spoken about). They pored over the accounts and the reports, which read like domestic films that keep breaking and getting spliced, but they could never find the end to the story in the subsequent issues of the journal.

At one point Galip rose from the table and called home, telling Rüya tenderly that he was going to work late with Saim and not to wait up but to go to sleep. The phone was at the far end of the room. Saim and his wife sent Rüya their regards: Rüya responded in kind, naturally.

While they were deep into the game of discovering the assumed names, deciphering them, and making logogriphs out of them, Saim’s wife went to bed, leaving the two men alone in the room, every inch of which was covered under piles of papers, periodicals, newspapers, and reports. It was way past midnight; Istanbul was under the bewitching silence of snow. While Galip indulged himself in the typesetting and spelling errors in the fascinating collection (“Too incomplete, too inadequate!” Saim said with his usual modesty) which was made up largely of sheets that had been faintly duplicated by the same mimeograph machines and dispersed in university canteens that smell of cigarette smoke, during strikes held in tents on rainy days and in remote train stations, Saim brought out from another room a tract which he called “very rare” and showed it to him with the pride of a collector:
Anti Ibn Zerhani or The Sufi Traveler Who Has His Feet on the Ground.

Carefully, Galip began to turn the pages of the bound book, which was nonetheless in typescript. “A fellow who lives in the province of Kayseri, in a town that doesn’t show up on a medium-size map of Turkey,” Saim explained. “He received training in religion and Sufi mysticism in his childhood from his dad who was the master of a small tekke. Years later, as he read the thirteenth-century Arab mystic philosopher Ibn Zerhani’s book called
The Inner Meaning of the Lost Mystery,
he wrote in the margins, emulating Lenin reading Hegel, a running ‘materialist’ commentary. He then made a fair copy of these notes, which he expanded with long and unnecessary parenthetical substantiations. As if his notes were the work of someone else whose notions were totally incomprehensible and esoteric, he next wrote a long explication, a kind of treatise. Then he put these together as if both were the work of other people, typed it all up including a ‘publisher’s foreword,’ which he also wrote himself. In the first thirty pages, he added the tale of his own religious and subsequent revolutionary life history. What was interesting in these tales was the account of how the author discovered, as he strolled in the town cemetery one afternoon, the strong connection between Sufi mysticism, which the West terms ‘pantheism,’ and the philosophical ‘thingism’ as propounded by the author in reaction to his father, a Sufi master. When he saw in the tall cypress trees the same crow he’d seen years ago in this very cemetery where the sheep graze and where even the ghosts are asleep—you know that the Turkish crow has a life span of two hundred years, don’t you?—he understood that the winged, shameless flying beast called ‘higher thought’ retained always, always, the same head and feet and especially the same body and wings. He drew the picture of the same crow, inscribed on the bound cover, himself. This book proves that any Turk who desires immortality has to be his own Boswell to his own Johnson, both his own Goethe and his own Eckermann. Six copies were typed in all. I bet there isn’t one in the archives of the National Bureau of Investigation.”