The Black Book (15 page)

“Pardon me, but you’ve got it all wrong,” countered the magazine writer. “During the years he ran the ‘Believe It or Not’ column, Jelal was completely on his own. Let me put to you a scene I didn’t get secondhand but saw with my own two eyes.”

It was a scene right out of a schlock Yeşilçam movie depicting the poor and lonesome years of a deserving kid who’ll eventually make good. On a New Year’s Eve, in their shabby house in the poor district, the cub reporter Jelal tells his mother that the well-off branch of the family has invited him to a New Year’s Eve entertainment at their place in Nişantaşı. There he’ll spend a noisy and fun evening with his uncles’ and aunts’ cheerful daughters and boisterous sons and end up at goodness knows which hot spot around town. The mother, who happens to be a seamstress, relishes imagining her son’s pleasure and has a surprise in store for him: just for tonight, she has quietly fixed his father’s old jacket to fit him. Jelal puts on the jacket, which fits him perfectly (the scene jerks the tears right out of the mother’s eyes: “You look exactly like your dad”), and the happy mother is relieved to hear that a fellow journalist has also been invited to the entertainment. When the journalist, who’s the witness of our story, and Jelal go down the cold and dark stairs of the wooden house and out into the muddy street, he learns that neither Jelal’s relations nor anybody else has invited poor Jelal to any New Year’s Eve entertainment. What’s more, Jelal is on duty at the newspaper so that he might earn the money to pay for the surgery his mother needs because she’s going blind from sewing in candlelight.

Following the silence after the story was over, Galip pointed out that some of the details didn’t jibe with Jelal’s life, but they didn’t much pay attention to his explanations. Sure, they could be mistaken as to the degree of the relationships and how far back the dates went; if Jelal’s father was still alive (Are you absolutely sure of that, sir?), they might have substituted the father for the grandfather, or the older sister for the aunt, but they were not about to make too big a deal of their inaccuracies. They had Galip sit down at the table, offered him a cigarette, asked him a question but didn’t listen to his reply (How did you say you’re related to him again?), then they started pulling reminiscences out of the bag like pieces they’d placed on an imaginary chessboard.

Jelal was so inundated with familial affection that even in those hopeless days when all subjects aside from the municipal problems had been prohibited, he could knock off a piece neither his readers nor the censors could make out, relating to his childhood memories of a great mansion where a different linden tree could be seen out of each window.

No, no, Jelal’s interpersonal skills outside of journalism were so limited that whenever he had to attend a big affair, he made sure he took along a friend whose every gesture and word, whose clothes and table manners he could safely imitate.

Not so at all! An aspiring young journalist, whose beat is the crossword puzzles and advice in the women’s section, who within three years lands the best-read column not only in his own country but also in the entire Balkans and the Middle East, and commences to slander folks left and right without any compunction. How else could the scenario be explained besides the tender love and care, albeit undeserved, of powerful friends and relations who pulled strings for him?

Take the “birthday party,” one of the cornerstones of the Western civilization, a human custom one of our forward-looking statesmen hoped to establish within our culture as well. So he invited journalists, along with a Levantine biddy who tinkled the piano, to a well-meaning “birthday party” he organized for his eight-year-old son, replete with eight lit candles on a butter-cream strawberry cake. Jelal lampooned the party in his column, running it into the ground mercilessly and pigheadedly, not for ideological, political, or even aesthetic reasons as it was surmised, but because he was stricken by the apprehension that in all his life he had never received any fatherly love, or any other kind of love, at all.

The fact that he couldn’t be located anywhere now, the revelation that he’d given out wrong or false telephone numbers and addresses, stemmed from the odd and unfathomable hatred he felt for these near relations, whose love he was unable to reciprocate, and for these distant relatives—nay, even for all mankind. (All Galip had done was to ask where he could find Jelal.)

Oh, well, the reason why he was hiding out in a remote corner of the city, having exiled himself from all humankind, had to depend on something else, naturally: he’d understood at last that he’d never recover from the disease of being a loner, that incurable feeling of loneliness that surrounded him like an unlucky halo since the day he was born. Like an invalid who’d surrendered to his disease, he’d finally let go, resigning himself in a room somewhere out of the way into the arms of an abject loneliness he couldn’t escape.

Galip brought up the fact that a TV crew “from Europe” was looking for Jelal, who was holed up somewhere in this out-of-the-way room.

“In any case,” interrupted the polemicist writer Neşati, “Jelal is about to get the boot. He hasn’t sent in anything new for ten days now. Everybody’s all too aware that the stuff he’s trying to palm off as backlog is nothing but twenty-year-old pieces retyped to make them look like new copy.”

The magazine writer disagreed, as Galip had hoped and expected he might: the columns were being read with even greater interest, the phones were ringing off the hook, and Jelal’s share of mail was no less than twenty letters a day.

“Yes!” said the polemicist. “The letters he gets are nothing but propositions from whores, pimps, terrorists, hedonists, dope dealers, and veteran gangsters whom he glorified.”

“You read his mail on the sly then?” the magazine writer said.

“So do you!” said the polemicist.

Both sat up in their chairs like a pair of chess players, pleased with their opening moves. The polemicist brought a small box out of the deep pocket of his coat. He displayed the box to Galip with the fastidiousness of a magician about to make an object disappear. “The only thing I now have in common with the man you call your relative is this stomach medicine. It blocks stomach acid instantly. Care to have one?”

Galip couldn’t figure out where this game started and where it ended, but he wanted in; so he took one of the white pills and swallowed it.

“How do you like our game so far?” said the old columnist, smiling.

“I’m still trying to figure out the rules,” Galip said mistrustfully.

“Do you read my column?”

“I do.”

“When you pick up the paper, do you read mine first, or Jelal’s?”

“Jelal happens to be my cousin.”

“Is that the only reason you read him first?” said the old writer. “Do family ties constitute a stronger bond than good writing?”

“Jelal writes well too!” Galip said.

“Anybody can do what he does, don’t you get it?” said the old columnist. “What’s more, most are too long to be proper columns. Fake stories. Artsy embellishment. Frivolous bunk. He has a couple of tricks that are his stock-in-trade, that’s all. Reminiscences and descants sweeter than honey are the order of the day. Every now and then, a paradox must be seized. Games of irony the courtly poets called ‘erudite ignorance’ must be resorted to. What isn’t likely must be told as if it is, and what’s gone down as if it has not. And if all this doesn’t work out, then the vacuousness of the piece must be hidden under highfalutin sentences that his fans take for good writing. Everybody has a life, memories, and a past which are no less than his. Anybody can play his game. Even you. Tell me a story!”

“What kind of a story?”

“Whatever comes to you: a story.”

“A man’s beautiful wife, whom he loves very much,” said Galip, “deserts him. So he sets out to look for her. He comes across her tracks everywhere in the city but not her…”

“Go on.”

“That’s all.”

“No, no! There has to be more to it!” said the old columnist. “What does he read into his wife’s traces in the city, this man? Is the wife a real beauty? Who did she leave him for?”

“This man reads his own past in the traces he finds all over the city. His own tracks together with his beautiful wife’s. He doesn’t know, nor does he want to know, for whom she’s given him the slip. He tends to think that the man, or the place, his wife made tracks for must exist somewhere in his own past.”

“Good subject,” said the old columnist. “Like Poe said: a beautiful woman who dies or is lost! But the storyteller has to be more decisive. The reader doesn’t trust a writer who cannot make up his mind. Let’s see, we might finish the story using one of Jelal’s tricks. Reminiscences: the city swarms with the man’s happier memories. Style: the clues in the reminiscences are buried in a highfalutin language that points to a void. Erudite Ignorance: the man pretends he can’t figure out the identity of the other man. The Paradox: therefore, the man the wife ran off with is the man himself. How’s that? See, you can do it. Anybody can.”

“But Jelal’s the one who does it.”

“That’s right! But from now on, you can do it too!” said the old writer, signaling that the subject was closed.

“If you want to track him down, study his columns,” said the magazine writer. “He’s got to be in there somewhere. His columns are full of messages sent hither and yon, small private messages. Do you get my meaning?”

By way of an answer, Galip said that when he was a child Jelal had shown him how to make sentences using the first and last words in his paragraphs. He had revealed the logogriphs he constructed to get around the censor and the press prosecutor, word chains he formed on the first and last syllables of sentences, the sentences based on all the capital letters, and the word games that made “our aunt” angry.

The magazine writer asked: “Was your aunt an old maid?”

“She never married,” Galip said.

Did Jelal and his father have a falling out over a flat?

Galip said it was “a very old” altercation.

Was it true that there was a lawyer uncle who confused his court records, writs, and bylaws with restaurant menus and ferryboat schedules?

Galip said he imagined this too was a story like all the others.

“Get a clue, young man!” the old writer said unpleasantly. “Jelal didn’t let him in on all that stuff! I bet our friend here, who’s keen on detective work and Hurufism, unearthed the meanings himself out of the letters Jelal concealed in his columns, excavating bit by bit, as if digging out a well with a sewing needle.”

The magazine writer said it was possible that the word games had a meaning, that perhaps they signaled messages from the unknown, and that perhaps it was his deep association with the unknowable that elevated Jelal above other writers who shall go nameless. Besides, he wanted to remind him that there was truth in the saying that “journalists who get too big for their pants get buried either by donation or by the city.”

“Maybe, God forbid, he’s even dead!” said the old journalist. “How do you like our game?”

“And the matter of him losing his memory,” said the magazine writer, “is it true, or fiction?”

“Both,” Galip said. “Fact and fiction.”

“And his hideouts all over the city?”

“They too.”

“Perhaps he’s breathing his last in one of his hideouts all alone,” said the columnist. “You know, he loves this kind of conjecture game himself.”

“If he were dying, he’d have summoned someone he feels close to,” the magazine writer said.

“There is no such person,” said the old columnist. “He feels close to no one.”

“I bet this young man doesn’t see it that way,” the magazine writer said. “You haven’t even told us your name.”

Galip told them.

“In that case, tell me, Galip,” said the magazine writer. “In this place he’s holed up—who knows under what compulsion—there must be somebody to whom Jelal feels close enough to pass on, at least, his literary secrets and his last testament, mustn’t there? He isn’t that much of a loner, after all.”

Galip thought it over. “He isn’t that much of a loner,” he said apprehensively.

“Who would he summon then?” said the magazine writer. “You?”

“His sister,” Galip blurted out. “He has a half-sister who’s twenty years younger than him, that’s who he would have called.” Then he fell into thought. He recalled the armchair with the rusty springs poking out of its belly. He went on thinking.

“Perhaps you’ve begun to catch on to the logic of our game,” the old columnist said. “You’re perhaps beginning to relish arriving at logical conclusions. That’s why I have to tell you this without any reservation: All Hurufis invariably come to a bad end. Fazlallah of Astarabad, who’s the founder of Hurufism, was put to death like a dog, and his corpse was dragged through markets and streets by a rope tied to his feet. Did you know that six hundred years ago, he too broke into his trade by interpreting dreams—just like Jelal? He didn’t ply his trade at some newspaper though, but in a cave just outside of town…”

“What can we know about a person,” the magazine writer said, “through this kind of comparison? How far can one penetrate into the secrets of someone’s life? It’s been more than thirty years that I’ve been trying to penetrate the secrets of the pitiful film artists we call ‘stars’ in imitation of the Americans. And this is what I’ve found out: Those who say that each human being has a double are wrong. Nobody is like anybody else. Every poor girl is poor in her own way. Each one of our stars is singular like the ones in the sky, all alone, a pitiful starlet that has no look-alike.”

“Aside from the original model in Hollywood,” said the old columnist. “Did I ever mention to you the list of originals that Jelal emulates? Aside from Dante, Dostoevsky, and Rumi, he’s cribbed liberally from our great divan poet Şeyh Galip’s
Beauty and Love.

“Each life is unique!” the magazine writer said. “Each story is a story because it has no double. Every writer is singularly himself, a two-bit writer in his own way.”

“Phooey!” said the old writer. “Let’s take the bit he presumably likes so well, the one called ‘The Day the Bosphorus Dries Up.’ Aren’t all the signs of the apocalypse lifted straight out of books that are thousands of years old describing the days of destruction before the arrival of the Messiah? Out of the Koran, the suras on the Day of Judgment? And out of Ibn Khaldun and Abu Khorosani? He then tacks on a vulgar story about some hoodlum. It has no artistic merit. Of course, all that hokum in the piece is not what heats up the excited reception a certain narrow spectrum accords it, or the hundreds of phone calls that hysterical women make on that day. There happen to be secret messages in the letters that are deciphered, not by you and me, but only by disciples who have the codebook in their possession. Scattered all over the country, these disciples, half of whom are prostitutes and the other half pederasts, who consider these messages sacred orders, call the paper day and night so that we don’t kick their sheikh Jelal Bey right out of the door for writing a bunch of nonsense. Besides, there are always one or two persons waiting for him in front of the door. How do we know, Mr. Galip, that you aren’t one of them?”