The Black Book (2 page)

It was about then that Grandpa was beginning to mention his dream, which recurred more often as time went on. The dream he recounted, his eyes flashing as they did when he told the stories they repeated to each other all day long, was blue; in the navy-blue rain of the dream, his hair and beard grew and grew. After listening to the dream patiently, Grandma would say, “The barber is due to arrive soon,” but Grandpa wasn’t cheered by the talk about the barber. “Talks too much, asks too many questions!” After the discussions of the blue dream and the barber, Galip had heard Grandpa mutter weakly under his breath a couple of times: “Should’ve built it somewhere else, a different building. Turns out, this place is jinxed.”

Much later, after they moved out of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments which they sold off flat by flat, and, just as in other buildings of the same type in the area, the little boutiques, gynecologists who performed abortions on the sly, and insurance offices moved in, every time Galip passed by Aladdin’s store he wondered, while he studied the building’s dark and mean façade, just what Grandpa had meant by saying the place was jinxed. Even when he was young, having noticed that the barber always inquired, more out of habit than curiosity, about Uncle Melih whom it took years to return first from Europe and Africa and then from Izmir to Istanbul and the apartment compound (So, tell me sir, when is the oldest boy coming back from Africa?), and being aware that Grandpa enjoyed neither the question nor the topic, Galip had sensed that the jinx in Grandpa’s mind had more to do with his oldest and oddest son leaving his wife and firstborn boy to go out of the country and then his return, when he did return, with a new wife and new daughter (Rüya).

As Jelal related to Galip years later, Uncle Melih was here when they started building the apartment compound. They couldn’t compete with Hacı Bekir’s sweetshop and his
lokums,
but they knew they could peddle Grandma’s quince, fig, and sour-cherry preserves in the jars they lined up on the shelves. At the building site in Nişantaşı, Uncle Melih would meet his dad and brothers, some of whom arrived from the candy shop in Sirkeci (which they first converted into a cake shop and later into a restaurant) and the others from the White Pharmacy at Karaköy. Uncle Melih, who wasn’t yet thirty then, would take the afternoons off from his law offices where he spent his time either quarreling or drawing pictures of ships and deserted islands on the pages of old lawsuits rather than practicing law, arrived at the site in Nişantaşı, took off his coat and tie, rolled up his sleeves, and got going just to egg on the construction workers who slacked up as the time to quit approached. It was then that Uncle Melih began to pontificate about the necessity of learning European confiture, ordering gilt wrappers for the chestnut candy, starting up a colorful bubble-bath mill in partnership with a French concern, acquiring the machinery from companies in America and Europe which kept going bankrupt in epidemic proportions, finessing a grand piano for Aunt Halé on the cheap, having someone take Vasıf to an acclaimed ear and brain specialist either in France or Germany. Two years later, when Vasıf and Uncle Melih left for Marseilles on a Romanian ship (the
Tristina
) the rose-scented photograph of which Galip first saw in one of Grandma’s boxes, and eight years later when he read the bit among Vasıf’s newspaper clippings about the ship’s hitting a floating mine and sinking on the Black Sea, the apartments had been built but not yet inhabited. A year after when Vasıf returned alone to the Sirkeci train station, he was still deaf and dumb “naturally” (this last word, the secret or the reason for the accentuation of which had never become clear to Galip, had been spoken by Aunt Halé when the subject came up), but in his lap he clasped an aquarium full of Japanese goldfish the sight of which he couldn’t bear to leave at first, which he watched at times as if his breath would stop, at times with tears running out of his eyes, and whose great-great-great-grandchildren, fifty years later, he would still be watching. At that time Jelal and his mother were living in the third-floor apartment (which was in later years sold to an Armenian) but since it was necessary to send Uncle Melih the money to continue his commercial research in the streets of Paris, they moved up into that small attic apartment on the roof (which was at first used as storage room and then converted into a semiflat) so that their own apartment could be rented out. His mother had already been thinking of taking Jelal and returning back home when the letters Uncle Melih sent from Paris containing recipes of candied fruit and cakes, formulas of soap and cologne, photos of movie stars and ballerinas who ate or used them, and the packages out of which came minty toothpastes, marrons glacées, samples of liqueur-filled chocolates, and toy fireman’s or sailor’s hats began to dwindle. For them to come to the decision to move out of the flat and return home to the wood-frame house in Aksaray, which belonged to her mother and father who had a small post in the charitable foundations administration, it took the Second World War to break out and Uncle Melih to send them a postcard from Benghazi on which could be seen a strange sort of minaret and an airplane. Following this brown-and-white postcard, which bore the information that the route back home had been mined, he’d sent other black-and-white postcards from Morocco where he went after the war. A handpainted postcard, showing the colonial hotel where an American movie was filmed later in which both the arms dealers and the spies fall for the same nightclub dames, was how Grandma and Grandpa found out that Uncle Melih had married a Turkish girl he met in Marrakesh, that the bride was a descendant of Muhammad, that is, she was a Sayyide, a Chieftain, and that she was extremely beautiful. (Much later, when Galip took another look at that postcard, years later when he was able to identify the nationalities of the flags waving on the second-story balconies, and thinking in the style Jelal used in the stories he called “The Bandits of Beyoğlu,” he’d decided that “the seed of Rüya had been sown” in one of the rooms of this hotel that looked like a wedding cake.) They didn’t believe Uncle Melih himself had sent the next postcard that arrived from Izmir six months later, since they’d been convinced that he would never return home. There’d been some gossip that he and his new wife had converted to Christianity, joined up with some missionaries on their way to Kenya, to a valley where the lions hunted deer with three antlers, and established the church of a new religious sect that brought together the Crescent and the Cross. Some curiosity seeker who knew the bride’s family in Izmir brought the news that, as a result of the shady enterprises Uncle Melih undertook in North Africa (like arms dealing and bribing a king), he had become a millionaire, and succumbed to the whims of his wife, whose beauty was on everyone’s lips, whom he intended to take to Hollywood and make famous, already the bride’s photos were supposed to be all over French and Arab magazines, etc. In reality, on the postcards that had gone around and around in the apartment building, getting scratched and ill-treated like money suspected of being counterfeit, Uncle Melih had written that the reason they were coming home was that he’d been so homesick, he’d taken to his bed. But they felt better “now” that he’d taken in hand, with a new and modern understanding, the business concerns of his father-in-law who was in tobacco and figs. On the next card the message appeared more tangled than nappy hair and the contents were interpreted differently on every floor perhaps because of the inheritance problems that would eventually push the family into a silent war. But later, as Galip read for himself, all Uncle Melih had written, in not too overwrought a style, was that he’d like to return to Istanbul soon and that he had a baby daughter he hadn’t decided what to name yet.

Galip had read Rüya’s name for the first time on one of the postcards that Grandma stuck into the frame of the mirror on the buffet where the liqueur sets were kept. It hadn’t surprised him that Rüya meant “dream”; but later, when they began figuring out the secondary meanings of names, they were astonished to find in a dictionary of Ottoman Turkish that Galip meant “victor” and Jelal “fury.” But that Rüya meant “dream” was so commonplace, it wasn’t surprising in the least. What was uncommon was the way Rüya’s baby and childhood pictures were placed among the row of images which went around the large mirror like a second frame (and which angered Grandpa from time to time) of churches, bridges, oceans, towers, ships, mosques, deserts, pyramids, hotels, parks, and animals. In those days, rather than being interested in his uncle’s daughter (called a “cousin” in the new usage) who was supposed to be the same age as him, Galip was more interested in his “Chieftain” Aunt Suzan who looked into the camera sadly as she parted the black-and-white cave of the mosquito netting to expose her daughter Rüya sleeping inside the scary, sleepy cave that stirred the imagination. He had understood later that it was this beauty, as Rüya’s photographs went around the apartments, that momentarily silenced the women in the compound as well as the men. Back then, most of the discussions centered around just when Uncle Melih and family would return to Istanbul and on which floor they’d live. For one thing, heeding Grandma’s entreaties, Jelal had returned to the compound and moved back into the attic apartment when he could no longer abide living in the spider-filled house in Aksaray after the untimely death of his mother who’d remarried a lawyer and died of some disease each doctor called by a different name. On behalf of the newspaper for which he came to write columns under an assumed name, he’d report on soccer games with the intent of ferreting out fixed matches, describe extravagantly the mysterious and well-crafted murders perpetrated by the thugs in the bars, nightclubs, and whorehouses in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, devised crossword puzzles in which the number of black squares always exceeded the white, took over the serial on wrestlers because the real writer who was stoned on opium wine couldn’t come up with the next installment; and from time to time, he would write columns like “Discerning Your Personality through Your Handwriting,” “Interpreting Your Dreams,” “Your Face, Your Personality,” “Your Horoscope Today” (according to friends and relations he’d first started sending encoded messages when he sent them to his sweethearts through these horoscope columns), stacks of the “Believe It or Not” series, and do film criticism on new American movies which he took in free on his own time. Given his industriousness, and if he continued living in the attic apartment by himself, it was thought he’d even save enough of the money he made as a journalist to get himself married. Later, when Galip observed one morning that the timeless pavement stones between the tram tracks had been covered under some senseless asphalt, he thought the jinx Grandpa talked about was connected to this odd congestion in the apartment compound, or to being out of place, or something else similarly indefinite and frightening. So when Uncle Melih, as if to demonstrate his resentment at his not being taken seriously, suddenly showed up in Istanbul with his beautiful wife and beautiful daughter, he moved, of course, right into his son Jelal’s apartment.

When Galip was late to school on the spring morning after Uncle Melih and his new family arrived, he had dreamed that he was late to school. He and a beautiful girl with blue hair, whose identity he couldn’t make out, were riding on a public bus which took them away from school where the last pages of the alphabet book were to be studied. When he woke up, he realized not only was he late, his dad was also late for work. And at the breakfast table, on which an hour’s sunlight fell and whose blue-and-white cloth reminded him of a chessboard, Mom and Dad were discussing the people who moved into the attic apartment as if talking about the mice that commandeered the compound’s air shaft or about the ghosts and jinns who hung out with Mrs. Esma, the maid. Galip, who was ashamed to go to school now that he was late, didn’t want to think why he was late any more than to wonder who the people were who moved in upstairs. He went up to Grandma and Grandpa’s flat where everything was repeated all the time, but the barber was already asking about the people up in the attic while he shaved Grandpa, who looked none too happy. The postcards which were usually stuck in the frame of the mirror were now scattered, odd and foreign articles had appeared here and there—and a new scent to which he’d eventually become addicted. Suddenly he felt a faintness, an apprehension, and a longing: What was it like, living in the countries he saw on tinted postcards? What was it like, knowing the beautiful aunt whose pictures he’d seen? He longed to grow up and become a man! When he announced he wanted his hair cut, Grandma was pleased, but the barber, being insensitive like most blabbermouths, sat him on a stool he placed on the dining table rather than in Grandpa’s armchair. On top of that, the blue-and-white checkered cloth which he took off Grandpa and tied around Galip’s neck was so big that, as if it weren’t enough that it almost choked him, it fell below his kneecaps much like a skirt on a girl.

Much later after their first meeting, 19 years 19 months and 19 days after (according to Galip’s calculations), looking at his wife’s head buried in the pillow some mornings, Galip would register that the blue quilt on Rüya and the blue cloth the barber took off Grandpa and tied around Galip’s neck gave him the same willies; yet he never mentioned anything about it to his wife, perhaps because he knew Rüya would not have the quilt recovered for a reason so vague.

Thinking the morning paper might have already been slipped under the door, Galip rose out of the bed with his habitually careful, feather-light movements, but rather than go to the door, his feet took him first to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. The teakettle was neither in the kitchen nor in the living room. Given that the copper ashtray was full to the rim with cigarette stubs, Rüya must’ve been up all night reading or not reading a new detective novel. He found the teakettle in the bathroom: there just wasn’t enough water pressure to run that scary contraption called a
“chauffebain,”
so bath water was heated in the same teakettle, a second one not having managed to get itself purchased. Before making love, much like Grandma and Grandpa, and like Mom and Dad, they too sometimes heated water, quietly and impatiently.