The Black Book (30 page)

As they were going down the stairs, Belkis inquired after Rüya. She was waiting up for him at home, Galip said; he had bought her three detective novels today; Rüya liked reading at night.

When Belkis asked about Rüya again, it was after they’d got into the woman’s nondescript Turkish Fiat, dropped off the brush-mustachioed architect on Cihangir Avenue, which was wide and always uncrowded, and were going up toward Taksim. Galip said Rüya didn’t have a job, but read detective novels; she also took her own sweet time, sometimes translating one she had read. As they took the traffic circle around Taksim Square, the woman asked Galip how Rüya did these translations and Galip said “Very slowly.” He went to his office in the morning and Rüya got down to work at the table after clearing away the breakfast things, but he couldn’t visualize Rüya working at the table since he had never seen her doing it. Galip responded to another question absentmindedly, saying that some mornings he left before Rüya got out of bed. He said they went to dinner once a week at the aunt’s whom they had in common, and some evenings to movies at the Palace Theater.

“I know,” Belkis said. “I used to see you at the movies. You seemed content with your life, looking at the photos in the lobby, holding your wife’s arm tenderly as you led her in the crowd going up to the balcony door. Yet she would be scanning the crowd and the posters for the face which would open the world’s doors to her. From where I sat at a distance from you, I intuited that she read the secret meaning in faces.”

Galip kept silent.

“During the five-minute intermission, while you, like the contented, good, and faithful husband that you are, wishing to please your wife with a coconut-filled chocolate bar or a frozen treat, signaled to the vendor tapping the bottom of his wooden tray with a coin, and went through your pockets looking for change, I used to sense that your wife was looking for the traces of a magic sign that might take her into another world, even in the advertisements for carpet sweepers or orange-juice extractors which she watched unhappily on the screen in the dim houselights.”

Galip still kept quiet.

“Just before midnight, when people came out of the Palace Theater, leaning more into each other’s coats than into each other, I used to see the two of you walk home arm in arm, staring at the sidewalk.”

“At most,” Galip said resentfully, “it must have been one time that you saw us at the movies.”

“Not one time, but twelve times at the movies, more than sixty times in the street, three times at restaurants, six times out shopping. When I got home, I imagined that the girl with you was not Rüya but me—just like I did when I was a young girl.”

Silence ensued.

“In middle school,” the woman went on, driving past the Palace Theater they were just talking about, “at recess, while she laughed at jokes told by the sort of boys who run the combs they take out of their back pockets through their wetted hair and hang their key chains on their belt buckles, I used to imagine it was not Rüya that you watched out of the corner of your eye, without looking up from the book on your desk, but me. On winter mornings, I used to imagine myself as the carefree girl, instead of Rüya, who crossed the street without looking, since you were there with her. Some Saturday afternoons when I saw you walk to the Taksim
dolmuş
stop with an uncle who made you two smile, I used to imagine you and I were being taken to Beyoğlu.”

“How long did this game go on?” Galip said, turning on the car radio.

“It wasn’t a game,” said the woman, and as she took the intersection without slowing down, she added, “I’m not making a turn into your street.”

“I remember this music,” Galip said, glancing at the street he lived on as if looking at a postcard from a distant town. “Trini Lopez used to sing it.”

Neither in the windows nor in the curtains was there a sign that Rüya had returned home. Galip didn’t know what else to do with his hands but fiddle with the radio dial. A well-modulated, kindly male voice was giving pointers on rat control in our barns. “Didn’t you get married?” asked Galip as the car turned into one of the backstreets in Nişantaşı.

“I am a widow,” said Belkis. “My husband died.”

“I just don’t remember you from school,” Galip said, being pointlessly unkind. “I recall another face that looked like you. A shy and very cute Jewish girl, Meri Tavaşi, her dad owned Vogue Hosiery; at New Year’s, some boys and even some teachers used to ask her for Vogue calendars that had pictures of girls putting on their stockings, and she’d dutifully bring them to school, embarrassed and abashed.”

“Nihat and I were happy during the first years of our marriage,” said the woman, telling her story after a brief silence. “He was delicate, quiet, and smoked too much. On Sundays he looked through the papers, listened to the game on the radio, and tried playing the flute that he’d acquired around that time. He drank, but very little, yet his face was very often sadder than the sorriest drunk’s. For a while he complained about a headache with embarrassment. Turns out he had been patiently growing a huge tumor in one corner of his brain. You know, there are some quietly stubborn children who won’t give up what they’ve got in their fists no matter how hard you try? Well, he protected the tumor in his brain just like those children. Just like those kids who smile for an instant when they finally give up the bead in their fists he gave me that same pleased smile as he was being wheeled in for brain surgery where he died quietly.”

They entered a building, which was a dead ringer for the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, not too far from Aunt Halé’s on a corner Galip didn’t go by very often but knew as well as the street he himself lived on.

“I knew that he took some sort of revenge on me by dying,” the woman continued on the dilapidated elevator. “He had realized that as much as I was an imitation of Rüya, he had to become an imitation of you. Some evenings when I overdid the cognac, I couldn’t keep myself from going on and on, telling him about you and Rüya.”

They fell silent and entered her place, and after settling down among furnishings that looked much like those at home, Galip said anxiously, “I remember Nihat from our class.”

“Would you say that he looked like you?”

Galip forced himself to extract a couple of scenes out of the depths of his memory: Galip and Nihat standing there with notes in their hands from their parents asking to be excused while the gym teacher accuses them of being lardasses; on a warm spring day, Galip and Nihat drink water, sticking their mouths on the faucets in the putrid student latrine. He was fat, clumsy, and none too bright. Galip could not feel any closeness for his look-alike he couldn’t quite remember despite all his goodwill.

“Yes,” said Galip. “Nihat looked a bit like me.”

“He didn’t look like you in the slightest,” Belkis said. For a moment her eyes had the same dangerous gleam in them as when Galip first noticed her. “I know he didn’t look at all like you. But we were in the same class. And I had managed to make him look at me the way you looked at Rüya. During lunch break when Rüya and I smoked with the other boys in the Milk Company pudding shop, I’d see him out on the sidewalk, glancing anxiously in the shop where he knew I was with the cool crowd. And on those sad fall evenings when night comes early, looking at the naked trees in the pale light that came from the apartment buildings, I knew that he would think of me the same way you thought of Rüya when you looked at those trees.”

When they sat down to breakfast, there was bright sunlight shining into the room in between the curtains that remained drawn.

“I know how difficult it is to be oneself,” Belkis said, bringing up the subject suddenly, as people do when they have been contemplating the same thing for a long time. “But I realized it only after I was thirty. Before that, if you asked me, the problem seemed like a mere desire to be like someone else or a case of simple jealousy. Lying on my back, sleepless, watching the shadows on the ceiling at midnight, I wanted to stand in for someone else so bad that I believed I could slip out of my skin like a hand slipping out of a glove and, through the vehemence of my wish, I could wrap myself into someone else’s skin and begin a new life. Sometimes, thinking about this other person, the pain of not being able to live my life as hers was so intense that, as I sat in a movie theater or watched self-absorbed people in a crowded bazaar, tears would pour out of my eyes.”

The woman passed her knife absentmindedly over the thin slice of bread hardened from being toasted too much as if she were buttering it, although there was no butter on the knife.

“After all these years, I still cannot figure out why anyone would want to live someone else’s life rather than her own,” the woman went on. “I cannot even say why I wanted to be Rüya rather than this or that person. All I can say is that for years I thought it was a disease that must be kept a secret. I was ashamed of my disease, of my soul that had contracted the disease, and of my body that had been condemned to carry the disease around. I thought my life was an imitation of what ought to be my ‘real life,’ and that, like all fake things, it was pitiful and shameful. Back then, I had no other recourse than imitating my ‘original’ to dispel my unhappiness. For a while, I even fantasized about changing schools, neighborhoods, and my circle of friends, but I knew that going away would not result in anything but thinking about you all the more. On a rainy autumn day, in the afternoon, when I felt like doing nothing, I’d sit in an easy chair for hours, watching the raindrops on the window pane. I’d think of the two of you: Rüya and Galip. I’d consider the clues such as I had, imagining what Rüya and Galip might be up to right about now, so much so that, after a couple of hours of it, I’d begin to believe that the person sitting in the chair in the dark room was not me but Rüya, and I began to derive a terrific delight from these horrible thoughts.”

Since the woman was able to smile amiably as if she were relating a pleasant story about a mere acquaintance while she went in and out of the kitchen to bring more toast or tea, Galip listened to what she had to say without feeling uneasy.

“The disease raged on until my husband died. Perhaps it still rages on, but I no longer experience it as a disease. During those days of loneliness and regret following my husband’s death, I came to the conclusion that there was no way one could be oneself. Back in those days, prompted by a massive feeling of regret which is another version of the disease, I was burning up with the desire to live through my life with Nihat again, all of it, identically, only this time as myself. In the middle of the one night when I became aware that regret would ruin the rest of my life, this weird thought went through my mind: I was going to spend the second half of my life as someone else who regretted that she couldn’t manage being herself, just like I had spent the first half not being myself because I’d wanted to be someone else. The notion seemed so ridiculous to me that the horror and the sorrow that I saw as my past and my future instantly metamorphosed into a destiny I shared with everyone else, which I didn’t wish to dwell on too much. I had at last learned a piece of knowledge that could never be forgotten: no one could ever be himself. I knew full well that the old fellow that I saw as someone sunk deep in his own troubles waiting in line at the bus stop was in fact keeping alive the ghost of some ‘real’ person whose shoes he had wished to step into many years ago. I knew that the hale and hearty mom who took her kid out sunning in the park had sacrificed herself to become the copy of another mother who took her child to the park. I knew that melancholics walking slowly out of movie houses, or unfortunates fidgeting in crowded streets and noisy coffeeshops were all being haunted day and night by the ghosts of their originals that they wanted to emulate.”

They sat smoking at the breakfast table. The more the woman went on, and the warmer the room got, the more Galip felt an irresistible feeling of sleepiness wrap itself gradually around his body; it was like the feeling of innocence that can be experienced only in one’s dreams. When he asked if he could take a nap on the sofa next to the radiator, Belkis began telling him the story of the Prince, which she thought was “related to all this stuff.”

Yes, long ago there lived a prince who had discovered that the most crucial problem in life was to be oneself, or not to be oneself, but as soon as Galip began animating the story’s details in his imagination, he initially felt that he was being transformed into someone else, and then into someone who fell asleep.

Chapter Eighteen

THE DARK VOID

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance.

—
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
,
The House of the Seven Gables

I went to see the building one afternoon after many years. I’d walked along that perpetually crowded street so very often, on those same sidewalks where during their midday break necktied but slovenly high-school students toting their school bags shove each other around, and where husbands pass on their way home from work and housewives from their get-togethers, but I’d never gone back after all these years just to look at that building again, the apartment building which had once meant so much to me.

It was an evening in winter. Darkness had fallen early and smoke from the chimneys had descended on the narrow avenue like a foggy night. Lights were on in two floors only: dim, dispirited lights in two business offices where people worked late. Otherwise, the façade of the building was in total darkness. Dark curtains had been closed in dark apartments; the windows were as empty and frightening as the eyes of a blind person. What I saw was a cold, insipid, and unprepossessing sight when compared to its past. One could not even imagine that once an extended family had lived here, on top of each other, in each other’s hair, and in a hubbub.

I enjoyed the rack and ruin which had pervaded the building like the punishment for the sins of youth. I knew that I was seized by this feeling only because I could never get my share of sinful bliss, and that seeing the decay gave me a taste of revenge, but at that moment I had something else on my mind: “I wonder what happened to the mystery hidden in the pit which became the air shaft. And what happened to the pit as well as what was inside it?”