The Black Book (41 page)

“Why so?”

“Last time we talked, I didn’t tell you that they have misplaced faith in the Messiah and are waiting for Him for nothing. They are just a bunch of soldiers, but they have read some of the pieces you wrote long ago. Like me, they believed it too. Try recalling some of the columns you wrote early in 1961, and reconsider the
nazire
you wrote on “The Grand Inquisitor,” and some of your movie reviews, and the conclusion to that snobbish bit in which you went on about why you didn’t believe the picture of the happy family on the National Lottery tickets (Mom’s knitting, Dad’s reading the paper—your column, perhaps—the son’s studying, the cat and the granny are by the stove, catching some Zs: if everybody is so damn happy, if they are all like my family, how come so many lottery tickets are sold?). What was the reason you ridiculed domestic films so strenuously back then? In these films, which give so many so much pleasure, and more or less express ‘our feelings,’ all you manage to see are the settings, the cologne bottles on the bedside commodes, the row of photographs on the piano which has gone to spiders because it doesn’t get played, the postcards stuck around mirror frames, the dog figurine sleeping on top of the family radio. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, yes, you do! You point out these things as signs of our misery and collapse. In the same vein you’ve commented on the pathetic objects thrown down air shafts, close relatives who all live in the same apartment building, and cousins who end up marrying each other due to their close proximity, and about slipcovers placed on armchairs to keep them from wearing out. You do it to present these things as the heartbreaking signs of our descent into banality and our inevitable decay. But soon after, you run away with yourself, hinting in your so-called historical essays that liberation is always possible: even at the darkest hour, a savior might appear to pull us out of our poverty. A savior who’d been here before, perhaps even centuries ago, would come back to life as someone else: this time, He shows up in Istanbul five hundred years later as Jelalettin Rumi or as Şeyh Galip or as some newspaper columnist! While you related this sort of stuff, yammering about the sadness of women in the slums waiting to get water at public water fountains and cries of love inscribed on the backs of wood seats in the old streetcars, there were these officers who took you at your word. They thought that with the coming of the Messiah they believed in, all melancholy and misery would come to an end and everything would be put to right instantly. You took them in! You know who they are! You wrote with them in mind!”

“So, what do you want from me now?”

“Just to see you will be enough.”

“What for? There is no dossier-shmossier, is there?”

“If I could just see you, I’d explain everything.”

“Your name is obviously assumed too!” Galip said.

“I want to see you,” said the voice, which sounded like the pretentious but strangely touching and convincing voice of a dubbing artist saying: I love you. “I want to see you. When you see me, you’ll know why I want to see you. No one knows you like I do. But no one. I know you’re dreaming all night, drinking the tea you’ve made yourself, and coffee, smoking those Maltepe cigarettes you’ve let dry out on the radiator. I know that you type your work and make corrections with a green ballpoint pen, and that you are not happy with yourself or your life. I know that nights when you pace your rooms disconsolately until daybreak, what you want is to be someone other than yourself, but you just cannot settle on the identity of this other you want to become.”

“I’ve written all about that!”

“I also know that you don’t love your father, and that when he returned from Africa with his new wife, he kicked you out of the attic flat where you’d taken refuge. I know about the hard times you went through, too, when you moved in with your mother. Ah, brother mine! You invented bogus murders when you were a starving reporter on the Beyoğlu beat. At the Pera Palas Hotel you interviewed the nonexistent stars of American films that had never been shot. You took opium in order to write the confessions of a Turkish opium eater! You were given a beating on the Anatolian trip you took to finish the serial on wrestling you published under an assumed name! You shed tears telling the story of your life in your ‘Believe It or Not’ column, but people didn’t even get it! I know that you have sweaty hands, that you’ve had two traffic accidents, that you haven’t been able to find waterproof shoes to wear, and that you are always alone despite your fear of loneliness. You enjoy climbing minarets, poking around in Aladdin’s store, hanging out with your stepsister, and pornography. Who else knows all this besides me?”

“Lots of people,” Galip said. “Anybody can read all about it. Are you going to tell me why you really want to see me?”

“The military coup!”

“I’m hanging up now…”

“I swear on it!” the voice said anxiously and hopelessly. “If I could just see you, I’d tell you everything.”

Galip pulled the plug out. He removed from the hallway cabinet a yearbook that had been on his mind since he first laid eyes on it yesterday, and he sat in the chair where Jelal sat when he returned home in the evening, all tuckered out. It was a 1947 War College yearbook with a good binding job: aside from pictures and aphorisms that belonged to Atatürk, the President, the Chief of Staff, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Commander and faculty of the War College, the rest of the book was full of nicely done photographs of the student body. Turning the pages with onionskin between them, Galip had no idea exactly why he felt like looking through the yearbook right after the phone conversation, but he thought the faces and the expressions were surprisingly identical, like the hats on the heads and the bars on the collars. For a moment he thought he was poking through an old journal of numismatics, found among cheap or junk books in dusty boxes that secondhand book dealers display in front of their stores, where the pictures of silver coins and the figures stamped on them can only be told apart by an expert. He became aware of the same music that rose inside him when he walked out on the streets or sat in ferryboat waiting rooms: he enjoyed observing faces.

Turning the pages reminded him of the feeling he used to have when he flipped through the pages that smelled of printing ink and paper in a new issue of the comic book for which he’d been waiting for weeks. Of course, as the books said, everything was connected to everything else. He began to perceive in the photographs the same momentary brightness that he’d observed in faces in the street: it was as if these too provided his eyes with as much meaning as did the faces.

Most of the planners of the unsuccessful military coup that was cooked up at the beginning of the sixties—aside from the generals who winked at the young officers without getting into hot water themselves—must have emerged from among the young officers whose photographs had been printed in this yearbook. There was nothing concerning the military coup in what Jelal had scribbled and doodled on the pages, and sometimes on the onionskin that covered them, but the faces in the photographs had been given beards and mustaches such as a child might draw, and some faces had been lightly shaded under the cheekbone or under the nose. The lines on some of the foreheads had been transformed into “fate lines” in which meaningless Latin letters could be discerned, the bags under some of the eyes had been changed into clear round letters that read
O
or
C,
and others had been decorated with stars, horns, and spectacles. The young cadets’ chin bones, the bones in their foreheads and their noses, had been marked, and proportion scales had been drawn across the width and the length of some of the faces and across the noses, lips, and foreheads. And under some of the photographs there were notes in reference to photographs on other pages. Pimples, moles, discolorations, Aleppo boils, birthmarks, and burn scars had been worked into many of the cadets’ faces. Next to the photograph of a face that was too clear and bright to be touched with lines or letters in any way, this sentence had been written: “Retouching a photograph kills its soul.”

Galip ran across the same sentence looking through some other yearbooks: he saw that Jelal had put similar lines and markings on the photographs of the student body at the School of Engineering, the faculty of the Medical School, members elected to the parliament in 1950, engineers and administrators who were employed in building the Sivas–Kayseri railroad, the members of the Association for the Beautification of Bursa, and volunteers from the Alsancak district of Izmir who fought in the Korean War. Most of the faces had been divided into two with a perpendicular line down the middle in an effort to make the letters on either side of the face clearer. At times Galip flipped through the pages rapidly, and other times he examined the photographs for a longer period: as if he were retrieving in the nick of time something he recollected with great difficulty before it vanished into the endless chasm of oblivion, as if he were trying to recall the address of a house he’d been taken to in the dark. Some faces did not reveal anything further after the first glance, but the calm and quiet façades of others began a narrative when it was least expected. That’s when Galip remembered the colors, the melancholy gaze of a waitress who’d appeared only briefly in a foreign film he had seen many years ago, and the last time a piece of music was played on the radio which he wanted to hear but always missed.

It was getting dark when Galip removed from the hallway cabinet all the yearbooks, the photo albums, the photo clippings, and all the photographs that had accumulated in the boxes from all kinds of sources and, taking them into the study, began going through them like a drunk. He couldn’t tell where, when, and why photographs had been taken of some of the faces he saw: of young girls, of gentlemen wearing melon hats, of women wearing head cloths, of honest-faced young men, and of the down-and-out. Yet it was quite obvious where and wherefore the pictures of some sad faces had been taken: under the kindly gaze of the cabinet ministers and the security police, a pair of citizens anxiously watch their alderman present the prime minister with a petition; a mother who was able to save her bedroll and her child from a fire on Dereboyu in Beşiktaş; women waiting in line to buy tickets at the Alhambra for a movie starring the Egyptian actor Abdul-Wahab; a well-known belly dancer and movie star, having been picked up for possessing hash, is accompanied by cops at the Beyoğlu precinct station; the accountant in whose face the meaning went blank the moment he was caught for embezzlement. The photographs he pulled out of the boxes at random seemed to explain the reasons for their own being and retention: “What can be more profound, gratifying, and curious than a photograph, the document of a person’s facial expression?” Galip thought.

He was sad to think that behind even the most “vacant” of faces, robbed of their meaning and expressiveness by photo retouching and other stock-in-trade trick photography, there were stories replete with memories, fears, and concealed mystery that could not be expressed with words but were present in the sorrow reflected in their eyes, eyebrows, and gazes. There were tears in Galip’s eyes looking at the photographs of the apprentice quilt maker’s happy but bewildered face when he hit the National Lottery jackpot, the face of the insurance man who knifed his wife, and the face of Miss Turkey who managed to “represent us in the best possible manner” in Europe by being selected as the second runner-up in the Miss Europe contest.

He surmised that the traces of sadness he observed throughout Jelal’s work must have been brought on by studying these photographs: the piece about the laundry hanging in the yards of tenements that overlook factory warehouses must have been inspired by the face of our amateur boxing champion fighting in the 57 kg. weight class; the piece regarding the notion that the crooked streets in Galata are crooked only in the eyes of the foreigners must have been penned by looking at the purple-white face of the hundred-and-eleven-year-old singer who implied that she had slept with Atatürk. And the faces of dead pilgrims wearing beanies, who had a traffic accident on their way back from Mecca, reminded Galip of a piece regarding old maps and engravings of Istanbul. In that column Jelal had written that there were signs marking the locations of treasures on some maps as well as signs in some European engravings showing crazed adversaries who arrived in Istanbul with the expressed purpose of assassinating the Sultan. Galip thought there must be a connection between the piece Jelal had written holed up for weeks in a hideaway somewhere in Istanbul and the maps that had been marked in green ink.

He began sounding out the syllables in the district names on the Istanbul map. Since the words had been used thousands of times every day for all these years, they were so overburdened with associations that, for Galip, they had no more to offer than words like “this” or “that.” Yet the names of districts that didn’t figure ostensibly in his life, when repeated out loud, had immediate associations for him. Galip remembered Jelal’s series of articles where he described some of the districts in Istanbul. Those he took out of the cabinet were entitled “Obscure Locations in Istanbul,” but as he read on, he realized the pieces were heavier on Jelal’s short fictions than on obscure spots in Istanbul. Another time, he might have smiled at having been let down like this, but now he was so put out that he theorized that Jelal had knowingly deceived all his life not only his readers, but Galip himself. While he read the narratives of a small altercation that broke out on the streetcar from Fatih to Harbiye, of the child who never returned to his home in Feriköy from the grocery store where he’d been sent, of the musical ticking at a clock shop, Galip kept murmuring to himself, “I will not fall for it any longer.” But only moments later when he couldn’t help thinking that Jelal might be holed up someplace in Harbiye, or Feriköy, or Tophane, he felt his anger turn away instantly from Jelal, who lured him into traps, and turn toward his own mental faculties that kept finding clues in Jelal’s writing. He despised the way he couldn’t live without narratives in the same way that he hated the sort of child who constantly seeks entertainment. He concluded instantly that there was no room in this world for signs, clues, secondary and tertiary meanings, secrets, and mysteries: all signs were the apprehensions of his own mind and imagination, set on a quest to discover and understand. He felt a wish to live peacefully in a world where every object existed only as itself; only then would none of the letters, texts, faces, streetlights, Jelal’s desk, Uncle Melih’s erstwhile cabinet, the scissors or the ballpoint pen with Rüya’s fingerprints be the suspect sign of something other than itself. How might one enter into a realm where the green ballpoint pen was only a green ballpoint pen, and where one would have no desire to be anyone other than himself? Like a kid who imagines himself living in a distant foreign country in the movie he’s watching, Galip studied the maps on the desk, wishing to convince himself that he lived in this other realm: for a moment he could almost see the wrinkled forehead of an old man; then a composite of all the sultans’ faces appeared before his eyes, to be followed by the face of an acquaintance—or was it a prince?—but before he could make it out clearly, it also vanished.