The Black Book (42 page)

A while later, thinking that he could look through the mug shots that Jelal had collected for thirty years with the notion that they were images from the realm where he wanted to live, he sat in the easy chair. He tried looking at the photographs he pulled out at random, avoiding any recognition of signs or mystery in the faces. Consequently, every face appeared to be the description of a physical object consisting of eyes, a nose, and a mouth, just like on identification cards and residence papers. Once in a while he felt sad when he saw the melancholy in a woman’s beautiful and expressive face in a photograph affixed to an insurance document; then, he pulled himself together and looked at another face that revealed no sorrow or narrative but only itself. In order to avoid getting involved in the faces’ stories, he wouldn’t read even the inscriptions under them or the letters Jelal had put on and around the photographs. After looking at the pictures for a long time, forcing himself to see them only as the maps of human faces, when the evening traffic in Nişantaşı got heavy and tears began flowing out of his eyes, Galip had managed to go through only a small fraction of the photographs that Jelal had collected for thirty years.

Chapter Twenty-five

THE EXECUTIONER AND THE WEEPING FACE

Don’t weep, don’t weep; oh, please don’t.

—
HALIT ZIYA

Why does the sight of a man in tears make us nervous? We perceive a weeping woman as an exceptional but sad and touching part of our lives, accepting her with affection and sincerity. But a weeping man makes us feel helpless. As if he were at the end of his rope, this man either has no other recourse left—as with the death of someone he loved—or some aspect of his world is at odds with ours, an aspect that is bothersome or even terrifying. We all know the terror and confusion occasioned by coming across a territory we have absolutely no knowledge of in the map we call a face with which we assume we are acquainted. I came across a story on the subject in the fourth volume of Naima’s
History,
and in Mehmet Halife’s
History for Royal Pages,
as well as in the
History of Executioners
by Kadri of Edirne.

A mere three hundred years ago on a spring evening, Black Ömer, the most renowned executioner of his time, was approaching Fort Erzurum on horseback. He had been dispatched twelve days before, having been handed an edict from the Sultan by the Chief of the Palace Guard for the execution of Abdi Pasha, who commanded Fort Erzurum. He was pleased he was making such good time on the Istanbul–Erzurum trip which, in that season, took an ordinary traveler a whole month; the cool spring evening had refreshed him, but still, some kind of heaviness weighed on him which was not how he usually felt prior to doing a job. He felt as if he were under the shadow of a curse, or else the anxiety of an indecision, that would prevent him from discharging his duty properly.

His was indeed a difficult job: he had to enter all alone a garrison full of men loyal to a Pasha who was totally unknown to him, present the edict, impress on the Pasha and his entourage—by virtue of his own intrepid presence and self-confidence—the futility of opposing the Sultan’s will; and if, by some remote chance, the Pasha was slow to be impressed that such action would be in vain, he had to kill the man without giving those around him a chance to come up with some culpable intent. He was so experienced with the procedure that the indecision he felt had to be the result of something else. In his thirty-year career, he had executed close to twenty royal princes, two grand viziers, six viziers, twenty-three pashas—more than six hundred persons in all, including honest folk and thieves, innocent and guilty, men and women, old and young, Christian and Moslem; and beginning with the days of his apprenticeship to date, he had put thousands of people to torture.

On that spring morning, the executioner dismounted before entering town, he took a ritual bath listening to the joyful twittering of the birds, and he went down on his knees to pray. Praying and begging God to make things go right for him was something he did very rarely. But, as was always the case, God accepted this diligent mortal’s prayer.

So, everything worked like a charm. The Pasha, who instantly knew what manner of man the executioner was from the conical red-felt hat on his shaved head and the greased noose in his cummerbund, realized his fate without fail, but he didn’t put up any resistance that could be construed as extraordinary. Perhaps he had become aware of his offense and had already submitted to his fate.

For starters, the Pasha read the edict ten times, each time with the same circumspection. (A characteristic of those who obey the rules.) After he finished reading it, he kissed the edict in an ostentatious manner and touched it to his forehead. (A response that seemed stupid to Black Ömer but one that is still observed in people for whom impressing those around them is a consideration.) He wished to read the Koran and perform his prayers. (A penchant seen both in those who are true believers and those who’re playing for time.) After getting through his prayers, he distributed among his company the valuable objects on him, his rings, jewels, decorations, saying “This is to remember me by,” thereby assuring himself that these things didn’t end up with the executioner. (A response observed in those who are too involved with the world and superficial enough to hold a personal grudge against their executioners.) And before the noose was slipped over his head, like most who display not only a few of these responses but all of them, he made an attempt to fight hand to hand, swearing a blue streak. But as soon as a stiff blow was landed on his chin, he collapsed and began to wait for death. He was in tears.

Weeping was an ordinary response displayed by victims in situations like this, but the executioner observed something else in the Pasha’s tearful face which, for the first time in his thirty-year career, made him vacillate. So he did something he had never done before: he covered his victim’s face under a piece of cloth before he strangled him. He criticized such behavior in his colleagues, seeing how he believed that, in performing his duty smoothly and flawlessly, an executioner had to be capable of looking his victim right in the eye until the very end.

As soon as he was sure his victim was dead, he severed the head off the body with the aid of a special straight razor called “the cipher,” and he plunged the head while it was still fresh in the honey-filled mohair sack that he had brought along: the head had to be preserved so that he could bring it back to Istanbul where those responsible could determine whether he’d performed his job successfully. While trying to place the head carefully into the honey-filled mohair sack, he observed once more with amazement the lachrymose gaze on the Pasha’s face, that inexplicable and terrifying expression, which he couldn’t forget until the end of his own life which was not too distant.

He mounted his horse at once and left town. While his victim’s body was being given a sickeningly sad and tearful funeral, the executioner always wished, what with the head riding on his horse’s rump, that he were at least two days’ ride away from the site. Consequently, after riding a day and a half, he arrived at Fort Kemah. He ate at the caravanserai and he went in his cell, toting the sack, and fell asleep for a long time.

Just as he began waking from a deep sleep, he was dreaming that he was in Edirne, just as it was in his childhood: as he approached the huge jam jar full of fig preserves which his mom had made, filling not only the house and the garden with the tart fragrance of figs boiling in syrup but the whole neighborhood, he first realized that the small green globes he thought were figs were in fact the eyeballs of a weeping head; then he opened the jar, feeling guilty more for witnessing the inexplicable horror on the weeping face than for doing something forbidden; and when he heard the sound of a mature man’s sobs come out of the jar, he became frozen with the feeling of helplessness that immobilized him.

The next night, in the middle of his sleep in a different bed in a different caravanserai, he found himself dreaming of an afternoon in his early youth: just before dark, he was in downtown Edirne, out in an alley. His attention having been called to it by a friend whose identity he couldn’t make out, he observed the setting sun at one end of the sky, and the white visage of a pale full moon at the other. Then, as the sun sank and the sky became dark, the moon’s gibbous face became more illuminated and more distinct, and soon afterwards it dawned on him that the brilliantly shining face was a weeping face that belonged to a human being. But no, what transformed the streets of Edirne into the disquieting and incomprehensible streets of some other town was not the sadness of the moon’s metamorphosis into a weeping face, but its enigma.

The next morning the executioner reflected that the truth he discovered in the middle of his sleep was in agreement with his own recollections. Throughout his career he’d observed the weeping faces of thousands of men, but none of those faces had aroused in him feelings of guilt, ruthlessness, and fear. Contrary to the usual assumption, he felt sad and sorry for his victims, but the feeling was immediately balanced with the logic of justice, necessity, and inevitability. He knew very well that the victims he decapitated, strangled, or whose necks he broke, were always better informed than their executioner about the chain of causes that led to their death. There was nothing unbearable or intolerable in seeing a man go to his death in a flurry of tears, begging through his snot, sobbing and choking. The executioner neither despised tearful men, as do some idiots who expect brave words and flamboyant gestures from the condemned which will go down in history or legends, nor did he become immobilized with a feeling of pity upon seeing them cry as do another class of idiots who have no comprehension at all of life’s random and inevitable ruthlessness.

But what was it about his dreams that arrested him? On a bright and sunny morning, riding past deep and rocky chasms with the mohair sack on his horse’s rump, the executioner reflected that the feeling of immobility that came over him was connected in some way with the indecisiveness he experienced just before he arrived at Erzurum and the shadow of a vague curse he sensed in his soul. Before he strangled the Pasha, he had seen the mystery that had forced him to cover his head with a coarse cloth, prompting him to consign his victim’s face into oblivion. As the day wore on, the executioner no longer thought about the expression on the face he carried behind him on his horse, riding along rocky precipices that had astonishing shapes (a sailboat with a potbellied hull, a lion with a fig-shaped head), along stands of pine and beech trees that were stranger and more surprising than usual, and along the ice-cold rivers over strange-looking pebble stones. It was now the world that was astonishing, a new world that he had become aware of for the first time.

He had just become aware that all trees looked like the dark shadows that stirred on sleepless nights among his recollections. He noticed for the first time that the innocent shepherds who grazed their flocks on the greening slopes carried their heads on their shoulders as if carrying someone else’s wares. He realized for the first time that ten-house settlements on the skirts of mountains looked like shoes lined up in front of the entrances to mosques. He had a new apprehension that the purple mountains he rode through a couple of days later in the western provinces, and above them clouds that looked as if they came out of miniature paintings, signified that the world was a bare, butt-naked place. He had just comprehended that all the plants, the objects, and the timid animals were signs of a realm as frightening as nightmares, as plain as helplessness, and as old as memories. As he proceeded westward, and as the lengthening shadows gathered new meanings, the executioner had a feeling that the signs and significances of a mystery which he couldn’t fathom were seeping into his environs like blood seeping out of a cracked earthen bowl.

At a caravanserai where he stopped just as it got dark, he had something to eat, but he realized he couldn’t sleep in a cell closeted with the head. He knew he couldn’t tolerate the fearful dream that would slowly spread out somewhere in the middle of his sleep, like pus draining out of a wound burst open, and the helpless face that kept weeping every night in his dreams under the guise of yet another recollection. For a while he rested, observing with astonishment the human faces in the caravanserai crowd, and then proceeded on his way.

The night was cold and silent. There was no wind or any movement in the trees. His tired horse made its way on its own. He went on his way for quite a while without observing anything, as in the good old days, or dwelling on some irritating question: sometime later, he’d attribute it to the fact that it was dark, considering that when the moon slipped out of the clouds, the trees, the shadows, the rocks were gradually transformed into the signs of an insoluble mystery. What was frightening was neither the pitiful tombstones in the graveyards, nor the solitary cypress trees, nor the howling of the wolves in the desolate night. What made the world so astonishing as to be frightful was his own seeming attempt to extract a story—as if the world wanted to tell him something, to signify some meaning, but the words were lost in a misty uncertainty, as in a dream. Toward daybreak, the executioner began hearing sobs in his ears.

At daybreak, he thought the sobs were an illusion created by the commencement of a wind in the trees; later, he ruled it the result of sleeplessness and fatigue. By noontime, the sobs that came from the sack on the pillion became so definite that, like someone who gets out of his warm bed in the middle of the night to put a stop to the unnerving squeak of a partially closed casement window, he dismounted and tightened as taut as he could the ropes that secured the sack on the pillion. Yet later, under a merciless rain, he would not only hear the sobs but would also feel on his very skin the tears shed by the weeping head.

When the sun came out again, he had understood that the mystery of the world was related to the enigma in the weeping face. It was as if that familiar old world that was comprehensible had been sustained by commonplace meanings and expressions on faces, and after the eerie expression appeared on the weeping face, the meaning of the world had disappeared leaving the executioner stranded, fearful, and alone—just as when an enchanted bowl shatters into smithereens, or a magic crystal vase cracks, things go topsy-turvy. While the wet clothes on him dried in the sun, he realized that for things to go back to normal, he had to change the expression that the head in the sack carried on its face like a mask. Yet, his guild ethics demanded that he bring back to Istanbul the head, which he had pressed into the sack of honey fresh after he cut it off, preserved and intact.