The Black Book (44 page)

According to Fazlallah, since everything that crossed over from nothingness into the material world produced a sound, sound was the demarcation line between Being and Nothingness: striking “the most soundless” objects against each other was enough for us to discern this. The most developed form of sound was, of course, the “word,” the exalted thing called “speech,” the magic known as “words” which were made up of Letters. The origin of Being, its Meaning, and the material aspect of God were distinguishable in Letters that were clearly written in the faces of men. We were all born with the native characteristic of two brow lines, four eyelash lines, and one hairline—seven strokes in all. At puberty, with the addition of the late-blooming nose dividing our faces, this figure was increased to fourteen, and doubled again when we took into account the imaginary and real numbers which were even more poetic, which all went to show that the twenty-eight letters of the language Muhammad spoke were not accidental in bringing the Koran into existence. When Galip read that in order to jack up the count to thirty-two, which was the number of letters in Persian (the language Fazlallah spoke and wrote his
Book of Eternal Life
in), it was necessary to examine the hair and chin lines more attentively, divide them down the middle—thereby finding two more lines, times two which made four—he realized why the hair had been parted in the middle (as actors in American films had done to their brilliantined hair in the thirties) in some of the photographs he’d found in the boxes. All this was so straightforward that, momentarily pleased with its childlike simplicity, Galip felt he understood once again what it was that attracted Jelal to these letter games.

Fazlallah proclaimed himself to be the deliverer, the prophet: the Messiah of the Jews, the Saviour whose second coming is anticipated by the Christians, the Mahdi whom Muhammad has heralded—the long-awaited figure, in short, who appeared in Jelal’s piece about “Him.” Surrounding himself in Ispahan with seven believers, Fazlallah began promoting his faith. It gave Galip a feeling of inner peace to read that Fazlallah went from town to town preaching that the world was not a place that yielded up its secrets right off, that it swarmed with secrets, and that in order to penetrate these secrets it was necessary to comprehend the mystery of letters. For Galip, it seemed now to be clearly proved that his world also swarmed with secrets, as he had always anticipated and desired. He sensed that the inner peace he felt was related to the simplicity of this demonstration; if it was true that the world was a place swarming with secrets, then it was also true that the coffee cup on the table, the ashtray, the letter opener, even his own hand that rested like a hesitant crab next to the letter opener, all pointed to and were a part of the existence of a hidden world. Rüya was in this world. Galip was at its threshold. Soon, the secret of letters would let him in.

That’s why he had to read more carefully. He read of Fazlallah’s life and death once more. He understood that Fazlallah had dreamed of his own death and had approached his death as if in a dream. He had been accused of heresy for worshipping letters, mankind, and idols instead of God, for proclaiming himself as the Messiah, and for believing his own fantasies, which he claimed to be the secret and invisible meaning of the Koran, instead of its real and visible significance. He was caught, tried, and hanged.

Hurufis, for whom it became difficult to hang on in Iran after the execution of Fazlallah and his associates, crossed over into Anatolia, thanks to the poet Nesimi who was one of Fazlallah’s successors. The poet, loading Fazlallah’s books and manuscripts on Hurufism in a green trunk which would achieve legendary status among Hurufis, traveled throughout Anatolia, hitting each and every town to find fresh adherents in remote seminaries where even the spiders took naps in lazarettos and tekkes for the lazy that teemed with lizards, and in order to illustrate for his trainees that not only the Koran but the whole world swarmed with secrets, he resorted to letter and word games inspired by the game of chess which he loved. Poet Nesimi—who, in two lines of verse, likened a feature and a beauty spot on his sweetheart’s face to a letter and a period, the letter and the period to a sponge and pearl in the bottom of the sea, himself to a diver who dies for the sake of the pearl, the diver who voluntarily dives into death to a lover seeking God, and so, coming full circle, likened his sweetheart to God—was arrested in Aleppo, subjected to a long trial, and flayed to death: After his body was strung up and exhibited in the city, the corpse was cut into seven parts, and each part was buried, as an object lesson, in one of the seven cities where he had found himself adherents and where his poems were recited.

Under Poet Nesimi’s influence, Hurufism had spread rapidly among the Bektaşis in the land of the Ottomans, and had even turned on Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror some fifteen years after his conquest of Constantinople. When the theologians around him realized that the Sultan carried Fazlallah’s treatises around, holding forth on the mystery of the world, the enigma of letters, the secrets of Byzantium, which he observed from his palace where he had moved in recently, and that he investigated how each and every chimney, dome, and tree that he pointed out individually could provide the key for penetrating into the mystery of another realm that existed underground, they had schemed against those Hurufis who managed to get close to the Sultan and had them burned alive.

In a little book which had a handwritten note appended to its last page, informing (or misinforming) that it was printed covertly in Horasan, near Erzurum, at the beginning of World War II, Galip came across pictures of Hurufis being beheaded and burned after an assassination attempt on the Conqueror’s son, Bayazit II. On another page, Hurufis who’d been burned to death for not obeying Süleyman the Magnificent’s order for their deportation had been depicted with a childlike execution and an expression of horror. In the undulating flames that lapped up the bodies, the
alifs
and
lams
of the word
Allah
were legible, but what was stranger was that the bodies, which burned furiously in the Arabic alphabet, emitted from their eyes tears that were adorned with O’s, U’s, and C’s of the Latin alphabet. This constituted the first Hurufi interpretation that Galip had run across of the 1928 Alphabet Reform—the transition from Arabic characters to the Latin alphabet—but since his mind was on the formula for the solution to a riddle, he continued reading what he found in the box without evaluating what he’d seen.

He read a great many pages attesting that God’s essential attribute was a “hidden treasure” (a
kenz-ı mahfı
), a mystery. The question was to find a way to get to it. The question was to realize that the mystery was reflected in the world. The question was to comprehend that the mystery was present in everything, every object, every person. The world was an ocean of clues, every one of its drops had the salt taste that led to the mystery behind it. The more Galip’s tired and inflamed eyes read on, the more he knew that he would penetrate into the ocean’s secrets.

Since the signs were everywhere and in everything, the mystery was also everywhere and in everything. Like the beloved’s face in poems, the pearls, roses, wine goblets, nightingales, golden hair, night, and flames that Galip kept reading about, the objects around him were both signs of themselves and of the mystery that he was slowly approaching. The curtain lit by the weak light of the lamp, the old armchairs teeming with memories of Rüya, the shadows on the walls, the ominous phone receiver, the very fact that they were so replete with stories and allusions, gave Galip the feeling that he was being sucked into a game unawares, as he had sometimes felt when he was in his childhood. He continued to go ahead, feeling only slightly mistrustful on account of his conviction that he could get out of the scary game (where everyone impersonated someone else and every object simulated something other than itself) by becoming, as he did when he was a child, still another someone else. “If you’re afraid, I’ll turn the light on,” he used to tell Rüya, realizing that she was just as scared as he was when they played the game in the dark. “Don’t turn it on,” said undaunted Rüya, who liked being scared. Galip went on reading.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some Hurufis had settled in remote villages that had been abandoned by the peasantry who had fled from pashas, judges, bandits, and imams during the Jelali uprisings that had left Anatolia in shambles. Galip was trying to make sense of the lines in a longish poem describing the felicitous and meaningful lifestyle that once prevailed in these Hurufi villages, when he recalled the happy memories of his own childhood spent with Rüya.

In those distant felicitous times, significance and action had been identical. In that Golden Age, things in our houses and our dreams of them were the same. Back in those years of happiness, everyone knew that daggers and pens, tools and such that we held in our hands, were extensions not only of our bodies but also of our souls. Back then, when a poet said “tree,” everyone could visualize that tree exactly, and everyone knew that in order for the word and the tree in the poem to signify whatever else was in the garden and life as well as the tree, there was no necessity to display undue skill enumerating the leaves and the branches. Everyone knew very well back then that words and what they described were so close that on mornings when fog descended on the phantom villages in the mountains, the words and what they described were intermingled. People who woke from their sleep on foggy mornings could not tell apart their dreams from reality, poems from life, and names from human beings. Back then, stories and lives were so real that nobody even conceived of asking which was the original life or which was the original story. Dreams were lived through and lives were thoroughly interpreted. As was everything else, people’s faces too were so meaningful back then that even those who weren’t literate, who couldn’t tell their
alpha
from an apple, their
a
from a hat, and their
alif
from a stick, began spontaneously reading the letters that reveal the meaning in our faces.

In those distant happy days people were not even conscious of time, the poet wrote that the orange sun stood still in the evening sky, and galleons whose sails were filled with a wind that did not blow made voyages without motion on a still ocean that was the color of glass and ash, and as Galip read he realized, having come across the image of white mosques and even whiter minarets rising like a mirage that would never vanish beside this sea, that the Hurufi imagination and life which had remained concealed since the seventeenth century had nonetheless encompassed Istanbul. When Galip read how the storks, albatrosses, simurghs, and the phoenix taking wing against the three-tiered white minarets toward the horizon swayed for centuries as if suspended in the sky above the domes of Istanbul; how every outing in the streets of Istanbul, none of which crossed each other at right angles nor according to some plan, was as heady and recreative as a holiday trip to eternity; and how on warm moonlit nights in summer, when it was possible to draw from wells not only ice-cold water but also pailfuls of mysterious signs and stars, everyone recited poems all night long that bespoke the meaning of the signs and the signs of the meaning, he understood not only that an unadulterated golden age of Hurufism had once existed in Istanbul, but that his own happy days with Rüya were long gone.

This felicitous age must have been short-lived. Galip read that soon after the golden age during which the secrets of the mystery became notorious, secrets had become more confusing—that in an effort to conceal their mysteries all the more, some people had resorted to elixirs made of blood, eggs, hair, and shit, mixtures like those concocted by the Hurufis in the phantom villages; others had dug passageways under their houses in Istanbul’s secret locations in order to bury their mysteries. He read that there were those not as lucky as the ones who had dug passageways, men caught for joining the Janissary rebellions and hanged on trees, whose facial letters got deformed by the greased noose tightened around their necks like neckties, and also that bards who took their lutes to dervish lodges in the slums to whisper Hurufi secrets were met with walls of incomprehension. All this evidence confirmed that the golden age, which was lived as much in secret locales and mysterious streets in Istanbul as in remote phantom villages, had been abruptly brought to an end.

When Galip reached the last page of the book of poetry that mice had gnawed along the edges and on the corners of which glass-green and turquoise mildew had flowered with the pleasant smell of paper and dampness, he came across a note that more elaborate information on the subject had been undertaken in another treatise. According to the long, ungrammatical sentence stuck in by the typesetter from Horasan in small print between the last lines of the poem and the addresses of the printers, the publishers, dates of composition and publication, the seventh book of the same series published by the same outfit in Horasan near Erzurum was a work penned by F. M. Üçüncü, called
Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery,
which had rated praise from the Istanbul journalist Selım Kaçmaz.

Galip, fogged out with dreams of Rüya and fantasies of words and letters, weary and sleepless, recalled Jelal’s early years in journalism. Back in those days, Jelal’s involvement with word and letter games did not go beyond sending coded messages to his lovers, family, and friends in the “Your Horoscope Today” and “Believe It or Not” columns. He searched furiously for the treatise among the wads of paper, magazines, and newsprint. After turning the place completely upside down, when he finally came across the book among the news clips from the early sixties that Jelal had saved, unpublished polemics, and some weird photographs in a box he was going through without any hope, it was way past midnight, and the sort of disheartening stillness that sends cold chills down your spine, characteristic of the curfew when the country was under martial law, had fallen on the streets.