The Black Book (60 page)

When İskender began to translate, Galip looked out the open window at the Golden Horn and the dim lights of Istanbul. Obviously they had meant to light the Mosque of Selım the Grim to make it attractive to tourists, but, as is always the case, some of the lights had been stolen, turning the mosque into an odd and scary pile of stone, making it look like the dark mouth of an old geezer who had but a single tooth in his head. As soon as İskender was through translating, the woman courteously made an apology about having been mistaken, which wasn’t lacking in humor and playfulness, saying that she had confused Mr. Salik with a tall, bespectacled novelist who’d told a story there that night, but she did not appear to be convinced of what she was saying. It looked as if she’d decided to accept Galip and the odd situation as an interesting Turkish eccentricity, having assumed the “I don’t understand it but I respect it” attitude adopted by tolerant intellectuals up against a different culture. Galip felt affectionate toward this sensitive woman who was a good sport, not calling off the game even though she sensed that the cards were rigged. Wasn’t she somewhat reminiscent of Rüya?

When Galip sat in the back-lit seat that was a bit like a modern execution chair with the black power cables, the mike and camera lines placed next to it, they noticed that he was uneasy. One of the men stuck a glass in Galip’s hand and smiling politely filled it with
rakı
and water to Galip’s taste. The woman, exercising the same sense of play—they kept smiling, anyway—hastily put a cassette into the player, and when she pushed the button provocatively like someone slipping a pornographic tape into the video machine in the twinkling of an eye the sights of Turkey they’d been recording for the last eight days appeared on the small portable screen. They watched quietly as if watching a porno film, with a vague sense of humor but without being totally disinterested: an acrobatic beggar who merrily exhibited his maimed arms and his unhinged legs; a fervent political demonstration and a fervent leader making a statement afterwards; two old coots playing a game of backgammon; scenes from taverns and nightclubs; a rug dealer priding himself on his display window; a nomadic tribe going up a hill on their camels; a train locomoting with its steam engine puffing out clouds; kids waving at the camera in shantytown districts; veiled women considering oranges at the greengrocer’s; the victim of a politically motivated murder and its aftermath covered under newspapers; an old porter transporting a grand piano on a horse cart.

“I happen to know that porter,” Galip said suddenly. “That’s the porter who moved us from the Heart-of-the-City Apartments to the place on the side street.”

They all had a sense of being game as well as serious, watching the old porter, who was also smiling with an identical sense of being game as well as serious, while he pulled his cart loaded with the piano into the front yard of an old apartment building.

“The Prince’s piano has come back,” Galip said. He had no clear idea of whose voice he was helping himself to, who in the hell he was, but he was sure everything was going well. “A Prince once lived in a hunting lodge that stood exactly on the same grounds as that apartment building. I’ll tell the story of the Prince!”

They set things up very quickly. İskender reiterated that the famous columnist was here to make a very significant historical statement. The woman prefaced the segment enthusiastically to her audience by placing it adroitly into a wide framework that covered the last Ottoman sultans, the clandestine Turkish Communist Party, Atatürk’s mysterious, concealed legacy, Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, the politically motivated assassinations, and the risk of a military coup.

“Once upon a time, a Prince lived here in this city who had discovered that the most important question in life was whether or not one could be oneself,” Galip began narrating. As he told the story, he felt the Prince’s rage inside him so strongly, he experienced himself as someone else. Who was this person? He was narrating the Prince’s childhood when he sensed that the new person whose identity he’d assumed had once been a kid called Galip. When he told how the Prince struggled with his books, he felt like the authors of these books. When he told about the days of solitude the Prince spent at his lodge, he felt like the heroes in the Prince’s stories. When he told how the Prince dictated his thoughts to his scribe, he felt as if he were the person enjoying these thoughts. When he told the Prince’s story as if telling Jelal’s stories, he felt himself to be the protagonist in a story told by Jelal. When he told of the final period in the Prince’s life, he thought, “Jelal used to tell it like this,” and felt angry toward the others in the hotel room for not catching on. He was empowered with such rage that the English crew listened to him as if they understood Turkish. As soon as he came to the end of the Prince’s days, he began to tell the same story over without coming to a stop. “Once upon a time, a Prince lived here in this city who had discovered that the most important question in life was whether or not one could be oneself,” he began with the same conviction. When he returned to the Heart-of-the-City Apartments four hours later, and considered the difference between the first time he told it and the second time, he would conclude that Jelal had been alive the first time, and that the second time he was lying dead right across from the police station, just a little way from Aladdin’s store, his body covered with newspapers. He’d stressed parts of the story to which he hadn’t paid attention when he’d first told it, and when he told it the third time, he understood clearly that each time he told it he could become a new person. “Like the Prince, I too narrate in order to become myself,” he felt like saying. Enraged against those who would not permit him to feel like himself, convinced that the mystery in life and the city could only be solved by telling stories, experiencing the inner sense of death and whiteness at the end, he’d finished his third narration when there was complete silence. Then the British journalists and İskender briskly applauded Galip, displaying the sincerity of an audience applauding a master player after one heck of a performance.

Chapter Thirty-five

THE STORY OF THE PRINCE

How nice were the former streetcars!

—
AHMET RASIM

Once upon a time, a Prince lived here in this city who had discovered that the most important question in life was whether or not one could be oneself. His discovery was his entire life and his entire life was his discovery. It was his short statement on the subject of his short life which he dictated to his scribe whom he retained toward the end of his life for the purpose of having his discovery penned. The Prince spoke and the Scribe wrote.

Once, a hundred years ago, our city wasn’t yet a place where millions of unemployed traipsed around like bewildered chickens, not yet a place where garbage flowed down the streets and sewers underneath bridges, where chimneys spewed up tar-colored smoke and people waiting at bus stops elbowed each other mercilessly. Back then, horse-drawn streetcars went by so slowly, you could hop on them while they were in progress; the ferries sailed so leisurely that some passengers would disembark and walk talking and laughing under the lindens, the chestnuts, and the planes to the next ferry station, and after having tea at the station teahouse, they’d get back on the same ferryboat that had finally caught up with them and continue on their way. Back then, the chestnut and walnut trees hadn’t yet been felled to be transformed into electric poles which would end up becoming places to stick handbills advertising tailors and circumcisers. Outside the city limits, it wasn’t bald garbage hills bristling with electric and telephone poles that met the eye, but woods, groves, and meadows where once wistful and insouciant sultans had hunted game. The Prince had lived twenty-two years and three months at the hunting lodge on one of these green hills that would eventually be riddled with sewage tiles, pavement stones, apartment buildings.

Where the Prince was concerned, dictating was a way of being himself. The Prince was convinced that he was himself only when he was in the process of dictating to the Scribe who sat at a mahogany desk. It was only when he dictated to his Scribe that he could prevail over other people’s voices which he heard in his ears all day long, their stories that stuck in his mind as he walked up and down in his lodge and their ideas he couldn’t shake off no matter what he did as he enjoyed his garden that was surrounded by high walls. “In order to be oneself, it is necessary that one apprehends only one’s own voice, one’s own stories, and one’s own thoughts,” the Prince said, and the Scribe wrote it down.

But that didn’t mean that the Prince heard only his own voice as he dictated. On the contrary, the Prince was fully aware that whenever he began to narrate, he was thinking of someone else’s story, that just as he was about to develop his own idea, he got involved with an idea someone else put forth, that just as he surrendered to his own anger, he also apprehended someone else’s anger. Yet he also knew that one could only find one’s own voice by producing a voice that contended against all the voices inside one’s head, or as the Prince put it, “by going at other snarling throats.” Dictation, he thought, was a battlefield where he had the upperhand in this melee.

The Prince gave battle against ideas, stories, and words as he walked up and down the rooms in the lodge, changing a sentence going down a twin staircase that he’d uttered as he went up the other that met its twin at the same landing; then, he’d have the Scribe read back the sentence he’d dictated as he went up the first staircase, or else sitting or lying down on the sofa directly across from the Scribe’s desk. “Read it back to me then,” the Prince would say and the Scribe would read in a monotone the last few sentences that his master had dictated.

“Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin knew that unless the question of being oneself was properly addressed as being paramount, all of us in this land, in this accursed land, were condemned to destruction, defeat, and slavery. According to Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin, peoples who had not discovered a way of being themselves were condemned to slavery, races to degeneracy, nations to nonexistence, to nothingness, nothingness.”

“Nothingness must be repeated three times,” the Prince said, either going up the staircase or coming down, or else circling the Scribe’s desk, “not merely twice!” He’d say this in such a voice and manner that, as soon as he said it, he’d be convinced he was imitating Monsieur François, who had taught him French in his early youth, down to mannerisms he used in
dictée
exercises, including his angry stride and even the pedagogic tone in his voice, and the Prince would be overcome by a crisis that would suddenly “interrupt his intellectual activity” and “bleach all the color out of his imaginative powers.” The Scribe, who was accustomed to all these fits, thanks to his years of experience, would drop his pencil and, wearing the frozen, meaningless, blank expression that he pulled on like a mask over his face, wait for the paroxysms and tantrums of “I cannot be myself” to cease.

Prince Osman Jelalettin was ambivalent about his memories of his childhood and youth. The Scribe remembered having once written down recollections of happy scenes from a joyous, entertaining, and active youth that had taken place in royal Ottoman palaces, lodges, and mansions, but these now remained in previous journals. “Since my mother, Honorable Lady Nurcihan, was his favorite, my father Sultan Abdül Mecid Khan loved me the best of all his thirty children,” the Prince had once revealed many years ago; and on another occasion of dictating these happy scenes, again many years ago, he had said, “Since my father Sultan Abdül Mecid Khan loved me the best of all his thirty children, my mother Honorable Lady Nurcihan, who was his wife number two, was his favorite in his harem.”

The Scribe had written how the Negro chief of harem had fainted when the little Prince had slammed a door in his face while running through the harem quarters of Dolmabahçe Palace opening and closing doors, skipping down the stairs two steps a time, in an effort to get away from his older brother Reşat who was chasing him. The Scribe had written about the night when the Prince’s fourteen-year-old sister Princess Münire was given in matrimony to a forty-five-year-old pompous ass of a pasha, how she had taken her sweet little brother on her lap and wept, saying she was sad only, and only, because she could no longer be with him; and that the Prince’s white collar had been completely sodden with his older sister’s tears. The Scribe had written about an entertainment held in honor of British and French personages who’d arrived in Istanbul on account of the Crimean War, where the Prince, besides getting to dance with an eleven-year-old English girl with his mother’s permission, had spent a lot of time together with the same girl, looking through the pages of a book where there were illustrations of locomotives, penguins, and corsairs. The Scribe had written about the time at a ceremony on the occasion of a ship being named after his grandmother, the Queen Mother Bezmi Alem, when the Prince had collected on a bet that he could eat exactly four pounds of Turkish delight, some of the pieces rose-flavored and some with pistachio nuts, by getting to deliver a slap on the nape of his retarded older brother’s neck. The Scribe had written about the time when the princes and the princesses had been punished when it got back to the palace that, having ventured out in royal carriages to a Beyoğlu store where all the handkerchiefs, bottles of cologne, fans, gloves, umbrellas in the world were on display, all they’d managed to buy was the apron off the sales boy, which they thought might come in handy for their playacting games. The Scribe had written how the Prince in his childhood and first youth used to imitate anything at all, the physicians, the British Ambassador, the ships that went by the window, prime ministers, the sound of squeaky doors and castrati voices of the harem chiefs, his father, horse-drawn carriages, the sound of rain on the windowpane, all that he read in books, people who wept at his father’s funeral, waves, and his Italian piano teacher Guateli Pasha. And later, the Prince would admonish the Scribe that all his recollections, which he reiterated with exactly the same details each time he related them, using words of anger and hate, had to be considered in conjunction with the kisses, all the kisses, presented him by dozens of women and girls, young and old, along with the cakes, confections, mirrors, music boxes, and lots and lots of books and toys.