The Black Book (63 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
The Prince described, with the sort of enthusiasm that precedes illness, the last months he and the Scribe worked together as being a period of “concentrated work, concentrated hope, and concentrated faith.” These were the happy days when the Prince strongly heard inside his head the voice with which he dictated all day and which made him more himself the more he dictated and told his own stories. They’d work late at night, and no matter how late it was, the Scribe would get in the carriage which waited for him on the grounds and go home, and he’d return early in the morning to take his place at the mahogany desk.
The Prince would narrate the stories of kingdoms that had collapsed because they couldn’t be themselves, races that had been annihilated because they imitated others, peoples in distant and unknown lands who’d fallen into oblivion because they couldn’t live their own lives. Illyrians had withdrawn from the world’s stage because they couldn’t come up with a king who through the sheer strength of his personality could teach them to be themselves. The collapse of Babel was not due to King Nimrod’s challenge to God, as it was commonly presumed, but because in an effort to put everything he had into building the tower, he had dried up the sources that could have made Babel be itself. The nomadic people of Lapitia were about to move into a settled economy when they fell under the enchantment of the Aitipal with whom they traded and, having given themselves over to complete emulation, had disappeared. The collapse of the Sassanids, according to Tabari’s
History,
was due to the fact that their last three rulers (Hormizd, Khosru, and Yazdigird) were incapable of being themselves for a single day in their entire lives because they were so fascinated by the Byzantine, Arabian, and Hebrew civilizations. After the Lydians’ first temple under Susian influence was built in their capital city of Sardis, it had taken fifty years for the mighty Lydian kingdom to fall and shuffle off the theater of history. Serberians were a race which not even historians could place today, not only because they’d lost their memories but because just as they were about to build a great Asian empire, they’d forgotten the mystery that made them themselves and they all began wearing Sarmatian attire and ornaments, and reciting Sarmatian poems as if the whole population had caught an epidemic disease. “Medes, Paphlagonians, Celts,” the Prince would dictate, and the Scribe would beat his master to the punch by adding, “collapsed and disappeared because they could not be themselves.” Late at night when they were dead beat and done telling the tales of death and collapse, they’d hear the determined chirping of a cicada in the silence of the summer night outside.
When the Prince caught a cold and took to his bed on a windy fall day, just as crimson chestnut leaves began to drop into the frog and lily pond on the grounds, neither of them had taken it too seriously. During that period, the Prince had been holding forth on what would befall the bewildered people who’d inhabit the degenerated streets of Istanbul, saying that “they would see their lives through the eyes of others, listen to other’s tales in favor of their own, and be spellbound with others’ faces rather than their own,” in case he failed in becoming himself and ascending the Ottoman throne in possession of the full power of being his own man. They made and drank linden blossom tea that came from the lindens on the grounds and proceeded to work until all hours.
Next day when the Scribe went upstairs to get another quilt to put over his feverish master prostrated on the sofa, he realized as if under a strange spell that the lodge, where the tables and chairs had been demolished, the doors pulled out, the furniture eradicated, was bare, so very bare. There was a dreamlike whiteness in the bare rooms, on the walls and the staircases. In one of the bare rooms stood the white Steinway, unique in all of Istanbul, which came from the Prince’s childhood; it hadn’t been played for years and had been totally forgotten. The Scribe observed the whiteness also in the white light that fell as if on another planet into the lodge through the windows which gave the impression that all recollections had faded, memory had frozen, and all sound, smell, objects having retreated, time itself had come to a stop. Going down the stairs with an unscented white quilt in his arms, he felt that the sofa the Prince lay on, his own mahogany desk where he’d worked all these years, the white paper, the windows, were all breakable, delicate, and unreal like the furnishings of dollhouses. As he laid the quilt over him, the Scribe noticed the white in the growth on his master’s face that hadn’t been shaved for a couple of days. There was half a glass of water and some white tablets on the table next to his head.
“Last night I dreamed that my mother was waiting for me in a dense, dark wood in a distant land,” dictated the Prince from where he lay on the sofa. “Water was pouring out of a large crimson pitcher, but slowly like fermented cereal,” dictated the Prince. “That was when I understood that I survived because I had insisted on being myself all my life.” The Scribe wrote: “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin spent his life waiting for silence so that he might hear his own voice and stories.” “To wait for silence,” repeated the Prince. “Clocks shouldn’t stop in Istanbul,” dictated the Prince. “When I looked at the clocks in my dream,” the Prince began, and the Scribe wrote, “he was always under the impression that he was telling other people’s stories.” There was a silence. “I envy stones in the desert for just being themselves, and rocks in mountains where no man has ever set foot, and trees in valleys hidden from human eyes,” the Prince dictated with effort and passion. “In my dream, wandering around the garden of my memories,” he began, and then added, “nothing at all.” “Nothing at all,” the Scribe put down with care. There was a long, long silence. Then the Scribe rose from his desk and approached the sofa where the Prince was lying down, took a good look at his master and returned quietly back to his desk. Then he wrote, “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin was deceased after dictating his last sentence, on the 7th of Shaban, 1321, Thursday, at 3:15 in the morning, at his hunting lodge on the hills of Teşvikiye.” But twenty years later what he wrote in the same hand was this: “The throne which Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin didn’t live to ascend was, seven years later, occupied by Honorable Mehmet Reşat whose neck he had slapped when he was young and during whose administration the Ottoman Empire, having entered the Great War, collapsed.”
The notebooks were presented by a relative of the Scribe’s to Jelal Salik, among whose papers this article was discovered after our columnist’s death.
Ye who read are still among the living;
But I who write
shall have long since gone my way
into the region of shadows.
—
EDGAR ALLAN POE
, “Shadow—a Parable”
“Yes, yes, I am myself!” Galip thought when he finished telling the Prince’s story. “Yes, I am me!” Now that he had told the story, he was so certain that he was capable of being himself and so pleased for having finally done it, he wanted to tear off for the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, sit down at Jelal’s desk, and write brand-new columns.
In the cab he got outside the hotel, the cabby began telling a story. Since he understood that one could only be himself through telling stories, Galip listened tolerantly to the cabby’s tale.
It seems that on a hot summer day a century ago, the German and Turkish engineers who built the Haydarpaşa train station across the Bosphorus were working on their computations spread out on a table, when one of the boyishly beautiful divers combing the bottom of the sea nearby for anything of value approached with a coin he’d found. There was a woman’s face embossed on the coin, a strange, enchanting face. The diver asked one of the Turkish engineers working under their black umbrellas if he could solve the mystery of the face, which he himself could not solve, by reading the letters on the coin. The young engineer was so deeply affected, not so much by the letters as by the enchanting expression on the face of the Byzantine empress, he was seized by such wonderment and awe, that it surprised even the diver. There was something in the face of the empress that involved not only the Arabic and Latin alphabets, both of which the engineer was busy using, but was also reminiscent of the beloved face of his uncle’s daughter whom he had dreamed of marrying someday. The girl was about to be married off to someone else at just about that time.
“Yeah, the street next to the Teşvikiye police station is blocked off,” the cabby said in response to Galip’s question. “Looks like they’ve shot someone again.”
Galip got out and walked down the short, narrow street that connects Emlak Street to Teşvikiye Avenue. Where the street met the avenue, the reflections on the wet asphalt of the blue lights of the squad cars parked there had the pale, sad color of neon signs. Over the small square in front of Aladdin’s store, where the lights were still on, a silence had fallen which Galip had never experienced before in his life and would only encounter again in his dreams.
Traffic had come to a stop. Trees were still. There was no wind. The small square seemed set up with the artificial colors and sounds of a theater stage. The mannequins placed between the Singer sewing machines in the window looked as if they were about to join the cops and the other officials. “Yes, I too am myself!” Galip felt like saying. When some photographer’s silver-blue flash went off in the crowd of cops and curiosity seekers, Galip became aware of something—as if it were a memory that came from a moment in a dream, or as if finding a key that had been lost for twenty years, or as if recognizing a face he didn’t want to see. A few paces from the window where the Singer machines were displayed, there was a pinkish-white blotch on the sidewalk. A solitary figure: he knew it was Jelal. The body had been covered under newspapers, except for the head. Where was Rüya? Galip got closer.
Clearly visible above the printed paper covering the body like a quilt, the head was resting on the filthy, muddy sidewalk as if resting on a pillow. The eyes were open but distracted as if dreaming; the face wore the expression of someone lost in his own thoughts, peaceful as if observing the stars, as if both resting and dreaming. Where was Rüya? Galip was overcome with the feeling that it was a game, a joke, then with a sensation of regret. There was no sign of blood. How had he known that the corpse was Jelal’s even before he’d seen the body? Had you known, he felt like saying, that I didn’t know that I knew everything? A well was on Jelal’s mind, on my mind, on our minds; the dry well of the air shaft; a button, a purple button: coins, soft-drink bottle caps, buttons discovered behind the cupboard. We are observing the stars, stars as seen in between the branches. There was something about the corpse that seemed to request being covered so as not to get cold. Cover him well, Galip thought, so he won’t get chilled. Galip felt chilly. “I am myself!” He realized the newspaper sections which had been folded open in the middle were copies of
Milliyet
and
Tercüman.
Stained with colors of the fuel-oil rainbow. Newspaper sections they used to check out for Jelal’s columns: Don’t get chilled. It’s cold.
He heard on the radio in the police van a metallic voice asking for the inspector. Sir, where’s Rüya, where is she, where? Traffic light blinking aimlessly at the corner: Green. Red. Then again: Green. Red. Then on the cake-shop lady’s window too: Green, red. I remember, I remember, I remember, Jelal was saying. Lights were on in Aladdin’s store, although the shutters had been rolled down. Could that be some sort of a clue? Mr. Inspector, Galip felt like saying; I am writing the first Turkish detective novel, and as you can see, here’s the clue: The lights have been left on. On the ground were cigarette butts, pieces of paper, trash. Galip sized up a young cop and went up to question him.
The incident had taken place between nine-thirty and ten. The identity of the assailant was not known. The poor man had been shot and was dead instantly. Yes, he was a famous journalist. No, there was no one with him. No, thank you, he didn’t smoke. Yes, police work was difficult. No, there was nobody with the dead man, the officer was certain of it; why did the gentleman ask? What kind of work did the gentleman do? What was the gentleman doing here at this hour? Would the gentleman be so kind as to show some identification?
While his identification was being checked out, Galip studied the quilt of newsprint that covered Jelal’s body. It was more noticeable from a distance that the light from the window with the mannequins shed a pinkish light on the newspapers. He thought: Officer, the deceased used to pay attention to such little details. I am the one in the picture, and the face is my face. There, take it. My pleasure. I’d better be going. You know, my wife happens to be waiting up for me at home. Seems like I managed things easy as pie.
He went by the Heart-of-the-City Apartments without stopping, crossed Nişantaşı Square at a running pace, and had just gone into his own street when, first time ever, a stray dog, a mud-colored mongrel, barked at him, snarling as if it meant business. What did it signal? He changed sidewalks. Were the living-room lights on? He thought in the elevator: How could I have missed it?
There was no one in the place. There was no sign anywhere that Rüya had been here even briefly. Everything in the place was intolerably painful, the furniture he touched, the door knobs, the scissors and spoons strewn about, the ashtrays where Rüya had once stubbed her cigarettes, the dining table where they once sat and ate together, the sad, desolate armchairs where once upon a time they used to sit across from each other, they were all too unbearably pathetic. He couldn’t wait to get himself out of there.
He walked the streets for a long time. On the streets that ran from Nişantaşı to Şişlı, on sidewalks where he and Rüya excitedly sped toward the City Cinema in their childhood, there was no movement aside from the dogs going through the garbage cans. How many stories had you done on these dogs? How many will I end up doing? After what seemed a very long walk, he went around Teşvikiye Square by way of the street behind the mosque and, just as he anticipated, his feet took him back to the corner where Jelal’s body had been lying forty-five minutes ago. But there was no one on the corner. Along with the body, the squad cars, the reporters, and the crowd had all disappeared. In the neon light reflected from the window where the sewing machines graced with mannequins were being displayed, Galip could see no trace on the sidewalk where Jelal’s body had been laid out. The newspapers that had covered the body must have been meticulously picked up. A cop in front of the station was, as usual, standing the usual patrol duty with his machine gun. Lights were still on in Aladdin’s store.
