The Black Book (7 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
On the subject of the skin magazines which he displayed in his store window and strung all the way around the large chestnut tree across from his doorway, I confided that in the dreams of the lonely men who passed by absentmindedly on his sidewalk, the local and foreign playmates who’d bared all for the camera would make whoopee that night like the insatiable slave girls and the sultans’ wives in the
Thousand and One Nights
tales. And, since we were on the subject of the
Thousand and One Nights,
I informed him that the tale which bore his name was never told in any of the
Nights
but that when the book was first published in the West a hundred and fifty years ago, it appeared among the pages due to a sleight of hand perpetrated by one Antoine Galland. And I explained that the story was never actually told to Galland by Scheherazade but by a Christian scholar from Aleppo called Youhenna Diab, and that the story was probably Turkish in origin, and that, more likely than not, it took place in Istanbul as indicated by the details about coffee. But, I went on, if truth be known, it was impossible to know what was what as to the origins of any story any more than the origins of any life. I explained this was true because I forgot everything, everything. In truth, I was old, miserable, cranky, alone, and I wanted to die. What drowned one in a flood of sorrow was the noise of the traffic around Nişantaşı Square and the sound of the music on the radio. I told him how, after a life of telling stories, I wanted to hear from Aladdin before I died about everything that I’d forgotten, and be told each and every story about the bottles of cologne in the store, the revenue stamps, the illustrations on match boxes, nylon stockings, postcards, the photographs of movie stars, the annals of sexology, the hairpins, and the books on ritual prayer.
Like all real persons who find themselves snatched into fictions, Aladdin had a superreal presence that challenged the world’s boundaries and a simple logic that stretched the rules. He conceded that he was pleased the press showed an interest in his store. For the last thirty years, he’d been keeping shop fourteen hours a day at that corner store which was busy as a beehive; and on Sundays, while everybody listened to the soccer game on the radio, he took a nap at home between two-thirty and four-thirty in the afternoon. His real name was something else but his customers didn’t know about it. As for newspapers, he only read the popular
Hürriyet.
He pointed out that no political meeting could ever take place in his store, seeing how the Teşvikiye police station was right across from it; besides, he was not interested in politics at all. It wasn’t true that he counted the magazines spitting on his fingers; nor was his store a place out of legends and fairy tales. He was sick of people’s goofs. Some poor geezers too, mistaking the plastic toy watches in the window for the real article, would go into a buying frenzy hoping to scoop up merchandise on the cheap. Then, there were those who played the Paper Horse Race or the National Lottery, and when they didn’t win, they got angry and started a ruckus, thinking Aladdin fixed these games when, in fact, they’d picked the tickets with their very own hands. Take the woman, for example, whose nylons sprung a run, or the mother of the kid who ate domestic chocolates and broke out all over, or the reader who didn’t care for the political views of the newspaper he bought, they all were down on Aladdin who didn’t make the stuff, after all, but only sold it. Aladdin was not responsible for the coffee-colored shoe polish that came in the package instead of coffee. Aladdin was not responsible for the domestic battery which, after only one song from Emel Sayın’s sultry voice, shook itself empty and gummed up the transistor radio. Aladdin was not responsible for the compass which, instead of always pointing to the North as it should, pointed to the Teşvikiye police station. Aladdin was not responsible for the packet of Bafra cigarettes that contained the love-and-marriage proposal put in there by a romantic factory girl; but even so, the painter’s assistant had rushed with bells on to kiss Aladdin’s hand and ask him for the girl’s name and address, as well as asking him to be the best man.
His store was in what was considered “the best” location in Istanbul, but his customers always, but always, knocked him for a loop. He was amazed that the coat ’n tie set still hadn’t caught on to waiting for their turn; sometimes he couldn’t help chewing out some people who ought to know better. He had given up selling bus tickets, for example, because of the handful who always rushed in just as the bus was turning the corner, and yelling like Mongolian soldiers on a looting spree, “Ticket, give me a ticket and make it quick!” they made a mess of the store. He’d known old marrieds who got into spats picking lottery tickets, painted ladies who sniffed thirty different brands before choosing a single bar of soap, retired army officers who came in to buy a whistle and ended up blowing on every whistle in the box, one by one. But he’d become used to it. He no longer cared. No longer was he offended by the housewife who grumbled because he didn’t stock a back issue of a photonovel from ten years ago, by the fat gent who licked a stamp to check out the flavor, and by the butcher’s wife who returned the crepe-paper carnation the next day, good and angry because the artificial flower didn’t have any scent.
He’d built up the store tooth and nail. For years he had bound the
Texas
and
Tom Mix
comics himself, with his own hands; he was the one who opened shop and swept it while the city slept; he himself had fastened the newspapers and the magazines on the door and on the chestnut tree; he’d put the trendiest goods in the store window; and, to satisfy his customers’ demands, he’d traversed the whole of Istanbul for years, inch by inch, store by store, to procure the oddest of merchandise (like the toy ballerinas who pirouetted as the magnetized mirror was brought close; the tricolored shoelaces; the plaster-of-Paris statuettes of Atatürk which had blue lightbulbs behind the pupils; the pencil sharpeners in the shape of Dutch windmills; the signs that said
FOR RENT
or
IN THE NAME OF ALLAH THE COMPASSIONATE, THE MERCIFUL
; the pine-flavored bubblegum which came with pictures of birds numbered from one to a hundred; the pink backgammon dice which could only be found at the Covered Bazaar; the transfer pictures of Tarzan and Admiral Barbarossa; the gadgets which were shoehorns on one end and bottle openers on the other; and the soccer hoods in the colors of the teams—he himself had worn a blue one the last ten years). He hadn’t yet said “nay” even to the most unreasonable demands (Do you carry rose-scented blue ink? Do you have any of those rings that sing?), reasoning that if something were being asked for, then it must have a prototype. He’d make a note in his book, saying “We’ll have it in here by tomorrow,” and he’d search the city, store by store, like a traveler questing after a mystery, until he landed his quarry. There’d been times he’d made easy money peddling photonovels which sold like mad, or else cowboy comics, or photos of domestic movie stars whose faces said blah; and then there’d been cold, bitchy, nothing-doing days when coffee and cigarettes ended up on the black market and people had to line up in cues. When you looked out of your store window, you wouldn’t think people who flowed down the sidewalk were “this way and that way,” but … but people were “something else.”
People who each seemed to march to a different drum suddenly all wanted musical cigarette boxes as if they were going out of style, or they all went ape over Japanese fountain pens no larger than your little finger; then they’d lose interest the next month, and they all wanted pistol-shaped cigarette lighters so bad that Aladdin had a time and a half keeping the lighters in stock. Then there’d be a fad for plastic cigarette holders, and, for the next six months, they’d all be watching the tar build up on the plastic with the obsession of a mad scientist. Then, abandoning that, all of them, the leftist and the conservative, the God-fearing and the godless, they all purchased at Aladdin’s the rosaries that came in all colors and all shapes, and they went to town fingering the beads. Before the bead storm was over and Aladdin could return the leftover rosaries, a dream fad would surface, and they’d line up at the door to get the little booklet interpreting dreams. Some American film would hit and all the punks had to have dark glasses; an item in the papers, and all the women had to have lip gloss; or the men had to have beanies for their heads as if they were imams. All in all, fads spread unchartered like the Black Death. Otherwise, why else had thousands, tens of thousands of people been inspired, all at the same moment, to place the same wooden sailboat on their radios, their radiators, in the rear window of their cars, in their rooms, on their desks, and on their workbenches? How else would you explain the phenomenon of moms and dads, kids and old folks, all goaded with some inexplicable desire to acquire and tack up on their walls and doors the poster of the waif with European features and a huge tear dripping out of his eye? This nation, these people … they’re really … really … “Strange,” I said, completing his sentence. It was my task now, not Aladdin’s, to find words like “incomprehensible,” or even “terrifying.” For a while we fell silent.
Later, I figured out that Aladdin and his customers had a bond through which to communicate the words he himself couldn’t nail down, say, for the little celluloid geese that nodded, or for the old-fashioned chocolates that were shaped like bottles and contained sour-cherry liquor as well as a sour cherry, or else the place in Istanbul you could get the cheapest wood strips for your kite. He favored equally both the little girl who came in with her grandma for one of those chiming hoops and the pimply youth who attempted, retiring to a dark corner of the store, to make rapid love to the nude in the French magazine he snatched when no one was looking. He also loved the bank teller with spectacles on her nose who bought in the evening the novel revealing the lives of the Rich and the Famous in Hollywood, and having digested it overnight, wanted to return it in the morning, saying, “It turns out I already had it in my collection”; and he loved the old guy who put in a special request to have the poster of the girl reading the Koran wrapped in plain newsprint. Even so, his was a conditional love. He could sympathize somewhat with the mother-daughter team who spread out the pattern sheets in fashion magazines all over the store in an effort to cut their material right then and there, and even with the boys who got their toy tanks into battle only to get them broken in fistfights even before they got out of the store. On the other hand, he got a feeling that signs were being sent him from a world that he neither knew nor understood when people asked him for pencil flashlights or for key chains with plastic skulls. What mystery prompted the man who came into the store on a snowy winter day and insisted on buying a “Summer Scape” instead of the “Winter Scape” being used for student home projects? Just as he was about to close shop one night, two shady individuals had come in and fondled the dolls with the movable arms (which came in all sizes and with their own ready-made wardrobes), holding them carefully, tenderly, and skillfully like doctors holding live babies; then watching the pink creatures open and close their eyes as if enchanted, they’d had Aladdin wrap up a doll for them along with a bottle of
rakı
before they disappeared into the dark night, giving Aladdin the willies. After many such incidents, Aladdin had dreams of the dolls he sold in boxes and plastic bags, hallucinating that after the store was closed at night, the dolls started to open and close their eyes very slowly while their hair grew and grew. Perhaps he was about to ask me what it all meant, but suddenly he let himself fall into the same abject and brooding silence that comes over our countrymen when they feel they’ve talked too much, occupied the world too much with their own troubles. Certain that it wouldn’t be disturbed too soon now, we kept the silence together.
Some time later, as Aladdin left wearing an apologetic look, he said it was all up to me now, and he was sure I’d do my best. Someday I might just do my best and write something good about those dolls and our dreams.
People separate for a reason. They tell you their reason. They give you a chance to reply. They do not run away like that. No, it is perfectly childish.
—
MARCEL PROUST
Rüya had written the nineteen-word farewell letter with the green ballpoint pen that Galip wanted kept right next to the phone. The pen was nowhere to be found; considering he couldn’t locate it in his subsequent searches throughout the apartment, Galip surmised that Rüya had written the letter the minute before she went out the door and, thinking the pen might come in handy, popped it into her purse. The fat fountain pen she used lovingly once in a blue moon to fuss over a letter (which she would never finish; if she did, she would hardly ever stick it into an envelope, and if she did, she would never mail it) rested in its usual place: the drawer in the bedroom.
Desperate to find the notebook from which she’d torn the piece of paper, Galip wasted chunks of time. He checked the pages against the letter, riffling through the notebooks in the drawers of the old bureau where, heeding Rüya and Jelal’s advice, he’d set up a museum dedicated to his personal history: the grade-school math workbook where the price of eggs was calculated at six pennies per dozen; the compulsory prayer notebook kept for religion class with swastikas and caricatures of the cross-eyed religion teacher drawn on the last few pages; and the Turkish Lit. notebook which had sketches of skirts in the margins along with the names of international celebrities, handsome local sports figures, and pop stars (“There may be a question on
Beauty and Love
on the exam”).
Later—after going through the same drawers that were so disappointing, getting to the bottoms of boxes that sadly revealed the same reminiscences, and searching for the last time Rüya’s pockets, where the self-same scents seemed to conspire against Galip, persuading him that nothing had changed—when he glanced at the old bureau again, sometime after the call to prayer at dawn, he finally chanced upon the school notebook out of which Rüya had torn the sheet. A page had been ripped hastily and recklessly from the middle of one he’d already looked through but without paying careful attention to the pictures and the notes (“The administration’s plunder of our national forests was what provoked the army into the coup of May 27th”; “The hydra’s cross section resembles the blue vase in Grandma’s sideboard”). It was yet another detail that yielded no conclusion other than Rüya’s reckless haste, other than the details he’d accumulated all night long, the small discoveries, the reminiscences that piled atop one another like falling dominoes.
