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The Black Book
By Orhan Pamuk, Güneli Gün Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1990 Orhan Pamuk
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8763-3
CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST TIME GALIP SAW RÜYA
Do not use epigraphs; they will only kill the mystery in the piece!
—ADLI
Go ahead, kill the mystery; kill the false prophet too who pushes mystery!
—BAHTI
Rüya slept on her stomach in the sweet and warm darkness under the blue-checkered quilt which covered the entire bed with its undulating, shadowy valleys and soft blue hills. The first sounds of the winter morning penetrated the room: carts passing by sporadically and old buses, the salep maker, who was in cahoots with the pastry man, banging his copper jugs up and down on the sidewalk, the whistle of the shill at the dolmus stop. The navy-blue drapes leached out the leaden winter light that came into the room. Galip, languid with sleep, studied his wife's head which poked out of the quilt: Rüya's chin was buried in the down pillow. In the curve of her brow there was something surreal that brought on anxious curiosity about the wondrous events that took place inside her head. "Memory," Jelal had written in one of his columns, "is a garden." Then Galip had thought: Gardens of Rüya, Gardens of Dreaming. Don't think, don't think! If you do, you will suffer jealousy. But Galip couldn't help thinking as he studied his wife's brow.
He wanted to explore in full sunlight the willows, the acacias, the climbing roses in the enclosed garden of Rüya's tranquil sleep. Shamefully apprehensive of the faces he met there: You here too? Well, then hello! Along with the unsavory memories he expected, registering with curiosity and anguish the unexpected male shadows: Beg your pardon, fella, but just when and where did you meet my wife? Why, three years ago at your place; in the pages of a foreign fashion magazine bought at Aladdin's store; at the middle school you both attended; at the foyer of the movie theater where you two stood holding hands ... No, no, perhaps Rüya's head was not this crowded and this cruel; perhaps, in the only sunny corner of her dark garden of memory, Rüya and Galip might have, just now, embarked on a boatride.
A few months after Rüya's folks moved to Istanbul, Galip and Rüya had both come down with the mumps. In those days either Galip's mom, or Rüya's beautiful mother Aunt Suzan, or both, leading Galip and Rüya by the hand, would take them on buses that jiggled along the cobbled streets to Bebek or to Tarabya where they'd go on boatrides. Those days, it was the germs that were redoubtable, not the medications; it was believed that clean Bosphorus air could alleviate the mumps. Mornings, the water was calm, the rowboat white, the boatman always the same and matey. Mothers or aunts would always sit astern and Rüya and Galip side- by-side in the bow, hiding behind the boatman whose back rose and fell as he rowed. Under their thin ankles and feet that looked alike stuck out over the water, the sea flowed by slowly—the seaweed, rainbows of spilled diesel oil, semitransparent pebbles, and the still legible pieces of newspaper which they checked out for Jelal's column.
The first time Galip saw Rüya, a few months before getting the mumps, he was sitting on a stool placed on the dining table for the barber to cut his hair. Those days, the tall barber with the Douglas Fairbanks mustache used to come to the house five days a week to shave Grandpa. That was at the time when the lines for coffee got longer in front of both the Arab's and Aladdin's store, when nylons were sold by traffickers, when Chevvies slowly began to proliferate in Istanbul, and when Galip started grade school and carefully read Jelal's column which he wrote under the pseudonym of "Selim Kaçmaz" on the second page of Milliyet five times a week, but not the time when he first learned to read; Grandma had taught him to read two years before all that. They sat at one corner of the dining table and Grandma, blowing the smoke of the Bafra cigarette that was never absent from her lips, making her grandson's eyes water, hoarsely divulged the great magic of how letters joined up with each other, and the unusually large horse in the alphabet book became bluer and more lifelike. The horse under which it said HORSE was larger than the bony horses that belonged to the lame watercarrier's and thievish ragman's horse carts. Galip used to wish he could pour a magic potion on this healthy alphabet-book horse that would bring it alive, but later, when he wasn't allowed to start school at the second-grade level but had to go through again the same alphabet book with the horse, he realized it was a silly wish.
Had Grandpa really been able to go out and get the magic potion he promised to bring in a pomegranate-colored vial, Galip would've poured the liquid on the dusty copies of L'Illustration full of First World War zeppelins, mortars, and muddy corpses, on the postcards Uncle Melih sent from Paris and Algiers, on the picture of the orangutan nursing its baby that Vasif had cut out of Dünya, and on the faces of the weird people Jelal clipped out of the papers. But Grandpa didn't go out anymore, not even to the barber's. He was home all day. Even so, he dressed up just as he did in those days when he had gone out to the store: his old English jacket with wide lapels which was gray like the stubble that grew on his face on Sundays, drop trousers, cuff links, and a narrow tie that Dad called "the bureaucrat's cravat." Mom said "cravate," never "cravat": her family had been better off than his in the old days. Then Mom and Dad would talk about Grandpa as if they were talking about those old, peeling wood-frame houses another one of which collapsed daily; and later, forgetting about Grandpa, if their voices rose up against each other, they'd turn to Galip: "You go upstairs and play now." "Shall I take the elevator?" "Don't let him take the elevator by himself!" "Don't take the elevator by yourself!" "Shall I play with Vasif?" "No, he gets mad!"
Actually, he didn't get mad at all. Vasif was deaf and mute, but he understood that I was only playing "Secret Passage," and not making fun of him, as I crept on the floor dragging myself under the beds to the end of the cave, as if to reach the depth of darkness in the apartment building, like a soldier who proceeds with feline caution in the tunnel he's dug into the enemy trenches; but all the others, aside from Rüya who arrived later, had no notion of how it was. Sometimes Vasif and I stood at the window together watching the streetcar tracks. One window in the concrete bay of the concrete apartment building looked on the mosque which was one end of the earth, the other window on the girls' lycée which was the other end; in between were the police station, the large chestnut tree, the street-corner, and Aladdin's store which buzzed with business. As we watched the customers go in and out of the store, pointing out cars to each other, Vasif could get excited and produce a fearsome snarling noise as if he were fighting the devil in his sleep, plunging me into abject terror. Then, just behind us, seated in his gimpy armchair across from Grandma where they both smoked like a couple of chimneys, Grandpa would comment to Grandma who didn't listen, "Vasif scared the devil out of Galip again," and then, more out of habit than curiosity, he'd ask us: "So, how many cars did you count?" But neither paid any attention to the detailed account I gave on the numbers of Dodges, the Packards, the DeSotos, and the new Chevrolets.
Grandma and Grandpa talked right through the Turkish and Western music, the news, the commercials for banks, cologne, and the state lottery, as they listened to the radio which was on from morning to night, and on top of which slept the figurine of a thick-coated and self-confident dog that didn't look like a Turkish dog. Often they complained about the cigarettes between their fingers as if talking about a toothache they'd become accustomed to because it never ceased, blaming each other for their failure to quit; and if one commenced to cough as if drowning, the other proclaimed being in the right, first with victory and merriment, then with anxiety and anger. But sooner or later, one of them would get good and mad: "Lay off, for God's sake! My cigarettes are the only pleasure I've got!" Then, something read in the paper would get dragged in: "Apparently, they're good for the nerves." Then maybe they would fall silent for a bit, but the silence during which the tick-tock of the wall clock in the hallway could be heard never lasted very long. While they rustled the newspaper in their hands and played bezique in the afternoon, they kept right on talking; and when the others in the building showed up for dinner and to listen to the radio together, having finished reading Jelal's column, Grandpa would say, "Maybe if he were allowed to sign his own name to his column, he'd pull his wits together." "A grown man too!" Grandma would sigh and with a sincere expression of curiosity on her face as if she were asking for the first time the same question she always asked: "So, does he write so badly because they won't let him sign his name to his column? Or is it because he writes so badly that they won't let him sign his name?" "At least, very few people know it's us that he's disgracing," Grandpa would say, opting for the consolation they both resorted to from time to time, "since he isn't allowed to sign his own name." "Nobody's any the wiser," Grandma would respond with a demeanor the sincerity of which didn't convince Galip. "Who says he's talking about us in those columns anyway?" Later—when Jelal received hundreds of letters from his readers every week and republished the earlier columns, this time under his own illustrious name, having changed the pieces only a little here and there because, according to some claims, his imagination had dried up, or because he couldn't find time from womanizing and politics, or because of simple laziness—Grandpa would repeat the same sentence he'd repeated hundreds of times before, affecting the boredom and the somewhat obvious pretensions of a two-bit stage actor, "Just who doesn't know, for God's sake? Everybody and his brother knows that the bit about the apartment building is all about this place!" and Grandma would shut up.
It was about then that Grandpa was beginning to mention his dream, which recurred more often as time went on. The dream he recounted, his eyes flashing as they did when he told the stories they repeated to each other all day long, was blue; in the navy-blue rain of the dream, his hair and beard grew and grew. After listening to the dream patiently, Grandma would say, "The barber is due to arrive soon," but Grandpa wasn't cheered by the talk about the barber. "Talks too much, asks too many questions!" After the discussions of the blue dream and the barber, Galip had heard Grandpa mutter weakly under his breath a couple of times: "Should've built it somewhere else, a different building. Turns out, this place is jinxed."
Much later, after they moved out of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments which they sold off flat by flat, and, just as in other buildings of the same type in the area, the little boutiques, gynecologists who performed abortions on the sly, and insurance offices moved in, every time Galip passed by Aladdin's store he wondered, while he studied the building's dark and mean façade, just what Grandpa had meant by saying the place was jinxed. Even when he was young, having noticed that the barber always inquired, more out of habit than curiosity, about Uncle Melih whom it took years to return first from Europe and Africa and then from Izmir to Istanbul and the apartment compound (So, tell me sir, when is the oldest boy coming back from Africa?), and being aware that Grandpa enjoyed neither the question nor the topic, Galip had sensed that the jinx in Grandpa's mind had more to do with his oldest and oddest son leaving his wife and firstborn boy to go out of the country and then his return, when he did return, with a new wife and new daughter (Rüya).
As Jelal related to Galip years later, Uncle Melih was here when they started building the apartment compound. They couldn't compete with Haci Bekir's sweetshop and his lokums, but they knew they could peddle Grandma's quince, fig, and sour-cherry preserves in the jars they lined up on the shelves. At the building site in Nisantasi, Uncle Melih would meet his dad and brothers, some of whom arrived from the candy shop in Sirkeci (which they first converted into a cake shop and later into a restaurant) and the others from the White Pharmacy at Karaköy. Uncle Melih, who wasn't yet thirty then, would take the afternoons off from his law offices where he spent his time either quarreling or drawing pictures of ships and deserted islands on the pages of old lawsuits rather than practicing law, arrived at the site in Nisantasi, took off his coat and tie, rolled up his sleeves, and got going just to egg on the construction workers who slacked up as the time to quit approached. It was then that Uncle Melih began to pontificate about the necessity of learning European confiture, ordering gilt wrappers for the chestnut candy, starting up a colorful bubble-bath mill in partnership with a French concern, acquiring the machinery from companies in America and Europe which kept going bankrupt in epidemic proportions, finessing a grand piano for Aunt Halé on the cheap, having someone take Vasif to an acclaimed ear and brain specialist either in France or Germany. Two years later, when Vasif and Uncle Melih left for Marseilles on a Romanian ship (the Tristina) the rose-scented photograph of which Galip first saw in one of Grandma's boxes, and eight years later when he read the bit among Vasif's newspaper clippings about the ship's hitting a floating mine and sinking on the Black Sea, the apartments had been built but not yet inhabited. A year after when Vasif returned alone to the Sirkeci train station, he was still deaf and dumb "naturally" (this last word, the secret or the reason for the accentuation of which had never become clear to Galip, had been spoken by Aunt Halé when the subject came up), but in his lap he clasped an aquarium full of Japanese goldfish the sight of which he couldn't bear to leave at first, which he watched at times as if his breath would stop, at times with tears running out of his eyes, and whose great- great-great-grandchildren, fifty years later, he would still be watching. At that time Jelal and his mother were living in the third-floor apartment (which was in later years sold to an Armenian) but since it was necessary to send Uncle Melih the money to continue his commercial research in the streets of Paris, they moved up into that small attic apartment on the roof (which was at first used as storage room and then converted into a semiflat) so that their own apartment could be rented out. His mother had already been thinking of taking Jelal and returning back home when the letters Uncle Melih sent from Paris containing recipes of candied fruit and cakes, formulas of soap and cologne, photos of movie stars and ballerinas who ate or used them, and the packages out of which came minty toothpastes, marrons glacées, samples of liqueur-filled chocolates, and toy fireman's or sailor's hats began to dwindle. For them to come to the decision to move out of the flat and return home to the wood-frame house in Aksaray, which belonged to her mother and father who had a small post in the charitable foundations administration, it took the Second World War to break out and Uncle Melih to send them a postcard from Benghazi on which could be seen a strange sort of minaret and an airplane. Following this brown-and-white postcard, which bore the information that the route back home had been mined, he'd sent other black-and-white postcards from Morocco where he went after the war. A handpainted postcard, showing the colonial hotel where an American movie was filmed later in which both the arms dealers and the spies fall for the same nightclub dames, was how Grandma and Grandpa found out that Uncle Melih had married a Turkish girl he met in Marrakesh, that the bride was a descendant of Muhammad, that is, she was a Sayyide, a Chieftain, and that she was extremely beautiful. (Much later, when Galip took another look at that postcard, years later when he was able to identify the nationalities of the flags waving on the second-story balconies, and thinking in the style Jelal used in the stories he called "The Bandits of Beyoglu," he'd decided that "the seed of Rüya had been sown" in one of the rooms of this hotel that looked like a wedding cake.) They didn't believe Uncle Melih himself had sent the next postcard that arrived from Izmir six months later, since they'd been convinced that he would never return home. There'd been some gossip that he and his new wife had converted to Christianity, joined up with some missionaries on their way to Kenya, to a valley where the lions hunted deer with three antlers, and established the church of a new religious sect that brought together the Crescent and the Cross. Some curiosity seeker who knew the bride's family in Izmir brought the news that, as a result of the shady enterprises Uncle Melih undertook in North Africa (like arms dealing and bribing a king), he had become a millionaire, and succumbed to the whims of his wife, whose beauty was on everyone's lips, whom he intended to take to Hollywood and make famous, already the bride's photos were supposed to be all over French and Arab magazines, etc. In reality, on the postcards that had gone around and around in the apartment building, getting scratched and ill-treated like money suspected of being counterfeit, Uncle Melih had written that the reason they were coming home was that he'd been so homesick, he'd taken to his bed. But they felt better "now" that he'd taken in hand, with a new and modern understanding, the business concerns of his father-in-law who was in tobacco and figs. On the next card the message appeared more tangled than nappy hair and the contents were interpreted differently on every floor perhaps because of the inheritance problems that would eventually push the family into a silent war. But later, as Galip read for himself, all Uncle Melih had written, in not too overwrought a style, was that he'd like to return to Istanbul soon and that he had a baby daughter he hadn't decided what to name yet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, Güneli Gün. Copyright © 1990 Orhan Pamuk. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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