The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  Outside was Mardin.

  The night air was a little cool. I walked under the archway in the stone room and looked out the window on the other side, into the darkness. The roads were silent, and I saw trembling lights in the side streets. The sound of music came to me again from somewhere, as though there were a musical evening someplace close by. Mesopotamia lay before me, quiet and still.

  I was inside the night of Mardin. All alone with myself. I leaned back on the silk pillows and took a sip of the rose sherbet in front of me.

  This city gave me a strange tranquility. As though I were a hundred years old. I knew everything; I’d lived it all and forgotten it. I felt that kind of lightness. I took another sip from the rose sherbet with lemon.

  From the edge of the window I could see part of the Şehidiye Mosque in the lights of the minarets.

  In a little while I’d lie down on my bed and drift off to sleep. Or I might curl up on the sofa where I was sitting. I could bury my head among the silk pillows. My eyelids were slowly getting heavier. A silver ring with a purple stone that I had seen in the underground market during the day came to mind. It was so beautiful.

  I wondered if I’d be able to find that store tomorrow.

  It was somewhere over there by the Seyr-i Mardin.

  I heard a noise by my ear. Like a cat purring. I quickly turned my head. I came nose to nose with a dark man. He was closely examining me with his deep black eyes, a rather ugly man whom I seemed to know from somewhere, but how could someone get into my room at this hour of the night?

  I jumped up from where I had been curled up. I was all set to yell as loud as I could, to let out a scream.

  The man slowly put his finger up to his lips and signaled me to be quiet.

  He was well dressed, wearing an olive-colored jacket with an open-necked white shirt underneath. He was unshaven and had purple rings under his eyes. His hands were long and his fingers bony.

  “What do you want here?” I asked. “Who are you?”

  “You don’t recognize me . . . ,” said the man.

  “I don’t know you! And what do you want in my hotel at this hour?”

  The man replied calmly:

  “I’m Luis Buñuel. The man you always think about. Or at least that’s what I thought. But see, you didn’t even recognize me . . .”

  I was befuddled.

  I scrutinized him very carefully now.

  Yes, it was. The man across from me was indeed the famous Spanish director Luis Buñuel. I suddenly recognized him. The photograph on the cover of the book in my house that I never put down . . . My Last Breath. The Spanish genius I so admired. The man I got so excited about when I read his autobiography. Someone I might desire to be with if he were alive.

  He was a close friend of the French surrealists, Sartre, Camus, Pablo Neruda, and Salvador Dali. Luis Buñuel, with whom the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was in love. There he was across from me among the multicolored silk cushions in my room with the stone arch in the Zinciriye Hotel in Mardin.

  He was an incredible man, an expert at passion and perversion, who could extract the human spirit like a liqueur from a still and masterfully explain it, male to the core, who played with guns, wandered in graveyards, and deafened himself in one ear by firing off a gun in an enclosed room.

  In Mardin . . .

  In my hotel room.

  “Mr. Buñuel, I do recognize you,” I said. “Please excuse me; I just couldn’t place you a minute ago. Tired from the trip . . . The influence of this city . . .”

  “But what a city,” muttered Luis Buñuel. “The city out there is incomparable. It’s very different from Toledo and Madrid, but it still has such a similar atmosphere.”

  “Yes,” I cried. “Toledo!”

  “And Madrid,” said Buñuel. “Here and there. The Madrid I live in and suffered with. Like in a dream . . . Bits and pieces.”

  I had read that he was very short tempered. The famous star Catherine Deneuve had written in an elegant little book her memories of the films she made with him and expressed how intimidated she was by Buñuel. Buñuel didn’t even speak to the star, who was in the lead role; some days were harder to work with him, he was very exacting and sometimes spent days on tiny details. Still, Catherine Deneuve admired him. She played the lead in his films Belle de Jour and Tristana.

  “His hearing difficulties sometimes made it impossible to communicate with him,” she wrote in one part of the book. “His genius was amazing. It was hard to meet his demands. He was a deep, silent man.”

  I was so jealous when I read these sentences of Catherine Deneuve’s . . . to work with Luis Buñuel. To go into his world, to be able to experience the unreachable power of his imagination and the pitch-black labyrinths of his subconscious. To be near him, as he analyzed life . . .

  “What are you thinking?” asked Buñuel.

  “The things that I know about you. What I was able to learn . . .”

  “Really?” he said. I realized that he was thinking about completely different things.

  “Tell me,” he said, leaning over toward me. “What did you feel when you read that midnight letter the old doctor wrote to you?”

  “How do you know about that letter?” I burst out, astonished.

  “I know,” said Buñuel. “I know this letter full of desire and obsession very well. You’re hiding it in your purse, in your business card case.”

  I was amazed.

  “How can you know all of these details? The inside of my purse?”

  He chuckled.

  “There’s a wonderful photograph of Marilyn Monroe on your card case. You had that case made in Giresun this year . . .”

  My mouth was agape.

  “Yes,” I muttered. “I had that case made when I went to Giresun. Marilyn’s picture is on it. And the letter is inside. But you . . . How can you know such details?”

  “It’s my job to know details,” said Buñuel. “Pay it no mind.”

  He drew close to me and stared into my eyes.

  “Why didn’t you throw that letter away? Why are you still keeping it in your card case? You could have ripped it up and thrown it away that night. But you didn’t throw it away; you’re keeping it,” he said. “Why? Tell me, why?”

  I couldn’t answer the question.

  “I don’t know why myself,” I murmured. “Maybe to read it again. All my life I always ripped up interesting letters that I received and threw them away. Maybe that’s why I kept this letter . . .”

  “A letter that comes from an eighty-six-year-old man,” said Buñuel.

  “Yes, it’s an interesting letter,” I said. “It completely exposes the male subconscious.”

  Buñuel nodded.

  “Yes, it’s very interesting,” he said. “Extraordinary, actually. Well that could be the subject for a film.”

  Why hadn’t I thrown away the letter that the old doctor had put in the white letter box at Elfe’s house after rushing downstairs in his pajamas in the middle of the night?

  I asked myself, “Why?”

  Buñuel’s eyes were fixed on me.

  “Don Luis,” I said. “As I said, I couldn’t throw that letter out because it exposed a man’s subconscious, stark, unexplored. Not everyone gets a letter like that. There are strange things in that midnight letter: insistence, an order, a forceful passion, and perversion. I couldn’t have thrown all of that into the garbage.”

  “Right,” said Buñuel. “The letter is a document. In your hands. That old doctor actually placed a map of his soul in your hands. A document of passion.”

  “A document of passion,” I muttered.

  I felt a sense of incredible excitement being there with Buñuel.

  “Do you want to see the letter?” I asked.

  “If you have no objection, yes,” he said.

  I went through my purse, which was on the table, and found my card case. From the cover, Marilyn was winking at me with her sexiest look.

  “Here, here’s th
e letter.”

  I took out the little smudged piece of paper and gave it to Buñuel. He took it from my hand and carefully read the sentences that the old doctor had written.

  “Let me order you a rose sherbet.”

  “Okay.”

  I pressed the buzzer. A little later there was a tap on the door; it was the waiter. I slowly opened the door in the entryway of my room, beyond the arch, a little crack.

  “I’d like another glass of rose sherbet.”

  “Of course, ma’am. Should I put a little cinnamon in it?”

  “Please do.”

  I went back into the room.

  Luis Buñuel held the letter out to me.

  “It’s an extraordinary sexual passion,” he said. “Where is this man now?”

  “In Ankara; he lives on the top floor of the building my friend lives in.”

  “Where does he observe you from?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Most likely from a window,” said Buñuel.

  There was a knock at the door. I went and got the rose sherbet.

  “Drink this.”

  “Is it good?”

  “You’ll like it . . .”

  “Thank you,” said Buñuel.

  He took a sip of the rose sherbet.

  “This is like the very city we’re in,” he said. “Mysterious. Wonderful.”

  I remembered the big living room window above the street door. The old doctor sat there sometimes.

  “He sees you from that world every day; he follows you,” said Luis Buñuel.

  The call to prayer drifting out over all Mardin from the minaret of the Şehidiye Mosque interrupted our conversation briefly. Then the call to prayer coming from the other mosques seemed to be echoing off the stone walls.

  Buñuel finished off his rose sherbet in one gulp.

  He had stood up.

  “Are you going?” I asked.

  “I am,” he said. “I’ll come again. It’s very late. I’ll go to Diyarbakır tomorrow. In the afternoon I’ll come back to Mardin.”

  “You’re going to Diyarbakır?” I asked in surprise.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have to meet someone in the Sülüklü Han. You’ll still be here, right?”

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’ll be in my room tomorrow afternoon, Don Luis.”

  “See you then,” he said.

  I rushed to the door after he left. I opened it and stared for a long time at the hall spread with green, blue, and red kilims. He must have left quickly. The corridor was empty and the hotel was asleep.

  I went back in my room and locked the door. I curled up on the couch. It must be almost morning. So that meant Buñuel had stayed in my room a long time.

  I looked at the empty glass of the rose sherbet he had drunk down.

  My eyes were slowly closing.

  THE WINDOW IN ANKARA

  I was about to go into Elfe’s apartment, on Meneviş Street, as I do every afternoon. I had gotten out of the taxi a second or two ago, and I was putting my change purse into my big handbag as I raised my eyes and looked up.

  He’s always there in the window. Sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, the woman who takes care of him sitting in the chair nearby.

  The old doctor was looking down from the window at me, smiling slightly. I seemed to see a strange gleam, like that of happiness, in his cold blue eyes.

  Ever since I got that letter, I’ve found myself ineluctably looking up at that window now and then.

  I raised my eyes a little, and I was met with that pair of pale blue eyes staring at me. I went inside with quick steps, sometimes even running, and quickly pressed Elfe’s bell one or two times.

  Elfe opened the door.

  “Your guy’s in the window again.”

  “When did you see him?” I asked.

  “A little while ago, when I went out to get simits for you. He was waiting there.”

  “Waiting for what? How would he know what time I was going to come?”

  “He just knows,” said Elfe. “You always come around the same time. He sits down in front of the window before noon.”

  “There’s a woman who takes care of him . . .”

  “She’s there for his wife,” said Elfe.

  “What if he comes downstairs again?”

  “Then I’ll tell the building manager.”

  “Don’t, that would be a terrible thing!”

  “They should control him. He’s obviously sneaking out of the house,” said Elfe.

  “Do you think that’s normal?”

  “How could it be normal? He’s senile. He probably has Alzheimer’s.”

  “But when they came down here and were talking to us, there was nothing wrong. Well, there was nothing definite,” I said.

  “It could have just happened all of a sudden,” said Elfe. “We hear him. He’s talking up there.”

  “But if that’s the case, it’s awful,” I said.

  “I think the caretaker is perfectly aware of everything. She’s always with the doctor there at the window. She says some things to him.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “He laid down the condition that you shouldn’t hear about anything in the letter he sent me.”

  “The guy is senile,” said Elfe. “Disgusting. Those thoughts . . .”

  “But this is only a manifestation. An aged brain manifesting a desire . . .”

  Elfe just kept staring at me.

  “It’s a really gross, audacious, awful thing.”

  “I know. Like the subconscious of the old people in Buñuel’s films,” I muttered.

  “Who’s Buñuel?”

  “Luis Buñuel. A surrealist. A Spanish director. I adore him. I’ll show you one of his films the first chance I get,” I said.

  “Are there things like this in his films?”

  “Things like this . . . and more. Very unusual.”

  Elfe shook her head.

  “Luis Buñuel,” she said. “Is he alive?”

  “No. He died. If he were alive, I’d find him. I adore him. I’m fixated,” I said.

  “Was he handsome?”

  “He was an ugly man.”

  “I’m curious,” said Elfe. “Let’s watch one of his films.”

  “Fine, I’ll bring one of his films over. Viridiana or Tristana.”

  “Where will you find it?”

  “There’s a video shop on the bottom floor of the shopping arcade in Tunalı Hilmi where the movie theater used to be.”

  “Okay.”

  PHYSICAL IMPRISONMENT

  I was slowly climbing up the narrow zigzag stairs with iron railings on the side to get to the Seyr-i Mardin. The inside of my hand had rust on it; I’d wipe it off when I got up there. Who knows where I had wandered?

  Finally I got up to the very top and reached the terrace up there.

  The view in front of me was dizzying.

  Silent, mysterious Mesopotamia stretched out to the edge of the horizon, where it seemed to meet Syria.

  The colors were always the same. A world of grey, beige, and light brown. In front of me were a few houses with flat roofs, and one or two unusual minarets. The air was cloudless and dry. There was a glow in the sky today, a secret track of the sun that seemed to show the plain in a different way.

  I sat down on a chair at the edge of the terrace, next to the iron railing, looking at the horizon and at the nearby surroundings. I could see things today that I couldn’t see yesterday. I saw a little graveyard next to a tiny mosque. Silent and alone. A haze slowly started to form in the air, like some kind of thin dust descending. I realized that the weather was getting warmer.

  I drifted off in thought.

  The body as a prison.

  I was imprisoned within my own body. This city, this atmosphere and the world I encountered here for the first time that was so unusual, so out of the ordinary, made me think of this.

  I was imprisoned in my body, by my eyes, whether sharp or myopic, my legs, weak or stron
g, by what I could reach with my two hands, the steps I took, the body I carried, my little aches and pains, my weariness, my lack of energy or the opposite feeling I sometimes had of extreme vitality, the swelling in my left foot, the ache in my left knee, the slight ringing in my ear, and the burning in my chest, all of these imprisoned me in my body. A soul confined in a body.

  I slowly started to be aware of this physical confinement that I had never noticed in the early years of my life.

  Was it a bad thing?

  Absolutely not. This was me, with my aching tooth, lazy eye, my stomach that sometimes filled with gas, it was me, and I was a person made out of flesh and bone.

  All these things that I have enumerated were things that reminded me of my existence and that I was alive. The moment I was released from the prison of my physical being, I would be dead.

  I suddenly realized that. My soul would leave the home it had had for years, go someplace else, and maybe to some new home where it would settle itself, try to find a brand-new fate for itself. I asked the waiter for cold water and a coffee with mastic in it.

  The plain of Mesopotamia and Mardin made me think of these things.

  Maybe the city made me feel the presence of the sheikhs and dervishes that could be abstracted out of its body.

  Its influence over me was extraordinary. As I experienced it, as I followed it for days and nights, I seemed to be constantly in dialogue with a kind of wisdom.

  “I am content,” I said. “I’m content with this imprisonment by the body.”

  My eye was attracted to the old cemetery on the slope of the ancient mosque. The bodies lying there had all been abandoned, left to the earth.

  So, that’s what was passing through my mind as I sat on the terrace on the top floor of the Seyr-i Mardin.

  Imprisoned by the body.

  “Anyway, one day this confinement will end; you’ll be let out,” said a voice next to my ear.

  I quickly turned and looked. There was no one there. I looked behind me, nobody there.

  I must have imagined I heard something, I thought to myself.

  There was no one around.

  The waiter had vanished too.

  I slowly sipped my water. If I asked for a rose sherbet, would they have it, I wondered, around here?