The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  Somebody was coming up the stairs. I heard his footsteps. It must be some tourist visiting the city. The place where I sat was one of the most attractive locations in the city. But this place was not a touristic city. It had remained beautiful and mysterious because it was untouched; it had withdrawn and protected itself.

  Suddenly I thought of that purple ring. The ring with the purple stone I saw in the window of a shop in the underground market yesterday morning. I had to buy it.

  The person climbing up the steps of the Seyr-i Mardin appeared now. He came over to me.

  It was Luis Buñuel!

  “Don Luis,” I called out excitedly. “Is that you? I heard your footsteps.”

  I immediately pulled a chair over next to me. He came and sat down.

  “The stairs were steep and exhausting, but it’s worth it to see this view,” he said.

  His eyes were sweeping over the plain of Mesopotamia.

  Who knew what the city was making him think?

  Suddenly I remembered. “You were supposed to go to Diyarbakır today,” I said.

  “Yes, I had something to do there, but I put it off,” he said. “I wandered around in Mardin and I looked for you. In the end I guessed that you would be here. I want to ask you some things.”

  I ordered rose sherbets from the waiter.

  “Please put cinnamon in it,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “There were things I wanted to ask,” Buñuel continued. “Things about the old doctor. Did he seem quite normal the last time you spoke to him?”

  “I only spoke to him once anyway. He seemed perfectly normal to me,” I said. “In other words, there was nothing strange in what he said or how he talked. He remembered everything very well. In fact, I was surprised at how powerful his memory was. He spoke about what Ankara and Izmir were like in the old days. We spoke about this and that, regular things, too. Everything seemed normal.”

  Buñuel took a sip from the rose sherbet the waiter had brought.

  “In other words, he didn’t show any symptoms of Alzheimer’s,” he said.

  “I don’t understand. Do you think the old doctor has Alzheimer’s?”

  “I don’t know,” said Buñuel. “I wonder about it. He might not either . . .”

  “But a letter like that, the audacity, coming downstairs in the middle of the night, that declaration of love?”

  He shook his head. He was thinking.

  “Maybe he’s in the first phases of the disease,” he said. “He recognizes you, knows himself, knows his desire and easily communicates it. There are orders and directions in the letter. There’s no disconnect, nothing missing.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I noticed that too.”

  “As though he were used to commanding . . .”

  “He was apparently an eminent doctor. A stern man,” I said. “Everyone in the hospital was terrified of him, I guess.”

  “He was a stern man.”

  Buñuel was intrigued.

  “Very tough,” I said. “In the apartment where he lives now, he gets involved in all kinds of things, giving orders, like all the old retired people. But I can imagine him in the hospital, when he was young.”

  I had finished my rose sherbet. In some indescribable way it quenched my thirst and cooled me.

  “So you’ve thought about him when he was young,” said Buñuel.

  I was taken aback for a moment.

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “Really, I imagined it.”

  “That’s so interesting,” said Buñuel. “It’s so interesting that you thought about that . . .”

  I blushed a little.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why is it interesting that I thought about his youth?”

  “You’re imagining what he was like years ago,” said Buñuel. “That proposal that came to you in the middle of the night. An old man over eighty, useless now. You would probably be afraid if you were left alone with him.”

  “That’s for sure,” I said.

  “A masculine spirit, trapped in an aged body. A brain that may or may not be working very well. And you’re an obsession in that brain now,” he said.

  “Yes,” I agreed softly.

  “It’s not important how the brain functions or doesn’t,” said Buñuel. “The really important thing is that you’re inside that brain. You’re there now. In fact right now, at this very moment as you sit here on this terrace in Mardin, you’re inside that man’s brain. You’re an image, a voice, an object of desire, someone he’s waiting for.”

  “It’s a terrible thing,” I said. “Revolting. What can I do?”

  “Nothing,” said Buñuel.

  “If the old doctor has Alzheimer’s, he might forget me,” I said.

  “Maybe he’ll remember only you,” said Buñuel.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know the male soul,” he said. “You know my films . . .”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s like a clip taken from one of your films.”

  He laughed a little.

  “I’m aware of that,” he said in a low voice.

  “Is that why you’re here, Don Luis? Are you here to follow this matter from up close?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  He had stood up.

  “Now I’ll go down those incredibly steep steps,” he said.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “I’ll come and find you again,” he said. He walked off toward the stairs.

  I sat there for a while. I gazed at the vast, endless plain in front of me, at the light slipping out from between the clouds and making plays of color on the plain, and the line of the little graveyard, and the hazy sky in the distance.

  IZMIR

  How did I get here?

  I was confused.

  It was as though I had been flung into the sky like a ball, and splat! landed here.

  I was in Izmir.

  Izmir was all around me. It must be just evening; there wasn’t a single light lit on the edge of the bay yet. A strange Izmir. A different Izmir.

  I looked around. I was somewhere over by Varyant. In front of me was an old building the color of cooked meat that I always used to see; across from me the bay stretched out, filled with the sea, like a blue oyster shell.

  There was something strange, the underpasses weren’t there, the bridges weren’t there, the silhouettes of the big hotels reaching into the sky weren’t there; everything was very plain and spare, like some old-time Izmir. I must be in an old Izmir. I suddenly realized this. The city around me was like the Izmir you see in some old postcard. Solitary and absolutely empty.

  I started to run down from Varyant in excitement. Am I in a dream? I wondered. But no, everything was very real. The sky was real, the bay was realistic, and there was very little traffic. The bay hadn’t been filled in; it was there before me the way it used to be long ago. Maybe it was the Izmir of the sixties that I was in now. I had never seen Izmir in the sixties. I was thinking it must be those years. Completely empty. Like a provincial town.

  What could have happened? How did I wind up here? It could also be the seventies. I just can’t figure it out. It could also be the fifties, I think to myself now. The old days . . . No crowds, nobody out on the streets. There are beautiful houses along the Kordonboyu waterfront, all of them right on the bay. I ran over there. My foot twisted. My shoe flew off my foot. I fell forward, head over heels. There was an unbelievable pain in my left ankle. A taxi stopped next to me. Tears came from my eyes; I was confused. How did I wind up in this weird world? And if something happens to my ankle . . .

  The driver got out of the car and came over to me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Can you get up?”

  “I can’t stand on my foot.”

  “Let me take you to the hospital,” said the driver.

  Leaning on his arm, I got into the car.

  “Which hospital are we going to?”

  “There’s a hospital,” he said. “Nearby. Konak
Maternity.”

  “Let’s go to the emergency room.”

  I was covered with sweat because of the pain. The car glided down from Varyant in the Izmir twilight. I lay back in the car, observing an Izmir I didn’t know at all.

  “Here we are.”

  I got out of the taxi in front of the hospital with the driver’s help. I virtually dragged myself over to the door of the emergency room.

  A short hospital orderly came out. He was a dark, burly man. He saw me and came running over. I took his arm and went inside.

  “Sit there,” he said to me. “The doctor will come in a minute.”

  “Is there an orthopedist? I guess it’s broken.”

  “There’s the emergency doctor. He’ll examine you.”

  I stared into the hospital, at this little room at the entrance. You could hear the call to prayer in the distance. It must be the evening prayer.

  “The doctor’s coming,” said the man.

  I got to my feet.

  A man burst in the door like the wind. He was a tall, thin man.

  I looked at his face.

  The doctor! It was that doctor! The one in Ankara. The old man who left me the letter in the middle of the night. I stared in amazement at his face. He was very young. He must have been twenty-six or twenty-seven. He looked at me briefly.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “My left ankle . . .”

  “How did it happen? Where did you fall?”

  “I tripped on the road.”

  “Were you dizzy?”

  “Maybe . . .”

  He was examining my ankle with his hand.

  “They should do an x-ray,” he said. “Take her on a stretcher.”

  He didn’t seem to recognize me.

  The attendant jumped up. A little later, I was being carried downstairs on a stretcher that was like a hammock.

  So the doctor was in this hospital. Maybe he was an intern. He just showed me a doctor’s cold professional interest. This was not the man who had written that letter burning with desire and put it in the mailbox at midnight in Ankara.

  What year were we in? I was so curious. I had to find a mirror. I had to look at my face, at my eyes. I started to be curious about myself.

  A technician was preparing to take the x-ray. The primitiveness of the equipment astonished me.

  “Please put your leg out like that. Slowly . . .”

  I stuck my leg out where the technician told me. The squat attendant was by my side. He hadn’t left me. I looked at my shoes. They were the black patent leather spring shoes with low heels I had put on this morning in Ankara. My stocking was ripped. My left knee was a little bruised.

  “Is there anything wrong with the knee?” the technician asked.

  “The doctor didn’t look at the knee,” the orderly replied.

  “Let’s take an x-ray of the knee too,” said the technician. “Look, it’s bruised.”

  The procedure took a long time. I stared at the ceiling from where I lay.

  I wonder what year we are in. What month? How are my face and my eyes? How old am I?

  I really wondered about this for a while. I couldn’t ask anyone. I couldn’t ask what year we were in either.

  “How’s my ankle?” I was able to ask.

  “The doctor will look at the films now,” said the technician. “They’ll take you upstairs. Sit up slowly.”

  I raised myself up and sat on the leather cushion. The stretcher, whose middle part swayed like a hammock, arrived. The attendant and a young man lifted me onto the stretcher. We went upstairs through shadowy staircases. The lights slowly started to come on in the hospital. They were dim bulbs that only slightly illuminated the faces of a few people passing by in the corridor before subsiding into an enigmatic semidarkness inside themselves. I was inside a color that was like a person’s past.

  We came to the doctor’s office. I sat down across from him in a worn-out chair with the attendant’s help.

  The young man gave the x-rays to the doctor. He was examining them now.

  “There’s a fracture in the ankle,” he said, looking at me.

  Those cold blue eyes and his youthful state astounded me.

  “Is it broken?” I burst out.

  “It’s broken but it’s a clean break. We’ll put a cast on it right away.”

  He put the x-rays aside.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  I said my name, staring into his eyes. He was writing something on a piece of paper with a fountain pen.

  “After the cast you can go home. Don’t walk on it for three weeks.”

  “I don’t have a home,” I murmured.

  The doctor was taken aback.

  “You don’t have a home?”

  “I’m not from Izmir.”

  “I see.”

  He was thinking.

  “I can put you in a bed in a ward of the hospital for a day or two. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, that would be fine.”

  “Well then, let me arrange for a bed in the ward.”

  He turned to the orderly. “Have them put the cast on. I’ll see her in the general surgery ward,” he said.

  MARDIN

  I came to my hotel, passing by the front of the Şehidiye Mosque. I had wandered around in the market and got some rose-scented soap for myself.

  There was a melancholy coffin resting on the funeral stone in the courtyard of the mosque. It must be the funeral of a soldier who had been killed. A mother and a beautiful young girl I surmised was the fiancée were weeping next to the coffin.

  The sound of someone in the back reading the Kuran came to my ears. The funeral procession started to leave. It was passing right by me now, and I read the name on the casket.

  “Sergeant Süleyman Şahin.”

  Sergeant Süleyman Şahin was lost to sight at the corner. I got to my hotel by walking amid the people following the funeral procession, and went in.

  I took out the card from my pocket and opened the door.

  The evening sun filled the room. There was a little fan at work inside. The white curtains with embroidered borders were open.

  There was a blonde sitting on the couch with the satin pillows. I was bowled over with surprise for a minute.

  The blonde was someone I didn’t know. She had a graceful figure, straight blonde hair, and a delicate face. Her long legs were gathered beneath her. She rose a little from where she was sitting when she saw me.

  “Who are you?” I whispered. “Just who are you?”

  “I’m Silvia Pinal,” said the blonde.

  “Silvia Pinal.”

  I had never heard this name before.

  “Silvia Pinal?”

  “Yes,” said the blonde. “Haven’t you ever heard my name?”

  “I may have,” I said. “Forgive me. I’m a little detached these days. It might be from the heat. Where do I know you from, I wonder?”

  The blonde was sitting up on the couch now, and crossed her legs. She had an innocent but cold face.

  “I act in Buñuel’s films,” she said. “I played in Viridiana. An old man’s niece who wanted to become a nun . . .”

  I suddenly recalled her. She was an extraordinary actress. She had a strange, unfeeling face, as though she were half asleep . . . She played a sleepwalker in Viridiana. The young niece who came to her uncle’s farm. The old man madly in love with her . . . The rich uncle who hanged himself from a tree when the young niece refused his proposal of marriage.

  It was one of Buñuel’s strangest films, and the one that affected me the most. A film made in 1961 in Spain.

  “I remember you!” I said. “You’re Viridiana. You were wonderful!”

  “Thank you,” said the blonde, with a demure smile.

  “I came to your room thinking I’d see Luis,” she said. “I know that he comes here.”

  “Buñuel? Yes, he stopped by here yesterday.”

  “Would you say that he’d come again today?
” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I just see him all of a sudden. Before me, next to me. Like an apparition, but real. We talk a little, and then he goes.”

  Silvia Pinal was listening to me closely.

  “That’s the way Luis is,” she said. “He suddenly appears next to someone like a protecting angel, or the Angel of Death. A person is afraid of him, feels shy. That kind of man. It’s curious that he came to your room at night.”

  “You probably weren’t expecting that he would come to my bedroom at night,” I said.

  “But he did, didn’t he?”

  The woman suddenly started to annoy me.

  “Yes, he did,” I said. “But I have a story. That’s why he came.”

  Silvia Pinal laughed out loud. Her face, her manner, that cold demeanor all suddenly changed.

  “Don’t get mad,” she said. “I’m just joking. I guessed you had a story. I know that’s why Luis came here.”

  “How did you find me here?” I asked.

  “Just the same way Luis did,” she said.

  She had sunk down into the silk pillows.

  “It must be an interesting story,” she murmured.

  “It’s not such an interesting thing at all,” I said. “An aged doctor left a letter for me in the middle of the night, filled with love, passion, and desire. That’s all.”

  The woman was listening intently to me.

  “What more do you want!” she exclaimed. “It’s an incredible story. Luis loved it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He was quite interested.”

  “It was just his kind of thing,” said Silvia Pinal. “Was the man very old?”

  “Very old,” I said. “On top of that he might have Alzheimer’s disease. This proposal he made is unbalanced. If you ask me, he’s going through something.”

  “He may be going through something, but if he’s written a love letter, it means there’s something real in this . . .”

  “A letter filled with passion and desire,” I said.

  “Sex at that age?” said Silvia Pinal.

  “He wrote the name of a drug in the letter too. He wants me to get that medicine from a pharmacy,” I said.

  “But this is incredible!” said Silvia Pinal. “Extraordinary. Now I understand why Luis was so interested in it. Do you know this old doctor well?”

  “I don’t know him at all. That’s the strange thing about it,” I said. “I’ve seen him once or twice, but that was in the staircase in the apartment building. He came with his wife and caretaker for a visit to my friend’s house.”