The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  “Oh,” said Silvia Pinal. “I understand. Like a lover. He’s given over his freedom, his world to you.”

  King Darius started to laugh.

  “He’s not at all like a lover or anything like that. He’s a slave, that’s all. My slave. He’s special, Alop. He has qualities that distinguish him from the other slaves.”

  “I’m His Majesty’s slave,” said Alop. “If he said to die, I would die.”

  King Darius said:

  “Alop’s been in the palace since he was a child. I brought him up. The queen likes Alop very much too.”

  Silvia Pinal asked:

  “Where is the queen?”

  King Darius said:

  “The Queen has been ill for years. She’s resting in the palace. With her companions. She doesn’t come out in this sun, this heat.”

  “I understand, I hope she gets better,” said Silvia Pinal.

  She was sipping her sherbet.

  King Darius said:

  “So you’re a star. A shining star. More beautiful than those bits of light in the sky. I’d like to have you as my guest in the palace. I’d like to show you my garden and my gemstones. Would you come?”

  “I’d be honored,” said Silvia Pinal.

  “Then let’s go to the palace,” said King Darius.

  He stood up.

  The sunbeams shining in through the window were playing on his silver cape.

  He turned to me. “We’ll see one another again,” he said. “I have many things to learn from you. I understand that.”

  “Wait, let me bring you down in the elevator,” I said.

  Silvia Pinal gathered her things. Alop the slave ran down the hall first.

  I brought them downstairs.

  A little later they were lost to the eye as they walked away in the Medrese Quarter.

  I went up to the room.

  Luis Buñuel was standing beside the window. He was all in black, and his slightly dark and sunken face seemed a little weary today.

  “Don Luis!” I called out in greeting. “Where have you been? I wanted to introduce you to someone!”

  “I was in the montage room,” said Buñuel. “I worked all night. I like to work with some of the details myself. Who were you going to introduce me to?”

  “I was going to introduce you to King Darius and his slave Alop. They were around here a little while ago.”

  “King Darius . . . The emperor of Persia, Darius I?” asked Buñuel.

  “That must be him,” I said. “‘I am the king of this place,’ he said. He’s a very interesting man. He came with his slave Alop to the Seyr-i Mardin. I met him there. He sits and looks at Mesopotamia there, once in a while . . .”

  “So King Darius was here.”

  “Yes, a little while ago. You just missed him by a few minutes.”

  Suddenly I thought of something.

  “Silvia Pinal came too!” I said. “She’s interested in the letter the old doctor wrote me. King Darius took her to his palace. He said he would show her his gardens and collection of jewels.”

  Buñuel was looking at me incredulously.

  “Silvia was here? She went to the palace with the king? These are astonishing things. Two people from completely different worlds, different times,” said Buñuel. “Silvia Pinal, who won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1961 for her starring role in Viridiana, and Emperor Darius, the king of these lands I don’t know how many thousands of years ago.”

  “There’s something about Mardin, Don Luis,” I said. “Your being here is more intriguing than King Darius’s being here. Isn’t that true? King Darius is a part of this civilization, part of its past. A powerful emperor who ruled fifty million people in his day. Perhaps as important and powerful as Alexander the Great. For him to show up once in a while and gaze at Mesopotamia is perfectly normal. But for you to be here . . .”

  Buñuel laughed.

  “I’m after that letter and a story, you know,” he said.

  “That story is actually in Ankara,” I said. “Behind that window above the street door.”

  “That’s true,” said Buñuel. “But you’re in Mardin, you have the letter, and there are some things going on in your mind . . .”

  “Are there? What’s there in my mind?” I asked with real curiosity.

  “There are,” said Buñuel. “I feel it. You’re creating a world. Something.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  WORLDS STILL THOUGHT TO EXIST

  The doctor was still sitting at one of the tables farthest in the back of the Mado in Tunalı Hilmi. His elderly friend was beside him. He had moved from the neighboring table to the old doctor’s table.

  They were sitting together. The sun had declined and faded, and no longer reached back to the rear section of the pastry shop. Small decorated lamps made little spots of light in the interior. The café was preparing for evening. The customers seemed different. Now customers waiting for evening were sitting at the scattered tables. The makeup of the women seemed somehow out of the ordinary. Their rouge seemed darker, and their eyelashes extended out above their cheeks.

  The old doctor was in the shadows. He looked at his friend sitting next to him.

  “Do you remember everything, Mustafa Bey?” he asked.

  “I remember everything,” said Mustafa Bey. “I have my old world in the palm of my hand. I remember my childhood, adolescence, the day I got married, everything, all very well. The sudden anxiety I experienced before the wedding, then the years I spent with my wife, the springs and the falls, getting together with friends in the evening once in a while, winter days, the wind burning on my cheeks, I remember it all.”

  His eyes were fixed on the distance.

  The old doctor said:

  “I remember everything too. Izmir, long years ago; the horse trams in Istanbul; Izmir again; my years at the Konak Maternity Hospital; times when life was hard and others when it was easy; that quick affair I had with the nurse; my nights on duty, the endless freedom; the first years of being a doctor. It’s as though they’re all here, right in front of me.

  “The nurse fell for me. It was like I saw the desire, the yearning in her eyes. I was very young. Later there were a lot of people in my life. Women . . .”

  “Were there a lot of women?” asked Mustafa Bey.

  “There were a lot of women,” said the old doctor. “The way each one looked, her smell, her hair, I don’t know, her desires, her needs were different. In the hospital where death is nearby, people get involved with each other more easily. If you see someone twist and die in bed, life seems to burst out of you at that very moment!”

  Mustafa Bey said:

  “I was an accountant. I just had my own little life. Not a lot of women. And I couldn’t get to the ones I liked. Anyway, I had a wife.”

  The old doctor said:

  “You’re escaping from the house.”

  “Yes, I get out of there every day. I go back in the evening.”

  The doctor said:

  “This morning was the first day I was able to escape from the house. And I have no intention of going back.”

  “Well, what are you going to do at night?”

  “I don’t know; I’ll spend the night somewhere. In some dark spot, some shadow.”

  “Won’t they look for you from home?”

  “They won’t find me,” said the old doctor. “My wife is very old. The attendant won’t be able to find me.”

  “Why did you run away, Doctor Bey?”

  “I’m in love with someone,” said the doctor. “There’s a woman I’m crazy with desire for. Maybe I’ll meet her. I’ll find her. Our days on earth are numbered. I want to live the way I like from now on.”

  Mustafa was listening to what the doctor said, lost in the distance.

  “So you’re in love with someone,” he said.

  “Yes. I want her. I want her to be mine.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “First I just
saw her,” said the old doctor. “I followed her for a long time. She came to an apartment in the building where I live. The window . . . I always watched her from the window. When she came, when she left.

  “Now finally I’ve been released from sitting behind the window,” he said afterward. “I stretched out my hands. I found the world again. Just like my years in Izmir in the Konak Maternity Hospital.”

  “Wonderful,” murmured Mustafa Bey. “How wonderful!”

  “But I’m not as strong as I used to be,” said the old doctor.

  “It’s like I’m imprisoned in this body. My arms, my legs . . . Everything’s slow now. My back has no strength. But my spirit . . . My spirit is the same,” he went on talking. “I’m like I was in old Izmir, in the Konak Maternity Hospital. Like when I was stroking Nurse Muazzez’s breasts as we lay on the stretcher behind the door . . . in the darkness of the Izmir night. Listening to the moans coming from the wards, clumsily opening the nurse’s legs, the sea breeze, the smell that came to my nose of a cigarette being smoked in the hallway.”

  Mustafa Bey listened to him with longing.

  “Oh my God, it’s evening again.”

  “Night,” said the old doctor. “The nights were so colorful . . . Even in that little old hospital; the nights were so colorful . . . the scent of a woman in my nose . . . a woman’s hair on my lip . . .”

  “Sometimes I have accidents down there,” said Mustafa Bey. “It just started. The other day it happened on the road. Going home. I went inside, and my pants were wet.

  “‘Senile!’ my wife screamed at me. ‘You senile thing, you wet yourself! Where were you off to this time?’ she said.”

  He paused for a minute.

  “I don’t want to go home either,” he said. “Tonight I won’t go home either. The senile man won’t go home tonight.”

  SILVIA PINAL PRIVATE THOUGHTS

  I’m mad at Buñuel. After that instant when we were close, he’s suddenly like ice. He’s distanced himself from me. But I felt that I affected him. He may be afraid that he’s attracted to me. He became tougher on the set, started to be more exacting when we were filming scenes. As though he were doing it on purpose. To crush me.

  “Silvia Pinal—once more.”

  “Silvia Pinal—speak with a stronger expression.”

  “Silvia Pinal—Silvia Pinal.”

  Then he goes off to his corner and puts on that invisible steel armor that envelops him. It’s impossible to get to him then.

  I’m sitting in a corner eating away at myself inside from nerves. He’s off in his own world, with all the shutters down against the outside.

  I came to Mardin in pursuit of him. I knew I would find him here. I went to that woman’s hotel. The Zinciriye Hotel. It’s an exotic world. They offer you sherbet scented with roses, couches with silk pillows. Buñuel had come and gone. I talked to the woman.

  She’s a strange one. She has some material in her hands that fascinates Buñuel. It’s a love letter that an old man wrote to her filled with sex. A message of lust and desire.

  She didn’t show me the letter. She was uncomfortable. I felt it.

  I went to her room again. This time she brought two people whom she said were King Darius and his slave Alop to the room. They were unusual men. Strange people. At first I thought they were actors. A little later when I realized they were genuine, I was really amazed.

  The slave was a very innocent type. King Darius was intriguing. He had piercing eyes, like steel. A man who seemed like he held the whole world in the palm of his hand.

  He was paying me compliments.

  “Let me take you to my palace,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We left the woman alone by herself and went to the palace.

  King Darius took me into an endless rose garden. Different colors, different varieties, on and on. There was an incredible scent of roses everywhere. It was marvelous. I felt dizzy, drunk. “Look,” he said. “Those are the black roses of Halfeti. Did you ever see them before?”

  There were black roses before me, like velvet. I was astonished.

  “I’ve never seen these before,” I said.

  He gave the slave an order to pick a bouquet of roses for me. Black roses of Halfeti. A huge bouquet in my hand. King Darius beside me. He was asking me questions, making me tell him what I do. I told him that I act in films. He doesn’t know what films are. He was a little interested. He has no idea what the cinema is.

  He took a peerless diamond out from under his silver-colored cloak, and gave it to me.

  “This is very valuable; why are you giving it to me?” I asked in surprise.

  “To make you happy,” he said. “It’s just a piece of stone. But I know it makes you happy. Be happy. Because you made me happy. I’ll have them take you back to the hotel. We’ll get together tomorrow. I’ll have them pick you up.”

  “That’s not my hotel.”

  “Which hotel are you staying at?”

  “In the Cercis Murat Mansion,” I said.

  “Let Alop take you there. Tomorrow morning I’ll have you picked up,” he said.

  A bouquet of black, velvetlike Halfeti roses in my hand, a huge diamond as big as a walnut!

  He kissed me on the lips. He called to the slave.

  I went to the Cercis Murat with the slave.

  I’m experiencing strange things. I threw myself down on the couch.

  Are all these things real, or am I seeing hallucinations because of the hot weather?

  I had them put the roses in a vase. I have to read that letter. I’m looking at the diamond, turning it over and over in my hand. It’s real!

  King Darius was going to go to his ill wife, probably. I sensed it.

  The black roses were magnificent. No news from Buñuel.

  The black roses of Halfeti had a wonderful scent.

  1949 IZMIR DR. AYHAN PRIVATE THOUGHTS

  I shaved and left the house. I walked quickly to the hospital. The wards were overflowing. There was the peace and quiet of Ramazan in the air. I think the assistant is fasting. Muazzez Hanım was ready, all dolled up, waiting for me to come. I knew it the second I saw her. She was thinking about last night. She flushed a little when she saw me. I have to be careful. Women are dangerous. And even though they’re dangerous, they attract me. My poor mother is trying to get me to like some good girl. There are going to be guests tonight after the iftar evening meal, but I don’t feel like seeing anyone. That woman I put in the ward . . . I’ve been thinking about her for a while. She’s an unusual woman. As though she came from a different world, some other civilization. Everything about her is like that. Strange. The clothes she wears, her hair, her little pocketbook, the way she talks, everything is different. Her ankle is broken, and there’s a cut next to it. I’m making her walk. She told me she had no place to go. But she’s not poor. Now and then I catch her staring at my face and my eyes. As though she’s looking for something in my face, in my eyes. As though she thinks I look like someone. Like she’s looking for someone . . . yes, like she’s looking for someone. Her eyes are like that. I was very meticulous about her ankle. I don’t want her to wind up crippled. A nice lady. Stylish. Mysterious, actually. There’s something about her, but I don’t know what it is. I’m keeping away from her. As I do with all the patients. I keep a definite distance.

  If I wanted to, I could have asked her a lot of things. I didn’t ask anything. I don’t think Muazzez Hanım likes her very much. Next to her she seems very provincial, very forced.

  This woman is natural. I caught her looking at the ward carefully but in amazement one night. Those looks were like the looks of a child newly come into the world.

  She interests me, this woman. I’m not going to release her yet. I wonder who she is. Where did she come from? What is it that she’s after?

  I’ll figure it out.

  THE ZINCIRIYE HOTEL MARDIN

  I stretched out on the bed. I turned the air conditioner that I had opened a
ll the way for King Darius down a little.

  I was full of thoughts.

  I had met so many people in this room in this stone hotel, this unusual world with silk pillows and a couch, and at the Seyr-i Mardin, where I went every day. I was completely overwhelmed.

  The director Luis Buñuel and his main star the blonde beauty Silvia Pinal, the Persian king Darius and his slave Alop . . . They were so different from one another and came from such different worlds.

  King Darius and Luis Buñuel. Two men with absolutely nothing in common. One of them a strange person who was a world-famous surrealist director, the virtual King of the Empire of Passion. He had won award upon award for his disturbing films, a Spaniard with a unique spirit of his own. The other a very powerful emperor who had ruled millions, had made those around him tremble, who had been the master of Babylon, Mesopotamia, and Persepolis. Alop the slave was a fine young man. It was obvious that he was very attached to the king.

  Silvia Pinal was a master artiste who drew men to her like a magnet with her frozen blonde beauty and her aloofness. I was in the middle of this little confusion. I had come from Ankara to Mardin to relax and found myself in this new kind of life that seemed full of images that belonged to this place.

  I was thinking about the old doctor and his midnight letter, which rested in my card case with the picture of Marilyn Monroe on it.

  I am insanely in love with you . . . I want to go to bed with you . . . I want you to be mine . . .

  As I lay there in my bed, I was full of curiosity at the same time.

  What was King Darius doing now? What did Silvia Pinal experience in the king’s palace? Why wasn’t Luis Buñuel anywhere to be seen?

  What was going on?

  In fact there were things going on outside of me, and I wanted to become involved in them.

  I wondered if I would ever see these people again.

  They were all so colorful and so incredible. Maybe these people were some little trick my mind was playing on me. Perhaps none of them really existed. Maybe it was all the Mardin Dream.

  When I thought of this I felt myself to be very alone.

  At that moment someone knocked softly on the door. I arose from my bed and slowly opened the door. Alop the slave was standing at the door.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Did I wake you up?”