The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  I slowly entered the room where King Darius was. They had put the television in the corner. It looked very nice on top of the little table.

  King Darius heard me come in. He turned to me.

  “Welcome!” he said.

  “I’m very excited. This is an extraordinary thing! Astonishing, unbelievable. The young man who set it up taught me how to change the channels, but I haven’t quite mastered it yet. When you touch it the picture changes very quickly.”

  “Give me the remote and I’ll show you,” I said.

  The plasma screen was shining like the sun in the corner of the ancient stone walls. I took the remote in my hands and started to press the buttons randomly.

  The television came to life.

  THE SALON FOR THE NIGHT PEOPLE

  The old doctor, Hıfzi Bey, Mustafa the accountant, and Şevki Bey were sitting in the salon prepared for the Night People and chattering energetically.

  “I feel so peaceful in this salon,” said Hıfzi Bey. “I’m relaxed here. It’s as though I lived my whole life in a living room like this. The room where my mother received her friends on her at-home day looked like this; when I first married we had a room like this in our house too, even the colors were the same.”

  “I said the same thing,” said the old doctor. “My house was the same as this too. The china cabinet in the corner with the mirror, the glasses inside it . . . that carpet on the floor. Just like my house.”

  “That picture of the pasha on the wall,” said Şevki Bey. “It’s just like my dear departed father. The same eyebrows, the same piercing eyes, the same big moustache. I ask myself, ‘Is that him?’ I wonder, is my late father here with us?”

  “Does he look like your father?” asked Mustafa Bey.

  “Exactly the same. Like his twin. He’s caught my eye. It seems like he follows every move I make.”

  “Was your father a pasha?” asked the old doctor.

  “He was a colonel.”

  “This one is a colonel too,” said the doctor. “So it must be your father.”

  “I can’t be exactly sure,” said Şevki Bey. “I’ve forgotten my father after all these years. I forgot what he looked like in his old colonel’s uniform.”

  Mustafa Bey joined in.

  “That isn’t a colonel. It’s a general, a pasha,” he said. He continued to speak. “What’s going to become of the years we didn’t live? Let’s not forget about that.”

  “Would we?” said the old doctor. “We’ll get those years back. But first we have to find out who that picture on the wall is.”

  “Right,” said Mustafa Bey. “We have to identify him.”

  Hıfzi Bey said:

  “He’s here with us every night in this room. I wonder if it’s the former owner of this place.”

  “I have no idea,” said Şevki Bey. “My father never had a house like this.”

  “Allah, Allah, who could it be?” asked Hıfzi Bey.

  “Like I said, he looks a lot like my father, but I can’t be sure,” said Şevki Bey.

  The four old men stared for a long time at the picture on the wall.

  “If we only knew who it was . . . ,” Hıfzi Bey said.

  “I wonder how we can find out who this pasha belongs to?” Şevki Bey asked.

  “I’m dying of curiosity,” said Hıfzi Bey. “I wonder from whom we could learn who this pasha is?”

  The blonde woman came in.

  “Gentlemen, I brought you tea,” she said. “I just brewed it.”

  She put the cups of tea that she’d carried in on a decorated tray down on a low table.

  “Excuse me, I’d like to ask you something,” said Hıfzi Bey.

  “Of course.”

  “I wonder who that pasha on the wall is, do you know him?”

  The woman stared for a time at the picture of the pasha on the wall.

  “I don’t know him at all. That picture was hanging on the wall when I came here. I have no idea as to who it could be.”

  “It’s a pasha,” said the old doctor. “We thought, who knows, maybe you know who he was.”

  “Unfortunately, I have no information about who the pasha is,” said the woman.

  “Well, let’s talk about the years we never lived,” said Hıfzi Bey. “Where can we get them back from? Where do we have to apply, I wonder?”

  “I’ll look into all of that,” said the woman. “The more I think about it, the more the number of years I never lived goes up. It’s unbelievable. I’ll get back almost to my twenties. It’s really amazing.”

  Şevki Bey said:

  “A whole bunch of details about my life came to mind. If I collect them all together, it would come to a few years more. Well, a few years in a person’s life are very important. A loose tooth, losing hair, a bald spot on the top. These are things that happen in a few years. I could even go back farther than that. I’m making up a list.” He went on, “Isn’t that the way it is? An ear that doesn’t hear well, an aching knee . . . A person could escape from all of them if we could get those years back . . .”

  “We’ll get those years we didn’t live back,” said Mustafa Bey. “Just like setting a clock back.”

  The tea was finished.

  A strange sound came from the wall.

  They all looked in that direction.

  KING DARIUS AND THE GLOBAL ADAPTOR

  I was trying to line up the channels one after another.

  King Darius asked, “Which one should we pick? What should we look at? There’s a part with blonde women. Women who all have shiny blonde hair. They’re in one place. Somewhere around there. In one place . . .”

  “What’s that, I wonder? I hadn’t noticed. Which program?”

  “If you press it again, they’ll come.”

  I pushed down on the remote control again.

  “Oh, see, there they are!” said King Darius.

  What was being shown on the screen was a concert with the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory Chorus and an Oriental saz ensemble.

  All of the women were dressed in black. They were of a certain age, mostly with blonde or platinum hair. Looking at the notes in front of them, they were singing a slow piece that was, I think, in the Hüzzam mode.

  They all looked meticulously dressed, with pearl necklaces around their necks, rings on their fingers, rouge, and nail polish.

  King Darius was looking at them in complete admiration.

  I was looking with a fresh eye at this music and the images on the screen that had never previously interested me.

  “The women are very beautiful,” said King Darius. “They’re singing a song.”

  “Yes . . . It’s a song in the Hüzzam mode. It’s the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory Chorus and a saz ensemble,” I said.

  Alop the slave was standing to the side. He couldn’t pull his eyes off the screen.

  “Your Majesty, Darius,” I said. “May I take your eyes away from the screen for a moment?”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked. “They sing so beautifully.”

  “They’ll be back again. I was going to look at something. With your permission.”

  “I give you permission,” said King Darius.

  Playing quickly with the buttons on the remote, I went back to the advertisement that had caught my eye a moment ago.

  “Uğur Dündar and Arena tonight. ‘Organ Mafia,’ kidneys for sale, Indian kidney market . . . Dr. Necip Yağmur talks to Uğur Dündar. Tonight on Arena.”

  King Darius listened closely to what was being said on the screen.

  “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “It’s a program I think you’ll find interesting,” I said.

  “Who was that man? They showed him, and now is he talking and explaining things?” he asked.

  “He’s a very famous television personality, newspaperman, and writer: Uğur Dündar,” I said.

  The king was listening carefully to what I said.

  “A television personality,” he repe
ated. “He’s inside the television; he doesn’t come out, right?”

  “No, dear, he comes out,” I said. “He’s someone just like you and me. He goes around outside. The television is an image. I don’t know how to explain it . . .”

  “I understand,” said King Darius. “It’s like the seer stone . . .”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  I suddenly recalled Buñuel’s incomparable dream that I had seen in the seer stone. The seer stone was more natural, it was even more difficult to understand. Maybe the images seen in the seer stone were composed of messages transferred from one brain to another by currents and signals.

  “These programs on the television are filmed in a studio,” I said.

  “So that’s it,” said King Darius. “What’s a studio?”

  “It’s a place where the people and filming instruments connect with television and where special lights are located.”

  “Little by little I will learn all of these things,” said King Darius. “Right now, let’s go back to those women. The ones who were just there.”

  I played with the remote.

  The women’s chorus came back on the screen again.

  They had gone on to a different song now. King Darius and Alop the slave began to watch them with admiration.

  THE PASHA

  Everyone was quiet in the half-dark salon of the Night People. That room that confined scenes from people’s pasts was now in silence. The four old men sitting in the armchairs heard the cough coming from the portrait of the pasha on the wall.

  The framed picture of the pasha cleared its throat once again.

  It began to speak in a deep bass voice.

  “Something’s caught in my throat. May I ask for a glass of water?”

  “I’ll bring it right away,” said the blonde woman.

  She jumped up and rushed to the kitchen. She came back a little later with a glass of water in her hand.

  “Here you are, Pasha.”

  “Thank you, my girl,” said the pasha. “Would you help me drink it?”

  “Of course, Pasha.”

  The woman slowly raised the glass to the pasha’s lips. After the pasha took a few sips of water, he slowly pulled back a little.

  “Thank you, my girl,” he said.

  “My pleasure, Pasha.”

  The four old men were staring in complete amazement at the portrait of the pasha from where they sat.

  The woman gently asked:

  “Are you going to speak today, Pasha?”

  “There’s a lot to say,” said the pasha.

  “There are so many things to tell . . . Things that have accumulated inside, memories that occupy my mind. Many things that I felt and heard in this room . . . But I’m not going to speak anymore today; I think I’ll just listen.”

  “Fine, Pasha.”

  The pasha became silent.

  His eyes were fixed on some point off in eternity. He had receded back into the gilt frame of the painting, lost in his own world.

  A little later Hıfzi Bey said:

  “Did he really talk?”

  Mustafa Bey answered:

  “He drank water and talked.”

  Dr. Ayhan was confused.

  Şevki Bey rearranged the diaper that was making his pajamas bulge.

  “The painting came to life and talked,” he said. “This is the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole life.”

  “It’s unbelievable,” said Hıfzi Bey.

  Doctor Ayhan said:

  “This pasha must be a part of this night that we’re lost in, where we just hold on to one of the edges. Something like that . . . This night, this salon, they’re all a part of it.”

  The blonde woman nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “You’re quite right. The pasha is part of the night, the darkness, and this room.”

  “Does he talk once in a while?”

  “Sometimes he talks,” said the woman.

  “How mysterious,” muttered the old doctor. “If only he had talked a little more.”

  “Maybe he’ll talk tomorrow night,” said the woman.

  “Let’s ask the pasha about the unlived years too,” said Şevki Bey. “Maybe he can give us an opinion. I wonder where we can get those unlived years back from?”

  Hıfzi Bey said:

  “It’s like a dream. To go back . . . to collect the old years, to make a bouquet of them and get to use them again. Will we be able to get those years back?”

  “We will,” said the old doctor. “We’ll get them back somehow.”

  The room became quiet.

  Outside, in Tunalı, there was no one.

  A cat screeched. It was a howl that reminded people of their childhood.

  The old men had become silent. Maybe they were asleep.

  The woman went into the back, poured the tea that had been boiling all night in the teapot down the sink, and put fresh tea on to brew.

  It was clear she was getting ready for the morning.

  Faint daylight was about to filter through the sheer curtains.

  THE BLACK ROSE OF HALFETI

  I was in my room in the Zinciriye Hotel in Mardin. I had no idea what time it was. Last night I’d watched Uğur Dündar’s Arena program until the late hours with King Darius in the palace. It was fabulous. It was the first time that I had watched a program like Arena through the eyes of an eminent emperor like King Darius, who had no knowledge of the new world, who didn’t even know what an organ was.

  The subject of Arena last night was the “Organ Mafia.” Uğur Dündar was explaining the organ traffickers whose trail he had been able to locate and describing how organ trafficking worked. For the last segment, he put on the air live a Dr. Necdet Nacar, known as “Dr. Frankenstein,” who performs illegal kidney transplants for millions of dollars in an unnamed hospital abroad. Visible live in a box in a corner of the screen with his green surgical uniform and mask was Dr. Necdet Nacar, who gave evasive answers to Uğur Dündar’s questions, speaking aggressively due to the anxiety he felt because the master journalist had located him and put him on screen, and he skipped off before the broadcast was finished.

  King Darius followed Uğur Dündar’s program with unbelievable curiosity and excitement. The kidneys taken from healthy people abroad, the Indian connection, poor Indians lying down on operating beds to sell their kidneys, the “Organ Mafia” that steals children’s kidneys, the lengthy line of ill people who see Dr. Necdet Nacar as a beacon of hope, the agreements for transplants made in a high-end bar in Dubai in the middle of the night, the money given to the doctor in a bag, the transportation of the removed kidneys to the hospital, the comments made by a patient about to die from an infection into a microphone held out by Uğur Dündar . . .

  The program was fascinating, the investigation, the revelations, the brief comments by Dr. Necdet Nacar from behind the operating table, the money being counted, the kidneys taken from corpses, the untrustworthy fat man in charge of the whole thing. What a slender young girl lying in a room in a mansion on Büyükada said into Uğur Dündar’s microphone . . .

  “These are such overwhelming things!” cried King Darius. “Illegal things!”

  The king was amazed by Uğur Dündar.

  “I want to meet him,” he said. “I have to get to know him. He’s an incredible man. Powerful.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Kidney? What’s a kidney?” said King Darius. “Tell me about kidneys. What does a kidney do? Do I have one? Do you have one too? Why are they so valuable? Look, these people are consuming one another over kidneys.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” I said. “The kidney is an organ essential for life. If it doesn’t work, a person would die!”

  “Oh!” said King Darius. “I had no idea about such a thing. A kidney.”

  “Wait till tomorrow, Your Majesty,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything little by little. There’s a lung too . . . a heart . . .”

  “What are they?”


  “They’re organs too.”

  King Darius stopped for a minute.

  “I have to learn the organs,” he said. “Kidney, lung, heart . . .”

  “Eye,” I said.

  I was getting sleepy.

  Arena ended at a late hour.

  I took leave of King Darius and went back to my hotel. I got into bed and immediately fell into a deep sleep. The weather must have turned warm. I woke toward morning and turned over a little in my bed.

  I felt there was someone in my room.

  Buñuel might have come. I sat up in bed.

  I picked out the Black Rose of Halfeti in the semi-dark room. She was sitting silently at the foot of my bed. She was wearing her magnificent black velvet gown and had strands of pearls around her neck.

  When she saw that I was awake, she leaned over toward me.

  “I woke you up,” she said.

  “No matter, did something happen?” I asked.

  “No, no. Nothing important,” she said. “We’ve been called to dreams. Morning dreams. Both of us. I came to get you.”

  “We’ve been called to dreams?”

  “Yes. We’re going into morning dreams.”

  I had gotten out of bed and was trying to put myself together.

  “Whose dreams are we supposed to go into?” I asked. At the same time, I had turned on the light and was combing my hair in front of the mirror.

  “You’re going into the old doctor’s dream,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti. “He spent the night in Ankara in a salon for the Night People in Tunalı Hilmi, and he’s sleeping now.”

  “Oh,” I said. “And you?”

  “I’m supposed to go into a pasha’s dream. Come on, get ready. Let’s go together,” she said.

  “What pasha?”

  I was curious.

  “Some former pasha,” she said. “He’s connected somehow with that salon where the Night People get together. I don’t have all the details. I’ll learn them when I get into the dream.”

  “And I’m going into the old doctor’s dream?” I asked.

  “Yes, he particularly wants you in his morning dream, apparently. You know morning dreams are very influential and important.”

  She paused for a minute.