Orbit 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  A tightness.

  And each day the light fell more obliquely across the white hills and was more quickly spent.

  One night, returning from a movie, he slipped on the iced cobbles just outside the door of his building, tearing both knees of his trousers beyond any possibility of repair. It was the only winter suit he had brought. Altin gave him the name of a tailor who could make another suit quickly and for less money than he would have had to pay for a readymade. Altin did all the bargaining with the tailor and even selected the fabric, a heavy wool-rayon blend of a sickly and slightly iridescent blue, the muted, imprecise color of the more unhappy breeds of pigeons. He understood nothing of the fine points of tailoring, and so he could not decide what it was about this suit—whether the shape of the lapels, the length of the back vent, the width of the pantlegs—that made it seem so different from other suits he had worn, so much… smaller. And yet it fitted his figure with the exactness one expects of a tailored suit. If he looked smaller now, and thicker, perhaps that was how he ought to look and his previous suits had been telling lies about him all these years. The color too performed some nuance of metamorphosis: his skin, balanced against this blue-gray sheen, seemed less “tan” than sallow. When he wore it he became, to all appearances, a Turk.

  Not that he wanted to look like a Turk. Turks were, by and large, a homely lot. He only wished to avoid the other Americans who abounded here even at this nadir of the off-season. As their numbers decreased, their gregariousness grew more implacable. The smallest sign—a copy of Newsweek or the Herald-Tribune, a word of English, an airmail letter with its telltale canceled stamp—could bring them down at once in the full fury of their good-fellowship. It was convenient to have some kind of camouflage, just as it was necessary to learn their haunts in order to avoid them: Divan Yolu and Cumhuriyet Cadessi, the American Library and the consulate, as well as some eight or ten of the principal well-touristed restaurants.

  Once the winter had firmly established itself he also put a stop to his sightseeing. Two months of Ottoman mosques and Byzantine rubble had brought his sense of the arbitrary to so fine a pitch that he no longer required the stimulus of the monumental. His own rooms—a rickety table, the flowered drapes, the blurry lurid pinups, the intersecting planes of walls and ceilings—could present as great a plentitude of “problems” as the grand mosques of Suleiman or Sultan Ahmet with all their mihrabs and minbers, their stalactite niches and faienced walls.

  Too great a plenitude actually. Day and night the rooms nagged at him. They diverted his attention from anything else he might try to do. He knew them with the enforced intimacy with which a prisoner knows his cell—every defect of construction, every failed grace, the precise incidence of the light at each hour of the day. Had he taken the trouble to rearrange the furniture, to put up his own prints and maps, to clean the windows and scrub the floors, to fashion some kind of bookcase (all his books remained in their two shipping cases), he might have been able to blot out these alien presences by the sheer strength of self-assertion, as one can mask bad odors with incense or the smell of flowers. But this would have been admitting defeat. It would have shown how unequal he was to his own thesis.

  As a compromise he began to spend his afternoons in a café a short distance down the street on which he lived. There he would sit, at the table nearest the front window, contemplating the spirals of steam that rose from the small corolla of his tea glass. At the back of the long room, beneath the tarnished brass tea urn, there were always two old men playing backgammon. The other patrons sat by themselves and gave no indication that their thoughts were in any way different from his. Even when no one was smoking, the air was pungent with the charcoal fires of nargilehs. Conversation of any kind was rare. The nargilehs bubbled, the tiny die rattled in its leather cup, a newspaper rustled, a glass chinked against its saucer.

  His red notebook always lay ready at hand on the table, and on the notebook his ballpoint pen. Once he had placed them there, he never touched them again till it was time to leave.

  Though less and less in the habit of analyzing sensation and motive, he was aware that the special virtue of this café was as a bastion, the securest he possessed, against the now omnipresent influence of the arbitrary. If he sat here peacefully, observing the requirements of the ritual, a decorum as simple as the rules of backgammon, gradually the elements in the space about him would cohere. Things settled, unproblematically, into their own contours. Taking the flower-shaped glass as its center, this glass that was now only and exactly a glass of tea, his perceptions slowly spread out through the room, like the concentric ripples passing across the surface of an ornamental pond, embracing all its objects at last in a firm, noumenal grasp. Just so. The room was just what a room should be. It contained him.

  He did not take notice of the first rapping on the café window, though he was aware, by some small cold contraction of his thoughts, of an infringement of the rules. The second time he looked up.

  They were together. The woman and the child.

  He had seen them each on several occasions since his trip to Usküdar three weeks before. The boy once on the torn-up sidewalk outside the consulate, and another time sitting on the railing of the Karaköy bridge. Once, riding in a dolmus to Taksim, he had passed within a scant few feet of the woman and they had exchanged a glance of unambiguous recognition. But he had never seen them together before.

  But could he be certain, now, that it was those two? He saw a woman and a child, and the woman was rapping with one bony knuckle on the window for someone’s attention. For his? If he could have seen her face…

  He looked at the other occupants of the café. The backgammon players. A fat unshaven man reading a newspaper. A dark-skinned man with spectacles and a flaring mustache. The two old men, on opposite sides of the room, puffing on nargilehs. None of them paid any attention to the woman’s rapping.

  He stared resolutely at his glass of tea, no longer a paradigm of its own necessity. It had become a foreign object, an artifact picked up out of the rubble of a buried city, a shard.

  The woman continued to rap at the window. At last the owner of the café went outside and spoke a few sharp words to her. She left without making a reply.

  He sat with his cold tea another fifteen minutes. Then he went out into the street. There was no sign of them. He returned the hundred yards to his apartment as calmly as he could. Once inside he fastened the chain lock. He never went back to the café.

  When the woman came that night, knocking at his door, it was not a surprise.

  And every night, at nine or, at the very latest, ten o’clock.

  Yavuz! Yavuz! Calling to him.

  He stared at the black water, the lights of the other shore. He wondered, often, when he would give in, when he would open the door.

  But it was surely a mistake. Some accidental resemblance. He was not Yavuz.

  John Benedict Harris. An American.

  If there had ever been one, if there had ever been a Yavuz.

  The man who had tacked the pinups on the walls?

  Two women, they might have been twins, in heavy eye make-up, garter belts, mounted on the same white horse. Lewdly smiling.

  A bouffant hairdo, puffy lips. Drooping breasts with large brown nipples. A couch.

  A beachball. Her skin dark. Bikini. Laughing. Sand. The water unnaturally blue.

  Snapshots.

  Had these ever been his fantasies? If not, why could he not bring himself to take them off the walls? He had prints by Piranesi. A blowup of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The Tchernikov sketch. He could have covered the walls.

  He found himself trying to imagine of this Yavuz… what he must be like.

  III.

  Three days after Christmas he received a card from his wife, postmarked Nevada. Janice, he knew, did not believe in Christmas cards. It showed an immense stretch of white desert—a salt-flat, he supposed—with purple mountains in the distance, and above the purple mountains, a hea
vily retouched sunset. Pink. There were no figures in this landscape, or any sign of vegetation. Inside she had written:

  “Merry Christmas! Janice.”

  The same day he received a manila envelope with a copy of Art News. A noncommittal note from his friend Raymond was paperclipped to the cover: “Thought you might like to see this. R.”

  In the back pages of the magazine there was a long and unsympathetic review of his book by F.R. Robertson. Robertson was known as an authority on Hegel’s esthetics. He maintained that Homo Arbitrans was nothing but a compendium of truisms and—without seeming to recognize any contradiction in this—a hopelessly muddled reworking of Hegel.

  Years ago he had dropped out of a course taught by Robertson after attending the first two lectures. He wondered if Robertson could have remembered this.

  The review contained several errors of fact, one misquotation, and failed to mention his central argument, which was not, admittedly, dialectical. He decided he should write a reply and laid the magazine beside his typewriter to remind himself. The same evening he spilled the better part of a bottle of wine on it, so he tore out the review and threw the magazine into the garbage with his wife’s card.

  The necessity for a movie had compelled him into the streets and kept him in the streets, wandering from marquee to marquee, long after the drizzle of the afternoon had thickened to rain. In New York when this mood came over him he would take in a double bill of science-fiction films or Westerns on 42nd Street, but here, though cinemas abounded in the absence of television, only the glossiest Hollywood kitsch was presented with the original soundtrack. B-movies were invariably dubbed in Turkish.

  So obsessive was this need that he almost passed the man in the skeleton suit without noticing him. He trudged back and forth on the sidewalk, a sodden refugee from Halloween, followed by a small Hamelin of excited children. The rain had curled the corners of his poster (it served him now as an umbrella) and caused the inks to run. He could make out:

  KIL G

  STA LDA

  After Atatürk, the skeleton-suited Kiling was the principal figure of the new Turkish folklore. Every newsstand was heaped with magazines and comics celebrating his adventures, and here he was himself, or his avatar at least, advertising his latest movie. Yes, and there, down the side street, was the theater where it was playing: Kiling Istanbulda. Or: Kiling in Istanbul. Beneath the colossal letters a skull-masked Kiling threatened to kiss a lovely and obviously reluctant blonde, while on the larger poster across the street he gunned down two well-dressed men. One could not decide, on the evidence of such tableaus as these, whether Kiling was fundamentally good, like Batman, or bad, like Fantomas. So…

  He bought a ticket. He would find out. It was the name that intrigued him. It was, distinctly, an English name.

  He took a seat four rows from the front just as the feature began, immersing himself gratefully into the familiar urban imagery. Reduced to black and white and framed by darkness, the customary vistas of Istanbul possessed a heightened reality. New American cars drove through the narrow streets at perilous speeds. An old doctor was strangled by an unseen assailant. Then for a long while nothing of interest happened. A tepid romance developed between the blond singer and the young architect, while a number of gangsters, or diplomats, tried to obtain possession of the doctor’s black valise. After a confusing sequence in which four of these men were killed in an explosion, the valise fell into the hands of Kiling. But it proved to be empty.

  The police chased Kiling over tiled rooftops. But this was a proof only of his agility, not of his guilt: the police can often make mistakes in these matters. Kiling entered, through a window, the bedroom of the blond singer, waking her. Contrary to the advertising posters outside, he made no attempt to kiss her. He addressed her in a hollow bass voice. The editing seemed to suggest that Kiling was actually the young architect whom the singer loved, but as his mask was never removed this too remained in doubt.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  He was certain it was she and he would not turn around. Had she followed him to the theater? If he rose to leave, would she make a scene? He tried to ignore the pressure of the hand, staring at the screen where the young architect had just received a mysterious telegram. His hands gripped tightly into his thighs. His hands: the hands of John Benedict Harris.

  “Mr. Harris, hello!”

  A man’s voice. He turned around. It was Altin.

  “Altin.”

  Altin smiled. His face flickered. “Yes. Do you think it is anyone?”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “You are seeing this movie?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is not in English. It is in Turkish.”

  “I know.”

  Several people in nearby rows were hissing for them to be quiet. The blond singer had gone down into one of the city’s large cisterns. Binbirdirek. He himself had been there. The editing created an illusion that it was larger than it actually was.

  “We will come up there,” Altin whispered.

  He nodded.

  Altin sat on his right, and Altin’s friend took the seat remaining empty on his left. Altin introduced his friend in a whisper. His name was Yavuz. He did not speak English.

  Reluctantly he shook hands with Yavuz.

  It was difficult, thereafter, to give his full attention to the film. He kept glancing sideways at Yavuz. He was about his own height and age, but then this seemed to be true of half the men in Istanbul. An unexceptional face, eyes that glistened moistly in the half-light reflected from the screen.

  Kiling was climbing up the girders of the building being constructed on a high hillside. In the distance the Bosphorous snaked past misted hills.

  There was something so unappealing in almost every Turkish face. He had never been able to pin it down: some weakness of bone structure, the narrow cheekbones; the strong vertical lines that ran down from the hollows of the eyes to the corner of the mouth; the mouth itself, narrow, flat, inflexible. Or some subtler disharmony among all these elements.

  Yavuz. A common name, the mail clerk had said.

  In the last minutes of the movie there was a fight between two figures dressed in skeleton suits, a true and a false Kiling. One of them was thrown to his death from the steel beams of the unfinished building. The villain, surely—but had it been the true or the false Kiling who died? And come to think of it, which of them had frightened the singer in her bedroom, strangled the old doctor, stolen the valise?

  “Do you like it?” Altin asked as they crowded toward the exit.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And do you understand what the people say?”

  “Some of it. Enough.”

  Altin spoke for a while to Yavuz, who then turned to address his new friend from America in rapid Turkish.

  He shook his head apologetically. Altin and Yavuz laughed.

  “He says to you that you have the same suit.”

  “Yes, I noticed that as soon as the lights came on.”

  “Where do you go now, Mr. Harris?”

  “What time is it?”

  They were outside the theater. The rain had moderated to a drizzle. Altin looked at his watch. “Seven o’clock. And a half.”

  “I must go home now.”

  “We will come with you and buy a bottle of wine. Yes?”

  He looked uncertainly at Yavuz. Yavuz smiled.

  And when she came tonight, knocking at his door and calling for Yavuz?

  “Not tonight, Altin.”

  “No?”

  “I am a little sick.”

  “Yes?”

  “Sick. I have a fever. My head aches.” He put his hand, mimetically, to his forehead, and as he did he could feel both the fever and the headache. “Some other time perhaps. I’m sorry.”

  Altin shrugged skeptically.

  He shook hands with Altin and then with Yavuz. Clearly, they both felt they had been snubbe
d.

  Returning to his apartment he took an indirect route that avoided the dark side streets. The tone of the movie lingered, like the taste of a liqueur, to enliven the rhythm of cars and crowds, deepen the chiaroscuro of headlights and shop windows. Once, leaving the Eighth Street Cinema after Jules et Jim, he had discovered all the streets signs of the Village translated into French; now the same law of magic allowed him to think that he could understand the fragmented conversation of passers-by. The meaning of an isolated phrase registered with the self-evident uninterpreted immediacy of “fact,” the nature of the words mingling with the nature of things. Just so. Each knot in the net of language slipped, without any need of explication, into place. Every nuance of glance and inflection fitted, like a tailored suit, the contours of that moment, this street, the light, his conscious mind.