The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  The astonishing aspect of the story was not the fact that the old journalist considered himself the hero of a novel or its author; after all, any Turk who passionately loves a masterpiece from the West which remains unread by his compatriots begins after a while to believe in all sincerity that not only does he love reading the book, but that he has written it himself. Eventually, this person will end up despising the people around him, not only because they have not read the book but because they have not written a book of the same caliber as his. That’s why the surprising thing was not the fact that the old journalist had considered himself Proust or Albertine for a long time, but that he had one day divulged the secret he’d kept to himself all these years to a young columnist.

  It was perhaps because the old journalist had a very special feeling for the young columnist that he could confide in him; the young fellow possessed a beauty that was reminiscent of Proust and Albertine: he had the bud of a mustache on his upper lip, a strong and classical build, nice hips, long lashes, and, like Proust and Albertine, he was dark and somewhat short in stature; his silky soft skin had the shimmer of a Pakistani’s complexion. But the similarities ended there. The young and beautiful columnist, whose taste for European literature didn’t go beyond Paul de Kock and Pitigrilli, laughed uproariously when he first heard the tale of the old journalist’s secret love; then he announced that he would use this interesting account in one of his columns.

  Realizing his mistake, the old journalist begged his young and beautiful colleague to forget everything, but the other turned a deaf ear and kept right on laughing. Once the old journalist returned home, he knew at once that his whole world had been demolished: in his deserted rooms he could imagine neither Proust’s jealousies, nor the time he spent with Albertine, nor even where Albertine had gone. That magical love that he alone lived and breathed in all of Istanbul, that sublime love that was his only source of pride and which no one could ever besmirch, was soon to be coarsely related to hundreds of obtuse readers in a way that would be like raping Albertine whom he’d worshipped all these years. The old journalist just wanted to die, thinking that Albertine’s name—the beautiful name that belonged to dear Albertine whom he loved so much, for whom he could die of jealousy, whose leaving destroyed him, and the sight of whom he could never, ever forget since the time that he first saw her riding a bicycle in Balbec—would be printed on pieces of newspaper which dumb readers, who never read of anything besides the ex-prime minister’s larcenies and the mistakes in the latest radio programs, would then spread under garbage pails or under fish to be cleaned.

  It was this notion that gave him the courage and determination to phone the columnist with the silken complexion and the bud of a mustache, and explaining that “only but only” he could comprehend such a special but uncurable love, this human condition, his abject and boundless jealousy, he begged him never to touch on the subject of Proust or Albertine in any of his columns. “Besides,” he added with fortitude, “you haven’t even read Marcel Proust’s masterpiece!” “Whose what masterpiece?” asked the young man, who had already forgotten about the subject and the old journalist’s obsession. So the old man retold his story, and the insouciant young columnist once again shrieked with laughter, saying gleefully that yes, yes, it was the very story that he should write. He might have even been under the impression that the old guy actually wanted the subject ventilated.

  And he went ahead and wrote it. In the column that was something like a short story, the old journalist was characterized much as in the account you have heard: a pitiful, lonely old man from Istanbul who falls in love with a weird novel from the West, imagining that he is both the heroine and the author of the book. The old journalist in the story has a tabby cat just like the real old journalist’s. The old journalist in the story is also shaken to see himself being ridiculed in a newspaper column. In the story within the story that was being told, the old journalist also wants to die upon seeing Albertine’s and Proust’s names in the paper. Lonely newsmen, Albertines, and Prousts in the story within the story within the story kept reappearing in infinite regression out of one bottomless well after another in the old writer’s nightmares during the last, unhappy nights of his life. When he woke from his nightmares at midnight, the old writer could no longer have the happiness of a love no one knew about. When his door was broken down three days after the publication of the cruel column, it was discovered that the old journalist had quietly died in his sleep, asphyxiated by the smoke that leaked from the stove that had refused to put out any heat. The tabby had not been fed in three days, but she still hadn’t mustered up the courage to chew on her master.

  Despite its sadness, Galip’s story had cheered his audience by virtue of drawing them together. Several people, some of whom were foreign journalists, got up to dance with the party girls to the music that came from an invisible radio, laughing and enjoying themselves until it was time to close the place.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I MUST BE MYSELF

  If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

  —PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Some time back I remembered a metaphysical experiment that befell me twenty-six years ago on a winter’s night and which I related briefly in these columns. It must be ten or twelve years ago, I can’t be sure (these days when my memory is really shot, the “secret archives” I keep on hand unfortunately aren’t available for reference), but when I wrote on the subject, it brought on piles of letters. Among the letters from my readers, irate that I hadn’t written the sort of column they’d come to expect from me (why hadn’t I discussed national concerns, why hadn’t I described the sadness of Istanbul streets in the rain), there was one from a reader who had “intuited” that I was of the same opinion as himself on a “very important matter.” He divulged that he’d soon pay me a visit and put to me questions concerning some “special” and “deep” subjects on which, he believed, we were in agreement.

  Just as I was about to write off this reader—who was a barber (this was odd in itself)—he turned up for real one afternoon. I had no time for him. Besides, I thought the barber might go on and on about his troubles and give me grief for not giving enough space to his endless woes in my column. Just to get rid of him, I told him to come back another time. He reminded me that he’d written that he’d be coming; on top of that, he had no time for “another time”; he had only two questions, ones that I could answer at once, on my feet. Pleased that the barber approached the subject so directly, I told him to ask away.

  “Do you have difficulty being yourself?”

  Expecting something strange, a joke we could share later—that an entertainment was about to break loose—a small crowd had gathered around my desk: younger journalists I’d taken under my wing, the loud and fat soccer correspondent who kept everyone in stitches. So, in answer to the question put to me, I came up with one of my “witticisms,” which had come to be expected of me in situations like this. The barber, after listening to the putdown as if it were the very response he thought I would make, asked his second question.

  “Is there a way a man can be only himself?”

  This time he made his query as if he were inquiring on behalf of someone else and not to satisfy his own curiosity. Obviously he’d prepared the question ahead of time and committed it to memory. The effect of my initial joke was still in the air; and other people, hearing the merriment, had joined us. Under the circumstances, what could be more natural than nailing a second joke on the head instead of holding forth on the ontological question of man’s being himself? On top of that, a second joke would aggrandize the first, making it even more impressive, turning it into an elegant story that could be repeated in my absence. After the second joke was cracked, which I cannot remember now, the barber said, “I just knew it!” and he left.

  Since our people appreciate double entendres only if the
second meaning is insulting or derogatory, I paid no attention to the barber’s thin skin. I can even say that I looked down on him as I would on the enthusiastic reader who, upon recognizing your columnist in the public urinal, inquires, as he buttons up his fly, about the meaning of life or if yours truly has faith in God.

  But as time went by … Misconstruing the half-finished sentence, the readers who think I regretted my insolence (that I thought the barber’s question was moot, or that I even had nightmares about him one night and woke up with guilt feelings), those readers haven’t yet come to know me. I didn’t even think of the barber, except once. And the one time I did think of him, my chain of thought didn’t start with the barber. What came to my mind was the continuum of an idea I’d first had years ago. In fact, at the beginning, it could hardly be called an idea. It was more like a refrain stuck in my mind since childhood which had suddenly surfaced in my ears—no, more like out of the depths of my soul: “I must be myself. I must be myself. I must be myself.”

  At the end of a day spent in crowds and among relatives and co-workers, before going to bed at midnight, I sat in the old armchair in the other room, my feet propped on a stool, as I smoked and stared at the ceiling. The incessant chatter of the people I listened to all day, their noise, their demands, had all come together into a single tone that reverberated like a nasty and tiresome headache, or even like a sinister toothache. The old refrain that I can’t call an “idea” began at first in response to this reverberation like—how to say it—a countertone. To shield me from the relentless noise of the crowds, it offered up a reminder of the way to my inner voice, my own peace, my own happiness, and even my very own smell: “You must be yourself. You must be yourself. You must be yourself.”

  It was then at midnight that I realized how pleased I was to live far away from all the crowds and the muck of that revolting disorder which “they” (the imam sermonizing on Friday, teachers, my aunt, my father, politicians, all of them) consider “Life,” desiring that I immerse myself, that we all immerse ourselves in it. I was so pleased to roam in the garden of my own dreams, and not in their plain and tasteless tales, that I even regarded my poor legs, stretched from the armchair to the stool, with affection, and I examined with tolerance my ugly hand that brought back and forth to my mouth the cigarette whose smoke I blew at the ceiling. For the first time in so many years I was able to be myself! For the first time in so many years I was able to love myself because I could be myself. Stronger than the refrain of the village idiot who repeats the same word as he goes by each stone along the wall of the mosque, more concentrated than the effort of an old passenger who counts the telegraph poles out of the window of a moving train, this feeling turned into a kind of force enveloping with its fury and impatience not only me but also the pitiful old room in which I sat—enveloping all “reality.” It was with this force that I repeated these words, not as a refrain but with a felicitous anger.

  I must be myself, I repeated, without paying any attention to them, their voices, smells, desires, their love, their hate. If I can’t be myself, then I become who they want me to be, and I cannot bear the person they want me to be; and rather than be that intolerable person they want me to be, I thought, it would be better that I be nothing at all, or not be.

  In my youth, when I visited my uncle’s and my aunt’s, I became the person who was thought of as someone who “works as a journalist, which is too bad, but he works hard at it, and if he keeps on working like this, chances are he will succeed someday.” And when, after working for years to escape being that person, I entered as a grown man the apartment building in which my father too lived now with his new wife, I became the person who “worked hard and after many years was somewhat successful.” And what’s worse, unable to see myself any other way, I let this person I didn’t like cling to my flesh like an ugly skin, and before long I caught myself speaking not my own words but the words of this person; when I returned home at night, just to torture myself I reminded myself of how I’d spoken the words of this person I didn’t care for, repeating trite sentences like “I touched on this subject in my long article this week,” “I considered this problem in my latest Sunday article,” “This coming Tuesday, I will delve into that too, in my long article,” until I thought I’d drown in my own unhappiness—when, at last, I could be somewhat myself.

  My entire life was full of these sorts of horrible memories. In the armchair where I sat stretching my legs, I recalled the times, one by one, that I was not myself, just to revel in my present state of selfhood.

  I recalled how, just because my “comrades-in-arms” had decided on the first day of my military service just what kind of a person I was, I’d spent my entire army days as “someone who didn’t give up joking around even in the worst of times.” Because I had once imagined that in the eyes of the idle crowd who stood smoking during the five-minute intermission at the trashy movies I then frequented—not to kill time but just to sit alone in the dark—I must appear as “a valuable young man destined to do worthwhile work,” I would behave, I remembered, as if I were “an absentminded young man deep in meaningful, even sacred, contemplation.” In those days when we planned a military coup and were deeply involved in dreaming of a future when we’d be at the helm of the state, I remember behaving like a patriotic person who loved his people so greatly that he couldn’t sleep nights, lest the coup be delayed, thereby prolonging the suffering of the people. I recalled how at the whorehouses I surreptitiously frequented, I pretended to be a lovelorn soul who’d recently gone through a terrible and impossible love affair because the whores gave such guys a better time. I’d walk by police stations (in case I hadn’t already had the presence of mind to change sidewalks) trying to appear like an ordinary good citizen. I’d pretend to have great fun playing bingo at my grandmother’s, where I went just because I didn’t have the courage to spend New Year’s Eve alone. I recalled how, when talking to attractive women, instead of being myself I pretended to be someone who thought of nothing but (assuming this was what they wanted) matrimony and responsibility, or that I was someone who had no time for anything but the struggle to save our country, or that I was a sensitive person sick and tired of the general lack of empathy and understanding in our land, or, to put it in banal terms, that I was a closet poet. And at the end (yes, at the very end), I recalled how at my barber’s, where I went every two months, I was not myself but the impersonator of my self who was the subtotal of all these personages I impersonated.

  Actually, I went to the barber’s to loosen up (another barber, of course, than the one at the beginning). But as the barber and I looked in the mirror together, we saw there, along with the hair that was to be cut, this head that carries the hair, the shoulders, the trunk; and I sensed at once that the person whom we watched in the mirror sitting in the chair was not “I” but somebody else. This head that the barber held in his hands as he asked, “How much off the front?”, the neck that carried the head, the shoulders, and the trunk weren’t mine, but belonged to Jelal Bey, Columnist. I had indeed no connection to this man! Such an obvious fact that I thought the barber would notice it, but he didn’t seem to catch on. What’s more, as if to rub it in that I was not me but “the Columnist,” he asked me the sort of questions columnists get asked, like: “If war broke out, could we whip the Greeks?” “Is it true that the prime minister’s wife is a slut?” “Are greengrocers responsible for the high prices?” And some mysterious power the origin of which I cannot discern would not let me answer these questions myself. But the columnist I watched in the mirror with utter amazement would answer for me, murmuring with his usual pedantic air something like: “Peace is a good thing.” “Prices won’t go down, you know, just because some people are strung up.”

  I hated this columnist who thought he knew everything, who knew it when he didn’t know it, and who’d pedantically taught himself to accept his shortcomings and excesses. I even hated the barber who, with each of his questions, turned me that much mo
re into Jelal the Columnist … And it was then, as I was recollecting my bad times, that I remembered the other barber, the one who came into the newsroom to ask his strange questions.

  At that point, late at night, as I sat in my own armchair that made me myself, my legs stretched out on the stool, listening to the new fury in the old refrain that reminded me of my bad moments, “Yes sir, barber,” I said to myself, “they won’t allow a man to be himself; they won’t let him; they won’t ever.” But these words, which I spoke with the same rhythm and anger as the old refrain, managed only to settle me deeper into the tranquility I so wanted. That’s when I discerned an order that I’ve spoken of before in these columns and that my most faithful readers will detect—a meaning and even a “mysterious symmetry,” if I may say so, in the complete story of the visit to the newsroom of that barber, the memory of whom was refreshed through the mediation of another barber. It was a sign indicative of my future: After a long day’s night, a man’s being left alone to sit in his own armchair and be himself is like a traveler’s coming home after a long and adventurous journey.

  Chapter Seventeen

  DO YOU REMEMBER ME?

  Whenever I cast a restorative gaze on the past, I seem to perceive a throng perambulating in the dark.