by Orhan Pamuk
Later, when the guide had completed his lecture, he spoke of the event which was his and his father’s fondest dream, one that would unfold on a hot summer’s day when all Istanbul was taking a sluggish, heavy siesta above, immersed in vapors thick with flies, the stench of garbage, and dust. In the cool, moist, and dark passages below, a great celebration, a great entertainment, a festival that went beyond time, history, and social constraints in its sanctification of life and of death would be organized by the forbearing skeletons and the mannequins alive with the life force of our countrymen. On the way back to the surface, thinking with horror of the pain the visitors had seen in the faces of the hundreds of “citizen” mannequins, Galip felt the weight of all the stories he’d heard and all the faces he’d beheld, and he imagined the skeletons and the mannequins gaily dancing together at the festival, the broken wine cups and bowls, the music and the silence, the horror of copulating couples clacking away in abandon. The weakness he felt in his legs had resulted neither from the steep passages they’d climbed nor from the fatigue of the long day he’d put in. His own body felt the weariness he saw in the faces of his brothers, those figures that he met on slippery steps under the light of bare bulbs and in the damp rooms that he had constantly crossed. Their lowered heads, bent spines, hunched backs, splayed legs, their troubles and their stories, were extensions of his own body. Since he felt that all the faces were his face, and all their misfortunes his misfortune, he wanted to stop looking at the lively mannequins as they approached and avoid their eyes, but he could no more tear his eyes away than he could have torn himself away from his identical twin. He wanted to convince himself, as he had when he read Jelal’s pieces as a teenager, that behind the visible world there was a simple secret he could get out from under if he discovered it, a mystery that would liberate a person once its recipe was known. But, just as when he had read Jelal in those earlier days, he found he was so deeply immersed in the world that every time he forced himself to seek for a solution to the mystery he sensed that he was becoming more and more helpless and childish, like someone in a fugue state. He was not aware of the meaning of the world signified by the mannequins; he did not know what he was doing here with all these foreigners; nor did he know anything of the mystery of letters, the meaning of faces, or the secret of his own existence. What’s more, the nearer they got to the surface, the farther up they went and the farther away from the secrets below, the stronger became his sense that he was already beginning to forget what he had seen and learned. When he saw in one of the upper rooms a line of “ordinary citizens” that the guide didn’t bother commenting on, he felt that he shared with them the same fate and the same vision: Once upon a time they had all lived a bright and meaningful life together, but due to an unknown cause they’d now lost that meaning along with their memory. Anytime they attempted to recover the meaning, they got lost in the spider-filled passages of their minds, they could not find their way back through their minds’ dark blind alleys, they could never locate the key to a new life, which had dropped down to the bottom of their lost memory banks, leaving them seized by the same helpless pain felt by those who have lost their homes, their countries, their past, and their history. The pain of exile and of loss was so intense and so unbearable that it was best to give up trying to remember the lost meaning or the mystery, and simply be patient and resign oneself to waiting quietly for the end of time. But as he got closer to the top, Galip sensed that he could never endure the suffocating sensation of waiting like this, and that he could not find peace unless he located what he was looking for. Was it not far better to be a bad imitation of someone else than to be somebody who had lost his past, his memory, and his dreams? At the threshold of the iron staircase, he wanted to have a go at being Jelal, scoffing at the mannequins and the driving idea that created them: it was nothing more than the obsessive repetition of a stupid notion; it was nothing but a caricature, a joke that fell flat; it was a miserable idiocy that signified nothing! And, as if to prove Galip’s case, there was the guide, a caricature of himself, babbling on about how his father did not go along with “Islam’s prohibition against pictorial representation,” how the faculty of thought was nothing more or less than pictorial representation, and how what they’d seen here was also a series of representations. Now the guide was standing in the room they’d been let into when they first arrived, explaining the necessity of doing business with the mannequin market in order to keep this colossal conception alive, and requesting that the visitors kindly drop whatever amount they wished in the green contribution box.
Galip had just dropped a thousand-lira note in the box when his eyes met the eyes of the antiques dealer.
“Do you remember me?” said the woman. Her face had a dreamy look and a playful childlike expression. “Turns out my grandmother’s stories were all true.” In the half-light, her eyes gleamed like a cat’s.
“Beg your pardon?” Galip said with embarrassment.
“You don’t remember me,” said the woman. “We were in the same class at middle school. Belkis.”
“Belkis,” Galip said, realizing for a second that he could not picture any other girl in the class aside from Rüya.
“I have a car,” the woman said. “I live in Nişantaşı too. I could drop you off.”
Once out in the open air, the crowd gradually dispersed. The British took off for the Pera Palas; the man with the fedora hat gave Galip his card, sent Jelal his regards, and disappeared into one of the backstreets in Cihangir. İskender hopped a taxi, and the architect with the brush mustache walked alongside of Belkis and Galip. At the intersection a little beyond the Atlas Theater, they bought a dish of pilav from a vendor who had set up in the street, and they ate it. They looked at the watches displayed in a frosty showcase as if they were seeing magic toys. Galip studied a torn poster which was the same color as the murky dark blue of the night and in a photographer’s window the photo of a prime minister who had been murdered long ago. That was when the architect suggested taking them to the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent. There, he would show them something even more remarkable than what they’d seen at the place he called “the Mannequin Hell.” The four-hundred-year-old mosque was apparently moving out of place a little at a time! They got into Belkis’s car, which she’d parked on a back alley in Talimhane, and set out quietly. As they drove past the dark and dreadful two-story buildings, Galip felt like saying, “Dreadful, dreadful!” It was snowing lightly and the city was asleep.
When they arrived at the mosque after driving for a considerable time, the architect told them the story: He was well acquainted with the underground passages below the mosque, having worked on its restoration and repairs, and he was also familiar with the imam, who’d be willing to open the doors in return for a tip. When the engine stopped, Galip said he would stay in the car and wait for them.
“You’ll freeze!” Belkis said.
Galip noted that Belkis spoke to him familiarly and also that despite her rather attractive appearance, under the weight of her coat and with the scarf on her head she looked more like a distant aunt. The marzipan offered by that aunt when they visited on religious holidays used to be so sweet that Galip had first to down a drink of water before he could eat another of the pieces that she forced on him. Why had Rüya always refused to go on these holiday visits?
“I don’t want to come,” said Galip, sounding determined.
“But why not?” said the woman. “We’ll go up the minaret afterwards.” She turned to the architect. “Can we?”
There was a moment of silence. A dog barked somewhere, not too far off. Galip heard the roar of the city under the blanket of snow.
“My heart can’t take all those stairs,” the architect said. “You two go up.”
The idea of going up the minaret appealed to Galip, so he got out of the car. They went past the outer courtyard, where the snow-covered trees were lit by naked lightbulbs. In the courtyard, with the great mass of stone suddenly seeming smaller th
an it actually was, the mosque was transformed into a familiar building which couldn’t hide its secrets. The icy layer of snow that covered the marble was dark and pitted like the surface of the moon in its closeup photographs.
The architect began monkeying officiously with the padlock on the metal door that stood where the arcade formed a corner. At the same time, he kept explaining how the mosque, due to its own weight and that of the hill where it stood, had been slipping into the Golden Horn for centuries by some two to four inches a year. In reality, it should have hit the water by this time, but the mosque’s progress was being slowed down by “these stone walls” that circumvented the foundations, the secret of which had yet to be discovered; and by “this sewer system” the technical sophistication of which was unsurpassed to this day; by the “water table” that had been balanced so accurately; and by the “system of passageways” that had been calculated four hundred years ago. When the door was unlocked and opened into a dark passageway, Galip noticed the sparkle of a life-affirming curiosity in the woman’s eyes. Perhaps Belkis did not possess unusual beauty, but one was curious as to what she would do next. “The West has been unable to solve this secret,” the architect said as if intoxicated and reeled into the passageway with Belkis like a drunk. Galip stayed outside.
Galip was listening to the squeaky sounds that came from the passageway when the imam turned up out of the shadows of the columns, which were edged with ice. The imam didn’t seem at all upset that he’d been awakened in the wee hours of the morning. After listening to the voices in the passageway, he asked, “Is the woman a tourist?” “No,” said Galip, thinking that the imam’s beard made him look older than he was. “Are you a teacher?” the imam asked. “I am a teacher.” “A professor, like Fikret Bey!” “Right.” “Is it true that the mosque is on the loose?” “It’s true. That’s why we are here.” “May God recompense you,” the imam said. He looked dubious. “Does the woman have a child with her?” “No,” said Galip. “There is a child hiding inside, somewhere deep under,” the imam said. “Apparently, the mosque has been slipping for ages,” Galip said uncertainly. “I know that,” said the imam. “Although entering that way is also forbidden, some tourist woman and her kid went in that way, I saw them. Then she came out alone. The kid was left behind.” “You should’ve told the cops,” Galip said. “Not necessary,” said the imam. “Both the woman’s and the kid’s pictures were in the papers: turns out the kid is the grandson of the Ethiopian King. High time that they came and got him.” “So, what was on the kid’s face?” Galip asked. “See!” the imam said suspiciously. “Even you know about it. One couldn’t look the kid in the eye.” “What was written on his face?” Galip insisted. “There was a lot written on his face,” the imam said, losing his self-confidence. “You know how to read faces?” Galip asked. The imam kept quiet. “Is it sufficient for a person to pursue the meaning in faces in order to find the face that he has lost?” “You’d know that stuff better than me,” the imam said apprehensively. “Is the mosque open?” Galip said. “I just opened the portals,” the imam said. “They’ll soon be coming in for the morning prayer. Go on in.”
The mosque was empty inside. The fluorescent lights illuminated the bare walls rather than the purple rugs that stretched out like the surface of an ocean. Having taken off his shoes, Galip felt his feet turn into ice in his socks. He looked up at the dome, the columns, and the imposing mass of stonework above, wishing to be moved but he could get no feeling stirred up other than the wish to be moved: a sense of waiting, a vaguely perceptible curiosity about what might happen … He felt the mosque was a colossal and closed object which was as self-sufficient as the stones that went into building it. The place neither summoned one anywhere, nor sent one somewhere else. Just as nothing signified anything, anything could also signify everything. For a moment it was as if he perceived a blue light, then he heard the rapid flutter of something like the wings of a pigeon, but immediately everything went back to the same old silent stagnance that awaited a new meaning. Then he had the thought that things and stones are more “naked” than they were supposed to be: it was as if things called out to him, saying “Give us a meaning!” A little later, when a couple of geezers approached the holy niche whispering to each other and went down on their knees, Galip could no longer hear the call of things.
That was why Galip had no premonition as he went up the minaret. When the architect informed him that Belkis had gone up without waiting, Galip had begun to go up the stairs quickly, but not too long after, feeling the beat of his heart in his temples, he came to a stop. And when a pain started up in his legs and hips, he sat down for a moment. From then on, every time he went past another of the bare bulbs that lit the way up the stairs, he sat down and then started up again. When he heard the woman’s footsteps somewhere above him, he speeded up, though he knew he would catch up with her later when he came out on the balcony. Once he was there, he and the woman stood looking down on Istanbul shrouded in darkness for a long time without speaking, watching the city’s lights, which were hardly visible, and the snow that fell sporadically.
When Galip became aware that the darkness was slowly being dispelled, the city itself seemed to retain the night for a long time like the dark side of a distant planet. Some time later he thought, as he shivered with the cold, that the light that reflected off the chimney smoke, the walls of the mosque, and the piles of concrete did not originate from somewhere outside of the city but leaked out from somewhere within it. Just as on the surface of a planet that was still being formed, it felt as if the uneven pieces of the city buried under concrete, stone, wood, plexiglass, and domes might slowly part and the flame-colored light of the mysterious underground seep through the darkness. As the larger letters on the billboards for banks and cigarettes gradually became visible in between walls, chimneys, roofs, they heard the imam’s metallic call to prayer boom out of the loudspeaker right next to them.
As they were going down the stairs, Belkis inquired after Rüya. She was waiting up for him at home, Galip said; he had bought her three detective novels today; Rüya liked reading at night.
When Belkis asked about Rüya again, it was after they’d got into the woman’s nondescript Turkish Fiat, dropped off the brush-mustachioed architect on Cihangir Avenue, which was wide and always uncrowded, and were going up toward Taksim. Galip said Rüya didn’t have a job, but read detective novels; she also took her own sweet time, sometimes translating one she had read. As they took the traffic circle around Taksim Square, the woman asked Galip how Rüya did these translations and Galip said “Very slowly.” He went to his office in the morning and Rüya got down to work at the table after clearing away the breakfast things, but he couldn’t visualize Rüya working at the table since he had never seen her doing it. Galip responded to another question absentmindedly, saying that some mornings he left before Rüya got out of bed. He said they went to dinner once a week at the aunt’s whom they had in common, and some evenings to movies at the Palace Theater.
“I know,” Belkis said. “I used to see you at the movies. You seemed content with your life, looking at the photos in the lobby, holding your wife’s arm tenderly as you led her in the crowd going up to the balcony door. Yet she would be scanning the crowd and the posters for the face which would open the world’s doors to her. From where I sat at a distance from you, I intuited that she read the secret meaning in faces.”
Galip kept silent.
“During the five-minute intermission, while you, like the contented, good, and faithful husband that you are, wishing to please your wife with a coconut-filled chocolate bar or a frozen treat, signaled to the vendor tapping the bottom of his wooden tray with a coin, and went through your pockets looking for change, I used to sense that your wife was looking for the traces of a magic sign that might take her into another world, even in the advertisements for carpet sweepers or orange-juice extractors which she watched unhappily on the screen in the dim houselights.”
Ga
lip still kept quiet.
“Just before midnight, when people came out of the Palace Theater, leaning more into each other’s coats than into each other, I used to see the two of you walk home arm in arm, staring at the sidewalk.”
“At most,” Galip said resentfully, “it must have been one time that you saw us at the movies.”
“Not one time, but twelve times at the movies, more than sixty times in the street, three times at restaurants, six times out shopping. When I got home, I imagined that the girl with you was not Rüya but me—just like I did when I was a young girl.”