by Orhan Pamuk
By the time Galip was through reading what Jelal had scribbled on bus and theater tickets, it was already noon. On some of them, Jelal had painstakingly put down his opinions on certain films, and on others he’d written the actors’ names. Galip tried making sense of the names that had been underlined. There were names and words on some of the bus tickets as well: on one (a fifteen-kuruş ticket, which meant it was issued in the sixties), there was a face that had been formed by letters in the Latin alphabet. He read the letters on the ticket, some of the film criticism, some of the earlier interviews (Famous American movie star Mary Marlowe was in town yesterday!), rough drafts of crossword puzzles, some reader mail that he chose at random, and some news clippings about certain Beyoğlu murders that Jelal had planned to write on. Most of these murders seemed to be imitations of each other: only sharp kitchen knives had been used, all had been committed at midnight; they happened because the parties not only were drunk but also were given to the macho instinct, and they’d been written up with a tough-guy sensibility that reflected a morality that says “This is how those who get into shady business meet their end!” Jelal had made use of some newspaper items on “Exceptional Spots in Istanbul” (Cihangir, Taksim, Laleli, Kurtuluş) in some of his columns where he retold the stories of these murders. Looking at the series called “Firsts in Our History,” Galip remembered that the first book in the Latin alphabet had been published in Turkey by Kasim Bey, who owned the Education Library Press, in 1928. The same man had put out for many years the “Educational Calendar with Time Tables” that came in a block of pages; one tore off a page every day on which was printed—aside from daily menus that Rüya loved, aphorisms from Atatürk, or eminent Islamic personages, or foreign notables like Benjamin Franklin or Bottfolio, and nice jokes—a clock dial that showed the times for prayers on that day. When Galip saw that on some of the calendar pages that he had kept Jelal had fiddled with the clock hands on these dials, transforming them into round human faces with either long noses or long mustaches, he convinced himself that he had come across a new clue and made a note of it on a fresh piece of paper. While he ate his lunch (bread, cheese, and apples), he became strangely interested in examining the note he’d made.
On the last pages of a notebook, in which the résumés of two detective novels in translation (The Golden Scarab and The Seventh Letter) had been entered as well as the secret codes and keys taken out of books concerning German spies and the Maginot Line, he saw the shaky green trail of a ballpoint pen. These traces looked somewhat like the green ink trail on the maps of Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul, or sometimes like a face perhaps, sometimes like flowers, sometimes like the curves of a narrow river meandering gracefully on a plain. After being subjected to the asymmetrical and meaningless curves in the first four pages, Galip solved the mystery of the trails on the fifth page. He figured out that an ant had been placed in the middle of a blank page, then the haphazard trail of the harried insect had been traced by the ballpoint pen hard on its heels. In the middle of the fifth page, where the exhausted ant had made a trail going in circles indecisively, its dried corpse had been fixed by being pressed into the notebook. Wondering just how long ago the unhappy ant had been executed for its inability to provide any sort of answer, and whether this odd experiment had any connection to the Rumi pieces, Galip began to investigate. In the fourth volume of the Mathnawi, Rumi had related the story of an ant’s trek over his rough drafts: at first, the insect recognizes that there are narcissi and lilies inherent in Arabic letters, then that a pen has created this garden of words, then that a hand guides the pen, and then that an intelligence operates the hand, “and, finally,” Jelal had added in one of his pieces, “it perceived that there was another Intelligence guiding that intelligence.” Galip might have been able to establish a reasonable connection between the dates in the journal and the columns, but the very last page contained only the locations of some historic Istanbul fires, their dates, and the number of wood-frame mansions they had managed to turn into ashes.
He read Jelal’s piece on the tricks pulled by a secondhand book-monger’s apprentice who sold books door to door at the beginning of the century. The apprentice dealer, who went by rowboat to a different district each day to hit mansions that belonged to the wealthy, sold bargain books in his satchel to harem ladies, to shut-ins, to clerks who were buried under work, and to dreamy kids. But his real customers were minister-pashas who were virtually grounded in their ministries and their mansions, thanks to Sultan Abdülhamit’s proscription which he supervised through the agency of his spooks. Galip felt he was gradually becoming someone else, which was what he wanted, reading how the apprentice dealer taught the pashas (whom Jelal had designated “his readers”) by letting them in on Hurufi secrets that were necessary to decipher the messages he stuck into the texts of the books he sold. Once Galip understood that these secrets were nothing more than the signs and the key letters given at the end of a simplified version of an American novel that takes place on distant seas, which Jelal had presented to Rüya one Saturday noon when they were children, he knew for sure that he could become someone else through reading. That was when the phone rang; it was, of course, the same guy on the line.
“I’m pleased you hooked up the phone, Jelal Bey!” said the voice, which made Galip think it belonged to someone past middle age. “In view of the terrible developments that are imminent, I wouldn’t even want to think that someone like you was disconnected from the city and the nation.”
“What page are you on in the phone book?”
“I’m hard at it, but it’s going slower than I expected. Reading numbers for hours, a man gets to think stuff he never thinks about. I’m seeing magic formulas, symmetrical arrangements, repetitions, matrices, and shapes in the numerals. They slow me down.”
“And faces too?”
“Yes, but those faces of yours appear out of certain arrangements of numbers. The numbers don’t always speak, sometimes they are silent. Sometimes I’m under the impression that the fours are telling me something, arriving as they do at each other’s heels. They start out two by two, then they’ve gone and changed columns symmetrically and, what do you know, they’ve now become sixteen. Then, the sevens have taken over where they’ve left off, whispering to the tune of the same order. I want to believe that these are nonsensical coincidences, but look, doesn’t the fact that Timur Bayazid’s number is 140 22 40 remind you that the Battle of Ankara in 1402 was fought between Timur the Lame and Beyazid the Lightning Bolt? And that, following his victory, that barbarian Timur grabbed up Beyazid’s wife for his own harem? The phone book is alive with Istanbul and our history! I get drawn into it, missing out on getting to you. Yet I know that you are the only one who can stop this great conspiracy. Since you are the taut bowstring that activated their arrow, Jelal Bey, only you can stop the military coup!”
“Why so?”
“Last time we talked, I didn’t tell you that they have misplaced faith in the Messiah and are waiting for Him for nothing. They are just a bunch of soldiers, but they have read some of the pieces you wrote long ago. Like me, they believed it too. Try recalling some of the columns you wrote early in 1961, and reconsider the nazire you wrote on “The Grand Inquisitor,” and some of your movie reviews, and the conclusion to that snobbish bit in which you went on about why you didn’t believe the picture of the happy family on the National Lottery tickets (Mom’s knitting, Dad’s reading the paper—your column, perhaps—the son’s studying, the cat and the granny are by the stove, catching some Zs: if everybody is so damn happy, if they are all like my family, how come so many lottery tickets are sold?). What was the reason you ridiculed domestic films so strenuously back then? In these films, which give so many so much pleasure, and more or less express ‘our feelings,’ all you manage to see are the settings, the cologne bottles on the bedside commodes, the row of photographs on the piano which has gone to spiders because it doesn’t get played, the postcards stuck around mirror frames, the dog fi
gurine sleeping on top of the family radio. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, yes, you do! You point out these things as signs of our misery and collapse. In the same vein you’ve commented on the pathetic objects thrown down air shafts, close relatives who all live in the same apartment building, and cousins who end up marrying each other due to their close proximity, and about slipcovers placed on armchairs to keep them from wearing out. You do it to present these things as the heartbreaking signs of our descent into banality and our inevitable decay. But soon after, you run away with yourself, hinting in your so-called historical essays that liberation is always possible: even at the darkest hour, a savior might appear to pull us out of our poverty. A savior who’d been here before, perhaps even centuries ago, would come back to life as someone else: this time, He shows up in Istanbul five hundred years later as Jelalettin Rumi or as Şeyh Galip or as some newspaper columnist! While you related this sort of stuff, yammering about the sadness of women in the slums waiting to get water at public water fountains and cries of love inscribed on the backs of wood seats in the old streetcars, there were these officers who took you at your word. They thought that with the coming of the Messiah they believed in, all melancholy and misery would come to an end and everything would be put to right instantly. You took them in! You know who they are! You wrote with them in mind!”
“So, what do you want from me now?”
“Just to see you will be enough.”
“What for? There is no dossier-shmossier, is there?”
“If I could just see you, I’d explain everything.”
“Your name is obviously assumed too!” Galip said.
“I want to see you,” said the voice, which sounded like the pretentious but strangely touching and convincing voice of a dubbing artist saying: I love you. “I want to see you. When you see me, you’ll know why I want to see you. No one knows you like I do. But no one. I know you’re dreaming all night, drinking the tea you’ve made yourself, and coffee, smoking those Maltepe cigarettes you’ve let dry out on the radiator. I know that you type your work and make corrections with a green ballpoint pen, and that you are not happy with yourself or your life. I know that nights when you pace your rooms disconsolately until daybreak, what you want is to be someone other than yourself, but you just cannot settle on the identity of this other you want to become.”
“I’ve written all about that!”
“I also know that you don’t love your father, and that when he returned from Africa with his new wife, he kicked you out of the attic flat where you’d taken refuge. I know about the hard times you went through, too, when you moved in with your mother. Ah, brother mine! You invented bogus murders when you were a starving reporter on the Beyoğlu beat. At the Pera Palas Hotel you interviewed the nonexistent stars of American films that had never been shot. You took opium in order to write the confessions of a Turkish opium eater! You were given a beating on the Anatolian trip you took to finish the serial on wrestling you published under an assumed name! You shed tears telling the story of your life in your ‘Believe It or Not’ column, but people didn’t even get it! I know that you have sweaty hands, that you’ve had two traffic accidents, that you haven’t been able to find waterproof shoes to wear, and that you are always alone despite your fear of loneliness. You enjoy climbing minarets, poking around in Aladdin’s store, hanging out with your stepsister, and pornography. Who else knows all this besides me?”
“Lots of people,” Galip said. “Anybody can read all about it. Are you going to tell me why you really want to see me?”
“The military coup!”
“I’m hanging up now…”
“I swear on it!” the voice said anxiously and hopelessly. “If I could just see you, I’d tell you everything.”
Galip pulled the plug out. He removed from the hallway cabinet a yearbook that had been on his mind since he first laid eyes on it yesterday, and he sat in the chair where Jelal sat when he returned home in the evening, all tuckered out. It was a 1947 War College yearbook with a good binding job: aside from pictures and aphorisms that belonged to Atatürk, the President, the Chief of Staff, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Commander and faculty of the War College, the rest of the book was full of nicely done photographs of the student body. Turning the pages with onionskin between them, Galip had no idea exactly why he felt like looking through the yearbook right after the phone conversation, but he thought the faces and the expressions were surprisingly identical, like the hats on the heads and the bars on the collars. For a moment he thought he was poking through an old journal of numismatics, found among cheap or junk books in dusty boxes that secondhand book dealers display in front of their stores, where the pictures of silver coins and the figures stamped on them can only be told apart by an expert. He became aware of the same music that rose inside him when he walked out on the streets or sat in ferryboat waiting rooms: he enjoyed observing faces.
Turning the pages reminded him of the feeling he used to have when he flipped through the pages that smelled of printing ink and paper in a new issue of the comic book for which he’d been waiting for weeks. Of course, as the books said, everything was connected to everything else. He began to perceive in the photographs the same momentary brightness that he’d observed in faces in the street: it was as if these too provided his eyes with as much meaning as did the faces.
Most of the planners of the unsuccessful military coup that was cooked up at the beginning of the sixties—aside from the generals who winked at the young officers without getting into hot water themselves—must have emerged from among the young officers whose photographs had been printed in this yearbook. There was nothing concerning the military coup in what Jelal had scribbled and doodled on the pages, and sometimes on the onionskin that covered them, but the faces in the photographs had been given beards and mustaches such as a child might draw, and some faces had been lightly shaded under the cheekbone or under the nose. The lines on some of the foreheads had been transformed into “fate lines” in which meaningless Latin letters could be discerned, the bags under some of the eyes had been changed into clear round letters that read O or C, and others had been decorated with stars, horns, and spectacles. The young cadets’ chin bones, the bones in their foreheads and their noses, had been marked, and proportion scales had been drawn across the width and the length of some of the faces and across the noses, lips, and foreheads. And under some of the photographs there were notes in reference to photographs on other pages. Pimples, moles, discolorations, Aleppo boils, birthmarks, and burn scars had been worked into many of the cadets’ faces. Next to the photograph of a face that was too clear and bright to be touched with lines or letters in any way, this sentence had been written: “Retouching a photograph kills its soul.”
Galip ran across the same sentence looking through some other yearbooks: he saw that Jelal had put similar lines and markings on the photographs of the student body at the School of Engineering, the faculty of the Medical School, members elected to the parliament in 1950, engineers and administrators who were employed in building the Sivas–Kayseri railroad, the members of the Association for the Beautification of Bursa, and volunteers from the Alsancak district of Izmir who fought in the Korean War. Most of the faces had been divided into two with a perpendicular line down the middle in an effort to make the letters on either side of the face clearer. At times Galip flipped through the pages rapidly, and other times he examined the photographs for a longer period: as if he were retrieving in the nick of time something he recollected with great difficulty before it vanished into the endless chasm of oblivion, as if he were trying to recall the address of a house he’d been taken to in the dark. Some faces did not reveal anything further after the first glance, but the calm and quiet façades of others began a narrative when it was least expected. That’s when Galip remembered the colors, the melancholy gaze of a waitress who’d appeared only briefly in a foreign film he had seen many years ago, and the last time a pi
ece of music was played on the radio which he wanted to hear but always missed.
It was getting dark when Galip removed from the hallway cabinet all the yearbooks, the photo albums, the photo clippings, and all the photographs that had accumulated in the boxes from all kinds of sources and, taking them into the study, began going through them like a drunk. He couldn’t tell where, when, and why photographs had been taken of some of the faces he saw: of young girls, of gentlemen wearing melon hats, of women wearing head cloths, of honest-faced young men, and of the down-and-out. Yet it was quite obvious where and wherefore the pictures of some sad faces had been taken: under the kindly gaze of the cabinet ministers and the security police, a pair of citizens anxiously watch their alderman present the prime minister with a petition; a mother who was able to save her bedroll and her child from a fire on Dereboyu in Beşiktaş; women waiting in line to buy tickets at the Alhambra for a movie starring the Egyptian actor Abdul-Wahab; a well-known belly dancer and movie star, having been picked up for possessing hash, is accompanied by cops at the Beyoğlu precinct station; the accountant in whose face the meaning went blank the moment he was caught for embezzlement. The photographs he pulled out of the boxes at random seemed to explain the reasons for their own being and retention: “What can be more profound, gratifying, and curious than a photograph, the document of a person’s facial expression?” Galip thought.
He was sad to think that behind even the most “vacant” of faces, robbed of their meaning and expressiveness by photo retouching and other stock-in-trade trick photography, there were stories replete with memories, fears, and concealed mystery that could not be expressed with words but were present in the sorrow reflected in their eyes, eyebrows, and gazes. There were tears in Galip’s eyes looking at the photographs of the apprentice quilt maker’s happy but bewildered face when he hit the National Lottery jackpot, the face of the insurance man who knifed his wife, and the face of Miss Turkey who managed to “represent us in the best possible manner” in Europe by being selected as the second runner-up in the Miss Europe contest.