by Orhan Pamuk
Much later, long after Galip had pulled the phone cord out of the jack and searched through Jelal’s notebooks, old costumes, closets, and worked like a somnambulist looking for his memories, lying in Jelal’s bed wearing his pajamas and listening to night noises in Nişantaşı, he understood once more, as he fell into a long and deep sleep, that the capital aspect of sleep was—aside from forgetting the heartbreaking distance between who a person was and who he believed he could someday become—peacefully scrambling together all that he’d heard and all that he hadn’t, all that he’d seen and all that he hadn’t, all that he knew and all that he did not.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE STORY GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
The two of them being together,
Reflection of the reflection entered the mirror.
—ŞEYH GALIP
I dreamed I had finally become the person I wished to be all these years. I was sleeping with the weariness of sorrow in the middle of the journey of our life we call a dream, rüya, in a dark wood of high-rises in a muddy city where the faces are even gloomier than the gloomy streets, when I came upon you. For the duration of this dream, or some other story, it seemed as if you’d love me even if I didn’t manage becoming someone else; it seemed as if it was necessary that I accept myself just as I am with the same resignation I feel looking at my passport picture; it seemed like it was useless struggling to be in someone else’s shoes. It seemed as if the dark streets and terrifying buildings which stooped over us parted as we walked by, that our passage gave meaning to shops and sidewalks along our way.
How many years has it been since you and I were startled to discover the magical game we would so often come across in our lives? It was the day before a religious holiday when our mothers led us to the children’s wear section at a clothing store (back in those wonderful times when we didn’t yet have to go to separate women’s and men’s departments); there, in a semilit corner of the store which was more boring than the most boring religion class, we found ourselves caught in between two full-length mirrors and observed how our reflections multiplied and got smaller and smaller as they went on into infinity.
Two years after that, we were making fun of the kids we knew who’d sent in their pictures to the page called “Friends of Animals Club” in Children’s Week, where each week we would read the columns on “Great Inventors” quietly to ourselves, when we noticed on the back cover the picture of a girl reading the magazine we were holding in our hands; and, when we examined the magazine the girl held in her hand, we realized the pictures had multiplied inside each other: the girl on the cover of the magazine that we held was holding the magazine on the cover of which the girl held the magazine on the cover of which the girl was holding the magazine who was the same redheaded girl and the same Children’s Week that got incrementally smaller and smaller.
Later, when we were even taller and had drifted away from each other, I saw the same thing on a jar of black-olive paste that had recently come on the market, which, since it didn’t get served in our flat, was available to me only at your breakfast table on Sunday mornings. The label on the jar, promos for which ran on the radio—“Wow, I see you’re having caviar!” “Oh no, it’s Exceptional Brand black-olive paste”—showed a perfect happy family where the mother, father, son, and daughter were sitting at their breakfast table. I showed you the jar that sat on the table pictured on the label of the jar, on the label of which was pictured yet another jar, and you realized that the pictures of jars of olive paste and the happy families got smaller and smaller inside each other; that was when we both knew the beginning of the fairy tale I am about to tell, but not how it ends.
The boy and the girl were cousins. They grew up in the same apartment building, climbed up the same staircase, gobbled together Turkish delights and coconut candy which bore the molded relief of a lion. They did their homework together, they came down with the same bug, they scared each other playing hide-and-seek. They were the same age. They went to the same school, the same movies, listened to the same radio shows, records, they read the same Children’s Week magazine, the same books, and went through the same closets and trunks where they found the same fezzes, the same silk covers, and the same boots. One day when their adult cousin whose stories they adored dropped by for a visit, they grabbed the book he was carrying and began reading it.
The book first amused the girl and the boy with its old words, highfalutin language and Persian expressions, then it bored them into throwing it down; and yet, thinking perhaps it had an illustration of a torture scene, a naked body, or a submarine, they riffled through the book curiously and ended up actually reading it. It turned out the book was terribly long. But near the beginning there was such a love scene between the hero and the heroine that the boy wished to be in the hero’s shoes. Love had been described so beautifully that the boy wanted to be in love like the hero in the book. So, when he realized he showed the same symptoms of love as the ones later on in the book which he’d fantasized about (impatience with food, inventing reasons to go see the girl, not being able to drink a whole glass of water even when thirsty), the boy realized he’d fallen in love with the girl at that magic moment they held the book together, each fingering the corners of opposing pages.
So what was this story they read fingering the corners of opposing pages? The story, which happened long ago, was about a boy and girl who’d been born into the same tribe. The girl and the boy, named Beauty and Love, who lived at the edge of a desert, were born on the same night, studied with the same teacher (Professor Madness), walked around the same fountain, and fell in love with each other. When the boy asked for the girl’s hand many years later, the elders of the tribe stipulated that he go to the Land of Hearts and bring back a certain alchemical formula. The boy who set out on the road met with a great many difficulties: he fell down a well and was enslaved by a painted witch; he got inebriated looking at the thousands of faces and images he saw in another well; he fell for the daughter of the Emperor of China because she resembled his beloved; he climbed out of the wells and got locked up in castles; he followed and was followed, struggled through winter, traveled great distances, went after clues and signs; he delved into the mystery of letters, telling and listening to stories. Finally, Poetry, who followed him in disguise and helped him get through his ordeals, said to him: “You are your beloved, and your beloved is you; do you still not understand?” That is when the boy in the story remembered how he fell in love with the girl reading the same book when they were studying with the same teacher.
The book they had read together told the story of a king called King Jubilant and a beautiful young man called Eternal with whom he had fallen in love; the bewildered king had no idea what was going on, but you’d already caught on that the lovers in this story would’ve fallen in love reading together a third love story. The lovers in that love story too would’ve fallen in love reading yet another love story in a book, and the lovers in that story would’ve fallen for one another reading still another love story.