by Orhan Pamuk
“You are smarter than what those scenarios suggest,” Galip said kindly.
“I was afraid that once we met and I, in all sincerity, delivered myself of the sort of flattery and adulation I just mentioned, we’d have nothing further to say.”
“But, see, it didn’t turn out like that at all,” Galip said. “See, we ended up having a good time chewing the fat.”
There was a silence.
“I’m going to kill you,” said the voice. “I will kill you. You are the reason why I could never be myself.”
“No one is ever himself.”
“You’ve written that a lot, but you could never feel it like me; you could have never understood that fact as I do … What you call ‘mystery’ was your knowing it without understanding it, writing the truth without getting it. No one could ever discover this truth without first being at one with himself. If he does discover it, then it also means that he hasn’t managed to become himself. Are you into the paradox?”
“I am both myself and also another,” Galip said.
“No dice, you don’t say it as if you mean it,” said the man on the other end of the line. “That’s why you’ll have to die. Just as in your writing, you convince without having the conviction yourself, and you succeed in making others believe because you yourself don’t believe. But people you’ve managed to deceive are gripped by terror when they realize you can convince but have no conviction.”
“Terror of what?”
“Of what you call ‘mystery.’ Don’t you get it? I’m afraid of that ambiguity, of that game of dissimulation called writing, of the obscure faces of letters. Reading you all those years, I felt that I was both there, where I read at my desk or in my chair, and also somewhere entirely different with the author of the narrative. Do you have any idea what it means to be deceived by disbelievers? Knowing that those who persuade you aren’t persuaded themselves? I am not complaining because you are the reason why I could never be myself. My poor pathetic life was enriched; I became you, thereby escaping the dreariness of my own tiresome inanity, but I am not at all certain about the magical entity I call ‘you.’ I don’t know, but I know without knowing it. Can that be called knowing? Apparently I did know where my wife of thirty years vanished after leaving me a goodbye letter that explained nothing on the dining table, but I hadn’t known that I knew it. It was because I didn’t know that I went through the city with a fine-tooth comb, not searching for you but for her. But as I was looking for her, I was also, without being aware of it, looking for you, given that I had this terrible thought in my head even on the first day I began trying to solve the mystery of Istanbul going at it street by street: ‘I wonder what Jelal Salik would say if he knew my wife suddenly left me?’ I’d come to think the situation was ‘a predicament that was pure Jelal Salik.’ I wanted to tell you everything. I thought the subject was the perfect subject to discuss with you that I’d been looking for but didn’t manage to come up with all these years. I was so excited that I had the nerve for the first time to get in touch with you, but I couldn’t find you anywhere; you were nowhere. I knew it, but I did not know it. I had several phone numbers for you that I’d acquired just in case I might call you someday. I called all those, but you weren’t there. I called your relatives, the aunt who’s fond of you, your stepmother who adores you, your father who cannot control his feelings for you, and your uncle; they are all very concerned but you weren’t there. I went to the Milliyet offices, you weren’t there either. Others were looking for you at the paper, like your cousin and your sister’s husband, Galip, who wanted to arrange for British TV people to interview you. I followed him around on an impulse, thinking that this dreamy kid, this somnambulist, might just know Jelal’s whereabouts. Not only would he know, I said to myself, he’d also know that he knows. I followed him all over Istanbul like a shadow. He in the lead and I following him at a distance, we hit the streets, went in brownstone business buildings, old shops, glass arcades, grungy movie theaters, we went all over the Covered Bazaar, out to slums without sidewalks, over bridges, to dark places and obscure districts in Istanbul, wading through dust, mud, and filth. We never reached the destination but still kept going. We walked on as if we knew Istanbul well but didn’t recognize it. I lost him, then found him, only to lose him again: I found him once more, then lost him again. Once, when I lost him again, he was the one who found me in a ramshackle nightclub. There, sitting around the table, each of us told a story to the group. I like telling stories but I can never find an audience. But they were listening this time. In the middle of my story, as my audience’s curious and impatient eyes tried reading the end of the story in my face, and, as is always the case, fearful that my face might give away the ending, as I went back and forth between the story and such thoughts, I realized that my wife had left me for you. ‘I’d known she’d gone to Jelal,’ I thought. I knew it but hadn’t known that I knew it. What I was looking for must have been this state of mind. I’d finally succeeded in going through a door in my psyche to enter a new realm. For the first time after all these years, I’d managed simultaneously being both someone else and also myself as I’d always wanted. On one hand, I felt like saying something phony like, ‘I took this story from a newspaper column’; on the other hand, I felt I’d finally relaxed into the peace of mind that I’d been seeking all these years. I read your old columns in order to locate where I might find you, ending up going through Istanbul street by street, beating the jumble of sidewalks, muddy landings in front of stores, and watching the sorrow in the faces of our compatriots. But I’d concluded my story and figured out where my wife had gone. What’s more, while I listened to the stories told by the waiter and the tall writer, I’d foreseen the terrible denouement that I just mentioned: I’d been deceived all my life, I’d always been taken in! My God! My God! Does any of this make sense to you?”
“It does.”
“Listen, in that case. I’ve concluded that the truth you had us all running after all these years under the guise of ‘mystery,’ the truth that you knew without knowing it and wrote without understanding it, was this: No one can ever be himself in this land! In the land of the defeated and oppressed, to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore, I am. All right, so what if the person with whom I want to trade places happens to be someone else? That’s why I say I’ve been seduced and deceived. The person I read and trusted could not have stolen the wife of someone who idolized him. I wanted to shout out to the whores, waiters, photographers, and cuckolded husbands around the table telling stories in the middle of the night, saying: ‘Hey you defeated! Hey you wretches! Hey you accursed! Hey you neglected! Hey you inconsequential! Don’t be afraid, no one is himself, but no one! Not even the kings, the privileged, the sultans, the stars, the rich and the famous with whom you want to trade places. Liberate yourselves of them! It’s in their absence that you will find the story they tell you as if it were a secret. Kill them off! Establish your own secret yourselves, find your own secret!’ You know what I’m saying? I will kill you, not out of a cuckolded husband’s brute outrage and vengeance but because I don’t want to be roped into your new world. That’s when all of Istanbul, all the letters, the signs, and the faces you arranged into your writing will regain their true mystery. ‘Jelal Salik Has Been Shot!’ the headlines will read: ‘A Mysterious Murder.’ And the ‘Mysterious Murder’ will never be solved. Our world’s dubious meaning will perhaps be completely lost and, just before the Messiah you keep talking about shows up in Istanbul, there will be anarchy; but for me and many others that will be the rediscovery of mystery that has been lost; that is, no one will be able to solve the secret behind this business. What else could it be but the rediscovery of the mystery you know all too well? The same mystery I talked about in my modest book which I was able to get published through your help.”
“Not so,” Galip said. “You go ahead and commit the most mysterious of murders, but they—the privileged and the downtrodden, the stupid and the n
eglected—would all get together and make up a story proving that there is no mystery involved. Their hoked-up story which they’ll readily fall for will transform my death into a colorless piece about conspiracy of the garden variety. Even before my funeral is over, everyone will have decided that my death was the result of a conspiracy that endangered our national integrity, or else of an intrigue that went on for years involving love and jealousy. They’ll end up saying the murderer turns out to be an agent of drug traffickers or one of the organizers of a coup d’état; it turns out the murder was instigated by the Nakşibendi order or an organization of politicized pimps; it turns out the dirty deed was arranged by the grandsons of the deposed sultan or flag burners; it turns out the trick was the work of persons who have designs against the Republic and democracy or persons who are hatching up the Crusade to End All Crusades aimed against the whole Islamic world!
“The corpse of the columnist is mysteriously found in the middle of an Istanbul garbage dump among vegetable peelings, carcasses of dogs, and lottery tickets, or out on a muddy sidewalk … How else can you get it through to these losers that the mystery on the shore of oblivion still walks incognito among us? Somewhere way down deep, buried in our past, among the dregs of our memories, lost among words and sentences. And that we need to discover this mystery?
“I say this on the strength of thirty years of experience writing,” Galip said. “They don’t remember anything, not a single thing. Besides, it’s not a foregone conclusion that you’ll manage to find me and pull off the job. At best, you’ll manage hitting me in a nonlethal spot and wounding me needlessly. What’s worse, while they beat the living daylights out of you at the police station—to say nothing of torture—I’ll become the hero you didn’t intend, one who has to put up with the prime minister’s stupidities paying his get-well visit. Rest assured, it ain’t worth it. They no longer have any desire to believe that there is an unattainable secret behind the visible.”
“Who’s going to prove to me that my whole life was not just a hoax, a bad joke?”
“Me!” Galip said. “Listen…”
“Bishnov,” he said in Persian. “No, I won’t stand for it.”
“Believe me, I too fell for it like you.”
“I’ll believe it,” Mehmet cried with ardor. “I’ll believe it so that I can rescue the meaning of my own life. But what about the apprentice quilt makers trying to spell out the lost meaning of their lives on the strength of the codes you’ve stuck into their hands? What about the dreamy virgins who imagine the furniture, the orange-juice machines, the fish-shaped lamps, and the lacy linens they’ll have in Paradise as you promised, waiting in vain for their fiancés who will neither return from Germany nor ever send for them? And what’s to become of the retired bus-ticket collectors who, using the procedure they’ve learned in your columns, have managed to see in their own faces the floor plans of the condos they’ll own outright in Paradise? What about the land surveyors, the gas-bill collectors, the simit vendors, the beggars (see, how I can’t get rid of your words?) who, inspired by the numerical values of letters as given in your columns, calculate the day of the Messiah’s advent in the cobblestone streets, who will save us all in this miserable land? And our sundries man, the attar, from Kars, and your readers, your pathetic readers, who’ve figured out, thanks to you, that the mythical bird that they seek is in fact themselves?”
“Forget it,” Galip said, fearful that the voice on the phone might, out of habit, keep going on with the list. “Forget them, forget it all, don’t think of any of them. Consider instead the last Ottoman sultans going around incognito. Consider the traditional methods of Beyoğlu hoods who routinely torture their victims before killing them just in case they have gold or secrets stashed away. Consider why the color touch-up artists always paint the sky Prussian blue, and our muddy land the color of English lawns on the black-and-white pictures of mosques, dancers, bridges, beauty queens, and soccer players cut out from magazines, such as Life, Sound, Sunday, Post, 7-Days, Fan, Girls, Review, Week, that hang on the walls of two-thousand-five-hundred barber shops. Consider all the Turkish dictionaries you have to plow through to find the hundreds of thousands of words describing the thousands of smells, their origins, and the ten thousands of their mixtures that fill our dark and narrow stairwells.”
“You bastard writer, you!”
“Consider the mysterious reason why the first steamboat the Turks ever bought from England had been christened Swift. Consider the left-handed calligrapher’s obsession with order and symmetry who, being a student of telling fortunes by reading coffee grounds, reproduced the bottoms of the thousands of cups of coffee he drank in his lifetime, showing the pictorial representations of his fortune which he then appended with his beautiful calligraphy and produced a three-hundred-page handwritten masterpiece.”
“You aren’t deceiving me anymore.”
“Consider that when all the wells dug in the gardens in the city for hundreds of thousands of years were filled with cement and stone in order to build foundations for high-rises, the scorpions, frogs, grasshoppers, and all manner of bright Ligurian, Phrigian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman gold coins, the rubies, diamonds, crosses, representational paintings, and forbidden icons, books and treatises, maps for buried treasure, and unfortunate skulls of murder victims whose killers remain unknown…”
“Here comes the corpse of Shams of Tabriz again, huh? Tossed down the well.”
“… the concrete that they support, the steel, all the apartments, the doors, the elderly doormen, the parquet floors where the cracks in between turn black like dirty fingernails, the troubled mothers, the angry fathers, the refrigerator doors that won’t stay shut, the sisters, the half sisters…”
“Do you get to play Shams of Tabriz? Or the Dadjdjal? The Messiah?”
“… the cousin who’s married the half sister, the hydraulic elevator, the mirror in the elevator…”
“Enough already, you’ve already written all that.”
“… the secret corners the children discover to play in, the bedspreads saved for trousseaus, the length of silk that grandfather’s grandfather bought from a Chinese merchant when he was the governor of Damascus which no one has been able to bring herself to cut…”
“You’re handing me a line, right?”
“… consider the very mystery of our lives. Consider the sharp straight razor called ‘the cipher,’ which old-time executioners used to lop the heads off their hanged victims’ bodies in order to display them on pedestals as a deterrent. Consider the vision of the retired colonel who renamed chess pieces, calling the king ‘mother,’ the queen ‘father,’ the rook ‘uncle,’ the knight ‘aunt,’ and the pawns ‘jackals’ and not ‘children.’”
“You know, after you betrayed us, I saw you only once in all those years, masquerading as Mehmet the Conqueror, perhaps, in a strange Hurufi getup.”
“Consider the immutable serenity of the man who on an ordinary evening sits down at the table to solve enigmas in divan poems, and crossword puzzles in the paper. Consider that everything in the room, aside from the papers and letters lit by the lamp on the table, remains in the dark, all the ashtrays, the curtains, clocks, time, memories, pain, sorrow, deception, anger, defeat—ah, defeat! Consider that you can only compare the freedom from gravity you feel while you are in the mysterious vacuum created by the movements down and across of a crossword puzzle’s letters to the unappeasable fascination with going incognito.”
“Look here, friend,” said the voice on the other end of the line, assuming a know-how tone which surprised Galip, “let’s put aside for now all the fascinations and the games, as well as the letters and their twins; we’ve gone past all that, we’re beyond that stuff. Yes, I tried setting you up, but it didn’t work. You already know it, but let me spell it out for you. Not only was your name not in the phone book; there never was a military coup or any file on it! We love you, we think about you all the time, both of us are your admirers, real fans.
Our lives were always devoted to you and will remain so. Let us now forget all that needs to be forgotten. Tonight, Emine and I can come and see you. We’ll pretend nothing has happened, we’ll talk as if nothing ever had. You can go on and on for hours just as you’ve been doing. Please, say yes! Trust us, I’ll do anything you want, bring you anything you wish!”
Galip thought it over for quite a while. Then he said, “Let’s hear these telephone numbers and addresses you’ve got on me!”
“Sure enough, but I won’t be able to erase them out of my mind.”
“Just go ahead and give them to me.”
When the man went to get his book, his wife got on the phone.
“Trust him,” she said in a whisper. “He’s really contrite this time, in all sincerity. He loves you very much. He was going to do something crazy, but he’s already given it up. He’ll take it all out on me; he won’t go after you; he’s a coward, I guarantee it. I thank God for having put everything right. Tonight I’ll wear the blue-checkered skirt that you liked so much. My darling, we’ll do whatever you want, both him and me! Let me just tell you this, though: Not only does he try to emulate you in the Hurufi Mehmet the Conqueror costume but he also tries to read the letters on the faces of your whole family…” She fell silent as her husband’s footsteps approached.
When the husband got back on the phone, Galip began to write down the phone numbers and addresses, which he had the voice on the other end of the line repeat many times, in the last page of a book (Les Caractères, La Bruyère) he pulled out of the shelf next to him. He planned to tell them that he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to see them, that he didn’t have much time to waste on persistent readers. He was thinking of something else. Much later, recalling approximately all that happened that night, he’d say, “I think I was curious. I was curious to take a look at the pair from a distance. Perhaps my motivation was being able to tell Jelal and Rüya, after having located them through these phone numbers and addresses, not only this incredible story and the phone conversations but also what this strange husband and wife looked like, how they walked, what they were wearing.”