Send Rüya Our Love
My grandfather had named them "the family."
—Rainer Maria Rilke
As he walked up the stairs to his Bab?ali office on the morning of the day his wife left him, with the newspaper he'd just finished reading still tucked under his arm, Galip was thinking about the green ballpoint pen he and Rüya had dropped into the depths of the Bosphorus during one of those rowboat rides they'd taken with their mothers while convalescing from the mumps. As he stared at Rüya's letter of farewell on the evening of the day she left him, he realized that she'd used a green pen identical to the one they'd dropped into the sea some twenty-four years earlier. The original pen had belonged to Celal: seeing Galip admiring it, he had lent it to him for a week. When they'd told him they'd lost it, after he'd listened to their story of the rowboat and the sea, he'd said, "Well, if we know which part of the Bosphorus it fell into, it's not really lost!" These words had come back to Galip as he sat in his office that morning, for he had been surprised, when reading about the "day of disaster," that it had not been this ballpoint pen Celal planned to take from his pocket to scrape the pistachio-colored moss off the glass. Because it was one of Celal's trademarks to mix objects dating back centuries with those from his own past; the muddy slopes of his future Bosphorus were littered with Byzantine coins and modern-day bottle caps, both bearing the name Olympos. Unless—as he'd suggested only the other evening—his memory was beginning to fail him. "When the garden of memory begins to dry up," Celal had said, "a man cannot but dote on its lingering rosebuds, its last remaining trees. To keep them from withering away, I water them from morning until night, and I caress them too: I remember, I remember so as not to forget!"
After Uncle Melih left for Paris—a year after Vas?f returned with his aquarium balanced on his lap—Father and Grandfather had gone to Uncle Melih's Bab?ali law offices, loaded all his files and his furniture into the back of a horse cart, and moved it into the attic flat of the Nis?antas? apartments. Galip had heard all this from Celal. Later on—after Uncle Melih had returned from the Maghreb with his beautful new wife and their daughter, Rüya, after the dried fig venture he'd entered into with his father-in-law had failed, after the family had decided to keep him out of their confectionery shops and pharmacies, for fear of these failing too, and Uncle Melih had decided to practice law again—he'd moved his old furniture to his new offices, the better to impress his clients. Years later, during one of those evenings they'd spent laughing and railing against the past, Celal had told Galip and Rüya that one of the porters they'd used that day, the porter who specialized in things like carrying refrigerators and pianos, turned out to be the same man who'd carried the same furniture up to the attic twenty-two years earlier; the only difference was that he was now bald.
Twenty-one years after Vas?f gave this porter a glass of water and a thorough examination, Uncle Melih bequeathed his law practice to Galip. According to Galip's father, this was because, instead of fighting his clients' opponents, Uncle Melih had preferred to fight with the clients themselves; according to Galip's mother, it was because Uncle Melih was so old and addled by then he could no longer distinguish court records and law briefs from restaurant menus and ferry timetables; while Rüya claimed that—although Galip was still only his nephew at that point—her beloved father had foreseen the future Galip would go on to share with her. And so it was that Galip had found himself surrounded by portraits of bald Western jurists—he had no idea what they were famous for, nor did he know their names—and fez-wearing teachers of the law school his uncle had attended a half century earlier; he was also the inheritor of dossiers of cases in which the plaintiffs, the defendants, and the judges had long since died, along with a desk that Celal had once used in the evening and his mother had used for tracing dress patterns in the morning, and that now was home to a huge ungainly black phone that looked more like an artifact from a hopeless war than an aid to communication.
From time to time, this telephone would ring of its own accord: the bell was shrill, ear-splitting; the pitch-black receiver was as heavy as a dumbbell; when you dialed a number, it creaked to the same melody as the old turnstiles for the Karak?y–Kad?k?y ferry; sometimes, instead of connecting you to the number you wanted, it connected you to whatever other number it happened to prefer.
When he dialed his home number and Rüya picked up right away, he was shocked. "You're awake already?" He was happy to hear that Rüya was no longer wandering though the garden of her memories and was back in the real world with everyone else. He could imagine the telephone table, the untidy room, even the way Rüya was standing. "Have you seen the paper I left on the table? Celal's written something very amusing." "No, I haven't read it yet," Rüya replied. "What time is it?" "You went to bed late, didn't you?" Galip said. "It looks like you made your own breakfast," said Rüya. "I couldn't bring myself to wake you up," said Galip. "What did you see in your dream?" "Late last night, I saw a black beetle in the hallway," Rüya said. Mimicking the radio announcements about free-floating mines spotted in the Black Sea but still betraying panic, she added, "Between the kitchen door and the hallway radiator … at two A.M…. and it was huge." There was a silence. "Shall I jump into a cab and come straight home?" Galip asked. "When the curtains are drawn, this house gives me the creeps," said Rüya. "Would you like to see a film this evening?" Galip asked. "There's something good at the Palace Theater. We could stop by at Celal's on the way home." Rüya yawned. "I'm sleepy." "Then go back to sleep," said Galip. Both fell silent. As he put down the receiver, Galip thought he could hear Rüya yawning again.
*
In the days that followed, as Galip went over and over that conversation in his mind, he began to wonder if he'd really heard that yawn, if he'd really heard anything they'd said. Reading new meanings into Rüya's every word, and changing her words to reflect his worst fears, he was soon telling himself, It was as if the person I was speaking to was not Rüya at all but someone else, and this someone else had deliberately set out to trick him. Later on, he would decide that Rüya had indeed said what he'd originally thought he heard, and that after the telephone call it had been he, and not Rüya, who had changed. This new persona had gone on to reinterpret everything he'd heard wrong, everything he'd misremembered. By now his own voice seemed to belong to someone else, for Galip was only too aware that when two people converse on the phone, they can each easily pretend to be someone other than themselves. But during the early days, he took a simpler line: He blamed it all on the telephone. Because the clumsy old monster had kept ringing all day long, he'd spent the whole day lifting and lowering the receiver.
After he'd spoken to Rüya, his first phone call was from a man who'd brought a lawsuit against his landlord. Then there was a wrong number. There were two more "wrong numbers" before ?skender called. Then there was a call from someone who knew he was Celal's relation and wanted his number. After that there was an ironmonger whose son had got mixed up in politics; he was willing to do anything to get him out of prison, but he still wanted to know why he had to bribe the judge before the decision and not after. ?skender rang next, and he wanted to speak to Celal too.
?skender and Galip had been friends at lycée but had rarely spoken since, so first Iskender gave him a quick summary of what he'd been up to over the past fifteen years. He congratulated Galip on his marriage; like so many others, he claimed he'd "always had a feeling it was going to turn out like this." He now worked as a producer in an advertising company. He was looking for Celal because a BBC team doing a program on Turkey wanted to interview him. "They want a columnist like Celal, who's been in the thick of things for thirty years—they want to interview him on camera!" They'd also spoken with politicians, businessmen, and trade unionists, he explained, giving Galip far more detail than he needed. But the person they most wanted to meet was Celal; he was, they'd decided, a must for their program.
"Don't worry!" Galip said. "I'll find him for you." He was pleased to have an excuse to call Celal. "The people at the newspaper have been giving me the runaround for two days now!" said Iskender. "That's why I finally rang you. Celal hasn't been near the paper for the last two days. Something must be going on." Although he was used to Celal disappearing for days at a time, hiding out in other parts of the city at unknown addresses with unlisted phones, Galip was still certain he'd be able to track him down. "Don't worry," he said again. "I'll find him for you right away."
By evening, he still hadn't found him, though he'd been calling his home and office numbers all day. Each time he'd change his voice, pretending to be someone else, projecting his voice the way he did whenever he and Rüya and Celal sat around of an evening, imitating actors from their favorite radio plays. If Celal answered, he would pretend to be one of Celal's more pretentious readers and say, "I have read today's column, my friend, and I have gleaned its hidden meaning!" But every time he'd called the paper, it was the same secretary telling him in the same voice that Celal Bey had not yet arrived. Only once was he left with the impression that his fake voice had actually fooled someone.
As evening fell, he called Aunt Hale, thinking she might know where Celal was, and she invited him to supper. When she added, "Galip and Rüya are coming too!" he realized she had mixed up their voices again and mistaken him for Celal. "What difference does it make?" Aunt Hale said, after she realized she'd made a mistake. "You're all my children, and all the same—you all neglect me! I was just about to ring you anyway." She berated him for ignoring her, in the same voice she used with Charcoal, her cat, when it scraped its sharp claws against the furniture, and then she asked if he could stop by Alaaddin's shop on the way over to pick up some food for Vas?f's Japanese fish: apparently, they couldn't eat the same fish food as their European cousins. And Alaaddin would only give this special food to people he knew.
"Did you read his column today?"
"Whose column?" she asked, in her usual stubborn way. "Alaaddin's column? No, of course not. We buy Milliyet so that your grandfather can do the crossword, and Vas?f can cut out his clippings. I certainly don't buy it so I can read Celal's column and worry myself sick about what this boy of ours has been up to."
"Then I'd be grateful if you'd call Rüya yourself to tell her the plan for this evening," Galip said. "I'm afraid I won't have time."
"Don't forget now!" said Aunt Hale, and reminded him of the job she'd given him and what time she expected him. She then announced the guest list, which, like the menu for such family gatherings, was set in stone; she recited the names in the same low but thrilling tones that radio announcers use when reading out the famous lineup for a soccer match that listeners have been awaiting with bated breath for days. "Your mother, your Aunt Suzan, your Uncle Melih, Celal if we can find him, and of course your father, plus Vas?f, Charcoal, and your Aunt Hale." The only thing she didn't do was end the list with a wheezing laugh; instead she said, "I'm making puff pastry, just for you!" and hung up.
No sooner had he replaced the receiver than the phone began to ring again, and as he gazed at it blankly, Galip thought about the man Aunt Hale had come very close to marrying the year before Rüya and her family had come home. He could recall what this suitor looked like, and he knew he had a strange name; it was on the tip of his tongue, but he still couldn't remember it. To keep his mind sharp, he decided not to answer the phone until this name came back to him. After seven rings, the phone fell silent. When it began to ring again a few moments later, Galip was thinking about the visit the suitor had made to the house with his uncle and his older brother to ask for Aunt Hale's hand. Again the phone fell silent. When it began to ring again, it was dark outside and he could barely see the furniture in his office. Galip still couldn't remember that man's name, but he could recall being unnerved by his shoes. He had an Aleppo boil on his face. "Are these people Arabs?" Grandfather had asked. "Hale, are you sure you want to marry this man? How did he meet you, anyway?" By chance!
By now the office building was emptying out, but before he left for his family dinner, Galip opened up the files of a client who wished to have his name changed; he sat down to read it in the light of the streetlamp and there it was, the name he'd been looking for. As he entered the line for the Ni?anta?? dolmu?, it occurred to him that the world was too large a place to fit into one man's head; an hour later, when he was back in Ni?anta??, heading for the apartment, he concluded that whatever meaning a person found in the world, he found by chance.
*
The building where Aunt Hale shared one apartment with Vas?f and Esma Han?m, and where Uncle Melih lived in another apartment with Aunt Suzan (and, once upon a time, Rüya), was in the back streets of Ni?anta??. It was only three streets down from the main street, the police station, and Alaaddin's shop—a mere five minutes' walk from the center—so it was not, perhaps, a "back street," but it was for his family, because when they had first moved to Ni?anta?? it was a muddy field dotted with kitchen gardens. As the neighborhood grew, it turned into a proper street, paved first with rocks and later with cobblestones, but his family had watched all this from a haughty distance. As they gazed down on the main street from the City-of-Hearts Apartments—the building that in Aunt Hale's words "towered over all of Ni?anta??"—they felt themselves at the center of the universe; as it slowly became clear that they were going to have to sell off the apartments one by one and move to the meanest and most remote streets of the neighborhood, as they struggled to make new homes in shabby rented flats, they'd been unable to resist calling it a back street—perhaps because no one could pass up a chance to exaggerate the disaster that had befallen them and hold someone else in the family responsible for it.
Three years before his death, on the day he moved out of the City-of-Hearts Apartments and into his new home in a back street, Mehmet Sabit Bey (Grandfather) had marked the occasion by sitting down in his wobbly old armchair, which no longer faced the window as in the old apartment but still faced the radio, which still sat on the same heavy table. Perhaps thinking of the emaciated horse and the rickety cart that had dragged their furniture across the city, he had cried out, "So congratulations, everyone. We've done ourselves proud! We've climbed off the horse, and now we're on the donkey!" Then he reached across to the radio—the china dog was back on top and already asleep on its embroidered doily—and turned the dial.
Eighteen years had passed since then. It was eight o'clock, and except for Alaaddin's, the florist's, and the little place where they sold nuts and dried fruits, all the shops had pulled down their metal shutters; sleet was falling through the clouds of soot, sulfur, coal, and exhaust fumes that clogged the air. As Galip saw the old lights shining in the apartment ahead of him, he felt as he always did—that his memories of this place stretched far beyond the eighteen years his family had been here. It didn't matter how narrow the street was or what the building was called (it was very hard on the tongue, too many o's and u's in it, so they never referred to it by name), and neither did it matter where it was—in Galip's mind his family had been living here in these higgledy-piggledy apartments since the dawn of time. As he climbed the stairs (they always smelled the same; in one of his angrier columns, Celal had claimed the smell was made up of wet cement, mold, cooking oil, onions, and the stink from the air shaft), Galip steeled himself for what lay ahead, his mind racing through the scenes with the practiced impatience of a reader leafing through a book he's already read too many times to count.
Since it is eight o'clock already, Uncle Melih will be in Grandfather's old armchair, reading the newspaper he's brought down from his own apartment, and if he's not pretending this is the first time he's ever set eyes on it, he'll mutter something about hoping he can read it from a new angle if he is sitting in a new chair, or wanting to take one last look at it before Vas?f takes to it with his scissors. But his foot won't stay still. Inside his luckless slippers his toes will be twitching with such impatience that I'll think I can hear my own childhood lament: I'm bored; I have nothing to do, nothing to do, nothing to do…. Esma Han?m will already have been expelled from the kitchen so that Aunt Hale can fry her puff pastries just the way she likes them, without anyone interfering; instead, Esma Han?m will be setting the table and there will be a filterless Bafra hanging from her lips, even though she still thinks Yeni Harman cigarettes are far superior. At one point she'll turn around and ask, "How many are we this evening?" as if she didn't know the answer, as if she didn't know everyone else in the room knew the answer as well as she did. Her eyes will go to Aunt Suzan and Uncle Melih, who will have taken up positions as Grandfather and Grandmother once did, on either side of the old radio and across from Mother and Father. After a lengthy silence, Aunt Suzan will smile hopefully at Esma Han?m and ask, "Are we expecting Celal to join us tonight?" Uncle Melih will say the usual—"That boy is never going to pull himself together, never!" Then, wishing to stand up for his nephew but also happy and proud to be more balanced and responsible than his older brother, Father will mention something amusing he read in one of Celal's recent columns. Added to the pleasure he takes in standing up for his nephew will be the pleasure he takes in showing off in front of his son; after giving us a résumé of whatever national issue or life-and-death matter Celal had been discussing in said column, he'll praise his nephew in words Celal himself would ridicule if he heard them. Then Father will offer up some "constructive" criticism, so that even Mother will start nodding her head—Mother, please, stay out of this!—but she can't stop herself; she considers it her duty to remind Uncle Melih that Celal is a better man than he thinks. When I see Mother joining in, I won't be able to stop myself; even though I know full well they'll never find the hidden meanings I see in his columns and never will, I shall say, to no one in particular, "Have you read today's column?" It will be now, perhaps, that Uncle Melih will ask, "What day is it?" or "Is he writing for them every day now? Not that it matters; I haven't read it"—even though I can see the paper in his hands is open to that very page. My father will say, "I don't like his using such coarse language against the prime minister, though!" and my mother will say, "But even if you don't respect his views, you still have to respect his identity as a writer," and it will be hard to know if she is defending Celal, my father, or the prime minister; at which point, perhaps taking courage from my mother's ambiguous remarks, Aunt Suzan will say, "When he talks about immortality, atheism, and tobacco, he sounds awfully French," and for a moment I'll think we're heading for another discussion about cigarettes. Now Esma Han?m, who still has no idea how many people are coming to supper, is laying the tablecloth, shaking it up and down as if it were a fragrant new bedsheet, first from one end and then the other, and squinting at it through her cigarette smoke as it wafts so very beautifully down to the table. But when Uncle Melih says, "Look at all that smoke, Esma Han?m, you're aggravating my asthma!" and she says, "If anything's aggravating your asthma, Melih Bey, it's the cigarette you're puffing on yourself!" I'll know what's coming next, and rather than listen to this argument for the umpteenth time I'll leave the room. In the kitchen, where the air smells of dough, oil, and melting cheese, will be my Aunt Hale, frying her puff pastries; in the scarf she's wrapped around her head, to protect her hair from the flying fat, she could be a witch stirring a cauldron. Perhaps to show that there is a special bond between us, or perhaps hoping for a kiss, she'll pop a piping-hot pastry into my mouth as if it were some kind of bribe. "Don't tell anyone!" she'll say, adding, "Is it too hot?" but my eyes will be watering too much by this point for me to answer, Yes, much too hot! From there I will go into the room where Grandfather and Grandmother spent so many sleepless nights wrapped up in their blue quilt; it was here, on the same blue quilt, that Rüya and I sat when they gave us our art, arithmetic, and reading lessons; after their deaths, Vas?f moved into this room with his beloved Japanese fish, and when I walk in tonight I'll find him sitting here with Rüya. They'll be looking at the fish together, or they'll be going through Vas?f's clippings. Perhaps I'll join them, and—because neither of us wishes to advertise the fact that Vas?f is deaf and dumb—for a while neither Rüya nor I will speak and then, using the sign language we invented together as children, we'll tell him about an old film we just saw on television and perhaps, because we haven't seen any old films this week, we'll act out that scene from Phantom of the Opera that always gets him so excited, in such great detail that you'd think we'd just been to see it again. A little later, Vas?f (who always understands far more than anyone else) will turn away and give his full attention to his beloved fish, and Rüya and I will look at each other, and yes, for the first time since this morning I'll see you; for the first time since last night we'll have a chance to speak face-to-face. I'll ask, "How are you?" and you'll say the same thing you always say, "Same as ever! Fine!" and, as always, I'll carefully consider every possible meaning, intended and unintended, that these words might convey, and then, to hide the emptiness of my thoughts, though I can guess how you spent the day: reading one of those detective novels that you love so much and that I have never once managed to read to the end—you're always telling me you'd like to translate them into Turkish one day, but today you just didn't get round to it, today you just wandered around in a haze—still, I'll ask you, "What did you do today? Rüya, what did you do?"
*
In yet another column, when Celal was writing again about stairwells in back-street apartment buildings that stank of sleep, garlic, mildew, lime, coal, and cooking oil, he suggested there might be another, more romantic ingredient. Before he rang the doorbell, Galip thought, Tonight I'm going to ask Rüya if she was the one who rang me three times at the office today!
Aunt Hale opened the door and said, "Oh, it's you. Where's Rüya?"
"Isn't she here already?" Galip said. "Didn't you call her?"
"I tried, but no one answered," said Aunt Hale. "I decided you must have told her."
"Maybe she's upstairs at her father's," said Galip.
"Your aunt and uncle came down here ages ago," said Aunt Hale.
For a moment, neither spoke.
"She's at home," Galip said finally. "Let me run home and get her."
"No one's answering your phone," said Aunt Hale. "And Esma Han?m's already frying up your puff pastries."
As Galip raced down the street, the wind driving the snow blew open his nine-year-old overcoat (another of Celal's topics). If, instead of going via the main road, he cut through the back streets—past the shuttered grocery stores and gloomy janitors' offices, past the dimly lit advertisements for Coca-Cola and nylon stockings, past that tailor on the corner who was still hard at work—he could make it from his aunt's apartment to his own in twelve minutes. This he'd calculated long ago, and he wasn't far off. He returned via the same streets (when he passed the tailor again, he was threading a needle with the same piece of cloth still resting on his knee), and the whole trip took him twenty-six minutes. It was Aunt Suzan who opened the door, and Galip told her the same thing he said to the rest of the family at the table: Rüya had come down with a cold and gone to bed, where she'd fallen into a stupor, possibly because she'd overdosed on antibiotics (she'd taken everything she'd found in the drawer!); she'd heard the phone ringing on and off but had been too drowsy to answer; she was still feeling very groggy and not at all hungry so had decided to stay in bed but had asked Galip to send her love to everyone.
Although he knew that this ran the risk of exciting too much interest (poor Rüya, languishing in her sickbed!) he was hoping it would also prompt a discussion about the safe consumption of pharmaceuticals, and so it did; as they ran through the antibiotics, penicillins, and cough medicines sold in our pharmacies, and rattled off the names of the vasodilators and painkillers that were best for the flu, and reminded each other at top volume of the vitamins that should be taken with them, they Turkified each product by adding a few syllables to its name. At any other time, he would have taken as much pleasure from their creative pronunciation and wild medical guesswork as he would from a good poem, but he was haunted now by the image of Rüya in her sickbed; even later he would not be able to decide how innocent this image was or how much of it he'd made up. The way Rüya's foot poked out of the quilt, the hairpins scattered on the sheets—these had to be images from real life, but the picture he had of her hair spreading across the pillow, for example, or the disarray on the night table—the water glass, the pitcher, the medicine boxes, the books—these were clearly borrowed from somewhere else; they came, he thought, from one of Rüya's favorite films, from one of those detective novels she consumed as ravenously as the pistachios she bought at Alaaddin's. Later, when he was fending off their well-meaning questions and trying to keep his answers as short as he could, he made an effort to draw a line in his mind between his memories of the real Rüya and the Rüya he'd invented—in deference, perhaps, to the fictitious detectives that she loved so much and that he would later try to emulate.
Yes, he told himself, as they sat down to eat, Rüya must be back asleep by now, there was no need for Aunt Suzan to wear herself out taking over some soup, and no, she had not asked for that awful doctor—he stank of garlic, and his bag smelled like a tannery. Yes, Rüya had forgotten to go to the dentist again this month, and yes, it was true, Rüya had not been going out much lately, she'd been spending most of her time inside; no, she'd not gone out at all today; oh, really, you saw her? Then she must have gone out for a while today, but she hadn't told Galip; no, she must have mentioned it, actually; where exactly did you see her? She must have gone to the button seller, to the haberdashers, to buy some purple buttons, and she would have gone past the mosque, yes, it all comes back to me now, and it was so cold today, wasn't it, that must have been how she caught cold, and she was coughing, and smoking, too, a whole pack, yes, she had seemed unusually pale, but no, Galip had not realized how pale he looked himself, and neither could he say when he and Rüya would decide to stop living such an unhealthy life.
Overcoat. Button. Kettle. Later, after the family interrogation was over, Galip would have no energy left to ask himself why these three words popped into his head. In one of his more baroque fits of anger, Celal had once written that the subconscious, the "dark spot" lurking in the depths of our minds, did not really exist, at least not in Turkey—it was a Western invention that we'd borrowed from those pompous Western novels, those affected film heroes we tried so hard and failed so miserably to imitate. (Celal had probably just seen Suddenly Last Summer, in which Elizabeth Taylor tries but fails to locate the dark spot in the strange mind of Montgomery Clift.) Galip was not to know at the time, but Celal was by then the author of a lengthy tract (influenced, no doubt, by a few psychology books he'd read in abridged translation, and certainly struck by their ample pornographic detail) in which he traced every misery known to man back to that dark, menacing spot lurking in the depth of our minds: This part of the story would only become clear to Galip after he'd discovered that Celal had turned his own life into a private museum-cum-library.
Galip was just about to change the subject—just about to say, Today, in Celal's column … —when, taking fright by force of habit, he blurted out something else. "Aunt Hale, I forgot to stop by Alaaddin's!" Esma Han?m had just brought out the pumpkin pudding, with such care that you might have mistaken the orange bundle in her arms for a baby plucked from her cradle, and now they were sprinkling over it the walnuts they had crushed with the mortar they'd taken as a keepsake from the candy store the family had owned so many years ago. A quarter century earlier, Rüya and Galip had discovered that if you struck the rim of this mortar with the flat side of a spoon, it would ring like a bell: ding-dong! "Could you stop ringing that thing before my head explodes? What do you think this is, a church?" Dear God, how hard that was to swallow! There wasn't enough crushed walnut to go around, so Aunt Hale made sure that the purple bowl came to her last; "Really, I'm really not in the mood," she said, but when she thought no one was looking she glanced longingly at the empty bowl. Then she laid into an old business rival who had, in her view, single-handedly brought about the decline in their fortunes, so that they couldn't even afford enough walnuts for their pumpkin pudding. She was going to drop by at the police station and report him. In fact, they regarded the police station as fearfully as a dark blue ghost. Once, after Celal had mentioned in a column that the dark spot in our subconscious was the police station, an officer from this police station had served him a subpoena asking him to report to the prosecutor's office to make a statement. The phone rang, and Galip's father answered it in his most serious voice. They're phoning from the police station, he thought. While his father talked on the phone, it seemed as if everything and everyone in the room took on the same blank expression (even the consoling wallpaper, which was the same as in the City-of-Hearts Apartments: green buttons falling through sprigs of ivy); Uncle Melih went into a coughing fit, while poor deaf Vas?f tried to look as if he were really listening, and it was now Galip noticed that his mother's hair, which had been getting lighter and lighter, was now almost as light as beautiful Aunt Suzan's. Like the rest of them, Galip listened to his father's half of the conversation and tried to work out who it was he was speaking to.
"No, sir, I'm afraid not.… Yes, sir, of course we were hoping.… Who did you say you were?" his father asked. "Thank you.… I'm the uncle.… Yes, we're certainly sorry, too.…"
Someone looking for Rüya, Galip decided.
"Someone looking for Celal," his father said, as he hung up the phone. He seemed pleased. "An old lady, a fan of his, a real lady, ringing to say how much she adored the column. She wanted to speak to Celal; she was looking for his address, his phone number."
"Which column?" Galip asked.
"Do you know which column, Hale?" his father asked. "It's strange, but the lady I was just speaking to sounded like you—a lot like you!"
"How strange can it be that an old lady seems to you to have a voice like mine?" said Aunt Hale. Her lung-colored neck shot up suddenly, like a goose. "But this woman's voice doesn't sound at all like mine!"
"How do you mean?"
"The lady you just spoke to rang this morning too," said Aunt Hale. "And she didn't sound like a lady to me, she sounded like a fishwife trying to pass herself off as a lady. Or even a man trying to sound like an older woman."
Galip's father asked, How had the old lady tracked them down to this number? Had Hale thought to ask her?
"No," said Aunt Hale, "I saw no reason. Ever since Celal took over the serial about the wrestler and began to flaunt our dirty linen in the paper for all the world to see, nothing he does can surprise me, and I almost thought, I almost wondered if—well, I thought that maybe, when he was finishing off a column in which he'd ripped us to pieces, he tacked on our phone number, just in case his devoted readers wanted to have a bit more fun with us. When I remember how much your dear departed parents suffered at his expense, there's only one way Celal could shock me, and it wouldn't be to give our phone number to his readers so they can have more fun with us. It would be to tell us what it is that's made him hate us so for the last ten years."
"He hates us because he's a Communist," said Uncle Melih, who had survived his coughing fit and was now lighting himself a victory cigarette. "When it finally sank in that they were never going to get anywhere with the workers or the Turkish people, the Communists tried to con the military into staging some sort of Janissary-type Bolshevik coup. By writing columns seething with blood and rancor, Celal became their pawn."
"No," said Aunt Hale. "It never went that far."
"I know this from Rüya," said Uncle Melih. He let out a laugh and managed not to cough. "Apparently they promised him that, after the coup, the new Alaturka Bolshevik Janissary Union would either make him foreign minister or ambassador to Paris, and he believed them! He was even studying French at home. At first I was happy to see that these hopeless revolutionary dreams of his had at least kindled an interest in French. He never picked up a single foreign language as a youth; he was too busy running around with his disreputable friends. But when things got out of hand, I wouldn't let Rüya see him anymore."
"Nothing like that ever happened, Melih!" Aunt Suzan cried. "Rüya and Celal kept seeing each other; they stayed very close. You'd never know he was only her half brother. She loved him like a real brother and he loved her like a sister!"
"It happened, it happened, but I left it too late," said Uncle Melih. "He may not have been able to fool the army and the Turkish people, but he did manage to fool his sister. That's how Rüya turned into an anarchist. If our Galip hadn't rescued her from those guerrilla thugs, from that rat's nest, who knows where Rüya would be? Certainly not asleep in her own bed."
Thinking that everyone around him was suddenly thinking of Rüya in her bed, Galip stared at his nails and wondered if Uncle Melih planned to add something new to his list of grievances, as he tended to do every two or three months.
"By now Rüya might even have landed herself in prison; she's never been as cautious as Celal," and he launched into his list with such excitement that he could barely hear the chorus crying God forbid! "By now, Rüya would be with Celal and those gangster friends of his—those Beyoglu gangsters, those heroin dealers, those nightclub bouncers and cocaine-addict White Russians, and all those other debauched creatures he spends time with in the name of reporting—and our poor Rüya would have been sitting there with him. Think of the company we'd have to keep to have any chance of finding her: Englishmen who've come to our city in pursuit of the vilest pleasures; homosexuals who love serials about wrestlers but crave the wrestlers themselves even more; vulgar American women looking for orgies in hamams; con artists; would-be starlets who'd never even rate as whores in a European country, let alone as artists; officers who were kicked out of the army for insubordination or embezzlement, even; chanteuses who look like men, whose voices have cracked from syphillis; beauties from the slums trying to pass themselves off as women of quality.… Tell her to take Isteropiramisin."
"Pardon?" said Galip.
"It's the best antibiotic for flu, if taken with Bekozim Fort. Every six hours. What time is it? Should she have woken up by now?"
Aunt Suzan said Rüya was probably still asleep. As Galip thought of Rüya in her bed, he imagined everyone else was too.
"I won't have it!" said Esma Han?m. She was carefully gathering up the sorry tablecloth, which they'd all used to wipe their mouths, a bad habit they'd picked up from Grandfather, much to Grandmother's distress. "No, I'm not letting anyone in this house speak ill of my Celal. My Celal is a very important man!"
According to Uncle Melih, it was because his fifty-five-year-old son had the same opinion of himself that he no longer bothered with his seventy-five-year-old father and never let anyone know what Istanbul apartment he was living in, so that no one—not just his father but no one in the family, not even Aunt Hale, who had shown him such forgiveness—was able to reach him. Not only had he refused to give them his phone number, he'd even pulled his phone out of its socket. Galip was afraid that Uncle Melih was getting ready to shed a few false tears, not out of sadness but out of habit. But he didn't, he did something Galip dreaded even more: again by habit, again forgetting the twenty-year difference between them, he told everyone how he'd always longed for a son like Galip, not Celal, someone with a head on his shoulders, like Galip, someone mature and well-behaved.
Twenty-two years earlier (in other words, when Celal was roughly the same age Galip was now) when Galip was still growing at an embarrassing rate and his gangly limbs were always getting in his way and he heard his Uncle Melih express this wish for the first time, the words had conjured up dreams of a life in which he'd be able to eat every night with Uncle Melih, Aunt Suzan, and Rüya, thus escaping those bland and colorless meals with his parents when everyone stared into the middle distance as the four walls around the dining table closed in on them. (Mother: There are some stewed beans left over from lunch, would you like some? Galip: Mmm, I don't think so. Mother: How about you? Father: What about me?) This was followed by other tantalizing visions: Aunt Suzan, whom he had seen in her blue nightgown once or twice, when he'd gone upstairs on a Sunday morning to play Secret Passage or I Can't See You with Rüya, would become his mother (a big improvement); Uncle Melih, whose stories about Africa and the law so thrilled him, would be his father (even better); and, because they were both the same age, Rüya and he would become twins (he dropped this line of fantasy before he could take it to its logical conclusion).
After supper was cleared, Galip told everyone that there'd been some people from the BBC trying to find Celal but they'd not managed to track him down; this had not ignited the usual complaints about how Celal hid his address and phone numbers from everyone and all the rumors about the apartments he had in all four corners of the city, and where they were, and how to find them. It's snowing, someone said. So when they all got up from the table, before they had glued themselves back into their favorite armchairs, they parted the curtains with the backs of their hands and stared out into the cold night to look at the light covering of snow on the back street below. It was clean snow, silent snow (a reprise from one of Celal's favorite tongue-in-cheek vignettes, Old Ramadan Nights)! Galip followed Vas?f into his room.
Vas?f sat down on the edge of the bed, and Galip sat down across from him. Vas?f ran his hand through his white hair and then draped it over Galip's shoulder: Rüya? Galip punched him in the chest and acted out a coughing fit; she has a bad cough! Then he joined his hands together and laid his head on the pillow; she's in bed. Vas?f took a large box out from underneath his bed: a collection of some of the clippings he'd made from newspapers over the past fifty years, the best of them, perhaps. Galip sat down next to him. He picked out a few illustrations for Galip to admire, and it was almost as if Rüya were sitting there next to them, as if they were smiling together at the things Vas?f was showing them. A once famous soccer player advertising shaving cream (the picture dated back twenty years and the star beaming at them through the foam had since died of a brain hemorrhage after countering a corner shot with a head shot); Kas?m, the Iraqi leader, lying dead in his bloody uniform in the aftermath of a coup; a reconstruction of the famous ?i?li Square Murder ("Upon discovering that his wife had been cuckolding him for twenty years," he could hear Rüya saying in her best radio-theater voice, "the jealous colonel would come out of retirement to trail the playboy journalist for days, finally shooting him along with the young wife traveling with him in the car"); Menderes, the prime minister, sparing the life of the camel that his loyal supporters had hoped to sacrifice in his honor, while in the background, Celal the reporter gazes off into the distance, as does the camel. Galip was just about to get up to go home when Vas?f, who was still on automatic pilot, pulled out two of Celal's old columns, "Alaaddin's Shop" and "The Executioner and the Weeping Face." Something to read tonight, while he tossed and turned! He did not have to do too much miming to convince Vas?f to let him borrow them. No one minded that he turned down the coffee Esma Han?m had brought him. His concern for his bedridden wife must have been etched deeply into his face. He was already at the door. Uncle Melih had even said, "Yes, let him go, let him go home!" Aunt Hale had bent down to greet Charcoal the cat on his return from the snowy street, while the others cried out from the sitting room, "Tell her to get well soon, tell her to get well soon, send Rüya our love, send Rüya our love!"
On his way home, Galip ran into the bespectacled tailor, who was standing outside his shop, pulling down the metal shutters. The streetlamp above them was studded with little icicles. The two men greeted each other and walked on together. "I'm late," said the tailor, perhaps to break the silence the snow had brought with it. "My wife's waiting for me at home." "It's cold," Galip replied. They continued walking, but in silence, listening to the snow crunch beneath their feet; when they had reached Galip's corner, he looked up at the top floor and saw the pale lamp glowing in his bedroom. The snow kept falling and, with it, darkness.
The lights were still off in the sitting room, just as Galip had left them, but the lights were on in the hallway. He went straight into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. After he'd taken off his jacket and trousers and hung them up, he went into the bedroom, where, in the pale light of the bed lamp he changed out of his wet socks. Then he sat down at the dining table and reread the farewell letter Rüya had written with her green ballpoint pen. It was even shorter than he remembered: only nineteen words.
