Perfectly Childish
People separate for a reason. They tell you their reason. They give you a chance to reply. They do not run away like that. No, it is perfectly childish.
—Marcel Proust
Rüya had written her nineteen-word goodbye letter with the green ballpoint pen that Galip always tried to keep next to the telephone. After he saw it was no longer there, after he'd searched the entire apartment and still not found it, he decided that Rüya must have used it at the last moment, on her way out the door; she must have thrown it into her bag, thinking, perhaps, she might need it later on; for her favorite fountain pen, the fat one she used on the rare occasions when she sat down to write a letter (she hardly ever finished them or, if she did, she never got around to putting them into an envelope, and if she did, she usually forgot to mail them) was still in its usual place, in a drawer in their bedroom. Galip spent a great deal of time trying to locate the notebook from which she'd torn the paper. He spent most of the night going through the old chest of drawers he had (at Celal's suggestion) turned into a museum of his own life, checking Rüya's letter against every notebook he found: his arithmetic exercise book from primary school, in which he'd calculated eggs to cost six kurus a dozen, the compulsory prayer book whose back pages he'd covered with swastikas and caricatures of his cross-eyed teacher, and the Turkish literature notebook whose margins were decorated with sketches of models and names of international film stars, along with Turkey's own best-looking singers and athletes. ("They may ask about Love and Beauty in the exam.") There was no faster way to shatter his illusions than to go through these drawers, but still he carried on, digging fruitlessly to the bottom of every box he could find, checking under the beds, and then, one last time, going through every pocket of every piece of clothing Rüya had left behind—each still held her scent, each held out the empty promise that nothing had changed or ever would. It was just after the dawn call to prayers that Galip glanced over at the old chest of drawers and saw the source of the paper for her letter. She'd torn it—roughly, mercilessly—from the middle of a school notebook he'd already checked, though without paying due attention to the words or pictures inside it. (The military coup on 27 May 1960 was provoked by concern about the government's plundering of the nation's forests…. The cross-section of the hydra looks just like that vase on Grandmother's buffet.) As he stared at this notebook more closely, all the other little memories—all the other little discoveries he had made during his nightlong search—came tumbling back.
A memory: Many years ago, in middle school, when he and Rüya were in the same class, sitting in the same row, listening to their hideous history teacher with all the patience and goodwill they could muster, there'd be times when this teacher would grimace all of a sudden and yell, "Get out your pens and paper at once!" As they sat in cowering silence, dreading the test for which they all were unprepared, someone somewhere would tear a sheet of paper from a notebook, even though they all knew how she hated this sound. "Don't tear pages from your notebooks!" she'd scream in that shrill voice of hers. "I want loose sheets! People who tear up our nation's notebooks, people who destroy our nation's property—they're not Turks, they're degenerates! I'll give them zeros!" And she did.
A small discovery: in the middle of the night, during one of those strange interludes when the refrigerator motor cut off suddenly, as if to unnerve him, when he was searching the back of the wardrobe—and even he could not have said how many times he'd already done so—wedged between a pair of dark green high-heeled shoes she'd left behind, he found a detective novel in translation. There were hundreds of these lying all over the house, so normally he would not have paid it much attention, but tonight he was struck by the owl staring so treacherously from the cover, and as he leafed through this black book, it was as if his hands, well trained after a night of reaching into the backs of drawers and wardrobes and leaving nothing unturned, knew exactly where to go: There, hidden between two pages, was a picture clipped from a glossy magazine: a handsome naked man. His penis was limp, and as Galip was deciding how it compared with his own, he told himself that Rüya must have cut the picture out of a foreign magazine she'd bought at Alaaddin's.
A memory: Rüya knew Galip couldn't bear her detective novels so she was confident he'd never look through one. He detested this world where the English were parodies of Englishness and no one was fat unless they were colossally so; the murderers were as artificial as their victims, serving only as clues in a puzzle. (I'm just trying to pass the time, OK? Rüya would say, and then she'd reach into the bag of nuts she'd bought from Alaaddin before returning to her book.) Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective book he'd ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murderer's identity. Instead of decorating the story with clues and red herrings, the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author's imagination. Rüya, who knew more about detective novels than Galip did, asked how the author was to manage all that extra detail. Because every detail in a detective novel served a purpose.
Details: Before leaving the apartment, Rüya had used that terrifying insect killer (the one with an enormous black beetle and three cockroaches pictured on the front) and sprayed it all over the bathroom, the corridor, and the kitchen. (The stink was still in the air.) She'd turned on the electric chauffe-bain (probably without thinking, and needlessly, because Thursdays were hot-water days in their building); she'd spent some time reading Milliyet (its pages were wrinkled); she'd even done a bit of the crossword with the lead pencil she must have taken with her: tomb, interval, moon, difficult, division, pious, secret, listen. She'd had breakfast (tea, white cheese, bread) and done the dishes. She'd smoked two cigarettes in the bedroom, another four in the sitting room. She'd taken with her only a few winter dresses and some of that makeup she said was bad for her skin, along with her slippers, the novel she was reading, the keyless key chain she'd hung on the chest of drawers for good luck, the pearl necklace that was her only piece of jewelry, and the hairbrush that had a mirror on its back; she'd left wearing the coat that was the same color as her hair. She must have put these things in an old medium-sized suitcase her father had brought back from the Maghreb that she had later borrowed for a trip they'd never taken. She'd shut most of the wardrobes (or, rather, kicked the doors closed); she'd shoved in the drawers, gathered up her trinkets, and put them back where they belonged, and she'd written her farewell letter in one go, without the slightest hesitation: there were no abandoned drafts in the ashtrays or wastepaper baskets.
Perhaps it was wrong even to call it a farewell letter. Although she'd not said if she would return, she'd not said she would not return either. It was almost as if she were just leaving the apartment, not leaving Galip. She'd managed, in a single four-word sentence, to enlist Galip as a co-conspirator: You manage the mothers! Galip was grateful she had chosen not to throw her real reason for leaving into his face, and it pleased him to be drawn into the conspiracy; whatever else it was, it was still a conspiracy with Rüya. He took comfort in the promise Rüya made next: it too was four words: I'll be in touch. He sat up all night, waiting in vain.
All night, the radiators and the water pipes groaned, gurgled, and sighed. There were flurries of snow. The boza seller wandered past at one point, hawking his millet drinks, but he never came back. For hours on end, Galip and Rüya's green signature stared at each other. Every object in the house, every shadow, took on a new personality; it was like waking up in a new home. That lamp that's been hanging from the ceiling for three years, Galip found himself thinking. It looks like a spider! Why am I only seeing that now? He tried to go to sleep, longing, perhaps, to escape into a beautiful dream, but to no avail. Instead he went over and over the search in his mind (had he looked into that box at the back of the drawer? … Yes, of course he'd looked, he must have looked, perhaps he hadn't looked, no, of course not, he'd forgotten to look, he was going to have to go through everything once more). Then he'd start all over again. Some way into this new bleak hunt, as he stood fingering the empty case of a long-lost pair of sunglasses, or grappling with the memories awakened by the buckle of one of Rüya's old belts, he'd see how hopeless, how pointless it all was (and how implausible the detectives in all those books, not to mention the kindly authors whispering clues into their ears!) and when that moment came, he'd return whatever object he had in his hand to its original location—with painstaking precison, like a researcher making an inventory of a museum—and lumber back to the kitchen like a sleepwalker. Looking into the refrigerator but taking nothing out, he would return to his favorite chair in the sitting room to sit for a few minutes before embarking on yet another ritual search.
Throughout their three-year marriage, it had been Rüya's chair; he would sit across from her, watching her devour her detective novels, watching her sigh with longing and tug at her hair and swing her legs with ever-growing impatience as she raced furiously from page to page. On the night she left him, whenever he sat there in her place, it was always the same scene playing before his eyes. But it did not date back to their lycée years, to the times he'd seen a gang of pimply boys who looked older than him (if only because they had taken up smoking earlier and managed to grow a few hairs on their upper lips) escorting Rüya into pastry shops where cockroaches roamed fearlessly on tabletops, and it was not that Saturday afternoon three years afterward, when he'd wandered up to Rüya's apartment (I came to ask if you happened to have a blue label!) and found Rüya glancing at her watch and swinging her legs with ill-concealed impatience while her mother sat at the rickety dressing table, making herself up; and it was not more than three years after that when Rüya, paler and more tired than he had ever seen her, announced that she had married a young leftist firebrand much admired in her circle for his courage, his devotion to the cause, and his decision to publish political analyses—the first ever to appear in Dawn of Labor—under his own name. As she assured him that the marriage itself was not political in the least, Galip counted the defects that had plunged him into lonely defeat (my face is asymmetrical, my arm is crooked, I have no color in my face, my voice is too rough!). The night Rüya left him, it was a much simpler image that shimmered before his eyes, an image that reminded him of a bit of fun, an opportunity, a piece of life that had slipped beyond his grasp: the light falling on the white pavement in front of Alaaddin's shop on a snowy evening.
It was a Friday evening, a year and a half after Rüya and her family moved into the attic apartment, when they were in third grade; it was winter and already dark, and the air was thick with the noise of traffic rising from Ni?anta?? Square; they'd just taken two games they'd invented together earlier—Silent Passage and I Didn't See It—and combined them to make a new game: I've Disappeared! One of them would slip into another apartment—their grandmother's or their uncle's—and "disappear" into a corner, and the other would try to find him. A very simple game, but because there was no time limit and because it was against the rules to turn on the light in any room no matter how dark it was, it tested courage and fired up the imagination. When it was his turn to disappear, Galip went straight to a hiding place he'd figured out two days earlier in a burst of inspiration (above the wardrobe in Grandmother's bedroom, which he reached by stepping first on the arm of the chair next to it and then, very carefully, its back) and because he was sure Rüya would never find him there, he conjured up her image in the darkness. In his daydream it was he who was searching for Rüya, not the other way around—just so that he could feel the pain Rüya felt at his disappearance! Rüya must be in tears, Rüya must be bored after so much time alone, Rüya must be in a dark room downstairs somewhere, pleading with him to come out of his hiding place! Much later, after a wait so long it seemed as endless as childhood itself, impatience got the better of him and—unaware that impatience had already brought the game to a close—he climbed down from his hiding place; after accustoming himself to the dim light, he set out to find Rüya. After searching the entire building, he was forced to ask Grandmother. His voice was strange and ghostly. "Goodness," she replied. "What's all that dust on the top of your head? Where have you been? They've been looking for you! Celal was here," she added. "Celal and Rüya have gone off to Alaaddin's shop!" Galip had run straight to the window, to the cold, shadowy, inky-blue window: It was dark outside and it was snowing, a sad, heavy snow that seemed to beckon him, that tugged at his heart. In the distance was Alaaddin's shop: amid the toys, magazines, balls, yo-yos, colored bottles, and tanks glimmered a light that was just the same shade as Rüya's complexion, and he could just see it reflected on the white pavement outside.
It was twenty-four years old, that memory, but all night long it kept foaming up out of nowhere, as acrid as boiling milk: this piece of life he'd missed. Where was it? He was mocked by the grandfather clock, ticking endlessly away; it was the same clock that had stood in his grandparents' hall for so many years, awaiting their appointment with eternity. When, soon after he and Rüya had married, Galip had insisted that they move it out of Aunt Hale's apartment and into their own new love nest, he had, in his excitement, thought it would keep their memories alive, remind them forever of the adventures they had shared as children. But throughout the three years they spent together, it was Rüya, not Galip, who'd seemed haunted by the joys and pleasures that had slipped beyond her grasp.
Every morning Galip would go to work; every evening he would head for home, fighting his way on and off buses, hopping from one shared taxi to another, plowing through an endless stream of dark anonymous faces, legs, and elbows that seemed to belong to no one. All day long, he'd look for reasons to phone Rüya; once or twice a day, he did. Though his excuses were thin and never failed to annoy her, he was still fairly confident he knew how she spent her days, just by counting the cigarettes in the ashtrays, taking note of the brands, and doing a quick check of the apartment. Had anything been moved? Was there anything new? From time to time—in a jealous moment, or a rare burst of happiness—he'd imitate those husbands in Western movies and ask her openly: What did you do all day, what did you do? His rash question would send them both tumbling into a dark and slippery world that no film—Eastern or Western—could ever hope to illuminate, face-to-face with that empty shell that statisticians and bureaucrats call "the housewife"; because Galip had never imagined Rüya bearing children and brandishing detergents, it was only after he married her that he discovered this world even existed.
But he would never know the strange herbs and ghastly flowers that engulfed this world; like the garden of Rüya's memories, it was closed to him. This forbidden realm was the common subject and target of most radio programs and color supplements, every soap and detergent ad, every photo novel, every news flash from a foreign magazine, though none came close to dispelling the mystery that surrounded it. There were times when he'd ask himself how it was that the paper scissors had ended up next to the copper bowl on the radiator in the hallway, and for what reason; or why, if they were out for a Sunday stroll and ran into a woman he'd not seen in years (though he knew Rüya still saw her frequently), Galip would stop in his tracks, sensing a sign, a clue to this silken, slippery, forbidden realm. He felt almost as if he had stumbled onto a secret cult that had once been forced underground but was now so powerful it no longer needed to conceal itself. It frightened him to see how infectious it was, how every anonymous housewife in the world was implicated, but what alarmed him more was their insistence that they had nothing to hide, that there were no esoteric rituals, no shared crimes, histories, or raptures, that everything they did, they did of their own volition. He was fascinated by their duplicity and also repelled by it. It called to mind the secrets kept by harem eunuchs, locked up and thrown away with the key. Everyone knew this world existed, so it lacked the dreadful power of a nightmare; it was, nonetheless, a mystery, never to be defined or named, and though it had been passed from generation to generation for centuries, it was tinged with sadness, for never had it been a source of pride. Never had it offered its denizens security; no victory had ever been claimed in its name. There were times when Galip thought of it as a curse, condemning every member of a family to centuries of bad luck, but because he had seen many women returning voluntarily to this accursed land—getting married, having children, leaving work for reasons that made little sense—he knew, too, that the cult exercised some sort of gravitational pull; this was most evident in women who'd gone to great lengths to break away, pursue careers, and make their mark in the world, for even they sometimes betrayed the hint of regret for the secret rites, the silken mysteries of the hidden world that would be forever closed to him. Sometimes, if Rüya shocked him by laughing too hard at one of his idiotic jokes, or if, in a moment of rapture, he dared to break all the rules he'd learned in magazines, if he passed his clumsy hands through Rüya's black silken hair to see her lips relax into a smile, Galip would suddenly want to ask his wife about her secret life—leaving aside the laundry, the dishes, the detective novels, and the trips to the store (the doctor said she wasn't going to have children, and Rüya had shown no great interest in going to work), he wanted to ask her what she had done that day, what she had done at a particular moment, but he feared the gulf that might open up between them after the question; it was so vast, and the thing he wanted to know so far beyond their shared vocabulary, he couldn't say a thing; instead, he'd hold her arms and stare at her blankly, vacantly. "You're giving me that blank look again," Rüya would say. "You're as white as a sheet," she'd say, happily repeating the words Galip's mother had said to him all through his childhood.
After the dawn call to prayer, Galip dozed off in the sitting-room chair. In his dream he was having a conversation with Vas?f and Rüya next to the aquarium; as Japanese fish swayed in water that was as green as the ink in Rüya's ballpoint pen, they agreed there'd been a mistake; it eventually emerged that it wasn't Vas?f who was deaf and dumb but Galip; this did not unduly distress them, though; whatever happened, things would soon set themselves right.
After he woke up, Galip sat down at the table and did what he guessed Rüya herself had done nineteen or twenty hours earlier: He looked for a blank piece of paper. When he, like Rüya, was unable to find one, he turned over her farewell letter and made a list of all the people and places that had occurred to him one by one over the course of the night. The more he wrote, the longer the list, the longer the list, the more names Galip was forced to add to it; he was acting like a detective in one of Rüya's novels, and this unnerved him. Rüya's old flames, her zany lycée friends, the acquaintances whose names crossed her lips from time to time, her comrades from her political days, and the mutual friends to whom Galip had decided to say nothing until he'd tracked Rüya down: As he jotted the names down, the curves and strokes of each vowel and consonant winked and waved, tantalizing Galip the apprentice detective with double meanings, mocking him with false clues. After the garbagemen had passed, knocking the sides of the truck as they emptied the enormous bins, Galip decided he should write no more, so he took his green pen and put it next to its mate in the inside pocket of the coat he was to wear that day.
He turned off all the lights in the apartment; the snow cast the shadows in a bluish glow. Galip did one last search of the trash bin and put it outside, hoping to keep the nosy janitor from asking too many questions. He brewed himself some tea, slipped a new blade into his razor and shaved, found himself clean underwear, put on a fresh but unironed shirt, and tidied up the mess he'd made while ransacking the house. While he drank his tea he leafed through the Milliyet that the janitor had slipped under his door while he was getting dressed; today Celal's column was about an eye he'd met many years earlier, in a dark alley in the middle of the night. Though it was a reprint of an old column, Galip still felt the terrible eye gazing down at him. At the same moment, the phone rang.
Rüya! Galip thought; by the time he picked up the receiver, he had already decided that he and she should see a film that evening—perhaps at the Palace Theater. Hope died at the sound of Aunt Suzan's voice, but he didn't miss a beat. Yes, he told her, Rüya's fever had come down and, yes, she'd had a good night's sleep, and when she woke up, she'd even told Galip about her dream. Of course she wanted to speak to her mother, could she hold on a moment? "Rüya!" Galip cried down the hallway, "It's your mother on the phone!" He imagined Rüya yawning as she rose from the bed, lazily throwing on her robe and searching for her slippers, and then the movie in his mind switched reels: Galip, the solicitous husband, strides down the hallway to find out why she has still not come to the phone; entering her room, he finds her back in bed again, fast asleep. To bring this second scene to life, to create an atmosphere strong enough for Aunt Suzan to believe it, too, he walked up and down the corridor to produce the right sound effects. He returned to the phone. "She's gone back to sleep, Aunt Suzan. When she woke up, the fever had glued her eyes shut so she got up to wash her face, but now she's gone back to sleep." "Make sure she drinks plenty of orange juice!" said Aunt Suzan, and she went on to tell him where he could find the best and cheapest fresh blood-orange juice in Ni?anta??. "We're thinking of going to the Palace Theater this evening," Galip told her in a confident voice. "Make sure she doesn't catch cold again!" said Aunt Suzan, and then, perhaps thinking she had meddled enough, moved on to a very different subject. "Do you know, you sound just like Celal on the phone. Or have you caught cold too? Watch out for those microbes! Make sure you don't catch what Rüya has!" There the conversation ended; they both hung up, almost noiselessly, perhaps to keep Rüya from waking or perhaps in silent deference to the fragile phone.
As soon as he had hung up, Galil went back to Celal's article, and as he read, the husband he had just impersonated came under the dreaded gaze of the eye: His mind filled with smoke, and it came to him in a flash. "Of course! Rüya's gone back to her ex-husband!" The truth could not be clearer; it shocked him to think he had failed to notice it until now. It was in the same decisive mode that he went to the phone to ring Celal. It was time to end the confusion, time to say, I'm going out now to find them. When I find Rüya with that ex-husband of hers—it shouldn't take me long—I'm not sure if I'll be able to persuade her to come home with me. You're much better than I am at deceiving her. What should I say to get her to come home? (He wanted to say come back to me but the words stuck in his throat.) "First calm down!" Celal would tell him. "When exactly did Rüya leave? Calm down! Let's think this through. Come to the paper, let's talk." But Celal was not at home yet, and neither was he at the paper.
As he left the house, Galip considered leaving the phone off the hook, though in the end he didn't. If Aunt Suzan says, "I rang and rang, but it was always busy," I could say, Rüya must have left the phone off the hook. You know how absentminded she is, and how forgetful.
