The Black Book Read Online Free PDF

the reason why the office and the old furniture had gone to Galip was explained differently: according to Galip’s father, Uncle Melih grappled not with the opponents of his clients but with the clients themselves; according to Galip’s mother, having become paralyzed and senile, Uncle Melih couldn’t tell his court records and law briefs from restaurant menus and ferryboat schedules; according to Rüya, her darling dad had already guessed what would happen between his daughter and his nephew, and that was why he’d been willing to hand over his law offices to Galip, who was still only his nephew, not yet his son-in-law. So now Galip had the naked-pated portraits of some Western jurisprudents whose fames as well as their names had long been forgotten, the fezzed pictures of teachers who had taught at the law school half a century ago, and the dossiers of lawsuits where the judges, the plaintiffs, and the defendants were long dead, the desk where Jelal studied in the evenings and where his mother traced dress patterns in the morning, and on one corner of this desk, the husky black telephone which, more than a tool of communication, looked like an unwieldy and feckless contraption of war.
    The bell on the phone, which sometimes rang of its own accord, was startling. The pitch-dark receiver was as heavy as a little dumbbell and when dialed, it grumbled with the squeaky melody of the old turnstiles at the Karaköy–Kadıköy ferryboat dock. Sometimes it connected with numbers at random, rather than the numbers dialed.
    When he dialed his home number and Rüya actually answered, he was surprised: “Are you awake?” He was pleased that Rüya no longer roamed in the enclosed garden of her own memory but in a world known to everyone. He visualized the table on which the phone stood, the messy room, Rüya’s stance. “Have you read the paper I left on the table? Jelal seems to have written some fun stuff.” “I haven’t,” Rüya said. “What time is it?” “You went to bed late, didn’t you?” Galip said. “You got your own breakfast,” Rüya said. “I couldn’t bear to wake you,” said Galip. “Whatever were you dreaming?” “I saw a cockroach in the hallway late at night,” Rüya said with the flat voice of a radio announcer warning sailors of a loose mine sighted in the Black Sea, but she then went on anxiously: “Between the kitchen door and the radiator in the hallway … at two o’clock … a big one.” Silence. “Shall I hop on a taxi and come home?” Galip said. “The house is scarier when the drapes are closed,” said Rüya. “Want to go to the movies tonight,” Galip said, “at the Palace? We could stop by at Jelal’s on the way back.” Rüya yawned. “I’m sleepy.” “Go to sleep,” said Galip. They both fell silent. Galip heard Rüya yawn faintly once more before he hung up.
    In the days that followed, when Galip had to remember this phone conversation again and again, he couldn’t decide how much of their verbal exchange he had actually heard. Let alone the faint yawn. Seeing how he remembered with suspicion the revised versions of what Rüya had said, “It was as if it weren’t Rüya I was speaking to but someone else,” he thought and imagined that this someone had duped him. Later on, he came to think that Rüya had said what he heard, but after that phone conversation, it wasn’t Rüya but he himself who had slowly begun to turn into someone else. He kept reconstructing what he thought he heard or remembered through his new persona. In those days when he listened even to his own voice as if it were someone else’s, Galip understood very well how two persons on two ends of a phone line speaking to each other could turn into two entirely different persons. But at first, going for a simpler explanation, he’d blamed it all on the old telephone: all day, the clumsy thing had kept ringing, making him pick up the receiver.
    After speaking to Rüya, Galip had first called a