Free The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

that. No, it is perfectly childish.
    — MARCEL PROUST
    Rüya had written the nineteen-word farewell letter with the green ballpoint pen that Galip wanted kept right next to the phone. The pen was nowhere to be found; considering he couldn’t locate it in his subsequent searches throughout the apartment, Galip surmised that Rüya had written the letter the minute before she went out the door and, thinking the pen might come in handy, popped it into her purse. The fat fountain pen she used lovingly once in a blue moon to fuss over a letter (which she would never finish; if she did, she would hardly ever stick it into an envelope, and if she did, she would never mail it) rested in its usual place: the drawer in the bedroom.
    Desperate to find the notebook from which she’d torn the piece of paper, Galip wasted chunks of time. He checked the pages against the letter, riffling through the notebooks in the drawers of the old bureau where, heeding Rüya and Jelal’s advice, he’d set up a museum dedicated to his personal history: the grade-school math workbook where the price of eggs was calculated at six pennies per dozen; the compulsory prayer notebook kept for religion class with swastikas and caricatures of the cross-eyed religion teacher drawn on the last few pages; and the Turkish Lit. notebook which had sketches of skirts in the margins along with the names of international celebrities, handsome local sports figures, and pop stars (“There may be a question on Beauty and Love on the exam”).
    Later—after going through the same drawers that were so disappointing, getting to the bottoms of boxes that sadly revealed the same reminiscences, and searching for the last time Rüya’s pockets, where the self-same scents seemed to conspire against Galip, persuading him that nothing had changed—when he glanced at the old bureau again, sometime after the call to prayer at dawn, he finally chanced upon the school notebook out of which Rüya had torn the sheet. A page had been ripped hastily and recklessly from the middle of one he’d already looked through but without paying careful attention to the pictures and the notes (“The administration’s plunder of our national forests was what provoked the army into the coup of May 27th”; “The hydra’s cross section resembles the blue vase in Grandma’s sideboard”). It was yet another detail that yielded no conclusion other than Rüya’s reckless haste, other than the details he’d accumulated all night long, the small discoveries, the reminiscences that piled atop one another like falling dominoes.
    A reminiscence: Years ago in middle school, when Galip and Rüya sat at the same desk, the hideous history teacher they suffered patiently and good-naturedly would all of a sudden pop a quiz, “Take out papers and pens!” But in the stillness that fell over the fearful classroom unprepared for a test, she couldn’t tolerate hearing the sound of pages getting torn out of notebooks. “Don’t rip the pages out of your notebooks!” her shrill voice would screech. “I want loose sheets! Those who rip up their notebooks and destroy this nation’s property aren’t Turks, but degenerates! I’ll hand them zeros!” And she would too!
    A small discovery: In the still of the night, shamelessly disturbed only by the refrigerator which switched on and off at gratuitous intervals, in the bottom of Rüya’s closet that he’d already gone through umpteen times, stuck between the dark green pumps she hadn’t taken along, Galip came across a detective novel in translation. There were hundreds of them in the apartment and he was about to toss it when, flipping through the pages of the black book with the imprint of a small but treacherous owl with huge eyes, and having learned in one night to go through everything in the bottoms of closets and the corners of drawers, his hand found, as if on its own, the photo clipped out of a glossy magazine: a good-looking naked man. Galip