Free The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk Page A

instinctively compared the guy’s size with his own, looked at the man-tool in the photo, which was flaccid, and thought: She must’ve cut it out of some magazine she got at Aladdin’s.
    Reminiscence: Rüya was sure Galip would never touch her books; she knew he couldn’t stand detective novels, which was all she had. Galip couldn’t bring himself to spend any time in the artificial world of the whodunit where the English were super-English and the fat superfat, where the subjects and the objects including the criminal and the victim didn’t behave like themselves but like devices, or rather were forced by the writer to act like them. (Kills time! Rüya used to say as she scarfed up the novel, along with the nuts’n’tachios also bought at Aladdin’s.) Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective novel worth reading would be one in which the writer himself didn’t know the identity of the murderer. Only then would the objects and the characters not turn into herrings and red herrings devised by the omniscient writer. By virtue of representing their correspondences in reality, they would exist as themselves in the book, instead of as figments of the novelist’s imagination. Rüya, who was a better reader of novels than Galip, had inquired how in the world the surfeit of details in such a novel as he proposed could be kept under control. The details in the detective novel were put there, apparently, to foreshadow the outcome.
    Details: Before she left, Rüya had sprayed the hell out of the bathroom, the kitchen, and the hallway with the can of bug bomb on which a huge black beetle and three smaller cockroaches served to terrify the consumer. (It still stank in there.) She’d turned on the so-called chauffe-bain without thinking (needless, since Thursday was central hot-water day in the building), she’d skimmed through Milliyet (it was wrinkled) and worked through some of the crossword puzzle using the pencil she took along: mausoleum, gap, luna, force, improvisation, pious, mystery, listen. She’d had breakfast (tea, feta, bread) and hadn’t done the dishes. She’d smoked two cigarettes in the bedroom, four in the living room. She’d taken some of her winter clothes, and some cosmetics which she claimed were bad for her skin, her slippers, the batch of novels she’d been reading, her lucky key chain with no keys which ordinarily dangled from the handle of her drawer, the pearl necklace that was her only jewelry, and her mirror-backed hairbrush. She’d worn the winter coat which was the color of her hair. She must’ve put the stuff into the old medium-size suitcase she borrowed from her dad (the one Uncle Melih brought back from the Barbary Coast) in case it might come in handy for the trip they never took. She’d closed most of the cupboards (by kicking them in), she’d slid in the drawers, put her paraphernalia back in their places. And she’d written the goodbye letter at one blow, without any hesitation. There were no torn-up rough drafts in the trash nor in the ash cans.
    Perhaps it wasn’t even a goodbye letter. Rüya had said nothing about returning, but she hadn’t said anything about not returning either. It was as if she were leaving the apartment, not Galip. She’d even put in a five-word proposal to draft him as an accomplice, “Handle Mom and the others,” a role he’d accepted right away. Not only was he pleased that she hadn’t put the blame for her leaving clearly on Galip, he was pleased to be Rüya’s accomplice, when all was said and done, to be her partner in crime. In return for this partnership, Rüya had made Galip a four-word promise: “Will keep in touch.” But she’d failed to keep in touch all night long.
    Instead, the radiator pipes kept in touch all night long with various moans, sighs, and burbles. Snow fell at intervals. The boza man hawked his fermented beverage once but didn’t return. Rüya’s green signature and Galip stared at each other for hours. The