Free The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk Page B

objects and the shadows in the rooms assumed a new character; the place seemed to have become another place. Galip thought of saying, “A spider! So that’s what the fixture hanging in here looked like all these years!” He wanted to fall asleep, perchance to catch a good dream; but he couldn’t sleep. All night, he launched new forays into the apartment at orderly intervals, disregarding his former searches. (He had looked into the box in the wardrobe, hadn’t he; he had, he probably had; probably hadn’t; no, he had not; and now he had to go through everything all over again.) He was holding either the memory-laden buckle of Rüya’s belt or else the empty case of her long-lost sunglasses when, conceding how aimless his efforts were, he put whatever he had in his hand meticulously back into its original place like a diligent researcher taking inventory at a museum. (Those storybook detectives, they were so damned unconvincing, with the writer whispering clues in the detective’s ear—what an optimist, to think a smart reader could be taken in!) The phantom legs of a somnambulist kept taking him to the kitchen where he went through the fridge without taking anything out; then he found himself back in the living room sitting in his favorite chair only to initiate the same old search ritual all over again.
    On the night he was abandoned, as he sat alone now in the chair in which for all three years of their marriage he’d watched Rüya across from him reading impatiently and nervously her detective novels, Galip kept fetching up the same image of her dangling her legs, twisting her hair, turning the pages with pleasure and passion, sighing deeply from time to time. What was on his mind was not the feelings of worthlessness, defeat, and loneliness (My face is not symmetrical, my hands are clumsy, I am too wishy-washy, my voice is too weak!) which had surfaced when, in high school, he witnessed Rüya at pastry and pudding shops where cockroaches strolled nonchalantly on the tables, hanging out with pimply guys who sprouted hair above their upper lips and began smoking before Galip did. No, not that. Nor was it the image when, three years after high school, he’d gone up to their flat one Saturday afternoon (“I’m here to see if you have any blue labels”) and seen Rüya glance at her watch and dangle her legs impatiently as Aunt Suzan sat at her dilapidated dressing table putting on makeup. It wasn’t even the image of Rüya looking pale and tired as he’d never seen her before, when he learned she had consummated a marriage which was not merely political to a young politico considered valiant and devoted by those around him, who already signed his own name to the first political analyses published in The Dawn of Labor. What was really before Galip’s eyes all night was the picture of a slice of life he’d missed, an opportunity, a bit of fun: snow falling into the light streaming out of Aladdin’s store that glimmered faintly on the white sidewalk.
    It was a Friday evening when they were in the third grade; that is, a year and a half after Rüya’s folks moved into the attic apartment. As darkness fell, and the winter eve’s roar of automobiles and streetcars reverberated on Nişantaşı Square, they’d just started to play a new game they’d invented: “I’ve Vanished,” a game combining the rules of “Secret Passage” and “Didn’t See.” One of the two “vanished” into a corner in their grandparents’, uncles’, or fathers’ apartments, and the other searched until the vanished one was found. A fairly simple game, and since it was against the rules to turn on the lights, and there was no time limit, it hearkened to the imagination and the patience of the seeker. When it was his turn to “vanish,” Galip had hid himself on top of the wardrobe in Grandma’s bedroom (stepping first on the arm of the chair then, carefully, on the back) and convinced that Rüya would never find him up