The Black Book Read Free

an airplane. Following this brown-and-white postcard, which bore the information that the route back home had been mined, he’d sent other black-and-white postcards from Morocco where he went after the war. A handpainted postcard, showing the colonial hotel where an American movie was filmed later in which both the arms dealers and the spies fall for the same nightclub dames, was how Grandma and Grandpa found out that Uncle Melih had married a Turkish girl he met in Marrakesh, that the bride was a descendant of Muhammad, that is, she was a Sayyide, a Chieftain, and that she was extremely beautiful. (Much later, when Galip took another look at that postcard, years later when he was able to identify the nationalities of the flags waving on the second-story balconies, and thinking in the style Jelal used in the stories he called “The Bandits of Beyoğlu,” he’d decided that “the seed of Rüya had been sown” in one of the rooms of this hotel that looked like a wedding cake.) They didn’t believe Uncle Melih himself had sent the next postcard that arrived from Izmir six months later, since they’d been convinced that he would never return home. There’d been some gossip that he and his new wife had converted to Christianity, joined up with some missionaries on their way to Kenya, to a valley where the lions hunted deer with three antlers, and established the church of a new religious sect that brought together the Crescent and the Cross. Some curiosity seeker who knew the bride’s family in Izmir brought the news that, as a result of the shady enterprises Uncle Melih undertook in North Africa (like arms dealing and bribing a king), he had become a millionaire, and succumbed to the whims of his wife, whose beauty was on everyone’s lips, whom he intended to take to Hollywood and make famous, already the bride’s photos were supposed to be all over French and Arab magazines, etc. In reality, on the postcards that had gone around and around in the apartment building, getting scratched and ill-treated like money suspected of being counterfeit, Uncle Melih had written that the reason they were coming home was that he’d been so homesick, he’d taken to his bed. But they felt better “now” that he’d taken in hand, with a new and modern understanding, the business concerns of his father-in-law who was in tobacco and figs. On the next card the message appeared more tangled than nappy hair and the contents were interpreted differently on every floor perhaps because of the inheritance problems that would eventually push the family into a silent war. But later, as Galip read for himself, all Uncle Melih had written, in not too overwrought a style, was that he’d like to return to Istanbul soon and that he had a baby daughter he hadn’t decided what to name yet.
    Galip had read Rüya’s name for the first time on one of the postcards that Grandma stuck into the frame of the mirror on the buffet where the liqueur sets were kept. It hadn’t surprised him that Rüya meant “dream”; but later, when they began figuring out the secondary meanings of names, they were astonished to find in a dictionary of Ottoman Turkish that Galip meant “victor” and Jelal “fury.” But that Rüya meant “dream” was so commonplace, it wasn’t surprising in the least. What was uncommon was the way Rüya’s baby and childhood pictures were placed among the row of images which went around the large mirror like a second frame (and which angered Grandpa from time to time) of churches, bridges, oceans, towers, ships, mosques, deserts, pyramids, hotels, parks, and animals. In those days, rather than being interested in his uncle’s daughter (called a “cousin” in the new usage) who was supposed to be the same age as him, Galip was more interested in his “Chieftain” Aunt Suzan who looked into the camera sadly as she parted the black-and-white cave of the mosquito netting to expose her daughter Rüya sleeping inside the scary,