The dark descent, p.150
The Dark Descent, page 150
He looked at the other occupants of the café. The backgammon players. A fat, unshaven man reading a newspaper. A dark-skinned man with spectacles and a flaring mustache. The two old men, on opposite sides of the room, puffing on nargilehs. None of them paid any attention to the woman’s rapping.
He stared resolutely at his glass of tea, no longer a paradigm of its own necessity. It had become a foreign object, an artifact picked up out of the rubble of a buried city, a shard.
The woman continued to rap at the window. At last the owner of the café went outside and spoke a few sharp words to her. She left without making a reply.
He sat with his cold tea another fifteen minutes. Then he went out into the street. There was no sign of them. He returned the hundred yards to his apartment as calmly as he could. Once inside he fastened the chain lock. He never went back to the café.
When the woman came that night, knocking at his door, it was not a surprise.
And every night, at nine or, at the very latest, ten o’clock.
Yavuz! Yavuz! Calling to him.
He stared at the black water, the lights of the other shore. He wondered, often, when he would give in, when he would open the door.
But it was surely a mistake. Some accidental resemblance. He was not Yavuz.
John Benedict Harris. An American.
If there had ever been one, if there had ever been a Yavuz.
The man who had tacked the pinups on the walls?
Two women, they might have been twins, in heavy eye make-up, garter belts, mounted on the same white horse. Lewdly smiling.
A bouffant hairdo, puffy lips. Drooping breasts with large brown nipples. A couch.
A beachball. Her skin dark. Bikini. Laughing. Sand. The water unnaturally blue.
Snapshots.
Had these ever been his fantasies? If not, why could he not bring himself to take them off the walls? He had prints by Piranesi. A blowup of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The Tchemikov sketch. He could have covered the walls.
He found himself trying to imagine this Yavuz . . . what he must be like.
3
Three days after Christmas he received a card from his wife, postmarked Nevada. Janice, he knew, did not believe in Christmas cards. It showed an immense stretch of white desert—a salt-flat, he supposed—with purple mountains in the distance, and above the purple mountains, a heavily retouched sunset. Pink. There were no figures in this landscape, or any sign of vegetation. Inside she had written:
“Merry Christmas! Janice.”
The same day he received a manila envelope with a copy of Art News. A noncommittal note from his friend Raymond was paperclipped to the cover: “Thought you might like to see this. R.”
In the back pages of the magazine there was a long and unsympathetic review of his book by F. R. Robertson. Robertson was known as an authority on Hegel’s esthetics. He maintained that Homo Arbitrans was nothing but a compendium of truisms and—without seeming to recognize any contradiction in this—a hopelessly muddled reworking of Hegel.
Years ago he had dropped out of a course taught by Robertson after attending the first two lectures. He wondered if Robertson could have remembered this.
The review contained several errors of fact, one misquotation, and failed to mention his central argument, which was not, admittedly, dialectical. He decided he should write a reply and laid the magazine beside his typewriter to remind himself. The same evening he spilled the better part of a bottle of wine on it, so he tore out the review and threw the magazine into the garbage with his wife’s card.
The necessity for a movie had compelled him into the streets and kept him in the streets, wandering from marquee to marquee, long after the drizzle of the afternoon had thickened to rain. In New York when this mood came over him he would take in a double bill of science-fiction films or Westerns on 42nd Street, but here, though cinemas abounded in the absence of televison, only the glossiest Hollywood kitsch was presented with the original soundtrack. B-movies were invariably dubbed in Turkish.
So obsessive was this need that he almost passed the man in the skeleton suit without noticing him. He trudged back and forth on the sidewalk, a sodden refugee from Halloween, followed by a small Hamelin of excited children. The rain had curled the corners of his poster (it served him now as an umbrella) and caused the inks to run. He could make out:
KIL G
STA LDA
After Atatürk, the skeleton-suited Kiling was the principal figure of the new Turkish folklore. Every newsstand was heaped with magazines and comics celebrating his adventures, and here he was himself, or his avatar at least, advertising his latest movie. Yes, and there, down the side street, was the theater where it was playing: Kiling Istanbulda. Or: Kiling in Istanbul. Beneath the colossal letters a skull-masked Kiling threatened to kiss a lovely and obviously reluctant blonde, while on the larger poster across the street he gunned down two well-dressed men. One could not decide, on the evidence of such tableaux as these, whether Kiling was fundamentally good, like Batman, or bad, like Fantomas. So . . .
He bought a ticket. He would find out. It was the name that intrigued him. It was, distinctly, an English name.
He took a seat four rows from the front just as the feature began, immersing himself gratefully into the familiar urban imagery. Reduced to black and white and framed by darkness, the customary vistas of Istanbul possessed a heightened reality. New American cars drove through the narrow streets at perilous speeds. An old doctor was strangled by an unseen assailant. Then for a long while nothing of interest happened. A tepid romance developed between the blond singer and the young architect, while a number of gangsters, or diplomats, tried to obtain possession of the doctor’s black valise. After a confusing sequence in which four of these men were killed in an explosion, the valise fell into the hands of Kiling. But it proved to be empty.
The police chased Kiling over tiled rooftops. But this was a proof only of his agility, not of his guilt: the police can often make mistakes in these matters. Kiling entered, through a window, the bedroom of the blond singer, waking her. Contrary to the advertising posters outside, he made no attempt to kiss her. He addressed her in a hollow bass voice. The editing seemed to suggest that Kiling was actually the young architect whom the singer loved, but as his mask was never removed, this too remained in doubt.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
He was certain it was she and he would not turn around. Had she followed him to the theater? If he rose to leave, would she make a scene? He tried to ignore the pressure of the hand, staring at the screen where the young architect had just received a mysterious telegram. His hands gripped tightly into his thighs. His hands: the hands of John Benedict Harris.
“Mr. Harris, hello!”
A man’s voice. He turned around. It was Altin.
“Altin.”
Altin smiled. His face flickered. “Yes. Do you think it is anyone?”
“Anyone else?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“You are seeing this movie?”
“Yes.”
“It is not in English. It is in Turkish.”
“I know.”
Several people in nearby rows were hissing for them to be quiet. The blond singer had gone down into one of the city’s large cisterns. Binbirdirek. He himself had been there. The editing created an illusion that it was larger than it actually was.
“We will come up there,” Altin whispered.
He nodded.
Altin sat on his right, and Altin’s friend took the seat remaining empty on his left. Altin introduced his friend in a whisper. His name was Yavuz. He did not speak English.
Reluctantly he shook hands with Yavuz.
It was difficult, thereafter, to give his full attention to the film. He kept glancing sideways at Yavuz. He was about his own height and age, but then this seemed to be true of half the men in Istanbul. An unexceptional face, eyes that glistened moistly in the half-light reflected from the screen.
Kiling was climbing up the girders of the building being constructed on a high hillside. In the distance the Bosphorous snaked past misted hills.
There was something so unappealing in almost every Turkish face. He had never been able to pin it down: some weakness of bone structure, the narrow cheekbones; the strong vertical lines that ran down from the hollows of the eyes to the corner of the mouth; the mouth itself, narrow, flat, inflexible. Or some subtler disharmony among all these elements.
Yavuz. A common name, the mail clerk had said.
In the last minutes of the movie there was a fight between two figures dressed in skeleton suits, a true and a false Kiling. One of them was thrown to his death from the steel beams of the unfinished building. The villain, surely—but had it been the true or the false Kiling who died? And come to think of it, which of them had frightened the singer in her bedroom, strangled the old doctor, stolen the valise?
“Did you like it?” Altin asked as they crowded toward the exit.
“Yes, I did.”
“And did you understand what the people said?”
“Some of it. Enough.”
Altin spoke for a while to Yavuz, who then turned to address his new friend from America in rapid Turkish.
He shook his head apologetically. Altin and Yavuz laughed.
“He says to you that you have the same suit.”
“Yes, I noticed that as soon as the lights came on.”
“Where do you go now, Mr. Harris?”
“What time is it?”
They were outside the theater. The rain had moderated to a drizzle. Altin looked at his watch. “Seven o’clock. And a half.”
“I must go home now.”
“We will come with you and buy a bottle of wine. Yes?”
He looked uncertainly at Yavuz. Yavuz smiled.
And when she came tonight, knocking at his door and calling for Yavuz?
“Not tonight, Altin.”
“No?”
“I am a little sick.”
“Yes?”
“Sick. I have a fever. My head aches.” He put his hand, mimetically, to his forehead, and as he did he could feel both the fever and the headache. “Some other time perhaps. I’m sorry.”
Altin shrugged skeptically.
He shook hands with Altin and then with Yavuz. Clearly, they both felt they had been snubbed.
Returning to his apartment, he took an indirect route that avoided the dark side streets. The tone of the movie lingered, like the taste of a liqueur, to enliven the rhythm of cars and crowds, deepen the chiaroscuro of headlights and shop windows. Once, leaving the Eighth Street Cinema after Jules et Jim, he had discovered all the street signs of the Village translated into French; now the same law of magic allowed him to think that he could understand the fragmented conversation of passers-by. The meaning of an isolated phrase registered with the self-evident uninterpreted immediacy of “fact,” the nature of the words mingling with the nature of things. Just so. Each knot in the net of language slipped, without any need of explication, into place. Every nuance of glance and inflection fitted, like a tailored suit, the contours of that moment, this street, the light, his conscious mind.
Inebriated by this fictive empathy, he turned into his own darker street at last and if most walked past the woman—who fitted, like every other element of the scene, so well the corner where she’d taken up her watch—without noticing her.
“You!” he said and stopped.
They stood four feet apart, regarding each other carefully. Perhaps she had been as little prepared for this confrontation as he.
Her thick hair was combed back in stiff waves from a low forehead, falling in massive parentheses to either side of her thin face. Pitted skin, flesh wrinkled in concentration around small pale lips. And tears—yes, tears—just forming in the corners of her staring eyes. With one hand she held a small parcel wrapped in newspaper and string, with the other she clutched the bulky confusion of her skirts. She wore several layers of clothing, rather than a coat, against the cold.
A slight erection stirred and tangled in the flap of his cotton underpants. He blushed. Once, reading a paperback edition of Krafft-Ebing, the same embarrassing thing had happened. That time it had been a description of necrophilia.
God, he thought, if she notices!
She whispered to him, lowering her gaze. To him, to Yavuz.
To come home with her . . . Why did he? . . . Yavuz, Yavuz, Yavuz . . . she needed . . . and his son . . .
“I don’t understand you,” he insisted. “Your words make no sense to me. I am an American. My name is John Benedict Harris, not Yavuz. You’re making a mistake—can’t you see that?”
She nodded her head. “Yavuz.”
“Not Yavuz! Yok! Yok, yok!”
And a word that meant “love” but not exactly that. Her hand tightened in the folds of her several skirts, raising them to show the thin, black-stockinged ankles.
“No!”
She moaned.
. . . wife . . . his home . . . Yalova . . . his life.
“Damn you, go away!”
Her hand let go her skirts and darted quickly to his shoulder, digging into the cheap cloth. Her other hand shoved the wrapped parcel at him. He pushed her back but she clung fiercely, shrieking his name: Yavuz! He struck her face.
She fell on the wet cobbles. He backed away. The greasy parcel was in his left hand. She pushed herself up to her feet. Tears flowed along the vertical channels from eyes to mouth. A Turkish face. Blood dripped slowly out of one nostril. She began to walk away in the direction of Taksim.
“And don’t return, do you understand? Stay away from me!” His voice cracked.
When she was out of sight he looked at the parcel in his hands. He knew he ought not to open it, that the wisest course was to throw it into the nearest garbage can. But even as he warned himself, his fingers had snapped the string.
A large lukewarm doughy mass of borek. And an orange. The saliva sprouted in his mouth at the acrid smell of the cheese.
No!
He had not had dinner that night. He was hungry. He ate it. Even the orange.
During the month of January he made only two entries in his notebook. The first, undated, was a long extract copied from A. H. Lybyer’s book on the Janissaries, the great slave-corps of the sultans, The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent. The passage read:
Perhaps no more daring experiment has been tried on a large scale upon the face of the earth than that embodied in the Ottoman Ruling Institution. Its nearest ideal analogue is found in the Republic of Plato, its nearest actual parallel in the Mamluk system of Egypt; but it was not restrained within the aristocratic Hellenic limitations of the first, and it subdued and outlived the second. In the United States of America men have risen from the rude work of the backwoods to the presidential chair, but they have done so by their own effort and not through the gradations of a system carefully organized to push them forward. The Roman Catholic Church can still train a peasant to become a pope, but it has never begun by choosing its candidates almost exclusively from families which profess a hostile religion. The Ottoman system deliberately took slaves and made them ministers of state. It took boys from the sheep-run and the plough-tail and made them courtiers and the husbands of princesses; it took young men whose ancestors had borne the Christian name for centuries and made them rulers in the greatest of Muhammadan states, and soldiers and generals in invincible armies whose chief joy it was to beat down the Cross and elevate the Crescent. It never asked its novices “Who was your father?” or “What do you know?” or even “Can you speak our tongue?” but it studied their faces and their frames and said: “You shall be a soldier and, if you show yourself worthy, a general,” or “You shall be a scholar and a gentleman and, if the ability lies in you, a governor and a prime minister.” Grandly disregarding the fabric of fundamental customs which is called “human nature,” and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children forever from parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold on property, gave them no definite promise that their sons and daughters would profit by their success and sacrifice, raised and lowered them with no regard for ancestry or previous distinction, taught them a strange law, ethics, and religion, and ever kept them conscious of a sword raised above their heads which might put an end at any moment to a brilliant career along a matchless path of human glory.
The second and briefer entry was dated the twenty-third of January and read as follows:
Heavy rains yesterday. I stayed in drinking. She came around at her usual hour. This morning when I put on my brown shoes to go out shopping they were wet through. Two hours to dry them out over the heater. Yesterday I wore only my sheepskin slippers—I did not leave the building once.
4
A human face is a construction, an artifact. The mouth is a little door, and the eyes are windows that look at the street, and all the rest of it, the flesh, the bone beneath, is a wall to which any manner of ornament may be affixed, gewgaws of whatever style or period one takes a fancy to—swags hung below the cheeks and chin, lines chiseled or smoothed away, a recession emphasized, a bit of vegetation here and there. Each addition or subtraction, however minor in itself, will affect the entire composition. Thus, the hair that he had trimmed a bit closer to the temples restores hegemony to the vertical elements of a face that is now noticeably narrower. Or is this exclusively a matter of proportion and emphasis? For he has lost weight too (one cannot stop eating regularly without some shrinkage), and the loss has been appreciable. A new darkness has given definition to the always incipient pouches below his eyes, a darkness echoed by the new hollowness of his cheeks.
But the chief agent of metamorphosis is the mustache, which has grown full enough now to obscure the modeling of his upper lip. The ends, which had first shown a tendency to droop, have developed, by his nervous habit of twisting them about his fingers, the flaring upward curve of a scimitar (or pala, after which in Turkey this style of mustache is named: pala biyik). It is this, the baroque mustache, not a face, that he sees when he looks in a mirror.
