The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online

downstairs already,” Aunt Halé said.
    They fell silent for a while.
    “She must be at home,” Galip ventured. “I’ll run home and get her.”
    “Your phone never answered,” Aunt Halé said, but Galip was already headed back down the stairs.
    “All right, but be quick about it,” Aunt Halé said. “Mrs. Esma is already frying up your puff böreks. ”
    As the cold wind that drove the wet snow flipped open his nine-year-old overcoat (the subject of another one of Jelal’s columns), Galip hurried along. He had calculated long ago that if he didn’t take the main street but walked along backstreets, went by the closed grocery stores, the bespectacled tailor who was still working, the doormen’s flats, and the dim neons for Coca-Cola and nylons, it would take twelve minutes to reach his apartment from his aunt and uncle’s building. If he returned via the same streets and the same sidewalks (the tailor was putting new thread through his needle, the same material still on the same knee), the round trip took twenty-six minutes total.
    When he returned, Galip told Aunt Suzan who opened the door and the others as they sat down to dinner that Rüya was sick with a cold and, having taken too many antibiotics (she swallowed everything she found in the drawers), that she had fallen into a stupefied sleep. Although she had heard the phone ring, she had been too groggy to answer, had no appetite, and sent everyone her love from her sickbed. He knew his words would stir the imagination of those at the table (Poor Rüya in her sickbed), and he had also guessed that he would stir up a verbal phenomenon: recounted and revealed were the names of the antibiotics sold over the counter at the drugstores, the penicillins, the cough syrups and the lozenges, the vasodilators and the painkillers taken for the flu and, as if talking about cream topping for dessert, the name brand vitamins that must be taken along with these, Turkicized by being pronounced with extra vowels stuck in between the consonants, along with directions as to how to take the medications. Another time, this festival of creative pronunciation and amateur medicine might have provided Galip with the same pleasure as reading a good poem. But the image of Rüya in her sickbed was on his mind and, later on, he could no longer discern how pure or how manufactured were the images that he’d fetched up. Sick Rüya’s foot sticking out of the quilt or her bobby pins scattered in the bed were presumably real images, but the image of her hair spread out on the pillow, for example, or the boxes of medicine, the water glass, the pitcher, and the books on the nightstand came from somewhere else (the movies, or the badly translated novels she read the way she devoured the pistachios she bought at Aladdin’s), images that were learned and imitated. Later, when Galip gave short answers to their “affectionate” questions, at least he made a special effort to distinguish, with the attentiveness of a mystery-novel detective which he wanted to acquire and to emulate, the pure images of Rüya from the secondhand.
    Yes (as they all sat down to dinner), Rüya would be asleep now. No, she wasn’t hungry, so there was no need for Aunt Suzan to go and make her some soup. And she had said she didn’t want that doctor whose breath smelled like garlic and whose bag stank like a tannery. No, she hadn’t managed to see the dentist this month either. True, lately Rüya went out hardly at all and spent her time cooped up in the apartment. But no, she hadn’t gone out at all today. Did you happen to see her out in the street? Must be that she had gone out briefly but didn’t tell Galip; no, she had actually. So, just where did you run into her? She must’ve gone out to the notions counter at the fabric shop to buy some purple buttons and passed by the mosque. Of course, she had told him; she must’ve caught a chill out in this terrible cold. She was coughing and smoking, a whole pack;