The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online Page B

his dad said, “the odd thing was, her voice sounded just like yours.”
    “Nothing more natural than my voice sounding like an older woman’s,” said Aunt Halé. Her lung-colored neck suddenly shot up like a goose’s. “But my voice is nothing like hers!”
    “What isn’t it like?”
    “That person you thought was a gentlewoman called this morning too,” Aunt Halé said. “More likely, rather than a gentlewoman’s, her voice was like a witch trying to sound like a gentlewoman. Perhaps even a man trying to sound like a mature woman.”
    So where had the older gentlewoman found this phone number, Galip’s dad wanted to know. Had Halé inquired?
    “Nope,” said Aunt Halé, “I didn’t think it was necessary. Since the day he began washing our dirty laundry in his column as if he were writing about wrestlers or something, I am never surprised by anything about Jelal, so I thought maybe he had given out our phone number in another column lampooning us, just to provide his readers with extra entertainment. Besides, as I think how our dear departed parents worried over him, I’ve come to understand now that the only thing about Jelal that could still shock me would be to learn why he’s hated us all these years—but not his giving out our number to keep his readers entertained.”
    “He hates because he’s a Communist,” Uncle Melih said, lighting up victoriously, having overcome his cough. “When it finally hit them on the head that they’d never be able to seduce the labor force or this nation, the Communists tried seducing the military to stage a Janissary-style Bolshevik revolution. So, he let his column become a tool for this dream that stinks of blood and vengeance.”
    “No,” said Aunt Halé, “that’s going too far.”
    “Rüya told me, I know,” Uncle Melih said. He laughed but didn’t cough. “He took up studying French on his own because he fell for the promise he’d be appointed either the minister of foreign affairs or else the ambassador to Paris in this à la Turca Bolshevik-Janissary order. In the beginning, I was even pleased that my son who hadn’t managed to learn a foreign tongue, having wasted all his time in his youth with the riffraff, had at last found a reason to learn French. But when he got out of hand, I wouldn’t let Rüya see him.”
    “None of this ever happened, Melih,” Aunt Suzan said. “Rüya and Jelal always saw each other, sought each other out, loved each other as if they were full sister and brother, as if they had the same mother.”
    “Sure it happened, but I was too late,” Uncle Melih said. “When he couldn’t seduce the Turkish nation or the army, he seduced his sister. That’s how Rüya turned into an anarchist. If my son Galip here hadn’t pulled her out of that hotbed of guerrilla thugs, that nest of vermin, Rüya wouldn’t be at home in her bed now but who knows where.”
    Galip stared at his nails as he imagined them all imagining Poor Rüya in her sickbed and wondered if Uncle Melih would add anything new to the list of offenses he enumerated every two to three months.
    “Rüya could’ve even ended up in jail, seeing how she’s not as cautious as Jelal,” Uncle Melih said and, paying no attention to the “God forbid!”s, he gave in to the excitement of his list as he recounted: “Then, going along with Jelal, Rüya might have gotten mixed up with those thugs. Poor Rüya might have become involved with those gangsters of Beyoğlu, the heroin traffickers, the casino hoodlums, cocaine-snorting White Russians, all the dissolute gangs he penetrated under the guise of getting interviews. We might have had to look for our daughter among Englishmen who come seeking nasty pleasures, homosexuals who’re keen on the wrestlers and articles about wrestling, American bimbos who turn up for bath orgies, con artists, local movie stars who couldn’t even be whores in Europe let alone act in films, ex-officers who’ve been kicked out of the army