The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

there, he’d fantasized her moves in the dark. He’d put himself in Rüya’s shoes who was yearning for him so that he might better empathize with Rüya’s emotions, excruciated by his absence! Rüya must be near tears; Rüya must be bored to death; Rüya must be begging tearfully that he come out, come out, wherever he was! Then, having waited as long as the eternity of childhood, he suddenly slipped off the top of the wardrobe impatiently, not yet aware that the game was already over because of impatience, and once his eyes got used to the dim lights, it was now Galip himself who began searching for Rüya through the apartment building. His searches through the flats completed, an odd and ghostly feeling came over him, an intimation of failure, and he’d resorted to questioning Grandma. “Good grief, you’re dusty all over!” said Grandma, who sat across from him. “Where have you been? They’ve all been looking for you!” Then she added, “Jelal showed up. He and Rüya went to Aladdin’s store.” Galip had run to the window at once, to that cold, dark, ink-blue window. It was snowing outside, a slow and pathetic snow that summoned you out; a light streamed out of Aladdin’s store, through the toys, the picture books, balls, yo-yos, the colored bottles. A light that was the color of Rüya’s complexion glimmered faintly on the snowy sidewalk.
    All through that long night, each time Galip recalled this twenty-four-year-old image, he felt the same impatience rise up in him with all the unpleasantness of a pot of milk that suddenly boils over. Where was that slice of life he’d missed out on? Now he heard the endless and derisive tick-tock of the grandfather clock that had awaited Grandma and Grandpa’s time eternal in the hallway, the same clock that when they were first married, he had removed from Aunt Halé’s apartment, eager to keep alive the myths and memories of their shared childhood, and placed with zeal and perseverance against the wall of his own nest of happiness. All through the three years of their married life, it had always been Rüya who seemed disgruntled to be missing the fun and games of some other unapprehended life, not Galip.
    Galip went to work every morning and returned home in the evening on the bus or the dolmuş, grappling with unidentified elbows and legs in the impersonal crowd that wore such a dark face on its return. All through the day he’d keep finding reasons, flimsy enough for Rüya to raise an eyebrow, to call her from the office. Once he returned to the warmth of his home, he’d approximate, without missing the mark by much, what Rüya had been up to that day by taking an inventory of the ashtrays, the number of the butts and the brands. In a moment of happiness (an exception) or a moment of suspicion, aping the husbands in films that came from the West, as he’d contemplated doing last night, if he came out and asked his wife what she’d done that day, they’d both feel the discomfort of entering an indefinite and slippery realm that was never clearly explained in the movies, neither in those from the East nor from the West. It was after he got married that Galip stumbled on that secret, mysterious, and slippery zone in the life of the anonymous personage referred to in the statistics and among the bureaucrats as “a housewife” (the woman with detergents and children bore no relation to Rüya in Galip’s mind).
    Galip was well aware that the garden in this clandestine world that swarmed with uncanny plants and terrifying flowers was closed to him totally, just like the uncharted depths of Rüya’s memory. That forbidden zone was the common subject and the goal of all detergent commercials, of photonovels, of the latest information translated from foreign publications, of most radio programs, and of the colorful supplements that came in the Sunday papers; but it was still beyond everybody’s ken and more mysterious and enigmatic than anybody knew. Sometimes