Ruya & Galip
It’s a surprisingly still morning and the houseguest is nowhere to be seen or heard. There’s an occasional call from a panic of tarentaals as they make their way across the veld at the back of the village. The mighty Atlantic is swooshing around the little bay in front, gently emptying out in an upcoming full moon induced spring tide. From where I’m standing, I can see a grey to flat white sky dripping down into a battleship grey seascape on the horizon. Each wavelet that laps at the rocky shore brings with it a richly salted blast of chilly air through the window. Its bite is enough to make me head back to bed to snuggle under the warmth of the covers.
I stack the pillows, prop myself up and pick up the much eared copy of Gibran’s Prophet and then quickly change tack and revert to Pamuk’s ‘The Black Book.’ I’m more than halfway through what has been described as ‘Pamuk’s masterpiece’ but now I can’t seem to muster the effort to push through and finish the story. Recently, every time I reach for this book it’s like the limbo from the lead character in the book, Galip has leached into my being. I feel as bewildered as Galip by the disappearance of Ruya and have developed a sudden yearning to be alone; eating meals of olives, cheese and bread, to be constantly smoking and taking long walks through the streets of my childhood village. Except Galip’s childhood village is Istanbul and mine is Durban. Hardly an even match. Also the streets of my birth village have transformed so much in the past thirty years that they are barely recognisable as my childhood playground and feel as far removed from my existence as current day Istanbul might feel to Pamuk’s other character from The Red-Haired Woman, the master well-digger, Mahmut.
The Black Book is both engaging as it is long, involved and filled with astonishing detail of Galip, Celal, Ruya and the ancient streets of Istanbul itself. The book draws you in and reading it really does feel like digging out a well with a pin. It is that deep and the story moves that slowly. And suddenly I am less aware of my practice of patience than I am of the overwhelming weight of death and grief I have been carrying around for a few years now. And Pamuk’s slow, steady, meandering and utterly beautiful writing takes me not just on Galip’s journey but keeps bringing me back to the journeys of my childhood, those of my ancestors and the hidden (and not so hidden) choices of my own life.
Patience and the practice of patience itself is a new practice for me. I’ve hardly made the time in my own life before to have the space to practise patience. Partly the organism of my human persona was shaped by its material conditions where work and being useful were rated higher than being left to sit quietly and enjoy guilt-free leisure. Or the privilege and indulgence of being endowed with the material means where leisure is normalised as much as working was. Even knowing that such practices as sitting quietly were an option and even desirable pursuits for adults and children. That home was not a staked out space inside a white supremacy designed ghetto of enforced culture. That it was a free choice. That it was a choice unburdened with the fears of losing another physical space that we tried to make a material home upon. That it would not be taken from us again by official letter, law and proclamation. That all the love, sweat, tears, and blood that we had poured into that soil to make a shady bower for rest was not reduced to a number per square metre; to be finally divided up amongst the eligible inheritors. Reminded that we as a family in this holy land were ineligible to remain in a space for hundreds of years due to laws that prevented us from living somewhere because hate-fuelled white supremacy said so.
The reflection on being (and not being) physically rooted for an extended period of time in a place is cut short by the sudden and almost silent appearance of houseguest in the doorway of the bedroom. ‘Morning’ she beams and then proceeds to unfurl herself like a flower from the woolly Aegean blue throw and plunges under the covers. In an instant her cold feet are over mine and I wince from the shock. It’s a thing to have cold feet and if time and life has taught me anything to date; it’s that it’s easier to learn to live with the cold-footed types instead of wondering how it is that G-d could have been so unkind to some people as to give them permanently cold feet.
Hours later, the wind has picked up and is now howling around every crevice and battering at every entryway. There’s likely few places in the world where the wind has so much persona and the west coast of the Western Cape province is one of those few places. It’s not that there’s wind sometimes it’s that there’s sometimes a respite from the wind. ‘This wind; it’s enough already’ comes her voice reaching across the small open space between the kitchen counter and the work table, with enough of a change in tone for it to register to another human. A human sort-of-working in the holiday season and otherwise lost to the world. As lost as one can be in this hyper-connected, always-on, overly stimulated world. As lost as one can be without the trustafarian moniker being smoothly (and judgmentally if jealousy) applied. As lost as a human can be while still having relatively easy access to wifi, electricity, a hospital and tarred roads. But not so lost as to miss a change in tone from the houseguest. Not so lost as to miss the solid steel of its timbre. Or the smoky velvet it somehow never manages to lose. Even breathless, her voice enters quietly and holds its own space.
My reverie between the voice reaching into my head and the small-arms fire erupting from the kitchen sink reminds me that I should be present in the real life happening in front of me instead of taking refuge behind the screen. Let me go pay some attention to the needs and sheer magnitude of demands of the Ruya that is my houseguest; lord knows it’s altogether too possible that she might disappear some morning and then those endless days and countless cigarettes I yearn for every time I reach for The Black Book might be manifest.
And if I’ve learnt anything else these past few years, it’s that we manifest so much more than we ever give ourselves credit for.
Ruya & Galip was inspired by the extended interruption in the reading of Orhan Pamuk’s, The Black Book brought on by the presence and unceasing demands of a treasured houseguest.
© Jesh Baker (1971–2023) for Oppi Stoep ®
