But his interest had been aroused; two days later he closed his eyes to a repet.i.tion of the same drama during another deer hunt, perhaps because he couldn"t withstand Hoja"s insistence, or perhaps because he had taken greater pleasure in the interrogations than I thought. By now we had crossed the Danube; again we were in a Christian village. As for the questions Hoja pressed on the villagers, there was little change in them. They reminded me of the violence of those nights during the plague when I succeeded in making him write down his sins, and at first I didn"t even want to hear the replies of the villagers, who feared the questions and the man who asked them, this anonymous judge silently supported by the sultan. I was overcome by a strange nausea; more than Hoja I blamed the sovereign, who was either duped by him or unable to resist the attraction of this sinister game. But it was not long before I was gripped by the same fascination; a man loses nothing by listening, I thought, and drew near them. Most of the sins and misdeeds, told now in a delicate language more pleasing to my ear, resembled one another: simple lies, small deceptions; one or two dirty tricks, one or two infidelities; at most, a few petty thefts.
In the evening Hoja said that the villagers had not revealed everything, they were withholding the truth; I had gone much further in my writings: they must have committed sins much more profound, more real, that distinguished them from us. In order to convince the sultan, to get hold of these truths, to be able to prove what kind of men "they", and furthermore "we", were, he would use violence if necessary.
This distasteful brutality grew more virulent and senseless with every pa.s.sing day. In the beginning everything had been simpler; we had been like children playing, cracking a few coa.r.s.e but harmless jokes between rounds in a game; each hour of interrogation was like a little skit between the acts of a play while we rested during our long and pleasurable hunting excursions; but as time went by they turned into rituals that sapped all our will, our patience, our nerve, but which we somehow could not forgo. I saw villagers stupefied with horror at Hoja"s questions and his incomprehensible rage; if they could have understood exactly what was being asked of them, perhaps they would have complied: I saw toothless and tired old men herded into the village square; before they stuttered out their misdeeds, real or imagined, they would beg for help from those around them, and from us, with hopeless eyes; I saw youths roughed up, knocked down and forced to stand again when their confessions and sins were not found satisfactory: I would remember how after reading what I"d written at the table Hoja had said, "You rogue, you", and brought a fist down on my back, mumbling and worrying himself to death because he could not understand how I could be like that. But now he had a better idea of what he was looking for, what conclusion he wanted to reach, even if not precisely. He tried other methods as well: half the time he"d interrupt the villager and insist that he was lying; then our men would rough up the offender. At other times he"d interrupt the man, claiming that one of his friends had contradicted him. For a while he tried calling them forward two by two. When he saw the confessions were superficial, and the villagers were ashamed before one another in spite of the violence that our men applied so purposefully, he"d fly into a rage.
By the time the relentless, heavy rains began I too was almost inured to what was happening. I remember the villagers who said very little, and had little intention of saying very much, being beaten in vain and made to stand and wait soaking wet in the muddy square of a village hour after hour. As time went on the attractions of the hunt faded and our excursions were cut short. Occasionally we killed a sad-eyed gazelle or a fat wild boar, which grieved the sultan, but now we were preoccupied not with the details of the hunt but with these inquisitions for which the preparations, like those for a hunt, began well in advance. At night, as if he felt guilty for what he had done all day, Hoja poured out his feelings to me. He, too, was disturbed by what was happening, by the violence, but he wanted to prove something, something that would benefit all of us: he wanted to demonstrate it to the sultan as well; and besides, why were those villagers hiding the truth? Later he said we should perform the same experiment in a Muslim village for comparison; but this did not yield the results he"d wished: although he interrogated them with little coercion, the fact was that they made more or less the same confessions and told the same stories as their Christian neighbours. It was one of those miserable days when the rain would not let up, Hoja muttered a few words implying they were not true Muslims, but in the evening when the day"s events were discussed I could see he realized this truth had not escaped the sultan"s notice either.
This discovery only increased his anger and forced him to resort to even more violence than the sultan could bear to witness but which, perhaps like me, he followed with morbid curiosity. As we moved further and further north we came once again to a forested area where the villagers spoke a Slav dialect; in a quaint little village we saw Hoja beat with his own fists a handsome adolescent who could remember nothing more than a childish lie. Hoja swore he would never do this again; in the evening he was overcome by a sense of guilt that even I found excessive. On another occasion, while a yellowish rain was falling, I thought I saw the women of a village weeping from afar at what was being done to their men. Even our soldiers, who had become expert at their work, were sick of what was happening; sometimes they would select the next man to confess before we did and bring him forward, and our translator asked the first questions himself instead of Hoja, who looked worn out by his rage. It was not that we never came across interesting victims who told of their sins at great length, as if deep down in their hearts they"d been waiting for years for this day of interrogation, terrified and bewildered either by tales of our violence, which we"d heard had travelled from village to village and become legend, or by the spectre of some absolute justice whose mystery they could not penetrate; but by now Hoja was no longer interested in the infidelities of husbands and wives, the stories of poor villagers who envied their rich neighbours. He continually repeated that there was a deeper truth, but I think he doubted now and then, as we did, whether we would be able to discover it. Or at least he sensed our doubt and flew into a rage, but we and the sultan all felt he had no intention of giving up. Perhaps for this reason we became resigned spectators, who watched him take the reins in his own hands. Once, sheltering from a sudden downpour under the edge of a roof, we grew hopeful at the sight of Hoja being soaked to the skin while he endlessly interrogated an adolescent who hated his stepfather and stepbrothers for mistreating his mother; but later in the evening, he closed the subject saying this one, too, was just a common adolescent not worth remembering.
We pressed north and further north; the march, twisting between the high mountains, inched forward very slowly on muddy roads through deep black forests. I loved the cool, dark air coming from the woods thick with pine and beech-trees, the misty silences awakening doubt, everything indistinct. Though no one called them by this name, I believe we were in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, which I"d seen in my childhood on a map of Europe my father had, one drawn by some mediocre artist who had decorated it with pictures of deer and Gothic chateaux. Hoja had caught cold in the rains and was ill, but we would still go into the forest every morning, breaking away from the march which was crawling along a road that twisted as if it wanted to delay ever reaching an end. We now seemed to have forgotten the hunting expeditions: it was as if we lingered at the sh.o.r.e of a lake or the edge of a precipice, not to shoot deer but rather to make the villagers who were preparing for us wait even longer! When we decided the time had come, we"d enter one of the villages, and after going through our ritual would trail along after Hoja who rushed us on to yet another village, never able to find the treasure he sought but desperate to forget those he manhandled and beat up, and his own despair. On one occasion he wanted to perform an experiment: the sultan, whose patience astounded me, had twenty janissaries brought forth for this purpose; he asked the same questions first of them, and then of the fair-haired villagers who stood dumbfounded in front of their houses. Another time he brought the villagers up to the march, showed them our weapon screeching and groaning while it strained to keep up with the sovereign"s army on the muddy roads, asked them what they thought of it and had the scribes write down their answers, but his strength was exhausted. Perhaps it was because, as he claimed, we knew nothing of truth, or perhaps he too was intimidated by the meaningless violence, perhaps it was the feeling of guilt that came over him at night, or because he was sick of hearing the army and the pashas mutter disapprovingly about the weapon and the episodes in the forest, or perhaps simply because he was ill, I don"t know: his hoa.r.s.e voice did not boom out as it used to; he"d lost his old vigour in asking the questions whose answers he knew by heart; in the evenings when he spoke of victory, of the future, of how we must rise up and save ourselves, it was as if even his own voice, diminishing as time went by, did not believe what he was saying. The last image I have of him is interrogating a few bewildered Slav villagers without any conviction while a yellow rain the colour of sulphurous smoke was just starting up again. We didn"t want to listen anymore and kept our distance; through the dreamy light flattened out by the rain, we saw them staring blankly at the wet surface of a huge mirror in a gilded frame that Hoja pa.s.sed from hand to hand.
We did not go out on these "hunting" expeditions again; we"d forded the river and entered the lands of the Poles. Our weapon could make no progress on roads which had turned to sodden clay in the filthy rain, growing heavier with every pa.s.sing day, and it held back the march now we needed to move quickly. It was then that the rumours increased about how our siege engine which the pashas already hated would bring misfortune, even a curse upon us; these were spiced with the whisperings of the janissaries who had partic.i.p.ated in Hoja"s "experiments". As always it was not Hoja but me, the infidel, whom they blamed. When Hoja started up his patter, leavened with verse that now made even the sovereign impatient, and spoke of the indispensability of the weapon, of the enemy"s strength, of how we must rouse ourselves and take action, the pashas listening to him in the sovereign"s tent were even more firmly convinced that we were charlatans and our weapon would bring bad luck. They looked upon Hoja as a sick man who"d gone astray but was not beyond saving; the truly dangerous, truly guilty one, was I, who had deceived Hoja and the sovereign and concocted these ill-omened ideas. At night when we withdrew into our tents Hoja would revile the pashas in his ravaged voice the way he used to rail against his fools in years past, but there was nothing left of the joy and hope I believed we had been able to keep alive in those years.
I could see, however, that he was not about to give up yet. Two days later, when our weapon got stuck in the mud right in the middle of the line of march, I lost all hope; but Hoja continued to struggle, sick as he was. No one would spare us a man, not even a horse; he went to the sultan and found nearly forty horses, had them unhitched from the cannon, and collected a group of men; towards evening, after struggling all day under the gaze of those who prayed it would sink into the mud and stay there, he whipped the horses in a rage and made our monstrous insect move. He spent the evening arguing with the pashas, who wanted to be rid of us and said the weapon was sapping the strength of the army as well as bringing bad luck, but I sensed he no longer believed in victory.
That night in our tent when I tried to play something on the oud I"d managed to take along on the campaign, Hoja grabbed it from my hands and threw it aside. Did I know that they wanted my head? I knew. He said he would be a happy man if it were his head they were after instead of mine. I knew this too, but said nothing. I was about to pick up my oud again when he stopped me, asked me to tell him more about that place, my country. When I told him a couple of little fictions as I did with the sovereign, he got angry. He wanted the truth, the real facts: he asked about my mother, my fiancee, my brothers and sisters. When I began to describe the "truth" to him he joined in, muttering hoa.r.s.e words in the Italian he"d learned from me, short, incomplete sentences I couldn"t make much sense of.
During the next few days, when he saw the ruined fortifications captured by our advance forces, I felt that he was desperately preoccupied by some sort of strange, foul thoughts. One morning as we were picking our way slowly through a village hit by our cannon fire, he dismounted when he saw the wounded dying in agony at the foot of a wall, and ran up to them. Watching him from a distance I thought at first that he wanted to help them, as if he would have asked them about their wounds had there been a translator with him; then I realized he was in the grip of an enthusiasm whose reason I seemed to sense; there was something else he wanted to ask them. The next day when we went with the sovereign to review the gutted fortifications and small towers on either side of the road, he was in the same excited state: he saw a wounded man whose head was still not severed from his body lying among the buildings levelled to the ground and wooden barricades riddled by cannon fire, and ran to his side. I followed him, to prevent him from doing some vile thing, afraid they would think I had put him up to it, or perhaps out of sheer base curiosity. It was as if he believed the wounded, their bodies shredded by projectiles and cannon b.a.l.l.s, would tell him something before they drew the mask of death over their faces; Hoja was prepared to interrogate them so they might divulge it; from them he would learn that deep truth which would change everything in an instant, but I saw that he immediately identified the despair on those faces so very close to death as his own despair, and when he came close to them he couldn"t speak.
That day at twilight, learning the sovereign was angry that Doppio Castle had not been captured despite all efforts, Hoja went to the sultan, again in the same state of excitement. He was apprehensive when he returned, but seemed not to know why. He had told the sultan that he wanted to send his weapon into battle, that it was for this day he"d worked on the machine so many years. The sovereign, contrary to my expectations, agreed that the moment had come, but judged it necessary to allow more time to Huseyn Pasha the Blond, whom he"d charged earlier with the a.s.sault on the castle. Why had the sovereign said this? It was one of those questions which through the years I could never be sure Hoja was asking of me or himself; for some reason I no longer felt close to him, I"d had enough of this anxiety. Hoja answered the question himself: it was because they feared he would steal a share of the victory.
Until the next afternoon, when we learned that Huseyn Pasha the Blond had still not been able to conquer the castle, Hoja squandered all his strength trying to convince himself that he was right. Since the rumours that I was accursed and a spy, I no longer went to the sovereign"s tent. That night when he went to interpret the events of the day, Hoja managed to tell tales of victory and good fortune that the sultan seemed to believe. When he returned to our tent he had a.s.sumed the optimistic air of a man who was confident he would break the legs of Satan in the end. As I listened to him I was struck less by his optimism than by the supreme effort he was apparently making to keep it alive.
He recounted the same old story of us and them, of the coming victory, but there was a sadness in his voice I had never heard before, accompanying these stories like a melancholy tune; it was as if he were speaking of a childhood memory which both of us knew very well because we had shared a life together. He didn"t object when I picked up my oud, nor when I clumsily jangled its strings: he was speaking of the future, of the wonderful days we would enjoy after we"d turned the river"s current in the direction we wished, but we both knew he was talking about the past: visions of tranquillity appeared before my eyes, graceful trees in a cloistered garden behind a house, warm rooms sparkling with light, a happy family crowd gathered round a dinner table. He gave me a feeling of peace for the first time in years; I understood what he felt when he said it would be hard to leave, that he loved the people here. Then, reflecting on these people for a while, he remembered his fools and grew angry, and I felt he had good cause. It seemed his optimism was not merely an affectation; perhaps because this feeling that a new life was about to begin was something we both shared, or because I thought I"d act in the same way if I were in his place, I don"t know.
The next morning when we launched our weapon, to test it, against a small enemy fortification close to the front, we both had the same uncanny premonition that it would not be much of a success. The nearly one hundred men the sovereign had provided for our support broke formation and scattered during the weapon"s first a.s.sault. Some of them were crushed to bits by the weapon itself, some of them, after a few ineffective shots, were hit when the apparatus got stuck like an a.s.s in the mud and they were left without cover. Most of them fled in fear of bad luck, and we were unable to regroup to prepare a fresh a.s.sault. We must both have been thinking the same thing.
Later, when Hasan Pasha the Stout and his men took the fortification with scarcely a casualty inside of an hour, Hoja wanted to put that profound science to the test once again, this time with a hope I imagined I too understood quite well, but all the infidel soldiers at the fortification had fallen under the sword; there was not even a single man left drawing a last breath among the burning ruins of the barricades. And when he saw the heads piled up to one side to be taken to the sovereign, I knew at once what he was thinking; I even found his fascination justified, but by now I could not stand to see it go so far: I turned my back on him. A bit later when I looked again, overcome by curiosity, he was moving away from the stack of heads; I was never able to learn just how far he had gone.
At noon we returned to the march to hear that Doppio Castle had still not been taken. Apparently the sultan was furious, he was talking about punishing Huseyn Pasha the Blond: all of us, the whole army, would join the siege! The sovereign told Hoja that if the castle did not fall by evening our weapon would be used in the morning a.s.sault. It was then the sultan ordered that an inept commander, who had been unable all day long to take even a small fortification, should have his head cut off. The sultan had paid no attention to our weapon"s failure at the fortification, news of which had by now caught up with the march, nor to the gossip about its bringing bad luck. Hoja no longer talked about sharing in the victory; although he didn"t say so, I knew he was thinking about the death of the former imperial astrologer; and when I dreamed of scenes from my childhood or the animals on our estate, I knew the same things were pa.s.sing through his mind; I knew that he, too, was thinking that news of a victory at the castle would be our last chance, that he didn"t really believe in this chance, didn"t want it. I knew there was a little church with its bell-tower ablaze in a village destroyed in rage against the castle that just could not be taken, and in that church the prayer intoned by a brave priest was summoning us to a new life; that as we moved north the sun setting behind the hills of the forest awakened in him, as it did in me, a feeling of the perfection of something being silently, carefully, brought to completion.
After the sun had set and we learned not only that Huseyn Pasha the Blond had failed, but that Austrians, Hungarians, and Kazaks had joined the Poles at the siege of Doppio, we finally saw the castle itself. It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white; purest white and beautiful. I didn"t know why I thought that one could see such a beautiful and unattainable thing only in a dream. In that dream you would run along a road twisting through a dark forest, straining to reach the bright day of that hilltop, that ivory edifice; as if there were a grand ball going on which you wanted to join in, a chance for happiness you did not want to miss, but although you expected to reach the end of the road at any moment, it would never end. When I learned that the flooding river had left a stinking swamp in the low ground between the dark woods and the foot of the slope, and that the infantry, though they were able to cross the swamp, could not get up the slope no matter how hard they tried and despite support of cannon fire, I thought of the road that had led us here. It was as if everything were as perfect as the view of that pure white castle with birds flying over its towers, as perfect as the darkening rocky cliff of the slope and the still, black forest. I knew now that many of the things I"d experienced for years as coincidence had been inevitable, that our soldiers would never be able to reach the white towers of the castle, that Hoja was thinking the same thing. I knew only too well that when we joined the siege in the morning our weapon would founder in the swamp leaving the men inside and around it to die, that as a result there would be voices demanding my head to silence the rumours of a curse, the fear, and the grumblings of soldiers, and I knew Hoja realized as much. I remembered how once, years earlier, to provoke him to talk about himself, I had spoken of a childhood friend of mine with whom I"d developed the habit of thinking the same thing at the same time. I had no doubt he too was now thinking of the very same things.
Late that night he went to the sultan"s tent and it seemed he would never return. For a while, since I could easily guess what he was going to say to the sovereign, who would want him to interpret for the pashas the events of the day and the future, I considered the possibility that he had been killed there on the spot and that the executioners would soon come for me. Later I imagined that he had left the tent and, without stopping to tell me, gone straight for the white towers of the castle gleaming in the dark, that having slipped past the guards, over the swamp and through the forest, he had already reached it. I was waiting for morning, thinking of my new life without much enthusiasm, when he came back. Only much later, years later, after talking at great length with those who"d been there in the sultan"s tent, was I able to learn that Hoja had said just what I"d guessed he would. At the time he explained nothing to me, he was rushing about like someone about to leave on a journey. He said there was a thick fog outside. I understood.
Till the break of day I talked with him about what I"d left behind in my country, told him how he could find my house, spoke of my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, how we were regarded in Empoli and Florence. I mentioned some tiny, special particulars by which he could know one person from another. As I spoke I recalled that I had told him all of these things before, down to the large mole on my little brother"s back. At times, while entertaining the sovereign, or now while writing this book, these stories have seemed to me mere reflections of my fantasies, not the truth, but then I believed them: my sister"s stutter was real, as were the many b.u.t.tons on our clothes and the things I had seen from the window overlooking the garden behind our house. Towards morning I began to think I had been seduced by these stories because I believed they would continue, perhaps from where they left off, even if much later. I knew that Hoja too was thinking the same thing, that he happily believed in his own story.
We exchanged clothes without haste and without speaking. I gave him my ring and the medallion I"d managed to keep from him all these years. Inside it there was a picture of my grandmother"s mother and a lock of my fiancee"s hair that had gone white; I believe he liked it, he put it around his neck. Then he left the tent and was gone. I watched him slowly disappear in the silent fog. It was getting light. Exhausted, I lay down in his bed and slept peacefully.
11.
I have now come to the end of my book. Perhaps discerning readers, deciding my story was actually finished long ago, have already tossed it aside. There was a time when I thought the same thing. I thrust these pages into a drawer years ago, intending never to read them again. In those days it was my intention to turn my mind to other stories I invented, not for the sultan but for my own pleasure, romances taking place in lands I"d never seen, in desolate wastes and frozen forests, involving a wily merchant who wandered into them like a wolf; I wanted to forget this book, this story. Though I knew it wouldn"t be easy after all I"d heard and experienced, I might have succeeded if a guest hadn"t come to visit me two weeks ago and persuaded me to bring my book out again. Today I know at last that of all my books this is the one I love most; I will finish it as it should be finished, as I have longed, have dreamed of doing.
From the old table where I sit finishing my book I can see a tiny sailboat ploughing the sea from Jennethisar to Istanbul, a mill turning in the distance among the olive-groves, children pushing each other as they play deep in the garden under the fig-trees, the dusty road from Istanbul to Gebze. During the winter snows few pa.s.s this way. In spring and summer I see the caravans travelling to the East, to Anatolia, even Baghdad, Damascus; I often watch the broken-down ox-carts going by at a snail"s pace, and sometimes I"m excited by the sight of a rider in the distance whose costume I can"t identify, but when the traveller draws near I realize he is not coming to see me. In these days no one comes, and now I know no one will.
But I have no complaints, and I am not lonely: I saved a great deal of money during my years as imperial astrologer, I married, I have four children; I foresaw the troubles coming and gave up my position in time, perhaps with an insight gained from practising my profession: before the sultan"s armies left for Vienna, before the fawning clowns and the imperial astrologer who succeeded me were beheaded in a frenzy of defeat, long before our sovereign who so loved animals was dethroned, I fled here to Gebze. I had this villa built and moved in with my beloved books, my children and a couple of servants. My wife, whom I married while I was still the imperial astrologer, is much younger than I, a fine housekeeper who manages the whole house and a few other minor tasks for me, and leaves me to write my books and dream, climbing towards seventy, alone all day in this room. Thus, to find an appropriate end to my story and my life, I think of Him to my heart"s content.
Yet during the first years I tried never to do that. Once or twice when the sovereign had wanted to speak of Him, he realized the subject didn"t attract me at all. I believe he was content to leave it that way; he was just curious; but what particularly he was curious about, and how much, I was never able to discover. At first he said I shouldn"t be ashamed to have been influenced by Him, to have learned from Him. He"d known from the start that all those books, those calendars and predictions I"d presented to him over the years had been written by Him, and told Him so even when I was still struggling at home with designs for our weapon that ended up stuck in the swamp; he"d also known that He had told me this, just as I used to tell Him everything. Perhaps then both of us had not yet lost the end of the thread, but I realized the sultan had his feet more firmly on the ground than I had. In those days I thought the sovereign was cleverer than I, knew everything he was supposed to know and was toying with me so as to have me more securely in the palm of his hand. And perhaps I was also influenced by the grat.i.tude I felt to him for having rescued me from that defeat whose germ was planted in the swamp, and from the rage of the soldiers driven mad by rumours of a curse. For when they learned the infidel had escaped, some of the soldiers wanted my head. If in the first years he had asked me candidly, I believe I would have told the sultan everything. In those days the rumours that I was not who I was had not yet begun, I wanted to talk with someone about what had happened, I missed Him.
To live alone in that house we had shared for so many years unnerved me even more. My pockets full of money, my feet soon learned the way to the slave market; I went back and forth for months until I found what I sought. In the end I bought some poor devil who didn"t really resemble me or Him and brought him home. That night when I told him to teach me everything he knew, to tell me about his country, his past, even to admit the sins he had committed, when I brought him to face the mirror, he was frightened of me. It was a terrible night, I pitied the poor man, I meant to set him free in the morning, but my stinginess won out and I took him to the slave market to sell him back. After that I decided to marry and let word of my intentions get out in the neighbourhood. They came gladly, thinking they would make me one of them at last, that peace would come to the street. I, too, was content to be like them, I felt optimistic, I thought the rumours had stopped, that I could live in peace inventing stories for my sovereign year after year. I chose my wife carefully; she even played the oud for me in the evenings.
When the rumours started again, I thought at first this must be another of the sultan"s games, for I believed he took pleasure in observing my anxiety and asking questions that would unsettle me. In the beginning I wasn"t much alarmed when he would suddenly say things to me like, "Do we know ourselves? A man must understand who he is"; I thought he"d learned these unnerving questions from the know-it-alls interested in Greek philosophy among the sycophants he"d started to gather around him once again. When he asked me to write something on the subject, I gave him my last book about gazelles and sparrows being content because they never reflected on themselves and knew nothing of what they were. When I found that he had taken the book seriously and read it with pleasure I relaxed a bit, but the gossip began to reach my ears: it was said I treated the sultan like a fool, I did not even resemble the man whose place I had taken, He was thinner and more delicate while I had grown fat; they"d known I was lying when I said I couldn"t know everything He knew; one day in time of war I, too, would bring down bad luck and then desert as He had done, I would betray secrets of state to the enemy and ease the way to defeat, etc., etc. To protect myself from these rumours that I believed the sultan had started, I withdrew from feasts and festivities, was not seen much in public, lost weight, and made careful inquiries into what had been discussed in the sovereign"s tent on that last night. My wife had one child after another, my income was good, I wanted to forget the rumours, forget Him, forget the past, and continue my work in peace.
I persevered for almost seven years more; perhaps if my nerves had been stronger, or more important, if I hadn"t sensed there would be another purge of the circle around the sultan, I would have gone on to the end; I would have pa.s.sed through the doors the sovereign opened for me and let go of the former life I wished to forget. I was now quite shameless in answering the questions about my ident.i.ty which had at first put me on guard: "Of what importance is it who a man is?" I"d say. "The important thing is what we have done and will do." I believe it was through this cupboard door that the sultan got into my mind! When he asked me to tell him about Italy, about the country to which He had escaped, and I replied that I had little knowledge of it, he grew angry: he knew that He had told me everything, why was I afraid, it was enough that I should remember what He had said. So I described to the sultan in detail again His childhood and His beautiful memories, some of which I have included in this book. At first my nerves were still fairly sound, the sultan listened to me as I intended as if listening to someone tell what he"d heard from someone else but in later years he went further; he began listening to what I said as if it were Him speaking: he"d ask me details only He could have known, told me not to be afraid, to give the first answer that came into my head: what event was it that had precipitated His sister"s stutter? Why had He not been accepted by the University of Padua? What colour clothes had His brother worn at the first fireworks display He"d seen in Venice? While I told the sovereign these details as if they had happened to me, we would be out for a day on the water, or resting by a pool teeming with frogs and water lilies, observing shameless monkeys in silver cages or strolling in one of those gardens that, because they"d walked there together, was filled with memories they shared. Then the sovereign, pleased with my stories and the play of our memories which blossomed like flowers opening in the garden, would feel closer to me and speak of Him as though recalling an old friend who had betrayed us: he said it was good He had run away, for although he found Him amusing, he"d often lost patience with His impertinence and thought of having Him killed. He revealed some things that frightened me because I couldn"t quite tell which of us he was talking about, but he spoke with love, not with violence: there had been days when, unable to tolerate His self-ignorance, he feared he would have Him killed in anger on that last night he had been on the point of calling the executioners! Later, he said I was not impertinent; I did not consider myself the most intelligent, most capable man in the world; I had not presumed to interpret the terror of the plague to my own advantage; I"d not kept everyone awake at night with tales of child-kings who were impaled at the stake; and now there was no one to whom I could run home and recount and ridicule the sultan"s dreams after listening to them, no one with whom I could write silly, entertaining fictions to lead him astray! As I listened I thought I saw myself, the two of us, from the outside as in a dream, and I realized that we had lost the end of the thread. But in the last months the sultan, as though to drive me mad, went on even further: I was not like Him, I had not given my mind to the sophists who distinguished between "them" and "us" as He had done! During the fireworks the eight-year-old sovereign had watched from the other sh.o.r.e before he met us, my own Devil had brought victory to that other devil in the dark sky for Him, and now had gone with Him to the land where it believed it would find peace! Later, during the walks in the garden which were always the same, the sovereign would ask thoughtfully: must one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another? Afraid, I would say nothing; as if to break my last effort at resistance he would ask once again: was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other"s place?
Because I hoped the sultan and I would succeed in forgetting Him one day, and because I had taken the precaution of saving more money, I might have endured this torture with patience; for I had grown used to the fear that comes with ambiguity. He opened and shut the doors of my mind mercilessly, as if riding hither and thither in pursuit of a rabbit in some forest where we"d lost our way. What"s more he was now doing this in front of everyone; he was surrounded by fawning sycophants again. I was afraid because I thought there would be another purge and all of our property would be confiscated, because I sensed the troubles soon to come. It was the day he had me tell of the bridges of Venice, of the lacework on the tablecloth on which He had eaten breakfast as a child, of the view through the window overlooking the garden at the back of His house that He recalled when he was about to be beheaded for his refusal to convert to Islam it was when the sultan ordered me to write down all of these stories in a book, as if they were my own record of what had happened to me, that I decided to escape from Istanbul as soon as possible.
I moved into a different house in Gebze so as to forget Him. At first I was afraid that palace guards would come for me, but no one sought me out, and my income was not touched; either I was forgotten, or the sovereign was having me watched secretly. I thought no more about it, I got started on my work, had this home built, landscaped the back garden as I wanted, according to my inner impulses; I pa.s.sed my time reading my books, writing stories for my own pleasure and advising visitors who came to consult me because they had discovered I was a former astrologer, more for the fun of it than for their money. It was perhaps from them that I learned most about my country where I have lived from childhood: before I agreed to tell the fortunes of cripples, or men bewildered at the loss of a son or brother, the chronically ill, the fathers of girls left unmarried, men who never grew to their full height, jealous husbands, the blind, sailors, and hopeless lovers with wild eyes, I"d make them tell me their life stories at length, and at night I would write down what I"d heard in notebooks so as to use them later in my stories, just as I have done with this book.
It was in those years, too, that I met the old man who brought a profound melancholy with him into my room. He must have been ten, fifteen years older than I. As soon as I saw the sadness in the face of this man called Evliya*, I decided that loneliness was his trouble, but he didn"t say that: it seems he"d devoted his whole life to wandering and the ten-volume book of travels he was about to finish. Before he died he meant to make the journey to the place closest to G.o.d, to Mecca and Medina, and write about them as well, but there was something missing in his book that disturbed him, he wanted to tell his readers about the fountains and bridges of Italy whose beauty he"d heard so much about, and he wondered whether I, whom he"d come to see because of my fame in Istanbul, might be able to tell him about them? When I said I"d never seen Italy, he declared that he knew that as well as anyone else, but had heard I"d once had a slave who came from there, who had described everything to me; if I would in turn tell Evliya, he would repay me with amusing anecdotes: wasn"t inventing and listening to diverting stories the pleasantest part of life? As he shyly took a map from his case, the worst map of Italy I"d ever seen, I decided to tell him what he wanted.
With his childish, pudgy hand, he started pointing out cities on the map and after p.r.o.nouncing each name syllable by syllable, wrote down carefully the descriptions I gave him. For every city he wanted a curious tale as well. Pa.s.sing thirteen nights in thirteen cities in this way, we traversed from north to south the whole of this land I was seeing for the first time in my life, then returned to Istanbul by the boat from Sicily. Thus we spent the entire morning. He was so pleased with what I had told him that he decided to give me pleasure too, and told me about the tightrope-walkers disappearing into the skies of Acre, the woman of Konya who gave birth to an elephant, the blue-winged bulls by the sh.o.r.es of the Nile, pink cats, the clock-tower of Vienna, the false front teeth he"d had made there and which he now displayed in a grin, the talking cave on the beach of the Sea of Azov, the red ants of America. For some reason these stories prompted a strange melancholy, I felt like crying. The red glow of the setting sun flooded my room. When Evliya asked if I, too, had amazing tales like these, I thought I"d really surprise him and invited him and his servants to stay the night: I had a story that would delight him, about two men who had exchanged lives.
The night after everyone else had retired to their rooms, after the silence we both waited for had fallen over the house, we returned to the room once more. It was then I first imagined this tale you are about to finish! The story I told seemed not to have been made-up but actually lived, it was as if someone else were softly whispering all these words to me, the sentences slowly following one another in sequence: "We were sailing from Venice to Naples when the Turkish fleet appeared..."
Long after midnight, when my story was finished, there was a prolonged silence. I sensed that we were both thinking of Him, but in Evliya"s mind there was a Him completely different from the one in mine. I have no doubt he was actually thinking of his own life! And I, I was thinking of my own life, of Him, of how I loved the story I"d created; and I felt pride in everything I had lived and dreamed of: the room we were sitting in overflowed with the sad memories of all that both of us had once wanted to be and what we had become; it was then I understood clearly for the first time that I would never again be able to forget Him, that this would make me unhappy for the rest of my days; I knew then that I would never be able to live alone: it was as if in the dead of night, along with my story, the shadow of an alluring phantom had fallen across the room, arousing our curiosity while it put us both on guard. Near dawn, my guest delighted me by saying he"d loved my story, but added that he had to disagree with certain details. Perhaps to escape the unnerving memory of my twin and to return again as quickly as possible to my new life, I gave him all my attention.
He agreed that we must seek the strange and surprising, as in my story; yes, perhaps this was the one thing we could do to combat the exhausting tedium of this world; because he had known this ever since those monotonous years of childhood and school, he had never in his life ever considered withdrawing within four walls; that"s why he had spent his whole life travelling, searching for stories down roads that never came to an end. But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else. Let us suppose that what happened in my story were true. Did I believe that those two men who had taken each other"s places could be happy in their new lives? I was silent. Later, for some reason or other, he reminded me of one detail in my story: we must not allow ourselves to be led astray by the hopes of a one-armed Spanish slave! If we did, little by little, by writing those kinds of tales, by searching for the strange within ourselves, we, too, would become someone else, and G.o.d forbid, our readers would too. He did not even want to think about how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this.
But I wanted to! So when this little old man I"d come to love in just one day gathered together his attendants at dawn for the journey to Mecca, and took to the road, I sat down at once and wrote out my story. For the sake of my readers in that terrible world to come, I did all I could to make both myself and Him, whom I could not separate from myself, come alive in the story. But recently, while looking again at what I"d tossed aside sixteen years before, I thought I had not been very successful. So I apologize to those readers who don"t like it when a man speaks of himself especially when he"s caught up in such confusing emotions and add these pages to my book: I loved Him, I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in my dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness, and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of a wild animal dying in pain, or enraged by the selfishness of a spoilt son of my own. And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself; my love for Him resembled the way I had become used to the futile insect-like movements of my hands and arms, the way I understood the thoughts which every day echoed against the walls of my mind and died away, the way I recognized the unique smell of sweat from my wretched body, my thinning hair, ugly mouth, the pink hand holding my pen: it was for this reason they had not been able to deceive me. After I had written my book and, so I"d forget Him, tossed it aside, I was never taken in by any of the rumours that were circulating, the games of those who had heard of our fame and wanted to take advantage of it not at all! Some pasha in Cairo had taken Him under his wing and now He was making designs for a new weapon! He had been inside the city walls of Vienna during the unsuccessful siege, advising the enemy how to rout us completely! He"d been seen in Edirne disguised as a beggar, and during a quarrel among merchants that He himself had stirred up, He"d knifed a quilter and disappeared! He was the imam of a neighbourhood mosque in a distant Anatolian village, He"d set up a clock-room those who told this story swore it was true; and He"d begun collecting money for a clock-tower! He"d become rich writing books in Spain, where he"d gone following the plague! They even said it was He who had conspired to have our poor sovereign dethroned! He was living in Slav villages, where he was treated with great respect as a legendary epileptic priest, writing books full of despair based on the true confessions He"d at last been able to hear! He was wandering around Anatolia, saying He"d overthrow those fools of sultans, leading a gang he"d bewitched with his predictions and poetry, and was calling for me to join Him! During those sixteen years when I wrote stories so as to forget Him, so as to distract myself with those terrifying people and their terrifying worlds of the future, to experience the full delights of my fantasies, I heard many more variations of these rumours, but I didn"t believe any of them. I don"t know, I wonder whether it happens to others: sometimes, when we felt imprisoned by those four walls at the far reaches of the Golden Horn, sometimes, waiting for an invitation which never seemed to come from a mansion or from the palace, relishing our hatred for each other, or grinning at one another while we wrote yet another treatise for our sovereign, in the little things of daily life, at the same moment, both of us would fasten upon one small detail: a wet dog we"d seen together in the rain that morning, the hidden geometry in the colours and shapes of a line of laundry hung between two trees, a slip of the tongue that suddenly brought out life"s symmetry! These are the moments I miss most! And for this reason I have returned to the book of my shadow, imagining that some curious person will read it years, perhaps hundreds of years after His death, and picture his own life rather than ours; this book that I really wouldn"t much care if no one ever read, and where I have hidden His name, buried, if not very deeply, inside it: so that I might once more dream of the nights of the plague, of my childhood in Edirne, of the delightful hours I"d spent in the sultan"s gardens, of the first time I saw Him unbearded at the pasha"s door, of the chill down my spine. To lay hands again upon the life and the dreams we lost, everyone understands the need to dream of these things again: I believed in my story!
I will conclude my book by telling of the day I decided to finish it: two weeks ago, while I sat again at our table, trying to dream up a different story, I saw a rider approaching from the Istanbul road. No one had brought me news of Him lately, perhaps because I was so brusque with my visitors that I hardly imagined they would come any more, but as soon as I caught sight of that traveller wearing a cape and carrying a parasol in his hand, I knew he was coming to see me. I heard his voice before he entered my room, he was speaking Turkish with His errors, though with not so many as He did, but as soon as he entered my room he switched to Italian. When he saw my face go sour and that I gave no answer, he said in his bad Turkish he"d thought I would at least know a little Italian. Later he explained he"d learned my name and who I was from Him. After returning to His country He had written a stack of books describing His unbelievable adventures among the Turks, about their last sovereign who so loved animals and his dreams, about the plague and the Turkish people, our customs at court and at war. With curiosity about the exotic Orient just beginning to spread among aristocrats and especially well-bred ladies, His writings were well-received, His books much read, He gave lectures in the universities, and grew rich. Moreover, His former fiancee, swept up in the romanticism of His writings, married him without giving a thought to her age or her husband"s recent death. They bought back the old family home which had been broken up and sold, and settled down there, returning the house and its garden to their former state. My guest knew all this because, having admired His books, he"d visited Him at home. He had been very polite, gave the visitor His whole day and answered his questions, told once again the adventures He"d written about in His books. It was then He"d spoken of me at length: He was writing a book about me with the t.i.tle "A Turk of My Acquaintance"; He was about to present my whole life to His Italian readers, from my childhood in Edirne to the day He left, supported by His cleverly written personal interpretations of the peculiarities of the Turks. "You told Him such a great deal about yourself!" my guest said. Later, to intrigue me even more, he recalled details from what little he"d read of the book: I had been ashamed after mercilessly beating up one of my childhood friends from the neighbourhood and wept with regret, I was intelligent, I had in six months understood all the astronomy He taught me, I loved my sister very much, I was fond of my religion, I performed my prayers regularly, I adored cherry preserves, I had a particular interest in quilting, my stepfather"s profession, like all Turks I loved people, etc., etc. After he had shown so much interest in me, I knew I couldn"t behave inhospitably to this fool and a traveller like him was sure to be interested, so I showed him my house, room by room. Later he became fascinated by the games my sons were playing with their friends in the garden; he wrote down in a notebook the rules of tipcat and blindman"s bluff, which he made them explain to him, and leapfrog, though he didn"t much like that game. It was then he said that He was an admirer of the Turks. While I showed him around our garden, for lack of anything else to do, and then the miserable town of Gebze and the house where I"d stayed with Him years before, he said it again. While examining our pantry, among the jars of preserves and pickles, the jugs of olive oil and vinegar, which rather interested him, he saw my portrait in oil that I"d commissioned from a Venetian painter and further confided, as if he were betraying a secret, that actually He was not a true friend of the Turks, that He"d written unflattering things about them: He"d written that we were now in decline, described our minds as if they were dirty cupboards filled with old junk. He"d said we could not be reformed, that if we were to survive our only alternative was to submit immediately, and after this we would not be able to do anything for centuries but imitate those to whom we had surrendered. "But He wanted to save us," I put in, wishing he would stop, and he responded at once saying yes, for our sake He had even built a weapon, but we had not understood Him; on a foggy morning the machine had been left stuck in a disgusting swamp like the awesome corpse of a pirate ship marooned in a storm. Then he added: yes, He had indeed wanted, very much, to save us. This did not mean there was no evil in Him. All genius was like that! While carefully examining my portrait which he"d picked up, he was mumbling a few more things about genius: if He had not fallen into slavery at our hands but instead lived a life in His own country, He might even have been the Leonardo of the seventeenth century. Later he returned to his favourite subject of evil, pa.s.sing on one or two nasty pieces of gossip about Him and money which I had heard but since forgotten. "The strange thing," he said later, "is that you have not been affected by Him at all!" He said he"d come to know and love me; he expressed his astonishment: how two people who"d lived together so many years could resemble each other so little, how they could be so unlike one another, he could not understand. He didn"t ask for my portrait, as I"d feared he would; after putting it back he asked if he could see the quilts. "What quilts?" I said, bewildered. He was surprised: didn"t I pa.s.s my free time by st.i.tching quilts? It was then I decided to show him the book I had not touched in sixteen years.
At this he became agitated, said he could read Turkish, that of course he was very interested in any book about Him. We went up to my work-room overlooking the garden. He sat at our table, and I found my book where I had, as if yesterday, thrust it away sixteen years before; I laid it open before him. He was able to read Turkish, if slowly. He buried himself in the book with that desire to be swept away without leaving one"s own sane and secure world which I"d seen in all travellers, and despised. I left him alone, I went out into the garden and sat down on the divan covered with straw matting where I could see him through the open window. At first he was cheerful and called out to me from the window, "How obvious it is you have never set foot in Italy!" But he soon forgot me; I sat in the garden for three hours, glancing up at him occasionally out of the corner of my eye as I waited for him to finish the book. By then he had understood, though there was confusion on his face; once or twice he called out the name of the white castle behind the swamp that had swallowed up our weapon; he even tried in vain to speak Italian with me. Then he turned and gazed blankly out of the window, resting and trying to digest what he"d read. I watched with delight as he looked first at some infinite point in the emptiness, as people do in such situations, at some non-existent focal point, but then, then, as I had expected, his vision focused: now he was looking at the scene through the frame of the window. My intelligent readers have surely understood: he was not so stupid as I supposed. As I had thought he would, he began to turn the pages of my book greedily, searching, and I waited with excitement till at last he found the page he was looking for and read it. Then he looked again at the view from that window overlooking the garden behind my house. I knew exactly what he saw. Peaches and cherries lay on a tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl upon a table, behind the table was a divan upholstered with straw matting, strewn with feather cushions the same colour as the green window frame. I was sitting there, nearly seventy now. Further back, he saw a sparrow perched on the edge of a well among the olive and cherry trees. A swing tied with long ropes to a high branch of a walnut-tree swayed slightly in a barely perceptible breeze.
198485.
* Evliya Chelebi (c. 161182) is the author of the renowned Book of Travels (Seyahatname) Trans.
About the Translator.
Victoria Holbrook lived in Istanbul for five years and is currently a.s.sistant Professor of Turkish Literature at Ohio State University.
By Orhan Pamuk.
Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari (1982).
The Silent House (1983).
The White Castle (1985) The Black Book (1990).
The New Life (1994) My Name is Red (1998).
Snow (2002) Istanbul (2003) My Father"s Suitcase (2006).
Other Colors (2007).
The Museum of Innocence (2009).
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (2010).
Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in the wealthy Nisantasi district of Istanbul. His experience growing up in a large family is reflected in his novels The Black Book and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, as well as in his memoir Istanbul. After graduating from American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, but left after three years to pursue writing. He completed a degree in Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976, but decided instead to become a full-time novelist. At 23, while living at home, he completed his first novel, and it was published seven years later in 1982. Cevdet Bey and His Sons was awarded the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes.
In 1985, the publication of The White Castle, a book that explores the relationship between a young Italian scholar taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire, and his master, brought Pamuk the beginnings of international fame. He traveled to the United States, and from 1985 to 1988 became a visiting scholar at Columbia University. While in New York, he wrote most of his next novel, The Black Book. In 1990, The White Castle won the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction, and the following year the French translation of Pamuk"s second novel, The Silent House, won the Prix de la Decouverte Europeene. Pamuk"s daughter Ruya was born in 1991, in Istanbul.
The New Life, published in 1994, became an extremely popular novel in Turkey. Four years later, My Name is Red was published, winning the French Prix du Meilleur Livre etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Snow, which the author described as a more "political" novel about the tensions between different racial and political groups in Kars, Turkey, was published in 2002. It was selected as one of the best 100 books of 2004 by The New York Times, and in 2005, it was awarded Le Prix Medicis etranger for the best foreign novel published in France that year. The following year, Snow also received Le Prix Mediterranee etranger.
In addition to Istanbul, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Orhan Pamuk"s non-fiction was published in the collection Other Colors, touching on topics including his personal library, travel, childhood, solitude, and the moments that have contributed to his fiction. His lyrical, witty and provocative articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers internationally, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, La Repubblica, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), El Pais, and Le Monde.
Pamuk"s most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence, became an instant bestseller upon its release in Turkey in January 2008, and was published internationally thereafter.
Pamuk may be best known for receiving the 2006 n.o.bel Prize for Literature, becoming the second youngest person ever to be awarded the Prize. TIME magazine also chose him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006. He holds honorary doctorates from universities including Yale University, the Free University of Berlin, Madrid University, and Georgetown University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. He was the 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University, and Harvard University Press will publish the Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, in November 2010. Pamuk is currently the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and lives in Istanbul.
As one of Turkey"s most prominent writers, his books have been translated into more than 50 languages.
A young Italian scholar on a sea-borne journey from Venice to Naples is captured by Turkish pirates, who sell him into slavery. He is rescued from a foul Istanbul dungeon by a pasha, who believes him a healer, and bound to Hoja, a servant who wants nothing more than to learn the Western sciences of astronomy, medicine, and engineering. As a peculiarly intimate relationship grows between the two, their striking resemblance to each other deepens, with unexpected results. Caught in a friendship-c.u.m-rivalry that becomes ever more intense, they labor on one marvelous invention after another, elevating Hoja to the rank of Imperial Astrologer. In their final grand project together, they build a fantastic war machine for the sultan one which will surely secure their immortality.
A marvelous mirror narrative of East and West looking at each other in fear and wonder, The White Castle has been justly compared to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Vladimir Nabokov. Combining the rich tapestry of the streets of 17th century Constantinople and the Italian high seas with the intrigue of science and mysticism, Orhan Pamuk takes us into the heart of several unsettling mysteries.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1998.
end.