by Orhan Pamuk
Following the night when the snow-covered garden was illuminated by moonlight reminiscent of the vastness and fearfulness of infinite time, during the days when he had begun telling his story and discovery every morning to the elderly, loyal, and patient Scribe sitting at the mahogany desk, the Prince would eventually remember he had actually discovered “the most significant historical dimension” in his story many years ago: Hadn’t he observed with his own eyes, prior to secluding himself in his lodge, that Istanbul streets were changing with every passing day in imitation of an imaginary city in a nonexistent foreign country? Didn’t he know that the unfortunate underprivileged that crowded the streets transformed their garb by observing Occidental travelers and studying photographs of foreigners that fell in their hands? Hadn’t he heard that the sorry folk who gathered in the evening around the stove at coffeehouses in the slums, instead of telling each other their own traditional tales, read for each other’s edification the sort of garbage in the papers written by second-rate columnists who pinched material from The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, in which the names of the heroes had been Moslemized? What’s more, with the object of looking for pleasant pastimes, hadn’t he himself been in the habit of frequenting Armenian bibliopoles who published collected editions of this odious stuff? Before displaying the decisiveness and the will to seclude himself, had the Prince not felt that his own face had also been gradually losing its former mysterious meaning, just as it happened to the underprivileged, dragged as he was into banality along with the underprivileged, the pitiful, and the unfortunate? “He had, indeed!” wrote the Scribe in response to each question, cognizant of the fact that that was how the Prince wanted it. “Yes, the Prince felt his face was also changing.”
Before the end of his first two years working with the Scribe—he called what they were up to “working”—the Prince had the Scribe take down everything: from the various ship horns which he imitated in his childhood, and the Turkish delights he managed to gobble, down to the nightmares that he had and the books he read in his forty-seven years of life, from the clothes he liked best down to the ones he disliked the most, from all the illnesses he survived down to everything he knew in connection with animals; and, as he frequently expressed it, he had done it, “by evaluating each sentence, each word in the light of the immense truth he had discovered.” Every morning when the Scribe sat at the mahogany desk and the Prince took up his position either on the sofa across from the desk or else his pacing grounds around it, or on the twin staircases that went up to the floor above and down again, perhaps they both knew that the Prince had no new story to dictate. But they were both in search of this silence, since, as the Prince was wont to say, “It is only when a man has nothing left to tell that he has come close to being completely himself. Only when his narrations have come to an end, when he hears inside him a profound silence because reminiscences, books, stories, and memory itself have all shut down, only then can he hear his own true voice which will make him himself, rising, as it does, from the depths of his own soul and the infinite dark labyrinths of his own being.”
On one of the days when they awaited for the voice to rise slowly out of somewhere deep inside a bottomless well of tales, the Prince took up the subject of women and love which, since he considered these “the most dangerous subjects,” he had rarely touched upon until that particular occasion. For a period that took nearly six months, he spoke of his old flames, affairs that couldn’t be considered love, his “intimacy” with some of the harem women whom, aside from a couple of them, he remembered with pity and sorrow, and his wife.
The most horrible aspect of this kind of intimacy, according to the Prince, was that even a commonplace woman who had no special attributes could, unbeknownst to you, invade a considerable portion of your thoughts. During his first youth, his marriage, and the early part of his residence at the lodge after leaving his wife and children at his estate on the Bosphorus—that is, until he turned thirty-five—the Prince had not been too concerned about this situation since he had as yet formed no resolution to become “only himself” and “free of influence.” What is more, since this “miserable copycat culture” had taught him, as it did everyone else, that forgetting yourself through love for a woman, a boy, or God—that is, “dissolving into love”—was something to be proud of and esteemed, the Prince too, like the multitudes in the streets, had taken pride in being “in love.”
After secluding himself at the lodge, reading continuously for six years, and at last perceiving that the most important question in life was whether or not one could be oneself, the Prince had immediately resolved to be cautious where women were concerned. It was true that he felt incomplete without the presence of women. Yet it was also true that every woman he became intimate with would spoil his thoughts and take up residence in the middle of his dreams, which he now desired to have originate only within himself. He had thought for a while that it was possible to immunize himself against the poison called love by being intimate with as many women as possible, but since he approached it with the utilitarian notion of getting inured to love and getting himself sick on the intoxication of love, he hadn’t been too interested in these women. Later, he had begun to see mostly Lady Leyla with whom he didn’t believe he could fall in love, given that she was, as he had dictated to the Scribe, “the most nondescript, colorless, blameless, and harmless” among all the women he knew. “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin was able to lay his heart bare without fear, believing, as he did, that he would not fall in love with her,” the Scribe had written one night, now that they’d begun to work also at night. “Since she was the only woman with whom I could lay bare my heart, I immediately fell in love with her,” the Prince had added. “It was one of the most horrifying periods of my life.”
The Scribe had written about the days when the Prince and Lady Leyla met at the lodge and quarreled. Lady Leyla would take off by carriage from the mansion of her father, the Pasha, accompanied by her men, and after half a day’s travel would arrive at the lodge, and the two of them would sit down at the meal prepared for them, the likes of which they read about in French novels, and eat talking about poetry and music like the delicate, refined characters in the novels, and just after the meal when it was time for her to go back home, they’d set to a quarrel that upset the cooks, the manservants, and coachman who listened behind doors that were partly ajar. “There was no ostensible reason for our quarrels,” the Prince had explained on one occasion. “I was merely angry with her since it was on her account that I couldn’t manage to be myself, my thoughts lost their purity, I could no longer hear the voice that rose out of the depths of my being. This went on until she died as a result of a mishap for which I will never understand whether or not I was to be blamed.”
The Prince had dictated that after Lady Leyla’s death, he was grieved but liberated. The Scribe, who was always quiet, respectful, and attentive, had done something he’d never done in his six years with the Prince; that is, he had tried prying into this love and death by broaching the subject several times, but the Prince would only return to it on his own terms and in his own good time.
One night six months before his death, the Prince explained that if he still had not managed to become himself, so to speak, if he were unsuccessful at the end of the fifteen-year battle he had put up at the lodge, then Istanbul streets would also turn into the streets of an unfortunate city that could no longer “be itself,” and that the hapless people who walked on the squares, parks, and sidewalks of this city which imitated squares, parks, sidewalks in other cities could never achieve being themselves; and he was saying that he had knowledge of each and every street in his beloved Istanbul and, even though he had not stepped outside even once, beyond the garden at the lodge, had kept every streetlight and shop alive in his imagination, when he abandoned his usual angry voice and dictated hoarsely that, during the period when Lady Leyla came every day to the lodge in her carriage, he’d spent the major portion of
his time imagining a horse-drawn carriage trailing through the city streets. “During the days when Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin struggled with becoming himself, he spent half the day imagining the route from Kuruçeşme to our lodge in a carriage drawn by two horses, one bay and the other black; and after their usual meal and the ensuing quarrel, he’d spend the rest of the day imagining the return trip that took the tearful Lady Leyla back to her Pasha father’s mansion in the carriage, going up and down streets that were mostly on the same route,” the Scribe had written in his usual painstaking, fastidious hand.
On another occasion, in order to suppress other voices and other stories he’d again begun to hear in his mind one hundred days prior to his death, the Prince was enumerating with anger all the personas he had carried around inside him all his life like a secondary soul, with or without his being aware of it, when he began quietly dictating that among all the personas, which he assumed like the different disguises some unhappy sultan was driven to assume every evening, he had affection for only one, the persona that loved a woman whose hair smelled like lilacs. Since the Scribe fastidiously read over and over again every line the Prince dictated to him, and since in his six years of service he had thus gradually come to know, acquire, and own the Prince’s past and his memory banks down to the last detail, the Scribe knew that the woman whose head smelled like lilacs was Lady Leyla because he remembered taking down on another occasion the story of a lover who couldn’t achieve becoming himself, this time on account of the smell of lilacs he couldn’t forget, when the woman whose head smelled of lilacs was killed due to an accident or mistake for which he would never be certain he was to blame.
The Prince described, with the sort of enthusiasm that precedes illness, the last months he and the Scribe worked together as being a period of “concentrated work, concentrated hope, and concentrated faith.” These were the happy days when the Prince strongly heard inside his head the voice with which he dictated all day and which made him more himself the more he dictated and told his own stories. They’d work late at night, and no matter how late it was, the Scribe would get in the carriage which waited for him on the grounds and go home, and he’d return early in the morning to take his place at the mahogany desk.
The Prince would narrate the stories of kingdoms that had collapsed because they couldn’t be themselves, races that had been annihilated because they imitated others, peoples in distant and unknown lands who’d fallen into oblivion because they couldn’t live their own lives. Illyrians had withdrawn from the world’s stage because they couldn’t come up with a king who through the sheer strength of his personality could teach them to be themselves. The collapse of Babel was not due to King Nimrod’s challenge to God, as it was commonly presumed, but because in an effort to put everything he had into building the tower, he had dried up the sources that could have made Babel be itself. The nomadic people of Lapitia were about to move into a settled economy when they fell under the enchantment of the Aitipal with whom they traded and, having given themselves over to complete emulation, had disappeared. The collapse of the Sassanids, according to Tabari’s History, was due to the fact that their last three rulers (Hormizd, Khosru, and Yazdigird) were incapable of being themselves for a single day in their entire lives because they were so fascinated by the Byzantine, Arabian, and Hebrew civilizations. After the Lydians’ first temple under Susian influence was built in their capital city of Sardis, it had taken fifty years for the mighty Lydian kingdom to fall and shuffle off the theater of history. Serberians were a race which not even historians could place today, not only because they’d lost their memories but because just as they were about to build a great Asian empire, they’d forgotten the mystery that made them themselves and they all began wearing Sarmatian attire and ornaments, and reciting Sarmatian poems as if the whole population had caught an epidemic disease. “Medes, Paphlagonians, Celts,” the Prince would dictate, and the Scribe would beat his master to the punch by adding, “collapsed and disappeared because they could not be themselves.” Late at night when they were dead beat and done telling the tales of death and collapse, they’d hear the determined chirping of a cicada in the silence of the summer night outside.
When the Prince caught a cold and took to his bed on a windy fall day, just as crimson chestnut leaves began to drop into the frog and lily pond on the grounds, neither of them had taken it too seriously. During that period, the Prince had been holding forth on what would befall the bewildered people who’d inhabit the degenerated streets of Istanbul, saying that “they would see their lives through the eyes of others, listen to other’s tales in favor of their own, and be spellbound with others’ faces rather than their own,” in case he failed in becoming himself and ascending the Ottoman throne in possession of the full power of being his own man. They made and drank linden blossom tea that came from the lindens on the grounds and proceeded to work until all hours.
Next day when the Scribe went upstairs to get another quilt to put over his feverish master prostrated on the sofa, he realized as if under a strange spell that the lodge, where the tables and chairs had been demolished, the doors pulled out, the furniture eradicated, was bare, so very bare. There was a dreamlike whiteness in the bare rooms, on the walls and the staircases. In one of the bare rooms stood the white Steinway, unique in all of Istanbul, which came from the Prince’s childhood; it hadn’t been played for years and had been totally forgotten. The Scribe observed the whiteness also in the white light that fell as if on another planet into the lodge through the windows which gave the impression that all recollections had faded, memory had frozen, and all sound, smell, objects having retreated, time itself had come to a stop. Going down the stairs with an unscented white quilt in his arms, he felt that the sofa the Prince lay on, his own mahogany desk where he’d worked all these years, the white paper, the windows, were all breakable, delicate, and unreal like the furnishings of dollhouses. As he laid the quilt over him, the Scribe noticed the white in the growth on his master’s face that hadn’t been shaved for a couple of days. There was half a glass of water and some white tablets on the table next to his head.
“Last night I dreamed that my mother was waiting for me in a dense, dark wood in a distant land,” dictated the Prince from where he lay on the sofa. “Water was pouring out of a large crimson pitcher, but slowly like fermented cereal,” dictated the Prince. “That was when I understood that I survived because I had insisted on being myself all my life.” The Scribe wrote: “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin spent his life waiting for silence so that he might hear his own voice and stories.” “To wait for silence,” repeated the Prince. “Clocks shouldn’t stop in Istanbul,” dictated the Prince. “When I looked at the clocks in my dream,” the Prince began, and the Scribe wrote, “he was always under the impression that he was telling other people’s stories.” There was a silence. “I envy stones in the desert for just being themselves, and rocks in mountains where no man has ever set foot, and trees in valleys hidden from human eyes,” the Prince dictated with effort and passion. “In my dream, wandering around the garden of my memories,” he began, and then added, “nothing at all.” “Nothing at all,” the Scribe put down with care. There was a long, long silence. Then the Scribe rose from his desk and approached the sofa where the Prince was lying down, took a good look at his master and returned quietly back to his desk. Then he wrote, “Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin was deceased after dictating his last sentence, on the 7th of Shaban, 1321, Thursday, at 3:15 in the morning, at his hunting lodge on the hills of Teşvikiye.” But twenty years later what he wrote in the same hand was this: “The throne which Prince Honorable Osman Jelalettin didn’t live to ascend was, seven years later, occupied by Honorable Mehmet Reşat whose neck he had slapped when he was young and during whose administration the Ottoman Empire, having entered the Great War, collapsed.”
The notebooks were presented by a relative of the Scribe’s to Jelal Salik, among whose papers this article was discovered after
our columnist’s death.
Chapter Thirty-six
BUT I WHO WRITE
Ye who read are still among the living;
But I who write
shall have long since gone my way
into the region of shadows.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “Shadow—a Parable”
“Yes, yes, I am myself!” Galip thought when he finished telling the Prince’s story. “Yes, I am me!” Now that he had told the story, he was so certain that he was capable of being himself and so pleased for having finally done it, he wanted to tear off for the Heart-of-the-City Apartments, sit down at Jelal’s desk, and write brand-new columns.
In the cab he got outside the hotel, the cabby began telling a story. Since he understood that one could only be himself through telling stories, Galip listened tolerantly to the cabby’s tale.
It seems that on a hot summer day a century ago, the German and Turkish engineers who built the Haydarpaşa train station across the Bosphorus were working on their computations spread out on a table, when one of the boyishly beautiful divers combing the bottom of the sea nearby for anything of value approached with a coin he’d found. There was a woman’s face embossed on the coin, a strange, enchanting face. The diver asked one of the Turkish engineers working under their black umbrellas if he could solve the mystery of the face, which he himself could not solve, by reading the letters on the coin. The young engineer was so deeply affected, not so much by the letters as by the enchanting expression on the face of the Byzantine empress, he was seized by such wonderment and awe, that it surprised even the diver. There was something in the face of the empress that involved not only the Arabic and Latin alphabets, both of which the engineer was busy using, but was also reminiscent of the beloved face of his uncle’s daughter whom he had dreamed of marrying someday. The girl was about to be married off to someone else at just about that time.
