by Orhan Pamuk
All factors considered, it was clear to us that, if the minaret were indeed to fall at the angle we had divined using our hands and a bit of string, it would not hit us: Our building, which looked out on the Bosphorus, was simply too far from the minaret, farther than the height of the structure. “So there’s no chance that the minaret would fall on us,” said my neighbor, as he took his leave. “Actually, it’s far more likely that our building will fall onto the minaret.”
In the days that followed—as I carried on with my research, trying to determine whether the building in which I worked would collapse onto the minaret, and whether the building in which I lived with my family was as likely to fall as the building in which I worked—I did not seek out my neighbor. This was not because he, like so many other acquaintances, tempered his earthquake angst with dark humor. It was because he, like the rest of us, was engrossed in his own particular way of addressing his fear of death. My neighbor had chipped a corner off our six-story building and sent it to Istanbul Technical University so that the strength of the concrete could be analyzed, and now he was waiting for the results, as were thousands of others who had done the same thing. Having done all that could be done, he found the wait calming; this much I know.
As for me, I assumed that peace of mind would come only with greater knowledge. My visits to the earthquake zones had taught me that buildings had collapsed mainly for two reasons: shoddy construction and poor soil. So, like many others, I set out to discover what sort of soil my home and my office building stood on and how sturdily they’d been built; this I did by speaking to construction engineers, examining maps, and exchanging notes with the many others who, like me, had developed a taste for worry and fear.
Though both epicenters were more than ninety miles outside the city, the two recent earthquakes had shaken all the inhabitants of Istanbul from their sleep; the death toll of thirty thousand had laid bare the construction sector’s practice of building shoddily on poor soil without any effort at earthquake proofing. For the twenty million living in the environs of the city, nightmares sprang from the well-founded fear that their homes would be unable to withstand an earthquake of the intensity that the scientists had now forecast. Even if the houses and apartments had been constructed according to the building code (highly improbable), it was not cheering to remember that these rules and regulations had been drawn up to protect against earthquakes far milder than the one we were all now expecting. And so even those homes, put up not by careless and dishonorable contractors, using too little iron and low-quality concrete, but by their own fathers and grandfathers, could not be presumed to be safe. Also, in many apartment buildings, bribes to city councils had made it possible for numerous extra floors to be added and columns and support walls heedlessly removed to create space for shops, making weak buildings even weaker. Furthermore, even if you had definitive proof that your building could not withstand what was expected, even if you had resolved to undertake repairs costing typically a third of the value of your apartment, you would still have to convince your other-minded, cynical, apathetic, depressed, brainless, opportunist, and most probably penniless neighbors to do likewise.
And so, despite the magnitude of the looming danger, I have not met many apartment dwellers in Istanbul who have faced reality and set about making their buildings safe. I do know quite a few earthquake worriers who have failed to persuade not only their neighbors but their wives, husbands, and children. Then there are those who cannot afford to make their homes safe; resigned to their fate, while also stricken with fear, they take refuge in cynicism, saying, “Well, even if I did spend all that money to make my building safe, what if the building across the street fell on us?” It’s because of this helplessness, this hopelessness, that millions of İstanbullus see earthquakes in their dreams.
My own dreams resemble a great many that others have reported to me. In the dream, you see the bed in which you are sleeping and recall the anxious thoughts you had about earthquakes just before getting into that bed. All at once an earthquake hits; it’s huge. You watch as the bed sways back and forth, an earthquake in slow motion as your little room, your house, your bed, and all the things around you lose all sense of place; as they sway, they change shape. Slowly, your perspective widens beyond the room to encompass scenes inspired by the helicopter views of flattened towns ubiquitous on television; it is now that the enormity of the disaster begins to dawn on you. But despite the Judgment Day atmosphere, you are—in the dream as in waking life—secretly happy, because witnessing the earthquake is proof that you survived it. The same holds true for the mother, the father, the spouse who blames the earthquake on your mistaken priorities: They scold you, but they too are still alive. These dreams stem partly from dread and the desire to get it over with, which may explain why so many people recall that, in spite of the terror they felt, they’d also felt cleansed of sin, as they might after a religious observance. Many of those who quake in terror, wafting through that dark zone between wakefulness and sleep, assume that there must have been a real earthquake while they were sleeping, that actual tremors prompted the dream, and if there is no one next to them to wake up and consult, if they are not able to work out whether it was just a dream or the real thing, they’ll be sure to scan the newspapers the next morning for the latest reports on aftershocks.
Having convinced ourselves that we cannot ensure the safety of our houses, we have decided that there is only one way to shake off that sense of impending disaster afflicting all earthquake survivors: Go back to the scientists and professors who have warned us that Istanbul is soon to suffer a great earthquake and make them reconsider.
It was Professor Işikara, the director of Turkey’s only big observatory, who first informed us that our fault line was much like the one in California, stretching from one tip of northern Turkey to the other, and that if you charted the big earthquakes of recent times you could see that they’d begun in the east and were coming closer and closer to Istanbul. After the first big earthquake in August 1999, when the entire press corps was seeking Professor Işikara out and he spent every evening racing from one television station to the next, reiterating views to which no one had paid the slightest attention for so many years, the presenters would all ask him the same question: “So tell me, sir, is there going to be another earthquake tonight?” In his early appearances, the answer had always been, “An earthquake can strike at any time.” Later—having scared millions of people out of their wits and seen hundreds jumping from their windows when a much smaller earthquake hit the city, and having heard complaints from the state about the chaos born of desperation—he edited himself, and his line became, “It is impossible to say when the next earthquake will hit.” Even so, two days after the great earthquake that killed thirty thousand people, when the aftershocks became more intense and the entire nation was watching him on television, we still took him to be insinuating that there might be another quake that very night, so we all moved outside to sleep in parks, gardens, and streets. This charming professor, with Einstein’s look of disheveled absentmindedness (though lacking his genius), came to be greatly loved by the people of Istanbul, because during the days of greatest hopelessness, with the fear of earthquakes at its height, he bent to the will of its sleepless inhabitants and gave us a brighter if not very convincing picture (suggesting, for example, that the fault line might be farther away from Istanbul than previously thought) and smiling whenever he imparted bad news, at all times speaking in very sweet tones.
Then there were the scientists who stood by their predictions, refusing to sugarcoat; Professor Şengör was one such expert. He greatly angered everyone by acting like an unfeeling clinician, describing that first earthquake, the one that killed thirty thousand people, as a “beauty.” But the greater reason to resent scientists like this who refused to soften their prognostications was the irrefutability of their proof that the impending earthquake would be enormous and the scolding, almost cruel manner in which they presented it. Beh
ind this demonic professorial anger was not just the fact that unsafe buildings housing ten million people had gone up in the earthquake area without anyone’s paying the weak warnings of science any heed, but also that no one had listened to the international press, which had quoted him 1,300 times. This is why he took on the air of an angry imam prophesying the punishments that the godless were soon to suffer.
These scientists were speaking on entertainment programs whose typical guests were beauty queens and champion bodybuilders, and the hosts would always interrupt the scientists’ detailed analyses to ask, “Sir, is there going to be an earthquake in the near future, and how strong will it be?” On one of the most important news programs on November 14, there was such a ferocious exchange about the latest data on the fault in the Sea of Marmara that Bill Clinton’s arrival in Turkey that day was mentioned only briefly in the forty-fifth minute of the show. That program, like so many others, ended by offering no definitive answers to the questions that the host had asked so insistently, so many times, and with the understanding that, for precisely that reason, we could only expect more inconclusive discussions, interrogations, and public declarations.
No scientists showed themselves willing to offer a hope to the public by saying that the earthquake might never come, barring the handful whose science was clearly unreliable, so very slowly the millions of İstanbullus living in unsound buildings on unsound soil have come to understand that they have to find their own way of fending off terror. This was how some came to leave the matter to Allah or, with time, simply to forget it, while others now take false comfort in precautions they adopted after the previous earthquake.
Many sleep with gigantic flashlights covered in plastic next to their beds, so that, in the event of an earthquake and a power failure, they can find their way out before fire overtakes them. Next to these flashlights are whistles, to alert rescue teams searching the rubble, and mobile phones. Some hang whistles (and in one case, a harmonica) around their necks. Others also wear their house keys, so that when the earthquake hits they needn’t waste time looking for them. Some have stopped shutting their doors, so they can flee without impediment from their two- or three-story houses, while others have suspended ropes from their windows so they can shimmy down to their gardens. During the first months, some were so unnerved by the continual aftershocks that they took to wearing miners’ helmets inside their homes. Because the first big quake struck at night, the desire to be prepared was so strong—even among those who lived in apartments so high up that getting downstairs and out with any speed was all but impossible—that they would go to bed fully dressed. I even heard of some so worried about being caught with their pants down that they rushed whenever they were in the toilet or taking a bath, and that some couples, afflicted by a similar worry, lost interest in making love, while others created shelters in which they stored food, drink, hammers, lamps, and so on—everything to escape a big burning city and survive without benefit of electricity and with roads and bridges collapsed. After the earthquake, some took to carrying large quantities of cash. In many homes, corners were deemed unsound and beds were pulled away from walls, clear of overloaded shelves and wardrobes. Shelters were erected next to the vital appliances of refrigerator and oven; in these one was theoretically protected from the ceiling caving in, or so it was claimed in the guides published by newspapers for constructing these “life triangles.”
I did much the same thing at one end of the long desk at which I have been writing novels for twenty-five years. With the heaviest books in my library—among them a forty-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica, an even older volume of the Islam Encyclopedia, and the Istanbul Encyclopedia that was one of my sources for the earthquakes of times past—I built a shelter beneath my desk. Having assured myself that it was strong enough to withstand falling concrete, I lay down there for a few earthquake drills, assuming a fetal position as instructed to protect my kidneys. The little earthquake guides also recommended storing biscuits, bottled water, a whistle, and a hammer in a secure corner, but I didn’t do any of those things. It was enough that my everyday life was full of these little precautions, bottled this and that. Was my reluctance to bring them to my desk rooted in some vague awareness that such accommodation might sink my morale even faster?
No, my reason was deeper and more mysterious. I’ve seen glints of it in many people’s eyes, though they rarely express it; I’d call it shame, a shame tinged with guilt and self-blame. It is something akin to what you might feel if you had a relative who was an alcoholic criminal or if you’d just suffered sudden financial ruin—your wish to protect yourself would be as strong as your wish to hide the necessity from others. When my friends and publishers outside Turkey wrote to me after the first big earthquake to ask me how I was, it was shame that kept me from giving any sort of answer; I turned in on myself, like a man just diagnosed with cancer, whose first concern is that no one find out. In the early days, if I wanted to discuss the subject, it was only with those who shared my predicament and anxiety about the next big one, people who took the same view of it as I did. Though most of these conversations were more like serial monologues, as we parroted, in anger and agitation, the views of experts whose respective degrees of pessimism and optimism had quickly become common knowledge.
For a while I limited my research to the neighborhoods in which my home and my office are located, seeking to determine how well the ground beneath them had withstood tremors in the past. I was relieved to discover that only a few buildings had collapsed in these neighborhoods in the 1894 earthquake. But when I studied the full inventory of collapsed houses, when I read the names of those whose roofs had fallen in on them—the Greek butchers, the milkmen, the Ottoman soldiers in their barracks—when I learned that all those markets and historic buildings I had visited on so many occasions had been destroyed and later rebuilt, I was overcome with sadness at the brevity of life and the fragility of men and minarets.
There was one little map published by a magazine that had undertaken to depict a disaster gradient for the earthquake to come, and it filled me with fury. It colored my neighborhood the dark shade indicating one of the districts expected to suffer the worst damage. Or was that just how it looked to me? Was it even possible to conclude anything from a map so small and crude? Armed with a magnifying glass, I examined the deadly blot that spread across this wordless map, as far as my street and my house, and tried to determine how it corresponded with more detailed maps. No other map in any other paper, no other source, said my neighborhood was in particular jeopardy. I decided it must be a mistake and tried to forget it. I knew I would have an easier job of this if I mentioned it to no one.
A few days later, I found myself at midnight poring over the same crude map, examining that dark blot through my magnifying glass. My landlord, who had discovered that I was worried about soil quality at the foundation of the building, dug out the photograph he’d proudly had taken with the workmen as they were laying it forty years earlier. Because I’d lived for forty years in that same neighborhood, the photograph brought back many memories, but when I picked up my magnifying glass it was to look for bedrock in the earth. The contradictory statements of the scientists, as well as the media’s irresponsible ratings war, had kept the inhabitants of Istanbul caught between anxious despair and excited relief—sleepless one night with a new piece of bad news, and sleepless the next night with an intimation of reprieve (according to the latest satellite pictures, the earthquake would only measure 5 on the Richter scale!). So it was, back and forth, with my research into soil quality under the blot on the map. I yielded to the urging of that magazine’s editors not to give so much importance to their crude little map, but I still thought long and hard about how that black spot might have come to fall on my house and my life.
Throughout this period, I’d also kept an ear out for the suspicions and rumors circulating like so many packs of wild dogs through the city. When, in the days following the earthquake, I heard that the sea h
ad grown warmer, proof that another earthquake was imminent, and when I heard of strange correspondences between the earthquake and the previous week’s solar eclipse, I merely laughed. “Don’t laugh so loud,” one angry young girl scolded me, “If there’s an earthquake, we won’t hear it.” One rumor had it that the earthquake was the work of Kurdish separatist guerrillas, another that it was caused by Americans who were now coming to our aid with a huge military hospital ship (“How do you suppose they made it here so fast?” the conspiracy theory went). In one outrageous version, the commander of said ship had looked sadly from the deck and guiltily sighed. “Look what we’ve done!”
Later on, the paranoid delusions took on a more domestic slant: The janitor who rang your doorbell every morning to deliver your milk and newspapers would announce (in the same voice he used to warn you that the water would be turned off for an hour) that a massive earthquake was predicted for ten past seven that evening, which would destroy the entire city. Or a demonic scientist who’d made no provisions of his own for the upcoming disaster had fled to Europe. Or it would be said that the state, knowing full well what was to come, had secretly imported a million body bags. You would also hear that the military had already sent out earth movers to dig mass graves in open fields outside the city, and that a friend who had doubts about the construction of his house—and of course the soil underneath it—had moved to another building on the same street, only to discover that his new apartment was even more unsafe. In Yeşilyurt, one of Istanbul’s richest neighborhoods built on some of its poorest soil, the homeowners attending a meeting to discuss the earthquake had divided into two opposing camps: those who wished to discuss how to protect themselves and those who said that such talk would depress real estate values. It was around the same time that a journalist friend of mine told me that they’d not been able to print the maps I’d wanted to consult while investigating the black stain on that little map, for fear of angering real estate agents and homeowners.
