Other Colors

by Orhan Pamuk

  I could see at once that our chauffeur was wondering whether he should just turn left. He was looking over both shoulders to see if any other car was entering the square: Should he obey the law, or should he use his head to find a way around it, the way he liked to think he always did whenever life threw him an unexpected challenge?

  I remembered how often I’d faced this same dilemma as a young man driving through the streets of Istanbul. I was a model driver on the main avenues of the city (which journalists liked to describe as “traffic anarchy”), but as soon as I’d taken my father’s car into the empty cobble-stoned back streets, I ignored the rules and did as I pleased. To obey a NO LEFT TURN sign on a back street when there wasn’t another car in sight, to sit in an out-of-the-way square in the middle of the night, patiently waiting for the light to turn green, was to bow down to an authority that made no allowances for the intelligent pragmatist. We had little respect for those who obeyed the letter of the law in those days; people only did that if they lacked brains, imagination, or character. If you were prepared to sit out a red light at an empty intersection, you were probably the sort of person who squeezed toothpaste tubes from the bottom and never took medicine without reading the entire label. Our contempt for this approach to life is well illustrated by a cartoon I remember seeing in magazines from the West during the 1960s: a lone driver waiting for the green light in the middle of an American desert

  When I think back to Istanbul as it was between 1950 and 1980, it seems to me that our contempt for the highway code was more than a simple longing for anarchy. Rather, it was a subtle form of anti-Western nationalism: When we were all by ourselves, without any strangers in our midst, the old order prevailed and we went back to our old tricks. In the sixties and seventies, a man could feel a surge of pride just by holding a rickety phone together with one well-placed nail or getting an unrepairable German radio to work by pounding it with a fist. Feats like this made us feel different from Westerners, who so venerated the rules of technology and culture; they reminded us of how worldly we were, and how wily.

  But as I sat on the edge of this square on the outskirts of Tehran, watching the driver waver between obedience and pragmatism, I could tell that this man, whom I knew well enough by then, had not the slightest interest in making a nationalist statement. His problem was much more mundane: Because we were in a hurry it seemed a waste of time to go all the way around the circle, but he was glancing anxiously at all the other roads that led into it, because he knew that if he rushed the decision he might end up crashing into another car.

  The day before, when we were snarled in traffic anarchy, watching one unimaginable tie-up after another, this man had complained to me that no one in Tehran obeyed the law. Granted, he was smiling as he said it, but all day we’d been sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, staring at the dented sides of domestic Peykan cars, their drivers shouting abuse at one another, and we’d been laughing at them darkly as if we were thoroughly modern people who sincerely believed in the highway code. Now, though, I could sense a certain anxiety beneath my driver’s smile as he tried to decide whether he should make the illegal turn.

  I remembered feeling just as anxious, struggling through the Istanbul traffic of my youth, and just as lonely. As our driver considered giving up on the benefits and protections offered by the rule of law in order to save a bit of time, he too knew he was going to have to make the decision alone. He would have to run through all the possibilities as quickly as he could, pursue all channels open to him, and then decide on the spot, knowing full well that he was taking his own life and perhaps the lives of those around him into his hands.

  You could argue that our driver was, by breaking the rules and choosing freedom, bringing this loneliness upon himself. But even if he was not making a free choice, he knew the city and its drivers well enough to realize that he was doomed to feel lonely for as long as he remained a driver in Tehran. Because even if you decide to obey the laws of modern traffic, others—pragmatic people just like you—will pay them no mind. Outside the city center, every driver in Tehran has to approach every intersection paying attention not just to the lights and the laws but also to any driver who might have chosen to ignore them. A driver in the West can change lanes feeling so sure that everyone around him is obeying the rules that he can listen to music, let his mind wander; a driver in Tehran feels freedom of a different order, and it offers him no peace.

  When I went to visit Tehran and saw the chaos and destruction these drivers brought upon themselves as they fought the highway code with furious ingenuity for the preservation of their autonomy, it seemed to me that their little bursts of lawless individualism were strangely at odds with the state-imposed religious laws that dictate every other aspect of life in the city. It is, after all, to convey the impression that everyone in public life and anyone walking down the street is sharing the same thought that an Islamist dictatorship feels it must veil its women, censor its books, keep its prisons full, and plaster all the highest walls in the city with huge posters of heroes who have martyred themselves for their country and their religion. Oddly, it’s when you’re battling your way through the mad traffic, fighting it out with the city’s lawless drivers, that you feel the presence of religion most keenly. Here’s the state, proclaiming that all must bow to the laws laid down in the Holy Book, mercilessly enforcing those laws in the name of national unity and making it clear that to break them is to end up in prison, when meanwhile the city’s drivers, knowing the state is watching, flout the highway code and expect everyone else to do likewise; they see the road as a place where they can test the limits of their freedom, their imagination, and their ingenuity. I saw reflections of the same contradiction in my meetings with Iranian intellectuals, whose freedoms were so severely restricted by the Sharia laws the state has imposed in the streets, the markets, the city’s great avenues, and all other public spaces. With a sincerity I cannot help but admire, they set out to prove they were not living in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union by showing me they could discuss whatever they wanted, wear whatever they liked, and drink as much bootleg alcohol as they pleased in the privacy of their own homes.

  In the final pages of Lolita, after Humbert has killed Quilty and is driving away from the scene of the crime in the car the reader has come to know so well, he suddenly swerves into the left lane. Fearful of being misunderstood, Humbert swiftly warns the reader against seeing this as a symbolic gesture of rebellion. Having already seduced a girl who is no more than a child and then committed murder, he has, after all, broken the greatest laws of humanity. This is the genius of Humbert’s story and of the novel itself: From the very first page we share his lonely guilt.

  When, after his brief attack of indecision on the outskirts of Tehran, my friend the driver took the shortcut—went into the wrong lane and made the turn without causing an accident, just as I had done so many times myself as a young man in Istanbul—we both felt the rush that can only come from breaking a rule and getting away with it, and we could not help but exchange smiles. The sad thing was knowing that (like Humbert, who was so brilliant at veiling his misdeeds with language, and like the inhabitants of Tehran who have found so many ways to circumvent the Sharia in the privacy of their own homes) the only time one could break the law in public was behind the wheel of a car, and that the law we broke governed traffic and nothing else.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  In Kars and Frankfurt

  It is a great pleasure to be in Frankfurt, the city where Ka, the hero of my novel Snow, spent the last fifteen years of his life. My hero is a Turk and therefore no relation of Kafka’s; they are related only in literary terms (I shall be saying more about literary relations later on). Ka’s real name was Kerim Alakuşoğlu, but he was not very fond of it, so he preferred the shorter version. He first came to Frankfurt in the 1980s as a political refugee. He was not particularly interested in politics—he didn’t even like politics; his whole life was poetry. My hero was a po
et living in Frankfurt. He saw Turkish politics as someone else might see an accident—something that he got mixed up in without ever meaning to. I would, if I have enough time, like to say a few words about politics and accidents. It is a subject about which I have thought a great deal. But do not worry: Though I write long novels, today I shall keep my comments brief.

  It was in the hope that I might describe Ka’s stay in Frankfurt during the eighties and early nineties without making too many mistakes that I came here five years ago, in the year 2000. Two people in the audience today were particularly generous in their help, and it was while they were showing me around that we visited the little park behind the old factory buildings near Gutleustrasse where my hero would spend the last years of his life. To better imagine the walk Ka made each morning from his home to the city library, where he spent most of his days, we walked through the square in front of the station, down the Kaiserstrasse, past the sex shops and the Turkish greengrocers, barbers, and kebab restaurants of Münchnerstrasse as far as Clocktower Square, passing just in front of the church where we are gathered today. We went into the Kaufhof, where Ka bought the coat he would draw such comfort from wearing for so many years. For two days, we roamed around the old poor neighborhoods where Frankfurt’s Turks have made their homes, visiting the mosques, restaurants, community associations, and coffeehouses. This was my seventh novel, but I recall taking such needlessly extensive notes that I might as well have been a novice, agonizing over every detail, asking questions like, Did the tram really pass this corner during the eighties?

  I did the same thing when I visited Kars, the small city in the northeast of Turkey where most of my novel takes place. Because I knew very little about Kars, I visited it many times before using it as my setting; during my stays there, I met many people and made many friends as I explored the city street by street and shop by shop. I visited the most remote and forgotten neighborhoods of this, Turkey’s most remote and forgotten city, conversing with the unemployed men who spent their days in coffeehouses without even the hope of ever finding another job; conversing, too, with lycée students, with the plainclothes and uniformed policemen who followed me wherever I went, and with the publishers of the newspaper, whose circulation never rose above 250.

  My aim here is not to relate how I came to write a novel called Snow. I am using this story as a way into the subject that I am coming to understand more clearly with each new day, and that is, in my view, central to the art of the novel: the question of the “other,” the “stranger,” the “enemy” that resonates inside each of our heads—or, rather, the question of how to transform this being. That my question is not central to all novels is self-evident: A novel can, of course, advance the understanding of humankind by imagining its characters in situations that we know intimately and care about and recognize from our own experience. When we meet someone in a novel who reminds us of ourselves, our first wish is for that character to explain to us who we are. So we tell stories about mothers, fathers, houses, streets that look just like ours, and we set these stories in cities we’ve seen with our own eyes, in the countries we know best. But the strange and magical rules that govern the art of the novel can open up our families, homes, and cities in a way that makes everyone feel as if they can see their own families, homes, and cities reflected in them. It has often been said that Buddenbrooks is an excessively autobiographical novel. But when I first picked up this book, as a boy of seventeen, I read it not as Mann’s account of his own family—for at the time I knew very little about him—but as a book about a universal family, one with which I could easily identify. The wondrous mechanisms of the novel allow us to take our own stories and present them to all humanity as stories about someone else.

  So, yes, one could define the novel as a form that allows the skilled practitioner to turn his own stories into stories about someone else, but this is just one aspect of the great and mesmerizing art that has entranced so many readers and inspired writers for almost four hundred years. It was the other aspect that drew me to the streets of Frankfurt and Kars: the chance to write of others’ lives as if they were my own. It is by doing this sort of research that novelists can begin to test the lines that mark off that “other” and in so doing alter the boundaries of our own identities. Others become “us” and we become “others.” Certainly a novel can achieve both feats simultaneously. Even as it describes our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people’s lives as if they were our own.

  Novelists wishing to enter into the lives of others do not necessarily need to visit other streets and other cities, as I did when preparing to write Snow. Novelists wishing to put themselves in others’ shoes and identify with their pains and troubles will draw first and foremost from their imaginations. Let me try to illustrate my point with an example that will call to mind what I was saying earlier about literary relations: “If I woke up one morning to find that I had turned into an enormous cockroach, what would become of me?” Behind every great novel is an author whose greatest pleasure comes from entering another’s form and bringing it to life—whose strongest and most creative impulse is to test the very limits of his identity. If I woke up one morning to find myself transformed into a cockroach, I would need to do more than research insects; if I were to guess that everyone else in the house would be revolted and even terrified to see me scuttling across the walls and the ceilings, and that even my own mother and father would hurl apples at me, I would still have to find a way to become Kafka. But before I try to imagine myself as someone else, I might have to do a little investigating. What I need most to ponder is this: Who is this “other” we are pressing ourselves to imagine?

  This creature who is nothing like us addresses our most primitive hatreds, fears, and anxieties. We know full well that these are the emotions that fire up the imagination and give us power to write. So the novelist observing the rules of his art will recognize that only good can come of his managing to identify with this “other.” He will also know that thinking about this other in whom everyone sees his own opposite will help to liberate him from the confines of his self. The history of the novel is a history of human liberation: By putting ourselves in another’s shoes, by using our imaginations to shed our identities, we are able to set ourselves free.

  So Defoe’s great novel conjures up not just Robinson Crusoe but also his slave, Friday. As powerfully as Don Quixote conjures up a knight who lives in the world of books, it also conjures up his servant, Sancho Panza. I enjoy reading Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s most brilliant novel, as a happily married man’s attempt to imagine a woman who destroys her unhappy marriage and then herself. Tolstoy’s inspiration was another male novelist who, though he himself never married, found his way into the mind of the discontented Emma Bovary. In the greatest of all allegorical novels, Moby-Dick, Melville explores the fears gripping America in his day—and particularly the fear of alien cultures—whose intermediary is the white whale. Those of us who come to know the world through books cannot think of the American South without also thinking of the blacks in Faulkner’s novels. Having failed to realize them credibly, his work would be found wanting. In the same way, we might feel that a German novelist who wished to speak to all of Germany, and who failed, explicitly or implicitly, to imagine the country’s Turks along with the unease they cause, was somehow lacking. Likewise, a Turkish novelist who failed to imagine the Kurds and other minorities, and who neglected the black spots in his country’s unspoken history, would have, in my view, produced something hollow.

  Contrary to what most people assume, one’s politics as a novelist have nothing to do with the societies, parties, and groups to which one might belong—or with a dedication to any political cause. A novelist’s politics arise from his imagination, from his ability to imagine himself as someone else. This power not only allows him to explore human realities previously unremarked—it makes him the spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger
is never heard, and whose words are suppressed. A novelist may, like me, have no real reason to take a youthful interest in politics, and if he does his motives may end up mattering very little. Today we do not read the greatest political novel, Dostoyevsky’s Demons, as the author originally intended—as a polemic against Russian Westernizers and Nihilists; we read it instead as a reflection of the Russia of its day, one that reveals to us the great secret locked inside the Slavic soul. Such a secret only a novel can explore.

  Obviously, we cannot hope to come to grips with matters this deep merely by reading newspapers and magazines or by watching television. To understand what is unique about the histories of other nations and other peoples, to share in unique lives that trouble us, terrifying us with their depths and shocking us with their simplicity—such truths we can glean only from the careful, patient reading of great novels. Let me add that when Dostoyevsky’s demons begin to whisper into the reader’s ear, telling him of a secret rooted in history, a secret born of pride and defeat, shame and anger, they are illuminating the shadows of the reader’s own history too. The whisperer is the despairing writer who loves and despises the West in equal measure, a man who cannot quite see himself as a Westerner but is dazzled by the brilliance of Western civilization, who feels himself caught between the two worlds.

  Here we come to the East-West question. Journalists are exceedingly fond of it, but when I see the connotations it carries in some parts of the Western press, I’m inclined to think that it would be better not to speak of the East-West question at all. Because most of the time it carries an assumption that the poor countries of the East should defer to everything the West and the United States might happen to propose. There is also a perceived inevitability that the culture, the way of life, and the politics of places like the one where I was raised will provoke tiresome questions, and an expectation that writers like me exist only to offer answers to those same tiresome questions. Of course there is an East-West question, and it is not simply a malicious formulation invented and imposed by the West. The East-West question is about wealth and poverty and about peace.