by Orhan Pamuk
“Grandmother, what are you thinking, aren’t you going to say?”
The encyclopedia: the natural sciences, all the sciences, science and Allah, the West and the Renaissance, night and day, fire and water, the East and time and death and life. Life! Life!
“What time is it now?” I asked.
It’s the thing that divides everything as it ticks away: time: I think of it and my hair stands on end.
“It’s almost six thirty, Grandmother,” said Nilgün. Then she came over to my table and asked, “How old is this clock, Grandmother?”
I didn’t recall what else they were saying at the table: something that revolted me and made me want to forget, because in the end, this is what the jeweler said: The dinner was wonderful. But this woman of yours who cooked it is even better. Who is she? And Selâhattin, in his cups, said something like: She’s a poor village woman! She’s not from around here. When her husband went off to the military he left her here with some distant relative, but that poor fellow’s boat sank, and he drowned. Anyway, Fatma was getting worn out, we were looking for a servant, so we put her in the little room downstairs, we couldn’t let her starve to death. She’s hardworking. But it was too small for her. So I built a shack. Her husband never came back from the military. He was either hanged for desertion, or else he died as a martyr. I really admire her: this woman has both my people’s good looks and their willingness to work. I’ve learned a lot of things from her for my encyclopedia article on the economic life of the village. Please have another glass! I had to close my door to save myself from hearing more!
“Whose clock was this, Grandmother? You told us last year.”
“It was my mother’s,” I said, and when Nilgün laughed, I realized that talking was a waste of breath.
Later, my poor Doğan, who had been forced to have dinner with a Jew and a drunk, came upstairs to me, and before I hugged and kissed him I made him wash his hands, after which I put him down for his afternoon nap. Selâhattin was still droning on downstairs, but it didn’t last much longer. The jeweler said he had to go. Selâhattin came upstairs: “The fellow’s going, Fatma. Before he does, he wants to see one of your jewels!” I was silent. “You know as well as I do that the man came from Istanbul because I wrote to him about your things, Fatma, we can’t send him back empty-handed.” I remained mum.
“Grandmother, this picture on the wall, that’s your grandfather’s picture, isn’t it?”
When I still wouldn’t speak: Fine, Fatma, he said, half in tears, you know, patients don’t come to the waiting room anymore, it’s not my fault, I’m not ashamed to tell you, because there is just no end to the stupidity in this damn country; my income is now zero, and if we don’t take this opportunity to sell the jeweler something from that box of yours that’s full to the brim anyhow … have you considered how we’ll manage all winter long, no, what am I saying, how we’ll manage for the rest of our lives? For ten years I’ve sold whatever I had to sell, Fatma, you know how much money I’ve spent on this house, the lot in Saraçhane went three years ago, we got through the last two years thanks to the sale of the shop in Kapaliçarsi, the house in Vefa, you know, Fatma, my no-good cousins refused to sell when I wanted to, and then they wouldn’t send me my share of the rent, it’s time you realized how we’ve got by for the last two years; they make fun of me in Gebze: those barbaric excuses for traders there, do you know how cheap I sold them my old jackets, my silver pen set, the only thing I had from my mother, my book trunk and gloves, the mother-of-pearl tesbih from my father, and that ridiculous riding coat that would just thrill the fops in Beyoglu? But I can do no more, and I have no intention of selling my books, the equipment for my experiments, or my medical instruments. I’m saying it plain: I have no intention of casting aside eleven years of work and slinking back to Istanbul without finishing my encyclopedia, which, in one blow, will shake the foundations of everything, of the whole life of the East. The man is waiting downstairs, Fatma! Just take out one little piece from the box. Not just to get rid of this fellow, but so that the East, which has been slumbering for centuries, will wake up and so our Doğan doesn’t pass this winter half starving and freezing in the cold, come on, Fatma, open the closet!
“Grandmother, do you know, when I was little I used to be afraid of Grandfather’s picture?”
With Selâhattin standing there two feet away from me I finally opened the closet.
“You were afraid?” I said. “What about Grandfather were you afraid of?”
“It’s a very dark picture, Grandmother!” said Nilgün. “I was afraid of his beard, of the way he looked out.”
Then I took the box out from the recesses of the closet and opened it and spent a long time unable to decide which piece I was going to give up: rings, bracelets, diamond pins, my enamel watch, pearl necklaces, diamond brooches, diamond rings, diamonds. My God!
“You’re not mad that I said I was afraid of Grandfather’s picture, are you, Grandmother?”
Then with his eyes gleaming as he clutched the single earring I gave him from the ruby pair, muttering curses as I parted with it, Selâhattin ran out; as soon as I heard him bound down the stairs, I knew that he would be swindled: it didn’t take long. As he walked toward the garden gate, the jeweler, with that strange bag in his hand and that strange hat on his head, was saying, Whenever you’d like to do some more business, just send me another letter, and I’ll be happy to come out here.
He came every time: a year later, with the same strange bag in his hand and strange hat on his head, to get the other ruby earring of the pair. By the time he visited eight months later to get the first of my diamond bracelets, Muslims were required to wear that same hat instead of the fez. The year he came for the second diamond bracelet wouldn’t be called 1345 anymore but 1926, by the Christian calendar. When he arrived to get the other bracelet he had the same bag in his hand, but he wasn’t asking about the beautiful serving woman anymore. Maybe, I thought, it was because you had to go to a civil court for a divorce now, whereas before it was enough for a husband just to say it three times. On that occasion and for a number of years afterward Selâhattin had to cook the food they ate together himself. As always I wouldn’t budge from my room, and I wondered whether by now he had told the jeweler everything. We had gotten rid of the servant and his bastards and would have the house to ourselves until Doğan went to the village and found them, one of them a dwarf, the other a cripple. Those were the best years. In the evening, Selâhattin would lose himself in the newspaper. Once, I was afraid the newspaper had written all about his crime and sin and the punishment I had imposed, but when I looked I saw nothing except pictures of Muslims wearing Christian hats. Another time, when Avram had come, the newspaper had, in addition to the Christian hats on the Muslim heads, Christian letters under the pictures. This was in the time that Selâhattin said, “My whole encyclopedia has been turned upside down in a day,” and it was also when he sold my diamond necklace.
“What are you thinking, Grandmother, are you okay?”
The time after that I had removed the diamond ring from the box. When I gave up the emerald ring my grandmother had added to my dowry, it was snowing, and the jeweler had walked to the house from the station in the blizzard, complaining that dogs had attacked him along the way. But I knew he had said it only in the hope of making us take less. His next visit, I remember, was in the fall, because it was then that Doğan had brought me to tears by telling us he was going to study politics at Mülkiye for university. When the jeweler came six months after that, my ruby ring and necklace set went off with him. At the time, Selâhattin still hadn’t gone to Gebze to register a family name, even though everyone was meant to do so without delay. Six months later, when he finally made the effort, he said he’d gotten into an argument with the registry clerk. When I read the family name he’d chosen, written on a piece of paper they proudly put in front of me, I didn’t wonder: it seemed a mockery that made my hair stand on end. I was disgusted to think how thi
s ugly name, Darvinoğlu (son of Darvin), would one day be carved on my tombstone. A year later when the jeweler came in summer and carried off my rose diamond ring and rose earrings, without telling Selâhattin I gave my pink pearls to Doğan. The poor boy was out of sorts and would pace the floor glumly, back and forth. I told him to sell the pearls and enjoy himself in Istanbul, but he did no such thing, which must have only made it easier to accuse me when he went off and found the bastards in the village after their mother had died, to resettle them back down in our house.
“What are you thinking, Grandmother? Are you thinking of them again?”
When the jeweler next came, he looked older. Selâhattin realized that the box was about empty, but he took one of my pins and declared that the encyclopedia was nearly finished. He was drunk all day long by then, and though I didn’t go out of my room, I knew that, because of his drinking, my pin had gone for half of what it was worth, as would my topaz brooch the following year. As for the sums he spent on books, these were never halved. When Selâhattin, who had completely given himself over to the devil by now, next called the old jeweler, war had broken out again. After that Avram would come two more times: the first for my ruby star-and-crescent pin, the second for my diamond pin that said THIS TOO SHALL PASS in the old letters. And so did Selâhattin sell off his good luck with his own hands: a little later, after what he said was an incredible discovery, just as he was thinking of calling the jeweler again, Selâhattin died. When my poor innocent Doğan took the last two diamond solitaire rings I had carefully hidden and gave them to the bastards he had brought back into the house, my box was finally empty. And so it has remained, sitting there at the bottom of my closet.
“What are you thinking, Grandmother, won’t you say!”
“Nothing,” I said vacantly. “I’m thinking about nothing.”
12
Hasan Is Vexed by Mathematics
Coming home in the evening after wandering the streets all day was like going back to school after the summer vacation. As everybody went home one by one, I stayed at the coffeehouse until it closed, hoping somebody would show up with something to do, but nobody did anything except call me Fox for the umpteenth time, and so I decided, forget it, I’ll go home and study math!
I’m walking up the hill, not paying attention to anybody. I actually like the dark: nothing but the sound of the crickets, I listen, and I can see my future in the darkness: trips to far-off countries, bloody wars, the rattle of machine guns, the intoxication of combat, historical films with galley slaves pulling the oars, whips to silence the howls of sinners, disciplined armies, factories, and prostitutes, yes, I will be a great man, I was thinking, and before I knew it, I was at the top of the hill.
Suddenly something touched a nerve. The lights of our house! I stopped and looked; our house was like a tomb with a light burning in it. Nothing moving in the windows. I crawled up close: my mother wasn’t there, she had gone to bed; my father was stretched out asleep on the couch, waiting for me, let him wait, I’ll slip in quietly and go to bed. But when I looked, I saw my window was closed. Okay! When I made some noise trying the other window, my father woke up. Instead of going and opening the door he opened the window.
“Where were you?” he shouted.
I didn’t say anything, just listened to the crickets. We were both silent for a bit.
“Come on, get in here, come on!” said my father. “Don’t just stand out there.”
I came in through the window. My father just stood there in front of me, giving me his look. Then he started again: Son, son, why don’t you study, son, son, what are you doing out in the street all day long, and so on. Suddenly I thought: Why does my mother put up with this whiny guy? I’ll go wake my mother and have a talk with her, and the two of us will leave this guy’s house. Then I thought about how upset my father would get and I got stressed. You’re right, it’s my fault, I did spend the whole day wandering in the street, but don’t worry, Dad, tomorrow you’ll see how I can work. If I’d actually said that, he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. In the end he stopped talking and was just looking at me, angry, and since he seemed like he was about to cry, I went straight to my room and sat down at my table, as if to say, look, I’m studying math, don’t be upset, Dad, okay? Finally, I had to close the door. But my lamp was on, let him see the light from under the door, see, I’m working. He was still muttering to himself.
A little later, I could no longer hear my father’s voice, and I was curious, so I slowly opened the door and looked: gone to bed. They want me to be working while they have a nice sleep. Okay, since a lycée diploma’s so important, I’ll work. I’ll work all night without sleeping, see, I’ll work so much that my mother will be upset in the morning, but I know that there are much more important things in life. If you like I’ll tell you, Mother: Communists, Christians, Zionists, you know what I mean, Masons, who are infiltrating this country—do you know what Carter and the pope talked about with Brezhnev? If I told them they wouldn’t listen, if they listened they wouldn’t understand … So anyway, I said, let me start on his math before I get myself all worked up.
I opened the book, but I got stuck because of that goddamned logarithm. Yes, we write it “log” and we say that a log(AB) = AlogB. This is the first rule, but there are others. The book calls them theorems. First I copied them all nicely in my notebook. Afterward it felt good to look at how I’d written it all out neatly. I’ve written four pages, I know how to work. So that’s all there is to this stuff they call logarithms. Let me do a problem, too, now, I said. Take this logarithm, it says:
Okay, I’ll take it. Then I looked at what I’d written in my notebook again, a long time went by, but I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to divide or multiply by what and what I was supposed to reduce with what. I read it again, I just about memorized it, how did they solve the model problem, I looked at that, too, but the weird symbols still weren’t speaking to me. I was really annoyed, so I got up. If I had a cigarette right now, I’d smoke it. I sat down again and picked up my pen and tried again, but my hand just made doodles on the page. Nilgün, look at what I wrote on the edge of the page a little later:
To you my heart does not incline
You’ve made my mind decline
Then I worked a little more, but it was no use. I thought a little more about it: What good is it to know the relationships between all these logs and square roots. Let’s say that one day I’m doing government business or I’m so rich that I can only calculate how much money I have by using these logarithms and square roots: on that day, would I be so stupid as not to even think of hiring some little accountant to do these calculations for me?
I put the math aside and opened up the English, but I was already in a bad mood: I thought, God, give that Mr. and Mrs. Brown what they deserve; the same pictures, the same cold smug faces on people who know everything and do everything correctly, these are the English, they have ironed jackets and ties, their streets are perfectly clean. One sits and the others stand and meanwhile they keep on putting a matchbox that doesn’t even look like one of ours on, under, in, and next to a desk. I had to memorize when it was on or in or under or—what was the other one—otherwise the lottery agent snoring away in the other room would beat himself up, because his son wasn’t studying. I covered them with my hand and memorized them, staring at the ceiling, I memorized them and then, when I couldn’t take it, I grabbed the book and threw it at the wall. Damn it to hell! I got up from the table and looked out the window. I’m not the kind of person who’s just going to put up with stuff like this. I felt a little better as I looked out from the corner of the garden at the dark sea and at that lighthouse on the island with the dogs, the one that blinks on and off all alone in the darkness. The lights from the neighborhood down below were out; there were only the streetlamps and the lights of the glass factory that made deep rumbling noises, and then a red light from a silent ship. The garden smelled of scorched plants, there was a faint smell o
f earth and of summer, and it was silent, except for the crickets, bold crickets who reminded us of their existence in the pitch-black darkness of the cherry orchards, the far hills, lonely corners, in the coolness of olive groves, and under the trees. I thought I might have also heard the frogs from the muddy water over by the Yelkenkaya road. I’m going to do a lot of things in life! I thought of it: wars, victories, the fear of defeat and the hope for glory, the kindness I would show the poor things and others whom I would save on that road we would take in this heartless world. The lights in the neighborhood below were dim: they were all sleeping, all asleep, having their dumb, meaningless pathetic dreams while up here, awake above them all, it’s just me. I love to live and I hate sleeping: there are so many things to do.
I stepped away from the window, and realizing that I wasn’t going to study anymore, I lay down without taking my clothes off. I’ll get up and start again in the morning. I told myself, actually, over the last ten days I’ve done enough English and math. I also said that soon the birds will start singing in the trees, and you’ll go to the beach because you think no one’s there, Nilgün. But I’ll come, too. Who could stop me? At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep and that my heart would strangle me again, but then I realized that I was falling asleep after all.
When I woke up the sun was on my arm, and my shirt and pants were damp with sweat. I got right up and looked: my mother and father weren’t up yet. I went into the kitchen. As I was eating bread and cheese my mother came in:
