by Orhan Pamuk
Nilgün bought a red comb, and I suddenly felt like I was going to cry, but I was even more surprised when she said:
“Oh, and a newspaper, Cumhuriyet, please!”
Amazing. I stared stupidly as she took the newspaper and went out the door without a care in the world, like some little kid who’d never even heard about evil and sin, and I suddenly ran after her.
“So you’re reading a Communist newspaper!” I said.
“Excuse me?” said Nilgün, for a second looking at me not with hostility, more like she was just trying to understand something, and then when she’d understood it, she turned and went off without saying anything.
But I thought, I’m not going to let it go. She ought to explain herself, and I have some things to tell her, too. I was just about to go off after her, when I realized I still had that stupid Coca-Cola bottle in my hand. Goddamn it! I went back and paid for it, and I said to myself, Better wait for the change so he doesn’t think something’s up, and so I waited like an idiot, and the bastard took forever, maybe on purpose so I would lose you.
By the time I came out of the shop and looked, Nilgün was gone, must have even turned the corner. If I’d run after her I would have caught up, but I wasn’t running, just walking fast, because people were looking, the stupid crowd going to the beach, going to the market, eating ice cream. I walked quickly up the hill, I went down, ran a few steps, then walked, then ran again when no one was looking, but when I turned the corner I saw that even if I kept running as fast as I could from there on, I couldn’t catch up. So I walked as far as her gate and looked between the iron bars: she had gone into the house from the garden.
I sat down under the chestnut tree across the street to think for a while. It was terrifying to think about the Communists and the different disguises they could assume to trick some people. Then I got up, stuck my hands in my pockets, and was about to head back but: I still had the green comb in my pocket! I took it out and looked at it, I should break it, I said, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was a garbage can where the sidewalk started. And so, Nilgün, I tossed that green comb of yours into the bin. And I walked on without looking back. All the way to the shop. Because I’d thought of something.
Okay, how about a little chat, Mr. Shopkeeper. Didn’t we tell you not to sell that newspaper? What do think your punishment should be, tell me! Maybe he’ll have the courage to confess and say, I’m a Communist, that girl is a Communist, too, I sell that newspaper because I believe in it! Suddenly I felt very sorry for Nilgün because she was such a nice girl when she was little. By the time I went into the shop I was in a really bad mood.
“You again?” said the shopkeeper. “What do you want?”
I waited awhile because there were other customers. But the shopkeeper asked again, and the customers were looking at me.
“Me?” I said. “I want, uhh … I need a comb.”
“Fine,” he said. “You’re the son of Ismail the lottery-ticket vendor, aren’t you?” He pulled out the box of combs to show.
“That girl who was just here bought a red one. It’s nice,” he said.
“What girl?” I said. “I just want any old comb.”
“Fine, fine,” he said. “Just you pick whatever color you like.”
“How much are you selling them for?”
He went to serve the other customers and left me in peace to look over the combs in the box one by one. I decided on a red one exactly the same color as yours, Nilgün. It was twenty-five liras. I left the shop thinking, Now we have the same color combs. Then I walked and walked until I came to the place where the sidewalk ended. The garbage can was still there, nobody was looking, and so I stuck my arm inside and pulled out the green comb, which you’d have never known had been sitting in a garbage can. Now there are two combs in my pocket, Nilgün, one actually yours, one the same as one that’s yours! It felt good just to think about it. Then I thought that if one of these guys saw what I had done, if any of them had seen, they would both pity and mock me for being such an idiot. But I’m not going to keep from doing what I want just because those stupid morons might laugh at me! I’m a free man. And if I want I’ll walk around in the streets thinking of you.
18
Faruk Needs to Find a Story
It was nearly five o’clock. The sun had long since dipped toward the windows of the musty basement room. In a little while I’d collect my bag and go continue my search for the plague out in the open air. But I was a bit disoriented. Just a moment ago, it seemed that I was doing fine merely ambling through the documents with no particular purpose. Now I was beginning to suspect this odd success I’d been enjoying … A moment ago, history was a nebulous aggregate of millions of unrelated droplets that somehow managed to coalesce in my head. Perhaps, I mused, if I open my notebook and quickly read what I have been writing, I can recapture that feeling!
And so I read the results of an extraordinary inventory undertaken in six villages in the environs of Çayirova, Eskisehir, and Tuzla, these being among the fiefs of Minister Ismail Pasha and under the judges of Gebze; I read that Hizir lodged a complaint against Ibrahim, Abdulkadir, and their sons for burning down his home and pillaging his possessions; I read orders issued for the construction of a pier on the shore of Eskisehir; I read that a village worth seventeen akçe in the vicinity of Gebze, one formerly belonging to Cavalryman Ali but taken from him when he failed to participate in a campaign and given to Habib, was now to be given to someone else still, because it had been determined that this Habib also had failed to take part in the campaign; I read that the servant Isa, having absconded with thirty thousand akçe, a saddle, a horse, two swords, and a shield belonging to his employer, Ahmed, took refuge with someone named Ramazan, and Ahmed lodged a complaint against the man under Ramazan’s protection; a certain Sinan had died and a conflict over the estate resulted in one of his heirs, Çelebioglu Osman, demanding from the court a full inventory of the deceased’s possessions; I read the detailed testimony of Mustafa, Yakup, and Hudaverdi to the effect that a stolen horse seized from some thieves upon their arrest and placed in the brigadier’s stable was in fact the horse that had earlier been stolen from Suleyman, the son of Gebzeli Dursun; and with that I felt my former euphoria returning: the last quarter of the sixteenth century was once again coming to life in my head, its multiplicity of events lodged there in the folds of my brain without any links of causality among them. Over lunch the image had occurred to me of an infinite worm galaxy stretching across empty space where there was no gravity, all the events of that quarter century like so many worms squirming in the void but unable to touch one another. I imagined my head as a large walnut, and if one cracked it, he would see the worms hiding among the folds of my brain!
But this renewed excitement did not last long, and again the galactic haze dissipated and disappeared. My obstinate mind, following its old habits, was making its customary demand of me: I had to find a little story, to make up a convincing tale! The structure of our brain probably has to change if we are ever to see and understand clearly, not just history, but also the world and life itself. That passion for listening to stories leads us astray every time, dragging us off to a world of fantasy, even as we continue to live in one of flesh and blood …
While I was eating lunch, I thought I had an answer for that as well. I was thinking of our Budak, whose story had been on my mind since yesterday. In the light of some things that I had read this morning it had taken on another dimension: I came to believe that Budak had found a way, who knows how, to be taken under the protective wing of a pasha in Istanbul. I was recalling other details gleaned from that book of my high school history teacher: they were all of a sort designed to win over lovers of stories, people who always try to make sense of the world by means of tales.
This got me thinking about a book I could write about sixteenth-century Gebze drawing on Budak’s adventures, a book with no beginning and no end. The book would have only one principle: to encompas
s, with no attention to relative value or importance, every piece of information I could discover about Gebze and its environs in that century. In this way, meat prices and commercial misunderstandings, kidnappings of girls and revolts, wars and marriages, pashas and murders, would be arranged in a sensible and tolerant manner alongside one another, without connections, just as they appear in the archives. On all this I would superimpose Budak’s story, not to give it any more importance than the other elements, but to offer at least one to people who insist on looking for stories in history books. Thus, my book would otherwise be a continuous feat of “representation.” As I finished my lunch, and no doubt owing somewhat to the beers I had drunk, I got lost in the mists of this concept, a feeling almost like the excitement of studying that I had when I was young. I’ll go into the Prime Ministry Archives, I said, I won’t let a single document escape my eye, every single event will take its place, one by one. Someone reading my book from cover to cover will during those weeks and months end up able to glimpse that cloudlike mass of events that I managed to perceive while working here, and like me he’ll murmur excitedly: This is history, this is history and life …
This crazy plan, which could consume thirty years of my life—no, all the rest of my days!—persisted in my mind’s eye awhile longer, morphing according to every contingency, from the prime of life to dotage, failing eyesight, and nervous disease. I recoiled in horror at the thought of how many pages I’d have to write. Then as I began to feel that this vision, which had seemed so awesome, in fact reeked of deception and foolishness, it began to evaporate.
For one thing, I would be faced with a problem before even setting down on paper what I had planned to write. Whatever my intention, my text would have to begin somewhere. No matter how I wrote the events, they would have to be arranged in some kind of order. Whether I intended it or not, all of this would suggest some meaning to the reader. The more I determined to avoid this, the more flummoxed I became about where to start and how to proceed. Because the human mind, bound as it is to its accustomed ways, will always infer an order from every arrangement, a symbol from every event, to the degree that the reader himself will wind up stirring into the facts the story I’d wished to spare him. Then I thought in despair: There’s no way to express history, or even life as it is, in words! The only solution would be to transform the structure of our brains: we’d have to change the nature of life in order to see life as it is! I wanted to formulate this notion better, but I couldn’t find a way. I left the restaurant and came back here.
I thought about it all afternoon. Was there no way to write that book so as to provoke the desired reaction in readers? From time to time as I pondered it, I quickly reread the things I had written in my notebook, just to reignite the feeling I thought I wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone.
While I was reading, I willed myself not to get absorbed in any particular story, just as I intended the book to be read: as a completely aimless stroll … A little while ago I thought that I had accomplished this, but now, as I said, I was suspicious of this peculiar success. And the sun even lower now, the time very nearly five o’clock, I was going to leave this musty basement without waiting for Riza and continue looking for the plague in the open air.
I got in the Anadol. I left the town where I had worked for three days in the archives completely deflated, as though departing a city where I had been forced to live for years as it slowly ate away at my insides. A little later I turned off from the Istanbul-Ankara road toward Gebze Station. I was going straight toward the Marmara through the olive groves and fig and cherry orchards. The station, which smelled of the republic and bureaucracy, was at one end of a meadow that stretched all the way to Tuzla. I thought that there must be the ruins of a caravanserai somewhere on this plain. I parked my car and went down the steps to the station.
Workers returning home, young people in blue jeans, aunties with head scarves, an old man nodding off on a bench, and a woman scolding her son were waiting for the train that would arrive from Istanbul before heading back the way it came. I was walking along the rail line, listening to the buzz of the electric wires and stepping over the switches. When I was little, I used to like to walk along the rail line. It was then I first saw the ruins, about twenty-five years ago, I guess. I was seven or eight years old. Recep was taking me around, supposedly to hunt. I had the air rifle my uncle had brought back for me from Germany, which could only wound a crow if you fired it from close by, but I was hardly a good shot! We had come as far as this meadow, Recep and I, gathering blackberries and walking along the creek. Suddenly a little wall sprung up in front of us, and then we saw some well-hewn stones spread out over a wide area. Five years later, when I could go around by myself without fear, I came and saw it again: I stopped and looked at just the wall and the stones, without trying to envision what they had been, not imagining anything other than what I saw. So there had been a creek, in a place near the railroad, then frogs, an open space, a meadow … How much of it was left? I looked around as I walked.
In a letter dated much later than the court records I’d found, there was mention of a caravanserai that had stood where the ruins were. The letter, written at the end of the nineteenth century, spoke with amazing sangfroid of certain deaths in the area, perhaps tied to the outbreak of a contagious disease. At that time I read the letter quickly and, in a moment of distraction, tossed it among the other papers without noting down its exact date or number. Of course, I would immediately regret having done that, and in an effort to find it again, I wound up turning everything upside down for an hour, but to no avail. By the time I returned to Istanbul my interest had been piqued even more.
As questions relating to this almost-mythical letter swirled through my head I finally found the creek: it was foul and had a rotten smell, but it was still able to host frogs. They weren’t croaking; it seemed that they were dozing because of the poison and the muck, just sitting there like the particles of pitch on the grass and leaves. The livelier ones, hearing my footsteps, got into the water with an annoying languor. I saw a bend in the creek, which I remembered, along with the fig trees. Didn’t there used to be more of them? Then the back wall of a factory disrupted everything, erasing my memories and returning me to the present.
If what I read in that letter could really point me toward things that once existed, that meant I could hope to hold on to my faith in “history” a few years longer. With this story of the plague I could destroy a host of historical “facts” just floating in the air without doubt as to their truth, like so many potted plants. In this way a whole crowd of credulous historians, realizing clearly that their work was in fact storytelling, would find the scales falling from their eyes, as I did. That day, I would be the only one ready to meet the ensuing institutional crisis, and through my writings and attack I’d hunt down these poor fools one by one. I stopped by the side of the railroad and tried to imagine in detail what would be a day of victory and grew a bit wistful. The truth was, I’d always envied my old professor Ibrahim, who spent twenty years of his life like a detective, researching the identities, whereabouts, and dates of those who, during the Ottoman Interregnum, proclaimed the sultanate and coined the first akçe.
The electric train appeared at one end of the station, loomed up before me, and passed by. I continued walking alongside the creek and the back walls of factories and little workshops on which political slogans had been scrawled in letters large enough for the train passengers to read them. Since, as I remembered quite well, this was where the creek started to move away from the railroad line, I should be able to find those hewn stones and remnants of the wall around there. The story must lie somewhere in the midst of those shanty houses, piles of garbage, tin drums, and fig trees, before you come to the gypsy tents along the road to Cennethisar. At my approach, the seagull observing me from atop the piles of garbage silently took to the air, opening like an umbrella in the wind, and spread out over the sea. I heard the engines of the buses lined up
in the side court of the factory up ahead; those were the workers going back to Istanbul, slowly getting on the buses. Beyond the factory there’s a bridge that goes over the train line and the creek; I saw piles of iron left to rust, tin cans, dilapidated houses whose roofs are covered with metal salvaged from these cans, children playing ball, and a horse with its colt; the horse must belong to the gypsies.
I turned back, but my feet were taking me to the same places. With the purposelessness of a cat that has forgotten what it’s looking for, I walked toward the shanties, alongside the walls, between the railroad and the creek, over dead plants poisoned by chemical spills and brambles not yet dead; I saw the skull of a sheep and a bone from who-knows-what part of its skeleton, alongside a barbed-wire fence, and I kicked the bone and a tin can.
Maybe I could make things that didn’t exist then look as though they belonged to that time. Then I saw the stupid chicken as big as an apartment house looking at me from farther down the plain: Chick Chicken was looking at me from a chicken farm’s giant billboard supported by steel props. The image had obviously been copied from foreign magazines, with the chicken in short pants and suspenders, an attempt to make the Chick Chicken Farm seem modern.
I was approaching one of the shanties, thinking it might have been made out of stones pulled from the ruins of the caravanserai. In the back a little garden, an onion patch, laundry on the line, and some sort of sapling, but flimsy walls, made of crumbling, lifeless cement blocks from a time of factories, not the hard, chiseled old stones I was looking for. I stood there, staring vacantly at the shanty’s wall and feeling that the things and period I sought were hiding somewhere; I lit a cigarette, and watched the smoking match fall to the ground, among dried branches, burnt grass, pieces of bottles, puppies running after their mothers, frayed lengths of rope, bottle caps, and a plastic clothespin broken in two. Someone had used a direction sign on the side of the railroad for target practice. I saw a fig tree and waited, staring at it, hoping it would remind me of something. In its shadow were unripe figs that had fallen from the branches, with flies continually landing and taking off the fruit. A little farther off two cows had their noses in the grass, grazing. When the gypsy’s mare decided to make a little run I stood there watching in astonishment, but the mare stopped right away, even as the colt continued on, before it remembered its mother and came back. On the bank of the creek were shreds of paper among the shreds of tires, the bottles, and paint cans and an empty plastic bag. I felt that none of it had any real meaning. I also felt like having a drink, knowing I’d be heading back in a little bit. Two crows overhead went on and on, paying no attention to me. This was the huge meadow where Mehmet the Conqueror had died in 1481. In the back lot of a factory, there were enormous crates that had been emptied of the metal things inside them, which were melted down for sale. When I’m back home, I will read Evliya Çelebi. A stupid frog that had noticed me long after its friends launched himself into the muck of the polluted water. Blup! I’ll talk to Nilgün. History? I’ll explain it to her. Broken tiles had turned the earth red. A village woman was taking in the laundry in the garden of her shanty. I’ll tell her history’s nothing but a story. Where did you get that idea, she’ll say. I stop and look at the sky. I can still feel the eyes of that chicken with the perplexed and modern expression on my back: cement blocks, bricks, crumbling walls with political slogans scrawled over them. Not a stone wall in sight! I started walking purposefully, as though I had just remembered something, and as another train went by, I looked at the abandoned construction materials, the planks, the leftover boards, no, it’s not there, it’s where the trees are, in the midst of the houses and the gardens, the rusty iron scraps, the plastic, the bone, the concrete, and the barbed wire.
