by Orhan Pamuk
As I kept reading and throwing things into the mouth of the stove in disgust, I was getting nicely warm. I have no idea how much I had read, how much I’d thrown into the fire, when the door opened. It was the dwarf, only seventeen at the time but already bold enough to say: What are you doing, Madam, this isn’t right. You be quiet! Please don’t burn them. I said be quiet! Isn’t what you’re doing wrong? When he still wouldn’t be quiet, I reached for my cane. Then he was silent. Are there any other papers you have hidden? Tell the truth, dwarf, is this all there is? He was silent. So that means you have hidden things, you’re not his son, dwarf, you’re his bastard, and you have no right to anything, do you understand, bring them quickly without another word! All right, then, where’s my cane? As I walked toward him, the little sneak ran clattering down the stairs. He called up from below: I don’t have anything, Madam, I swear, I didn’t hide a thing! Fine! I let it go for the moment. Then in the middle of the night I burst in on him, got him out of bed, and sent him out while I looked in every nook and cranny of his strange-smelling room, even the tiny padding of the little child’s bed he used. It was true, he had nothing.
But that didn’t ease my fears entirely. He’d hidden something somewhere, there was some scrap of paper that had escaped my eye, and Doğan, very much his father’s son, would look and find it and have it printed, because he was always asking: Mother, where are those things my father wrote? I’m sorry, what was that, my dear? You know, he was writing for years, where are all those papers, Mother? I can’t hear you, my child. I’m talking about my father’s half-finished encyclopedia, Mother. I’m sorry, I can’t hear. Maybe it has some value, my father devoted his whole life to it, I really want to read those articles, Mother, please would you give it to me. I wish I could hear you better, my child. Maybe we can have it printed someplace, as my father had always wished, because, the anniversary of May 27 is coming up, and they say the military is going to stage another coup. After this coup there’ll be another turn back to Kemalism, they say, at least we could get some pieces, the interesting parts of the encyclopedia, published. Why don’t you get them out from wherever they are and give them to me, Mother! Oh, these ears of mine! Where are those papers, for God’s sake, I look and look and I can’t find them, and the books are missing, too, there’s nothing but those weird instruments left in the laundry room! Oh, dear, can’t hear a thing! Mother, what have you done with the books and papers, you didn’t just throw them away? I was quiet. You couldn’t have just burned them, could you, tell me you didn’t? He started to cry. Eventually he found comfort in raki. I’ll be like my father, I’ll take up writing, too, there’s no choice, just look around you, everything is getting worse, something must be done about this dangerous decline, this mounting idiocy, they can’t all be so base or stupid, there must be some good ones among them, Mother. I know the minister of agriculture from school, we were in love with the same girl, but we were good friends, he was one class behind me, but we were together on the track team, we both threw shot put, he was very fat, but he had a heart of gold, anyway I’m writing him a long report. And General So-and-So, second in command of the general staff, he was a captain when I was the assistant district commissioner in Zile, he’s a good man, he only ever wanted to do some good for the country, I’ll send him a copy of that report, too, you have no idea, Mother, of the injustices taking place … Fine, but why are they your responsibility, son? If we see things and do nothing, we are as guilty ourselves, that’s why, Mother, I’m sitting down to write so at least I won’t bear that blame … You’re more pathetic than your father, and a worse coward!… I’m not, Mother, I’m not. If I were a coward, I’d join them, it’s my turn to be governor, but I’ve had it up to here, have you any idea what they do to those poor villagers? I’ve never cared to know, my son! They’ve got them up in those forsaken corners of the mountains where, as they say, even the birds don’t fly and the caravans don’t pass … It was my father who taught me that simply bothering to know about it doesn’t do a bit of good! They just leave them up there, with no teacher and no doctor … What a shame that I wasn’t able to teach you what my dearly departed father taught me, Doğan! How once a year you could snatch the harvest from their hands at a cheap price … What a shame, son, that you didn’t take after me at all … They just leave them, Mother, leave them to their sad fate in that awful darkness and forget about them. He would go on and on, even after I’d stopped listening and gone off to my room where I’d sit and think: How strange, it’s as though some strange force had made them different from everyone else, for some reason not content simply to go back and forth in peace between work and hearth! Whatever being had made them this way must be enjoying a good laugh watching me in my torment!… It was three, but I still couldn’t sleep, I could hear the hubbub from the beach. Then my mind turned to the dwarf and I shuddered.
What if he’d written to Doğan from the village and stirred his pity. Or maybe his father had told Doğan. But at that point Selâhattin thought of nothing but his writing. In the summer after he finished university Doğan started to ask about them over and over again: Why did Recep and Ismail leave, Mother? Then one day he went off. When he came back a week later, he had them with him; they were no longer children: a dwarf and a cripple, dressed in rags! Why did you bring them here from their village, son, what business do they have in our house, I said. You know why I brought them, Mother, he said, and put them both in the room where the dwarf is now. The cripple left when he got his greedy hands on the money from the diamond that he forced Doğan to sell, but he didn’t go far: every year when we went to the cemetery they showed me his house on the hill road! I always wondered why the dwarf stayed. They said it was because he was ashamed, because he was afraid to go out among regular people. After Doğan left, I’d sometimes hear Selâhattin off in some corner talking to him: Tell me, son, Selâhattin would say, what was life like in the village, was it really hard for you, did they make you pray, tell me, do you believe in God, tell me, how did your mother die? She was such a good woman, she had the beauty of our people, but, unfortunately, I had to finish this encyclopedia. The dwarf would be silent, and when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I’d run off to my room and try to forget, but I could never get it out of my mind: What a good woman, she had the beauty of our people, what a good woman she was!
No, Selâhattin, she was just a sinful woman and a servant. She and her husband fled their village because of a blood feud and came to Gebze, and when he went to the military, leaving her in the care of a fisherman, and the fisherman’s boat overturned and he drowned, this one could be seen over there, by the ruins of the dock, wretched, snot nosed, ragged, living off who knows what. So when the cook from Gerede became high-handed with Selâhattin, saying things like You don’t believe in God, but God will show you, Selâhattin got rid of him and brought this disgusting wretch into the house. What can we do, Fatma, it’s become so difficult to find decent domestic help. I’ll have nothing to do with it, I said, but she learned the housework quickly, and when she made her first stuffed grape leaves Selâhattin said, What a capable woman, Fatma, and I could see right then and there what was going to happen and I was full of disgust, thinking, How strange that my mother should have brought me into this world just to witness other people’s crimes and sins.
On cold winter nights, when noxious fumes were rising up from the raki well of his mouth, Selâhattin, thinking I was asleep, would creep slowly downstairs, where, in the room that is now the dwarf’s, she would be waiting for him, my God such a shameful thing, he would walk back on tiptoe, but I would see him with loathing. Later in order to enjoy himself with her more comfortably and “in perfect freedom,” to use the expression he employed so frequently in the encyclopedia, he built that little shack by the chicken coop; when, in the middle of the night, he would wander out of his study completely drunk and stumble over there, I would sit in my room, with my knitting in my hand, motionless, and horrified to think of what they were doing.
/> Things he couldn’t make me do he was now forcing upon that poor woman; to immerse her completely in sin he must have given her drink, before making her … God forbid, Fatma, don’t even think of it! Sometimes, when I slipped out into the room overlooking the chicken house and stared at the gloomy sinful lights of the shack, I would murmur to myself: There, at this very moment, maybe he’s kissing his bastards, telling them how there is no God, maybe they’re all laughing and maybe … Don’t think of that, Fatma, don’t think of it! Then I would go back to my room full of shame, take up the vest I was knitting for Doğan, and wait for Selâhattin’s return: I’d hear him come out of the shack an hour later, and a little after that he would be stumbling up the stairs, no longer even bothering to be quiet, I would open the door of my room a crack, and from that little opening I would follow him with devilish curiosity, fear, and loathing until he went back into his study.
Once, as he was tottering up the stairs, he paused for a moment: just then, I saw him look straight at the crack in the door and into my eyes, and I was so afraid, I wanted to shut the door and quietly return to my room, but it was too late, because Selâhattin started to shout: Why are you always poking your nose out from there, cowardly woman! Isn’t it enough you know where I’m going and what I’m doing, must you stand by the door every night? I wanted to shut the door and get away, but I couldn’t take my hand off the handle, as though I would somehow be party to the sin if I let go! He shouted some more: I’m not ashamed of anything, Fatma, not anything! I have moved beyond all the foolishness of the East, the guilt and the sins, Fatma, do you understand? You’re watching me for nothing: I am proud of the things that you are pleased to condemn and find revolting! Then, swaying back and forth, he went up a few more steps and yelled at the door I still held open a finger’s breadth: I’m proud, too, of that woman and of the children she bore me … She’s a hardworking woman, honest, honorable, direct, and beautiful! She doesn’t live simply to avoid guilt and sins as you do, and she has no intention of learning how to use a knife and fork to become refined! Hear what I’m going to say, listen to me carefully! His voice wasn’t belittling now, it was persuasive, and I was listening, even as I held fast to the door handle between us: There’s nothing to be ashamed of here, Fatma, nothing disgusting, no need to accuse anyone, you see, we’re free! It’s only others who would limit our freedom! There’s no one here but us, Fatma, you know that, it’s as if we’re living on a desert island, like Robinson Crusoe, we’ve left that whole cursed thing called society behind in Istanbul, and we won’t return until the day I can overturn the whole East with my encyclopedia. Now hear me: at this moment I am coming from that shack, but what reason is there to hide it, you know that I was there with the serving woman’s children, my children, Recep and Ismail; I got them a stove from Gebze, but it hasn’t done any good, they’re freezing out there, Fatma, and I can no longer have them shivering in the cold just for the sake of your crazy notions of morality, are you listening to me?
I understood and I was frightened; I continued listening to what he said as he pounded on the door frame begging tearfully, and I remained silent. A little later, he went into his room weeping, and I was astonished to hear so soon afterward that deep, peaceful, drunken snoring of his, and I stayed up thinking until dawn. It was snowing. I was staring out the window. The next morning at breakfast he told me exactly what I had already guessed.
That woman was serving us, when suddenly, just as the dwarf does now, she went off, down to the kitchen, as if she’d had her fill of serving, and Selâhattin whispered, You call them bastards, but they’re human beings like any others, he said in a voice so incredibly soft and polite, as if he were telling me some secret or pleading with me for something: The poor boys, they’re shivering in that shack, and they’re so little, one of them is just two, the other barely three, Fatma, I’ve made my decision, I’m going to settle them with their mother here in this house! That little room is too small now. I’ll put them in the room next door. Don’t forget, in the end they’re my children. Please don’t oppose this with your foolish beliefs! I listened and I said nothing. When I came down for lunch he said it again, this time in a loud, forceful voice, and he added: I can no longer have them sleeping on the floor wrapped in those rags for blankets … Tomorrow when I go do the monthly shopping in Gebze … So, I thought, he’s going to Gebze tomorrow! Then in the afternoon I thought: Maybe at dinner he’ll say that we’re all going to sit together at the table from now on. Because doesn’t he say that we’re all equal? But he didn’t say it. He drank his raki, reminded me that he would be going to Gebze in the morning, and without pause rose from the table and went off. I ran upstairs right away and from the back room watched him from behind: March off, Satan, swaying over the snow sparkling in the moonlight toward the sinful light of the shack, tomorrow you’ll see! I stared at the snowy garden with one eye on that dim light, so ugly, of the shack’s lamp until he returned. When he did, this time he came to my room and said: Don’t put too much faith in the fact that for the past two years the law would have required a court case for me to divorce you and that I couldn’t have taken a second wife even if I’d wanted to! There’s nothing left between us but that ridiculous contract called marriage, Fatma! Anyway, according to the conditions of that agreement, when we made it under Ottoman law, I could have divorced you anytime with just two words, or taken another wife as well, but I simply didn’t feel the need. Do you understand? He went on talking some more, and I listened, until he said once more that he was going to Gebze in the morning and went off to bed.
But enough, Fatma, don’t think anymore! I felt myself perspiring under the quilt. Then it occurred to me: Could the dwarf be telling them? Did you know that your grandmother used to come at us with that cane in her hand …!
I pulled the quilt over my head, but I still heard the noise from the beach, and I said to myself, Now I realize how nice those lonely winter nights were, when I had the silence of the night all to myself, when everything was stone still, I pressed my ear into the soft darkness of the pillow, I imagined that deep lonely silence of the world, as though it were coming from outside of time, the world was making itself known to me from under the pillow: Selâhattin went to Gebze the next day. The day of judgment seemed so far off back then! I was all by myself in the house. How far away they were, the bodies that didn’t decay even in the tomb! As I’d decided, I picked up my cane, went downstairs and out into the snowy garden. Making tracks in the melting snow I walked quickly over to the nest of sin that devil called the shack. They were still far off, the bats, the rattlesnakes, the skeletons, so far away! I got to the shack, knocked at the door, waited a little, and the wretched simple woman, the foolish servant, opened the door. I pushed my way in, So these are your bastards, she even tried to restrain my hand! Please don’t, hanimefendi, please don’t, what wrong have the children done? Hit me instead of them, hanimefendi, what sin have they committed? Oh God, children, run, run! They couldn’t run away! Rotten little bastards! They couldn’t run away and I hit them and—What? You dare to raise your hand to me? So I hit their mother, too, and when she tried to hit me back I hit her even more, and in the end, Selâhattin, it was that woman you said was so hardworking and sturdy, she was the one who crumbled, not I! Then I looked around inside that disgusting nest of sin that you planted at the foot of the garden as I listened to the sounds of your bastards crying. Wooden spoons, tin knives, the chipped and broken dishes from my mother’s sets, and look, Fatma, all those things that you thought were lost are here and in fine shape, the trunks serving as tables, rags, cloth remnants, stovepipes, bedding mats laid on the floor, newspaper stuffed under the door and window frames, oh God, what sickening piles of stained rags, heaps of paper, burnt matches, a broken table, scraps of wood in emptied tin cans, overturned old chairs, clothespins, empty raki and wine bottles, bits of broken glass on the floor, dear God, and those bastards continuing to wail, I was sickened, and when Selâhattin returned that evening he sh
ed a few tears, and ten days later he bundled them off to the village far away.
