by Orhan Pamuk
During the long years when I thought myself the only one to possess this depraved and mysterious talent, it was normal to keep it hidden in my other world, where both my pleasures and the evil inside me had free reign. This was the world I would enter when, out of pure boredom, I pretended to be someone else and somewhere else. It was a very easy to escape into this other world I concealed from everyone. In my grandmother’s sitting room, I’d pretend to be inside a submarine. I’d just had my first trip to the movies to see an adaptation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and as I sat watching it in the dusty Palace Cinema, what terrified me most were the film’s silences. In its frantic, claustrophobic camerawork, its shadowy black-and-white submarine interiors, I could not help but recognize something of our house. I was too young to read the subtitles, but my imagination filled in the blanks. (Even later, when I could read a book perfectly well, what mattered most was not to “understand” it but to supplement the meaning with the right fantasies.)
“Don’t swing your legs like that, you’re making me dizzy,” my grandmother used to say, when I was obviously immersed in one of my carefully staged daydreams.
I would stop swinging my legs, but in my daydream an airplane was still banking in and out of the smoke rising from the Gelincik cigarette she was raising to her lips, and soon I would enter the forest inhabited by the many rabbits, leaves, snakes, and lions I had previously identified among the geometric shapes on the carpets. Involving myself in an adventure from one of my comics, I’d mount a horse, start a fire, kill a few people. With one ear always alert for external sounds, I would hear the door of the elevator slam shut and, before returning my thoughts to half-naked redskins, note that İsmail the caretaker had gone up to our floor. I enjoyed setting houses on fire, spraying burning houses with bullets, escaping from burning houses through tunnels I had dug with my own hands, and slowly killing flies I had caught between the windowpane and the tulle curtains, which stank of cigarettes; when they fell to the perforated board over the radiator, the flies were gangsters who were finally paying the price for their crimes. Until the age of forty-five, it was my habit, whenever I was drifting in that sweet cloud between sleep and wakefulness, to cheer myself by imagining I was killing people. I would like to apologize to my close relatives—some, like my brother, very close indeed—as well as to the many politicians, literary luminaries, tradesmen, and mostly imaginary characters among my victims. Another frequent crime: I’d lavish affection on a cat, only to strike it cruelly in a moment of despair, from which I would emerge with a bout of laughter that made me so ashamed I would shower the poor cat with even more love than before. One afternoon twenty-five years later, when I was doing my military service, watching an entire company linger in the canteen after lunch for a chat and a smoke, I surveyed these 750 almost identical soldiers and imagined that their heads were separated from their bodies. As I contemplated their bloody esophagi through the cigarette smoke that bathed the cavernous canteen in a sweet transparent-blue haze, one of my soldier friends said, “Stop swinging your legs, son. I’m tired and I’ve had enough.”
The only person who seemed at all aware of my secret fantasy world was my father.
I’d be thinking of my bear—whose only eye I’d snapped off in a moment of angry excitement and who was getting thinner and thinner as I pulled more and more stuffing out of its chest—or I’d be thinking of the finger-sized soccer player who kicked when you pressed a button in his head; it was my third soccer player—I’d broken the first two in bursts of excitement—and now I’d broken this one too, and I’d be wondering if my wounded toy was dying in his hiding place. Or else I’d be lost in fearful imaginings about the martens our maid Esma Hanım claimed to have seen on the roof of the house next door—she’d used the same voice she used when speaking of God—when suddenly I’d hear my father say, “What’s going on in your head? Tell me and I’ll give you twenty-five kurus.”
Never sure whether to tell him the whole truth, change it a little, or tell an outright lie, I would fall silent; after a short while, he would smile and say, “It’s too late now—you should have told me right away.”
Had my father spent time in the other world too? It would be years before I discovered that my strange pastime was commonly known as daydreaming. So my father’s question always induced panic; eager, as always, to avoid disturbing thoughts, I evaded his question and then put it out of my mind.
Keeping the second world secret made it easier for me to come and go. When I was sitting across from my grandmother, and a shaft of light came through her curtains—just like searchlights on the ships passing through the Bosphorus at night—I could, if I stared right into it and blinked, will myself to see a fleet of red spaceships floating past me. After that I could summon up the same armada whenever I liked, returning to the real world as someone else might leave a room and turn off the lights behind him (as throughout my childhood, people were always reminding me to do in the real world).
If I dreamed of changing places with the other Orhan in the other house, if I longed for a life beyond the museum’s rooms, corridors, carpets (how I hated those carpets!) and beyond the company of positivist men who loved mathematics and crossword puzzles, if I felt hemmed in by this gloomy, cluttered house that rejected (though my family would deny it later) any suggestion of spirituality, love, art, literature, or even mythology, if I was from time to time a refugee in the second world, it was not because I was unhappy. Far from it, especially in those years between the ages of four and six, when, as a bright well-behaved child I felt the love of nearly everyone I met, endlessly kissed and passed from lap to lap and offered treats no good boy could resist: the greengrocer’s apple (“Don’t eat it until it’s washed,” my mother would tell me), the raisins from the man in the coffee store (“Have them after lunch”), the sweets my aunt gave me when we met her in the street (“Say thank you”).
If I had cause for complaint, it was my inability to see through walls. When looking out the window, I hated seeing nothing of the building next door, nothing of the street below, and only the narrowest strip of sky. At the smelly butcher shop across from us (I’d forget about the smell, only to remember it the moment I stepped into the cool street), it vexed me to be too short to see the butcher pick up one of his knives (each of them as big as my leg) to chop meat on the wooden block; I hated not being able to inspect counters, tabletops, or the insides of ice-cream freezers. When there was a small traffic accident in the street, drawing policemen on horseback, an adult would stand in front of me and I’d miss half the action. At the soccer matches to which my father took me from an early age, every time our team found itself in jeopardy, all the rows ahead of us would stand up, occluding my view of the decisive goals. But in truth, my eyes were never on the ball; they were on the cheese bread and cheese toasts and foil-covered chocolates my father bought for my brother and me. Worst of all was leaving the stadium, finding myself imprisoned by the legs of men jostling toward the exits, a dark airless forest of wrinkled trousers and muddy shoes. Apart from beautiful ladies like my mother, I cannot say I was very fond of adults in Istanbul, finding them in the main ugly, hairy, and coarse. They were too clumsy, too heavy, and too realistic. It could be they had once known something of a hidden second world, but they seemed to have lost their capacity for amazement and forgotten how to dream, which disability I took to coincide with the sprouting of objectionable hair on their knuckles and on their necks, in their noses, and in their ears. And so while I enjoyed their kind smiles and—even more—their presents, their incessant kisses meant enduring the abrasions of their beards and whiskers, the stink of their perfume, and their smoker’s breath. I thought of men as part of some lower and more vulgar race and was thankful most of them belonged to the streets outside.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Destruction of the Pashas’ Mansions: A Sad Tour of the Streets
The Pamuk Apartments were built at the edge of a large lot in Nişantaşı that
had once been the garden of a pasha’s mansion. The name itself, meaning “target stone,” comes from the days of the reformist westernizing sultans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Selim III and Mahmud II), who placed stone tablets in the empty hills above the city in those areas where they practiced shooting and archery; the tablets marked the spot where an arrow landed or where an empty earthenware pot was shattered by a bullet; they usually carried a line or two describing the occasion. When the Ottoman sultans, fearing tuberculosis and desirous of western comforts (as well as a change of scene), abandoned Topkapı Palace for new palaces in Dolmabahçe and Yıldız, their viziers and princes began to build their own wooden mansions in the hills of nearby Nişantaşı. My first schools were housed in the Crown Prince Yusuf İzzeddin Pasha Mansion, and in the Grand Vizier Halil Rifat Pasha Mansion. Each would be burned and demolished while I was studying there, even as I played soccer in the gardens. Across the street from our home, another apartment building was built on the ruins of the Secretary of Ceremonies Faik Bey Mansion. In fact, the only stone mansion still standing in our neighborhood was a former home of grand viziers that had passed into the hands of the muncipality after the Ottoman Empire fell and the capital moved to Ankara. I remember going for my smallpox vaccination to another old pasha’s mansion that had become the headquarters of the district council. The rest—those mansions where Ottoman officials had once entertained foreign emissaries and those that belonged to the nineteenth-century Sultan Abdülhamit’s daughters—I recall only as dilapidated brick shells with gaping windows and broken staircases darkened by bracken and untended fig trees; to remember them is to feel the deep sadness they evoked in me as a young child. By the late fifties, most of them had been burned down or demolished to make way for apartment buildings.
Through the back windows of our building on Teşvikiye Avenue, beyond the cypress and linden trees, you could see the remains of the mansion of Tunisian Hayrettin Pasha, a Circassian from the Caucasus who served as grand vizier for a short while during the Russian-Ottoman War. As a young boy (in the 1830s, a decade before Flaubert wrote that he wanted to “move to Istanbul and buy a slave”), he’d been brought to Istanbul and sold into slavery, eventually to find his way into the household of the Governor of Tunis, where he was raised speaking Arabic, before being taken to France for much of his later youth. When he returned to Tunis to join the army, he quickly rose through the ranks, serving in top posts at command headquarters, in the governor’s office, the diplomatic corps, and the finance ministry. Finally, just as he was turning sixty, he retired to Paris, whereupon Abdülhamit (acting at the suggestion of another Tunisian, Sheikh Zafiri) summoned him to Istanbul. After engaging him as a financial adviser for a short time, he made him grand vizier. The pasha thus became one of the first in a long line of foreign-educated financial experts who, given the mandate to pull Turkey from a sea of debts, went beyond dreaming (like their counterparts in so many other poor countries) of national reform along western lines. As with many of his successors, people expected a great deal from this pasha, simply because he was more western than Ottoman or Turk. And for precisely the same reason—that he wasn’t Turkish—he felt a deep shame. The gossip was that Tunisian Hayrettin Pasha would make notes in Arabic when returning home in his horse-drawn carriage from his meetings held in Turkish at the palace; later he would dictate these to his secretary in French. The coup de grâce was a report of rumors that his Turkish was poor and that his secret aim was to establish an Arabic-speaking nation; while knowing them to be mostly baseless, the ever-suspicious Abdülhamit nevertheless gave these denunciations some credence and removed the pasha as vizier. Because it would have been unseemly for a fallen grand vizier to take refuge in France, the pasha was forced to end his days in Istanbul, spending his summers at his Bosphorus villa in Kuruçeşme and his winters as a half prisoner in the mansion in whose garden we would later build our apartment house. When he was not writing reports for Abdülhamit, he passed the time composing his memoirs in French. These memoirs (translated into Turkish only eighty years later) prove their author to have possessed a greater sense duty than of humor: He dedicated the book to his sons, one of whom would later be executed for his involvement in the attempted assassination of Grand Vizier Mahmut Şevket Pasha, by which time Abdülhamit had bought the mansion for his daughter Şadiye Sultan.
Watching the pashas’ mansions burn to the ground, my family maintained a stony equanimity—much as we had done in the face of all those stories about crazy princes, opium addicts in the palace harem, children locked in attics, treacherous sultans’ daughters, and exiled or murdered pashas—and ultimately the decline and fall of the empire itself. As we in Nişantaşı saw it, the Republic had done away with the pashas, princes, and high officials, so the empty mansions they had left behind were only decrepit anomalies.
Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. That which I would later know as pervasive melancholy and mystery, I felt in childhood as boredom and gloom, a deadening tedium I identified with the “alaturka” music to which my grandmother tapped her slippered feet. I escaped this state by cultivating dreams.
The only other escape was to go out with my mother. Because it was not yet the custom to take children to parks or gardens for their daily fresh air, the day I went out with my mother was an event. “Tomorrow I’m going out with my mother!” I’d boast to my aunt’s son, who was three years my junior. After walking down the spiral staircase, we would pause before the little window facing the door through which the caretaker (when he was not in his basement apartment) could see everyone coming and going. I would inspect my clothes in the reflection, and my mother made sure all my buttons were buttoned; once outside I would exclaim in amazement, “The street!”
Sun, fresh air, light. Our house was so dark sometimes that stepping out was like opening the curtains too abruptly on a summer’s day; the light would hurt my eyes. Holding my mother’s hand, I would gaze in fascination at the displays in the shops: through the steamy window of the florist, at the cyclamens that looked like red wolves; in the window of the shoe shop, at the barely visible wires that suspended the high-heeled shoes in midair; and at the laundry (just as steamy as the florist’s) where my father sent his shirts to be starched and ironed. But it was from the windows of the stationery store—in which I noticed the same school notebooks my brother used—that I learned an early lesson: Our habits and possessions were not unique, and there were other people outside our apartment who lived lives very similar to our own. My brother’s primary school, which I, too, would attend a year later, was right next door to Teşvikiye Mosque, where everyone had their funerals. All my brother’s excited talk at home about my teacher, my teacher had led me to imagine that—just as every child had his own nanny—every pupil had his own teacher. And so when I walked into that school the following year to find thirty-two children pressed into one classroom with a single teacher, my disappointment was profound. The discovery that in effect I counted for nothing in the outside world made it only harder to part each day from my mother and the comforts of home. When my mother entered the local branch of the Bank of Commerce, I would refuse, without explaining, to accompany her up the six steps to the cashier: wooden steps with gaps between them into which I had convinced myself I might fall and disappear forever. “Why won’t you come in?” my mother would call down to me, as I pretended to be someone else. I’d imagine scenes in which my mother kept disappearing: Now I was in a palace, now at the foot of
a well.… If we walked as far as Osmanbey or Harbiye past the Mobil station on the corner, the winged horse on the sign covering the entire side of an apartment building would find its way into those dreams. There was an old Greek lady who darned stockings and sold belts and buttons; she also sold “eggs from the village,” which she’d take out of a varnished chest one by one, like jewels. In her store was an aquarium where undulating red fish would open their small but frightening mouths trying to bite my finger pressed against the glass, swimming up with a stupid determination that never failed to amuse me. Next, there was a small tobacconist-cum-stationery-newspaper shop run by Yakup and Vasil, so small and crowded that most days we’d give up the moment we entered. There was a coffee shop called the “Arab shop” (just as Arabs in Latin America were often known as Turks, the handful of blacks in Istanbul were known as Arabs); its enormous belted coffee grinder would begin to thunder like the washing machine at home, and as I moved away from it the “Arab” would smile indulgently at my fear. When these shops went out of fashion and closed one by one to make way for a string of other, more modern enterprises, my brother and I would play a game—less inspired by nostalgia than to test our memories—that went like this: One of us would say, “The shop next to the Girls’ Night School,” and the other would list its later incarnations: “The Greek lady’s pastry shop, a florist, a handbag store, a watch shop, a bookmaker, a gallery bookshop, and a pharmacy.”
Before entering the cavelike shop where for fifty years a man named Alaaddin sold cigarettes, toys, newspapers, and stationery, I would, by design, ask my mother to buy me a whistle or a few marbles, a coloring book or a yo-yo. As soon as she put the present into her handbag, I’d be seized by an impatience to go home. But it wasn’t only the glamour of the new toy.
