by Orhan Pamuk
During one of my mother’s disappearances, my father came back to the house one day with a nanny. She was short with very pale skin, far from beautiful, round, and always smiling. When she took charge of us she said, with an air of wisdom she seemed proud to possess, that we were to behave just as she did; unlike the nannies we’d seen in other families, she was Turkish. This disappointed us and we never warmed to her. The nannies we knew were mostly Germans with Protestant souls, and this one held no authority for us; when we fought, she’d say, “Nice and quiet, please, nice and quiet,” and when we imitated her in front of my father, he laughed, and before long this nanny disappeared too.
Years later, during my father’s other disappearances, when my brother and I were in a fight to the death and my mother really lost her temper, she would say something like “I’m leaving!” or “I’m going to throw myself out the window!” (once going so far as to put one of her beautiful legs over the windowsill)—all to no avail. But whenever she said, “And then your father will marry that other woman!” the candidate for new mother I’d imagine was not one of the women whose names she would sometimes blurt out in a moment of anger but that pale, round, well-meaning, and bewildered nanny.
Because these dramas all took place on the same small stage, and because (I would later imagine this was the case for all real families) we almost always talked about the same things and ate the same things, even arguments could be deadly dull (routine being the source of all happiness, its guarantee, and its death!), and so I came to welcome these sudden disappearances as a form of release from the terrible curse of boredom; like my mother’s mirrors, they were fun, perplexing poisonous flowers that opened my way into another universe. Because they took me into a dark place that made me remember myself and restored me to a solitude I had tried to forget, I wasted few tears on them.
Most of the quarrels would begin over a meal. In later years, however, it became more convenient to begin the quarrel in my father’s 1959 Opel, because it was harder for combatants to extract themselves from a fast-moving car than it was for them to leave the table. Sometimes, if we set out on a car journey we’d been planning for days, or if we were just out on one of our drives along the Bosphorus, a quarrel would break out within minutes of leaving the house. My brother and I would then make a bet. Would it be after the first bridge or after the first petrol station that my father would brake suddenly, make a U-turn, and (like an ill-tempered captain returning his cargo to its place of origin) drop us off at home before taking himself and his car somewhere else?
There was one row from the early years that had a deeper effect on us, perhaps owing to a certain poetic grandeur. One evening, during supper in our summer home in Heybeliada, my mother and father both left the table (I liked it when this happened, because it meant I could eat the way I wanted to and not the way my mother made me). For a while my brother and I sat staring at our plates as we listened to our mother and father shouting at each other on the top floor, and then, almost by instinct, we went upstairs to join them. (Just as, almost by instinct, I find myself opening this parenthesis, suggesting that I have no desire, none at all, to recall this incident.) When my mother saw us trying to join the scuffle, she pushed us into the next room and shut the door. The room was dark, but there was a strong light shining directly in through the Art Nouveau designs on the frosted glass of the two large French doors. My brother and I watched through the illuminated glass as our mother and father’s shadows approached each other and pulled apart, moved forward again to touch each other, shouting as they blended into a single shadow. From time to time this shadow play would become so violent that the curtains (the frosted glass) would tremble—just as they did when we went to the Karagöz shadow theater—and everything was black and white.
CHAPTER NINE
Another House: Cihangir
Sometimes my parents would disappear together. So it was in the winter of 1957, when my brother was sent two floors up to live for a while with my aunt and uncle. As for me, another aunt came to Nişantaşı one evening and took me off to her home in Cihangir. She did everything she could to make sure I was not upset. The moment we were in the car (a ’56 Chevrolet, very popular in Istanbul throughout the sixties), she said, “I’ve asked Çetin to bring you some yogurt this evening,” and I remember having no interest in yogurt but much interest in the fact that they had a chauffeur. When we reached their big apartment building (my grandfather had built it, and I would later live in one of its apartments) and discovered that it had no lifts or heating and that the apartments were very small, I was badly disappointed. To make things worse, the next day as I was glumly trying to accustom myself to my new house, I had another nasty surprise: After I’d been bedded down in my pajamas like a nice pampered child for my afternoon nap, I called out to the maid of the house just as I did at home—“Emine Hanım, come and pick me up, get me dressed!”—only to get a sharp reprimand in return. This may be why, for the rest of my stay, I tried to act older than my age and put on a few airs. One evening, when I was eating supper with my aunt, my uncle Şevket Rado (the poet and publisher of the Melling facsimile edition), and my twelve-year-old cousin Mehmet, with my unnerving double in the kitsch reproduction staring down from the white frame on the wall, I happened to mention in passing that Adnan Menderes, the prime minister, was my uncle. My comment was not received in the respectful way I had hoped; when everyone at the table began to giggle, I felt deeply wronged, because I really did believe that the prime minister was my uncle.
But I believed this only in one enciphering corner of my mind. Both my Uncle Özhan and Prime Minister Adnan had five-letter names ending in the same two letters; the prime minister had just been to the United States, where my uncle had been living for years; I saw both their pictures many times every day (the prime minister’s in the papers, and my uncle’s all over my grandmother’s sitting room), and in some of those pictures they looked very much alike—so it is not so outlandish that the illusion took root. In later life, my awareness of this mental mechanism failed to save me from many other specious beliefs, opinions, prejudices, and aesthetic preferences. For instance, I have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters; that an unfamiliar word—be it Turkish or foreign—must be semantically similar to a word spelled like it; that the soul of a dimpled woman must carry something of the soul of another dimpled woman I knew before; that all fat people are the same; that all poor people belong to a fraternity about which I know nothing; that there must be a link between peas and Brazil—not just because Brazil is Brezilya in Turkish and the word for pea is bezelye but also because the Brazilian flag has, it seems, an enormous pea on it. I’ve seen many Americans do the same thing when they assume a link between Turkey the country and turkey the bird. My uncle and the prime minister are linked in my mind to this day; once the connection has been made, nothing can sever it, so when I think of a distant relation I once saw eating eggs with spinach at a restaurant (one of the great pleasures of childhood was running into relatives and acquaintances wherever I went in the city), a part of me is convinced that this relative is still in that same restaurant, eating spinach with eggs, half a century later.
My talent for prettifying my life with soothing illusions served me well in this house, where I was not taken seriously and did not feel I belonged. I soon embarked on some bold new experiments. Every morning, after my cousin had left for the German lycée, I would open up one of his huge, thick, handsome books (it was a Brockhaus edition, I think) and, sitting myself down at a table, I would copy out its lines. Because I knew no German, much less how to read, I did this without comprehension, drawing, as it were, the prose I saw before me. I drew an exact picture of every line and every sentence. After I had finished a word containing one of the more difficult Gothic letters (a g or a k), I would do as the Safevi miniaturists did after drawing thousands of leaves of a great plane tree one by one: I would rest my eyes by looking out through the gaps between th
e apartments, the empty lots, and the streets leading down to the sea, and gaze at the ships passing up and down the Bosphorus.
It was in Cihangir (where we too would move as our fortunes dwindled) that I first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives—a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what—but an archipelago of neighborhoods in which everyone knew one another. When I looked out the window, I didn’t see just the Bosphorus and the ships moving slowly down the familiar channels, I also saw the gardens between the houses, old mansions that had not yet been pulled down, and children playing between their crumbling walls. As with so many houses that look out on the Bosphorus, there was, just in front of the building, a steep and winding cobblestone alley that went all the way down to the sea. On snowy evenings I would stand with my aunt and my cousin and watch from afar with the rest of the neighborhood as noisy, happy children slid down this alley on sleds, chairs, and planks of wood.
The center of the Turkish film industry—which put out seven hundred films a year in those days and was ranked second largest in the world, after India—was in Beyoğlu, on Yeşilçam Street, only ten minutes away, and because many of the actors lived in Cihangir, the neighborhood was full of the “uncles” and tired, heavily made-up “aunties” who played the same character in every film they did. So when children recognized actors they knew only from their hackneyed film personae (for example, Vahi Öz, who always played the fat old card shark who seduced innocent young housemaids), they’d heckle them and chase them down the street. At the top of the steep alley, on rainy days, cars would skid on the wet cobblestones, and trucks had to struggle to get to the top; on sunny days, a minibus would appear from nowhere, and actors, lighting men, and “film crews” would pile out; after shooting a love scene in ten minutes flat, they would disappear again. It was only years later, when I happened to see one of these black-and-white films on television, that I realized the true subject was not the love affair raging in the foreground but the Bosphorus glittering in the distance.
While I was looking at the Bosphorus through the gaps between the apartment buildings of Cihangir, I learned something else about neighborhood life: There must always be a center (usually a shop) where all the gossip is gathered, interpreted, and assessed. In Cihangir this center was the grocery store on the ground floor of our apartment building. The grocer was Greek (like most of the other families living in the apartments above him); if you wanted to buy anything from Ligor, you’d lower a basket from your floor and then shout down your order. Years later, when we moved into the same building, my mother, who found it unbecoming to shout down to the grocer every time she wanted bread or eggs, preferred to write her order down on paper and send it down in a basket much more stylish than those used by our neighbors. (When my aunt’s naughty son opened the window, it was usually to spit onto the roof of a car that was struggling up to the top of the alley, or throw a nail, or a firecracker he had skillfully attached to a string. Even today, whenever I am at a high window that looks out onto a street, I can’t help wondering how it would feel to spit down on passersby.)
Şevket Rado, my aunt’s husband, spent his early life trying and failing to be a poet; he would later become a journalist and editor, and at the time of my stay he was editing Hayat (Life), then Turkey’s most popular weekly magazine. But at the age of five I had no interest in this or in the fact that my uncle was a friend and colleague of many of the poets and writers who would come to influence my own ideas about Istanbul. His circle of friends included Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Kemalettin Tuğcu, the author of melodramatic Dickensian children’s stories that painted a thrilling and textured picture of the street life in the city’s poor neighborhoods. Rather, what excited me then were the hundreds of children’s books that my uncle published and gave to me as presents after I had learned to read (The Abridged 1001 Nights, The Falcon Brother series, The Encyclopedia of Discoveries and Inventions).
Once a week my aunt would take me back to Nişantaşı to see my brother, who would tell me how happy he was in the Pamuk Apartments: how he’d eaten anchovies for breakfast; how they’d laughed and played together in the evenings and done all the other family things I missed so much—playing soccer with my uncle, going out to the Bosphorus on Sunday in my uncle’s Dodge, listening to sports hour on the radio and to our favorite radio plays. All this he’d relate in detail, exaggerating wherever possible. Then Şevket would say, “Don’t go; from now on you should stay here.”
When the time came to return to Cihangir, it was very hard to leave my brother and even to say goodbye to the sad locked door of our apartment. One time I tried to fend off the moment of departure by clinging to the radiator in the hall, crying all the louder when they tried to pry off my hands; though it shamed me to do so, I hung on for a very long time—I felt like one of my comic book heroes, clinging to a lonely branch at the edge of a sheer cliff.
Was I attached to the house, perhaps? Fifty years later, I am indeed back in the same building. But it’s not the rooms of a house that matter to me or the beauty of the things inside it. Then as now, home served as a center for the world in my mind—as an escape, in both the positive and negative sense of the word. Instead of learning to face my troubles squarely—awareness of my parents’ quarrels, my father’s bankruptcies, my family’s never-ending property squabbles, our dwindling fortune—I amused myself with mental games in which I changed the focus, deceived myself, forgot what had been troubling me altogether, or wrapped myself in a mysterious haze.
We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity, veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day. Steamed-up windows make me feel hüzün, and I still love getting up and walking over to those windows to trace words on them with my finger. As I shape words and figures on the steamy window, the hüzün inside me dissipates and I can relax; after I have done all my writing and drawing, I can erase it all with the back of my hand and look outside.
But the view itself can bring its own hüzün. It is time to come to a better understanding of this feeling that the city of Istanbul carries as its fate.
CHAPTER TEN
Hüzün
Hüzün,, the Turkish word for melancholy, has an Arabic root; when it appears in the Koran (as huzn in two verses and hazen in three others) it means much the same thing as the contemporary Turkish word. The Prophet Muhammad referred to the year in which he lost both his wife Hatice and his uncle, Ebu Talip, as Senettul huzn, the year of melancholy; this confirms that the word is meant to convey a feeling of deep spiritual loss. But if hüzün begins its life as a word for loss and the spiritual agony and grief attending it, my own readings indicate a small philosophical fault line developing over the next few centuries of Islamic history. With time, we see the emergence of two very different hüzüns, each evoking a distinct philosophical tradition.
According to the first tradition, we experience the thing called hüzün when we have invested too much in worldly pleasures and material gain; the implication is, “If you hadn’t involved yourself so deeply in this transitory world, if you were a good and true Muslim, you wouldn’t care so much about your worldly losses.” The second tradition, which rises out of Sufi mysticism, offers a more positive and compassionate understanding of the word and of the place of loss and grief in life. To the Sufis, hüzün is the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah, because we cannot do enough for Allah in this world. A true Sufi follower would take no interest in worldly concerns like death, let alone goods or possessions; he suffers from grief, emptiness, and inadequacy because he can never be close enough to Allah, because his apprehension of Allah is not deep enough. Moreover, it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes h
im distress. It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it; he suffers because he has not suffered enough, and it is by following this logic to its conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold hüzün in high esteem. If hüzün has been central to Istanbul culture, poetry, and everyday life over the past two centuries, if it dominates our music, it must be at least partly because we see it as an honor. But to understand what hüzün has come to mean over the past century, to convey its enduring power, it is not enough to speak of the honor that Sufi tradition has brought to the word. To convey the spiritual importance of hüzün in the music of Istanbul over the last hundred years; to understand why hüzün dominates not just the mood of modern Turkish poetry but its symbolism, and why, like the great symbols of Divan poetry, it has suffered from overuse and even abuse; to understand the central importance of hüzün as a cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness, and spiritual suffering, it is not enough to grasp the history of the word and the honor we attach to it. If I am to convey the intensity of the hüzün that Istanbul caused me to feel as a child, I must describe the history of the city following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and—even more important—the way this history is reflected in the city’s “beautiful” landscapes and its people. The hüzün of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.
To explore the ambiguities of the word, we must return to the thinkers who see hüzün not as a poetic concept or a state of grace but as an illness. According to El Kindi, hüzün was associated not just with the loss or death of a loved one but also with other spiritual afflictions, like anger, love, rancor, and groundless fear. The philosopher-doctor Ibn Sina saw hüzün in the same broad terms, and this was why he suggested that the proper way of diagnosing a youth in the grip of a helpless passion was to ask the boy for the girl’s name while taking his pulse. The approach outlined by these classic Islamic thinkers is similar to the one proposed in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s enigmatic but entertaining tome of the early seventeenth century. (At some 1,500 pages, it makes Ibn Sina’s great work, Fi’l Huzn, seem like a pamphlet.) Like Ibn Sina, Burton takes an encyclopedic view of the “black pain,” listing fear of death, love, defeat, evil deeds, and any number of drinks and foods as its possible causes, and his list of cures ranges just as broadly. Combining medical science with philosophy, he advises his readers to seek relief in reason, work, resignation, virtue, discipline, and fasting—another interesting instance of common ground underlying these two texts that rise out of such very different cultural traditions.
