Istanbul

by Orhan Pamuk

  “I’ll have you know, sir, that I never touch alcohol.”

  Forty years later, if she got a bit merry on the glass of beer she allowed herself at our family dinners on New Year’s Day, someone would always repeat this story, and she would let out a large embarrassed laugh. If it was an ordinary day and she was sitting in her usual chair in her sitting room, she would laugh for a while and then shed a few tears about the early death of that “exceptional” man, whom I knew only from a collection of photographs. As she cried, I would try to imagine my grandparents sauntering through the city streets, but it was hard to imagine this woman, a round, relaxed matron from a Renoir painting, as a tall thin nervous woman in a Modigliani tableau.

  After my grandfather had made a large fortune and died of leukemia, my grandmother became the boss of our large family. That was the word her cook and lifelong friend Bekir used with light sarcasm, whenever he tired of her never-ending commands and complaints: “Whatever you say, boss!” But my grandmother’s authority did not extend beyond the house she patrolled with a large set of keys. When my father and my uncle lost the factory they had inherited at a very young age from my grandfather, when they entered into large construction projects and made rash investments that ended in failure, forcing her to sell off the family assets one by one, my grandmother would just shed a few more tears and then tell them to be a bit more careful next time.

  She would pass her mornings in bed, under thick heavy quilts, propped up against a pile of huge down pillows. Every morning, Bekir would serve her soft-boiled eggs, olives, goat cheese, and toasted bread on a huge tray he would place carefully on a pillow he had arranged on the quilt (it would have spoiled the ambiance to put an old newspaper between the flower-embroidered pillow and the silver tray, as practicality would have dictated); my grandmother would linger over her breakfast, reading the paper and receiving her first guests of the day. (It was from her that I learned the joy of drinking sweet tea with a piece of hard goat cheese in my mouth.) My uncle, who could not go to work without first embracing his mother, paid his visit early every morning. After my aunt had sent him off to work, she too would arrive, clutching her handbag. For a short period before beginning school, when it had been decided that it was time I learned to read, I did as my brother had done; every morning I would arrive with a notebook in hand, prop myself up on my grandmother’s quilt, and try to learn from her the mystery of the alphabet. As I would discover when I began school, it bored me to learn things from someone else, and when I saw a blank piece of paper, my first impulse was not to write something but to blacken the page with drawings.

  Right in the middle of these reading and writing lessons, Bekir would come in and ask, using the same words, “What are we going to serve these people today?”

  He treated this question with enormous gravity, as if he were charged with running the kitchen of a large hospital or army barracks. My grandmother and her cook would discuss who was coming from which apartment for lunch and supper and what they should cook for them, and then my grandmother would take out her great almanac, which was full of mysterious information and pictures of clocks; they would look for inspiration at the “menu of the day” as I watched a crow flying between the branches of the cypress tree in the back garden.

  Despite his heavy workload, Bekir never lost his sense of humor and had nicknames for everyone in the household, from my grandmother to her youngest grandchild. Mine was “Crow.” Years later, he told me it was because I was always watching the crows on the roof next door, and also because I was very thin. My older brother was much attached to his teddy bear and wouldn’t go anywhere without it, so to Bekir he was “Nurse.” One cousin who had very narrow eyes was “Japan,” another who was very stubborn was “Goat.” A cousin born prematurely was called “Six-month.” For years, he called us by these names, his gentle mockery softened by compassion.

  In my grandmother’s room—as in my mother’s room—there was a dressing table with a winged mirror; I would have liked to open its panels and lose myself in the reflections, but this mirror I was not allowed to touch. My grandmother, who spent half the day in bed and never made herself up, had positioned the table in such a way that she could see all the way down the long corridor, past the service entrance and the vestibule, and right across the sitting room to the windows that looked out to the street, thus allowing her to supervise everything happening in the house—the comings and goings, the conversations in corners, and the quarreling grandchildren beyond—without getting out of bed. Because the house was always so dark, the reflection of a particular maneuver was often too faint to see, so my grandmother would have to shout to ask what was going on—for example, next to the inlaid table in her sitting room—and Bekir would rush in to report who was doing what.

  When she wasn’t reading the paper or (from time to time) embroidering flowers on pillowcases, my grandmother spent her afternoons smoking cigarettes with other Nişantaşı ladies, mostly of her age, and playing bezique. I remember their playing poker on occasion too. Among the real poker chips, which she kept in a soft blood-red velvet pouch, were old perforated Ottoman coins with serrated edges inscribed with imperial monograms, and I liked to take these into the corner and play with them.

  One of the ladies at the game table was from the sultan’s harem; after the fall of the empire, when the Ottoman family—I can’t bring myself to use the word dynasty—was forced to leave Istanbul and they closed the harem, this lady came out of it and married one of my grandfather’s colleagues. My brother and I used to make fun of her overly polite way of speaking: despite her being grandmother’s friend, the two would address each other as “madam,” while still falling happily upon the oily crescent rolls and cheese toasts that Bekir brought them from the oven. Both were fat, but because they lived at a time and in a culture in which this was not stigmatized, they were at ease about it. If—as happened once every forty years—my fat grandmother had to go outside or was invited out, the preparations would go on for days; until the last step, when my grandmother would shout for Kamer Hanım, the janitor’s wife, to come up and pull with all her strength on the strings of her corset. I would watch with my hair on end as the corseting progressed behind the screen—with much pushing and pulling and cries of “Easy, girl, easy!” I was bewitched, too, by the manicurist who would have paid her a visit some days earlier; this woman would sit there for hours with bowls of soapy water and many strange instruments assembled all around her; I would stand transfixed as she painted my revered grandmother’s toenails firehouse red, and the sight of her placing cotton balls between my grandmother’s plump toes evoked in me a strange combination of fascination and revulsion.

  Twenty years later, when we were living in other houses in other parts of Istanbul, I would often go to visit my grandmother in the Pamuk Apartments, and if I arrived in the morning I would find her in the same bed, surrounded by the same bags, newspapers, pillows, and shadows. The smell in the room—a mixture of soap, cologne, dust, and wood—never varied either. My grandmother always kept with her a slim leather-bound notebook in which she wrote something every day. This notebook, in which she recorded bills, memories, meals, expenses, plans, and meteorological developments, had the strange and special air of a protocol book. Perhaps because she’d studied history, she liked to follow “official etiquette” on occasion, but there was always a note of sarcasm in her voice when she did; her interest in protocol and Ottoman etiquette had another result—every one of her grandsons was named after a victorious sultan. Every time I saw her, I kissed her hand; then she would give me some money, which I would shamefacedly (but also gladly) slip into my pocket, and after I had told her what my mother, father, and brother were up to, my grandmother would sometimes read me what she’d written in her notebook.

  “My grandson Orhan came to visit. He’s very intelligent, very sweet. He’s studying architecture at university. I gave him ten liras. With God’s will, one day he’ll be very successful and the Pamuk family name
will once again be spoken with respect, as it was when his grandfather was alive.”

  After reading this, she would peer at me through the glasses that made her cataracts look even more disconcerting and give me a strange mocking smile, leading me to wonder, as I tried to smile in the same way, whether she was laughing at herself or because she knew by now that life was nonsense.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Joy and Monotony of School

  The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. I was still too young to grasp that people of breeding were meant to affect innocence of this fundamental distinction, and that the same courtesy applied to any disparity that might rise out of religious, racial, sexual, class, financial, and (most recently) cultural difference. So in my innocence I would raise my hand every time the teacher asked a question, just to make it clear I knew the answer.

  After some months of this, the teacher and my classmates must have been vaguely aware I was a good student, but still I felt the compulsion to raise my hand. By now the teacher seldom called on me, preferring to give other children a chance to speak too. Still, my hand shot up without my even willing it, whether or not I knew the answer. If I was putting on airs, like someone who, even in ordinary clothes, sports a gaudy piece of jewelry, it’s also true that I admired my teacher and was desperate to cooperate.

  Another thing I was happy to discover at school was the teacher’s “authority.” At home, in the crowded and disordered Pamuk Apartments, things were never clear; at our crowded table, everyone talked at the same time. Our domestic routines, our love for one another, our conversations, meals, and radio hours—these were never debated; they just happened. My father held little obvious authority at home, and he was often absent. He never scolded my brother or me, never even raised his eyebrows in disapproval. In later years, he would introduce us to his friends as “my two younger brothers,” and we felt he had earned the right to say so. My mother was the only authority I recognized at home. But she was hardly a distant or alien tyrant: Her power came from my desire to be loved by her. And so I was fascinated by the power my teacher wielded over her twenty-five pupils.

  Perhaps I identified my teacher with my mother, for I had an insatiable desire for her approval. “Join your arms together like this and sit down quietly,” she would say, and I would press my arms against my chest and sit patiently all through the lesson. But gradually the novelty wore off; soon it was no longer exciting to have every answer or solve an arithmetic problem ahead of everyone else or earn the highest mark, and time began to flow with painful slowness or stop flowing altogether.

  Turning away from the fat half-witted girl who was writing on the blackboard, who gave everyone—teachers, janitors, and her classmates—the same vapid, trusting smile, my eyes would float to the window, to the upper branches of the chestnut tree that I could just see rising up between the apartment buildings. A crow would land on a branch. Because I was viewing it from below, I could see the little cloud floating behind it; as the cloud moved it kept changing shape: first a fox’s nose, then a head, then a dog. I didn’t want it to stop looking like a dog, but as it continued its journey it changed into one of the four-legged silver sugar bowls from my grandmother’s always-locked display case, and I’d long to be at home. Once I’d conjured up the reassuring silence of the shadows of home, my father would step out from them, as if from a dream, and off we’d go on a family outing to the Bosphorus. Just then, a window in the apartment building opposite the school would open, and a maid would shake her duster and gaze absentmindedly at the street, which I could not see from where I was sitting. What was going on down there? I’d wonder. I’d hear a horse cart rolling over the cobblestones, and a rasping voice would cry out, “Eskiciiiiiii!,” and the maid would watch the junk dealer make his way down the street before pulling her head back inside and shutting the window behind her. Then, right next to that window, moving as fast as the first cloud but going in the opposite direction, I’d see a second cloud. But now my attention was called back to the classroom, and seeing all the other raised hands, I would eagerly raise my hand too: Long before I had worked out from my classmates’ responses what the teacher had asked us, I was foggily confident I had the answer.

  It was exciting, though sometimes painful, to get to know my classmates as individuals and to find out how different they were from me. There was a sad boy who, whenever he was asked to read out loud in Turkish class, would skip every other line; the poor boy’s mistake was as involuntary as the laughter it would elicit from the class. In first grade, there was a girl who kept her red hair in a pony-tail and sat next to me for a time. Although her schoolbag was a slovenly jumble of half-eaten apples, simits, sesame seeds, pencils, and hair bands, she always smelled of dried lavender, and that attracted me. I was also drawn to her gift for speaking so openly about the little taboos of daily life, and if I didn’t see her on the weekend, I missed her, though there was another girl so tiny and delicate that I was utterly entranced by her as well. Why did that boy keep on telling lies, even knowing no one was going to believe him? How could that girl be so indiscreet about the goings-on in her house? And could this other girl be shedding real tears as she read that poem about Atatürk?

  Just as I was in the habit of looking at the fronts of cars and seeing noses, so too I liked to scrutinize my classmates, looking for the creatures they resembled. The boy with the pointed nose was a fox, and the big one next to him was, as everyone said, a bear, and the one with the thick hair was a hedgehog.… I remember a Jewish girl named Mari telling us all about Passover; there were days when no one in her grandmother’s house was allowed to touch the light switches. Another girl reported that one evening, when she was in her room, she turned around so fast she glimpsed the shadow of an angel—a fearsome story that stayed with me. There was a girl with very long legs who wore very long socks and always looked as if she was about to cry; her father was a government minister, and when he died in a plane crash from which Prime Minister Menderes emerged without a scratch, I was sure she’d been crying because she knew in advance what was going to happen. Lots of children had problems with their teeth; a few wore braces. On the top floor of the building that housed the lycée dormitory and the gymnasium, just next to the infirmary, there was rumored to be a dentist, and when teachers got angry they would often threaten to send naughty children there. For lesser infractions, pupils were made to stand in the corner between the blackboard and the door with their backs to the class, sometimes on one leg, but because we were all so curious to see how long someone could stand on one leg that the lessons suffered, this particular punishment was rare.

  In his memoirs, Falaka and Nights, Ahmet Rasim wrote at length about his school days a century ago, when teachers in Ottoman schools held rods so long they could hit their pupils without even rising from their seats; our teachers encouraged us to read these books, perhaps to show us how lucky we were to have been spared the pre-Republican, pre-Atatürk era of the falaka. But even in wealthy Nişantaşı, in the well-endowed Işık Lycée School, the old teachers left over from the Ottoman period found in some “modern” technical innovations new tools for oppressing the weak and defenseless: Our French-made rulers, and especially the thin hard strips of mica inserted into their sides, could, in their practiced hands, be as effective as the falaka and the rod.

  In spite of myself, I almost rejoiced whenever someone else was disciplined for being lazy, uncivilized, stupid, or insolent. I was happy to see it applied to one gregarious girl who came to school in a chauffeur-driven car; a teacher’s pet, she was always standing up before us to do a croaky rendition of “Jingle Bells” in English, but this earned her no clemency when she was found guilty of doing sloppy homework. There were always a few who hadn’t done their homework but pretended they had, acting as if it was somewhere in their notebook if only they could find it. They’d cry out, “I can’t find it right now, teacher!” just
to delay the inevitable for a few seconds, but it only added to the violence with which the teacher smacked them or pulled their ear.

  When we’d moved on from the sweet and motherly women teachers of our early years to the angry old embittered men who taught us religion, music, and gymnastics in the upper grades, these rituals of humiliation became more elaborate, and there were times when the lessons were so boring that I was glad for the few minutes of entertainment the punishments provided.

  There was a girl I admired from a distance, perhaps because she was tidy and attractive or perhaps because she was fragile—when she was being punished and I saw tears gather in her eyes and her face went bright red, I’d long to come to her rescue. When the fat blond boy, my tormentor at recess, got caught for talking and then got beaten for being caught, I’d watch with cold-blooded joy. There was one child who was, I’d decided, a hopeless imbecile—no matter how severe the punishment meted out to him, this boy would resist it. Some teachers seemed to call pupils to the blackboard not so much to test their knowledge as to prove their ignorance, and some of the ignorant seemed to enjoy being humiliated. Other teachers would go mad when they saw a notebook that had been covered with paper of the wrong color, still others would go for long stretches taking offense at nothing, only to hit a child for whispering. Some pupils, even when giving correct answers to simple questions, would look like rabbits caught in a car’s headlights; some—and I appreciated these the most—would, if they didn’t know the answer, tell the teacher anything else they knew, gormlessly hoping that this might save them.

  I’d watch these scenes—first a scolding, then an angry shower of books and notebooks, while the rest of the class sat in frozen silence—thankful I was not one of those hapless pupils marked for humiliation. I shared my good fortune with about a third of the class. If this had been a school for children of all backgrounds, the line that set the lucky ones apart might have been more distinct, but this was a private school and all the pupils came from wealthy families. In the playground during recess, we enjoyed a childish fellowship that made the line disappear, but whenever I watched the beating and humiliation, I, like the awesome figure seated at the teacher’s desk, would ask myself why it was that some children could be so lazy, dishonorable, weak-willed, insensitive, or brainless. There were no answers to my dark moral probings in the comic books I’d begun reading; their evil characters were always drawn with crooked mouths. Finding nothing, either, in the shadowy depths of my own childish heart, I’d let the question fade away. I came to understand that the place they called school had no part in answering life’s most profound questions; rather, its main function was to prepare us for “real life” in all its political brutality. And so, until I reached lycée, I preferred to raise my hand and remain safely on the right side of the line.