by Orhan Pamuk
My family’s ambivalence about religion was most evident at Kurban Bayram, the Feast of Sacrifice. Like all wealthy Muslim families, we’d buy a ram and keep it in the small garden behind the Pamuk Apartments until the first day of the holiday, when the neighborhood butcher would come and slaughter it. In contrast to the golden-hearted child heroes in my Turkish comics who longed for the ram to be spared, I didn’t much like sheep, so my heart didn’t bleed every time I saw the doomed ram frolicking in our yard. I would even feel glad that we’d soon be disposing of this ugly, stupid, foul-smelling animal; I do remember, however, having a troubled conscience about the way we did it: After distributing the meat among the poor, we ourselves would sit down to a great family feast at which we drank the beer our religion forbade us and feasted on meat from the butcher, because the fresh meat of our sacrifice had too powerful an odor. The point of the ritual is to prove our bond with the Almighty by sacrificing an animal in the place of a child, thereby delivering us from guilt; and so it followed that people like us, who ate nice meat from the butcher in the place of the animal we had sacrificed, had cause to feel all the guiltier.
In our household, doubts more troubling than these were suffered in silence. The spiritual void I have seen in so many of Istanbul’s rich, westernized, secularist families is evident in these silences. Everyone talks openly about mathematics, success at school, soccer, and having fun, but they grapple with the most basic questions of existence—love, compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred—in trembling confusion and painful solitude. They light a cigarette, give their attention to the music on the radio, and return wordlessly to their inner worlds. The fast I undertook to express my secret love of God was conducted in much the same spirit. As it was winter and the sun set early, I don’t think I suffered much hunger. Even so, while eating the meal my mother had prepared for me (the anchovies and mayonnaise and fish roe salads bore little resemblance to the traditional Ramadan feast) I felt happy and at peace. But my joy had less to do with knowing I had honored God than the simple satisfaction of having set myself a test and succeeded. After I had eaten my fill, I went off to the Konak Cinema to see a Hollywood film and put the whole thing out of my mind. I never again entertained the slightest desire to keep a fast.
Even if I didn’t believe in God as much as I might have wished, part of me still hoped that if God was omniscient, as people said, She must be clever enough to understand why it was that I was incapable of faith—and so forgive me. So long as I did not broadcast my faithlessness or indulge in erudite attacks on faith, God would understand and ease the guilt and suffering of my disbelief, or at least not trouble Herself overmuch about a child like me.
What I feared most was not God but those who believed in Her to excess. The stupidity of the pious, whose judgment could never be compared with those of the God—God forbid—they adored with all their heart: This was the second thing that scared me. For years, I carried around the dread that one day I would be punished for not being “like them,” and this dread had a far greater impact on me than any of the political theory I read during my leftist youth. What surprised me later on was finding out how few of my fellow secularist, half-believing, half-westernized İstanbullus shared my secret guilt. But it pleased me to imagine that—after a traffic accident, as they’re lying in a hospital bed—people who have never performed their religious duties—who have always looked on the pious with contempt—will enter into a secret understanding with God.
At middle school I had a classmate courageous enough to shun this sort of secret understanding. He was a devilish boy from an ultra-rich family that had made its fortune in real estate; he rode horses in the gigantic gardens of their gorgeous houses in the hills above the Bosphorus and even represented Turkey in international equestrian events. One time we were talking metaphysics at recess, in the way children sometimes do, when he saw I was quivering with fear. He looked up at the sky and cried, “If God exists, let Him strike me dead!” and then, with a confidence that shocked me, he added, “But as you see, I’m still breathing.” I felt guilty about lacking such courage and guilty, too, for secretly suspecting he was right, though even in my confusion, I felt glad without quite understanding why.
After I turned twelve, and my interests—and guilt—came to revolve more around sex than religion, I was less concerned about the imponderable tensions between the desire to believe and the desire to belong. The pain, it seemed from then on, was not in being far from God but from everyone around me, from the collective spirit of the city. Even so, whenever I am in a crowd, on a ship, or on a bridge and come face-to-face with an old woman in a white scarf, a shiver still passes through me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Rich
During the mid-sixties, my mother would go to the newsagent every Sunday morning to buy a copy of Evening. Unlike our daily newspapers, it wasn’t delivered to our house, and—knowing that my mother went to the trouble of getting it for the sake of the society gossip column entitled “Have You Heard?” written anonymously under the pen name Gül-Peri (Rose Nymph)—my father never passed up an opportunity to tease her about it. His mockery gave me to understand that an interest in society gossip was a sign of personal weakness. It was to ignore that the journalists hid behind pen names to vent their resentment of the “rich” (including those with whom we socialized or wished to be classified) by making up lies about them. And even if they weren’t lies, rich people inept enough to draw the attention of a society columnist were not leading exemplary lives. These insights, however, did not stop my father from reading these columns and believing them:
• Poor Feyziye Madenci! Her Bebek house has been robbed, but no one seems to know what’s missing. Let’s see if the police manage to solve this riddle.
• Aysel Madra didn’t get to go swimming in the sea once last summer—and all because she had her tonsils taken out. This summer she’s enjoying herself on Kuruçeşme Island—although we hear she’s still a bit irritable. Let’s not ask why.
• Muazzez İpar is off to Rome! We’ve never seen this Istanbul socialite looking quite this happy. What’s cheered her up? We wonder. Could it be the dashing man at her side?
• Semiramis Sarıay used to spend her summers on Büyükada, but now she’s turned her back on us and returned to her villa in Capri. It’s soooo much closer to Paris, after all. We hear she’s going to do a few exhibitions of her art. So when’s she going to show us her statues?
• Istanbul society has been undone by the evil eye! Many illustrious personages who have made frequent appearances in this column have been falling ill and rushing into hospital for operations. The latest bad news comes to us from the Çamlıca home of the much lamented Ruşen Eşref, where Harika Gürsoy was having such a good time at a moonlit party.…
“So Harika Gürsoy’s had her tonsils out now too, eh?” my mother would say.
“She’d have been better off getting those nobs taken off her face first,” my father would say, with idle malice.
Some of these socialites were named and others weren’t, but from the back-and-forth I deduced they were people my parents knew and were interesting to my mother because they were richer than we were. My mother envied them—while also disapproving of their wealth, a rebuke clear from the way she sometimes talked about their “falling into the papers.” It was not my mother’s unique view. That the rich should not flaunt themselves in public was a belief then held just as strongly by most İstanbullus.
From time to time they even said it out loud; it was not, however, a cry for humility or an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of pride; neither did it suggest, as it were, a Protestant work ethic. It simply sprang from a fear of the state. For centuries, ruling Ottoman pashas had eyed all other rich persons—most of whom were themselves powerful pashas—as threats and would seize any excuse to kill them and confiscate their property. As for the Jews, those who were in a position to loan money to the state during the last centuries of the empire—th
ey shared with the Greeks and Armenians who gained prominence as businessmen and artisans the bitter memory of the punitive Wealth Tax imposed on them during the Second World War, paving the way for the seizure of their land and factories, and of the riots of September 5 and 6, 1955, during which so many of their shops were pillaged and burned.
So the big Anatolian landowners and the second-generation industrialists now pouring into Istanbul were quite daring to flaunt their riches. Naturally, those still fearful of the state, or people like us who had failed through our own ineptitude to preserve our wealth for more than a generation, found such daring not just foolish but vulgar. One such second-generation industrialist, Sakıp Sabancı, now the head of Turkey’s second richest family, was derided for his nouveau-riche ostentation, his odd opinions, and his unconventional behavior (though none of the papers wrote about it, for fear of losing advertising revenue), but it was his provincial courage in the 1990s that allowed him to follow Henry Clay Frick’s example and turn his home into Istanbul’s finest private museum.
Nevertheless, the anxieties that gripped the Istanbul rich of my childhood were not unfounded, their discretion not unwise. The state bureaucracy maintained a greedy interest in all aspects of production, and because it was impossible to become seriously wealthy without entering into deals with politicians, everyone assumed that even the “well-meaning” rich had tainted pasts. After my grandfather’s money ran out and my father was forced to work for many years for Vehbi Koç, the head of Turkey’s other leading industrialist family, he did not content himself with making fun of his boss’s provincial accent or the intellectual shortcomings of his less-than-brilliant son. In his moments of anger, my father would say that the family had made its fortune during the Second World War and had not a little to do with the famines and food lines that the country had had to endure during that period.
Through my childhood and youth, I never saw the rich of Istanbul as beneficiaries of their own ingenuity but as people who long ago had seized some opportunity to bribe someone in the state bureaucracy and then struck it rich. Until the 1990s, when the fear of the state abated, I assumed that most of them had made quick fortunes and devoted the rest of their lives to keeping their money well hidden, while at the same time seeking to legitimize their social standing. Since no intellectual application was required to get rich, these people had no interest in books or reading or even chess. This was a far cry from the meritocratic Ottoman period, when only by dint of an education could a man of humble background hope to rise through the ranks, get rich, and become a pasha. With the closing of the Sufi tekkes in the early years of the Republic, the repudiation of religious literature, the alphabet revolution, and the voluntary shift to European culture, all mobility through acculturation ended.
As the new rich came (with good reason) to fear the state, these timid families had only one way to advance themselves, and that was to show themselves to be more European than they really were. So they amused themselves by going to Europe and buying clothes, luggage, and the latest appliances (everything from juicers to electric shavers), taking great pride in these trappings. Sometimes an older Istanbul family would set up a business and strike it rich again (as happened to a famous columnist and newspaper owner who was a close friend of my paternal aunt). But they had already learned their lesson; even if they had broken no laws and offended no official and had no reason to fear the state, it was not uncommon for such people to sell everything and move to a nondescript London flat, from which they’d stare either at the neighbors’ walls across the way or their inscrutable English television, which they never quite understood, but somehow this was still an improvement over the uncertain comforts of an apartment in Istanbul with a Bosphorus view. Often, too, the western longing produced tales with echoes of Anna Karenina: a rich family would hire a foreign nanny to teach the children her language, only for the man of the house to run off with her.
The Ottoman state had no hereditary aristocracy, but with the coming of the Republic, the rich worked hard to be seen as its rightful heirs. So in the 1980s, when they suddenly became interested in the last remnants of Ottoman culture, they struggled to collect the few “antiques” that had survived the burning of the wooden yalis. Since we had once been rich and were still seen to be, we loved to gossip about how the rich had made their fortunes (my favorite story was the one about the man who had brought in a boat full of sugar in the middle of the First World War, becoming rich overnight and enjoying the proceeds until the day he died). Perhaps it was the glamour of such stories, or perhaps it was the startled tragic air or the desperate uncertainty as to what to do with their sudden wealth and how to keep it from vanishing as mysteriously as it had come; whatever the reason, whenever I met someone rich—a distant relation, a family friend, a childhood friend of one of my parents, a Nişantaşı neighbor, or one of those soulless and uncultured rich people who ended up in “Have You Heard?”—I had the insatiable urge to probe their empty lives.
There was a childhood friend of my father’s, a chic avuncular man who had inherited a great deal of property from his father (a vizier in the last years of the Ottoman Empire); the income he derived from his inheritance was so large that—and I could never tell if people were praising or damning him when they said it—“he never had to work for a day in his life.” This man did little but read the paper and watch the streets from his Nişantaşı apartment. In the afternoon he would take a very long time shaving and combing his mustache; then, donning an elegant outfit made in Paris or Milan, he would set out on his one mission of the day, which was to sip tea for two hours in the lobby or the pastry shop of the Hilton Hotel. As he once explained to my father with raised eyebrows, as if he were sharing a great secret, and wearing a mournful face to suggest deep spiritual pain, “Because it’s the only place in the city that feels like Europe.” From the same generation there was a friend of my mother’s, a very rich and very fat woman who, in spite of (or perhaps because of) looking an awful lot like a monkey herself, would greet everyone with the words, “How are you, monkey?”—an affectation my brother and I loved to imitate. She spent most of her life rejecting suitors, complaining they weren’t refined or European enough; when she was approaching fifty, she gave up on men who were too rich or too elegant to want a woman as plain as she and married a “very distinguished, very refined” thirty-year-old policeman. After a short spell, this marriage failed, and she spent the rest of her life advising girls of her class to marry only rich men who were their social equals.
The westernized rich of the last Ottoman generation by and large failed to capitalize on their inherited wealth and share in the great commercial and industrial boom that Istanbul was entering. All too often, scions of these old families not only refused to sit down at a table to do business with the “vulgar businessmen” who tempered their swindling and deception with a capacity for “true and sincere” friendship and community spirit, they refused even to drink tea with them. These old Ottoman families were also (without knowing it) being swindled by the lawyers they hired to protect their interests and collect their rents. Whenever we went to visit members of this dying breed in their mansions or their Bosphorus yalis, it was clear to me that most of them usually preferred their cats and dogs to people, so I always particularly valued the special affection they showed me. When, five or ten years later, the dealer Rafi Portakal would display in his antiques shop the same furniture that had surrounded these people—lecterns, divans, tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, oil paintings, framed calligraphy, old rifles, historic swords passed down from their grandfathers, tablets, and huge clocks—I remembered fondly the diminished lives they had led. They all had hobbies and eccentricities that distracted them from their troubled relations with the outside world. I remember one frail man who showed my father his collection of clocks and his collection of weapons as surreptitiously as one might reveal a cache of erotic drawings. When one aged aunt warned us to make a detour around a small but dangerous collapsed wa
ll on our way down to the boat-house, we were amused to remember she’d used the same words when we visited her five years earlier; another would always whisper, to keep the servants from hearing her precious secrets; a third would annoy my mother by rudely asking where my paternal grandmother was from. One of my fat maternal uncles got into the habit of taking guests around his house as if it were a museum; he would then discuss seven-year-old corruption scandals and disasters as if they’d been reported only that morning in Hürriyet and had left the entire city agog. As we negotiated these strange rituals, as I tried to catch my mother’s eye to make sure we weren’t misstepping, it would slowly dawn on me that we were not important people in the eyes of these rich relatives of ours who were working so hard to impress us, and then I’d suddenly want to leave their yali and go home. It was when someone got my father’s name wrong or mistook my grandfather for a provincial farmer or—as I often saw among the reclusive rich—exaggerated some small inconsequential annoyance—the maid who brought sugar cubes instead of loose sugar as requested; the servant girl wearing socks of a disagreeable color; the speedboat that came too close to the house—that I sensed the difference in our social standing. But for all their snobberies, the sons and grandsons—boys my age with whom I had to be friendly—were uniformly considered “difficult”; many would end up arguing with the fishermen in the coffeehouse, beating up priests in the French school downtown, or (if they weren’t locked up in a Swiss asylum) committing suicide.
