The White Castle

by Orhan Pamuk

  His first impression was born of sheer frustration. By now, because he could not concentrate on any subject for long, he passed his time like a spoiled and stupid child who cannot amuse itself, wandering from room to room in the house, up and down the staircase from one floor to the other, gazing absently from this window or that. When he would pass by me during this endless, maddening to and fro that made the floors of the wooden house groan and creak in protest, I knew he hoped I would distract him with some joke, some novel idea or encouraging word. But despite my sense of defeat, the anger and hatred I felt for him had lost none of their force and I would not respond. Even when, to get some sort of answer out of me, he swallowed his pride and met my intractability humbly, with a few kind words, I wouldn’t say what he longed to hear; when he announced he had information from the palace that could be favourably interpreted, or was struck by a new idea that could be worth its weight in gold if he persisted and followed it up, I either pretended not to hear him or doused his enthusiasm at once by emphasizing the most insipid thing in what he said. I enjoyed watching him struggle in the vacuum of his own mind.

  But later he found in this very emptiness the new idea he needed; perhaps because he was left to his own devices, perhaps because his mind, unable to be still, could not escape its own rampant impatience. It was then that I gave him an answer – I wanted to encourage him – my interest too was aroused; perhaps while this was going on I even thought he cared for me. One evening when Hoja’s steps creaked through the house to my room and he said, as if asking the most ordinary sort of question, ‘Why am I what I am?’ I wanted to encourage him and tried to answer.

  I replied that I didn’t know why he was what he was, adding that this question was often asked by ‘them’, and asked more and more every day. When I said this I had nothing to support it, no particular theory in mind, nothing at all but a desire to answer his question as he wished, perhaps because I sensed instinctively that he would enjoy the game. He was surprised. He eyed me with curiosity, he wanted me to continue; when I remained silent he couldn’t restrain himself, he wanted me to repeat what I’d said: So they ask this question? When he saw me smile in approval he immediately became angry: he wasn’t asking this because he thought ‘they’ asked it, he’d asked it on his own without knowing they did, he couldn’t care less what they did. Then, in a strange tone he said, ‘It’s as if a voice were singing in my ear.’ This mysterious voice reminded him of his beloved father, he’d heard a voice like that too before he died, but his song had been different. ‘Mine keeps singing the same refrain,’ he said, and seeming a bit embarrassed, added suddenly, ‘I am what I am, I am what I am, ah!’

  I almost laughed out loud, but controlled the impulse. If this were a harmless joke then he should laugh too; he wasn’t laughing; but he realized that he was on the verge of appearing ridiculous. I had to show that I was aware both of the absurdity and the meaning of the refrain; for this time I wanted him to go on. I said the refrain should be taken seriously; of course, the singer he heard was none other than himself. He must have found some hint of ridicule in what I said, for he became angry: he too knew that; what mystified him was why the voice kept on repeating this phrase!

  He was so agitated that of course I didn’t tell him, but frankly, this is what I was thinking: I knew, not only from my own experience but from that of my brothers and sisters, that the boredom selfish children experience could lead either to productive results or to nonsense. I said it was not why he heard this refrain, but what it meant that he should consider. Perhaps it also occurred to me then that he might go mad for lack of anything to fix upon; and that I could escape the oppression of my own despair and cowardice by watching him. Then again, perhaps this time I would genuinely be able to respect him; if he could do this, something real might now happen in both our lives. ‘So what should I do?’ he asked helplessly at last. I told him he should think about why he was what he was, and that I did not say this because I presumed to give him advice; I wouldn’t be able to help him, this was something he had to do for himself. ‘So what should I do, look in the mirror?’ he said sarcastically. But he didn’t seem any less upset. I said nothing, to give him time to think. ‘Should I look in the mirror?’ he repeated. Suddenly I was angry, I felt Hoja would never be able to achieve anything on his own. I wanted him to realize this, I wanted to tell him to his face that without me he could not think at all, but I didn’t dare; with an air of indifference I told him to go ahead and look in the mirror. No, it wasn’t courage I lacked, I just didn’t feel like it. He flew into a rage and slammed the door, shouting as he left: You are a fool.

  Three days later when I brought up the subject again and saw he still wanted to talk about ‘them’, it pleased me to continue the game; whatever might come of it, it gave me hope just to see him occupied with something. I said ‘they’ did look in the mirror, and in fact much more often than people here did. Not only the palaces of kings, princes, and noblemen, but the homes of ordinary people as well were full of mirrors carefully framed and hung upon the walls; it wasn’t only because of this but because ‘they’ constantly thought about themselves that ‘they’ had progressed in this respect. ‘In what?’ he asked, with an eagerness and innocence that surprised me. I thought he was taking what I said seriously, but then he grinned: ‘So you mean that they gaze in mirrors from morning till night!’ For the first time he was mocking my country and what I had left behind. Angrily, I searched for something to say to hurt him, and suddenly, without thinking, without believing it, I declared that only he could discover who he was, but he wasn’t man enough to try. It gave me pleasure to see his face contort with pain.

  But this pleasure would cost me dear. Not because he threatened to poison me; a few days later, he demanded that I demonstrate the courage I’d said he lacked. At first I tried to make a joke of it; of course, a person could no more discover who he was by thinking about it than by looking in a mirror; I’d said that in anger to annoy him; but he seemed not to believe me: he threatened to feed me less, even to lock me in the room if I did not prove my courage. I must work out who I was and write it down; he would see how it was done, see how much courage I had.

  5

  At first I wrote a few pages about my happy childhood with my brothers and sisters, my mother and grandmother on our estate at Empoli. I didn’t know just why I chose to write about these memories in particular as a way of discovering why I was who I was; perhaps I was prompted by the longing I must have felt for the happiness of that life I’d lost; and Hoja had so pressed me after what I’d said in anger that I was obliged, just as I am now, to dream up something my reader would find believable and to try to make the details enjoyable. But at first Hoja didn’t like what I wrote; anyone could write things like this, he said; he doubted this was what people thought about when they contemplated themselves in the mirror, for this could not be the courage I had said he lacked. His response was the same when he read about how I suddenly came face to face with a bear on a hunting expedition in the Alps with my father and brothers, and we’d stood still staring at one another for a long time, or how I’d felt at the deathbed of our beloved coachman who was trampled by his own horses before our eyes: anyone could write these things.

  To this I replied that people there did no more than this, what I’d said before was exaggerated, I’d been angry, and Hoja should not expect more of me. But he wasn’t listening; I dreaded being locked in the room and so continued writing down the images that came to mind. In this way I spent two months reviving and reviewing, sometimes painfully, sometimes happily, a host of memories of this kind, all minor, but pleasant to remember. I imagined and relived the good and the bad experiences I’d had before I became a slave, and in the end I realized I had enjoyed the exercise. Now Hoja didn’t have to force me to write; every time he said he was not satisfied, I’d go on to another memory, to another tale I’d decided on beforehand to write down.

  Much later, when I noticed that Hoja enjoyed re
ading what I’d written as well, I began to watch for an opportunity to draw him into this activity. To prepare the ground I spoke of certain experiences I’d had in childhood: I told him about the terrors of an endless, sleepless night following the death of my closest friend with whom I’d got into the habit of thinking the same thing at the same time, how I feared that I might be presumed dead and be buried alive with him. I didn’t expect he would be so taken by this! Soon after I dared to tell him a dream I’d had: my body separated itself from me, joined with a look-alike of mine whose face was veiled by shadows, and the two of them conspired together against me. At the time Hoja had been saying he was hearing that ridiculous refrain again and more intensely. When I saw that, as I’d hoped, he was affected by the dream, I insisted that this kind of writing was something he too should try. It would distract him from this endless anticipation, and he would discover what it was that truly set him apart from his fools. He was called to the palace from time to time, but there were no encouraging developments there. At first he resisted, but when I pressed him, he was curious, embarrassed and fed up enough to say he would try it. He was afraid of being found ridiculous and even jokingly asked me: just as we wrote together, would we also look at ourselves in the mirror together?

  When he said he wanted us to write together, I had no idea he would actually want to sit together at the table. I had thought that when he started to write I would get back to the idle freedom of an indolent slave. I was wrong. He said we must sit at the two ends of the table and write facing one another: our minds, confronted by these dangerous subjects, would drift, trying to escape, and only in this way would we start on the path, only in this way could we strengthen each other with the spirit of discipline. But these were excuses; I knew he was afraid to be left alone, to feel his own solitude while he was thinking. I saw this also by the way he began to mumble, just loud enough for me to hear, when he came face to face with the blank page; he was waiting for me to approve beforehand what he was going to write. After scrawling a few sentences, he showed them to me with the innocent humility and eagerness of a child: were these things worth writing about, he wondered? Naturally I gave my approval.

  Thus in the space of two months I learned more about his life than I’d been able to learn in eleven years. His family had lived in Edirne, a city we later visited with the sovereign. His father died very young. He couldn’t be sure he remembered his face. His mother had been a hard-working woman. She remarried after his father died. She had two children by her first husband, one girl and one boy. By her second husband she’d had four sons. This man had been a quilter. The child most inclined to study had of course been himself. I learned that he also had been the most intelligent, cleverest, most diligent, and the strongest of his brothers; he had also been the most honest. He remembered all of them with hatred, except for his sister, but he wasn’t quite sure it was worth writing all of this down. I encouraged him, perhaps because I already sensed then that I would later adopt his manner and his life-story as my own. There was something in his language and his turn of mind that I loved and wanted to master. A person should love the life he has chosen enough to call it his own in the end; and I do. He thought all his brothers were fools, of course; they only sought him out to get money from him; he, however, had given himself over to study. Accepted at the Selimiye seminary, he’d been falsely accused just as he was about to graduate. He never referred to this incident again, nor did he ever speak of women. At the very beginning he wrote that he’d once been on the point of marrying, then angrily ripped up everything he’d written. There was a filthy rain falling that night. It was the first of many terrifying nights I would later endure. He insulted me, said what he’d written was a lie, and began all over again; and since he required that I sit facing him and write also, I went for two days without sleep. He no longer took any notice of what I wrote; I sat at the other end of the table, copying what I had written, without bothering to use my imagination, and watched him out of the corner of my eye.

  A few days later, on that expensive, immaculate paper imported from the East, he began with the title ‘Why I Am What I Am’, but under this heading, every morning, he wrote nothing but reasons why ‘they’ were so inferior and stupid. Still, I did learn that after his mother’s death he’d been cheated, had come to Istanbul with what money he salvaged from his inheritance, stayed at a dervish house for a while but left when he decided that all the people there were base and false. I wanted to get him to tell me more about his experiences at the dervish house; I thought that breaking away from them had been a real success for him: he’d been able to set himself apart from them. When I said this he became angry, said I wanted to hear sordid things so I could use them against him some day; I had already learned too much anyway, and on top of this it made him suspicious that I wanted to learn those details – here he used one of those sexual expressions considered coarse. Then he talked for a long time about his sister Semra, of how virtuous she was and how wicked her husband had been; he spoke of his regret at not seeing her for so many years, but when I showed interest in this he became suspicious again, and passed on to another topic: after he’d spent what money he had on books, he did nothing but study for a long time, later found work as a scribe here and there – but people were so shameless – and then he remembered Sadik Pasha, whose death had just been reported from Erzinjan. Hoja had met him for the first time then, and immediately had caught his eye with his love of science. The pasha had found Hoja his teaching job at the primary school, but he was just another fool. At the end of this bout of writing, which lasted a month, one night, ashamed, he tore to shreds everything he’d written. It’s because of that, as I try to reconstruct his scribblings and my own experiences, relying only on my imagination, I’m not frightened any more of being overwhelmed by details that fascinate me so much. In a last burst of enthusiasm he wrote a few pages organized under the heading ‘Fools I Have Known Well’, but then flew into a rage: all of this writing had got him nowhere; he’d learned nothing new, and he still didn’t know why he was what he was. I had deceived him, I’d made him think pointlessly about things he didn’t want to remember. He was going to punish me.

  I don’t know why this idea of punishment, which recalled our first days together, so preoccupied him. Sometimes I thought my cowardly obedience had made him bold. Yet the moment he spoke of punishment, I made the decision to stand up to him. When Hoja had become completely fed up with writing about the past, he paced up and down the house for a while. Then he came to me again and said it was thought itself that we must write down: just as man could view his appearance in a mirror, he could examine his essence within his own thoughts.

  The bright symmetry of the analogy excited me as well. We sat down immediately at the table. This time I too, though half ironically, wrote ‘Why I Am What I Am’ across the top of the page. Right away, since it came to mind as something characteristic of my personality, I began to write down a childhood memory of my shyness. Then, when I read what Hoja was writing about the wickedness of others, I had an idea which at that moment I believed to be important, and spoke up. Hoja should write about his own faults too. After reading what I’d written, he insisted that he was not a coward. I argued that though he wasn’t a coward, he had his negative sides like everyone else, and if he delved into them he would find his true self. I had done this, and he wanted to be like me; I could sense this in him. I saw him become angry when I said this, but he controlled himself and, trying to be rational, said that it was the others who were evil; not everyone, certainly, but it was because most people were imperfect and negative that everything was wrong in the world. At this I disagreed, saying that there was much in him that was wicked, even vile, and that he should recognize this. I added defiantly that he was worse than I was.

  That was how those absurd and terrifying days of evil began! He’d tie me to the chair at my table and sit down facing me, ordering me to write what he wanted, though he no longer knew what this was. He ha
d nothing in mind but that analogy: just as a person could view his external self in the mirror, he should be able to observe the interior of his mind in his thoughts. He said I knew how to do this but was withholding the secret from him. While Hoja sat across from me, waiting for me to write down this secret, I filled the sheets in front of me with stories exaggerating my own faults: I wrote with delight about the petty thefts of my childhood, the jealous lies, the way I schemed in order to make myself more loved than my brothers and sisters, the sexual indiscretions of my youth, stretching the truth more and more as I went along. The greedy curiosity with which Hoja read these tales, and the queer pleasure he derived from them, shocked me; afterwards he would become even more angry, intensifying the cruel treatment he had already let go beyond bounds. Perhaps it was because he could not tolerate the sins of a past he already sensed he would make his own. He began to beat me outright. After reading about one of my transgressions, he’d shout ‘You rogue!’ and bring his fist down upon my back with a vehemence that was only half in jest; once or twice, unable to control himself, he slapped me in the face. Perhaps he did these things because he was summoned even less frequently to the palace, because he had now convinced himself that he would find nothing to distract him other than the two of us, perhaps it was out of sheer frustration. But the more he read about my sins and increased his petty, infantile punishments, the more I became wrapped in a peculiar sense of security: for the first time, I began to think I had him in the palm of my hand.