by Orhan Pamuk
After he got rid of the visitor Hoja had a tantrum. I concluded that the complacency he derived from sharing the same attitudes that others held, or from pretending to do so, had come to an end. Wanting to deal him one last blow, I said that those who did not fear the plague were as stupid as this fellow. He became apprehensive, but asserted that he did not fear the plague either. Whatever the reason, I decided he had said this sincerely. He was extremely nervous, could not find anything to do with his hands, and kept repeating his refrain, lately forgotten, about the ‘fools’. After nightfall he lit the lamp, placed it at the centre of the table, and said we would sit down. We must write.
Like two bachelors telling each other’s fortunes to pass the time on endless winter nights, we sat at the table face to face, scratching out something or other on the empty pages before us. The absurdity of it! In the morning when I read what Hoja had written as his dream I found him even more ridiculous than I did myself. He had written down a dream in imitation of mine, but as everything about it made clear, this was a fantasy which had never been dreamt at all: he had us as brothers! He’d found it appropriate to play the role of elder to me while I listened obediently to his scientific lectures. The next morning as we ate breakfast he asked what I made of the neighbours’ gossip about our being twins. This question pleased me but did not flatter my pride; I said nothing. Two days later he woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that this time he had really dreamt that dream he wrote down. Perhaps it was true, but for some reason I didn’t care. The next night he confessed he was afraid to die of plague.
Oppressed by being shut up in the house, I’d gone out into the streets at twilight: children were climbing trees in a garden and had left their colourful shoes on the ground; chattering women in line at the fountains no longer fell silent as I walked by; the market-places were full of shoppers; there were street brawls and people trying to break them up and others enjoying the spectacle. I tried to make myself believe that the epidemic had played itself out, but when I saw the coffins emerging one after another from the courtyard of the Beyazit Mosque I panicked and rushed home. As I entered my room Hoja called out: ‘Come and have a look at this, will you.’ His shirt unbuttoned, he was pointing to a small swelling, a red spot below his navel. ‘There are so many insects around.’ I came closer and looked carefully, it was a small red spot, slightly swollen, like a large insect bite, but why was he showing it to me? I was afraid to bring my face any nearer. ‘An insect bite,’ said Hoja, ‘don’t you think?’ He touched the swelling with the tip of his finger. ‘Or is it a flea bite?’ I was silent, I didn’t say I had never seen a flea bite like that.
I found some excuse to stay in the garden until sunset. I realized I must not stay in this house any longer, but I had no place in mind where I could go. And that spot really did look like an insect bite, it was not as prominent and broad as a plague bubo; but a little later my thoughts took another turn: perhaps because I was wandering in the garden among the flourishing plants, it seemed to me that the red spot would swell up within two days, open like a flower, and burst, that Hoja would die, painfully. I told myself it might be an abscess caused by indigestion, but no, it looked like an insect bite, I thought I’d remember which insect it was in a moment, it had to be one of those huge nocturnal flying insects which thrive in tropical climates, but the name of the phantom-like creature would not even rise to the tip of my tongue.
When we sat down to dinner Hoja tried to pretend he was in good spirits, he joked, teased me, but he couldn’t keep this up for long. Much later, after we had risen from the dinner we ate without speaking and the night, windless and silent, had settled in, Hoja said, ‘I feel uneasy. My thoughts are heavy. Let’s sit at the table and write.’ Apparently this was the only way he could distract himself.
But he couldn’t write. He sat idly watching me out of the corner of his eye while I wrote contentedly. ‘What are you writing?’ I read to him about how impatient I’d been returning home for vacation in a one-horse carriage after my first year of studies in engineering. But I had loved both the school and my friends; I read to him how I’d missed them while I sat alone on the bank of a stream reading the books I’d taken with me on vacation. After a short silence Hoja, as if revealing a secret, whispered suddenly: ‘Do they always live happily like that there?’ I thought he’d regret it as soon as he asked, but he was still looking at me with childish curiosity. I whispered too: ‘I was happy!’ A shadow of envy passed over his face, but it was not threatening. Shyly, haltingly, he told his story.
When he was twelve years old living in Edirne, there had been a period when he used to go with his mother and sister to the hospital of Beyazit Mosque to visit his mother’s father who suffered from a stomach ailment. In the morning his mother would leave his brother, who was still too young to walk, at the neighbours, take Hoja, his sister, and a pot of pudding she’d prepared earlier, and they would set out together; the journey was short but delightful, along a road shaded with poplar trees. His grandfather would tell them stories. Hoja loved those stories, but loved the hospital more and would run off to wander through its courtyards and halls. On one visit he listened to music being played for the mental patients, under the lantern of a great dome; there was also the sound of water, flowing water; he’d wander through other rooms where strange, colourful bottles and jars shone brightly; another time he lost his way, started to cry, and they’d taken him to every room in the whole hospital one by one before finding his grandfather Abdullah Efendi’s room; sometimes his mother cried, sometimes she listened with her daughter to the old man’s stories. Then they’d leave with the empty pot grandfather had given back to them, but before they reached the house his mother would buy them halva and whisper, ‘Let’s eat it before anyone sees us.’ They’d go to a secret place by a stream under the poplars where the three of them would sit with their toes dangling in the water, eating where no one could see them.
When Hoja finished talking a silence descended, making us uneasy while bringing us closer together with an unaccountable feeling of brotherhood. For a long time Hoja ignored the tension in the air. Later, after the heavy door of a nearby house was thoughtlessly slammed, he said he’d first felt his interest in science then, inspired by the patients and those colourful bottles, jars, and scales that brought them health. But after his grandfather died they did not go there again. Hoja had always dreamed he would grow up and return alone, but one year the Tunja River which flows through Edirne flooded without warning, the patients were removed from their beds, the rooms were filled with filthy, turbid water and when it finally receded that beautiful hospital remained buried for years under an accursed, stinking mud that could not be cleaned away.
As Hoja again fell silent our moment of intimacy was lost. He’d risen from the table, out of the corner of my eye I saw his shadow pacing the room, then taking the lamp from the middle of the table he stepped behind me, and I could see neither Hoja nor his shadow; I wanted to turn around and look but didn’t; it was as if I were afraid, expecting something evil. A moment later, hearing the rustle of clothes being taken off, I turned around apprehensively. He was standing in front of the mirror, naked from the waist up, carefully examining his chest and abdomen in the light of the lamp. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘what kind of pustule is this?’ I remained silent. ‘Come and look at this, will you?’ I didn’t stir. He shouted, ‘Come here, I say!’ Fearfully I approached him like a student about to be punished.
I’d never been so close to his naked body; I didn’t like it. At first I wanted to believe it was for this reason that I could not approach him, but I knew I was afraid of the pustule. He knew it as well. Yet, wanting to conceal my fear I brought my head near and muttered something, my eyes fixed upon that swelling, that inflammation, with the air of a doctor. ‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ Hoja said at last. Trying to prove that I was not, I brought my head even closer. ‘You’re afraid it’s a plague bubo.’ I pretended not to have heard, and was about
to say an insect had bitten him, probably the same strange insect that bit me too once, somewhere, but the creature’s name still did not come to mind. ‘Touch it, will you!’ said Hoja. ‘Without touching it how will you know? Touch me!’
When he saw I wouldn’t, he brightened up. He stretched out the fingers with which he’d touched the swelling towards my face. When he saw me start back with revulsion he laughed out loud, made fun of me for being afraid of a simple insect bite, but this merriment did not last long. ‘I’m afraid to die,’ he said suddenly. It was as if he were speaking of something else; he was more angry than ashamed; it was the anger of someone who felt betrayed. ‘Don’t you have a pustule like this? Are you sure? Take off your shirt, now!’ At his insistence I pulled off my shirt like a child who hates to be washed. The room was hot, the window was shut, but a cool breeze blew in from somewhere; perhaps it was the coldness of the mirror that made my flesh creep, I don’t know. Ashamed of how I must look, I stepped outside of the mirror’s frame. Now I saw Hoja’s face reflected obliquely as he brought his head near my torso in the mirror; he’d bent that huge head everyone said resembled mine straight towards my body. He’s doing this to poison my spirit, I thought all of a sudden; but I’d never done that to him, on the contrary, all these years I’d taken pride in being his teacher. Absurd as it was, for a moment I believed that bearded head, grotesque in the shadows of the lamplight, intended to suck my blood! Apparently I’d been much affected by those horror stories I’d loved to listen to as a child. While thinking this I felt his fingers on my abdomen; I wanted to run away, wanted to hit him over the head with something. ‘You don’t have one,’ he said. He went behind me and examined my armpits, my neck, the backs of my ears. ‘There are none here either, it seems the insect has not bitten you.’
Putting his hands on my shoulders he came forward and stood next to me. He acted like a dear old friend who had shared my deepest secrets. Squeezing the nape of my neck from both sides with his fingers, he pulled me towards him. ‘Come, let us look in the mirror together.’ I looked, and under the raw light of the lamp saw once more how much we resembled one another. I recalled how I’d been overwhelmed by this when I’d first seen him as I waited at Sadik Pasha’s door. At that time I had seen someone I must be; and now I thought he too must be someone like me. The two of us were one person! This now seemed to me an obvious truth. It was as if I were bound fast, my hands tied, unable to budge. I made a movement to save myself, as if to verify that I was myself. I quickly ran my hands through my hair. But he imitated my gesture and did it perfectly, without disturbing the symmetry of the mirror image at all. He also imitated my look, the attitude of my head, he mimicked my terror I could not endure to see in the mirror but from which, transfixed by fear, I could not tear my eyes away; then he was gleeful like a child who teases a friend by mimicking his words and movements. He shouted that we would die together! What nonsense, I thought. But I was also afraid. It was the most terrifying of all the nights I spent with him.
Then he claimed he’d been afraid of the plague all along, everything he’d done had been done in order to test me, as when he’d watched Sadik Pasha’s executioners lead me away to kill me, or when people had likened us to one another. Then he said he had taken possession of my spirit; just as a moment before he’d mirrored my movements, whatever I was thinking now, he knew it, and whatever I knew, he was thinking it! When he asked me what I was thinking at this moment, I couldn’t think of anything but him and said I couldn’t think of anything at all, but he wasn’t listening to me, he was talking not to discover something but only to frighten me, to play upon his own fear, to make me share the burden of that fear. I sensed that the more he felt his loneliness the more he wanted to do me harm; as he ran his fingers over our faces, as he tried to bewitch me with the horror of that uncanny resemblance and himself grew even more excited and agitated than I was, I thought that he wanted to do something evil. I told myself that he kept holding me in front of the mirror, squeezing the nape of my neck, because his heart couldn’t bear to commit this evil right away, but he seemed neither absurd nor helpless. He was right, I too wanted to say and do the things he said and did, I envied him because he could take action when I could not, because he could play upon the fear in the plague and the mirror.
But despite the intensity of my fear, although I believed I’d just seen things about myself I’d never noticed before, I somehow could not shake off the feeling that it was all a game. His fingers on my neck had relaxed, but I did not step out of the frame of the mirror. ‘Now I am like you,’ he said. ‘I know your fear. I have become you!’ I understood what he was saying but tried to convince myself that this prophecy, half of which I now have no doubt is true, was silly and childish. He claimed he could see the world as I did; ‘they’, he was saying again, now at last he understood how ‘they’ thought, how ‘they’ felt. Letting his gaze wander beyond the mirror-frame, he talked for a while, glancing around in the shadows at the table, the glasses, the chairs and objects half illuminated by the lamplight. He declared he could now say things he couldn’t before because he had not been able to see them, but I thought he was mistaken: the words were the same, and so were the objects. The only thing new was his fear; no, not that either; the form of his experience of it; but it seemed to me that even this, which I cannot clearly describe now, was something he put on in front of the mirror, a new trick of his. And unwillingly putting aside this game too, his mind seemed to whirl back to dwell upon that red pustule, asking: was it an insect or was it plague?
He spoke for a while about how he wanted to pick up from where I had left off. We were still standing half-naked in front of the mirror. He was going to take my place, I his, and to accomplish this it would be enough for us to exchange clothes and for him to cut his beard while I left mine to grow. This thought made our resemblance in the mirror even more horrible, and my nerves grew taut as I heard him say that I would then make a freedman of him: he spoke exultantly of what he would do when he returned to my country in my place. I was terrified to realize he remembered everything I had told him about my childhood and youth, down to the smallest detail, and from these details had constructed an odd and fantastical land to his own taste. My life was beyond my control, it was being dragged elsewhere in his hands, and I felt there was nothing for me to do but passively watch what happened to me from the outside, as if I were dreaming. But the trip he was going to take to my country as me and the life he was going to live there had a strangeness and naïveté that prevented me from believing it completely. At the same time I was surprised by the logic in the details of his fantasy: I felt like saying that this too could have been, my life could have been lived like this. Then I understood I’d sensed something more profound about Hoja’s life for the first time, but wasn’t able to say what this was just yet. All I could do, as I listened in confusion to what ‘I’ would do in my old world I’d longed for all these years, was to forget the fear of plague.
But this didn’t last long. Hoja now wanted me to say what I would do when I took his place. My nerves were so exhausted from holding myself rigid in that bizarre pose, trying to believe we didn’t look alike and that the swelling was only an insect bite, that nothing at all came to mind. When he insisted, I remembered I’d once planned to write my memoirs when I returned to my country: when I said I might one day make a good story of his adventures, he looked at me in disgust. I didn’t know him as well as he knew me – in fact not at all! Shoving me out of the way, he stood alone in front of the mirror: when he took my place he would decide what would happen to me! He said the swelling was a plague bubo; I was going to die. He described how horribly I would suffer before I died; the fear, for which I was unprepared since I had not yet realized it would come, would be worse than death. While he was saying how I would be strangled by the torments of the disease, Hoja had stepped out of the mirror’s frame; when I looked again he was stretched out on his bed that he had rolled out untidily on the floor, describing th
e torments I would suffer. His hand was on his belly, as if, it occurred to me, to touch the pain he was describing. Just then he called out, and when I, trembling, went to his side, I immediately regretted it; he tried to lay his hand on me again. Whatever the reason, I now thought it was just an insect bite, but still I was afraid.