The White Castle

by Orhan Pamuk

  According to Hoja we were gradually influencing him, but I no longer believed we would succeed. Hoja would obtain his promise regarding a new weapon or the establishment of an observatory or a house of sciences, and after nights of enthusiastically dreaming up projects, months would pass without his speaking again seriously even once about these subjects with the sultan. A year after the plague, when Grand Vizier Koprulu died, Hoja found another pretext for optimism: the sultan had hesitated to put his plans into practice because he’d feared Koprulu’s power and personality, and now that the grand vizier had died and his son, less powerful than the father, had taken his place, it was time to expect courageous decisions from the sultan.

  But we spent the next three years waiting for them. What bewildered me now was not the inactivity of the sultan, who was dazzled by his dreams and his hunting excursions, but that Hoja could still fix his hopes on him. All these years I’d been waiting for the day when he would lose hope and become like me! Although he no longer talked as much as he used to about ‘victory’, and didn’t feel that exhilaration he had during the months following the plague, he was still able to keep alive his dream of a day when he would be able to manipulate the sultan with what he called his ‘grand plan’. He could always find an excuse: right after that great fire that reduced Istanbul to rubble, the sultan’s lavish investments in grand plans gave his enemies their opportunity of conspiring to put his brother on the throne; the sultan’s hands were tied for the time being because the army had left on an expedition to the land of the Huns; the following year we expected them to begin an offensive against the Germans; then there was still the completion of the New Valide Mosque on the shores of the Golden Horn where Hoja often went with the sovereign and his mother Turhan Sultana, and for which great sums were being spent; there were also those endless hunting excursions in which I didn’t take part. While I waited at home for Hoja to return from the hunt, I’d try to follow his instructions and come up with bright ideas for that ‘grand plan’ or ‘science’, dozing lazily as I turned the pages of his books.

  It no longer amused me even to daydream about these projects; I cared little about the results they would yield should they ever be realized. Hoja knew as well as I did that there was nothing of substance in our thoughts about astronomy, geography, or even natural science during the years we first knew each other; the clocks, instruments, and models had been forgotten in a corner and long since gone to rust. We had postponed everything till the day when we would practise this obscure business he called ‘science’; we had in hand not a grand plan that would save us from ruin, but only the dream of such a plan. In order to believe in this drab illusion, which didn’t deceive me at all, and to feel a sense of camaraderie with Hoja, I tried sometimes to look with his eyes at the pages I turned, or put myself in his place as thoughts occurred to me at random. When he’d return from the hunt, I’d act as if I had discovered a new truth about whatever subject he’d left me to wear out my mind on, and that we could change everything in its light: when I said: ‘The cause of the rising and falling of the sea is related to the heat of the rivers emptying into it’, or, ‘The plague is spread by tiny dust-motes in the air, and when the weather changes, it goes away’, or, ‘The Earth revolves around the sun, and the sun around the moon’, Hoja, changing out of his dusty hunting costume, always gave me the same answer, making me smile with love: ‘And the idiots here don’t even realize this!’

  Then he’d explode in a fit of rage which dragged me along in its fury, rave for hours about how the sovereign had chased after a stunned boar, or what nonsense it was for him to shed tears over a rabbit he’d had the greyhounds catch, admit against his will that what he’d said to the sultan during the hunt went in one ear and out the other, and ask rancorously over and over again when these idiots were going to realize the truth. Was it mere coincidence that so many fools were collected together in one place or was it inevitable? Why were they so stupid?

  Thus he gradually came to feel he must begin anew with the thing he called ‘science’, this time in order to understand the nature of their minds. Since it reminded me of those days I loved when we had sat at the same table and, despising each other, been so alike, I was as enthusiastic as Hoja to start again on our ‘science’, but after some initial attempts we understood that things were not as they had been.

  First of all, since I didn’t know how to lead him on or why I should, I just couldn’t pressure him. More important, I felt as if his sufferings and defeats were my own. On one occasion I reminded him of the folly of the people here, giving exaggerated examples, and made him feel he was as doomed to failure as they were – although I didn’t believe this – and then observed his reaction. Although he disagreed with me violently, saying failure was not an inevitability if we acted first and devoted ourselves to this task – if, for example, we could realize the project of that weapon, we could still turn the tide of this river of history that was pushing us backwards – and although he made me happy by speaking not of his plans but of ‘our’ plans, as he did when he despaired, nevertheless he dreaded the approach of an inescapable defeat. I thought of him as an orphaned child, I loved his rage and sadness that reminded me of my first years of slavery; and I wanted to be like him. While he paced up and down the room looking out at the filthy, muddy streets under a dark rain or the washed-out, trembling lamps still burning from a couple of houses on the shores of the Golden Horn, as if he were searching there for some indication of a new sign he could pin his hopes on, it seemed for a moment that what paced, agonized, inside this room was not Hoja, but my own youth. The person I once had been had left me and was gone, and the I that was now dozing in a corner jealously desired him, as if in him I could recover the enthusiasm I had lost.

  But I had also finally grown weary of this enthusiasm that never tired of regenerating itself. After Hoja became imperial astrologer his property at Gebze had increased and our income had grown. There was no need for him to do anything more than chat with the sultan now and then. Once in a while we’d go to Gebze, tour the dilapidated mills and villages where wild sheepdogs were the first to greet us, check on the income, rummage through the accounts and try to figure out how much the overseer had cheated us. We’d write entertaining treatises for the sovereign, sometimes laughing but most of the time groaning with boredom, and that was all we did. If I hadn’t insisted, he probably would not have arranged for those interludes when we’d lie with luxuriously perfumed prostitutes after idling away our days.

  What unnerved him more was that the sovereign, encouraged by the absence of the army and the pashas who abandoned the city for the German campaign or the Cretan fortress, and because his mother couldn’t force him to listen to her, had gathered around him again all those chattering wiseacres, buffoons, and impersonators who’d been driven from the palace. So as to set himself apart from these fakes whom he viewed with hatred and disgust and make them accept his superiority, Hoja was determined not to mingle with them, but when the sovereign insisted then he had no recourse but to talk with them and listen to their debates. After these gatherings discussing such questions as whether or not animals had souls, if so which ones, and which would go to heaven and which to hell, whether mussels were male or female, whether the sun that rises each morning is a new sun or simply the same sun that sets in the morning on the other side, he’d emerge despairing of the future, saying that if we did not take action the sultan would soon be beyond his grasp.

  Because he talked about ‘our’ plans, ‘our’ future, I happily went along with him. Once, to try to grasp what was on the sultan’s mind, we went through the notebooks I’d kept for years, our dreams, our memories. As if we were enumerating the contents of the drawers of a chest, we tried to tally the contents of the sovereign’s mind; the result was not at all encouraging: although Hoja was still able to chatter enthusiastically about the incredible weapon that would be our salvation, or about the mysteries to be solved still hidden in the recesses of our minds,
now he could no longer behave as if he didn’t anticipate some catastrophic defeat drawing near. For months we wore ourselves out discussing this subject.

  Did we understand ‘defeat’ to mean that the empire would lose all of its territories one by one? We’d lay out our maps on the table and mournfully determine first which territories, then which mountains or rivers would be lost. Or did defeat mean that people would change and alter their beliefs without noticing it? We imagined how everyone in Istanbul might rise from their warm beds one morning as changed people; they wouldn’t know how to wear their clothes, wouldn’t be able to remember what minarets were for. Or perhaps defeat meant to accept the superiority of others and try to emulate them: then he would recount some episode from my life in Venice, and we would imagine how acquaintances of ours here would act out my experiences dressed up with foreign hats on their heads and pants on their legs.

  As a last resort we decided to present the sultan with these dreams that made us forget how we passed the time as we invented them. We thought that perhaps all these visions of defeat, brought to life in the vivid shades of our fantasies, might spur him to action. So, during the silent, dark nights, we filled a book with all the visions that flowed from the fantasies of defeat and failure we had dreamed up with a sad, despairing joy: those paupers with heads bowed, muddy roads, buildings left half-finished, dark, strange streets, people pleading that everything might be as it once was while they recited prayers they didn’t understand, grieving mothers and fathers, unhappy men whose lives were too short for them to pass on to us what had been accomplished and recorded in other lands, machines left idle, souls whose eyes were moist from lamenting for the good old days, stray dogs reduced to skin and bones, villagers without any land, vagabonds wandering wildly through the city, illiterate Muslims wearing pants and all the wars ending in defeat. We put my faded memories in another part of the book: a few scenes from the happy and instructive experiences of my schooldays in Venice with my mother, father, and brothers and sisters: those who would conquer us live like this, and we must take action before they do and emulate them! In the conclusion our left-handed calligrapher copied out there was a well-measured verse which, using the metaphor of the cluttered cupboard Hoja loved so well, could be considered a door opening into the black puzzle of our minds’ intricate mysteries. The finely woven mist of this poetry, majestic and silent in its own way, caught the sad essence of all the books and treatises I had written with Hoja.

  Only a month after Hoja had submitted this book, the sultan ordered us to start work on that incredible weapon. We were bewildered by his command, and could never decide how far our success was due to this book.

  9

  When the sultan said, ‘Let us see this incredible weapon that will ruin our enemies’, perhaps he was testing Hoja, perhaps he’d had a dream he’d kept from Hoja, perhaps he wanted to show his domineering mother and the pashas who harassed him that the ‘philosophers’ he kept around were good for something, perhaps he thought Hoja might work another miracle after the plague, perhaps he’d truly been affected by those images of defeat we’d filled our book with, or perhaps it was the few actual military failures he’d suffered rather than our images of defeat which had alarmed him with the thought that, as he’d feared, those who wanted to put his brother in his place would drive him from the throne. We considered all these possibilities as we calculated in a daze the tremendous income that would come from the villages, caravansarays, and olive-groves the sovereign had granted us to finance the weapon.

  Hoja decided that we should be surprised only by our own surprise: were they false, all those stories he’d told the sultan year after year, the treatises and books we’d written, that we should now have doubts when he believed them? And there was more: the sovereign had begun to be curious about what went on in the darkness of our minds. Hoja excitedly asked me if this wasn’t the victory we’d waited for so long.

  It was, and this time we had begun work as partners; since I was less anxious than he was about the result, I too was happy. During the next six years, while he worked to develop the weapon, we were in constant danger. Not because we worked with gunpowder, but because we drew upon ourselves the envy of our enemies; because everyone waited impatiently for us to triumph or fail; and we were in danger because we, too, waited in fear for the same things.

  First we wasted a winter just working at the table. We were excited, enthusiastic, but had nothing more to hand than the idea of the weapon and the obscure and formless notions that haunted us when we imagined how it would crush our enemies. Later we decided to go out in the open air and experiment with gunpowder. Just as in the weeks of preparing the fireworks display, our men mixed the compounds in proportions we prescribed, then touched them off from a safe distance while we withdrew into the cool shadows under the tall trees. Curiosity-seekers came from the four corners of Istanbul to watch the colourful smoke exploding with various levels of noise. With time the crowds made a fairground of the field where we set up our tents, our targets and the short and long-barrelled cannon we had cast. One day at the end of summer, the sultan himself appeared without warning.

  We put on a display for him, rocking earth and sky with sound; one by one we displayed the cartridge cases and shells we’d had prepared with well-primed gunpowder mixtures, the plans for the moulds of new guns and long-barrelled cannon not yet cast, the timed firing mechanisms that seemed to detonate by themselves. He showed more interest in me than he did in them. Hoja had wanted to keep me away from the sultan at first but when the display began and the sovereign saw that I gave the orders as often as Hoja, that our men looked to me as much as to him, he became curious.

  As I was ushered into his presence for the second time after fifteen years, the sultan looked at me as if I were someone he’d met before but could not immediately place. He was like someone trying to identify a fruit he was tasting with his eyes shut. I kissed the hem of his skirt. He was not disturbed when he learned that I’d been here for twenty years but still had not become a Muslim. He had something else on his mind: ‘Twenty years?’ he said, ‘How strange!’ Then he suddenly asked me that question: ‘Is it you who are teaching him all this?’ He apparently hadn’t asked this in order to learn my answer, for he left our tattered tent which smelled of gunpowder and saltpetre, and was walking towards his beautiful white horse when suddenly he stopped, turned towards the two of us just then standing side by side, and smiled all at once as if he’d seen one of those matchless wonders God created to break the pride of mankind, to make them sense their absurdity – a perfect dwarf or twin brothers alike as peas in a pod.

  That night I was thinking about the sultan, but not in the way Hoja wanted me to. He continued to speak of him with disgust, but I had realized I would not be able to feel hatred or contempt: I was charmed by his informality, his sweetness, that air of a spoiled child who said whatever came to his mind. I wanted to be like him or to be his friend. After Hoja’s angry outburst I lay in my bed trying to sleep, reflecting that the sultan did not seem to be someone who deserved to be duped; I wanted to tell him everything. But what exactly was everything?

  My interest didn’t go unreciprocated. One day when Hoja grudgingly said that the sovereign expected me too that morning, I went with him. It was one of those autumn days that smell of the sea. We spent the whole morning by a lily-pond under the plane-trees in a great forest covered with fallen red leaves. The sultan wanted to talk about the wriggling frogs that filled the pond. Hoja wouldn’t indulge him, and only repeated a few clichés devoid of imagery and colour. The sultan didn’t even notice the rudeness that shocked me so much. He was more interested in me.

  So I spoke at length about the mechanics of how frogs jumped, about their circulatory systems, how their hearts continued to beat for a long time if carefully removed from their bodies, about the flies and insects they ate. I asked for pen and paper to demonstrate more clearly the stages an egg underwent to become a mature frog in the pond. The sovere
ign watched attentively while I drew pictures with the set of reed pens brought in a silver case inlaid with rubies. He listened with obvious pleasure to the stories I remembered about frogs and when I came to the part about the princess kissing the frog he gagged and made a sour face, but still did not resemble the foolish adolescent Hoja had described; he was more like a serious-minded adult who insisted on starting each day with science and art. At the end of those serene hours that Hoja frowned his way through, the sultan looked at the pictures of frogs in his hand and said ‘I had always suspected it was you who made up his stories. So you drew the pictures as well!’ Then he asked me about mustachioed frogs.

  This was how my relationship with the sultan began. Now I accompanied Hoja every time he went to the palace. In the beginning Hoja said little, I did most of the talking to the sultan. While I spoke with him about his dreams, his enthusiasms, his fears, about the past and future, I’d wonder to what degree this good-humoured, intelligent man in front of me resembled the sultan Hoja had talked about year after year. I could tell from the clever questions he asked, from his shrewdness, that ever since he’d received the books we presented to him the sultan had been speculating how much of Hoja was me, and how much of me was Hoja. As for Hoja, at that time he was too busy with the cannon and the long barrels he was trying to get cast to be interested in these speculations, which he found idiotic anyway.

  Six months after we began work on the cannon Hoja was alarmed to learn that the imperial master-general of artillery was furious that we were poking our noses into these affairs, and the man demanded either to be removed from office himself or to have crazy fools like us, who brought the craft of gunnery into disrepute with our belief that we were inventing something new, run out of Istanbul. But Hoja didn’t look for a compromise, even though the imperial master-general did seem willing to reach an agreement. A month later, when the sultan ordered us to develop the weapon in a way that would not involve cannon, Hoja was not terribly disturbed. We both knew now that the new guns and long-barrelled cannon we’d had cast were no better than the old sort that had been used for years.