The White Castle

by Orhan Pamuk

  With his childish, pudgy hand, he started pointing out cities on the map and after pronouncing each name syllable by syllable, wrote down carefully the descriptions I gave him. For every city he wanted a curious tale as well. Passing thirteen nights in thirteen cities in this way, we traversed from north to south the whole of this land I was seeing for the first time in my life, then returned to Istanbul by the boat from Sicily. Thus we spent the entire morning. He was so pleased with what I had told him that he decided to give me pleasure too, and told me about the tightrope-walkers disappearing into the skies of Acre, the woman of Konya who gave birth to an elephant, the blue-winged bulls by the shores of the Nile, pink cats, the clock-tower of Vienna, the false front teeth he’d had made there and which he now displayed in a grin, the talking cave on the beach of the Sea of Azov, the red ants of America. For some reason these stories prompted a strange melancholy, I felt like crying. The red glow of the setting sun flooded my room. When Evliya asked if I, too, had amazing tales like these, I thought I’d really surprise him and invited him and his servants to stay the night: I had a story that would delight him, about two men who had exchanged lives.

  The night after everyone else had retired to their rooms, after the silence we both waited for had fallen over the house, we returned to the room once more. It was then I first imagined this tale you are about to finish! The story I told seemed not to have been made-up but actually lived, it was as if someone else were softly whispering all these words to me, the sentences slowly following one another in sequence: ‘We were sailing from Venice to Naples when the Turkish fleet appeared...’

  Long after midnight, when my story was finished, there was a prolonged silence. I sensed that we were both thinking of Him, but in Evliya’s mind there was a Him completely different from the one in mine. I have no doubt he was actually thinking of his own life! And I, I was thinking of my own life, of Him, of how I loved the story I’d created; and I felt pride in everything I had lived and dreamed of: the room we were sitting in overflowed with the sad memories of all that both of us had once wanted to be and what we had become; it was then I understood clearly for the first time that I would never again be able to forget Him, that this would make me unhappy for the rest of my days; I knew then that I would never be able to live alone: it was as if in the dead of night, along with my story, the shadow of an alluring phantom had fallen across the room, arousing our curiosity while it put us both on guard. Near dawn, my guest delighted me by saying he’d loved my story, but added that he had to disagree with certain details. Perhaps to escape the unnerving memory of my twin and to return again as quickly as possible to my new life, I gave him all my attention.

  He agreed that we must seek the strange and surprising, as in my story; yes, perhaps this was the one thing we could do to combat the exhausting tedium of this world; because he had known this ever since those monotonous years of childhood and school, he had never in his life ever considered withdrawing within four walls; that’s why he had spent his whole life travelling, searching for stories down roads that never came to an end. But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else. Let us suppose that what happened in my story were true. Did I believe that those two men who had taken each other’s places could be happy in their new lives? I was silent. Later, for some reason or other, he reminded me of one detail in my story: we must not allow ourselves to be led astray by the hopes of a one-armed Spanish slave! If we did, little by little, by writing those kinds of tales, by searching for the strange within ourselves, we, too, would become someone else, and God forbid, our readers would too. He did not even want to think about how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this.

  But I wanted to! So when this little old man I’d come to love in just one day gathered together his attendants at dawn for the journey to Mecca, and took to the road, I sat down at once and wrote out my story. For the sake of my readers in that terrible world to come, I did all I could to make both myself and Him, whom I could not separate from myself, come alive in the story. But recently, while looking again at what I’d tossed aside sixteen years before, I thought I had not been very successful. So I apologize to those readers who don’t like it when a man speaks of himself – especially when he’s caught up in such confusing emotions – and add these pages to my book:

  I loved Him, I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in my dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness, and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of a wild animal dying in pain, or enraged by the selfishness of a spoilt son of my own. And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself; my love for Him resembled the way I had become used to the futile insect-like movements of my hands and arms, the way I understood the thoughts which every day echoed against the walls of my mind and died away, the way I recognized the unique smell of sweat from my wretched body, my thinning hair, ugly mouth, the pink hand holding my pen: it was for this reason they had not been able to deceive me. After I had written my book and, so I’d forget Him, tossed it aside, I was never taken in by any of the rumours that were circulating, the games of those who had heard of our fame and wanted to take advantage of it – not at all! Some pasha in Cairo had taken Him under his wing and now He was making designs for a new weapon! He had been inside the city walls of Vienna during the unsuccessful siege, advising the enemy how to rout us completely! He’d been seen in Edirne disguised as a beggar, and during a quarrel among merchants that He himself had stirred up, He’d knifed a quilter and disappeared! He was the imam of a neighbourhood mosque in a distant Anatolian village, He’d set up a clock-room – those who told this story swore it was true; and He’d begun collecting money for a clock-tower! He’d become rich writing books in Spain, where he’d gone following the plague! They even said it was He who had conspired to have our poor sovereign dethroned! He was living in Slav villages, where he was treated with great respect as a legendary epileptic priest, writing books full of despair based on the true confessions He’d at last been able to hear! He was wandering around Anatolia, saying He’d overthrow those fools of sultans, leading a gang he’d bewitched with his predictions and poetry, and was calling for me to join Him! During those sixteen years when I wrote stories so as to forget Him, so as to distract myself with those terrifying people and their terrifying worlds of the future, to experience the full delights of my fantasies, I heard many more variations of these rumours, but I didn’t believe any of them. I don’t know, I wonder whether it happens to others: sometimes, when we felt imprisoned by those four walls at the far reaches of the Golden Horn, sometimes, waiting for an invitation which never seemed to come from a mansion or from the palace, relishing our hatred for each other, or grinning at one another while we wrote yet another treatise for our sovereign, in the little things of daily life, at the same moment, both of us would fasten upon one small detail: a wet dog we’d seen together in the rain that morning, the hidden geometry in the colours and shapes of a line of laundry hung between two trees, a slip of the tongue that suddenly brought out life’s symmetry! These are the moments I miss most! And for this reason I have returned to the book of my shadow, imagining that some curious person will read it years, perhaps hundreds of years after His death, and picture his own life rather than ours; this book that I really wouldn’t much care if no one ever read, and where I have hidden His name, buried, if not very deeply, inside it: so that I might once more dream of the nights of the plague, of my childhood in Edirne, of the delightful hours I’d spent in the sultan’s gardens, of the first time I saw Him unbearded at the pasha’s door,
of the chill down my spine. To lay hands again upon the life and the dreams we lost, everyone understands the need to dream of these things again: I believed in my story!

  I will conclude my book by telling of the day I decided to finish it: two weeks ago, while I sat again at our table, trying to dream up a different story, I saw a rider approaching from the Istanbul road. No one had brought me news of Him lately, perhaps because I was so brusque with my visitors that I hardly imagined they would come any more, but as soon as I caught sight of that traveller wearing a cape and carrying a parasol in his hand, I knew he was coming to see me. I heard his voice before he entered my room, he was speaking Turkish with His errors, though with not so many as He did, but as soon as he entered my room he switched to Italian. When he saw my face go sour and that I gave no answer, he said in his bad Turkish he’d thought I would at least know a little Italian. Later he explained he’d learned my name and who I was from Him. After returning to His country He had written a stack of books describing His unbelievable adventures among the Turks, about their last sovereign who so loved animals and his dreams, about the plague and the Turkish people, our customs at court and at war. With curiosity about the exotic Orient just beginning to spread among aristocrats and especially well-bred ladies, His writings were well-received, His books much read, He gave lectures in the universities, and grew rich. Moreover, His former fiancée, swept up in the romanticism of His writings, married him without giving a thought to her age or her husband’s recent death. They bought back the old family home which had been broken up and sold, and settled down there, returning the house and its garden to their former state. My guest knew all this because, having admired His books, he’d visited Him at home. He had been very polite, gave the visitor His whole day and answered his questions, told once again the adventures He’d written about in His books. It was then He’d spoken of me at length: He was writing a book about me with the title ‘A Turk of My Acquaintance’; He was about to present my whole life to His Italian readers, from my childhood in Edirne to the day He left, supported by His cleverly written personal interpretations of the peculiarities of the Turks. ‘You told Him such a great deal about yourself!’ my guest said. Later, to intrigue me even more, he recalled details from what little he’d read of the book: I had been ashamed after mercilessly beating up one of my childhood friends from the neighbourhood and wept with regret, I was intelligent, I had in six months understood all the astronomy He taught me, I loved my sister very much, I was fond of my religion, I performed my prayers regularly, I adored cherry preserves, I had a particular interest in quilting, my stepfather’s profession, like all Turks I loved people, etc., etc. After he had shown so much interest in me, I knew I couldn’t behave inhospitably to this fool and a traveller like him was sure to be interested, so I showed him my house, room by room. Later he became fascinated by the games my sons were playing with their friends in the garden; he wrote down in a notebook the rules of tipcat and blindman’s bluff, which he made them explain to him, and leapfrog, though he didn’t much like that game. It was then he said that He was an admirer of the Turks. While I showed him around our garden, for lack of anything else to do, and then the miserable town of Gebze and the house where I’d stayed with Him years before, he said it again. While examining our pantry, among the jars of preserves and pickles, the jugs of olive oil and vinegar, which rather interested him, he saw my portrait in oil that I’d commissioned from a Venetian painter and further confided, as if he were betraying a secret, that actually He was not a true friend of the Turks, that He’d written unflattering things about them: He’d written that we were now in decline, described our minds as if they were dirty cupboards filled with old junk. He’d said we could not be reformed, that if we were to survive our only alternative was to submit immediately, and after this we would not be able to do anything for centuries but imitate those to whom we had surrendered. ‘But He wanted to save us,’ I put in, wishing he would stop, and he responded at once saying yes, for our sake He had even built a weapon, but we had not understood Him; on a foggy morning the machine had been left stuck in a disgusting swamp like the awesome corpse of a pirate ship marooned in a storm. Then he added: yes, He had indeed wanted, very much, to save us. This did not mean there was no evil in Him. All genius was like that! While carefully examining my portrait which he’d picked up, he was mumbling a few more things about genius: if He had not fallen into slavery at our hands but instead lived a life in His own country, He might even have been the Leonardo of the seventeenth century. Later he returned to his favourite subject of evil, passing on one or two nasty pieces of gossip about Him and money which I had heard but since forgotten. ‘The strange thing,’ he said later, ‘is that you have not been affected by Him at all!’ He said he’d come to know and love me; he expressed his astonishment: how two people who’d lived together so many years could resemble each other so little, how they could be so unlike one another, he could not understand. He didn’t ask for my portrait, as I’d feared he would; after putting it back he asked if he could see the quilts. ‘What quilts?’ I said, bewildered. He was surprised: didn’t I pass my free time by stitching quilts? It was then I decided to show him the book I had not touched in sixteen years.

  At this he became agitated, said he could read Turkish, that of course he was very interested in any book about Him. We went up to my work-room overlooking the garden. He sat at our table, and I found my book where I had, as if yesterday, thrust it away sixteen years before; I laid it open before him. He was able to read Turkish, if slowly. He buried himself in the book with that desire to be swept away without leaving one’s own sane and secure world which I’d seen in all travellers, and despised. I left him alone, I went out into the garden and sat down on the divan covered with straw matting where I could see him through the open window. At first he was cheerful and called out to me from the window, ‘How obvious it is you have never set foot in Italy!’ But he soon forgot me; I sat in the garden for three hours, glancing up at him occasionally out of the corner of my eye as I waited for him to finish the book. By then he had understood, though there was confusion on his face; once or twice he called out the name of the white castle behind the swamp that had swallowed up our weapon; he even tried in vain to speak Italian with me. Then he turned and gazed blankly out of the window, resting and trying to digest what he’d read. I watched with delight as he looked first at some infinite point in the emptiness, as people do in such situations, at some non-existent focal point, but then, then, as I had expected, his vision focused: now he was looking at the scene through the frame of the window. My intelligent readers have surely understood: he was not so stupid as I supposed. As I had thought he would, he began to turn the pages of my book greedily, searching, and I waited with excitement till at last he found the page he was looking for and read it. Then he looked again at the view from that window overlooking the garden behind my house. I knew exactly what he saw. Peaches and cherries lay on a tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl upon a table, behind the table was a divan upholstered with straw matting, strewn with feather cushions the same colour as the green window frame. I was sitting there, nearly seventy now. Further back, he saw a sparrow perched on the edge of a well among the olive and cherry trees. A swing tied with long ropes to a high branch of a walnut-tree swayed slightly in a barely perceptible breeze.

  1984–85

  * Evliya Chelebi (c. 1611–82) is the author of the renowned Book of Travels (Seyahatname) – Trans.

  About the Translator

  Victoria Holbrook lived in Istanbul for five years and is currently Assistant Professor of Turkish Literature at Ohio State University.

  By Orhan Pamuk

  Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari (1982)

  The Silent House (1983)

  The White Castle (1985)

  The Black Book (1990)

  The New Life (1994)

  My Name is Red (1998)

  Snow (2002)

  Istanbul (2003)

  My Father’s S
uitcase (2006)

  Other Colors (2007)

  The Museum of Innocence (2009)

  The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (2010)

  Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in the wealthy Nisantasi district of Istanbul. His experience growing up in a large family is reflected in his novels The Black Book and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, as well as in his memoir Istanbul. After graduating from American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, but left after three years to pursue writing. He completed a degree in Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976, but decided instead to become a full-time novelist. At 23, while living at home, he completed his first novel, and it was published seven years later in 1982. Cevdet Bey and His Sons was awarded the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes.

  In 1985, the publication of The White Castle, a book that explores the relationship between a young Italian scholar taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire, and his master, brought Pamuk the beginnings of international fame. He traveled to the United States, and from 1985 to 1988 became a visiting scholar at Columbia University. While in New York, he wrote most of his next novel, The Black Book. In 1990, The White Castle won the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction, and the following year the French translation of Pamuk’s second novel, The Silent House, won the Prix de la Découverte Européene. Pamuk’s daughter Rüya was born in 1991, in Istanbul.