Other Colors

by Orhan Pamuk

  I loved it when he took me to films, and I loved listening to him discuss the films we’d seen with others; I loved the jokes he made about the idiotic, the evil, and the soulless, just as I loved hearing him talk about a new kind of fruit, a city he’d visited, the latest news, or the latest book; but most of all I loved it when he caressed me. I loved it when he took me out for a ride, because together, in the car, I felt at least for a while that I wouldn’t lose him. When he was driving, we couldn’t look each other in the eye so he could speak to me as a friend, touching upon the most difficult and delicate questions. After a time, he’d pause to tell a few jokes, fiddle with the radio, and speak about whatever music reached our ears.

  But what I loved most was being close to him, touching him, being at his side. When I was a lycée student, and even in my first years at university, during the deepest depression of my life, I would, in spite of myself, long for him to come to the house and sit down with me and my mother and say a few things to lift our spirits. When I was a small child, I loved to climb onto his lap or lie down next to him, smell his smell, and touch him. I remember how, on Heybeliada, when I was very small, he taught me how to swim: As I was sinking to the bottom, thrashing wildly, he would grab hold of me and I would rejoice, not just because I could breathe again but because I could wrap my arms around him and, not wishing to sink back to the bottom, cry, “Father, don’t leave me!”

  But he did leave us. He’d go far away, to other countries, other places, corners of the world unknown to us. When he was stretched out on the sofa reading, sometimes his eyes would slip away from the page and his thoughts would wander. That was when I’d know that, inside the man I knew as my father, there was another I could not reach, and guessing that he was daydreaming of another life, I’d grow uneasy. “I feel like a bullet that’s been fired for no reason,” he’d say sometimes. For some reason this would make me angry. Quite a few other things made me angry. I don’t know who was in the right. Perhaps by then I too was longing to escape. But still I loved it when he put on his tape of Brahms’s First Symphony, passionately conducting an imaginary orchestra with his imaginary baton. It would annoy me when, after a lifetime of seeking pleasure and running away from trouble, he would lament the fact that self-indulgence offered no meaning beyond itself and seek to blame others. In my twenties, there were times when I said to myself, “Please don’t let me turn out like him.” There were other times when I was troubled by my failure to be as happy, comfortable, carefree, and handsome as he was.

  Much later, when I’d put all that behind me, when anger and jealousy no longer clouded my view of the father who had never scolded me, never tried to break me, I slowly came to see—and to accept—the many and inescapable similarities between us. So that now, when I am grumbling about some idiot or other, or complaining to a waiter, or biting my upper lip, or throwing some books into the corner half read, or kissing my daughter, or taking money out of my pocket, or greeting someone with a lighthearted joke, I catch myself imitating him. This is not because my arms, legs, wrists, or the mole on my back resemble his. It is something that frightens—terrifies—me and reminds me of my childhood longing to be more like him. Every man’s death begins with the death of his father.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Notes on April 29, 1994

  The French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur asked hundreds of authors to describe their activities on April 29 in whatever corner of the world they happened to be that day. I was in Istanbul.

  TELEPHONE. I disconnected the phone and, as always happens during the hours I spend working—for better or for worse—on my novel, a moment arrived when I imagined that someone was trying to reach me at that very moment to speak to me about something important, a matter of huge consequence, but could not get through. But still I did not reconnect the phone. When I did, much later, I had a few conversations I would immediately forget. A journalist calling from Germany told me he would visit Istanbul and hoped to talk to me about the rise of “fundamentalism” in Turkey and the success of the Islamist Refah Party in the municipal elections. I asked again what television station he worked for, and he rattled off a few letters.

  LETTERS, LOGOS, AND BRANDS. Once again I was most struck by the letters in the blue jeans and bank advertisements I came across in newspapers, on television, and on street signs. A friend I met on the street, a university professor, dipped into her bag to give me a list of companies and brand names that I come across every day. Their owners support the Islamist Refah Party, she’d been told; she informed me that quite a few people had decided to stop buying this brand of biscuits and that brand of yogurt and never again to set foot in the shops and restaurants on the list. As always, extreme boredom prompted me to ignore the mirror in the lift in my building and to look instead at the plaque: Wertheim. On a Casio calculator I made a simple computation that will appear at the end of this essay. On the street I came across a 1960 Plymouth, and a 1956 Chevrolet still in service as a taxi.

  STREETS AND AVENUES. Although Turkey’s currency halved in value overnight two months ago, plunging us into an economic crisis, the streets and avenues were as crowded as ever. As always, I wondered where all these people were going, and this in turn reminded me that literature was a futile profession: I saw women with children gazing into shop windows, lycée students whispering and giggling in huddles, vendors who had spread their wares—black-market foreign cigarettes, Nescafé, Chinese porcelain, old romance novels, and well-thumbed foreign fashion magazines—along the full length of the mosque wall; I saw a man with a three-wheeled cart selling fresh cucumbers and buses packed with people. The men gathered in front of the buffets in the foreign exchange shops were clutching sandwiches or cigarettes or plastic bags stuffed with money as they watched the rise of the dollar on the electronic notice board. A grocery boy was unloading a crate of bottled water, lifting the demijohns onto his back. I caught another glimpse of the madman who had recently arrived in the neighborhood, noticing that he was the only person on the crowded pavement who was not carrying a plastic bag. In his hands was a steering wheel salvaged from a real car; he twisted it to the left and to the right as he made his way through the crowd. At lunchtime, after I had drunk my orange juice and was returning to the small office where I write, I saw an old friend in the crowd coming out of Friday prayers and we had a few laughs.

  JOKES, LAUGHTER, AND HAPPINESS. My painter friend and I were laughing about several rich people we knew who were facing ruin after various banks in which they had money had gone under. Why were we laughing? Because it had turned out that they were neither as adroit as they’d assumed nor as intelligent, that’s why. In the early evening, a translator friend of mine rang to invite me to come out to drink in the street outside a few meyhanes “in protest” against Istanbul’s Refah Party mayor, and we had a good laugh too. Because the new mayor had been harassing meyhanes and removing the tables they’d set up in the streets, hundreds of intellectuals were planning to take to the streets and drink themselves senseless on the pavements. Once upon a time, politically minded friends took a dim view of drink, but now suddenly it seemed to have been decided that to drink was to engage in a mature political action. When my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Rüya, laughed as I was tickling her before bedtime, I laughed too. Perhaps these several laughs were not expressions of happiness, perhaps they were merely appreciation of the sort of silence that a person longs for in a city like Istanbul, with its ceaseless roar.

  ISTANBUL’S NOISE. Even when I am paying it the least attention and feeling most lonely, I (along with some ten million others) hear this roar all day long: car horns, grumbling buses, sputtering motors, sounds of construction, children’s screams, loudspeakers on vendors’ wagons and on minarets, ship horns, police and ambulance sirens, music cassettes playing everywhere, slamming doors, metal shutters crashing to the ground, telephones, doorbells, traffic altercations on street corners, police whistles, school vans…. Toward evening, just as the sky was darkening, ther
e was the usual lull, something close to silence; looking out into the garden from the back windows of my office, I saw the swarms of madly chirping swallows flying over the cypresses and mulberry trees. From the table where I was sitting, I could see lamps and television screens glowing in neighboring apartments.

  TELEVISION. After supper, I could tell from the synthetic colors flashing in their windows that quite a few people kept changing channels just as I did: a bleached-blond chanteuse singing old Turkish songs, a child eating chocolate, a woman prime minister saying everything was going to turn out fine, a football match on an emerald field, a Turkish pop group, journalists arguing about the Kurdish question, American police cars, a child reading the Koran, a helicopter exploding into flames in midair, a gentleman walking onto the stage and doffing his hat as the audience applauds, the same woman prime minister, a housewife telling an inquiring microphone a thing or two as she hangs up her laundry, an audience applauding the woman who has given the right answer in a general knowledge quiz…. At one point I looked out the window and it occurred to me that—except for the travelers on the Bosphorus ships whose lights I could see in the distance—all of Istanbul was watching the same images.

  NIGHT. The noise of the city changed, turning into a whisper, a sleepy sigh. At a late hour, as I was walking back to my office, thinking I might be able to write a bit more, I saw a pack of four dogs roaming the empty streets. In a coffeehouse below street level there were still people playing cards and watching television. I saw a family, and it was obvious they were returning from a visit to relatives—the little boy was asleep on his father’s shoulder, the mother was pregnant—they passed me in silence and in haste, as if something had frightened them. In the middle of the night, long after I had sat down at my table, the phone rang and gave me a fright.

  FEAR, PARANOIA, AND DREAMS. It was the lunatic who called me every night, never saying a word, echoing my silence with his. I disconnected the phone and worked for a long time, but in some corner of my mind there were premonitions of evil, impending disaster: Perhaps, before long, people would begin again to shoot one another in the streets; perhaps we’d see a civil war; perhaps this summer the severe water shortage they’d been predicting in the newspapers would come to pass; perhaps the great earthquake that had been expected for so many years now would flatten the entire city. After midnight, after all the televisions had been turned off and the lamps in the apartments extinguished, a garbage truck clattered past. As always, there was a man who kept eight or ten paces ahead of the truck, emptying the bins that had been left on the street, hastily combing them for useful bottles, metalware, and packs of paper and putting these into his sack. Later still, a junk dealer, his horse cart creaking under the weight of old newspapers and a washing machine, passed down the empty street where I have lived for forty years. I sat down at my table and took out my calculator.

  TOTAL. I did a simple calculation, days multiplied by years. If the figure is correct, I have now lived exactly 15,300 days like this. Before I went to sleep, it occurred to me that I would be a very lucky man if I had an equal number of days ahead of me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Spring Afternoons

  Between 1996 and 1998 I wrote short weekly pieces for a small political humor magazine called Oküz (Ox); I illustrated these lyrical exercises with drawings in keeping with the magazine’s mood.

  I don’t like spring afternoons: the city’s aspect, the way the sun beats down, the crowds, the shop windows, the heat. I long to flee the heat and the light. There is a cool draft wafting through the tall doors of certain stone and concrete apartment buildings. Inside these apartment buildings, it’s even cooler and, of course, darker. The darkness and cold of winter have retreated inside.

  If only I could walk into one of those apartments, if only I could go back into winter. If only there were a key in my pocket, if only I could open a familiar door, take in the familiar smell of a cool and dark apartment, and slip blithely into the back room, away from the sun and the oppressive crowds.

  If there were a bed in that back room, a bedside table, and on it a pile of newspapers and books, my favorite magazines for me to leaf through, and a television. If I could stretch out on that bed fully dressed and rejoice at being alone with my despair, my misery, my wretched life. There is no greater happiness than coming face-to-face with your own squalor and wretchedness. There is no greater happiness than being out of sight.

  Yes, all right, I also wish there were this sort of girl: as tender and soft as a mother, as smart as a seasoned businesswoman. Because she knows very well what I need to do, I trust her too.

  If she asks me, “What’s troubling you?”

  If I say, “You already know. It’s these spring afternoons.”

  “You’re depressed.”

  “It’s worse than depression. I want to disappear. I don’t care if I live or die. Or if the world comes to an end, even. In fact, if it ended right this minute, so much the better. If I have to spend a few years in this cool room, then so be it. I could smoke cigarettes. I could do nothing but smoke cigarettes for years.”

  But as time passes, I can no longer hear that voice inside me. That is the worst moment. I am alone, abandoned on the busy streets.

  I don’t know if this happens to other people too, but sometimes on spring afternoons it seems as if the world has become heavier. Everything turns to concrete, dull as concrete, and soaking in my sweat I am astounded at the way others are able to go about their daily lives.

  They wander down the street, peering into shop windows, and they peer at me through bus windows, before the bus spews its exhaust fumes into my face. The fumes? They’re hot too. I run about in a panic.

  I go into a passage. Inside, it is cool and dark and I calm down. The people in here seem less anxious and easier to understand. But still I sense trouble. As I walk to the cinema, I look into the shops.

  In the old days they used to use dog meat in sausage sandwiches—in other words, in the sausages. I don’t know if this still happens.

  According to the papers, they caught the men who had been making soft drinks in the same vats people washed their feet in.

  They live here, they see each other, they fall in love, and then they marry these girls who bleach their hair such an ugly shade of blond.

  In our pockets, paper money has turned to dough from the humidity.

  Here is the sort of American film that would do me wonders right now: A boy and a girl are running away, heading for another country. Loving each other as dearly as they do, they’re always arguing, but these arguments only bring them closer together. I should be sitting in one of the seats at the very front. The film should be so clear that I can see the pores on the girl’s skin; she and the film and the cars should seem more real than anything here. When they start killing a huge number of people, I should be there to see it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dead Tired in the Evening

  I come home dead tired in the evenings. Looking straight ahead, at the roads and the pavements. Angry about something, hurt, incensed. Though my imagination is still conjuring up beautiful images, even these pass quickly in the film in my head. Time passes. There’s nothing. It’s already nighttime. Doom and defeat. What’s for supper?

  The lamp atop the table is lit; next to it sits a bowl of salad and bread, all in the same basket; the tablecloth is checkered. What else?… A plate and beans. I imagine the beans, but it’s not enough. On the table, the same lamp is still burning. Maybe a bit of yogurt? Maybe a bit of life?

  What’s on television? No, I’m not watching television; it only makes me angry. I’m very angry. I like meatballs too—so where are the meatballs? All of life is here, around this table.

  The angels call me to account.

  What did you do today, darling?

  All my life … I’ve worked. In the evenings, I’ve come home. On television—but I’m not watching television. I answered the phone a few times, got angry at a few people; then
I worked, wrote…. I became a man … and also—yes, much obliged—an animal.

  What did you do today, darling?

  Can’t you see? I’ve got salad in my mouth. My teeth are crumbling in my jaw. My brain is melting from unhappiness and trickling down my throat. Where’s the salt, where’s the salt, the salt? We’re eating our lives away. And a little yogurt too. The brand called Life.

  Then I gently reached out my hand, parted the curtains, and in the darkness outside caught sight of the moon. Other worlds are the best consolations. On the moon they were watching television. I finished off with an orange—it was very sweet—and my spirits lifted.

  Then I was master of all worlds. You understand what I mean, don’t you? I came home in the evening. I came home from all those wars, good, bad, and indifferent; I came home in one piece and walked into a warm house. There was a meal waiting for me, and I filled my stomach; the lights were on; I ate my fruit. I even began to think that everything was going to turn out fine.

  Then I pressed the button and watched television. By then, you see, I was feeling just fine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Out of Bed, in the Silence of Night

  On the table there is an ugly little fish. Its mouth is wide open, it’s frowning, and its eyes are wide with pain. It’s a little ashtray in the shape of a fish. You flick your ashes into the fish’s huge mouth. Maybe the fish is in convulsions because of that cigarette jammed into its mouth so suddenly. Just like that—pftt!—the ash fell into the fish’s mouth, but this will never happen to the smoker himself, not once in his life. Someone made a porcelain ashtray in the shape of a fish, and the poor fish will be burned by cigarettes for years on end, its mouth opened wide enough so that it’s not just dirty ashes it will have to swallow; its mouth is big enough to accommodate butts, matches, and all manner of filth.