by Orhan Pamuk
“In the winter they go hungry, they suffer, they tear one another apart.”
There was a silence. For a long time no one spoke.
“Daddy, I’m bored,” said Rüya.
“Driver, let’s get going,” I said.
When the carriage began to move, Rüya turned her attention to the trees, the sea, and the road and forgot me too. That was when I closed my eyes again and tried one last time to remember what I knew about dogs.
3. Once there was a dog I loved. If a long time had passed since he’d last seen me, this dog would so ecstatically wriggle on his back waiting for me to pet him that he’d wet himself. Then they poisoned him and he died.
4. It’s easy to draw a dog.
5. In a neighborhood where a friend of mine lived, there was a dog that barked furiously at any poor passerby, but the rich he let pass without making a sound.
6. The sound of a dog dragging a broken chain along the ground scares me. It must remind me of something traumatic.
7. That dog back there didn’t follow us.
I opened my eyes and this was what I thought: People actually remember very little. I’d seen tens of thousands of dogs in this world, and when I’d seen them they’d struck me as beautiful. The world surprises us in the same way. It is here, there, right next to us. Then it fades away; everything turns to nothing.
8. Two years after I wrote this piece and published it in a magazine, I was attacked by a pack of dogs in Maçka Park. They bit me. I had to have five injections at the Rabies Hospital in Sultanahmet.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Note on Poetic Justice
When I was little, a boy the same age as I—his name was Hasan—hit me just under the eye with a stone from his slingshot. Years later, when another Hasan asked me why all the Hasans in my novels were evil, this memory returned to me. In middle school, there was a big fat bully who used to find any excuse to torment me at recess. Years later, to make a character less attractive, I had him sweat like this tough fatso; he was so fat he had only to stand there and these beads of sweat would form on his hands and his forehead, until he looked like a giant pitcher that had just come out of the refrigerator.
When I was little and my mother took me shopping, I used to dread the butchers who worked such long hours in their stinking shops wearing bloody aprons and wielding their great long knives, and I didn’t eat too many of the chops they cut for us because they were too fatty. In my books, butchers figure as people who cut up contraband animals and engage in bloody, shady activities. And the dogs that have followed me all my life are portrayed as creatures that cause alarm and suspicion in the heroes to whom I feel close.
A similarly innocent sense of justice has meant that bankers, teachers, soldiers, and elder brothers are never cast as good people. Nor are barbers, because when I was very little I’d be in tears when taken to the barber, and over time my relations with them continued to be poor. Because I came to love horses during my childhood summers on Heybeliada, I’ve always given very good parts to horses and their carriages. My horse heroes are sensitive, delicate, forlorn, innocent, and often the victims of evil. Because my childhood was full of good, well-meaning people who always smiled at me, there are lots of good people in my books too, but justice reminds us first and foremost of evil. In the mind of such a reader, as for a person strolling through an art gallery, there is this faint feeling of justice: What we expect from poets is that they should avenge evil somehow.
As I’ve been trying to explain, I try to avenge evil single-handedly, and mostly I do this in a most personal way, but in such a way that the reader isn’t meant to notice and sees the revenge as beautiful. Because poetic justice reaches its high point at the end of children’s books and adventure comics, when the hero punishes the villain, saying, “And this blow is for such and such … and this blow for …,” I invented just such a scene as a novelist: Line by line, I enumerate every heinous act committed by an evil Hasan or a butcher, until the butcher or whoever panics and drops the knife in his hand and is cleaning up the shop, crying, “Please, my brother, I beg you not to treat me harshly; I have a wife and children!”
Revenge breeds revenge. Two years ago, when eight or nine dogs cornered and attacked me in Maçka Park, it seemed as if they had read my books and knew I had exacted poetic justice on them to punish them for roaming, especially in Istanbul, in packs. This, then, is the danger in poetic justice: Taken too far, it might ruin not just your book—your work—but your very life. You might carry out your revenge with elegance, and with no one the wiser, your writing more and more a thing of beauty, but there are always dogs waiting to catch the vengeful poet alone at a corner and sink their teeth into him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After the Storm
After the storm, when I went out into the streets in the early morning, I saw that everything had changed. I am not talking about broken and fallen branches or yellow leaves lying in the muddy streets. Something deeper and harder to see had changed, as if in the early light of morning the armies of snails that were now everywhere, the discomfiting smell of the water in the soil, the stale air—all these were signs that something had changed forever.
I stood next to a puddle; I looked into it. At the bottom I saw the soil in the form of soft mud, as if waiting for a sign, an invitation. A little farther along, yellowing grass, broken ferns, green herbs, on the sides of clovers, that looked like drops of water, and, at the base of the cliff to my right, along which I walked with wonder and decisiveness, the slowly swirling seagulls seemed more dangerous and determined than ever before.
Of course all these things—this clarity of perception, this sudden chilling of the air by a wind from nowhere, this sky that the storm has wiped so clean, this new color that all of nature has taken on—they could be fooling me. But as I walked it occurred to me that before the storm the birds and the bugs, the trees and the stones, that old rubbish bin and this tilting electricity pole—everything had lost interest in the world, lost sight of its aims, forgotten what it was here for. Later, after midnight and before the first light of dawn, the storm swooped in to restore the lost meaning, the lost aspirations.
To sense that life is deeper than we think it is, and the world more meaningful, does a person have to wake in the middle of the night to clattering windows, to wind blowing through a gap in the curtains, and the sounds of thunder? Like a sailor who wakes up in a storm and instinctively rushes to his sails, I jumped still half asleep from my bed, closing the open windows one by one and turning off a table lamp that had been left burning, and after doing all this I sat in the kitchen and drank a glass of water as the kitchen’s overhead light swayed in the wind howling through the cracks. Suddenly a great gust came that seemed to shake the whole world and there was a power outage. Everything went dark, and the kitchen tiles felt cold under my bare feet.
From where I was sitting, I could look through the window, through the swaying pines and poplars, and see the whiteness of the froth on the ever-larger waves. Between the thunder claps, it seemed as if a bolt of lightning might have struck at sea somewhere nearby. Then, amid the continual flashes of lightning, the racing clouds, and the tips of the swaying branches, land and sky blended into each other. As I stood at the kitchen window looking out at the world, in my hand an empty glass, I felt content.
But in the morning, as I wandered around trying to make sense of what had happened, like an investigator combing the scene of a violent incident, a legendary crime, a world in turmoil, this is what I said to myself: It is in times of violence, times of storms, that we remember we all live in the same world. Later still, as I was looking at broken branches and bicycles that had been thrown from their resting places, this came to my mind too: When a storm hits, we don’t just understand that we live in the same world, we begin to feel as if we are all living one and the same life.
A bird, a little sparrow, had fallen into the mud—I don’t know why—and was dying. As I was sketching it in curiosi
ty and cold blood, rain began to pelt down on my open notebook and all the other sketches in it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
In This Place Long Ago
One day when I was lost in thought and very tired, I went down that road. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I had no set destination in mind, I just wanted to reach the end of every road I entered—a man impatient to get home. As I walked and walked, and my mind wandered, I suddenly raised my head and that road was stretching out before me, and there, amid the trees, I saw a roof; I saw the sweet way the road curved, and the shrubs along the side, and the first fallen leaves of autumn.
I was so taken by what I saw that I stopped in the middle of the road. I looked at the bicycle tracks stretching out before me, the dark shadowy tip of the cypress tree in my path. The trees on my left, the gentle curve of the road, the clear sky, the way it all lined up—how beautiful this place was!
I had warm associations with this road, as if I’d lived here long ago, despite the fact that I was visiting it for the first time. Why did it look so beautiful to me? The view resembled the place I’m always trying to reach. How often I’d thought about this, that sweet curve in the road just ahead of me, the shelter of the trees, the pleasure of standing here and gazing at this view. I’d thought about the view before me so often that it now seemed like a memory, laden with the memories of all the things I’d seen long ago without paying them any mind.
But in one corner of my mind, I knew I was walking down this road for the first time. I did not have any desire to return to this place, nor did I have the inclination or even the appetite to dwell on it too long. My aim was to forget it, the way we all forget the roads along which we have come. My mind would just not settle. I had other things to do.
So even as I marveled at the beauty of the view, I continued on my way. I wanted to forget what I’d seen. But I never have forgotten it, never.
After returning to the noise of the city, plunging once again into the pandemonium of everyday life, that road, that place—which had so enthralled me even as I tried to forget it—came to me as a memory. This time it was a real memory. I’d passed down that road, and its beauty had touched me, but—what a shame—I’d still hurried on. Now the place I’d turned my back on returned to me. It belonged to my memories now, to my own past.
What bound me to it? Its abundant beauty, that’s what; the fact of happening upon it without even knowing such a beautiful and wondrous place was there, and then, on seeing it, of opening my eyes, my heart; of this I have no doubt. Perhaps it was because I had no doubt that I was frightened by the beauty I saw before me and continued on my way. But the thing on which I turned my back came to me at the following times and in the following shapes:
1. When surrounded by a crowd, eating in company, chattering with friends and acquaintances, I’d take offense at some tiny slight, and suddenly I’d remember that road stretching out before me, the cypresses and plane trees, that mysterious roof, and those leaves on the ground, and think about them for a long time. It would be very difficult to get that view out of my mind.
2. At night, when I was awoken by thunder and a storm, or while the woman on television told me what the weather would be the next day, I’d suddenly imagine rain falling on that place, and storms raging; I’d hear thunder and imagine that lightning had struck somewhere nearby. When the sky and the earth had blended into each other, when the plane tree that had witnessed my silence shook in the storm, when the storm had restored that pristine view, who knew what beauties one might find? I was wasting my life on such stupid things here, so far away from there.
3. If I’d gone back to that point in the road, back to that place where I’d stopped to look at the view, and just stood there waiting, my life would have taken an entirely different course. How would this have happened? I have no idea. I think I would have begun walking again after a time, but knowing deep inside myself that this road was going to take me to an entirely different place, and once I reached that place I would live an entirely different life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The House of the Man Who Has No One
This is the house of the man who has no one. It sits on the top of a hill, at the end of a long and winding road. The road is the white of lime in some places and in others the green of grass, and when it reaches the top it dwindles away. This is where we stop to catch our breath and be cooled by the wind. If you walk a little farther, you arrive at a point where you can suddenly see the other side of the hill; the wind stops and you are in a hot and sunny place facing south. This part of the road is so far off the beaten track that ants build their nests here; it’s impossible to distinguish the road from the open field.
The fig trees. The fragments of perforated bricks. Plastic bottles. Pieces of disintegrating and no longer transparent plastic wrap. Sometimes it’s hot, sometimes windy. These things belong to the man who has no one. He must have brought all these things and piled them up here because it’s a place no one else visits.
Once upon a time he wasn’t a man with no one. When he came here he had his wife with him. She was a good woman, people say; she had friends living nearby, in the houses below. But like the man who would come to have no one, she had no relatives, no one from the city where she was born. Those friends were from some other Black Sea city. If what I’m told is true, the man who has no one once owned property in that city; he was rich, but—they always smiled when they told me this—he was always making trouble with people and so had as much difficulty settling there as he’d had here. No. Before he wasn’t like that. One day his wife had to go into the hospital down the hill. He went there too, to the hospital. Then his wife died. All this went on for years; for years his wife was ill. Now all he does is watch television, smoke cigarettes, and make trouble, and in the summers he works as a waiter in a restaurant on the shore.
It’s the television that shocks me—because the sweeping view from his house, from this hill, is stunning, extraordinary. A person could spend years here, gazing at the other hills, at the reflections of the sun on the wind-brushed sea, at the ships moving in on the city from all directions, at the islands, at the ferries traveling to and fro, at the crowds in the neighborhoods below that are too far away to cause harm, at the miniature mosques in the distance and the houses that sink into a faint cloud of mist in the mornings, at the whole city. They stopped building new houses here years ago.
A hearty seagull lets out a long cry. With the wind comes the sound of a radio somewhere below.
Actually, the house is proof that he really did bring some money from the city where he was born. That’s what they say. He laid the tiles on the roof in clean and tidy rows. He made the roof of the extension with goodquality tin plate, lining it with stones to keep it in place. The toilet that you can see behind the house as you approach he made from briquettes, the plastic water tank he added later; the chairs, planks and scraps, you can see among the thorns, the shrubs, and the baby pines.
One evening, as we are standing in the wind, looking at the neighborhoods on other city hills, at houses made of the same tiles, bricks, plastics, and stones, the man comes out and gives us a long hard look. In his hands is something I’ve never seen before: an iron, or perhaps the handle of a small pot. That’s when I notice that his house is bound together with a large quantity of wire, pipe, and cable.
He goes inside and disappears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Barbers
In 1826, after the Ottoman army had suffered a string of defeats at the hands of the West and the Janissaries who had traditionally served as its soldiers had resisted attempts to modernize them and bring them up to European standards, the reformist Sultan Mahmud II dispatched his new disciplined army to attack the Janissary headquarters in Istanbul, reducing it to rubble. It was an important moment, not just in the history of Istanbul but in the history of the Ottoman Empire, one that all lycée students in Turkey are taught to view from a Westernizing, modernizing, nationali
st perspective and to call “The Propitious Event.” What is less well known is that this propitious event, which involved clashes with tens of thousands of Janissaries in the center of the city and wholesale slaughter in its streets and shops, changed the face of Istanbul in ways that can be seen even today.
Certainly there is some truth in the story as told by nationalist modernizing historians. Throughout their 450-year ascendancy, most Janissaries belonged to the same Sufi sect, Bektasis who were closely linked with the city’s shopkeepers. The Janissaries were stationed all over the city and walked the streets armed, performing many of the duties of today’s police and gendarmes and owning all variety of shops; their blustering street presence meant they were in a position to mount a strong resistance against the reformist state. Mahmud II sent his armies first to the coffeehouses and barbershops, most of whose owners belonged to the Janissary fraternity; having secured a military victory, he (like so many other sultans wishing to quell rebellions in the street, most notably Murad IV, who is said still to wander the city streets in disguise by night) went on to shut those coffeehouses and barbershops down. Here we might draw a parallel with something else I’ve seen often in my own lifetime: the modern Republic’s predilection for shutting down newspapers. For until very recently, each coffeehouse and barbershop in the city served (like the dolmuşes, the shared taxis, of my childhood) as places where news, legends, and rampant rumors, outright lies, and tales of wrath and resistance were fabricated and enriched to undermine the pronouncements of religious leaders and the state, thus paving the way for rumors of plots against them, while in the neighborhoods surrounding mosques, churches, and markets, and in the villages along the Bosphorus, each served also as a local newspaper.