Other Colors

by Orhan Pamuk

  After the death of Mehmet the Conqueror, his son Bayezid II, who did not share his father’s lifestyle or his passion for portraiture, had Bellini’s portrait sold in the bazaar. In the Turkey of my childhood, our lycée textbooks lamented this rejection of Renaissance art as a mistake, a missed opportunity, and suggested that, had we gone on from where we’d started five hundred years ago, we might have produced a different kind of art and become “a different nation.” Perhaps. Whenever I look at Bellini’s cross-legged youth, I think this other path might have served miniaturists best. Because they could have painted so much better, once seated at tables—and also saved themselves from the aching joints and legs that make Beckett’s heroes so miserable.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Black Pen

  We are troubled by the abundance of rumors about where we come from, who we are, where we’re going, and who drew us. We are not, in essence, the sort to be easily deceived by gossip, and neither are we swayed by the stories, be they true or false, that people tell about us. Obviously, we don’t give a damn about what academics say, and the same goes for the loose talk we hear when people subject our drawing to close examination. Like the donkey standing with us, we belong to this world; we step through it cautiously and know exactly where we are going. Our concern is that people have become so caught up in arguments about our origins and our likely destination that they’ve forgotten we are a drawing. We would have preferred you to take pleasure in us not because we come from the darkest corner of a story lost in a forgotten history but because we are a drawing. We ask that you try to see us in this way: to savor our full presence, our humble colors, and the way in which we have immersed ourselves in our conversation.

  To find ourselves on this course, glueless, unfinished paper, to have been sketched so hastily and with such crude lines—this pleases us. Because the artist chose not to draw the horizon behind us or the earth, grass, and flowers on which we tread so heavily, he makes our raw virility all the more apparent. The eye is drawn to our gigantic fingers, to our rough clothing, to the strong and healthy gestures that bind us to the earth. Please note the alarm in the donkey’s eyes and the demonic glint in ours; see the panic in our gaze, as if something has frightened us. At the same time it should be clear, from the winsome way the artist has drawn the donkey, the haphazard way he has sketched us, and the color he has given our cheeks, that the mood is light. The fear you see in our eyes, the panic, haste, and humorous alarm, the blank page that surrounds us—all these things suggest that something important is happening. It is as if one day hundreds of years ago, we three and our donkey were traveling along a road when we happened upon an artist—just as one might in a story—and this artist, God be praised, this master artist captured us on paper, as deftly as if—and please permit us to use an expression from another age here—he’d taken our photograph. Our master artist got out his rough paper and his black pen and drew us so quickly that he caught the chatterbox among us with his mouth open, showing his ugly teeth in all their glory. We would like you to enjoy our ugly teeth, our whiskers, our clumsy hands that look like bear paws, and all the other dirty, tired, shabby, or even malevolent guises we’ve taken in other drawings. Just remember: It’s not us you’re smiling at, it’s our drawing.

  But we know it’s the master artist that most concerns you. What a pity it is that you belong to an age when people cannot learn to love a drawing without first knowing who the artist was. All right then: His name is Muhammad Siyah Qalam, Muhammad of the Black Pen. It is probably clear from his drawing’s theme and style that our artist is the same as the one who did so many other drawings of us nomads. But all scholars agree that the signature on the edge of the drawing was only added much later. We can confirm their hypothesis.

  The person who drew us did not sign our drawings, because he belonged to an age when storytelling and artistry were more important than credits. To tell you the truth, we didn’t mind this at all. We were, after all, drawn in a distant time when the point of a drawing was to illustrate a story, so for us it was enough to serve our stories well. We were humble. But long after these stories had been forgotten, in an age more inclined to accept us as drawings in our own right, a sharp-eyed retainer in the Topkapi Palace during the reign of Ahmed I (1603—17) took it upon himself to add this signature to a number of drawings. It was all rather haphazard, however, so “Black Pen” served more as an attribution than a signature.

  The desire to link us with a master artist led to a further mistake, for this signature also appears in other drawings that were placed, for whatever reason, in the same album, although they bear no stylistic or thematic resemblance to our own. Just because we’re in the same album, called the Fatih album, they give us all the same signature. However, the historians Dust Muhammad, Qadi Ahmad, and Mustafa Ali, who saw fit to write a few words about the great Persian and Ottoman artists, make no mention of Siyah Qalam. In other words, we know nothing about our deft and masterful artist except for his name.

  But as a consolation for those who have been so anxious to conjure up for us a common style, a name, a signature, and a master, let us also say this: The name we’ve been awarded, Black Pen, refers to the thick-bordered black-and-white line drawings favored by Persian writers during the sixteenth century. So we can draw this conclusion: Black Pen is not the name of the artist who sketched us so hastily, as we three chatted and ambled along our road, but the name of the style he used. But if this is the case, what are we to make of the glorious reds and blues he has splashed all over us?

  Almost everything people say about us contradicts everything else they’ve said, and we find it all very amusing. There have been scores of articles, theories, and learned conferences to establish where we come from—to prove that we are Uighurs, Turks, Mongols, or Persians, to establish that we lived at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries—but after years of politely contradicting one another, scholars have come no closer to offering definitive or convincing evidence linking us with a particular time and place. All they do is arouse suspicion.

  Turks gripped by romantic myths of nationalism are keen to establish that we come from Mongolia or Central Asia. And looking at the sweet djinns, devils, and demons that appear in the same albums, they like to link us with the shamans. Speaking for ourselves, we like the fact that these fearful but charming creatures wear the same crafty expressions and are drawn with the same crude, curling lines. Because other similarly drawn demons in the same albums appear to be of Chinese origin, some scholars claim we come from even farther afield, perhaps even from China; this speaks to our nomadic souls, awakening our love of the road, and so it too pleases us.

  Scholars who claim that the demons in some drawings bear the influence of The Shahname (The Book of Kings), or that they are similar in style to those produced at the Whitesheep Palace in Tabriz, are inclined to place us within the borders of Iran. After all, most scholars tend to see us as belonging to the spoils of the war won by the great Ottoman sultan Selim I over the Safavids at Chaldiran in 1514. There are even those who have studied the bell-shaped headdress worn by our friend in red and decided that we must be Russian.

  The doubt and admiration that all these guesses inspire have something in common with the admiration we hope to awaken in you by asking you to appreciate us as drawings. There is, first, the wonder, fear, and doubt stirred by the drawing itself. Then there is an air of mystery aroused by the rumors and theories about our origins. We take pride in being the most enigmatic, discussed, disputed drawings from the remotest corner of the world. As for all those things they’ve written about us—yes, they do make us uneasy, because of this tendency to forget we’re drawings. But all these theories they’ve spun about us in the timeless bastions of art history, all the suspicion, fear, and admiration that our many observers have heaped upon us—it all does give us a lovely air of enchantment.

  What we really want to say is this: Stop trying to figure out whether we’re from China, India, Central
Asia, Iran, Transoxiana, or Turkistan. Stop trying to pinpoint where we are from and where we are going, and please pay attention instead to our humanity. See how caught up we are in what’s going on. Our eyes are open wide and we are immersed in our work. We are trying to protect ourselves and, even as our panic grows, we are talking among ourselves. Our poverty is evident, as is our fear, our endless travels—we are huge barefooted men, we are horses, we are terrible creatures—feel our strength! A wind is blowing that ripples our clothes; we fear and tremble but we continue down the road. The bleak plain we are trying to cross has much in common with this colorless, featureless paper on which we are drawn. Neither mountains nor hills rise up from this level field; we are ageless, in a world beyond time.

  Once you’ve begun to feel our humanity, it won’t be long, we think, before you begin to sense the demons inside us. We are aware that—even as we fear those demons—we are made of the same stuff. Look at the horns of those creatures, and their hair, their curling eyebrows; our bodies curl the same way. Their hands and thick legs are just as crude as ours, but see how they pulse with life! Look first at the noses on the demons, and then look at ours; understand that we are brothers and fear us. But we see that you smile at the very thought that you should fear us.

  There is, we know, a tragic reason why we cannot make you quake with fear. The stories we once belonged to have been lost. Just as you do not know who we are, where we came from, or where we are going, you don’t even know which part of which story we fit into, and that is even worse. After passing through so many misadventures and catastrophes, after walking such great distances, it is almost as if we too have forgotten our stories, forgotten who we are.

  We hear angry protests about our being Turks, Mongolians, men of Tabriz. Centuries after we were drawn, we’ve been linked with many peoples, nations, and stories. That razor-toothed, sharp-nailed, grinning demon over there—maybe he’s taken one of us away, who knows where, perhaps even to the underworld. So yes, as, for example, many of the sages among you have already guessed, we could be from the great Persian epic, The Book of Kings, and we could depict the scene in which a giant demon named Akvan prepares to throw the sleeping hero Rüstem into the Caspian Sea. But what about the other drawings? What moments do they depict, and what stories do they belong to? As we three walk down the road with our donkey, what scene from what forgotten story are we bringing to life?

  You don’t know. So let us tell you a secret. We were traveling from some distant point in Asia, with our donkey, when we met an artist who drew our likeness—this much you already know. Well, look now at that friend you can see coming up behind the donkey: Our drawing is inside the portfolio he is holding in his arms. When evening falls, when we are all sitting together in a candlelit tent, this storyteller, perhaps someone not so different from the writer who is at this very moment using us as his mouthpieces, will tell us this tale. To add to our enjoyment, and to make sure his story stays in our minds, he will take out this drawing you are looking at right now and show it to us. We will not be the first drawing he shows, nor will we be the last. All the drawings he shows will illustrate our story.

  But after centuries of wandering, defeat, and disaster, our stories are lost. The drawings that once illustrated these stories have been scattered across the world. Now even we have forgotten where we are from. We have been stripped of our stories and our identities. But it was still a lovely thing to have been drawn.

  Once upon a time there was a storyteller who looked at us and—perhaps because he shared our unease—began his story like this:

  “We are troubled by the abundance of rumors about where we come from, who we are, where we’re going, and who drew us.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Meaning

  Hi! Thank you for reading me. I should be happy to be here, though I can’t help feeling confused. I like the way your eyes are traveling over me. Because I’m here to serve you. Even though I’m not sure what that means. I don’t even know what I am these days—isn’t that a pity? I’m a concoction of signs; I long to be seen, but then I lose my nerve. Would I be better off hiding myself away in the shadows, far away, protected from all eyes? That’s what I can’t decide. I’m making such a big effort to be here, even with all these worries, strangely. Here’s what I want you to understand: This kind of exposition is new to me. I’ve never existed in quite this way. In the old days, we were more to one side. I’d love to attract your attention, but without giving it too much thought, for that is when I feel most relaxed. So just keep me in the corner of your mind and forget I’m even there. I’d like to remind you—quietly, the way I did in the old days—how nice it was to exist for you without your even knowing it. I’m not really sure that this can ever really happen again, though. Because the real problem is this: I tend to think I’m a picture, when really all I am is words. Because when I’m letters, I think I’m a picture, and when I’m a picture I think I’m letters. But this is not out of ambivalence—this is my life. Let’s see how long it takes for you to get used to it. If you ask me, the reason we can’t understand each other is that the inside of your head is different. You see, the only reason I’m here is to mean something. But you look at me as if I’m just an object. Yes, I know—I do have a body. But my body is only here to help my meaning flap its wings and take flight. I know from the way you’re looking at me that I have this body, that my left side and my right side are decorated with colors and figures. This pleases me and it confuses me. Once upon a time, when I was just a meaning, it never occurred to me that I was also an object, and I didn’t even have a mind; I was nothing more than a humble sign passing between two beautiful minds. I was not aware of my own existence, and this was lovely. You could look at me and I would think nothing of it. But now, as your eyes run across us letters, I feel as if I have a body—as if all I am is a body—and a chill runs through me. Okay, I’ll admit it: I like it, just a little, and I go along with it, but I also feel a little ashamed. But the moment it begins to please me, I want more and that scares me. I end up asking myself, What’s going to happen next? I start worrying that my body is going to obscure my soul and that the meaning—my meaning—will get pushed deep inside me. That’s when I start wanting to hide in the shadows. That’s when you can no longer understand me, and you start getting confused, and even you can’t figure out if you’re reading me, or just staring at me. That’s when even I get scared of my body and wish I were just a meaning, but I also know I’ve left it too late. There’s no way I can go back to the good old days now, to the days before you arrived; there’s no going back to when I was just a meaning. At a time like this I am neither fully here nor fully somewhere else; instead, I hover between heaven and earth, undecided. This is painful, and I try to console myself with bodily pleasures. I’d love to attract your attention, but without your giving it too much thought, for that is when I feel at my most relaxed. Should I be a meaning or an object? A letter or a picture? Which reminds me, I—hang on, don’t go yet … I can’t bear the thought of your turning the page yet … you still don’t understand me and already you’re casting me away….

  OTHER CITIES, OTHER CIVILIZATIONS

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  My First Encounters with Americans

  In 1961 we moved to Ankara on account of my father’s work, making our home in an expensive apartment house across from the city’s most beautiful park, in which there was an artificial lake that was home to two weary swans. On the top floor lived an American family, whose blue Chevrolet we would sometimes hear rattling as they drove it into the garage. We kept a close eye on them.

  Our interest was not in American culture but in the Americans themselves. When we sat with great crowds of other children at the reduced-price Sunday matinees in Ankara’s film theaters, we had no idea whether the film we were watching was American or French. The subtitles told us all we needed to know: that what we were watching came to us from Western civilization.

  Because there were many
Americans living in this expensive new neighborhood at that time, we’d see them everywhere, and what interested us most were the things they consumed and discarded. The most fascinating objects were the Coca-Cola cans, which we collected—some of us retrieving them from rubbish bins—and later flattened by stamping on them furiously. (Maybe some of these were beer cans; maybe there were other brands.) In the beginning we used them for a game called Find the Can, and sometimes we’d cut and shape them into metal signs, use the tabs as money, but never in my life did we drink any cola or indeed anything else from cans like these.

  In one of the new apartments in whose giant rubbish bins we found our cans there was a beautiful young American woman, to whom we paid great attention. Her husband was taking his car out of the garage one day, moving slowly past us, interrupting our football game, and as he watched her standing on the balcony in her nightdress, blowing him a kiss, we all fell silent for some time. No matter how much they loved each other, the grown-ups we knew would never have displayed their happiness in front of others in such a carefree way.

  As for the things that Americans owned, and that passed into the hands of those who established relations with them, they came from the Post Exchange, or PX, known to us as the Piyeks, though I had never seen it, as the place was off limits except to American military and consular personnel and Turks were not allowed in. Blue jeans, chewing gum, Converse All-Star sneakers, the latest American record albums, chocolates that were salty and sweet and upset my stomach, barrettes of all colors, baby food, toys … some things found their way out of the Piyeks to be sold under the counter at certain stores in Ankara for exorbitant prices. My older brother was crazy about marbles, so he would save up his money and buy them from these stores, and laid next to his Turkish-made mica and glass marbles, these porcelain American marbles looked like jewels.