Other Colors

by Orhan Pamuk

  We found out about these marbles one day from the boy who lived with his family on the third floor and who went to school every morning in a big orange school bus of the type I would later see in films about American life. He was an only child, about our age, with no friends and an American-style crew cut. He probably saw us playing marbles in the garden with our friends, and he had hundreds of his own from the Piyeks. It seemed to us as if he had thousands of marbles when we had only a handful. Whenever he emptied them out of his bag, they made in their hundreds such a racket rolling across the floor that it really got on our nerves.

  News of this abundance had soon spread to all our friends in the neighborhood. We’d go to the back garden in twos and threes, stand under the Americans’ windows, and shout, “Hey, boy!” After a long silence, he would suddenly appear on the balcony and angrily toss down a handful of marbles, and having watched my friends scamper after the marbles and come to blows over them, he would suddenly disappear again. He stopped tossing out handfuls of marbles, throwing them instead one by one at regular intervals as my friends ran whispering about the garden.

  One afternoon, this little king began to throw marbles onto our balcony too. They rained down intensely, some of the marbles bouncing off our balcony into the garden below. My brother and I couldn’t hold ourselves back; we rushed out to the balcony to gather up the marbles. When the rain of marbles became even more intense, we began to whisper, “That one’s mine, that one’s yours!”

  “What is going on here?” my mother cried. “Come inside, now.”

  Closing the door to the balcony, we watched the shower of marbles with shame from inside; the downpour had slackened somewhat. When he realized we weren’t coming back onto the balcony, he went into his room to pour his hundreds of marbles onto the floor. When the coast was clear, my brother and I went back out to the balcony, where we shamefacedly and silently gathered up the remaining marbles, to joylessly divide them between us.

  The next day, we followed our mother’s instructions, and when he appeared on his balcony, we called from below, “Hey, boy, do you want to trade?”

  Standing on our balcony, we showed him our own glass and mica marbles. Five minutes later, our doorbell rang. We gave him a few mica and glass marbles, and he offered us a handful of his expensive American marbles. We made the exchange in silence. Then he told us his name, and we told him ours.

  What impressed us more than the value of the exchange was that his name was Bobby, that his squinting eyes were blue, and that his knees were dirty from playing outside, just like ours. In a panic, he raced back up to his own apartment.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  Views from the Capital of the World

  New York, 1986

  A friend came with his car to pick me up at Kennedy Airport. On our way to Brooklyn, we got lost on the expressway: poor neighborhoods, warehouses, brick buildings, decrepit gas stations, soulless apartments…. In fact I could see the Manhattan skyline rising behind them from time to time, but this wasn’t the New York of my dreams. This is how I reached the easy conclusion that Brooklyn wasn’t New York. I left my bags in my friend’s Brooklyn brownstone, we drank some tea together, lit up cigarettes. As I walked around the apartment, I still kept thinking that this was not New York yet: The real thing, the place to go—the dream—was just over there, across the river.

  An hour later, the sun that had made the day seem so long was about to set. We crossed the Brooklyn Bridge over to Manhattan. Cities have come to all look the same, but if any silhouette was still unmistakable, it was the New York I now saw. In Istanbul I’d just finished a new novel, and other matters had begun to pile up; I was tired; awake now for forty hours, but my eyes were wide open. It was as if I believed that, somewhere among the shadows of these giant silhouettes, I might find the key to not just everything on the face of the earth but to the originals of the dreams of all my years. Perhaps all great cities stir this sort of illusion.

  As we began to drive along the avenues and streets of Manhattan, I tried to compare what I was seeing with the images in my mind. What drew my eye was something behind the crowded streets, behind the sidewalks along which people seem to move so slowly, as if in a peaceful dream, behind the lights of an ordinary evening. Just as my friend tired of driving up and down the city streets, I figured it out: My eyes couldn’t stop searching, because they couldn’t find the secret behind all these sights, the truth that all dreamers hope will one day be revealed to them. I decided to be humble: I would only be able to draw the secret out from this streetscape—the common pavements, the little neighborhood shops, the familiar glow of the streetlamps—through fortitude and resignation. If the great truth I had glimpsed in my dreams existed, I would not find it among the shadows of the skyscrapers but in the little observations I would now patiently gather.

  I spent the next few hours taking in the sights around me in this way. I noticed the colors of the hoses and the numbers on the gas pumps; I looked at black boys rushing through the traffic with dirty rags to “clean” the windows of cars stopped in traffic; at men in shorts and running shoes and the metallic glow of bluish phone booths; at walls, bricks, sheets of glass, trees, dogs, yellow taxis, delicatessens…. It was as if I were seeing an elegant landscape set down on this earth fully formed, with its patiently repeating fire hydrants, garbage cans, brick walls, and beer cans. Every street, every neighborhood—even the places where we sat down to have a beer or coffee—seemed to serve the same happy dream.

  I felt no differently about the people. The teenager in his leather jacket with the partly shaven head and a little purple ponytail at the top, the girl with an extraordinarily fat woman, that man in the suit who ran past me so quickly, the black men walking past me with huge transistor radios, the pale-faced, long-legged women with headphones running with dogs who had the same sense of purpose—all these people passed us on the sidewalk.

  Late in the evening, after my friend’s wife finished work and joined us, we went to sit among the crowded tables of a pastry shop that extended to a sidewalk café. They asked me a few things about Turkey and I mumbled a reply; they had more questions and I answered them. In this way I tried to convince myself that I had joined in the life of a city, now less a fiction made from ghostly echoes of the sounds and movements of a summer evening than a place apart, a real world filled end to end with real people. After that I watched the streets, whose images and lights I would come to know so well as they changed slowly from a dreamscape into real asphalt streets. Who can say which world was the real New York?

  Still there are a few dreamlike images that I will never forget. The top of that table on the sidewalk was of white Formica. Sitting on it was a greenish beer bottle and our cream-colored coffee cups. The view of the crowds on the pavement was blocked by the wide back of a woman in a green pullover at the table in front of us. The pale orange light coming from the windows of the stone houses as their facades receded into the night, turning purple. Because the street was narrow, the streetlamp across the way was obscured by the leaves of a tree whose trunk stood on our side: Every once in a while I would see its white light playing on the huge silent cars parked along that curb.

  Very late that night, after the tables on the sidewalk had emptied and the pastry shop was closing down, my friend yawned and asked if I had set my watch to New York time. I told him that the watch I had been wearing for fifteen years had broken during the flight; taking it from my wrist, I showed it to him, and I never wore that watch again.

  The Police Watching Police TV

  “Hey guys, look at my new watch,” said one of the policemen.

  He stretched out his arm. There were three of us in the backseat of the car. I was sitting next to the right-hand window, and next to me were two more policemen.

  “Where did you get it?” asked the one sitting next to me.

  “Some guy on the sidewalk. Eight bucks,” said the policeman in the front.

  “It’ll break by tomorrow!” sa
id the other.

  “I’ve had it for two days already.”

  We were driving south along the Hudson on the West Side Highway, and our destination this morning was the courthouse. A month earlier, I’d been mugged. The black youths who’d mugged me had been clumsy enough to get caught and I had had to identify them, and now that they had confessed to all their crimes, I had been called to testify at their trial. When she had called me on the phone the day before, the prosecutor had realized that I wasn’t keen to give evidence, and—perhaps suspecting I would try to get out of it—she told me a police car would bring me to court in the morning. These two blond policemen alongside me would also be testifying. They had caught my clumsy young muggers as they stood waiting for the next victim about two blocks away from where they’d mugged me.

  As we entered the city traffic, the policemen began to discuss a television series. From what they said, I gathered that the characters were also in the NYPD, driving around in the same sort of blue-and-white cars as the one we were in now, warring with the same gangsters and drug dealers and suffering the same burnout. I was reminded of the provincial girls and unhappy daydreaming housewives of the nineteenth century who would put themselves in the place of the heroines of the novels they read, for these policemen had put themselves in the place of the heroes of this television series and were now discussing the series as if it presented their own lives. The language they used was different, though; most of their curse words I was hearing for the first time.

  After passing through Chinatown, we arrived at the courthouse, where we embarked on yet another of those long journeys upward in a lift. Then they took me to the prosecutor’s office. She did not fit my idea of a prosecutor; she looked more like a sweet, gentle ex-classmate. After telling me a few things very quickly, she said, “I’ll be right back,” and she rushed from the room.

  Her desk was covered with papers, and to pass the time I thought I might take a look: These were the confessions of the boys who had mugged me. I knew already that the gun they had used was not a real one. I was still annoyed with them, though. They had referred to me as a “white guy.” With my twenty dollars they’d bought crack. Realizing then that perhaps I should not have read these documents, I put them back on the table and, instead, leafed through a thick book I found sitting on the side: The Prosecutor’s Interrogation Handbook. I read about why a prosecutor could not charge a defense lawyer who colluded with a murderer by refusing to disclose the whereabouts of a buried corpse. The prosecutor returned.

  “You don’t seem to want to be a witness,” she said. We had left her office and were walking down the corridor.

  “I feel sorry for the boys,” I said.

  “Which boys?”

  “The ones who mugged me. How many years will they get?”

  “But they took your twenty dollars,” she said. “Do you know how they spent your money?”

  We went down in the lift; the courtroom was in the skyscraper on the other side of the street. The prosecutor carried her papers pressed against her chest, the way a college student might do, greeting other prosecutors as we passed them and affably telling me a few things about herself: She was from Nevada and she had majored in marine biology in Arkansas, discovering only later the profession she was meant to follow.

  “What profession?” I asked.

  “Law,” she said, making a circle with her lips.

  We embarked on another journey in a lift. No one spoke, all eyes glued to the numbers flashing sequentially above the door. When we got out, the prosecutor stopped by a bench along the corridor.

  “Wait here. When the judge calls you, just tell him the same thing you told me on your last visit,” she said.

  “This will be my last visit, I hope!” I said.

  She left. I was not allowed inside the courtroom, so I sat down on the bench and waited. After a while, I was joined by the policemen who’d driven me in, but before long they got back up on their feet. Curious, I went over to ask them what was going on.

  “The suspects have arrived, but the elevators are broken,” one of the policemen told me.

  “I’m wondering why they confessed to everything,” I said.

  “Because we treated them so well, that’s why,” said the other policeman with the thin mustache.

  “But that doesn’t explain why they confessed to all those other crimes,” I said. “Doesn’t this stand to increase their sentence? How many years are they going to get?”

  “Four years per robbery count, so twenty-eight years.”

  “Can’t a person defend himself?”

  “Look, mister,” said the one with the new watch, now beginning to look annoyed. “We didn’t touch a hair on their heads. I had nothing to eat that night, but they did. You follow me?”

  “I told them that if they confess to everything,” said the other policeman, trying to explain, “I’d tell the judge they weren’t bad guys and he’d give them a lighter sentence. They think I knew the judge in high school.”

  They both laughed.

  The policeman with the new watch pointed down the corridor. “That’s the guy who’ll be testifying. He knows how to make a good impression.”

  “I’m their friend,” said the policeman with the mustache.

  They laughed again. I went back to my bench. The policemen were called into the courtroom. There was another long wait; the side of the bench was in direct sunlight, and I had begun to perspire. I stood up and began to walk up and down the long, empty corridor. Then I stopped to look at the New York skyline. It was as if everything—the skyscrapers and the billboards—were about to crumble before my eyes. More time passed, and finally the prosecutor appeared.

  “So you’re still with us, are you? The elevators are broken, and the suspects are coming up the stairs. We’re still waiting for them.”

  After a while, the policemen returned. They were talking among themselves. I could not help but hear them. A friend of theirs had witnessed an incident in front of his house on his day off, and the fleeing suspect had shot and wounded him. Because this fugitive suspect also knew his address, the off-duty policeman had begun to receive threatening phone calls, and at that point he had moved to a different neighborhood. The policemen were laughing and talking about something else when they passed me to go into the courtroom. No one came out for a long time. As I sat in the silent corridor, I thought they had forgotten me. The lights on the ceiling and the corridor’s empty chairs and benches were reflected on the polished marble floors. I perspired a little more. After a while, the prosecutor came out again.

  “They made it to the courthouse, but now we can’t find them,” she said.

  “Aren’t they coming up the stairs?”

  “We’re still waiting.”

  She left. I watched her high-heeled shoes cross the marble floor. There was something about her gait that made me think of the way one might with his fingers suggest a figure walking. She went through the courtroom door and disappeared. By now I had lost the desire to check my watch, and I have no idea how long I did nothing but sit there perspiring on that bench. I wondered if the policeman’s new watch had broken yet; when I got up to take another look at the Manhattan skyline, it seemed to be spewing out steam; I gazed into the clouds, trying to draw some meaning from them. Much, much later, the prosecutor reappeared.

  “The suspects are lost somewhere in the building. We can’t find them anywhere, so the judge has postponed the hearing. You can go now.”

  When I reached the street after another long journey in the lift, I wanted to wash my face. I went into a restaurant, where a waiter said, “The restroom is for customers only. You have to sit down.”

  “I’d like a hamburger,” I said, without sitting down.

  “Just a plain hamburger?”

  “Yes.”

  I went into the restroom and washed my face.

  Flavorless Sweet Rolls and Beautiful Vistas

  When I told them that the cinnamon rolls we’d brought
from the bakery had lost their flavor, they laughed at me. It was a dark and rainy Saturday afternoon, and we were drinking tea and discussing whether or not to go to a Columbia University faculty party for students. They explained that the heavenly cinnamon smell that made you long for the sweet rolls the moment you walked into the bakery was actually an artificial fragrance they pumped into the store. Conned by that aroma, customers longed to touch these buns, when in fact there wasn’t even an oven in the back. You might wish to call this a “lost illusion,” as people used to say, or, more prosaically and descriptively, an absence of flavor. But you could also say it turned the store into a sham.

  Until you get used to this city, you spend a good part of the day pondering these absent flavors; because we still know what a real brick wall looks like and how it is constructed, a concrete wall that’s been made to look like a brick wall is a sham that causes most of us no pain. But how about when you see them beginning to put up huge buildings that are imitations of things they are not? The ostentatious postmodern structures that are now springing up all over New York City are the work of architects who do just this. These architects go out of their way to emphasize the fact that their buildings are imitations: With their enormous glass facades, their almost medieval twists and bends, they make me wonder whether they have no desire to be actually anything whatsoever. Do they wish only to deceive us, appearing to be something other than what they are? But then, can any deception so obvious be a deception at all?