by Orhan Pamuk
In the Middle Ages, they believed God sent the plague down upon the earth to separate the guilty from the innocent. If you can guess that a fraction of those struck down by the plague might have rejected that idea, you can also understand why American smokers might be so eager to prove themselves good citizens. Whenever a group retreats to a corner to congregate around an ashtray at a meeting or a workplace, or convene in a smoking room (if one exists at all), these cursed addicts are quick to tell you that they’re on the point of quitting. In fact they are good citizens, but because they have regrets about this habit that lack of culture, willpower, and success bequeathed them, they think of themselves as having succumbed to it only temporarily. They have in their minds a story that will offer them deliverance from the land of the thief and the sinner: After resolving their problems with their lovers, finishing their unfinishable dissertations, or finding jobs, they will give up this accursed habit and join the ranks of right-living Americans. Some may even grow uneasy about their sinful deportment around the ashtray and seek to prove to the rest that they aren’t really guilty of the crime they are committing: They tell you that actually they don’t smoke at all, they’re just smoking this cigarette because of a particularly rough day, or the cigarette is extremely low in tar and nicotine, they smoke in fact only three cigarettes a day, and, as you have already seen, they carried no matches or lighters.
But there are always a few among the guilty who have so given themselves over to a life of sin that—in their own homes, at least—they embrace their habit with pride. I have met happy, cultivated, self-disciplined, and well-off people of the older generation who have been smoking for too long ever to give up and who have resigned themselves to the early death that cigarettes may bring them. Some of these same people were not at all resigned when they came into conflict with the young business types who were banning smoking at their places of work: This they saw as a curb on their freedom. I remember sitting with a writer much older than myself by the front window of a luncheonette, watching the cigarette ads on the tops of the yellow taxis going past us and talking at length about the taste of cigarettes. In the Italian sense of the expression, he also “smoked like a Turk.” In the way that an idle aristocrat might discuss rare wines, he talked about the rough taste of long Camels and the nice, refined taste of short Kents, and it seemed to me that what he was fearlessly embracing was the taste of our sin: Every reference to cigarettes brought the love of life into conflict with the fear of death, leading me to wonder if New York’s cigarette ideology isn’t some sort of religion.
Forty-second Street
They’d met on the corner of Forty-second and, without pausing to speak, headed south to go into the first luncheonette they could find. When the rain began, the blacks who had been hawking cordless telephones and radios on Fifth Avenue withdrew from the street. Inside the diner it smelled of steam and cooking oil. Running parallel to the counter were a row of tables and red-upholstered booths. The man took off his old coat and carefully placed it next to him on the booth against the wall. The woman sat down, taking off her coat too. Sitting on one of the stools at the counter was an old man dozing over the sports pages.
“Don’t hang your handbag there,” said the man to the woman. “If someone snatches it, he’ll be out the door before anyone can stop him.”
The woman let her eyes wander over the menu. They were both close to thirty. As the man began groping nervously for his cigarettes, the woman moved the bag from where she had hung it and put it on top of the coat beside her.
“It’s bad,” she finally said. “They don’t want any more buttons.”
“Why not?”
“They haven’t been able to sell the ones I already made for them yet.”
“Have they paid you?”
“They’ve paid me half.”
“How about the earrings?”
“They don’t want buttons, and they don’t want earrings.”
The buttons were actually bracelets. She did designs on wooden beads and earrings and sold them to some hag of a vendor for two dollars a pair. She could no longer remember why she called the bracelets “buttons” but it was probably because these bracelets looked like buttons.
“Do you think I should get a job?” the woman asked.
“You know that wouldn’t work,” said the man. “If you did, you’d have no time left to paint.”
“No one’s ever bought one of my paintings.”
“But they will,” said the man. “Why don’t we call Bariş? He wanted to see your studio.”
He and Bariş had studied together at university in Istanbul. Now his old friend had come to New York for a meeting with a computer company.
“Do you think he’d buy something?” the woman asked.
“He did say he wanted to see your studio. Why else would he want to see your studio?”
“Because he’s curious, maybe.”
“If he sees something he likes, he’ll buy it,” said the man.
The waiter came to take their order.
“Two coffees,” said the man. Then he turned to the woman and said, “You want coffee, right?”
“I want something to eat too,” said the woman, but by now the waiter had left. For a time they were silent.
“What hotel is Bariş staying at?” asked the man.
“He doesn’t want to buy anything,” said the woman. “He just wants to see it. I don’t want to call him just because he might buy something.”
“If he’s not interested in buying anything, why would he want to see it?” said the man. “I can’t imagine that he developed a taste for neo-expressionism while he was doing business in Istanbul.”
“He’s interested in knowing what I’m up to; it’s as simple as that,” said the woman. “He wants to see what sort of place I work in.”
“By now, though, he’ll have forgotten all about it.”
“Forgotten what?”
“What he said, about wanting to see your paintings.”
“He didn’t say he wanted to see my paintings, he said he wanted to see my studio,” said the woman. “He’s a nice boy. Why should I trick him into buying paintings that no one in New York wants to buy either?”
“If you think you’re cheating anyone who wants to buy your paintings, then you’ll never sell a single one,” said the man.
“If that’s what I have to do to sell them, then I’d prefer not to sell them at all.”
There was a silence.
“That’s how everyone sells things,” said the man. “Everyone always sells to their friends first.”
“I am not living here in New York so I can sell paintings to my old friends from Turkey,” said the woman. “This is not what I came to New York to do. Anyway, I don’t think he’d buy anything.”
“So tell me, why did you come to New York?” asked the man resentfully.
The waiter arrived with their two coffees. The woman gave no answer.
“So tell me, why did you come to New York?” the man asked again, this time with anger.
“Oh, please, don’t start!” said the woman.
“I know why you came here. You didn’t come for me. It’s clear by now that you didn’t come here to do paintings, either. You seem to have come here to paint little designs on rings and restrooms.”
He knew this would offend her. The woman had done hundreds of designs for a company that produced Gentlemen and Ladies signs for restrooms: in the shape of umbrellas, cigars, high-heeled shoes, silhouettes of men and women, bowler hats, handbags, peeing children. When she had started working for them, she used to laugh about these things, but now she hated them.
“Okay. Bariş is staying at the Plaza,” said the woman.
“The Plaza is where good people stay,” said the man.
“Aren’t you going to call him?”
The man got up and walked to the far end of the luncheonette, and after he had found the hotel in the directory and dialed the number, the woman looked at him f
or some time. His face was pale, but he was powerfully built, with good posture, and in good health. Behind him were posters of the type one often saw in such places: Greece and the Aegean,FLY PAN AM TO THE SUNNY PARADISE OF RHODES. Room 712 did notanswer. He returned to his seat.
“The good man is not there!”
“I didn’t say he was a good man, I said he was a nice boy,” the woman said carefully.
“If he’s just a nice boy, why is he staying at the Plaza, why is he earning so much money?”
“He’s a nice boy!” the woman insisted stubbornly.
“We don’t have enough money to make it to Monday. He’s nibbling on oysters and lobster at the Plaza, and he’s a nice boy.”
“Do you know what?” said the woman vengefully. “You’re waiting around for nothing. I’m never going back to Turkey.”
“I know—”
“You know why I’m not going back, don’t you? Because I cannot abide Turkish men.”
“And you’re a Turkish girl,” said the man angrily. “You’re a Turkish girl who can’t figure out how to sell her paintings. If you can even call them paintings.”
They fell silent. Someone put a coin into the jukebox at the far end, and the restaurant filled with sweet and gentle music, and then a tired and troubled blues singer joined in. They listened. When the girl took her trembling hand off the table and nervously began to search through her coat pockets and her handbag, the man understood: She was looking for her lost handkerchief, to wipe away her tears.
“I’m leaving,” said the man, standing up. He picked up his coat and went out.
The rain was falling harder now, and the street was darker. The patch of sky between the lights of the skyscrapers was as black as night. He walked to Forty-second Street and turned left. The men who had been hawking cordless telephones only a short while ago were now hawking umbrellas, which they’d hung on their arms and legs. When he reached Sixth Avenue, the street brightened. As people walked past them on the wet pavement, the blacks standing in the doorways and in front of shops ablaze with strip lights were chanting the same words, as if they’d all learned this song together: “Bad girls, amazing girls, bunny girls, girls-girls-girls. Come on in, come on in and check it out, sir; check it out, check it out: We have private booths, one-way mirrors, live shows, real nipples, girls-girls-girls; come in and check it out, look and see.” Some men who had not yet decided were standing outside, looking at the posters: DREAMS OF A WILD CHILD, WET LIPS, INSATIABLE. Passing an empty lot near Seventh Avenue, he caught the smell of aloe. Gathered together in a dark corner, a group of Pakistanis dressed in long robes were selling the Koran in English, stsectrings of huge prayer beads, bottles of aromatic oils, and religious pamphlets. After gazing blankly at the bus terminal for a very long time, he walked through the dark across Forty-first Street back to Fifth Avenue. The luncheonette was called Tom’s Place. The woman was no longer at the table. He asked the waiter.
“Did the woman who was sitting here leave?”
“The lady who was sitting here?” asked the waiter. “The lady who was sitting here is gone.”
THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW
Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul, where he still lives. His family had made a fortune in railroad construction during the early days of the Turkish Republic and Pamuk attended Robert College, where the children of the city’s privileged elite received a secular, Western-style education. Early in life he developed a passion for the visual arts, but after enrolling in college to study architecture he decided he wanted to write. He is now Turkey’s most widely read author.
His first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, was published in 1982 and was followed by The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985/1991 in English translation), The Black Book (1990/1994), and The New Life (1994/1997). In 2003 Pamuk received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red (1998/2001), a murder mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul and narrated by multiple voices. The novel explores themes central to his fiction: the intricacies of identity in a country that straddles East and West, sibling rivalry, the existence of doubles, the value of beauty and originality, and the anxiety of cultural influence. Snow (2002/2004), which focuses on religious and political radicalism, was the first of his novels to confront political extremism in contemporary Turkey and it confirmed his standing abroad even as it divided opinion at home. Pamuk’s most recent book is Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003/2005), a double portrait of himself—in childhood and youth—and of the place he comes from.
This interview with Orhan Pamuk was conducted in two sustained sessions in London and by correspondence. The first conversation occurred in May 2004 at the time of the British publication of Snow. A special room had been booked for the meeting—a fluorescent-lit, noisily air-conditioned corporate space in the hotel basement. Pamuk arrived, wearing a black corduroy jacket over a light blue shirt and dark slacks, and observed, “We could die here and nobody would ever find us.” We retreated to a plush, quiet corner of the hotel lobby where we spoke for three hours, pausing only for coffee and a chicken sandwich.
In April 2005 Pamuk returned to London for the publication of Istanbul, and we settled into the same corner of the hotel lobby to speak for two hours. At first he seemed quite strained, and with reason. Two months earlier, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Der Tages-Anzeiger, he had said of Turkey, “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” This remark set off a relentless campaign against Pamuk in the Turkish nationalist press. After all, the Turkish government persists in denying the 1915 genocidal slaughter of Armenians in Turkey and has imposed laws severely restricting discussion of the ongoing Kurdish conflict. Pamuk declined to discuss the controversy for the public record in the hope that it would soon fade. In August, however, Pamuk’s remarks in the Swiss paper resulted in his being charged under Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code with “public denigration” of Turkish identity—a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. Despite outraged international press coverage of his case, as well as vigorous protest to the Turkish government by members of the European Parliament and by International PEN, when this magazine went to press in mid-November Pamuk was still slated to stand trial on December 16, 2005.
—Ángel Gurría-Quintana
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about giving interviews?
ORHAN PAMUK
I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences. I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
INTERVIEWE
You’ve generally received a positive response to your books in Europe and the United States. What is your critical reception in Turkey?
PAMUK
The good years are over now. When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.
INTERVIEWER
When you say “the previous generation,” whom do you have in mind?
PAMUK
The authors who felt a social responsibility, authors who felt that literature serves morality and politics. They were flat realists, not experimental. Like writers in so many poor countries, they wasted their talent on trying to serve their nation. I did not want to be like them, because even in my youth I had enjoyed Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Proust—I had never aspired to the social-realist model of Steinbeck and Gorky. The literature produced in the sixties and seventies was becoming outmoded, so I was welcomed as an author of the new generation.
After the mid-nineties, when my books began to sell in amounts that no one in Turkey had ever dreamed of, my honeymoon years with the Turkish press and intellectuals were over. From then on, critical reception was mostly a reaction to the publicity and sales, rath
er than the content of my books. Now, unfortunately, I am notorious for my political comments—most of which are picked up from international interviews and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more radical and politically foolish than I really am.
INTERVIEWER
So there is a hostile reaction to your popularity?
PAMUK
My strong opinion is that it’s a sort of punishment for my sales figures and political comments. But I don’t want to continue saying this, because I sound defensive. I may be misrepresenting the whole picture.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you write?
PAMUK
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the other world, which the imagination needs to operate, fade away. So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats.