by Orhan Pamuk
When I realized that one of the children of one of the women waiting for their orders was staring at me, I got annoyed. Let me think about something else, I said, but finally I couldn’t stand it, I rose and picked up my bottles.
“I’ll be back later,” I said.
I headed for the grocer’s. Children’s curiosity is unbearable. I was curious when I was little, too. I used to think it was because my mother had me before she was married, but that idea came to me later, after she had said that my father wasn’t my real father.
“Uncle Recep!” someone said. “Didn’t you see me?”
It was Hasan.
“I swear I didn’t see you,” I said. “I was thinking about something. What are you doing around here?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Go on, go home and study your lessons, Hasan,” I said. “What are you going to do around here? You have no business around here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t misunderstand, son,” I said. “I just mean you should be studying.”
“I can’t study in the morning, uncle,” he said. “It’s too hot. I study in the evenings.”
“Study in the evenings and in the mornings, too,” I said. “You want to get an education, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s not as hard as you think to study. I’ll do fine.”
“May it please God!” I said. “Okay, go on home now.”
“Have Faruk Bey and his family come yet?” he said. “I saw the white Anadol. How are they? Did Nilgün and Metin come, too?”
“They did,” I said. “They’re fine.”
“Say hello to Nilgün and Metin,” he said. “Anyway I just saw her. We used to be friends a long time ago.”
“I’ll tell them,” I said. “Now, go on home.”
“Okay, I’m going,” he said. “But I want to ask you something, Uncle Recep. Can you give me fifty liras? I have to get a notebook, and they are really expensive.”
“Are you smoking?” I said.
“I’m telling you my notebook is all used up …”
I put the bottles down, took out a twenty, and gave it to him.
“This isn’t enough,” he said.
“Come on, come on,” I said. “Before I get annoyed.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get a lead pencil, at least.” Just as he was going, he stopped. “Don’t tell my father, okay? He gets all upset over nothing.”
“Do not upset your father.”
There was nobody in the shop, but Nazmi, the grocer, was busy writing in his account book. Then he looked up, and we talked a little. He asked about the visitors. I said they were fine. And Faruk Bey, too? Why should I tell him he drinks, he knows that already, since Faruk Bey has been coming every evening to get bottle after bottle. The others? They’ve grown up, you know. Yes, I see the girl, he said, what was her name? Nilgün. She comes in the morning and gets the paper. She’s all grown up, yes. But it’s really the other one who’s grown, I said. Yes, that Metin. He had seen him, too, and told me his impressions of the boy: so there you are; what we call conversation and friendship. We tell each other things that we already know, and it makes me feel good; I know they’re just empty words, but it’s a distraction, at least, and I still get a kick out of it. He weighed my things and wrapped them up. Write the charges down on a piece of paper, I said. Back at the house I note them all in a ledger, and at the end of the month—in the winter, every two or three months—I show it to Faruk Bey. I say, so much for this, so much for that, take a look in case I’ve made a mistake in the addition. He doesn’t look. Fine, Recep, he says, thank you, these are the household expenses, here’s your monthly salary, pulling out damp crumpled bills from his wallet that smells of leather. I put them in my pocket without counting them and then quickly want to change the subject.
Nazmi wrote the bill on a slip of paper and I paid him. As I was leaving the shop, he suddenly said, “You know Rasim?”
“Rasim the fisherman?”
“Yes,” he said. “He died yesterday.”
He was just looking at me, but I didn’t say anything. I took my change, the string bag, and the packages.
“They say it was his heart,” he said. “They’ll bury him at noon, the day after tomorrow, when his sons come.”
Well, there you have it, everything’s beyond the power of our speech and our words.
14
Faruk Remembers the Pleasure of Reading
It was nine thirty when I got to Gebze, and already there was not a trace of the morning coolness. I made straight for the district governor’s office, wrote out a request, and signed it. When a clerk put a number on my request without reading it, I imagined another historian three hundred years later finding it amid the ruins and trying to figure out what it was. The historian’s profession is a strange one.
Strange, yes, but one that requires patience. In this way, feeling proud of my patience, I started to work with confidence. The story of two shopkeepers who killed each other in a fight immediately gripped my interest. Long after the funeral rites had been held and those two had been buried, their relatives were accusing one another in court. Witnesses testified in detail how the two of them had come at each other with knives in the middle of the market on the seventeenth of Cemaziulevvel 998. After transcribing it, I checked my conversion guide and found it would have been March 24, 1590, by the Christian calendar. So the altercation took place in the winter! All the while I’d had before my eyes the vision of a fiery hot summer day. Maybe it was a sunny March day. Then I read the record of a suit lodged by someone seeking to return an Arab slave he had purchased for six thousand akçe only to discover that the slave had an abscess on his foot. The purchaser wrote in clearly angry terms how he had been fooled by the words of the seller and how deep the wound was on the slave’s foot. Then I read the things written concerning a man who’d become a powerful landowner and who had business with Istanbul. Elsewhere in the court records it was revealed that twenty years earlier, when still a watchman on the dock, the same man had been convicted of malfeasance. I tried to work out from the decrees the exact nature of the fraud perpetrated in Gebze by this man, whose name was Budak, momentarily diverting myself from trying to track down the plague. I figured out that he had registered a parcel of land that didn’t exist and paid taxes on the nonexistent land for two years before exchanging it for a vineyard, and he even managed to worm his way out of trouble by pulling the wool over the new owner’s eyes. Or at least that version, which to my mind seemed just right for this Budak character, wasn’t disproved by the court records. It was no small feat whipping up this story on very limited evidence. I also had Budak getting involved in winemaking with the grapes from his new vineyard and selling his product illicitly out of a stable belonging to someone else. I took pleasure in reading how, when accused by some men he had ill used in business, he turned around and accused them even more vehemently. Later I learned that he had built a small mosque in Gebze. Just then, I was astonished to remember that my history teacher had devoted several pages in his history of Gebze to this man and that mosque. The Budak in his mind was completely different from the one in mine, his portraying a respectable, established Ottoman gentleman whose picture deserved inclusion in high school history books, while my Budak was at best a clever swindler and a parvenu. Just as I began to wonder whether the truth wasn’t in fact more complicated than either story, Riza announced that it was time for the noon break.
Outside, I went through the passage with the berry bushes to the old market to avoid the heat on the new avenue. I walked uphill, all the way to the new mosque. The courtyard was deserted; there were hammering noises coming from the body shop next door. Not yet feeling hungry enough to eat, I turned around and walked over to the coffeehouse. As I passed the opening of one of the side streets, I could swear I heard one of the kids calling out “Fatso.” I didn’t turn around to see whether the others were laughing or not.
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I sat down, asked for tea, and lit up a cigarette. There must be more to history, I thought, than just copying things down and linking a string of events together to make a story. Maybe it was like this: looking for the causes of a series of events, we look to other events to compare them with, and those events in turn must be explained by comparison with other events still, and on and on until we find that our entire lives wouldn’t suffice to get to the bottom of so many facts. We have to leave off the task somewhere, expecting others to continue from where we left off, but no sooner do they begin than they decide all our explanations are wrong. And so there always remains important work to be done.
I was bored by these reflections. I lit into the kid who still hadn’t brought my tea. Then to console myself, I thought: You’re just tormenting yourself, don’t you see that your thoughts about what historians do are themselves but another story? In someone else’s telling, historians could be said to do something completely different. They may accuse us of harboring ideologies and filling the heads of our contemporaries with more or less false notions about themselves and their world, but I’ve no doubt that the true appeal of history is the pleasure of the story, the power to divert us. Not that my colleagues in their starched-collar self-importance would ever admit as much, preferring instead to distance themselves from their own children. When my tea finally came I tossed in two sugar cubes and watched them dissolve in the glass. After one more cigarette, I went to the restaurant.
I used to eat here two years ago, happy to have found a cozy, quiet, pleasant place. Behind a warm fogged-up window were stuffed grape leaves, musakka, as well as various other eggplant dishes, including a stew and a puree, all in a row on trays, each bathing in the same thick oil, as was a pile of half-melted meatballs, which called to mind so many water buffalo wallowing in mud to escape the summer heat. My appetite perked up. I ordered an eggplant musakka, a pilaf, and a plate of stew. When the waiter who was wearing socks and flip-flops proposed it, I said that, yes, I would have a beer, too.
I ate my food in a good mood, slowly savoring each bite, dipping my bread in the oil and drinking the beer. But suddenly I found myself thinking about my wife about to have a child with her new husband, and I became depressed. In our first few months of marriage, we had been careful not to have a child, to the point that it took all the fun out of things, since Selma wouldn’t hear of contraceptive pills and devices. By the time we spoke about having a child a year later we discovered that it wouldn’t be so easy, and for a long time, nothing materialized. One day Selma came to me and said it was time we consult a doctor, and in order to give me courage she said that she would go first. I objected, saying I wouldn’t stand for those brutes called doctors getting involved in our private lives. I don’t know whether Selma ever went or not. Maybe she did without telling me, but I didn’t have a chance to think about this much, because we separated shortly afterward.
The waiter picked up the empty plates and carried them off. I asked what they had for dessert, and he said kadayif, and I asked him to bring it. I also asked for another beer, telling him, it’ll go well with kadayif, won’t it, and laughed. He didn’t laugh, and I sat there thinking.
I remembered when I was with my mother and father in Kemah, in the east. There was still no Nilgün and no Metin. My mother was healthy and could manage the housework on her own. We were living in a two-story stone house; the steps used to be like ice, and so when I was hungry in the night I didn’t dare go down to the kitchen all by myself, so I paid the price for my greediness with sleepless fantasies of what morsels there might be in the larder. The stone house had a little balcony, too; on cloudless cold winter nights, a pure-white meadow appeared between the mountains. When it got colder, we would hear the howling of the wolves, and it was said that they came down to the town at night, so hungry sometimes they would knock at the door, and so, it was said, we should never open up without asking who was there. One night my father even opened the door with a gun in hand. And in the spring, once, he went after a fox that had gotten in among the chicks with the same revolver. We didn’t see the fox; we only heard the scratching and rattling noises he made. My mother said that crows were also known to make off with chicks. I thought what a pity it was I’d never seen that. Soon I realized that it was long since time for me to return to the archives.
When I started rooting around in the moldy papers again my spirits lifted immediately. I began to read at random. I had to laugh when I read how Yusuf, a debtor, finally paid what he owed, redeemed the donkey that he had left as guaranty, only to discover on the way home that the donkey had been lamed in its back right hoof, obliging the former debtor to go to court against his creditor, Hussein. For a moment I thought I had laughed only because of the two bottles of beer, but when I read the same story again, I laughed all the more. After that I would read whatever I happened on, regardless of whether or not I had read it before. I wasn’t even bothering to take notes. As I perused one document after another, one page and the next, I found I was reading for the pure pleasure of it, enjoying every laugh. A little later I felt myself becoming excited; after the sensation had mostly passed, I realized it was like listening to a favorite piece of music after having had a few. My mind kept alighting on disjointed concern about my life as I tried to pay attention to the stories flowing by in front of me. A foundation director and a miller had fallen into dispute and appeared before the court reciting a whole pile of figures concerning the income and output of the mill. The court secretary wrote them all down carefully just as I did in my notebook. After I’d filled up a whole page with the figures—monthly and seasonal income, bushels of wheat and barley ground, the profit of years gone by—I looked at it all with a childish glee that propelled me on.
A ship carrying wheat had disappeared after docking in Karamürsel. It had never reached Istanbul nor had anyone shown up with news of its whereabouts. I decided that the ship had sunk somewhere on those rocks off Tuzla and that none of the crewmen knew how to swim. Then I read the trial transcript concerning Dursun’s son Abdullah, who asked for the return of the four linens consigned to the dyers Kadri and Mehmet to be dyed, but I didn’t write anything. I couldn’t understand why Abdullah would want them back undyed. The pickler Ibrahim Sofu had sold three pickled cucumbers for one akçe on Shaban 19, 991 (September 7, 1583), a simple matter yet nevertheless one resulting in a complaint and court proceedings. Three days after this event, with no apparent connection, thirteen akçe’s worth of beef sold by Mehmet the butcher was found to be one hundred forty dirhams short, a grievance entered in the records and also in my notebook. I wondered what my colleagues on the faculty would think if they found this notebook; they couldn’t possibly think that I had just made all this stuff up, which would really make them worry. If I could only find a good story, then they’d be completely astonished. My man Budak, who started out selling wine and climbed his way up, he’d be the ideal protagonist. I put my mind to thinking up a suitably grand title for such a story, a story I could fancy up with a heap of footnotes and document numbers: “A Prototype of the Nobility: Koca Budak of Gebze”! Not bad! If only it were Budak Pasha instead of just Budak, it would be even better. Perhaps he eventually became a pasha. Maybe I would write a paper explaining how he became a pasha, by way of sketching a general portrait of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. But when I thought about all the boring details I would have to include, my enthusiasm wilted; for a moment I thought I would weep, another effect of the beer, I thought, but surely its effect had worn off by then. Well, what could I do but keep reading.
I reread the arrest orders for the cavalry soldier Tahir, son of Mehmet, who had taken up banditry. I read the orders prescribing steps to be taken to prevent animals of the neighboring villages from grazing in the orchard of Ethem Pasha, and about Nurettin, thought to have died of the plague, but who, it was alleged, had actually been beaten to death by his wife’s father. But I wrote down none of it. Instead I copied in full a long list of
market prices. Then I read that Ömer’s son Pir Ahmet promised in the presence of the attorney Sheikh Fethullah that he would pay his debt to Mehmet the hamam owner within eight days. Following that: the report of how Musa’s son Hizir’s mouth smelled of wine. I might have laughed had I drunk a little more beer. For a long while I continued reading through the court records very intently but without forming any particular thoughts or taking notes. I read as though I were looking for something, as though I were right on the heels of something. Finally I stopped when my eyes got tired, and I noticed that the sun was shining through the basement window.
Why did I become a historian? After my mother died in the spring, my father gave up his position as district administrator before he was eligible for a pension and settled in Cennethisar. I spent that summer there going through his books and walking in the gardens and along the seashore thinking about what I had read. I told people who asked if I was going to be a doctor that, yes, my grandfather was a doctor, too. But then just like that, I went off in the fall and signed up for history. How many are there like me who chose history for their occupation so willfully? Selma used to say that my foolish pride and the haughtiness inherent in my personality were the cause of idiocies I commit. But she wasn’t displeased that I was a historian. I guess my father didn’t like it; when he heard that I had registered for history he started drinking. Then again, he was already drinking anyway, something my grandmother would constantly scold him for. She herself wasn’t too pleased with my chosen profession. When I thought of Grandmother, I thought of the house and Nilgün; it was nearly five. I no longer felt the effect of the beer. A little later when I could take no more pleasure in reading I got up and left without waiting for Riza.