by Orhan Pamuk
But earnest interests did not cure me of the urge to mock everyone and everything. At Robert Academy, when my classmates showed more interest in the spicy jokes I was whispering to them than in the teacher, it pleased me to be proven a good storyteller. The main butts of my jokes were the boring Turkish teachers, some of them uneasy about teaching in an American school and fearful that “spies” among us were “informing” on them to the Americans; other Turkish teachers were given to long nationalist orations and because, compared with the Americans, they seemed apathetic, tired, old, and depressed, we felt they didn’t like us any more than they liked themselves or life itself. Unlike the friendly and well-meaning American teachers, their first impulse was always to make us memorize the textbook and punish us if we didn’t, and we hated them for their bureaucratic souls.
The Americans were mostly younger and, in their zeal to teach their Turkish students, took us to be far more innocent and wide-eyed than we were. Their almost religious fervor when explicating the wonders of western civilization would leave us caught between laughter and despair. Some had come to Turkey hoping to teach the illiterate children of the impoverished third world; most were leftists born in the 1940s who would read to us from Brecht and offer up Marxist analyses of Shakespeare; even when they were reading us literature, they were trying to prove that the source of all evil was a society created by good people who had taken the wrong path. One teacher who made a point of explaining the fate of a good person who refused to bow to society, often used the phrase “You are pushed,” and a few of the jokers in the class kept saying, “Yes, sir, you are pushed,” the teacher never the wiser about a Turkish word that sounded just like “pushed” and meant queer; when the whole class tittered, we weren’t insulting him, but our veiled resentment of our American teacher was acknowledged among us. Our timid anti-Americanism was in keeping with the nationalist leftist mood of the time, and it worried the school’s bright Anatolian scholarship students the most. They’d taken difficult exams to earn the right to study at this exclusive school and were mostly brilliant and hardworking boys from poor provincial families; while they had grown up dreaming of American culture and the land of the free—most of all, they longed for the chance to study at an American university and perhaps settle in the States—even so, they were troubled by the war in Vietnam and not immune to resentment, and from time to time their anger at Americans bubbled over. The Istanbul bourgeoisie and my rich-kid friends weren’t particularly troubled by all this. For them, Robert Academy was simply the first step toward the future that rightfully awaited them as managers and owners of the country’s biggest companies or as Turkish agents of big foreign firms.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to be, but if anyone asked I said I would stay in Istanbul and study architecture. It wasn’t just my idea, my family had reached a consensus to this effect some time before. As I had a good mind like my grandfather, my father, and my uncle, I too was meant to study engineering at Istanbul Technical University, but since I had such a keen interest in painting, it was decided that it would be more fitting for me to study architecture at the same institution. I cannot remember who first applied this simple logic to the question of my future, but by the time I was at Robert Academy it was a settled plan and I’d made it my own. Never once did I entertain the idea of leaving the city. This wasn’t owing to any great love of the place where I lived, but rather a deep-seated reluctance to abandon habits and houses that had made me the sort who was just too lazy to try out anything new. I was, as I had begun to discover even then, the sort who could wear the same clothes and eat the same things and go for a hundred years without getting bored so long as I could entertain wild dreams in the privacy of my imagination.
At the time, my father was the head of Aygaz, Turkey’s leading propane company, so sometimes he said he had to go out to Büyükçekmece to inspect a few depots or filling stations that were under construction in Ambarlı. We would take the car for a Sunday morning spin there, or we’d go to the Bosphorus, or we’d go out to buy something or visit my grandmother—whatever the reason, he’d put me in the car (a German Ford, a 1966 Taunus), turn on the radio, and put his foot on the accelerator. It was on these Sunday morning excursions that we discussed the meaning of life and what I was to do with mine.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the main streets of Istanbul were empty on Sunday mornings, and as we drove through neighborhoods I’d never seen before, we’d listen to “light western music” (the Beatles, Sylvie Vartan, Tom Jones, and suchlike) and my father would tell me that the best thing a person could do was to live by his own lights—money could never be the object, but if happiness depended on it, it could be a means to that end—or he would tell me how once when he had left us he had gone to Paris, had written poems in his hotel room, and had also translated Valéry’s poems into Turkish, but years later, while he was traveling in America, the suitcase in which he kept all his poems and translations had been stolen. As the music rose and fell in rhythm with the city streets, he would would adjust his stories to the beat—he spoke of having seen Jean-Paul Sartre many times in the streets of Paris during the 1950s, of how the Pamuk Apartments in Nişantaşı had come to be built, of the failure of one of his first businesses—and I knew I would never forget anything he told me. From time to time he’d pause to admire the view or a beautiful woman on the pavement, and while I listened to his offerings of gentle and understated wisdom and advice, I would gaze at scenes of the leaden winter morning as they flashed across the windshield. As I watched the cars crossing the Galata Bridge, the back neighborhoods where a few wooden houses still stood, the narrow streets, the crowds heading to a soccer match, or the thin-funneled tugboat pulling coal barges down the Bosphorus, I’d listen to my father’s wise voice telling me how important it was that people followed their own instincts and passions; that actually life was very short; and that also it was a good thing if a person knew what he wanted to do in life—that, in fact, a person who spent his life writing, drawing, and painting could enjoy a deeper, richer life—and as I drank in his words, they would blend in with the things I was seeing.
Before long, the music, the views rushing past the window, my father’s voice (“Shall we turn in here?” he’d ask), and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway, that true happiness and meaning resided in places we would never find and perhaps did not wish to find, but—whether we were pursuing the answers or merely pleasure and emotional depth—the pursuit mattered no less than the attainment, the asking as important as the views we saw through the windows of the car, the house, the ferry. With time, life—like music, art, and stories—would rise and fall, eventually to end, but even years later those lives are with us still, in the city views that flow before our eyes, like memories plucked from dreams.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
To Be Unhappy Is to Hate Oneself and One’s City
Sometimes one’s city can look like an alien place. Streets that seem like home will suddenly change color; I’ll look into the ever-mysterious crowds pressing past me and suddenly think they’ve been there for hundreds of years. With its muddy parks and desolate open spaces, its electricity poles, the billboards plastered over its squares, and its concrete monstrosities, this city, like my soul, is fast becoming an empty—a truly empty—place. The filth of the side streets; the foul smell from open rubbish bins; the ups, downs, and holes in the pavements; all this disorder and chaos; the pushing and shoving that make it the sort of city it is—I am left wondering if the city is punishing me for adding to the squalor, for being here at all. When its melancholy begins to seep into me and from me into it, I begin to think there’s nothing I can do; like the city, I belong to the living dead, I am a corpse that still breathes, a wretch condemned to walk streets and pavements that can only remind me of my filth and my defeat. Even when I peer between the hideous new concrete apar
tment buildings (each one crushing my soul) and catch a glimpse of the Bosphorus shimmering like a silken scarf, hope still eludes me. The darkest, most murderous, and authentic strain of melancholy creeps in from streets too distant to see, and I can almost smell it—just as an experienced İstanbullu can tell from the soft scent of algae and sea on an autumn evening that the south winds are bringing us a storm; and like someone who rushes home to take shelter from that storm, that earthquake, that death, I too long to be back within my own four walls.
I don’t like afternoons in spring when the sun suddenly comes out full strength, mercilessly illuminating all the poverty, disorder, and failure. I don’t like Halaskârgazi, that great avenue that stretches from Taksim through Harbiye and Şişli and goes all the way to Mecidiyeköy. My mother, who lived in this area as a child, speaks longingly of the mulberry trees that once lined its avenues; now they’re lined with apartment buildings constructed during the sixties and seventies in the “international style”; they have huge windows and walls covered with ugly mosaic tiles. There are back streets in Şişli (Pangaltı), Nişantaşı (Topağacı), and Taksim (Talimhane) that make me want to flee at once: These are places, far from anything green and without the sliver of a Bosphorus view, where family quarrels have caused the small lots to be parceled out into yet smaller ones, from which apartments rise up in crooked misery.
In the days when I walked up and down these airless and downhearted streets, I’d think that every aunty looking down from her window and every old mustachioed uncle hated me—and, moreover, that they were right to do so. I hate the back streets between Nişantaşı and Şişli with their clothing stores, the streets between Galata and Tepebaşı with their lighting and chandelier stores, the area around Taksim Talimhane when it was still mostly stores selling spare automotive parts. (During the roller-coaster years, when my father and my uncle were gleefully investing my grandfather’s legacy in one lackluster venture after another, they too had opened such a store here, but being unable to get it off the ground, they forgot about car parts and amused themselves with practical jokes, like getting their errand boys to “sample Turkey’s first canned tomato juice” after they had doused it heavily with pepper.) As for the pot-makers that have invaded the streets around Süleymaniye, causing an endless din of hammers and machine presses, I hate them as much as I hate the taxis and little trucks that service these places and clog up the traffic. I see them, and the anger brewing up inside me makes me hate the city as much as I hate myself, all the more so when I look at the huge and brilliantly colored letters of signs by which the gentlemen of the city advertise their names, businesses, jobs, professions, and successes. All those professors, doctors, surgeons, certified financial consultants, lawyers admitted to the bar, Happy Döner Shops, Life Groceries, and Black Sea food stores; all those banks, insurance agencies, detergent brands and newspaper names, cinemas and jeans stores; the posters advertising soft drinks; the stores where you can buy drinking water and tickets for soccer pools for the lottery; the stores that announce themselves as licensed retailers of propane gas in signs festooned above their names in huge proud letters—all these give me to know that the rest of the city is as confused and unhappy as I am and that I need to return to a dark corner, to my little room, before the noise and signs pull me under.
AKBANKMORNINGDÖNERSHOPFABRICGUARANTEE
DDRINKITHEREDAILYSOAPSIDEALTIMEFORJEWELSNURIBA
YARLAWYERPAYINSTALLMENTS
So in the end I’ll escape the terrorizing crowds, the endless chaos, and the noonday sun that brings every ugly thing in the city into relief, but if I’m already tired and depressed, the reading machine inside my head will remember every sign from every street and repeat them, run together like a Turkish lament.
SPRINGSALESELAMIBUFFETPUBLICTELEPHONESTAR
BEYOĞLUIPNOTARYALEMACARONIANANKARAMARKET
SHOWHAIRDRESSERHEALTHAPTRADIOANDTRANSISTORS
Count the French and English words on billboards and posters, in shop signs, magazines, and businesses; this is indeed a city moving westward, but it’s still not changing as fast as it talks. Neither can the city honor the traditions implied by its mosques, its minarets, its calls to prayer, its history. Everything is half formed, shoddy, and soiled.
RAZORSPLEASEPROCEEDATLUNCHTIMEPHILIPS
LICENSEEDOCTORDEPOTFOLDTHECARPETS
PORCELAINFAHIRATTORNEYATLAW
To escape this hybrid lettered hell, I conjure up a golden age, a pure and shining moment when the city “was at peace with itself,” when it was a “beautiful whole.” The Istanbul Melling painted, of western travelers like Nerval, Gautier, and de Amicis. But as my reason reasserts itself, I remember that I love this city not for any purity but precisely for the lamentable want of it. And that same inner pragmatist, the one who will pardon me my defects too, warns me against the hüzün hanging over the city, its telegraphy still tapping away inside my head.
STREETYOURMONEYYOURFUTUREINSURANCESUN
BUFFETRINGTHEBELLNOVAWATCHESARTIN
SPAREPARTSVOGUEBALIVIZONSTOCKINGS
I’ve never wholly belonged to this city, and maybe that’s been the problem all along. Sitting in my grandmother’s apartment, drinking beer and liqueur with my family after a holiday feast, or tooling around the city on a winter’s day with my rich would-be playboy friends from Robert Academy in their fathers’ cars, I felt the same way I feel now if I’m walking the streets on a spring afternoon: The idea rises up inside me that I’m worthless and belong nowhere, that I must distance myself from these people and go hide in a corner—it’s almost an animal instinct—but it’s the desire to flee the very community that has opened its arms to me, it’s God’s all-seeing, all-forgiving gaze, that induces such deep guilt.
When I started lycée, loneliness seemed a transitory thing; I was not yet mature enough to see it as my fate. I would dream of a good friend to accompany me to the cinema, sparing me the worry of standing about idle and alone during the intermissions. One day, I dreamed, I would meet intelligent and cultivated people with whom I could discuss the books I read and the paintings I painted, and never for a moment would I feel fake. One day, too, sex would cease to be a solitary pursuit; I would have a beautiful lover with whom I would share my forbidden pleasures. Though certainly of an age to fulfill such ambitions, I was paralyzed by longing, shame, and fear.
In those days, misery meant feeling out of place, in one’s home, one’s family, and one’s city. It was this greater community—where strangers addressed you as an elder brother, where everyone said we as if the entire city were watching the same soccer match—from which I’d cut myself off. Fearful that this condition would become a way of life, I’d resolve to be like other people. In my late adolescence, I succeeded in becoming the sort of sociable young wise guy who was everyone’s friend, easygoing and insipid. I joked incessantly, told anecdotes, made everyone in class laugh by imitating the teacher; my pranks became family legends. When I took the game too far, I was an able diplomat, dignifying nefarious deeds with fine euphemisms. But afterward, when I shut myself up in my room, the only way I knew to escape from the world’s duplicity and my own hypocrisy was to masturbate.
Why were the little rituals of friendship so much harder for me than for everyone else? Why did I have to clench my teeth to push myself through ordinary niceties and then hate myself, and why, when I made friends, did I feel like I was playing a part? Occasionally I would embrace a role with such manic energy I’d forget I was just acting; I’d enjoy myself, for a time, like everyone else, but then a melancholy wind would blow in out of nowhere, and I’d want to return to my house, my room, my darkness, and curl up in a corner. The more I turned my mocking gaze inward, the more it was directed at my mother, my father, my brother, and the horde of relations—harder and harder for me to call my family—my school friends, various other acquaintances, the entire city.
I sensed that what had plunged me into this wretched state was Istanbul itself. Not just the Bosphorus, the ships, t
he all-too-familiar nights, lights, and crowds; of that I was sure. There was something else that bound its people together, smoothing their way to communicate, do business, live together, and I was simply out of harmony with it. This world of “ours”—in which everyone knew everyone, both good points and limits, and all shared in a common identity, respecting humility, tradition, our elders, our forefathers, our history, our legends—was not a world in which I could “be myself.” Wherever I was the performer and not the spectator, I could not feel at home. At a birthday party, for example, after a while—even as I went around the room smiling benevolently, asking “How’s it going?” and patting people’s backs—I would begin to observe myself from the outside, as if in a dream, and I would recoil at the sight of this pretentious idiot.
After I had gone home and spent some time reflecting on my duplicity (“Why do you always lock your room now?” my mother had started to ask), I would conclude that this flaw, this flair for deception, resided not just in me but in the spirit of the community that had created these relations; it was in the “we,” and only someone who had gone crazy enough to see the city from the outside could recognize it as the city’s “communal ideology.” But these are the words of a fifty-year-old writer who is trying to shape the chaotic thoughts of a long-ago adolescent into an amusing story.
To continue: Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen it wasn’t just myself I despised but my family, my friends, and their culture; the official and unofficial political statements that purported to explain what was happening around us; the newspaper headlines; and the way we all wanted to look different from who we were and basically never understood ourselves at all. Throbbing in my head were all the letters from the street signs and billboards. I wanted to paint, I wanted to live like the French painters I’d read about in books, but I lacked the strength to create such a world in Istanbul, nor did Istanbul lend itself to the project. Even the worst paintings of the Turkish impressionists—their views of mosques, the Bosphorus, wooden houses, snowy streets—pleased me, not as paintings but as likenesses of my city. If a painting looked like Istanbul, then it wasn’t a good painting; if it was a good painting, it didn’t look enough like Istanbul to suit me. Perhaps this meant I had to stop seeing the city as art, as a landscape.