The White Castle Read online

  So according to Hoja we had entered yet another new phase in which we would dream up everything anew from the beginning, but because I’d now grown used to his rages and his dreams, the only thing that was new for me was getting to know the sovereign. And the sultan enjoyed our company. Like an attentive father who separates two brothers arguing over their marbles, saying “this one is yours, and this one is yours’, he disentangled us with his observations about our speech and behaviour. These observations, which I found sometimes childish and sometimes clever, started to worry me: I began to believe that my personality had split itself off from me and united with Hoja’s, and vice versa, without our perceiving it, and that the sultan, by evaluating this imaginary creature, had come to know us better than we knew ourselves.

  While we interpreted his dreams, or talked about the new weapon – and in those days we had only our own dreams of it to struggle with – the sovereign would stop suddenly and, turning to one of us, say, ‘No, this is his thought, not yours.’ And sometimes he’d distinguish between our actions: ‘Now you are glancing around just as he does. Be yourself!’ When I laughed in surprise he’d continue, ‘That’s better, bravo. Have you two never looked at yourselves in the mirror together?’ He’d ask which of us could stand to be himself when we did look in the mirror. On one occasion he’d ordered that all those treatises, bestiaries, and calendars we’d written for him over the years be brought out, and said that when he’d first read them, he’d tried to imagine as he turned the pages one by one which of us had written which parts, and even which parts one of us had written by putting himself in the other’s place. But it was that impersonator he had summoned while we attended him who really made Hoja angry, and enchanted me while utterly bewildering me as well.

  This man resembled us neither in face nor form, he was short and fat, and his dress completely different, but when he began to speak I was shocked; it was as if Hoja, not he, were talking. Like Hoja, he’d lean towards the sovereign’s ear as if whispering a secret, like Hoja he made his voice grow grave with a studied, thoughtful air when he discussed finer points, and suddenly, just like Hoja, he’d be swept up in the excitement of what he was saying, passionately wave his hands and arms in order to persuade his interlocutor and be left breathless; but although he spoke with Hoja’s accent he didn’t describe projects related to the stars or incredible weapons, he merely enumerated the dishes he’d learned in the palace kitchen and the ingredients and spices necessary to prepare them. While the sultan smiled, the mimic continued with his impersonation, which turned Hoja’s face upside-down, by listing the caravansarays between Istanbul and Aleppo one by one. Then the sultan asked the mimic to imitate me. That man who looked at me with his mouth hanging open in shock was me: I was stupefied. When the sovereign asked him to impersonate someone who was half Hoja and half me, I was totally bewitched. Watching the man’s movements I felt like saying, just as the sultan had, ‘This is me, and this is Hoja’, but the mimic did this himself by pointing with his finger at each of us in turn. After the sultan praised the man and sent him away, he ordered us to reflect on what we’d seen.

  What did he mean? That evening when I told Hoja that the sultan was a much cleverer man than the person he’d been describing to me for years, and said the sultan had found for himself the direction Hoja wanted to lead him in, Hoja flew into a rage once more. This time I felt he had cause: the mimic’s art was not to be endured. Hoja said he would not set foot in the palace again unless he was forced to. He had no intention, now the opportunity he’d waited for all these years had at last come within his grasp, of humiliating himself by wasting time with those fools. Since I knew the sultan’s enthusiasms and had the wit to play the buffoon, I would go to the palace in his place.

  When I told the sovereign that Hoja was ill, he didn’t believe me. ‘Let him work on the weapon,’ he said. Thus during those four years while Hoja planned and brought the weapon to completion, I went to the palace and he stayed at home with his dreams as I used to do.

  In these four years I learned that life was to be enjoyed rather than merely endured. Those who saw that the sovereign esteemed me as he did Hoja soon invited me to the ceremonies and celebrations which were the daily palace fare. One day a vizier’s daughter was getting married, the next day one more child was born to the sovereign, his sons’ circumcisions were marked by festival, another day they celebrated the recapture of a castle from the Hungarians, then ceremonies were arranged to mark the prince’s first day at school, while Ramadan and other holiday festivities began. I quickly grew fat from stuffing myself with rich meats and pilaus and gobbling down sugar lions, ostriches, mermaids and nuts at these festivities, most of which lasted for days. The greater part of my time was spent watching spectacles: wrestlers, their skin glistening with oil, struggling till they fainted, or tightrope-walkers on high-wires stretched between the minarets of mosques who juggled with the clubs they carried on their backs, crushed horseshoe nails with their teeth, and stabbed themselves with knives and skewers, or conjurors who produced snakes, doves, and monkeys from their robes, making the coffee cups in our hands and the money in our pockets disappear in the twinkling of an eye, or the shadow-plays of Karagoz and Hajivat whose obscenities I adored. At night, if there were no fireworks display, I’d follow my new friends, most of whom I’d met that same day, to one of those palaces or mansions where everyone went and after drinking raki or wine and listening to music for hours, I’d enjoy myself clinking glasses with beautiful girl dancers who imitated languorous gazelles, handsome boys who walked on water, vocalists with their burning voices who sang sensitive and joyous songs.

  I’d often go to the mansions of the ambassadors who were so curious about me, and after watching a ballet of girls and boys stretching their lovely limbs, or listening to the latest pretentious nonsense played by an orchestra brought from Venice, I would enjoy the benefits of my gradually increasing fame. The Europeans gathered at the embassies would ask me about the terrifying adventures I’d lived through, they wondered how much I’d suffered, how I’d endured, how I was still able to go on. I’d conceal the fact that I had passed my whole life dozing within four walls writing silly books, and tell them incredible stories which I’d learned to extemporize, just as I did with the sultan, about this exotic land which so fascinated them. Not only the young women making their pre-nuptial appearances before their fathers, and the ambassadors’ wives who flirted with me, but all those dignified ambassadors and officials listened full of admiration to the bloody tales of religion and violence, intrigues of love and the harem, that I invented. If they pressed me, I’d whisper one or two state secrets or describe some strange habits of the sultan no one could know of which I’d make up on the spot. When they wanted more information, I’d enjoy giving myself a secretive air; I’d act as if I couldn’t say everything I knew, I’d take refuge in a silence which inflamed the curiosity of these fools Hoja wanted us to emulate. But I knew they whispered amongst themselves that I was involved in some grand and mysterious project requiring mastery of science, some design for an obscure weapon requiring a stupendous amount of money.

  When I returned in the evenings from these mansions, these palaces, my mind filled with the images of the beautiful bodies I’d seen, and fogged by the vapours of the spirits I’d drunk, I would find Hoja sitting at our twenty-year-old table. He’d thrown himself into his work with an urgency I had never seen in him before, the table loaded with strange models I couldn’t make sense of, drawings, pages covered with desperate scribblings. He’d ask me to recount what I’d seen and done all day, but he was soon disgusted by these pastimes which he found shameless and stupid, so he’d interrupt me and begin to describe his plan, speaking of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

  He’d repeat once again that everything was connected with the unknown inner landscape of our minds, he’d based his whole project on this, he talked excitedly about the symmetry, or the chaos, of the cupboard full of junk we call the brain, but I could not un
derstand how this might serve as a point of departure for designing the weapon on which he’d set all his hopes, all our hopes. I doubted that anyone – including him, contrary to what I’d once thought – would be capable of fathoming this. He declared that one day someone would open up our heads and prove all these ideas of his. He spoke of a great truth he’d perceived during the days of the plague when we had contemplated ourselves in the mirror together: now all of it had achieved clarity in his mind, you see, the weapon had its genesis in this moment of truth! Then he would point out to me – moved as I was, without understanding – a bizarre, obscure, ambiguous shape on paper with the tips of his trembling fingers.

  This shape, which I saw slightly more developed each time he showed it to me, seemed to remind me of something. While I looked at that black stain I will call the ‘devil’ of the drawing, I would be on the point of suddenly saying what it reminded me of, but suffering a moment’s hesitation, or thinking my mind was playing tricks on me, I’d keep silent. All during those four years I never clearly perceived this shape he scattered over pages, giving it a sharper definition as it developed a little more each time, and which, after consuming all that effort and money accumulated over the years, he was at last able to bring to life. Sometimes I likened it to things in our daily life, sometimes to images in our dreams, once or twice to things we saw or talked about in the old days when we recounted our memories to one another, but I was unable to take the final step of clarifying the images that passed through my mind, so I’d submit to the confusion of my thoughts, and waited in vain for the weapon itself to reveal its mystery. Even four years later, when that little stain had been transformed into a bizarre creature as tall as a grand mosque, a terrifying apparition which all Istanbul talked about and Hoja called a real machine of war, and while everyone likened it to one thing or another, I was still lost in the details of what Hoja had told me in the past about how the weapon would triumph in the future.

  Like someone waking up and struggling to remember a dream that memory stubbornly wants to forget, on my visits to the palace I would try to repeat these vivid, terrifying details for the sultan. I would speak of those wheels, the catapult, the dome, the gunpowder and levers that Hoja had described to me who knows how many times. The words were not my words, and although there was none of the fire of Hoja’s passion in what I said, still I saw that the sovereign was affected. And it moved me too that this man, whom I found serious-minded, was inspired with hope by this obscure mass of speech, my crude rendition of Hoja’s fervent poetry of victory and salvation. The sovereign would say that Hoja, the man sitting at home, was me. These intellectual games of his thoroughly confused my mind but no longer took me by surprise. When he said that I was Hoja, I’d think it better not to follow his logic, for soon he’d assert that I was the one who had taught Hoja all of these things – not the lethargic person I was now, but the one who had changed Hoja long ago. If only we would talk about the entertainments, the animals, the festivals of the old days, or the preparations for the shopkeepers’ parade, I thought. Later the sultan said everyone knew that I was behind this project of the weapon.

  This was what frightened me most. Hoja had not been seen in public for years, he was almost forgotten, I was the one appearing so often at the sovereign’s side in the palaces, in the city, and now they were jealous of me! They were grinding their teeth at me, the infidel, not just because the income from so many herds of sheep, olive-groves, caravansarays, was tied up in this obscure plan for a weapon they gossipped about more and more each day, not just because I was so close to the sultan, but also because by working on this weapon we were poking our noses in other people’s business. When I couldn’t shut my ears against their slander, I would reveal my fears to Hoja or the sultan.

  But they were not very responsive. Hoja had buried himself completely in his work. I longed for his anger as old men long for the passion of youth. During those last months while he nourished that dark and ambiguous stain on paper with details and transformed it into designs for the mould of a freakish monster, pouring out incredible amounts of money for the moulds and casting with iron too heavy for any cannon to penetrate, he didn’t even listen to the evil gossip I related to him; he showed interest only in the ambassadors’ mansions where they were talking about his work: what kind of men were these ambassadors, what did they think, did they have any opinion about this weapon? And most important: why did the sultan never think of sending envoys to establish embassies representing the Empire in those countries? I sensed he wanted this post for himself, wanted to escape from the idiots here and live among them, but he never spoke openly of this desire, even on the days when he despaired of ever realizing his design, when the iron he’d cast had cracked, or he believed he would run out of money. He let slip only once or twice that he wanted to establish relations with ‘their’ men of science; perhaps they would understand the truths he’d discovered about the insides of our heads; he wanted to correspond with men of science in Venice, Flanders, whatever faraway land occurred to him at the moment. Who were the very best among them, where did they live, how could one correspond with them, could I learn these things from the ambassadors? In those last days I took little interest in the weapon finally being realized and gave myself over to pleasure, forgetting these hopes of his, with their traces of a despondency our rivals would have found amusing.

  The sultan too had turned a deaf ear to our enemies’ gossip. During the days when Hoja, ready to test the weapon, was looking for brave men to enter that terrifying mountain of metal and turn the flywheels while choking in the stench of rusting iron, the sultan didn’t even listen as I complained about the rumours. As he always did, he made me repeat what Hoja had been saying. He believed in him, was content with everything, didn’t at all regret having put his trust in him: for all of this he was grateful to me. Always for the same reason of course: because I had taught Hoja everything. Like Hoja, he too talked about the insides of our heads; and then he’d bring up the other question akin to this interest of his; just as Hoja had done once upon a time, the sultan would ask me how they lived in that land, in my old country.

  I regaled him with dreams. I can’t tell now whether these stories, most of which I have come to believe myself after repeating them so often, were things I actually experienced in my youth or visions which flowed from my pen every time I sat down at the table to write my book; sometimes I’d throw in a couple of amusing falsehoods which sprang to mind. I had certain fables which had grown with re-telling, since the sovereign showed interest in the detail that the clothes people wore had lots of buttons, I’d make sure to repeat this and told stories that I wasn’t sure were from memories or my dreams. But there were also things I had still not been able to forget after twenty-five years, things that were real: the talks I had with my mother and father, my brothers and sisters while breakfasting at the family table under the linden-trees! These were the details which least interested the sultan. He had said to me once that basically every life was like another. This frightened me for some reason: there was a devilish expression on the sultan’s face I’d never seen before, and I wanted to ask what he meant by this. While I looked apprehensively into his face, I felt an impulse to say ‘I am I’. It was as if, had I been able to find the courage to speak this nonsensical phrase, I would obliterate all those games played by all those gossips scheming to turn me into someone else, played by Hoja and the sultan, and live at peace again within my own being. But like those who shy away from even the mention of any uncertainty that might jeopardize their security, I kept silent in fear.

  This happened in the spring, in the days when Hoja had finished work on the weapon but had not yet been able to test it because he couldn’t assemble the team of men he needed. Soon after, we were shocked when the sovereign left with the army on an expedition to the land of the Poles. Why had he not taken the ultimate weapon along with him, why hadn’t he taken me, didn’t he trust us? Like the rest of those left behind in Istanbul, w
e believed the sultan had gone not to war but to hunt. Hoja was happy to have gained one more year; since I had no other occupation or entertainment, we worked on the weapon together.

  It was a great struggle recruiting men to operate the machine. No one was willing to go inside the terrifying, mysterious vehicle. Hoja let it be known he would pay very well, we sent criers out into the city, to the shipyards, the cannon foundries, searched for men among the idlers in the coffee-houses, the homeless, the adventurous. Most of the men we were able to find, even if they overcame their fear and went inside the iron heap, soon ran away, unable to endure operating the flywheels while crammed into that bizarre insect cooking in the heat. When we were able to get the vehicle moving at the end of summer, all the money accumulated over the years for the project had run out. The weapon stirred clumsily under the bewildered and frightened gaze of the curious, and to shouts of victory it weaved from right to left attacking an imaginary fortress, fired its shells, then stopped still. Money continued to pour in from our villages and olive-groves, but the team we had gathered proved too expensive to maintain and Hoja was forced to let the men go.