The White Castle Read online

  Winter passed in waiting. The sovereign had stopped in his beloved Edirne on his return from the expedition; no one sought us out, we were left to ourselves. Since there was no one in the morning at the palace for us to entertain with our stories, and no one for me to be entertained by in the mansions in the evenings, we had nothing to do. I tried to while away the days having my portrait done by a painter from Venice and taking music lessons on the oud; Hoja went every other minute to Kuledibi by the old walls to look at his weapon which he had left a watchman to guard. He could not resist adding a few things to it here and there, but soon tired of this. During the nights of the last winter we spent together, he mentioned neither the weapon nor his plans for it. A lethargy had descended on him, but not because he had lost his passion – he was like this because I no longer inspired him.

  At night we’d spend most of our time waiting, waiting for the wind or the snow to stop, waiting for the last cries of the peddlers passing by in the street late at night, for the fire to die down so we could put more wood in the stove. On one of those winter nights during which we spoke very little, often drifting off into our own thoughts, Hoja suddenly said I had much changed, that I had finally become a completely different person. My stomach burned, I began to sweat; I wanted to make a stand against him, to tell him he was wrong, tell him that I was as I had always been, that we were alike, that he should pay attention to me the way he used to do, that we still had many, many things to talk about, but he was right; my eye was caught by the portrait of myself I had brought home that morning and left leaning against a wall. I had changed: I’d grown fat from stuffing myself at feasts, I had a double chin, my flesh had become slack, my movements slow; worse, my face was completely different; a coarse expression had crept into the corners of my mouth from drinking and making love at those bacchanals, my eyes were languid from sleeping at odd times, from passing out drunk, and like those fools who are content with their lives, the world, themselves, there was a crude smugness in my glance, but I knew I was content with my new state: I said nothing.

  Later, up until the time we learned the sultan had summoned us and our weapon to Edirne for the campaign, I had a recurring dream: we were at a masked ball in Venice reminiscent in its confusion of the feasts of Istanbul: when the ‘courtesans’ took off their masks I recognized my mother and fiancée in the crowd, and I took off my own mask full of hope that they would recognize me too, but somehow they didn’t know it was me, they were pointing with their masks to someone behind me; when I turned to look, I saw that this person who would know that I was me was Hoja. Then when I approached him, in the hope that he would recognize me, the man who was Hoja took off his mask without a word and from behind it, terrifying me with a pang of guilt that woke me from my dream, emerged the image of my youth.

  10

  Hoja finally sprang into action at the beginning of summer, the moment he learned the sultan expected us and the weapon at Edirne. It was then I realized he’d kept everything ready, maintaining contact all winter long with the group of men who had operated the weapon. In three days we were ready for the campaign. Hoja passed the night of the last day as if we were moving to a new house, rummaging through his old books with torn bindings, half-finished treatises, yellowing first drafts, his personal things and so forth. He got his rusty prayer-clock working, dusted off his astronomical instruments. He was up till dawn examining twenty-five years’ worth of rough drafts of books, models and sketches of weapons. At sunrise I saw him turning the torn, yellowed pages of the little notebook I’d filled with observations from our experiments for that first fireworks display. He asked shyly: should we take these with us?; would they be of use did I think? When he saw me look at him blankly, he threw the things into a corner in disgust.

  Nevertheless, on this ten-day trip to Edirne we felt close to one another, even if less than in the old days. Above all, Hoja was optimistic; our weapon that they called freak, insect, satan, turtle archer, walking tower, iron heap, red rooster, kettle on wheels, giant, cyclops, monster, swine, gypsy, blue-eyed weirdie, took to the road very slowly with a bizarre uproar of frightening screeches and groans, striking all who saw it with exactly the terror that Hoja intended, and was moving forward more speedily than he’d expected. It delighted him to see the curious gather from the surrounding villages and line up on the hills along the road, straining to get a view of the machine they feared to approach. At night, in the silence measured by crickets, when our men had fallen into a deep sleep in their tents after sweating blood and tears all day long, Hoja would describe to me the devastation his red rooster was going to wreak upon our enemies. True, he was not as exuberant as he had been, and like me he worried about the reaction the sovereign’s circle and the army would have to the weapon, what kind of position it would be given in the attack formation, but he was still able to speak with satisfaction and certainty of our ‘last chance’, of how we had been able to turn the tide in our favour, and more importantly, of the ‘them and us’ for whom he never lost his mania.

  The weapon entered Edirne with a ceremony only the sovereign and a few shameless sycophants in his retinue welcomed with any warmth. The sultan received Hoja like an old friend, there were rumours of the possibility of war, but little preparation or haste; they began to spend their days together. I joined them as well; when they mounted their horses and rode to the surrounding dark woods to listen to the birds singing, or took excursions by boat down the Tunja and Merich Rivers to watch the frogs, or went to pet the storks that had been clawed in fights with eagles and wailed in the courtyard of the Selimiye Mosque, or to watch the weapon execute its manoeuvres once more, I was always with them. But I realized with chagrin that I had nothing to contribute to their conversations, nothing I could say to them sincerely or that they would find interesting. Perhaps I was jealous of their intimacy. But I knew I was finally sick of it all. Hoja was still reciting the same poetry and by then it shocked me to see how the sovereign was taken in by the same trumped-up tale of victory, of ‘their’ superiority, of how the time had come for us to rouse ourselves at last and take action, of the future and the mysteries of our minds.

  One day, midway through a summer thick with rumours of war, Hoja said he had need of a strong companion and asked me to come with him. We walked quickly through Edirne, passing through the gypsy and Jewish neighbourhoods down some ashen streets I had wandered through before with the sense of oppression that came over me now again, passing the houses of poor Muslims most of which were indistinguishable from one another. Eventually when I realized the ivy-covered houses I had seen on my left were now on my right, I understood we had retraced our steps; I enquired, and was told we were in the district of Fildami. Hoja suddenly knocked at the door of one house. A green-eyed child about eight years old opened the door. ‘Lions,’ said Hoja to him, ‘lions have escaped from the sultan’s palace, we’re making a search.’ He shoved the child aside and entered the house with me at his heels. We hurried through the half-darkness of the interior smelling of sawdust and soap, up some creaking stairs into a long hall on the upper floor; Hoja began to open the doors leading off it. In the first room there was an old man dozing, his toothless mouth wide open, and two laughing children reaching for his beard who jumped when they saw the door opening. Hoja closed that door and opened another; there was a pile of quilts and quilting material inside. The child who had opened the street door grabbed the handle of the door to the third room before Hoja did, saying, ‘There are no lions here, just my mother and auntie,’ but Hoja opened the door anyway on two women with their backs turned towards us performing their prayers in the pale light. In the fourth room a man stitching a quilt, who resembled me more because he was unbearded, rose when he saw Hoja. ‘You madman, what are you doing here?’ he cried. ‘What do you want from us?’ ‘Where is Semra?’ said Hoja. ‘She went to Istanbul ten years ago,’ the man said. ‘We heard she died of plague. Why haven’t you croaked as well?’ Without saying a word Hoja went down the stairs
and left the house. As I followed him I heard the child shouting behind me and a woman answering him: ‘The lions were here, Mother!’ ‘No child, your uncle and his brother!’

  Perhaps because I could not bring myself to forget the past, or perhaps in preparation for my new life and this book you are still reading patiently, two weeks later I returned to that same place at dawn. At first, unable to see clearly in the early light, I had trouble finding the house; when I did, I tried to return by way of the road I guessed would be the quickest shortcut to the hospital of Beyazit Mosque. Perhaps because I was mistaken in thinking Hoja and his mother would have taken the quickest way, I couldn’t find the short road shaded by poplar trees that led to the bridge; I did find a poplar-lined road, but there was no river near it where they might have rested eating halva so long ago. And at the hospital there were none of the things I’d imagined, it was not muddy but perfectly clean, there was no sound of running water, nor coloured bottles. When I saw a patient in chains I couldn’t resist asking a doctor about him: he had fallen in love, gone mad, and believed he was someone else like most madmen; he would have told me more, but I left.

  The decision to embark on the campaign we had thought would never come was made at the end of summer, on a day we least expected it: the Poles, who would not accept the defeat of the previous year and the heavy taxes which followed, sent the message: ‘Come and collect the taxes with your swords.’ While the attack formation was being planned, no one in the army gave any thought to the deployment of the weapon, and Hoja spent the next few days choking with rage; no one wanted to march into battle alongside this heap of wrought iron; no one expected anything useful from this gigantic kettle; worse, they believed it was an ill omen. On the day before the planned departure, while Hoja was examining the omens for the campaign, we heard that our rivals were stirring up talk and it was being said openly that the weapon could just as easily bring a curse as a victory. When Hoja told me people believed the responsibility for this curse lay with me rather than him, I was terrified. The sovereign announced his confidence in Hoja and the weapon, and to avoid any further dispute, commanded that during the battle the weapon would be directly attached to himself, to his own forces. At the beginning of September, on a hot day, we departed from Edirne.

  Everyone thought it was late in the season for a campaign, but the matter was not discussed much: I was just beginning to learn that during a campaign the soldiers feared inauspicious omens as much as they did the enemy, sometimes more, that they were battling as much with this fear. On the first night, after marching north through prosperous villages over bridges that groaned under the weight of our weapon, we were surprised to be summoned to the sultan’s tent. Like his soldiers the sovereign had suddenly become child-like, he had about him the air of a boy eager and excited at the start of a new game, and would ask Hoja, just as his soldiers did, for his interpretation of omens: the red cloud before the setting sun, the low-flying falcons, the broken chimney of a house in the village, the cranes pressing south, what did these things mean? Hoja of course interpreted them all favourably.

  But apparently our work was not finished; we were both just finding out that on the journey the sovereign especially liked to be told strange, frightening stories at night-time. Hoja called up dark images from the passionate poetry of that book of ours I loved best, the one we had given the sultan years before – evil images swarming with corpses, bloody battles, defeats, treachery and misery – but he directed the sovereign’s wide eyes to the flame of victory shining in a corner of this tableau: we must fan that flame with the bellows of our intelligence, ‘theirs and ours’, and realize the secret truths of the interior of our minds and all the other things Hoja had told me about for years which I now wanted to forget – we must rouse ourselves out of our somnolent state as soon as possible! I was becoming weary of these bitter tales, but each night Hoja increased a little more their gloom, the ugliness, the malevolence, perhaps because he thought even the sovereign was now becoming sated with the stories. Again I felt the sultan shiver with pleasure when Hoja mentioned the interior of our minds.

  The hunting excursions began the week after our departure. A party that came along with the army solely for this purpose rode in advance, and after scouring the area, passing over the arable land and rousing the villagers, the sovereign, ourselves, and the hunters would gallop off from the march towards a forest that was famous for its gazelles, up the slopes of a mountain where wild boar ran, or into a wood teeming with foxes and hares. After these amusing little diversions, which lasted for hours, we’d return to the march with elaborate fanfare as if we were returning victoriously from battle, and while the army saluted the sovereign we would watch, standing directly behind him. Hoja endured these ceremonies with anger and hatred, but I loved them; I enjoyed talking with the sultan in the evenings about the hunt much more than about the march, the villages through which the army had passed or the condition of the towns and latest news of the enemy. Then Hoja, enraged at this chatter he found stupid and idiotic, would begin his stories and predictions that escalated in violence with every night that passed. Like others in his circle even I by now was pained to see the sovereign give credence to these tales that were meant to be frightening, these ghost stories about the dark recesses of the mind.

  But I would be witness to even worse! We were hunting again; a nearby village had been evacuated, the locals were spread out through the forest, beating tin pots to drive boar and deer with all this clamour towards the spot where we waited with our horses and weapons. Yet by noon we had not seen even one animal. To relieve our weariness and the discomfort of the midday heat, the sovereign ordered Hoja to tell him some of those tales that made him shiver at night. We were moving along very slowly, listening to the barely perceptible roar of the tin pots coming from far away when, coming upon a Christian village, we halted. It was then I saw Hoja and the sultan point to one of the empty houses in the village and cajole a skinny old man stretching his head out of the door to come forward. A little earlier they had been talking about ‘them’ and the insides of their heads and now, when I saw the fascination on their faces and heard Hoja ask the old man a few things through the interpreter, I came closer, dreading the prospect. Hoja was questioning the old man, demanding he answer at once without thinking: what was his greatest transgression, the worst thing he had done in his life? The villager, in a Slav dialect the translator had difficulty interpreting for us, mumbled hoarsely that he was a blameless, innocent old man; but Hoja insisted with a peculiar vehemence that the old man should tell us about himself. Only when he saw that the sovereign was as attentive as Hoja did the old man confess that he had sinned: yes, he was guilty, he too should have left his house along with the rest of the village, he should have joined the hunt with his brothers and sisters as they chased the animals, but he was sick, he had an excuse, he was not healthy enough to run around in the forest all day, and when he gestured to his heart, asking forgiveness, Hoja became angry and shouted that he was asking about his real sins, not about that. The villager however could not understand the question our translator kept on repeating, he sorrowfully pressed his hand upon his heart, at a loss for anything else to say. They took the old man away. When the next one they brought said the same things, Hoja flushed bright red. He told this second villager about my childhood trangressions, the lies I’d told in order to be loved more than my brothers and sisters and the sexual indiscretions I’d committed while studying at the university, as if he were describing the crimes of an unnamed sinner, giving examples of wickedness and vice to prompt the villager, while I listened, remembering with revulsion and shame those days we spent together during the plague but which I recall now with longing as I write this book. When the last villager they brought forward, a cripple, confessed in a whisper that he had secretly spied on women bathing in the river, Hoja calmed down a bit. Yes, you see, this was how they behaved when confronted with their sins, they were able to face up to them; but we, who suppose
dly understood by now what took place in the recesses of the mind, etc., etc. I wanted to believe the sultan was not impressed.

  But his interest had been aroused; two days later he closed his eyes to a repetition of the same drama during another deer hunt, perhaps because he couldn’t withstand Hoja’s insistence, or perhaps because he had taken greater pleasure in the interrogations than I thought. By now we had crossed the Danube; again we were in a Christian village. As for the questions Hoja pressed on the villagers, there was little change in them. They reminded me of the violence of those nights during the plague when I succeeded in making him write down his sins, and at first I didn’t even want to hear the replies of the villagers, who feared the questions and the man who asked them, this anonymous judge silently supported by the sultan. I was overcome by a strange nausea; more than Hoja I blamed the sovereign, who was either duped by him or unable to resist the attraction of this sinister game. But it was not long before I was gripped by the same fascination; a man loses nothing by listening, I thought, and drew near them. Most of the sins and misdeeds, told now in a delicate language more pleasing to my ear, resembled one another: simple lies, small deceptions; one or two dirty tricks, one or two infidelities; at most, a few petty thefts.

  In the evening Hoja said that the villagers had not revealed everything, they were withholding the truth; I had gone much further in my writings: they must have committed sins much more profound, more real, that distinguished them from us. In order to convince the sultan, to get hold of these truths, to be able to prove what kind of men ‘they’, and furthermore ‘we’, were, he would use violence if necessary.