The White Castle Read online

  I didn’t ask what it was that ‘they’ must realize. And perhaps I had a premonition which made me afraid I might find that Hoja didn’t know what it was either. Later they’d talked of other things, the pasha was frowning and looking contemptuously at the instruments before him. Hoja remained at the mansion into the late hours of the night, waiting in the hope that the pasha’s interest would revive, though he knew he was no longer welcome. At last he had loaded his instruments onto the cart. I pictured someone in a house along the dark, silent road back, lying in bed unable to sleep: wondering at the sound of the huge clock ticking amidst the clatter of the wheels.

  Hoja stayed up until the break of day. I wanted to replace the dying candle, but he stopped me. Because I knew he wanted me to say something, I said, ‘The pasha will understand.’ I said this while it was still dark, perhaps he knew as well as I did that I didn’t believe it, but a moment later he spoke up, saying the whole problem was to unravel the mystery of that moment when the pasha had stopped talking.

  In order to solve this mystery, he went to see the pasha at the first opportunity. He had greeted Hoja cheerfully this time. He said he’d understood what had happened, or what was intended, and after soothing Hoja’s feelings advised him to work on a weapon. ‘A weapon to make the world a prison for our enemies!’ That is what he had said, but he hadn’t said what kind of thing this weapon should be. If Hoja turned his passion for science in this direction, then the pasha would support him. Of course he’d said nothing about the endowment we hoped for. He simply gave Hoja a purse full of silver coins. We opened it at home and counted the money: there were seventeen coins – a strange number! It was after giving him this purse that he’d said he would persuade the young sultan to grant Hoja an audience. He explained that the child was interested in ‘such things’. Neither I nor Hoja, who was more easily enthused, took his promise very seriously, but a week later there was news. The pasha was going to present us, yes, me as well, to the sultan, after the evening breaking of the fast.

  In preparation Hoja revised and memorized again the speech he’d recited for the pasha, changed this time so that a nine-year-old child could understand it. But for some reason his mind was on the pasha, not the sultan, he was still wondering why the pasha had fallen silent. He would discover the secret of this one day. What kind of thing could this weapon be that the pasha wanted made? There was little left for me to say, Hoja was working on his own now. While he stayed locked up in his room till midnight, I sat vacantly at my window, not even thinking of when I would return home but daydreaming like a foolish child: it was not Hoja but I who was working at the table, free to go wherever, whenever I wished!

  Then one evening we loaded our instruments on to a wagon and went off to the palace. I’d come to love walking the streets of Istanbul, I felt like an invisible man moving like a ghost among the giant plane-trees, the chestnut and erguvan trees in the gardens. We set up the instruments with the help of attendants, on the site they pointed out to us in the second courtyard.

  The sovereign was a sweet, red-cheeked child of a height proportionate to his few years. He handled the instruments as if they were his toys. Am I thinking now of that time when I wanted to be his peer and friend, or of another time much later, fifteen years later, when we met again? I cannot tell; but I felt immediately that I must do him no wrong. Hoja suffered a bout of nerves while the sultan’s entourage waited, crowding round in curiosity. At last he was able to begin; he’d added new things to his tale; he talked about the stars as if they were intelligent, living beings, likening them to attractive, mysterious creatures who knew arithmetic and geometry, and who revolved in accord with their knowledge. He grew more passionate as he saw that the child was affected and raised his head from time to time to look at the sky in wonder. See, the planets hung on the turning transparent spheres were represented in the model there, there was Venus and it revolved this way and the huge ball hanging there was the moon and it, you understand, followed a different course. While Hoja made the stars turn, the bell attached to the model tinkled with a sweet sound and the little sultan, scared, took a step back, then, gathering his courage, made an effort to understand and approached the ringing machine as if it were an enchanted treasure-chest.

  Now, as I recollect my memories and try to invent a past for myself, I find this a portrait of happiness fit for the fables I heard as a child, exactly as the painters of the pictures in those fairy-tale books would have it. The gingerbread-red roofs of Istanbul need only be encased in those glass spheres that swirl with snow when you shake them. The child had begun to ask Hoja questions, and he to find answers for them.

  How did the stars stay in the air? They hung from the transparent spheres! What were the spheres made of? Of an invisible material, so they were invisible too! Didn’t they bump into one another? No, each had its own zone, layered as in the model! There were so many stars, why weren’t there as many spheres? Because they were very far away! How far? Very, very! Did the other stars have bells that rang when they turned? No, we attached the bells to mark each complete revolution of the stars! Did thunder have any relation to this? None! What did it relate to? Rain! Was it going to rain tomorrow? Observation of the sky showed it would not! What did the sky reveal about the sultan’s ailing lion? It was going to get better, but one must be patient, and so on.

  While he gave his opinion about the ailing lion, Hoja continued to look at the sky, as he did when he talked about the stars. After returning home he mentioned this detail, saying that it didn’t matter. The important thing was not that the child distinguish between science and sophistry, but that he should ‘realize’ a few things. He was using the same word again, as if I understood what it was he should realize, while I was thinking it would make no difference whether I became a Muslim or not. There were exactly five pieces of gold in the purse they gave us as we left the palace. Hoja said the sultan had grasped that there was a logic behind what happened in the stars. O my sultan! later, much later did I know him! It amazed me that the same moon appeared through the window of our house, I wanted to be a child! Hoja, unable to stop himself, returned to the same subject: the question of the lion was not important, the child loved animals, that was all.

  The next day he shut himself up in his room and began to work: a few days later he loaded the clock and the stars on to the wagon again and, under the gaze of those curious eyes behind the latticed windows, went this time to the primary school. When he returned in the evening he was depressed, but not so much as to keep silent: ‘I thought the children would understand as the sultan did, but I was wrong,’ he said. They had only been frightened. When Hoja had asked questions after his lecture, one of the children replied that Hell was on the other side of the sky and began to cry.

  He spent the next week bolstering his confidence in the sovereign’s intelligence; he went over with me one by one every moment that we had spent in the second courtyard, getting my support for his interpretations: the child was clever, yes; he already knew how to think, yes; he was already possessed of enough character to withstand the pressure put upon him by those around him at court, yes! Thus long before the sultan began to dream for us, as he would in later years, we began to dream for him. Hoja was working on the clock, too, at this time; I believed he was also thinking a bit about the weapon, because he said so to the pasha when he was called to see him. But I could tell that he’d given up on the pasha. ‘He’s become like the others,’ he said. ‘He no longer wants to know that he doesn’t know.’ A week later the sovereign summoned Hoja again, and he went.

  The sultan had received Hoja in good spirits. ‘My lion is better,’ he’d said, ‘it is as you predicted.’ Later they’d gone out into the courtyard with his retinue. The sovereign, showing him the fish in the pool, had asked what he thought of them. ‘They were red,’ Hoja said when he told me about it. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to say.’ Then he’d noticed a pattern to the movements of the fish; it was as if they were actually disc
ussing the pattern among themselves, trying to perfect it. Hoja had said he found the fish to be intelligent. When a dwarf, standing next to one of the harem eunuchs who continually reminded the sovereign of his mother’s admonitions, laughed at this, the sultan rebuked him. As punishment he didn’t allow the red-headed dwarf to sit next to him when he ascended to his carriage.

  They’d gone by carriage to the hippodrome, to the lion-house. The lions, leopards, and panthers the sultan showed Hoja one by one were chained to the columns of an ancient church. They stopped in front of the lion Hoja had predicted would get well, the child spoke to it, introducing the lion to Hoja. Then they’d gone to another lion lying in a corner, this animal, not filthy-smelling like the others, was pregnant. The sovereign, his eyes shining, asked, ‘How many cubs will this lion give birth to, how many will be male, how many female?’

  Taken by surprise, Hoja did something he later described to me as a ‘blunder’. He told the sultan he had knowledge of astronomy but was not an astrologer. ‘But you know more than Imperial Astrologer Huseyn Efendi!’ the child had said. Hoja didn’t answer, fearing someone nearby might hear and pass it on to Huseyn Efendi. The impatient sovereign had insisted: or did Hoja know nothing, did he observe the stars in vain after all?

  In response Hoja was forced to explain at once things that he’d intended to say only much later: he replied he had learned many things from the stars and arrived at very useful conclusions based on what he’d learned. Interpreting favourably the silence of the sovereign, who was listening with widening eyes, he said it was necessary to build an observatory to watch the stars; like that observatory his grandfather Ahmet the First’s grandfather, Murat the Third, had built for the late Takiyuddin Efendi ninety years ago, and which later fell into ruin from neglect. Or rather, something more advanced than that: a House of Science where scholars could observe not only the stars, but the whole world, its rivers and oceans, clouds and mountains, flowers and trees and, of course, its animals, and then come together to discuss their observations at leisure and make progress in the advance of the intellect.

  The sultan had listened to Hoja talk of this project which I, too, was hearing about for the first time, as if listening to an agreeable fable. As they returned to the palace in their carriages he’d asked once again, ‘How will the lion give birth, what do you say?’ Hoja had thought it over and this time answered, ‘An equal number of male and female cubs will be born.’ At home he told me there was no danger in having said this. ‘I will have that fool of a child in the palm of my hand,’ he said. ‘I am more adept than the Imperial Astrologer Huseyn Efendi!’ It shocked me to hear him use this word in speaking of the sovereign; for some reason I even took offence. In those days I was keeping myself occupied with housework out of boredom.

  Later he began to use that word as if it were a magical key that would unlock every door: because they were ‘fools’ they didn’t look at the stars moving over their heads and reflect on them, because they were ‘fools’ they asked first what was the good of the thing they were about to learn, because they were ‘fools’ they were interested not in details but in summaries, because they were ‘fools’ they were all alike, and so on. Although I too had liked to criticize people this way, not many years before, when I still lived in my own country, I’d say nothing to Hoja. At the time, in any case, he was preoccupied with his fools, not with me. Apparently my folly was of another kind. In my indiscretion those days I had told him of a dream I’d had: he had gone to my country in my place, was marrying my fiancée, at the wedding no one realized that he was not me, and during the festivities which I watched from a corner dressed as a Turk, I met up with my mother and fiancée who both turned their backs on me without recognizing who I was, despite the tears which finally wakened me from the dream.

  Around that time he went twice to the pasha’s mansion. I believe the pasha was not pleased to find Hoja developing a relationship with the sovereign away from his watchful eye; he’d interrogated him; he’d asked after me, he’d been investigating me, but only much later, after the pasha had been banished from Istanbul, did Hoja tell me this; he feared I might have passed my days in terror of being poisoned if I had known. Still, I could tell that the pasha was more intrigued by me than he was by Hoja; it flattered my pride that the resemblance between Hoja and myself disturbed the pasha more than it did me. In those days it was as if this resemblance were a secret Hoja would never wish to know and whose existence lent me a strange courage: sometimes I thought that by grace of this resemblance alone I would be safe as long as Hoja lived. Perhaps that is why I contradicted Hoja when he’d say the pasha, too, was one of those fools; he became irritated at that. He spurred me to a brazenness I was not accustomed to, I wanted to feel both his need for me and his shame before me: I relentlessly questioned him about the pasha, about what he said regarding the two of us, strangling Hoja in a rage the cause of which I believe was not clear even to him. Then he’d stubbornly repeat that they would get rid of the pasha too, soon the janissaries would be up to something, he sensed the presence of conspiracies within the palace. For this reason, if he were going to work on a weapon as the pasha suggested, he should build it not for some vizier who would come and go, but for the sultan.

  For a while I thought he was occupied exclusively with this obscure notion of a weapon; planning but not getting anywhere, I said to myself. For had he made progress, I was sure he’d have shared it with me, even if trying to belittle me while doing so, he would have told me about his designs in order to learn my opinion. One evening we were returning home after going to that house in Aksaray where we listened to music and lay with prostitutes, as we did every two or three weeks. Hoja said he was planning to work till morning, then asked me about women – we had never talked about women – and said suddenly, ‘I’m thinking...’ but the moment we entered the house he shut himself up in his room without revealing what was on his mind. I was left alone with the books I now had no desire even to browse through, and thought of him: of whatever plan or idea he had that I was convinced he could not develop, of him shut up in the room sitting at the table to which he was still not completely accustomed, staring at the empty pages before him, sitting fruitlessly at the table for hours in shame and rage...

  He emerged from his room well after midnight and like an embarrassed student needing help with some minor question that defeated him, sheepishly called me inside to the table. ‘Help me,’ he said abruptly. ‘Let’s think about them together, I can’t make any progress on my own.’ I was silent for a moment, thinking this had something to do with women. When he saw me look blank he said seriously, ‘I’m thinking about the fools. Why are they so stupid?’ Then, as if he knew what my answer would be, he added, ‘Very well, they aren’t stupid, but there is something missing inside their heads.’ I didn’t ask who ‘they’ were. ‘Don’t they have any corner inside their heads for storing knowledge?’ he said, and looked around as if searching for the right word. ‘They should have a compartment inside their heads, some compartment like the drawers of this cabinet, a spot where they can put various things, but it’s as if there were no such place. Do you understand?’ I wanted to believe I had understood a thing or two, but couldn’t quite succeed in this. For a long time we sat facing one another in silence. ‘Who can know why a man is the way he is anyway?’ he said at last. ‘Ah, if only you’d been a real physician and taught me,’ he went on, ‘about our bodies, the insides of our bodies and our heads.’ He seemed a bit embarrassed. With an air of good humour which I thought he feigned because he didn’t want to frighten me, he announced that he was not going to give up, he would go on to the end, both because he was curious about what would happen and because there was nothing else to do. I understood nothing, but it pleased me to think he’d learned all of this from me.

  Later he often repeated what he’d said, as if we both knew what it meant. But despite the conviction he affected, he had the air of a daydreaming student posing questions; every time he
said he would go on till the end I’d feel I was witnessing the mournful, angry complaints of a hapless lover asking why all this had befallen him. In those days he said this very often; he said it when he learned the janissaries were plotting a rebellion, said it after he told me the students in the primary school were more interested in angels than in stars, and after another manuscript he paid a considerable sum for was thrown aside in a rage before he’d read it even halfway through, after parting from his friends in the mosque clock-room with whom he now got together merely out of habit, after freezing in the badly heated baths, after stretching out on his bed with his beloved books strewn over the flowered quilt, after listening to the idiotic chatter of the men making their ablutions in the mosque courtyard, after learning that the fleet had been beaten by the Venetians, after listening patiently to the neighbours who came to call saying he was getting old and should marry, he repeated it again: he would go on till the end.