Other Colors Read online

  About the bleakness, I agree. But humor is a way out. When people say it’s bleak, I ask them, Isn’t it funny? I think there is a lot of humor in it. At least that was my intention.

  INTERVIEWER

  Your commitment to fiction has gotten you into trouble. It is likely to get you into further trouble. It has meant severing of emotional links. It’s a high price to pay.

  PAMUK

  pamuk

  Yes, but it’s a wonderful thing. When I’m traveling, and not alone at my desk, after a while I get depressed. I’m happy when I’m alone in a room and inventing. More than a commitment to the art or to the craft, which I am devoted to, it is a commitment to being alone in a room. I continue to have this ritual, believing that what I am doing now will one day be published, legitimizing my daydreams. I need solitary hours at a desk with good paper and a fountain pen like some people need a pill for their health. I am committed to these rituals.

  INTERVIEWER

  For whom, then, are you writing?

  PAMUK

  As life gets shorter, you ask yourself that question more often. I’ve written seven novels. I would love to write another seven novels before I die. But then, life is short. What about enjoying it more? Sometimes I have to really force myself. Why am I doing it? What is the meaning of all of it? First, as I said, it’s an instinct to be alone in a room. Second, there’s an almost boyish competitive side in me that wants to attempt to write a nice book again. I believe less and less in eternity for authors. We are reading very few of the books written two hundred years ago. Things are changing so fast that today’s books will probably be forgotten in a hundred years. Very few will be read. In two hundred years, perhaps five books written today will be alive. Am I sure I’m writing one of those five? But is that the meaning of writing? Why should I be worrying about being read two hundred years later? Shouldn’t I be worried about living more? Do I need the consolation that I will be read in the future? I think of all these things and I continue to write. I don’t know why. But I never give up. This belief that your books will have an effect in the future is the only consolation you have to get pleasure in this life.

  INTERVIEWER

  You are a best-selling author in Turkey, but the books you sell at home are outnumbered by your sales abroad. You have been translated into forty languages. Do you now think about a wider global readership when writing? Are you now writing for a different audience?

  PAMUK

  I am aware that my audience is no longer an exclusively national audience. But even when I began writing, I may have been reaching for a wider group of readers. My father used to say behind the backs of some of his Turkish author friends that they were “only addressing the national audience.”

  There is a problem of being aware of one’s readership, whether it is national or international. I cannot avoid this problem now. My last two books averaged more than half a million readers all over the world. I cannot deny that I am aware of their existence. On the other hand, I never feel that I do things to satisfy them. I also believe that my readers would sense it if I did. I’ve made it my business, from the very beginning, that whenever I sense a reader’s expectations I run away. Even the composition of my sentences—I prepare the reader for something and then I surprise him. Perhaps that’s why I love long sentences.

  INTERVIEWER

  To most non-Turkish readers, the originality of your writing has much to do with its Turkish setting. But how would you distinguish your work in a Turkish context?

  PAMUK

  There is the problem of what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.” Like all authors, I had it when I was young. In my early thirties I kept thinking that I might have been too much influenced by Tolstoy or Thomas Mann—I aimed for that kind of gentle, aristocratic prose in my first novel. But it ultimately occurred to me that although I may have been derivative in my techniques, the fact that I was operating in this part of the world, so far away from Europe—or at least it seemed so at the time—and trying to attract such a different audience in such a different cultural and historical climate, it would grant me originality, even if it was cheaply earned. But it is also a tough job, since such techniques do not translate or travel so easily.

  The formula for originality is very simple—put together two things that were not together before. Look at Istanbul, an essay about the city and about how certain foreign authors—Flaubert, Nerval, Gautier—viewed the city, and how their views influenced a certain group of Turkish writers. Combined with this essay on the invention of Istanbul’s romantic landscape is an autobiography. No one had done this before. Take risks and you will come up with something new. I tried with Istanbul to make an original book. I don’t know if it succeeds. The Black Book was like that too—combine a nostalgic Proustian world with Islamic allegories, stories, and tricks, then set them all in Istanbul and see what happens.

  INTERVIEWER

  Istanbul conveys the sense that you have always been a very lonely figure. You are certainly alone as a writer in modern Turkey today. You grew up and continue to live in a world from which you are detached.

  PAMUK

  Although I was raised in a crowded family and taught to cherish the community, I later acquired an impulse to break away. There is a self-destructive side to me, and in bouts of fury and moments of anger I do things that cut me off from the pleasant company of the community. Early in life I realized that the community kills my imagination. I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. And then I’m happy. But being a Turk, after a while I need the consoling tenderness of the community, which I may have destroyed. Istanbul destroyed my relationship with my mother—we don’t see each other anymore. And of course I hardly ever see my brother. My relationship with the Turkish public, because of my recent comments, is also difficult.

  INTERVIEWER

  How Turkish do you feel yourself to be, then?

  PAMUK

  First, I’m a born Turk. I’m happy with that. Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself. I am known as a Turkish author. When Proust writes about love, he is seen as someone talking about universal love. Especially at the beginning, when I wrote about love, people would say that I was writing about Turkish love. When my work began to be translated, Turks were proud of it. They claimed me as their own. I was more of a Turk for them. Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined internationally, then your Turkishness is underlined by Turks themselves, who reclaim you. Your sense of national identity becomes something that others manipulate. It is imposed by other people. Now they are more worried about the international representation of Turkey than about my art. This causes more and more problems in my country. Through what they read in the popular press, a lot of people who don’t know my books are beginning to worry about what I say to the outside world about Turkey. Literature is made of good and bad, demons and angels, and more and more they are only worried about my demons.

  TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW

  A Story

  1.

  If there’s nothing to watch and no stories to listen to, life can get tedious. When I was a child, boredom was something we fought off by listening to the radio or looking out the window into neighboring apartments or at people passing in the street below. In those days, in 1958, there was still no television in Turkey. But we didn’t like to admit it: We talked about television optimistically, just as we did the Hollywood adventure films that took four or five years to reach Istanbul’s film theaters, saying it “had yet to arrive.”

  Looking out the window was such an important pastime that when television did finally come to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows. When my father, my uncles, and my grandmother watched television, they would argue without looking at one another, pausing now and again to report on what they’d just seen, just as they did while gazing out the window.

  “If if keeps snowing like th
is, it’s going to stick,” my aunt would say, looking at the snowflakes swirling past.

  “That man who sells helva is back on the Nişantaşi corner!” I would say, peering from the other window, which looked out over the avenue with the streetcar lines.

  On Sundays, we’d go upstairs with my uncles and aunts and everyone else who lived in the downstairs apartments to have lunch with my grandmother. As I stood at the window, waiting for the food to arrive, I’d be so happy to be there with my mother, my father, my aunts, and my uncles that everything before me seemed to glow with the pale light of the crystal chandelier hanging over the long dining table. My grandmother’s sitting room was dark, as were the downstairs sitting rooms, but to me it always seemed darker. Maybe this was because of the tulle curtains and the heavy drapes that hung at either side of the never-opened balcony doors, casting fearsome shadows. Or maybe it was the screens inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the massive tables, the chests, and the baby grand piano, with all those framed photographs on top, or the general clutter of this airless room that always smelled of dust.

  The meal was over, and my uncle was smoking in one of the dark adjoining rooms. “I have a ticket to a football match, but I’m not going,” he’d say. “Your father is going to take you instead.”

  “Daddy, take us to the football match!” my older brother would cry from the other room.

  “The children could use some fresh air,” my mother would call from the sitting room.

  “Then you take them out,” my father said to my mother.

  “I’m going to my mother’s,” my mother replied.

  “We don’t want to go to Granny’s,” said my brother.

  “You can have the car,” said my uncle.

  “Please, Daddy!” said my brother.

  There was a long, strange silence. It was as if everyone in the room was thinking certain thoughts about my mother, and as if my father could tell what those thoughts were.

  “So you’re giving me your car, are you?” my father asked my uncle.

  Later, when we had gone downstairs, while my mother was helping us put on our pullovers and our thick checked woolen socks, my father paced up and down the corridor, smoking a cigarette. My uncle had parked his “elegant, cream colored” ’52 Dodge in front of the Teşvikiye Mosque. My father allowed both of us to sit in the front seat and managed to get the motor started with one turn of the key.

  There was no line at the stadium. “This ticket for the two of them,” said my father to the man at the turnstile. “One is eight, and the other is ten.” As we went through, we were afraid to look into the man’s eyes. There were lots of empty seats in the stands, and we sat down at once.

  The two teams had already come out to the muddy field, and I enjoyed watching the players run up and down in their dazzling white shorts to warm up. “Look, that’s Little Mehmet,” said my brother, pointing to one of them. “He’s just come from the junior team.”

  “We know.”

  The match began, and for a long time we didn’t speak. A while later my thoughts wandered from the match to other things. Why did footballers all wear the same strip when their names were all different? I imagined that there were no longer players running up and down the field, just names. Their shorts were getting dirtier and dirtier. A while later, I watched a ship with an interesting smokestack passing slowly down the Bosphorus, just behind the bleachers. No one had scored by halftime, and my father bought us each a cone of chickpeas and a cheese pita.

  “Daddy, I can’t finish this,” I said, showing him what was left in my hand.

  “Put it over there,” he said. “No one will see you.”

  We got up and moved around to warm up, just like everyone else. Like our father, we had shoved our hands into the pockets of our woolen trousers and turned away from the field to look at the people sitting behind us, when someone in the crowd called out to my father. My father brought his hand to his ear, to indicate that he couldn’t hear a thing with all the noise.

  “I can’t come,” he said, as he pointed in our direction. “I have my children with me.”

  The man in the crowd was wearing a purple scarf. He fought his way to our row, pushing the seatbacks and shoving quite a few people to reach us.

  “Are these your boys?” he asked, after he had embraced my father. “They’re so big. I can hardly believe it.”

  My father said nothing.

  “So when did these children appear?” said the man, looking at us admiringly. “Did you get married as soon as you finished school?”

  “Yes,” said my father, without looking him in his face. They spoke for a while longer. The man with the purple scarf turned to my brother and me and put an unshelled American peanut into each of our palms. When he left, my father sat down in his seat and for a long time said nothing.

  Not long after the two teams had returned to the field in fresh shorts, my father said, “Come on, let’s go home. You’re getting cold.”

  “I’m not getting cold,” said my brother.

  “Yes, you are,” said my father. “And Ali’s cold. Come on, let’s get going.”

  As we were making our way past the others in our row, jostling against knees and sometimes stepping on feet, we stepped on the cheese pita I’d left on the ground. As we walked down the stairs, we heard the referee blowing his whistle to signal the start of the second half.

  “Were you getting cold?” my brother asked. “Why didn’t you say you weren’t cold?” I stayed quiet. “Idiot,” said my brother.

  “You can listen to the second half on the radio at home,” said my father.

  “This match is not on the radio,” my brother said.

  “Quiet, now,” said my father. “I’m taking you through Taksim on our way back.”

  We stayed quiet. Driving across the square, my father stopped the car just before we got to the off-track betting shop—just as we’d guessed. “Don’t open the door for anyone,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He got out of the car. Before he had a chance to lock the car from the outside, we’d pressed down on the buttons and locked it from the inside. But my father didn’t go into the betting shop; he ran over to the other side of the cobblestone street. There was a shop over there that was decorated with posters of ships, big plastic airplanes, and sunny landscapes, and it was even open on Sundays, and that’s where he went.

  “Where did Daddy go?”

  “Are we going to play upstairs or downstairs when we get home?” my brother asked.

  When my father got back, my brother was playing with the accelerator. We drove back to Nişantaşi and parked again in front of the mosque. “Why don’t I buy you something!” said my father. “But please, don’t ask for that Famous People series again.”

  “Oh, please, Daddy!” we pleaded.

  When we got to Alaaddin’s shop, my father bought us each ten packs of chewing gum from the Famous People series. We went into our building; I was so excited by the time we got into the lift that I thought I might wet my pants. It was warm inside and my mother wasn’t back yet. We ripped open the chewing gum, throwing the wrappers on the floor. The result:

  I got two Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmaks; one each of Charlie Chaplin, the wrestler Hamit Kaplan, Gandhi, Mozart, and De Gaulle; two Atatürks, and one Greta Garbo—number 21—which my brother didn’t have yet. With these I now had 173 pictures of Famous People, but I still needed another 27 to complete the series. My brother got four Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmaks, five Atatürks, and one Edison. We tossed the chewing gum into our mouths and began to read the writing on the backs of the cards.

  Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmak

  General in the War of Independence

  (1876–1950)

  MAMBO SWEETS CHEWING GUM, INC

  A leather soccer ball will be awarded to the lucky person who collects all 100 famous people.

  My brother was holding his stack of 165 cards. “Do you want to play Tops or Bottoms?”

  “No.
”

  “Would you give me your Greta Garbo for my twelve Fevzi Çakmaks?” he asked. “Then you’ll have one hundred and eighty-four cards.”

  “No.”

  “But now you have two Greta Garbos.”

  I said nothing.

  “When they do our inoculations at school tomorrow, it’s really going to hurt,” he said. “Don’t expect me to take care of you, okay?”

  “I wouldn’t anyway.”

  We ate supper in silence. When World of Sports came on the radio, we found out that the match had been a draw, 2—2, and then our mother came into our room to put us to bed. My brother started getting his bag ready for school, and I ran into the sitting room. My father was at the window, staring down at the street.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”

  “Now how can you say that?”

  “They’re giving us those inoculations tomorrow. I come down with a fever, and then I can hardly breathe. Ask Mummy.”

  He looked at me, saying nothing. I raced over to the drawer and got out a pen and a piece of paper.

  “Does your mother know about this?” he asked, putting the paper down on the volume of Kierkegaard that he was always reading but never managed to finish. “You’re going to school, but you won’t have that injection,” he said. “That’s what I’ll write.”

  He signed his name. I blew on the ink and then folded up the paper and put it in my pocket. Running back to the bedroom, I slipped it into my bag, and then I climbed up onto my bed and began to bounce on it.