The White Castle Read online

  Now I begin to wonder: who, once having read what I’ve written to the end, patiently following everything I have been able to convey of what happened, or of what I have imagined, what reader could say that Hoja did not keep this promise he made?

  4

  One day near the end of summer we heard that the body of the Imperial Astrologer Huseyn Efendi had been found floating by the shores of Istinye. The pasha had at last obtained the order for his death, and the astrologer, unable to keep quiet, betrayed his hiding place by sending letters near and far saying Sadik Pasha would soon die, it was written in the stars. When he attempted to escape to Anatolia the executioners overtook his boat and strangled him. As soon as Hoja learned that the dead man’s property had been seized, he rushed to get his hands on the papers and books; for this he spent all his savings on bribes. One evening he brought home a huge trunk filled with thousands of pages and after devouring these in just one week, said angrily that he could do much better.

  I assisted him as he laboured to make good his word. For two treatises he had decided to write for the sovereign, entitled The Bizarre Behaviour of The Beasts and The Curious Wonders of God’s Creatures, I described to him the fine horses and the donkeys, rabbits, and lizards I had seen in the spacious gardens and meadows on our estate at Empoli. When Hoja remarked that my powers of imagination were all too limited, I remembered the mustachioed French turtles in our lilypond, the blue parrots that talked with Sicilian accents, and the squirrels who would sit facing one another preening their coats before mating. We devoted much time and care to a chapter on the behaviour of ants, a subject which fascinated the sultan but which he could not learn enough about because the first courtyard of the palace was continually being swept.

  As Hoja wrote of the orderly, logical life of ants, he nurtured a dream that we might educate the young sultan. Finding our native black ants inadequate for this purpose, he described the behaviour of American red ants. This gave him the idea to write a book that would be entertaining as well as instructive about the lazy aborigines who lived in that snake-ridden country called America and never changed their ways: I suppose he did not dare finish this book in which he said, as he described it to me in detail, that he would also write how a child-king fond of animals and hunting was ultimately impaled at the stake by Spanish infidels because he paid no attention to science. The drawings by a miniaturist we employed to give a vivid representation of winged buffalo, six-legged oxen, and two-headed snakes, satisfied neither of us. ‘Reality may have been flat like that in the old days,’ said Hoja. ‘But now everything is three-dimensional, reality has shadows, don’t you see; even the most ordinary ant patiently carries his shadow around on his back like a twin.’

  Hoja received no communication from the sultan and so decided to ask the pasha to present the treatises on his behalf, but he later regretted this. The pasha gave him a lecture, saying that astrology was sophistry, that the Imperial Astrologer Huseyn Efendi had got in over his head by mixing himself up in politics and that he suspected Hoja now had his eye on the position left empty, that he himself believed in this thing called science but it was a matter of weapons, not stars, that the office of imperial astrologer was an inauspicious one as was clear from the fact that all who occupied it were murdered sooner or later, or worse, vanished into thin air, and he therefore did not want his beloved Hoja, whose science he relied upon, to take up this position, that in any case the new imperial astrologer would be Sitki Efendi, who was stupid and simple enough to do this job, that he’d heard Hoja had obtained the former astrologer’s books and he wanted him not to bother himself further with this affair. Hoja replied that he concerned himself only with science and gave the pasha the treatises he wanted conveyed to the sultan. That evening at home he said that indeed he did care only for science, but would do whatever was necessary in order to practise it; and for a start he cursed the pasha.

  During the next month we tried to guess the child’s reaction to the colourful animals of our fancy, while Hoja wondered why he had still not been called to the palace. At last we were summoned to the hunt; we went to Mirahor Palace on the shores of Kagithane River, he to stand at the sovereign’s side, I to watch from afar; a great crowd had gathered. The imperial gamekeeper had prepared well: rabbits and foxes were let loose and greyhounds set on their heels, and we watched while all eyes followed one of the rabbits as it drew away from its fellows and threw itself into the water; when, swimming frantically, it reached the far shore, the gamekeepers wanted to let more dogs loose there as well, but even we at our distance could hear the sovereign withhold his permission with the order: ‘Let the rabbit go free.’ However, the rabbit jumped into the water again and a wild dog on the far shore chased and caught it, but the gamekeepers rushed forward to rescue it from the dog’s jaws and brought it into the sultan’s presence. The child examined the animal at once and was gratified to find no serious wound; he ordered that the rabbit be taken to a mountain-top and set free. Then I saw a group including Hoja and the red-headed dwarf gather around the sovereign.

  That evening Hoja explained to me what happened: the sultan had asked how the event should be interpreted. After everyone else had spoken and Hoja’s turn came, he said it meant that enemies would emerge from quarters the sultan least expected, but he would survive the threat unscathed. When Hoja’s rivals, among them the new Imperial Astrologer Sitki Efendi, criticized this interpretation for raising the spectre of death – even going so far as to compare the sovereign with a rabbit – the sultan silenced them all saying he would take Hoja’s words as the earring for his ear. Later, while they watched a black eagle attacked by falcons fight for its life, and saw the pitiful death of a fox mauled by ravenous hounds, the sultan said that his lion had given birth to two cubs, one male and one female, an equal number as Hoja had predicted, that he loved Hoja’s bestiaries, and asked about the bulls with blue wings and the pink cats who live in the meadows near the Nile. Hoja was intoxicated with a strange mixture of triumph and fear.

  Only much later did we hear of the mischief at the palace: the sultan’s grandmother, Kosem Sultana, had conspired with the janissary aghas in a plot to murder him and his mother, and have Prince Suleyman put on the throne in his place, but the plot failed. They strangled her till the blood flowed from her mouth and nose. Hoja learned all this from the gossip of the fools at the clock-room in the mosque, and he continued his teaching at the school, but otherwise did not venture from the house.

  In the autumn for a while he considered working on his cosmographical theories again but lost faith: he needed an observatory; moreover the fools here cared as little for the stars as the stars do for fools. Winter came, dark clouds hung heavy in the sky, and one day we learned the pasha, had been dismissed from office. He too was to have been strangled, but the sultan’s mother would not consent and he was instead banished to Erzinjan, his property confiscated. We heard nothing more about him until his death. Hoja said he now feared no one, he owed a debt to no man – I don’t know how much consideration he gave to whether he’d learned anything from me when he said this. He claimed he no longer feared either the child or his mother. He felt ready to cast dice with death and glory, but we sat at home among our books quiet as lambs, talking about American red ants and dreaming up a new treatise on the subject.

  We passed that winter at home like so many before and so many to come; nothing at all happened. On the cold nights when the north wind blew down the chimney and under the doors we would sit downstairs talking till dawn. He no longer belittled me, or couldn’t be bothered to act as if he did. I attributed his new comradeship to the fact that no one sought him out, neither from the palace nor from the palace circle. At times I thought he perceived the uncanny resemblance between us as much as I did, and I was worried that when he looked at me now he saw himself: what was he thinking? We had finished another long treatise on animals, but since the pasha’s banishment this lay on the table, while Hoja said he wasn’t ready to put up with the
caprices of those who had access to the palace. Now and then, idle as the days passed without incident, I would leaf through the pages of the treatise looking at the violet grasshoppers and flying fish I’d drawn, wondering what the sultan would think when he read these lines.

  Only when spring came was Hoja finally summoned. The child had been very pleased to see him; according to Hoja it was obvious from his every gesture, his every word, that the sultan had long been thinking of him, but was prevented by the idiots at court from seeking him out. The sovereign spoke of his grandmother’s treachery, saying Hoja had foreseen the threat but had also foreseen that the sultan would survive unharmed. That night in the palace the child had not been in the least afraid when he heard the shouts of those who meant to murder him, because he’d remembered that vicious dog had not harmed the rabbit in its jaws. After these words of praise he ordered that Hoja be granted the income from a suitable piece of land. Hoja had to leave before the subject of astronomy could arise; he was told to expect the grant at summer’s end.

  While he waited, Hoja made plans to build a small observatory in the garden, anticipating the income from the land. He calculated the dimensions of the foundations to be dug and the price of the instruments he would require, but he quickly lost interest this time. It was then he found a poorly transcribed manuscript in the old book bazaar, recording the results of Takiyuddin’s observations. He spent two months testing the accuracy of the observations, but in the end gave up in disgust, unable to determine which discrepancy was due to the shortcomings of his inferior instruments, which to Takiyuddin’s own errors, and which to the carelessness of the scribe. What irritated him even more were the verses a former owner of the book had scribbled between the trigonometric columns calculated in degrees of sixty. The former owner, using numerical values of the alphabet and other methods, offered his humble observations on the future of the world: in the end a male child would be born to him after four females, a plague would strike dividing the innocent from the guilty, and his neighbour Bahaeddin Efendi would die. Although Hoja was at first amused by these predictions, he later grew depressed. He now talked about the insides of our heads with a strange and ominous conviction: it was as if he were talking about trunks with lids one could open and look inside, or about the cupboards in our room.

  The grant promised by the sultan did not come at the end of summer, nor yet as winter approached. The next spring Hoja was told a new deed register was being prepared; he must wait. During this time he was invited to the palace, though not very often, to offer his interpretations of such phenomena as a mirror that cracked, a bolt of green lightning which struck the open sea around Yassi Island, a blood-red crystal decanter filled with cherry juice which splintered to smithereens where it stood, and to answer the sovereign’s questions about the animals in the last treatise we had written. When he came home he would say that the sovereign was entering puberty; this was the most impressionable stage of a man’s life, he would have that child in the palm of his hand.

  With this goal in mind he started afresh on a completely new book. He had learned from me of the fall of the Aztecs and the memoirs of Cortez, and had in mind even before that the story of a pathetic child-king who was impaled at the stake because he paid no heed to science. He often talked of the immoral wretches who, with their cannon and machines of war, their deceiving tales and their weapons, ambushed honourable men while they slept and forced them to submit to their rule; but for a long time he hid from me whatever it was he shut himself up to write. I could tell that at first he expected me to show interest, but in those days my intense longing for home, which would suddenly plunge me into the most extraordinary gloom, had increased my hatred for him; I suppressed my curiosity, pretended not to care about the dusty books with torn bindings he read because he got them cheap, and to disdain the conclusions his creative intellect derived from what I had taught him. Day by day he gradually lost confidence, first in himself, then in what he was trying to write, while I watched with vindictive pleasure.

  He’d go upstairs to the little room he’d made his private study, sit at our table which I’d had built, and think, but I sensed that he wasn’t writing, I knew he could not; I knew he didn’t have the courage to write without first hearing my opinion of his ideas. It was not exactly want of my humble thoughts, which he pretended to scorn, that made him lose faith in himself: what he really wanted was to learn what ‘they’ thought, those like me, the ‘others’ who had taught me all that science, placed those compartments, those drawers full of learning inside my head. What would they think were they in his situation? It was this he was dying to ask, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. How long I waited for him to swallow his pride and find the courage to ask me this question! But he didn’t ask. He soon abandoned this book. I could not tell whether he’d finished writing or not, and resumed his old refrain about the ‘fools’. He would renounce his belief that the fundamental science worthy of practice was the one which would analyse the causes of their folly; renounce the desire to know why the insides of their heads were like they were, and stop thinking about it! I believed these broodings were born of his despair because the signs of favour he expected from the palace did not appear. Time passed in vain, the sovereign’s puberty wasn’t much help after all.

  But in the summer before Koprulu Mehmet Pasha became grand vizir, Hoja received the grant at last; and it was one he might have chosen himself: he’d been granted the combined income from two mills near Gebze and two villages an hour’s ride from that town. We went to Gebze at harvest time, taking our old house which by chance stood empty, but Hoja had forgotten the months we’d passed there, the days when he looked with distaste at the table I brought home from the carpenter. His memories seemed to have grown old and ugly along with the house: in any case he was consumed with an impatience that made it impossible for him to care for anything in the past. On a few occasions he went to inspect the villages; he calculated the income earned in previous years, and influenced by Tarhunju Ahmet Pasha, whom he’d heard about from his friends’ gossip at the mosque clock-room, he announced that he’d found a new system for keeping an accounts’ ledger in a much simpler and more readily understandable fashion.

  But the originality and usefulness of this innovation, in which even he did not believe, was not enough for him: the wasted nights he spent sitting in the garden behind the old house looking at the sky rekindled his passion for astronomy. I encouraged him for a while, believing he’d take his theories a step further; but his intention was not to make observations or use his mind: he invited the most intelligent youths he knew from the village and from Gebze to the house, saying he’d teach them the highest science, set up for them in the back garden the orrery he’d sent me to Istanbul to retrieve, repaired the bells, oiled it, and one evening, with an enthusiasm and energy he got from I don’t know where, passionately repeated, without omission or error, that theory of the heavens he’d expounded years before first to the pasha and then to the sultan. But when the next morning we found a sheep’s heart on our doorstep, still warm and bleeding, with a spell written upon it, this was enough to make him finally give up all hope both in the youths who’d left the house at midnight without asking one question, and in astronomy.

  But he did not dwell on this setback either: surely they were not the ones to understand the turning of the earth and stars; for now it was not necessary that they should understand; the one who must understand was about to grow out of puberty, and perhaps he had sought us in our absence, we were missing our opportunity for the sake of the few pennies we’d receive here after the harvest. We settled our affairs, hired the most intelligent-looking of those bright youths as overseer, and returned to Istanbul.

  The next three years were our worst. Every day, every month, was like the one before, every season a sickening, nerve-racking repetition of some other season we’d lived through: it was as if we painfully, desperately, watched the same things happening again, waiting in vain for some disas
ter we could not name. He was still called to the palace now and then, where they expected him to provide his inoffensive interpretations, and still gathered with his friends in science at the mosque clock-room on Thursday afternoons, still saw his students in the mornings and beat them, even if not as regularly as before, still resisted those who came to the house now and then with offers of marriage, even if not quite as decisively as he used to, still was obliged to listen to that music he said he didn’t like anymore in order to lie with the women, still sometimes seemed about to choke on the hatred he felt for his fools, still would shut himself in his room, lie down on the bed he spread out, thumb irritably through the pages of the manuscripts and books stacked all around him and wait, staring at the ceiling for hours on end.

  What made him even more miserable were the victories of Koprulu Mehmet Pasha he heard about from his friends at the mosque clock-room. When he told me the fleet had routed the Venetians, or that the islands of Tenedos and Limnos had been recaptured, or that the rebel Abaza Hasan Pasha had been crushed, he’d add that these were the last of merely fleeting successes, the pathetic wrigglings of a cripple soon to be buried in the slime of idiocy and incompetence: he seemed to be waiting for some disaster to change the monotony of these days that exhausted us all the more as they repeated one another. Worse, since he no longer had the patience and confidence to concentrate on the thing he obstinately called ‘science’, he had nothing to distract him: he could not keep his enthusiasm for a new idea for more than one week, he soon remembered his fools and forgot all else. Wasn’t the thought he’d devoted to them till now enough? Was it worth wearing himself out over them? Worth getting so angry? And perhaps, since he had only just learned to set himself apart from them, he could muster neither the strength nor desire to investigate this science in detail. He had begun, however, to believe he was different from the others.