The White Castle Read online

  Late that night he went to the sultan’s tent and it seemed he would never return. For a while, since I could easily guess what he was going to say to the sovereign, who would want him to interpret for the pashas the events of the day and the future, I considered the possibility that he had been killed there on the spot and that the executioners would soon come for me. Later I imagined that he had left the tent and, without stopping to tell me, gone straight for the white towers of the castle gleaming in the dark, that having slipped past the guards, over the swamp and through the forest, he had already reached it. I was waiting for morning, thinking of my new life without much enthusiasm, when he came back. Only much later, years later, after talking at great length with those who’d been there in the sultan’s tent, was I able to learn that Hoja had said just what I’d guessed he would. At the time he explained nothing to me, he was rushing about like someone about to leave on a journey. He said there was a thick fog outside. I understood.

  Till the break of day I talked with him about what I’d left behind in my country, told him how he could find my house, spoke of my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, how we were regarded in Empoli and Florence. I mentioned some tiny, special particulars by which he could know one person from another. As I spoke I recalled that I had told him all of these things before, down to the large mole on my little brother’s back. At times, while entertaining the sovereign, or now while writing this book, these stories have seemed to me mere reflections of my fantasies, not the truth, but then I believed them: my sister’s stutter was real, as were the many buttons on our clothes and the things I had seen from the window overlooking the garden behind our house. Towards morning I began to think I had been seduced by these stories because I believed they would continue, perhaps from where they left off, even if much later. I knew that Hoja too was thinking the same thing, that he happily believed in his own story.

  We exchanged clothes without haste and without speaking. I gave him my ring and the medallion I’d managed to keep from him all these years. Inside it there was a picture of my grandmother’s mother and a lock of my fiancée’s hair that had gone white; I believe he liked it, he put it around his neck. Then he left the tent and was gone. I watched him slowly disappear in the silent fog. It was getting light. Exhausted, I lay down in his bed and slept peacefully.

  11

  I have now come to the end of my book. Perhaps discerning readers, deciding my story was actually finished long ago, have already tossed it aside. There was a time when I thought the same thing. I thrust these pages into a drawer years ago, intending never to read them again. In those days it was my intention to turn my mind to other stories I invented, not for the sultan but for my own pleasure, romances taking place in lands I’d never seen, in desolate wastes and frozen forests, involving a wily merchant who wandered into them like a wolf; I wanted to forget this book, this story. Though I knew it wouldn’t be easy after all I’d heard and experienced, I might have succeeded if a guest hadn’t come to visit me two weeks ago and persuaded me to bring my book out again. Today I know at last that of all my books this is the one I love most; I will finish it as it should be finished, as I have longed, have dreamed of doing.

  From the old table where I sit finishing my book I can see a tiny sailboat ploughing the sea from Jennethisar to Istanbul, a mill turning in the distance among the olive-groves, children pushing each other as they play deep in the garden under the fig-trees, the dusty road from Istanbul to Gebze. During the winter snows few pass this way. In spring and summer I see the caravans travelling to the East, to Anatolia, even Baghdad, Damascus; I often watch the broken-down ox-carts going by at a snail’s pace, and sometimes I’m excited by the sight of a rider in the distance whose costume I can’t identify, but when the traveller draws near I realize he is not coming to see me. In these days no one comes, and now I know no one will.

  But I have no complaints, and I am not lonely: I saved a great deal of money during my years as imperial astrologer, I married, I have four children; I foresaw the troubles coming and gave up my position in time, perhaps with an insight gained from practising my profession: before the sultan’s armies left for Vienna, before the fawning clowns and the imperial astrologer who succeeded me were beheaded in a frenzy of defeat, long before our sovereign who so loved animals was dethroned, I fled here to Gebze. I had this villa built and moved in with my beloved books, my children and a couple of servants. My wife, whom I married while I was still the imperial astrologer, is much younger than I, a fine housekeeper who manages the whole house and a few other minor tasks for me, and leaves me to write my books and dream, climbing towards seventy, alone all day in this room. Thus, to find an appropriate end to my story and my life, I think of Him to my heart’s content.

  Yet during the first years I tried never to do that. Once or twice when the sovereign had wanted to speak of Him, he realized the subject didn’t attract me at all. I believe he was content to leave it that way; he was just curious; but what particularly he was curious about, and how much, I was never able to discover. At first he said I shouldn’t be ashamed to have been influenced by Him, to have learned from Him. He’d known from the start that all those books, those calendars and predictions I’d presented to him over the years had been written by Him, and told Him so even when I was still struggling at home with designs for our weapon that ended up stuck in the swamp; he’d also known that He had told me this, just as I used to tell Him everything. Perhaps then both of us had not yet lost the end of the thread, but I realized the sultan had his feet more firmly on the ground than I had. In those days I thought the sovereign was cleverer than I, knew everything he was supposed to know and was toying with me so as to have me more securely in the palm of his hand. And perhaps I was also influenced by the gratitude I felt to him for having rescued me from that defeat whose germ was planted in the swamp, and from the rage of the soldiers driven mad by rumours of a curse. For when they learned the infidel had escaped, some of the soldiers wanted my head. If in the first years he had asked me candidly, I believe I would have told the sultan everything. In those days the rumours that I was not who I was had not yet begun, I wanted to talk with someone about what had happened, I missed Him.

  To live alone in that house we had shared for so many years unnerved me even more. My pockets full of money, my feet soon learned the way to the slave market; I went back and forth for months until I found what I sought. In the end I bought some poor devil who didn’t really resemble me or Him and brought him home. That night when I told him to teach me everything he knew, to tell me about his country, his past, even to admit the sins he had committed, when I brought him to face the mirror, he was frightened of me. It was a terrible night, I pitied the poor man, I meant to set him free in the morning, but my stinginess won out and I took him to the slave market to sell him back. After that I decided to marry and let word of my intentions get out in the neighbourhood. They came gladly, thinking they would make me one of them at last, that peace would come to the street. I, too, was content to be like them, I felt optimistic, I thought the rumours had stopped, that I could live in peace inventing stories for my sovereign year after year. I chose my wife carefully; she even played the oud for me in the evenings.

  When the rumours started again, I thought at first this must be another of the sultan’s games, for I believed he took pleasure in observing my anxiety and asking questions that would unsettle me. In the beginning I wasn’t much alarmed when he would suddenly say things to me like, ‘Do we know ourselves? A man must understand who he is’; I thought he’d learned these unnerving questions from the know-it-alls interested in Greek philosophy among the sycophants he’d started to gather around him once again. When he asked me to write something on the subject, I gave him my last book about gazelles and sparrows being content because they never reflected on themselves and knew nothing of what they were. When I found that he had taken the book seriously and read it with pleasure I relaxed a bit, but the gossip began to re
ach my ears: it was said I treated the sultan like a fool, I did not even resemble the man whose place I had taken, He was thinner and more delicate while I had grown fat; they’d known I was lying when I said I couldn’t know everything He knew; one day in time of war I, too, would bring down bad luck and then desert as He had done, I would betray secrets of state to the enemy and ease the way to defeat, etc., etc. To protect myself from these rumours that I believed the sultan had started, I withdrew from feasts and festivities, was not seen much in public, lost weight, and made careful inquiries into what had been discussed in the sovereign’s tent on that last night. My wife had one child after another, my income was good, I wanted to forget the rumours, forget Him, forget the past, and continue my work in peace.

  I persevered for almost seven years more; perhaps if my nerves had been stronger, or more important, if I hadn’t sensed there would be another purge of the circle around the sultan, I would have gone on to the end; I would have passed through the doors the sovereign opened for me and let go of the former life I wished to forget. I was now quite shameless in answering the questions about my identity which had at first put me on guard: ‘Of what importance is it who a man is?’ I’d say. ‘The important thing is what we have done and will do.’ I believe it was through this cupboard door that the sultan got into my mind! When he asked me to tell him about Italy, about the country to which He had escaped, and I replied that I had little knowledge of it, he grew angry: he knew that He had told me everything, why was I afraid, it was enough that I should remember what He had said. So I described to the sultan in detail again His childhood and His beautiful memories, some of which I have included in this book. At first my nerves were still fairly sound, the sultan listened to me as I intended – as if listening to someone tell what he’d heard from someone else – but in later years he went further; he began listening to what I said as if it were Him speaking: he’d ask me details only He could have known, told me not to be afraid, to give the first answer that came into my head: what event was it that had precipitated His sister’s stutter? Why had He not been accepted by the University of Padua? What colour clothes had His brother worn at the first fireworks display He’d seen in Venice? While I told the sovereign these details as if they had happened to me, we would be out for a day on the water, or resting by a pool teeming with frogs and water lilies, observing shameless monkeys in silver cages or strolling in one of those gardens that, because they’d walked there together, was filled with memories they shared. Then the sovereign, pleased with my stories and the play of our memories which blossomed like flowers opening in the garden, would feel closer to me and speak of Him as though recalling an old friend who had betrayed us: he said it was good He had run away, for although he found Him amusing, he’d often lost patience with His impertinence and thought of having Him killed. He revealed some things that frightened me because I couldn’t quite tell which of us he was talking about, but he spoke with love, not with violence: there had been days when, unable to tolerate His self-ignorance, he feared he would have Him killed in anger – on that last night he had been on the point of calling the executioners! Later, he said I was not impertinent; I did not consider myself the most intelligent, most capable man in the world; I had not presumed to interpret the terror of the plague to my own advantage; I’d not kept everyone awake at night with tales of child-kings who were impaled at the stake; and now there was no one to whom I could run home and recount and ridicule the sultan’s dreams after listening to them, no one with whom I could write silly, entertaining fictions to lead him astray! As I listened I thought I saw myself, the two of us, from the outside as in a dream, and I realized that we had lost the end of the thread. But in the last months the sultan, as though to drive me mad, went on even further: I was not like Him, I had not given my mind to the sophists who distinguished between ‘them’ and ‘us’ as He had done! During the fireworks the eight-year-old sovereign had watched from the other shore before he met us, my own Devil had brought victory to that other devil in the dark sky for Him, and now had gone with Him to the land where it believed it would find peace! Later, during the walks in the garden which were always the same, the sovereign would ask thoughtfully: must one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another? Afraid, I would say nothing; as if to break my last effort at resistance he would ask once again: was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other’s place?

  Because I hoped the sultan and I would succeed in forgetting Him one day, and because I had taken the precaution of saving more money, I might have endured this torture with patience; for I had grown used to the fear that comes with ambiguity. He opened and shut the doors of my mind mercilessly, as if riding hither and thither in pursuit of a rabbit in some forest where we’d lost our way. What’s more he was now doing this in front of everyone; he was surrounded by fawning sycophants again. I was afraid because I thought there would be another purge and all of our property would be confiscated, because I sensed the troubles soon to come. It was the day he had me tell of the bridges of Venice, of the lacework on the tablecloth on which He had eaten breakfast as a child, of the view through the window overlooking the garden at the back of His house that He recalled when he was about to be beheaded for his refusal to convert to Islam – it was when the sultan ordered me to write down all of these stories in a book, as if they were my own record of what had happened to me, that I decided to escape from Istanbul as soon as possible.

  I moved into a different house in Gebze so as to forget Him. At first I was afraid that palace guards would come for me, but no one sought me out, and my income was not touched; either I was forgotten, or the sovereign was having me watched secretly. I thought no more about it, I got started on my work, had this home built, landscaped the back garden as I wanted, according to my inner impulses; I passed my time reading my books, writing stories for my own pleasure and advising visitors who came to consult me because they had discovered I was a former astrologer, more for the fun of it than for their money. It was perhaps from them that I learned most about my country where I have lived from childhood: before I agreed to tell the fortunes of cripples, or men bewildered at the loss of a son or brother, the chronically ill, the fathers of girls left unmarried, men who never grew to their full height, jealous husbands, the blind, sailors, and hopeless lovers with wild eyes, I’d make them tell me their life stories at length, and at night I would write down what I’d heard in notebooks so as to use them later in my stories, just as I have done with this book.

  It was in those years, too, that I met the old man who brought a profound melancholy with him into my room. He must have been ten, fifteen years older than I. As soon as I saw the sadness in the face of this man called Evliya*, I decided that loneliness was his trouble, but he didn’t say that: it seems he’d devoted his whole life to wandering and the ten-volume book of travels he was about to finish. Before he died he meant to make the journey to the place closest to God, to Mecca and Medina, and write about them as well, but there was something missing in his book that disturbed him, he wanted to tell his readers about the fountains and bridges of Italy whose beauty he’d heard so much about, and he wondered whether I, whom he’d come to see because of my fame in Istanbul, might be able to tell him about them? When I said I’d never seen Italy, he declared that he knew that as well as anyone else, but had heard I’d once had a slave who came from there, who had described everything to me; if I would in turn tell Evliya, he would repay me with amusing anecdotes: wasn’t inventing and listening to diverting stories the pleasantest part of life? As he shyly took a map from his case, the worst map of Italy I’d ever seen, I decided to tell him what he wanted.