The White Castle Read online

  Once, after he had hurt me very badly, I saw that he felt pity for me, but this was a malignant sentiment mixed with the repugnance felt for a person one doesn’t consider in any way equal: I sensed this also in the way he was finally able to look at me without hatred. ‘Let’s not write any more,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to write any more,’ he then corrected himself, for weeks had passed while he’d merely watched me write about my faults. He said we must leave this house, buried deeper in gloom with each passing day, and take a trip, perhaps to Gebze. He was going to turn once more to his work in astronomy, and he was thinking of writing a more rigorous treatise on the behaviour of ants. It alarmed me to see he was about to lose all respect for me, so in an effort to keep his interest I invented one more story that would expose my wickedness in the harshest light. Hoja read it with relish and did not even get angry; I sensed he merely felt intrigued at how I could abide being such an evil person. And perhaps, too, seeing such baseness, he no longer wanted to imitate me but was content to remain himself till the very end. Of course, he knew quite well that there was something of a game in all this. That day I spoke to him like a palace sycophant who knows he is not counted a real man; I tried to arouse his curiosity even more: what would he lose if, before leaving for Gebze, he tried one last time – in order to understand how I could be the way I was – to write about his own faults? What he wrote need not even be true, nor need anyone believe it. If he did this he would understand me and those like me, and one day this knowledge could be useful to him! Finally, unable to endure his own curiosity and my babbling, he said he would try it the following day. Of course, he didn’t forget to add that he would do it only because he wanted to, not because he was taken in by my foolish games.

  The next day was the most enjoyable of all those I spent in slavery. Although he didn’t tie me to the chair, I spent the whole day sitting facing him so I could enjoy watching him become someone else. At first he believed so intensely in what he was doing that he didn’t even bother to write that silly title of his, ‘Why I Am What I Am’, at the top of the page. He had the confident air of a mischievous child looking for an amusing lie; I could see at a glance that he was still within his own safe world. But this inflated sense of security didn’t last long; neither did the show of contrition that he assumed for my sake. In a short time his pretended disdain became anxiety, the game became real; it bewildered and frightened him to act out this self-accusation, even if it were a pretence. He immediately crossed out what he wrote without showing it to me. But his curiosity had been aroused, and I believe he felt ashamed in front of me, for he persisted with it. Yet if he had followed his first impulse and got up from the table right away, perhaps he would not have lost his peace of mind.

  During the next few hours I watched him slowly unravel: he’d write something critical about himself then tear it up without showing it to me, each time losing more of his self-confidence and self-respect, but then he’d begin again, hoping to recover what he’d lost. Supposedly he was going to show me his confessions; by nightfall I’d not seen one word of what I so longed to read, he’d ripped them all up and thrown them away, and his strength too was spent. When he shouted insults at me, saying this was a loathsome infidel’s game, his self-confidence was at such a low ebb I even replied brazenly that he would get used to not feeling regret, to being evil. He got up and left the house, perhaps because he couldn’t bear to be observed, and when he returned late I could tell from the perfume on him that, as I’d suspected, he’d been with prostitutes.

  The next afternoon, to provoke him to continue working, I told Hoja he was surely strong enough not to be affected by such harmless games. Furthermore, we were doing this to learn something, not merely to pass the time, and in the end he would reach an understanding of why those he called fools were like that. Wasn’t the prospect of really knowing one another fascinating enough? A man would be as spellbound by someone knowing the smallest details of his soul as he would by a nightmare.

  It was not what I said, which he took about as seriously as he did the flattery of a palace dwarf, but the security of daylight that prompted him to sit down again at the table. When he got up that evening, he believed in himself even less than he had the day before. When I saw him set off to the prostitutes again that night, I pitied him.

  Thus every morning he would sit down at the table, believing himself capable of transcending the evils he would write of that day and hoping to regain what he’d lost the day before, then every evening get up having left on the table a little more of what self-confidence he still had. Since he now found himself contemptible he could no longer look upon me with contempt; I thought I had at last found some confirmation of the equality I’d wrongly believed existed between us in the first days we’d spent together; this pleased me very much. Because he was wary of me, he said I needn’t sit with him at the table; this too was a good sign, but my anger, gathering momentum for years, now grasped the bit between its teeth. I wanted to take revenge, to attack. Like him I had lost my balance. I felt that if I could make Hoja doubt himself just a little more, if I could read a few of those confessions he carefully kept from me and subtly humiliate him, then he would be the slave and sinner of the house, not I. There were already signs of this anyway: I could tell he needed now and then to be sure whether I was mocking him or not. He could no longer believe in himself, so had begun to seek my approval. He now asked my opinion more often on trivial daily affairs: were his clothes suitable, was the answer he’d given someone a good one, did I like his handwriting, what was I thinking? Not wanting him to despair completely and give up the game, I would sometimes criticize myself so as to raise his spirits. He’d give me that look that meant ‘you rogue’, but he no longer struck me; I was sure he thought he also deserved a beating.

  I was extremely curious about these confessions that made him feel such self-hatred. Since I was accustomed to treating him as an inferior, even if only in secret, I thought they would consist of a few petty, insignificant sins. Now when I try to lend realism to my past, and tell myself to imagine in detail one or two of these confessions of which I never read one sentence, I somehow cannot find a sin Hoja could have committed that would destroy my story’s consistency and the life I have imagined for myself. But I suppose that someone in my position can learn to trust himself again: I must say that I brought Hoja to make a discovery without his realizing it, that I exposed him to his own weak points and those of people like him, even if not entirely decisively and frankly. I probably thought the day was not far off when I would tell him and the others what I thought of them; I would destroy them by proving how wicked they were. I believe that those who read my story realize by now that I must have learned as much from Hoja as he learned from me! Maybe I just think this way now because when we are old we all look for more symmetry, even in the stories we read. I must have boiled over with a resentment gathering force for years. After Hoja had thoroughly humiliated himself I would make him accept my superiority, or at least my independence, and then derisively demand my freedom. I was dreaming that he would set me free without even grumbling, thinking of how I would write books about my adventures among the Turks when I returned to my country. How easy it had been for me to lose all sense of proportion! The news he brought me one morning suddenly changed all that.

  Plague had broken out in the city! Since he said this as if speaking of some other, far away place, not of Istanbul, I didn’t believe it at first; I asked how he’d heard the news, I wanted to know everything. The number of sudden deaths was rising for no apparent reason, presumably caused by some disease. I asked what the signs of illness were – perhaps it wasn’t plague after all. Hoja laughed at me: I shouldn’t worry, if I caught it I’d know beyond any doubt, a person had only three days of fever in which to find out. Some had swellings behind their ears, some under their armpits, on their bellies, buboes developed, then a fever took over; sometimes the boils burst, sometimes blood spewed from the lungs, there were thos
e who died coughing violently like consumptives. He added that people from every district were dying in threes and fives. Anxious, I asked about our own neighbourhood. Hadn’t I heard? A bricklayer who quarrelled with all the neighbours because their chickens were getting in through his wall, had died screaming with fever just one week ago. Only now did everyone realize that he’d died of the plague.

  But I still didn’t want to believe it; outside in the streets everything looked so normal, people passing by the window were so calm, I needed to find someone to share my alarm if I were to believe the plague was here. The next morning, when Hoja went to school, I flew out into the streets. I searched out the Italian converts I’d managed to meet during the eleven years I had spent here. One of them, known by his new name Mustafa Reis, had left for the dockyards; the other, Osman Efendi, wouldn’t let me in at first although I knocked at his door as though I would beat it down with my fists. He had his servant say he wasn’t at home but finally gave in and shouted after me. How could I still question whether the disease was real; didn’t I see those coffins being carried down the street? He said I was scared, he could see it in my face, I was scared because I remained faithful to Christianity! He scolded me; a man must be a Muslim to be happy here, but he neglected to press my hand before he retreated into the dank darkness of his own house, didn’t touch me at all. It was the hour of prayer, and when I saw the crowds in the courtyards of the mosques, I was seized with fear and started for home. I was overcome by the bewilderment that strikes people at moments of disaster. It was as if I had lost my past, as though my memory had been drained, I was paralysed. When I saw a group carrying a funeral bier through the streets of our neighbourhood it completely unnerved me.

  Hoja had come back from the school, I sensed he was pleased when he saw how I was. I noticed that my fear increased his self-confidence and this made me uneasy. I wanted him to be rid of this vain pride in his fearlessness. Trying to check my agitation, I poured out all my medical and literary knowledge; I described what I remembered from the scenes of plague in Hippocrates, Thucydides and Boccacio, said it was believed the disease was contagious, but this only made him more contemptuous – he didn’t fear the plague; disease was God’s will, if a man was fated to die he would die; for this reason it was useless to talk cowardly nonsense as I did about shutting oneself up in one’s house and severing relations with the outside or trying to escape from Istanbul. If it was written, so it would come to pass, death would find us. Why was I afraid? Because of those sins of mine I’d written down day after day? He smiled, his eyes shining with certainty.

  Until the day we lost one another I was never able to find out if he really believed what he said. Seeing him so completely undaunted I had been afraid for a moment, but then, when I remembered our discussions at the table, those terrifying games we played, I became sceptical. He was circling around, steering the conversation to the sins we’d written down together, reiterating the same idea with an air of conceit that drove me wild: if I was so afraid of death I couldn’t have mastered the wickedness I appeared to write about so bravely. The courage I showed in pouring out my sins was simply the result of my shamelessness! Whereas he had hesitated at the time because he was so painstakingly attentive to the tiniest fault. But now he was calm, the deep confidence he felt in the face of the plague had left no doubt in his heart that he must be innocent.

  Repelled by this explanation, which I stupidly believed, I decided to argue with him. Naïvely I suggested that he was confident not because he had a clear conscience but because he did not know that death was so near. I explained how we could protect ourselves from death, that we must not touch those who had caught the plague, that the corpses must be buried in limed pits, that people must reduce their contact with one another as much as possible, and that Hoja must not go to that crowded school.

  It seems this last thing I said gave him ideas even more horrible than the plague. The next day at noon, saying he’d touched each of the children at school one by one, he stretched out his hands towards me; when he saw me balk, that I was afraid to touch him, he came closer and embraced me with glee; I wanted to scream, but like someone in a dream, I couldn’t cry out. As for Hoja, he said, with a derisiveness I only learned to understand much later, that he was going to teach me fearlessness.

  6

  The plague was spreading quickly, but I somehow could not learn what Hoja called fearlessness. At the same time I wasn’t as cautious as I had been at first. I could not stand any longer to be cooped up in one room like an ailing old woman, staring out the window for days on end. Once in a while I’d burst out into the street like a drunkard, watch the women shopping in the market-place, the tradesmen working in their shops, the men gathering in the coffeehouses after burying their dear ones, and try to learn to live with the plague. I might have done so, but Hoja would not leave me in peace.

  Every night he’d reach for me with the hands he said he’d touched people with all day long. I’d wait without moving a muscle. You know how when, barely awake, you realize a scorpion is crawling over you and freeze, still as a statue – like that. His fingers did not resemble mine; running them coolly over my flesh Hoja would ask: ‘Are you afraid?’ I would not move. ‘You’re afraid. What are you afraid of?’ Sometimes I’d feel an impulse to shove him away and fight, but I knew this would increase his rage even more. ‘I’ll tell you why you are afraid. You’re afraid because you are guilty. You’re afraid because you are steeped in sin. You’re frightened because you believe in me more than I believe in you.’

  And it was he who insisted we must sit down at the two ends of the table and write together. Now was the time to write why we were what we were. But again he ended up writing nothing more than why ‘the others’ were the way they were. For the first time he proudly showed me what he wrote. When I thought how he expected me to be humbled by what I read I could not hide my revulsion and told him he was no different from the fools he wrote about and that he would die before me.

  I decided then that this prediction was my most effective weapon, and reminded him of his ten-years’ labour, of the years he’d spent on theories of cosmography, the observations of the heavens he’d made at the expense of his eyesight, of the days he’d never taken his nose out of a book. Now it was I who would not leave him in peace; I said how foolish it would be for him to die in vain while it was possible to avoid the plague and go on living. By saying these things I increased not only his doubts but my punishments. I noticed then he seemed, as he read what I wrote, to grudgingly rediscover the respect for me he’d lost.

  So as to forget my bad fortune in those days I filled page after page with the happy dreams I often had, not only at night, but during my midday naps as well. Trying to forget everything, as soon as I awoke I’d write down those dreams in which action and meaning were one, taking great pains to make my style poetic: I dreamt there were people living in the woods by our house who had solved the mysteries that for years we had wanted to understand, and if you dared to enter the darkness of the woods you became friends with them; our shadows were not extinguished with the setting of the sun, but took on a life of their own, mastering the thousand little things that we should have mastered while we slept peacefully in our clean, cool beds; the beautiful, three-dimensional people in the tableaux I fashioned in my dreams stepped out of their picture-frames and mingled among us; my mother, my father and I set up steel machines in our back garden to do our work for us...

  Hoja was not unaware that these dreams were devilish traps that would drag him into the darkness of a deadly science, but still he continued to question me, realizing that he lost a bit more of his self-confidence with every question: what did these silly dreams mean, did I really see them? Thus I first practised on him what we would do together years later with the sultan; I derived conclusions from our dreams about both of our futures: it was obvious that once infected by a fascination with science, a man could no more escape it than he could the plague; it wasn’t hard
to say that this addiction had taken hold of Hoja, but still I wondered about Hoja’s dreams! He listened, openly mocking me, but since he had swallowed his pride to the extent of asking questions, he could not arouse my resentment much; and I could see that my answers aroused his curiosity. As I saw that the equanimity Hoja affected with the plague’s appearance was being disturbed, my own fear of death did not diminish, but at least I no longer felt alone in my fear. Of course I paid the price of his nightly torments, but now I realized my struggle was not in vain: as he stretched out his hands toward me I told Hoja again that he would die before I did, and reminded him that those who were not afraid were ignorant, that his writings were left half-finished, that my dreams he’d read that day were full of happiness.

  However, it wasn’t what I said that brought matters to a head but something else. One day the father of a student of his at school came to the house. He seemed an innocuous, humble little man, said he lived in our neighbourhood. I listened, curled up in a corner like a sleepy house-cat, while they talked for a long time about this and that. Then our guest blurted out what he’d been dying to say: his cousin on his father’s side had been left a widow last summer when her husband fell from the roof he was retiling. She now had many suitors, but our visitor had thought of Hoja because he’d heard from the neighbours that he was considering proposals of marriage. Hoja reacted more brutally than I’d expected: he said he did not want to marry, but even if he had he wouldn’t take a widow. Upon this our visitor reminded us that the Prophet Muhammad had not minded Hadije’s widowhood and even taken her as his first wife. Hoja said he’d heard of this widow, that she wasn’t worth the saintly Hadije’s little finger. Upon this our peculiar, proud neighbour wanted to make Hoja understand he himself was no prize either and said that although he didn’t believe it, the neighbours were saying that Hoja had completely gone out of his mind, no one took as favourable signs all his stargazing, his playing with lenses and making strange clocks. With the spleen of a merchant criticizing the goods he intends to buy, our visitor added that the neighbours were saying that Hoja ate his food at a table like an infidel instead of sitting down cross-legged; that after paying purse upon purse of money for books, he threw them on the floor and trod on the pages in which the Prophet’s name was written; that, unable to placate the devil within him by gazing at the sky for hours, he lay on his bed in broad daylight gazing at his dirty ceiling, took pleasure not in women but only young boys, I was his twin brother, he didn’t fast during Ramadan and the plague had been sent on his account.