The White Castle Read online

  He began to describe his problem in such a way that I was forced to conclude that it was a rare illness which had stricken only the pasha of all the men on the face of the earth, because his enemies had deceived God with their calumnies. But his complaint was simply shortness of breath. I questioned him at length, listened to his cough, then went down to the kitchen and made mint-flavoured green troches with what I found there. I prepared cough-syrup as well. Because the pasha was afraid of being poisoned, I swallowed one of the troches with a sip of the syrup while he watched. He told me I must leave the mansion secretly, taking great care not to be seen, and return to the prison. The officer later explained that the pasha did not want to arouse the envy of the other doctors. I returned the next day, listened to his cough, and gave him the same medicine. He was as delighted as a child with the colourful troches I left in his palm. As I walked back to my cell, I prayed he would get better. The following day the north wind was blowing. It was a gentle, cool breeze and I thought a man would improve in this weather even against his will, but heard nothing.

  A month later when I was called for, again in the middle of the night, the pasha was up on his feet in good spirits. I was relieved to hear him draw breath easily as he scolded a few people. He was glad to see me, said his illness was cured, that I was a good doctor. What favour did I ask of him? I knew he would not immediately free me and send me home. So I complained of my cell, of the prison; explained I was being worn out pointlessly with heavy labour when I could be more useful if I were occupied with astronomy and medicine. I don’t know how much of it he listened to. The guards took a lion’s share of the purse full of money he gave me.

  A week later an officer came to my cell one night, and after making me swear I wouldn’t try to escape, took off my chains. I was to be taken out to work again, but the slave-drivers now gave me preferential treatment. Three days later the officer brought me new clothes and I realized I was under the pasha’s protection.

  I was still being summoned at night to various mansions. I administered drugs to old pirates with rheumatism, and young soldiers whose stomachs ached. I bled those who itched, lost colour, or had headaches. Once, a week after I gave syrups to a servant’s stuttering son, he recovered and recited a poem for me.

  Winter passed in this way. When spring came I heard that the pasha, who hadn’t asked for me in months, was in the Mediterranean with the fleet. During the hot days of summer people who noticed my despair and frustration told me I had no reason to complain, as I was earning good money as a doctor. A former slave who had converted to Islam many years before advised me not to run away. They always kept a slave who was useful to them, as they were keeping me, never granting him permission to return to his country. If I became a Muslim as he had done, I could make a freedman of myself, but nothing more. Since I thought he might have said this just to sound me out, I told him I had no intention of trying to escape. It wasn’t the desire I lacked but the courage. Those who fled, all of them, were caught before they got very far. After these unfortunates were beaten I was the one who spread salve on their wounds at night in their cells.

  As autumn drew near, the pasha returned with the fleet; he greeted the sultan with cannon fire, tried to cheer the city as he had done the previous year, but it was obvious they’d not passed this season at all well. They brought only a few slaves to the prison. We learned later that the Venetians had burned six ships. Hoping to get news of home, I watched for an opportunity to talk with the slaves, most of whom were Spanish; but they were silent, ignorant, timid things who had no desire to speak unless to beg for help or food. Only one of them interested me: he’d lost an arm, but optimistically said one of his ancestors had lived through the same misadventure and survived to write a romance of chivalry with the arm he had left. He believed he would be spared to do the same. In later years, when I wrote stories to live, I remembered this man who dreamed of living to write stories. Not long after this a contagious disease broke out in the prison, an ill-omened epidemic which killed more than half of the slaves before it passed on, and from which I protected myself by smothering the guards with bribes.

  Those left alive were taken out to work on new projects. I didn’t go. In the evenings they talked of how they went all the way to the tip of the Golden Horn, where they were set to work at various tasks under the supervision of carpenters, costumers, painters: they were making papier mâché models – ships, castles, towers. Later we learned why: the pasha’s son was to marry the daughter of the grand vizier and he was arranging a spectacular wedding.

  One morning I was called to the pasha’s mansion. I went, thinking his shortness of breath had returned. The pasha was engaged, they took me to a room to wait, I sat down. After a few moments another door opened and someone five or six years older than myself came in. I looked up at his face in shock – immediately I was terrified.

  2

  The resemblance between myself and the man who entered the room was incredible! It was me there... for that first instant this was what I thought. It was as if someone wanted to play a trick on me and had brought me in again by a door directly opposite the one I had first come through, saying, look, you really should have been like this, you should have come in the door like this, should have gestured with your hands like this, the other man sitting in the room should have looked at you like this. As our eyes met, we greeted one another. But he did not seem surprised. Then I decided he didn’t resemble me all that much, he had a beard; and I seemed to have forgotten what my own face looked like. As he sat down facing me, I realized that it had been a year since I last looked in a mirror.

  After a few moments the door through which I had entered opened and he was called inside. While I waited, I thought this must be all a fiction of my troubled mind rather than a cleverly planned joke. For in those days I was always fantasizing that I would return home, welcomed by all, that they would immediately set me free, that actually I was still asleep in my cabin on the ship, it had all been a dream – consoling visions of that sort. I was about to conclude that this, too, was one of those day-dreams, but one come to life, or that it was a sign that everything would suddenly change and return to its former state, when the door opened and I was summoned inside.

  The pasha was standing up, a little behind my look-alike. He let me kiss the hem of his skirt, and I intended when he enquired after my welfare to mention my sufferings in my cell, that I wanted to return to my country, but he wasn’t listening. It seemed that the pasha remembered I’d told him I had knowledge of science, astronomy, engineering – well then, did I know anything of those fireworks hurled at the sky, of gunpowder? Immediately I replied that I did, but the instant my eyes met those of the other man I suspected they were leading me into a trap.

  The pasha was saying that the wedding he planned would be unparalleled, and he would have a fireworks display, but it must be quite unlike any other. My look-alike, whom the pasha called only ‘Hoja’, meaning ‘master’, had in the past, at the sultan’s birth, worked on a display with fire-eaters arranged by a Maltese who had since died, so he knew a little about these things, but the pasha thought I would be able to assist him – we would complement one another. The pasha would reward us if we put on a good display. When, thinking the time had come, I dared to say that what I wanted was to return home, the pasha asked me if I’d been to a whorehouse since I arrived, and hearing my answer, said if I had no desire for a woman what good would freedom be to me? He was using the coarse language of the guards and I must have looked bewildered, for he roared with laughter. Then he turned to that spectre he called ‘Hoja’: the responsibility was his. We left.

  In the morning as I walked to my look-alike’s house I imagined there was nothing I would be able to teach him. But apparently his knowledge was no greater than mine. Moreover, we were in accord: the whole problem was to come up with the right camphoric mixture. Our task would thus be to carefully prepare experimental mixtures with scale and measures, fire them off at night in t
he shadows of the high city walls at Surdibi, and derive conclusions from what we observed. Children watched our men in awe while they ignited the rockets we’d prepared, and we stood under the dark trees waiting anxiously for the result, just as we would do years later by daylight while testing that incredible weapon. After these experiments I would try, sometimes by moonlight, sometimes in blind darkness, to record our observations in a small notebook. Before separating for the night, we’d return to Hoja’s house overlooking the Golden Horn and discuss the results at length.

  His house was small, oppressive, and unattractive. The entrance was on a crooked street muddied by a dirty stream flowing from some source I was never able to discover. Inside there was almost no furniture, but every time I entered the house I felt pressed in and overcome by a queer feeling of distress. Perhaps it came from this man who, because he didn’t like being named after his grandfather, wanted me to call him ‘Hoja’: he was watching me, he seemed to want to learn something from me, but wasn’t yet sure what it was. Since I could not get used to sitting on the low divans that lined the walls, I stood up while we discussed our experiments, sometimes pacing nervously up and down the room. I believe Hoja enjoyed this. He could sit and watch me to his heart’s content, if only by the dim light of a lamp.

  As I felt his eyes following me it made me all the more uneasy that he didn’t notice the resemblance between us. Once or twice I thought he saw it but was pretending not to. It was as if he were toying with me; he was performing a small experiment on me, obtaining information I couldn’t comprehend. For in those first days he continually scrutinized me as if he were learning something and the more he learned the more curious he became. But he seemed hesitant to take any further steps to penetrate the meaning of this strange knowledge. It was this inconclusiveness that oppressed me, that made the house so suffocating! True, I gained some confidence from his hesitation, but it did not reassure me. Once, while we were discussing our experiments, and another time when he asked me why I still had not become a Muslim, I felt he was covertly trying to draw me into an argument so I did not respond. He sensed my restraint; I realized he thought less of me for it, and this made me angry. In those days it was perhaps only in this way we understood each other: each of us looked down on the other. I held myself in check, thinking that if we succeeded in putting on the fireworks display without mishap, they would grant me permission to return home.

  One night, elated by the success of a rocket that had climbed to an extraordinary height, Hoja said that someday he would be able to make one that would shoot as high as the moon; the only problem was to find the requisite proportions of gunpowder and cast a chamber that could tolerate the mixture. I remarked that the moon was very far away but he interrupted me, saying he knew that as well as I, but wasn’t it also the planet nearest the Earth? When I admitted he was right, he didn’t relax as I expected, he became even more agitated, but said nothing more.

  Two days later, at midnight, he took up the question again: how could I be so sure that the moon was the closest planet? Perhaps we were letting ourselves be taken in by an optical illusion. It was then I spoke to him for the first time about my studies in astronomy and explained briefly the basic principles of Ptolemaic cosmography. I saw that he listened with interest, but was reluctant to say anything that would reveal his curiosity. A little later, when I stopped talking, he said he too had knowledge of Ptolemy but this did not change his suspicion that there might be a planet nearer than the moon. Towards morning he was talking about that planet as if he had already obtained proofs of its existence.

  The next day he thrust a badly translated manuscript into my hand. In spite of my poor Turkish I was able to decipher it: I believe it was a second-hand summary of Almageist drawn up not from the original but from another summary; only the Arabic names of the planets interested me, and I was in no mood to get excited about them at that time. When Hoja saw I was unimpressed and soon put the book aside, he was angry. He’d paid seven gold pieces for this volume, it was only right that I should set aside my conceit, turn the pages and take a look at it. Like an obedient student, I opened the book again and while patiently turning its pages came across a primitive diagram. It showed the planets in crudely drawn spheres arranged in relation to the Earth. Although the positions of the spheres were correct the illustrator had no idea of the distances between them. Then my eye was caught by a tiny planet between the moon and the Earth; examining it a little more carefully, I could tell from the relative freshness of the ink that it had been added to the manuscript later. I went over the entire manuscript and gave it back to Hoja. He told me he was going to find that planet: he did not seem at all to be joking. I said nothing, and there was a silence that unnerved him as much as it did me. Since we were never able to make another rocket shoot high enough to steer the conversation to astronomy again, the subject was not re-opened. Our little success remained a coincidence whose mystery we could not solve.

  But we had very good results with the violence and brightness of light and flame, and we knew the secret of our success: in one of the herbalist shops Hoja searched out one by one he’d found a powder even the shop-owner did not know the name of; we decided that this yellowish dust, which produced a superb brightness, was a mixture of sulphur and copper sulphate. Later we mixed the powder with every substance we could think of to give brilliance to the effect, but we were unable to obtain anything more than a coffee-coloured brown and a pale green barely distinguishable from one another. According to Hoja, even this was infinitely better than anything Istanbul had ever seen.

  And so was our display on the second night of the celebration, everyone said so, even our rivals who intrigued behind our backs. I was very nervous when we were told that the sultan had come to watch from the far shore of the Golden Horn, terrified something might go wrong and that it would be years before I could return to my country. When they ordered us to begin, I said a prayer. First, to welcome the guests and announce the beginning of the display, we fired off colourless rockets shooting straight up into the sky; immediately after that we set off the hoop display Hoja and I called ‘The Mill’. In an instant the sky turned red, yellow and green, booming with terrifying explosions. It was even more beautiful than we’d hoped; as the rockets soared the hoop gathered speed, whirled and whirled and suddenly, lighting up the surrounding area bright as day, hung suspended, motionless. For a moment I thought I was in Venice again, an eight-year-old watching a fireworks display for the first time and just as unhappy because it was not I who was wearing my new red suit, but my big brother who’d torn his own clothes in a quarrel the previous day. The exploding fireworks were as red as the bright buttoned suit I couldn’t wear that night and swore I never would again, the same red as the matching buttons on the suit which was too tight for my brother.

  Then we set off the display we called ‘The Fountain’; flames poured from the mouth of a scaffold the height of five men; those on the far shore should have had a good view of the streaming flames; they must have been as excited as we were when the rockets began to shoot out of the mouth of ‘The Fountain’, and we did not intend to let their excitement die down: the caiques on the surface of the Golden Horn stirred. First the papier mâché towers and fortresses, shooting rockets from their turrets as they sailed by, caught fire and went up in flames – these were supposed to symbolize victories of former years. When they released the ships representing those from the year I’d been taken captive, other ships attacked our vessel with a rain of rocket fire; thus I relived the day I had become a slave. As the ships burned and sank, shouts of ‘God, oh God!’ arose from both shores. Then, one by one, we released our dragons; flames spurted from their huge nostrils, their gaping mouths and pointed ears. We had them fight one another; as planned, none could defeat the other at first. We reddened the sky even more with rockets fired from shore, and after the sky had darkened a bit, our men on the caiques turned the winches and the dragons began to ascend very slowly into the sky; now ever
yone was screaming in fear and awe; as the dragons attacked one another again with a great uproar, all the rockets on the caiques were fired at once; the wicks we had placed in the bodies of the creatures must have caught fire at just the right moment, for the whole scene, exactly as we desired, was transformed into a burning inferno. I knew we had succeeded when I heard a child screaming and weeping nearby; his father had forgotten the boy and was staring open-mouthed at the terrible sky. At last I will be allowed to return home, I thought. Just then, the creature I called ‘The Devil’ glided into the inferno on a little black caique invisible to the eye; we had tied so many rockets to it that we were afraid all the caiques might blow up, along with our men, but everything went as planned; as the battling dragons disappeared into the sky, spitting flames, ‘The Devil’ and its rockets, all catching fire at once, swooped into the heavens; balls of fire scattering from every part of its body exploded, booming in the air. I exulted at the thought that in one moment we had managed to terrify all Istanbul. I was afraid as well, just because I seemed to have at last found the courage to do the things I wanted in life. At that moment it seemed of no importance what city I was in; I wanted that devil to hang suspended there, showering fire over the crowd all night long. After swaying a little from side to side, it fluttered down upon the Golden Horn without harming anyone, accompanied by ecstatic screams from both shores. It was still spewing fire from its top as it sank into the water.