White Castle (4 page)

Taken by surprise, Hoja did something he later described to me as a ‘blunder’. He told the sultan he had knowledge of astronomy but was not an astrologer. ‘But you know more than Imperial Astrologer Huseyn Efendi!’ the child had said. Hoja didn’t answer, fearing someone nearby might hear and pass it on to Huseyn Efendi. The impatient sovereign had insisted: or did Hoja know nothing, did he observe the stars in vain after all?

In response Hoja was forced to explain at once things that he’d intended to say only much later: he replied he had learned many things from the stars and arrived at very useful conclusions based on what he’d learned. Interpreting favourably the silence of the sovereign, who was listening with widening eyes, he said it was necessary to build an observatory to watch the stars; like that observatory his grandfather Ahmet the First’s grandfather, Murat the Third, had built for the late Takiyuddin Efendi ninety years ago, and which later fell into ruin from neglect. Or rather, something more advanced than that: a House of Science where scholars could observe not only the stars, but the whole world, its rivers and oceans, clouds and mountains, flowers and trees and, of course, its animals, and then come together to discuss their observations at leisure and make progress in the advance of the intellect.

The sultan had listened to Hoja talk of this project which I, too, was hearing about for the first time, as if listening to an agreeable fable. As they returned to the palace in their carriages he’d asked once again, ‘How will the lion give birth, what do you say?’ Hoja had thought it over and this time answered, ‘An equal number of male and female cubs will be born.’ At home he told me there was no danger in having said this. ‘I will have that fool of a child in the palm of my hand,’ he said. ‘I am more adept than the Imperial Astrologer Huseyn Efendi!’ It shocked me to hear him use this word in speaking of the sovereign; for some reason I even took offence. In those days I was keeping myself occupied with housework out of boredom.

Later he began to use that word as if it were a magical key that would unlock every door: because they were ‘fools’ they didn’t look at the stars moving over their heads and reflect on them, because they were ‘fools’ they asked first what was the good of the thing they were about to learn, because they were ‘fools’ they were interested not in details but in summaries, because they were ‘fools’ they were all alike, and so on. Although I too had liked to criticize people this way, not many years before, when I still lived in my own country, I’d say nothing to Hoja. At the time, in any case, he was preoccupied with his fools, not with me. Apparently my folly was of another kind. In my indiscretion those days I had told him of a dream I’d had: he had gone to my country in my place, was marrying my fiancée, at the wedding no one realized that he was not me, and during the festivities which I watched from a corner dressed as a Turk, I met up with my mother and fiancée who both turned their backs on me without recognizing who I was, despite the tears which finally wakened me from the dream.

Around that time he went twice to the pasha’s mansion. I believe the pasha was not pleased to find Hoja developing a relationship with the sovereign away from his watchful eye; he’d interrogated him; he’d asked after me, he’d been investigating me, but only much later, after the pasha had been banished from Istanbul, did Hoja tell me this; he feared I might have passed my days in terror of being poisoned if I had known. Still, I could tell that the pasha was more intrigued by me than he was by Hoja; it flattered my pride that the resemblance between Hoja and myself disturbed the pasha more than it did me. In those days it was as if this resemblance were a secret Hoja would never wish to know and whose existence lent me a strange courage: sometimes I thought that by grace of this resemblance alone I would be safe as long as Hoja lived. Perhaps that is why I contradicted Hoja when he’d say the pasha, too, was one of those fools; he became irritated at that. He spurred me to a brazenness I was not accustomed to, I wanted to feel both his need for me and his shame before me: I relentlessly questioned him about the pasha, about what he said regarding the two of us, strangling Hoja in a rage the cause of which I believe was not clear even to him. Then he’d stubbornly repeat that they would get rid of the pasha too, soon the janissaries would be up to something, he sensed the presence of conspiracies within the palace. For this reason, if he were going to work on a weapon as the pasha suggested, he should build it not for some vizier who would come and go, but for the sultan.

For a while I thought he was occupied exclusively with this obscure notion of a weapon; planning but not getting anywhere, I said to myself. For had he made progress, I was sure he’d have shared it with me, even if trying to belittle me while doing so, he would have told me about his designs in order to learn my opinion. One evening we were returning home after going to that house in Aksaray where we listened to music and lay with prostitutes, as we did every two or three weeks. Hoja said he was planning to work till morning, then asked me about women – we had never talked about women – and said suddenly, ‘I’m thinking...’ but the moment we entered the house he shut himself up in his room without revealing what was on his mind. I was left alone with the books I now had no desire even to browse through, and thought of him: of whatever plan or idea he had that I was convinced he could not develop, of him shut up in the room sitting at the table to which he was still not completely accustomed, staring at the empty pages before him, sitting fruitlessly at the table for hours in shame and rage...

He emerged from his room well after midnight and like an embarrassed student needing help with some minor question that defeated him, sheepishly called me inside to the table. ‘Help me,’ he said abruptly. ‘Let’s think about them together, I can’t make any progress on my own.’ I was silent for a moment, thinking this had something to do with women. When he saw me look blank he said seriously, ‘I’m thinking about the fools. Why are they so stupid?’ Then, as if he knew what my answer would be, he added, ‘Very well, they aren’t stupid, but there is something missing inside their heads.’ I didn’t ask who ‘they’ were. ‘Don’t they have any corner inside their heads for storing knowledge?’ he said, and looked around as if searching for the right word. ‘They should have a compartment inside their heads, some compartment like the drawers of this cabinet, a spot where they can put various things, but it’s as if there were no such place. Do you understand?’ I wanted to believe I had understood a thing or two, but couldn’t quite succeed in this. For a long time we sat facing one another in silence. ‘Who can know why a man is the way he is anyway?’ he said at last. ‘Ah, if only you’d been a real physician and taught me,’ he went on, ‘about our bodies, the insides of our bodies and our heads.’ He seemed a bit embarrassed. With an air of good humour which I thought he feigned because he didn’t want to frighten me, he announced that he was not going to give up, he would go on to the end, both because he was curious about what would happen and because there was nothing else to do. I understood nothing, but it pleased me to think he’d learned all of this from me.

Later he often repeated what he’d said, as if we both knew what it meant. But despite the conviction he affected, he had the air of a daydreaming student posing questions; every time he said he would go on till the end I’d feel I was witnessing the mournful, angry complaints of a hapless lover asking why all this had befallen him. In those days he said this very often; he said it when he learned the janissaries were plotting a rebellion, said it after he told me the students in the primary school were more interested in angels than in stars, and after another manuscript he paid a considerable sum for was thrown aside in a rage before he’d read it even halfway through, after parting from his friends in the mosque clock-room with whom he now got together merely out of habit, after freezing in the badly heated baths, after stretching out on his bed with his beloved books strewn over the flowered quilt, after listening to the idiotic chatter of the men making their ablutions in the mosque courtyard, after learning that the fleet had been beaten by the Venetians, after listening patiently to the neighbours who came to call saying he was getting old and should marry, he repeated it again: he would go on till the end.

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.