White Castle (8 page)

It was around this time too that the permit system was instituted. The Aga of the Janissaries distributed permits to those whose work was considered essential for commerce to continue and the city to be fed. When I was beginning to see a pattern in the death-counts for the first time, we learned the Aga was collecting a great deal of money from this, and that the small tradesmen, unwilling to pay, had begun preparations for a rebellion. While Hoja was saying the Grand Vizier Koprulu planned to mount a conspiracy in league with the small tradesmen, I interrupted him to tell him about the pattern and tried to make him believe the plague had slowly withdrawn from the outer neighbourhoods and poor districts.

What I said did not quite convince him, but he left the work of preparing the calendar to me. He said he’d written a story to distract the sultan which was so meaningless that no one would be able to conclude anything from it. A few days later he asked if it were possible to make up a story that had no moral or meaning other than the pleasure of reading or listening to it. ‘Like music?’ I suggested, and Hoja looked surprised. We discussed how the ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation. The night before he went to the palace we sat up chattering happily, working in haste. In the next room our left-handed calligrapher friend was writing out a clean copy of the beginning of the story Hoja had still not managed to finish. Towards morning, working with the limited figures I had in hand, I had concluded from the equations I’d struggled for days to produce that the plague would take its last victims in the markets and leave the city in twenty days. Hoja didn’t ask me what I based this conclusion on, and remarking only that the day of salvation was too far off he told me to revise the calendar for a two-week period and conceal the duration with other figures. I doubted this would succeed, but I did what he said. Hoja then and there composed verse chronograms for some of the dates and thrust them into the hand of the calligrapher who was just about to finish his work; he told me to draw pictures illustrating some of the verses. Towards noon, irritable, depressed, and frightened, he hurriedly bound the treatise with a blue marbled cover and left with it. He said he had less faith in the calendar than in those pelicans, winged bulls, red ants and talking monkeys he’d crammed into his story.

When he returned in the evening he was exhilarated, and this exuberance dominated the three weeks during which he completely convinced the sultan of the soundness of his prediction: at the beginning he’d said, ‘Anything can happen’, the first day he was not at all hopeful; a few in the crowd gathered around the sultan had even laughed while listening to his story recited by a youth with a beautiful voice. Of course they did this on purpose to belittle Hoja, to put him out of favour with the sultan, but the sovereign demanded silence and reprimanded them; he asked Hoja only on what signs he had based his conclusion that the plague would end in two weeks. Hoja replied that everything was contained in the story, which no one had been able to understand. Then, in order to please the sultan, he’d made a show of affection for the cats of every colour brought by ship from Trabzon which were now swarming over the inner courtyards and into every room of the palace.

He said that by the time he had arrived on the second day the palace was divided into two camps; one group, which included the Imperial Astrologer Sitki Efendi, wanted to lift all the precautions imposed on the city; the others taking Hoja’s part said, ‘Let the city not even breathe, let it not inhale the plague devil roving within.’ I was hopeful as I watched the death-counts fall day by day, but Hoja was still anxious, it was whispered that the first group, reaching an understanding with Koprulu, had begun preparations for a revolt; their goal was not to conquer the plague but to be free of their rivals.

At the end of the first week there was a visible reduction in the number of deaths, but my calculations showed that the epidemic would not disappear in just one more week. I grumbled at Hoja for changing my calendar, but now he was hopeful; he told me excitedly that the whisperings about the grand vizier had ceased. On top of this Hoja’s party had spread the news that Koprulu was collaborating with them. As for the sultan, he was thoroughly frightened by all these machinations and sought peace of mind with his cats.

As the second week came to an end the city was suffocating more from the precautions than from the plague; with each passing day fewer people died, but only we and those who like us followed the death-counts realized this. Rumours of famine had broken out, mighty Istanbul was like an abandoned city; Hoja told me about it, for I never left the neighbourhood: a man could feel the desperation of people being strangled by plague behind all those closed windows and courtyard gates, waiting for some reprieve from plague and death. The palace too was in a state of suspense, every time a cup fell on the floor or someone coughed loudly, that crowd of wiseacres burst their bladders in anticipation, whispering all at once ‘Let us see what decision the sultan will make today’, hysterical like all helpless souls who yearn for something to happen, whatever it might be. Hoja was swept away by this agitation; he’d tried to explain to the sultan that the plague had gradually withdrawn, that his predictions had proved correct, but he hadn’t been able to make much of an impression on him, and in the end was forced again to talk about animals.

Two days later he’d been able to conclude from a count made at the mosques that the epidemic had thoroughly receded, but Hoja’s happiness that Friday was due more to the fact that a group among the despairing tradesmen had clashed with the janissaries guarding the roads, and that another group of janissaries discontented with the preventive measures had joined forces with a couple of idiot imams preaching in the mosques, some vagrants eager for loot and other idlers who said the plague was God’s will and no one should interfere with it. But this turmoil was suppressed before it got out of hand. When a judgement was obtained from the sheikh of Islam, twenty men were executed immediately, perhaps to make these events seem more momentous than they were. Hoja was delighted.

The following evening he announced his victory. No longer could anyone in the palace complain that the preventive measures should be lifted; when the Aga of the Janissaries was summoned, he’d made mention of the rebel partisans in the palace; the sultan had been angered; that group whose enmities had for a while made life hard for Hoja, scattered like a covey of partridges. For a time it was whispered that Koprulu would take harsh measures against the rebels with whom it was believed he had collaborated. Hoja announced with evident pleasure that he’d influenced the sultan in this regard as well. Those who put down the revolt had been trying to convince the sultan that the plague had subsided. And what they said was true. The sovereign praised Hoja as he’d never done before; he took him to see the monkeys he’d had brought from Africa in a cage made specially to his order. While they watched the monkeys, whose filth and impertinence disgusted Hoja, the sovereign asked whether they could learn to speak like parrots could. Turning towards his retinue the sultan had declared that in future he wanted to see Hoja at his side more often, the calendar he’d devised had proved correct.

One Friday a month later Hoja was appointed Imperial Astrologer; he became even more than that: as the sultan went to the Hagia Sophia Mosque for the Friday prayers in which the entire city participated to celebrate the end of the plague, Hoja followed directly behind him; the precautions had been lifted, and I too was among the cheering crowds giving thanks to God and the sultan. While the sovereign passed before us on horseback, the populace screamed with all their might; they became ecstatic, there was pushing and shoving, the crowd rose up in a wave and the janissaries pushed us back, for a moment I was squeezed against a tree by the people who surged over me, and when, elbowing the crowd, I threw myself to the front, I came face to face with Hoja, walking four or five steps away from me looking pleased and happy. He glanced away as if he didn’t know me. In that incredible uproar, suddenly, stupidly swept up in the general enthusiasm, I believed Hoja had not seen me at that moment, that if I shouted out to him with all my strength he would be made aware of my existence and rescue me from the crowd, and I would join that happy parade of those who held the reins of victory and power! It wasn’t that I wished to seize a share in the triumph or to receive a reward for what I had done; the feeling I had was quite different: I should be by his side, I was Hoja’s very self! I had become separated from my real self and was seeing myself from the outside, just as in the nightmares I often had. I didn’t even want to learn the identity of this other person I was inside of; I only wanted, while I fearfully watched my self pass by without recognizing me, to rejoin him as soon as I could. But a brute of a soldier pushed me back with all his strength into the crowd.

8

In the weeks after the plague subsided Hoja was not only raised to the position of imperial astrologer, but also developed a more intimate relationship with the sultan than we had ever hoped for: the grand vizier, after the failure of that minor uprising, persuaded the sovereign’s mother that her son should now be rescued from those buffoons he kept around him; for both the tradesmen and the janissaries held that crowd of wiseacres, who misled the sultan with their idle nonsense, responsible for the troubles. So when the faction of the former Imperial Astrologer Sitki Efendi, who was said to have had a hand in the plot, was driven from the palace into exile or a change of position, their duties were left to Hoja as well.

By now he was going every day to one of the palaces where the sultan was in residence, conversing with him during hours the sultan regularly set aside for their talks. When Hoja returned home he’d tell me, elated and triumphant, how every morning the sultan would first of all have him interpret his dream of the night before. Of all the functions Hoja had assumed he perhaps loved this one most: when the sultan admitted sadly one morning that he’d had no dream the night before, Hoja proposed he interpret someone else’s dream, and when the sovereign enthusiastically accepted this, the imperial guards rushed to find someone who’d had a good dream and brought him into the sovereign’s presence, and thus it became an abiding custom that a dream be interpreted every morning. The rest of the time, as they strolled through the gardens shaded by flowering erguvan and great plane-trees, or sailed the Bosphorus in caiques, they would talk of the sultan’s beloved animals and, of course, the creatures we had imagined. But he was broaching other subjects with the sultan as well, which he exuberantly recounted to me: what was the cause of the Bosphorus currents? What valuable knowledge could be learned from observing the methodical habits of ants? From whence did the magnet derive its power, other than from God? What significance was there in the hither and thither of the stars? Could anything be found in the customs of infidels but infidelity, anything that was worth knowing? Could one invent a weapon that would scatter their armies in fear and dread? After telling me how attentively the sultan had listened to him, Hoja would dash to the table and draw designs on expensive, heavy paper for the weapon: long-barrelled cannon, firing mechanisms that detonated by themselves, engines of war, apparitions making one think of satanic beasts, calling me to the table to bear witness to the violence of these images he said would very soon be realized.

Yet I wanted to share in these dreams with Hoja. Perhaps this was why my mind still lingered on the plague that had made us experience those dreadful days of brotherhood. All Istanbul had prayed at Hagia Sophia in thanks for deliverance from the plague-devil, but the disease had still not completely withdrawn from the city. In the mornings, while Hoja hurried to the sultan’s palace, I wandered the city anxiously, keeping count of the funerals still taking place in the neighbourhood mosques with their squat minarets, the poor little mosques with red-tiled roofs overgrown with moss, hoping out of motives I could not understand, that the disease would not leave the city and us.

While Hoja talked of how he had influenced the sultan, of his victory, I would explain to him that the epidemic was still not over and that since the preventive restrictions had been lifted it could flare up anew any day. He would silence me angrily, claiming I was jealous of his triumph. I saw his point: he was now imperial astrologer, the sultan told him his dreams every morning, he could make the sultan listen to him in private without that whole crowd of fools around, these were things we’d waited fifteen years for, it was a victory; but why did he speak as if the victory were his alone? He seemed to have forgotten that it was I who had proposed the measures against the plague, I who had prepared the calendar that didn’t quite prove accurate but had been received as if it were; what I resented even more was that he remembered only that I’d fled to the island, not the circumstances under which he’d hurriedly brought me back.

Perhaps he was right, perhaps what I felt could be called jealousy, but what he didn’t realize was that this was a fraternal feeling. I wanted him to understand this, but when I made him recall how in the days before the plague we used to sit at the two ends of a table like two bachelors trying to forget the boredom of lonely nights, when I reminded him of how sometimes he or I had been afraid but we had learned so much from these fears, and confessed that I had missed those nights even while I was alone on the island, he listened contemptuously to everything I said as if he were merely a witness to my hypocrisy surfacing in a game he himself took no part in, he gave me no hope, he said nothing to hint that we would return to those days when we lived together as brothers.

As I wandered from district to district I could now see that, despite the lifting of restrictions, the plague, as if it didn’t want to cast a shadow over this thing Hoja called ‘victory’, was slowly receding from the city. Sometimes I wondered why it made me lonely to think the dark fear of death was withdrawing from our midst and going away. Sometimes I wanted us to talk, not about the sultan’s dreams or the projects Hoja described to him, but about our earlier days together: I’d long been ready to stand together with him, even with the fear of death, and face the dreadful mirror he’d taken down from the wall. But for a long time now Hoja had been treating me with contempt, or pretending to; what’s worse, at times I believed he could not be bothered to do even that.

Now and then, trying to draw him back to our former happy life, I’d say the time had come for us to sit down at the table again. So as to set an example, I tried once or twice to write; when I read him the pages I’d filled with exaggerated accounts of the terror of plague, of that desire to do evil born of fear, of my sins left half-told, he didn’t even listen to me. He said mockingly, with a force he perhaps derived more from my helplessness than from his own triumph, that he’d realized even then that our writings were nothing but nonsense, at the time he’d played those games out of boredom, just to see where they would end, and because he’d wanted to test me: in any case he’d known what kind of man I was the day I ran away believing he’d been infected by the plague. I was an evil-doer! There were two types of men; the righteous like him and the guilty like me.

I made no reply to these words of his, which I tried to attribute to the intoxication of victory. My mind was as sharp as ever, and when I caught myself becoming angry at trivialities I knew I had not lost my ability to feel rage, but I seemed not to know how to respond to his provocations, nor how to lead him on, how to catch him in a trap. During the days I spent in flight from him on Heybeli Island I realized that I had lost sight of my goal. What difference would it make if I returned to Venice? After fifteen years my mind had long accepted that my mother had died, my fiancée was lost to me, married, with a family; I didn’t want to think of them, they appeared less and less in my dreams; moreover I no longer saw myself among them in Venice as in my first years, but dreamt of their living in Istanbul, in our midst. I knew that if I should return to Venice I would not be able to pick up my life where I’d left it. At most I might be able to begin anew with another life. I no longer felt any enthusiasm for the details of that previous life, unless for the sake of one or two books I’d once planned to write about the Turks and my years of slavery.

Sometimes I thought Hoja treated me with contempt because he sensed I had no country and no purpose, because he knew I was weak, and sometimes I doubted he understood even this much. Each day he was so intoxicated by the stories he’d told the sultan, by the image and the triumph of that incredible weapon he dreamed about and said would definitely win over the sultan, that perhaps he did not even realize what I was thinking. I’d catch myself observing this totally self-absorbed contentment of Hoja’s with envy. I loved him, I loved that false exhilaration he got from his exaggerated sense of victory, his never-ending plans, and the way he said he’d soon have the sultan in the palm of his hand. I couldn’t have admitted, even to myself, that I had thoughts like these, but while I followed his movements, his daily actions, I was sometimes overcome by the feeling that I was watching myself. Looking at a child, a youth, a man will sometimes see his own childhood and youth and observe him with love and curiosity: the fear and curiosity I felt was of that kind; it often came back to me how he had grasped the nape of my neck and said, ‘I have become you’, but when I reminded him of those days, Hoja would cut me short and talk about what he had said that day to the sultan to make him believe in the unbelievable weapon, or describe in detail how that morning he had seduced the sovereign’s mind while interpreting his dream.

I, too, wanted to be able to believe in the brilliance of these successes he made sound so sweet as he recounted them. Sometimes it happened that, carried away by my boundless fantasies, I gladly put myself in his place and did believe in them. Then I would love him and myself, us, and with my mouth hanging open like a simpleton listening to an engrossing fairy-tale, lost in what he was saying, I’d believe that he spoke of those wonderful days to come as a goal we would pursue together.

This was how I came to join him in interpreting the sultan’s dreams. Hoja had decided to provoke the twenty-one-year-old sovereign to assert greater control over the government. Thus he explained to him that the lone horses the sultan often saw galloping wildly in his dreams were sad because they were riderless; and that the wolves who sank their merciless teeth into their quarries’ throats were happy because they were self-sufficient; that the weeping old women and beautiful blind girls and the trees whose leaves were stripped off in black rains were calling out to him for help; that the sacred spiders and the proud falcons symbolized the virtues of independence. We wanted the sultan to be interested in our science after he took control of the government; we even exploited his nightmares towards this end. During the long, exhausting nights on hunting excursions the sultan, like most who love the hunt, would dream that he himself was the prey, or, in his fear of losing the throne, that he saw himself sitting on the throne as a child, and Hoja would explain that on the throne he would remain forever young, but only by making weapons superior to those of our ever-vigilant enemies could he be safe from their treachery. The sultan dreamt that his grandfather Sultan Murat had proved his strength by striking a donkey in two with a single blow of his sword so swiftly that its two halves galloped away from one another; that the shrew called Kosem Sultana, his grandmother, rose from the grave to strangle him and his mother, and leapt upon him stark naked; that instead of the plane-trees in the hippodrome, there grew fig-trees from which bloody corpses dangled instead of fruit; that evil men whose faces resembled his own were chasing him in order to thrust him into the sacks they carried and smother him; or that an army of turtles with candles on their backs whose flames were somehow not blown out by the wind, entered the sea from Uskudar and was marching straight for the palace, and we tried to interpret these dreams, which I patiently and cheerfully wrote down in a book and classified, to the advantage of science and the incredible weapon which must be built, thinking how wrong were the courtiers who whispered that the sultan neglected the affairs of government and had nothing in his head but hunting and animals.

According to Hoja we were gradually influencing him, but I no longer believed we would succeed. Hoja would obtain his promise regarding a new weapon or the establishment of an observatory or a house of sciences, and after nights of enthusiastically dreaming up projects, months would pass without his speaking again seriously even once about these subjects with the sultan. A year after the plague, when Grand Vizier Koprulu died, Hoja found another pretext for optimism: the sultan had hesitated to put his plans into practice because he’d feared Koprulu’s power and personality, and now that the grand vizier had died and his son, less powerful than the father, had taken his place, it was time to expect courageous decisions from the sultan.

But we spent the next three years waiting for them. What bewildered me now was not the inactivity of the sultan, who was dazzled by his dreams and his hunting excursions, but that Hoja could still fix his hopes on him. All these years I’d been waiting for the day when he would lose hope and become like me! Although he no longer talked as much as he used to about ‘victory’, and didn’t feel that exhilaration he had during the months following the plague, he was still able to keep alive his dream of a day when he would be able to manipulate the sultan with what he called his ‘grand plan’. He could always find an excuse: right after that great fire that reduced Istanbul to rubble, the sultan’s lavish investments in grand plans gave his enemies their opportunity of conspiring to put his brother on the throne; the sultan’s hands were tied for the time being because the army had left on an expedition to the land of the Huns; the following year we expected them to begin an offensive against the Germans; then there was still the completion of the New Valide Mosque on the shores of the Golden Horn where Hoja often went with the sovereign and his mother Turhan Sultana, and for which great sums were being spent; there were also those endless hunting excursions in which I didn’t take part. While I waited at home for Hoja to return from the hunt, I’d try to follow his instructions and come up with bright ideas for that ‘grand plan’ or ‘science’, dozing lazily as I turned the pages of his books.

It no longer amused me even to daydream about these projects; I cared little about the results they would yield should they ever be realized. Hoja knew as well as I did that there was nothing of substance in our thoughts about astronomy, geography, or even natural science during the years we first knew each other; the clocks, instruments, and models had been forgotten in a corner and long since gone to rust. We had postponed everything till the day when we would practise this obscure business he called ‘science’; we had in hand not a grand plan that would save us from ruin, but only the dream of such a plan. In order to believe in this drab illusion, which didn’t deceive me at all, and to feel a sense of camaraderie with Hoja, I tried sometimes to look with his eyes at the pages I turned, or put myself in his place as thoughts occurred to me at random. When he’d return from the hunt, I’d act as if I had discovered a new truth about whatever subject he’d left me to wear out my mind on, and that we could change everything in its light: when I said: ‘The cause of the rising and falling of the sea is related to the heat of the rivers emptying into it’, or, ‘The plague is spread by tiny dust-motes in the air, and when the weather changes, it goes away’, or, ‘The Earth revolves around the sun, and the sun around the moon’, Hoja, changing out of his dusty hunting costume, always gave me the same answer, making me smile with love: ‘And the idiots here don’t even realize this!’