White Castle (9 page)

Then he’d explode in a fit of rage which dragged me along in its fury, rave for hours about how the sovereign had chased after a stunned boar, or what nonsense it was for him to shed tears over a rabbit he’d had the greyhounds catch, admit against his will that what he’d said to the sultan during the hunt went in one ear and out the other, and ask rancorously over and over again when these idiots were going to realize the truth. Was it mere coincidence that so many fools were collected together in one place or was it inevitable? Why were they so stupid?

Thus he gradually came to feel he must begin anew with the thing he called ‘science’, this time in order to understand the nature of their minds. Since it reminded me of those days I loved when we had sat at the same table and, despising each other, been so alike, I was as enthusiastic as Hoja to start again on our ‘science’, but after some initial attempts we understood that things were not as they had been.

First of all, since I didn’t know how to lead him on or why I should, I just couldn’t pressure him. More important, I felt as if his sufferings and defeats were my own. On one occasion I reminded him of the folly of the people here, giving exaggerated examples, and made him feel he was as doomed to failure as they were – although I didn’t believe this – and then observed his reaction. Although he disagreed with me violently, saying failure was not an inevitability if we acted first and devoted ourselves to this task – if, for example, we could realize the project of that weapon, we could still turn the tide of this river of history that was pushing us backwards – and although he made me happy by speaking not of his plans but of ‘our’ plans, as he did when he despaired, nevertheless he dreaded the approach of an inescapable defeat. I thought of him as an orphaned child, I loved his rage and sadness that reminded me of my first years of slavery; and I wanted to be like him. While he paced up and down the room looking out at the filthy, muddy streets under a dark rain or the washed-out, trembling lamps still burning from a couple of houses on the shores of the Golden Horn, as if he were searching there for some indication of a new sign he could pin his hopes on, it seemed for a moment that what paced, agonized, inside this room was not Hoja, but my own youth. The person I once had been had left me and was gone, and the I that was now dozing in a corner jealously desired him, as if in him I could recover the enthusiasm I had lost.

But I had also finally grown weary of this enthusiasm that never tired of regenerating itself. After Hoja became imperial astrologer his property at Gebze had increased and our income had grown. There was no need for him to do anything more than chat with the sultan now and then. Once in a while we’d go to Gebze, tour the dilapidated mills and villages where wild sheepdogs were the first to greet us, check on the income, rummage through the accounts and try to figure out how much the overseer had cheated us. We’d write entertaining treatises for the sovereign, sometimes laughing but most of the time groaning with boredom, and that was all we did. If I hadn’t insisted, he probably would not have arranged for those interludes when we’d lie with luxuriously perfumed prostitutes after idling away our days.

What unnerved him more was that the sovereign, encouraged by the absence of the army and the pashas who abandoned the city for the German campaign or the Cretan fortress, and because his mother couldn’t force him to listen to her, had gathered around him again all those chattering wiseacres, buffoons, and impersonators who’d been driven from the palace. So as to set himself apart from these fakes whom he viewed with hatred and disgust and make them accept his superiority, Hoja was determined not to mingle with them, but when the sovereign insisted then he had no recourse but to talk with them and listen to their debates. After these gatherings discussing such questions as whether or not animals had souls, if so which ones, and which would go to heaven and which to hell, whether mussels were male or female, whether the sun that rises each morning is a new sun or simply the same sun that sets in the morning on the other side, he’d emerge despairing of the future, saying that if we did not take action the sultan would soon be beyond his grasp.

Because he talked about ‘our’ plans, ‘our’ future, I happily went along with him. Once, to try to grasp what was on the sultan’s mind, we went through the notebooks I’d kept for years, our dreams, our memories. As if we were enumerating the contents of the drawers of a chest, we tried to tally the contents of the sovereign’s mind; the result was not at all encouraging: although Hoja was still able to chatter enthusiastically about the incredible weapon that would be our salvation, or about the mysteries to be solved still hidden in the recesses of our minds, now he could no longer behave as if he didn’t anticipate some catastrophic defeat drawing near. For months we wore ourselves out discussing this subject.

Did we understand ‘defeat’ to mean that the empire would lose all of its territories one by one? We’d lay out our maps on the table and mournfully determine first which territories, then which mountains or rivers would be lost. Or did defeat mean that people would change and alter their beliefs without noticing it? We imagined how everyone in Istanbul might rise from their warm beds one morning as changed people; they wouldn’t know how to wear their clothes, wouldn’t be able to remember what minarets were for. Or perhaps defeat meant to accept the superiority of others and try to emulate them: then he would recount some episode from my life in Venice, and we would imagine how acquaintances of ours here would act out my experiences dressed up with foreign hats on their heads and pants on their legs.

As a last resort we decided to present the sultan with these dreams that made us forget how we passed the time as we invented them. We thought that perhaps all these visions of defeat, brought to life in the vivid shades of our fantasies, might spur him to action. So, during the silent, dark nights, we filled a book with all the visions that flowed from the fantasies of defeat and failure we had dreamed up with a sad, despairing joy: those paupers with heads bowed, muddy roads, buildings left half-finished, dark, strange streets, people pleading that everything might be as it once was while they recited prayers they didn’t understand, grieving mothers and fathers, unhappy men whose lives were too short for them to pass on to us what had been accomplished and recorded in other lands, machines left idle, souls whose eyes were moist from lamenting for the good old days, stray dogs reduced to skin and bones, villagers without any land, vagabonds wandering wildly through the city, illiterate Muslims wearing pants and all the wars ending in defeat. We put my faded memories in another part of the book: a few scenes from the happy and instructive experiences of my schooldays in Venice with my mother, father, and brothers and sisters: those who would conquer us live like this, and we must take action before they do and emulate them! In the conclusion our left-handed calligrapher copied out there was a well-measured verse which, using the metaphor of the cluttered cupboard Hoja loved so well, could be considered a door opening into the black puzzle of our minds’ intricate mysteries. The finely woven mist of this poetry, majestic and silent in its own way, caught the sad essence of all the books and treatises I had written with Hoja.

Only a month after Hoja had submitted this book, the sultan ordered us to start work on that incredible weapon. We were bewildered by his command, and could never decide how far our success was due to this book.

9

When the sultan said, ‘Let us see this incredible weapon that will ruin our enemies’, perhaps he was testing Hoja, perhaps he’d had a dream he’d kept from Hoja, perhaps he wanted to show his domineering mother and the pashas who harassed him that the ‘philosophers’ he kept around were good for something, perhaps he thought Hoja might work another miracle after the plague, perhaps he’d truly been affected by those images of defeat we’d filled our book with, or perhaps it was the few actual military failures he’d suffered rather than our images of defeat which had alarmed him with the thought that, as he’d feared, those who wanted to put his brother in his place would drive him from the throne. We considered all these possibilities as we calculated in a daze the tremendous income that would come from the villages, caravansarays, and olive-groves the sovereign had granted us to finance the weapon.

Hoja decided that we should be surprised only by our own surprise: were they false, all those stories he’d told the sultan year after year, the treatises and books we’d written, that we should now have doubts when he believed them? And there was more: the sovereign had begun to be curious about what went on in the darkness of our minds. Hoja excitedly asked me if this wasn’t the victory we’d waited for so long.

It was, and this time we had begun work as partners; since I was less anxious than he was about the result, I too was happy. During the next six years, while he worked to develop the weapon, we were in constant danger. Not because we worked with gunpowder, but because we drew upon ourselves the envy of our enemies; because everyone waited impatiently for us to triumph or fail; and we were in danger because we, too, waited in fear for the same things.

First we wasted a winter just working at the table. We were excited, enthusiastic, but had nothing more to hand than the idea of the weapon and the obscure and formless notions that haunted us when we imagined how it would crush our enemies. Later we decided to go out in the open air and experiment with gunpowder. Just as in the weeks of preparing the fireworks display, our men mixed the compounds in proportions we prescribed, then touched them off from a safe distance while we withdrew into the cool shadows under the tall trees. Curiosity-seekers came from the four corners of Istanbul to watch the colourful smoke exploding with various levels of noise. With time the crowds made a fairground of the field where we set up our tents, our targets and the short and long-barrelled cannon we had cast. One day at the end of summer, the sultan himself appeared without warning.

We put on a display for him, rocking earth and sky with sound; one by one we displayed the cartridge cases and shells we’d had prepared with well-primed gunpowder mixtures, the plans for the moulds of new guns and long-barrelled cannon not yet cast, the timed firing mechanisms that seemed to detonate by themselves. He showed more interest in me than he did in them. Hoja had wanted to keep me away from the sultan at first but when the display began and the sovereign saw that I gave the orders as often as Hoja, that our men looked to me as much as to him, he became curious.

As I was ushered into his presence for the second time after fifteen years, the sultan looked at me as if I were someone he’d met before but could not immediately place. He was like someone trying to identify a fruit he was tasting with his eyes shut. I kissed the hem of his skirt. He was not disturbed when he learned that I’d been here for twenty years but still had not become a Muslim. He had something else on his mind: ‘Twenty years?’ he said, ‘How strange!’ Then he suddenly asked me that question: ‘Is it you who are teaching him all this?’ He apparently hadn’t asked this in order to learn my answer, for he left our tattered tent which smelled of gunpowder and saltpetre, and was walking towards his beautiful white horse when suddenly he stopped, turned towards the two of us just then standing side by side, and smiled all at once as if he’d seen one of those matchless wonders God created to break the pride of mankind, to make them sense their absurdity – a perfect dwarf or twin brothers alike as peas in a pod.

That night I was thinking about the sultan, but not in the way Hoja wanted me to. He continued to speak of him with disgust, but I had realized I would not be able to feel hatred or contempt: I was charmed by his informality, his sweetness, that air of a spoiled child who said whatever came to his mind. I wanted to be like him or to be his friend. After Hoja’s angry outburst I lay in my bed trying to sleep, reflecting that the sultan did not seem to be someone who deserved to be duped; I wanted to tell him everything. But what exactly was everything?

My interest didn’t go unreciprocated. One day when Hoja grudgingly said that the sovereign expected me too that morning, I went with him. It was one of those autumn days that smell of the sea. We spent the whole morning by a lily-pond under the plane-trees in a great forest covered with fallen red leaves. The sultan wanted to talk about the wriggling frogs that filled the pond. Hoja wouldn’t indulge him, and only repeated a few clichés devoid of imagery and colour. The sultan didn’t even notice the rudeness that shocked me so much. He was more interested in me.

So I spoke at length about the mechanics of how frogs jumped, about their circulatory systems, how their hearts continued to beat for a long time if carefully removed from their bodies, about the flies and insects they ate. I asked for pen and paper to demonstrate more clearly the stages an egg underwent to become a mature frog in the pond. The sovereign watched attentively while I drew pictures with the set of reed pens brought in a silver case inlaid with rubies. He listened with obvious pleasure to the stories I remembered about frogs and when I came to the part about the princess kissing the frog he gagged and made a sour face, but still did not resemble the foolish adolescent Hoja had described; he was more like a serious-minded adult who insisted on starting each day with science and art. At the end of those serene hours that Hoja frowned his way through, the sultan looked at the pictures of frogs in his hand and said ‘I had always suspected it was you who made up his stories. So you drew the pictures as well!’ Then he asked me about mustachioed frogs.

This was how my relationship with the sultan began. Now I accompanied Hoja every time he went to the palace. In the beginning Hoja said little, I did most of the talking to the sultan. While I spoke with him about his dreams, his enthusiasms, his fears, about the past and future, I’d wonder to what degree this good-humoured, intelligent man in front of me resembled the sultan Hoja had talked about year after year. I could tell from the clever questions he asked, from his shrewdness, that ever since he’d received the books we presented to him the sultan had been speculating how much of Hoja was me, and how much of me was Hoja. As for Hoja, at that time he was too busy with the cannon and the long barrels he was trying to get cast to be interested in these speculations, which he found idiotic anyway.

Six months after we began work on the cannon Hoja was alarmed to learn that the imperial master-general of artillery was furious that we were poking our noses into these affairs, and the man demanded either to be removed from office himself or to have crazy fools like us, who brought the craft of gunnery into disrepute with our belief that we were inventing something new, run out of Istanbul. But Hoja didn’t look for a compromise, even though the imperial master-general did seem willing to reach an agreement. A month later, when the sultan ordered us to develop the weapon in a way that would not involve cannon, Hoja was not terribly disturbed. We both knew now that the new guns and long-barrelled cannon we’d had cast were no better than the old sort that had been used for years.

So according to Hoja we had entered yet another new phase in which we would dream up everything anew from the beginning, but because I’d now grown used to his rages and his dreams, the only thing that was new for me was getting to know the sovereign. And the sultan enjoyed our company. Like an attentive father who separates two brothers arguing over their marbles, saying “this one is yours, and this one is yours’, he disentangled us with his observations about our speech and behaviour. These observations, which I found sometimes childish and sometimes clever, started to worry me: I began to believe that my personality had split itself off from me and united with Hoja’s, and vice versa, without our perceiving it, and that the sultan, by evaluating this imaginary creature, had come to know us better than we knew ourselves.

While we interpreted his dreams, or talked about the new weapon – and in those days we had only our own dreams of it to struggle with – the sovereign would stop suddenly and, turning to one of us, say, ‘No, this is his thought, not yours.’ And sometimes he’d distinguish between our actions: ‘Now you are glancing around just as he does. Be yourself!’ When I laughed in surprise he’d continue, ‘That’s better, bravo. Have you two never looked at yourselves in the mirror together?’ He’d ask which of us could stand to be himself when we did look in the mirror. On one occasion he’d ordered that all those treatises, bestiaries, and calendars we’d written for him over the years be brought out, and said that when he’d first read them, he’d tried to imagine as he turned the pages one by one which of us had written which parts, and even which parts one of us had written by putting himself in the other’s place. But it was that impersonator he had summoned while we attended him who really made Hoja angry, and enchanted me while utterly bewildering me as well.

This man resembled us neither in face nor form, he was short and fat, and his dress completely different, but when he began to speak I was shocked; it was as if Hoja, not he, were talking. Like Hoja, he’d lean towards the sovereign’s ear as if whispering a secret, like Hoja he made his voice grow grave with a studied, thoughtful air when he discussed finer points, and suddenly, just like Hoja, he’d be swept up in the excitement of what he was saying, passionately wave his hands and arms in order to persuade his interlocutor and be left breathless; but although he spoke with Hoja’s accent he didn’t describe projects related to the stars or incredible weapons, he merely enumerated the dishes he’d learned in the palace kitchen and the ingredients and spices necessary to prepare them. While the sultan smiled, the mimic continued with his impersonation, which turned Hoja’s face upside-down, by listing the caravansarays between Istanbul and Aleppo one by one. Then the sultan asked the mimic to imitate me. That man who looked at me with his mouth hanging open in shock was me: I was stupefied. When the sovereign asked him to impersonate someone who was half Hoja and half me, I was totally bewitched. Watching the man’s movements I felt like saying, just as the sultan had, ‘This is me, and this is Hoja’, but the mimic did this himself by pointing with his finger at each of us in turn. After the sultan praised the man and sent him away, he ordered us to reflect on what we’d seen.

What did he mean? That evening when I told Hoja that the sultan was a much cleverer man than the person he’d been describing to me for years, and said the sultan had found for himself the direction Hoja wanted to lead him in, Hoja flew into a rage once more. This time I felt he had cause: the mimic’s art was not to be endured. Hoja said he would not set foot in the palace again unless he was forced to. He had no intention, now the opportunity he’d waited for all these years had at last come within his grasp, of humiliating himself by wasting time with those fools. Since I knew the sultan’s enthusiasms and had the wit to play the buffoon, I would go to the palace in his place.

When I told the sovereign that Hoja was ill, he didn’t believe me. ‘Let him work on the weapon,’ he said. Thus during those four years while Hoja planned and brought the weapon to completion, I went to the palace and he stayed at home with his dreams as I used to do.

In these four years I learned that life was to be enjoyed rather than merely endured. Those who saw that the sovereign esteemed me as he did Hoja soon invited me to the ceremonies and celebrations which were the daily palace fare. One day a vizier’s daughter was getting married, the next day one more child was born to the sovereign, his sons’ circumcisions were marked by festival, another day they celebrated the recapture of a castle from the Hungarians, then ceremonies were arranged to mark the prince’s first day at school, while Ramadan and other holiday festivities began. I quickly grew fat from stuffing myself with rich meats and pilaus and gobbling down sugar lions, ostriches, mermaids and nuts at these festivities, most of which lasted for days. The greater part of my time was spent watching spectacles: wrestlers, their skin glistening with oil, struggling till they fainted, or tightrope-walkers on high-wires stretched between the minarets of mosques who juggled with the clubs they carried on their backs, crushed horseshoe nails with their teeth, and stabbed themselves with knives and skewers, or conjurors who produced snakes, doves, and monkeys from their robes, making the coffee cups in our hands and the money in our pockets disappear in the twinkling of an eye, or the shadow-plays of Karagoz and Hajivat whose obscenities I adored. At night, if there were no fireworks display, I’d follow my new friends, most of whom I’d met that same day, to one of those palaces or mansions where everyone went and after drinking raki or wine and listening to music for hours, I’d enjoy myself clinking glasses with beautiful girl dancers who imitated languorous gazelles, handsome boys who walked on water, vocalists with their burning voices who sang sensitive and joyous songs.

I’d often go to the mansions of the ambassadors who were so curious about me, and after watching a ballet of girls and boys stretching their lovely limbs, or listening to the latest pretentious nonsense played by an orchestra brought from Venice, I would enjoy the benefits of my gradually increasing fame. The Europeans gathered at the embassies would ask me about the terrifying adventures I’d lived through, they wondered how much I’d suffered, how I’d endured, how I was still able to go on. I’d conceal the fact that I had passed my whole life dozing within four walls writing silly books, and tell them incredible stories which I’d learned to extemporize, just as I did with the sultan, about this exotic land which so fascinated them. Not only the young women making their pre-nuptial appearances before their fathers, and the ambassadors’ wives who flirted with me, but all those dignified ambassadors and officials listened full of admiration to the bloody tales of religion and violence, intrigues of love and the harem, that I invented. If they pressed me, I’d whisper one or two state secrets or describe some strange habits of the sultan no one could know of which I’d make up on the spot. When they wanted more information, I’d enjoy giving myself a secretive air; I’d act as if I couldn’t say everything I knew, I’d take refuge in a silence which inflamed the curiosity of these fools Hoja wanted us to emulate. But I knew they whispered amongst themselves that I was involved in some grand and mysterious project requiring mastery of science, some design for an obscure weapon requiring a stupendous amount of money.