White Castle by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online

what happened in the stars. O my sultan! later, much later did I know him! It amazed me that the same moon appeared through the window of our house, I wanted to be a child! Hoja, unable to stop himself, returned to the same subject: the question of the lion was not important, the child loved animals, that was all.

    The next day he shut himself up in his room and began to work: a few days later he loaded the clock and the stars on to the wagon again and, under the gaze of those curious eyes behind the latticed windows, went this time to the primary school. When he returned in the evening he was depressed, but not so much as to keep silent: ‘I thought the children would understand as the sultan did, but I was wrong,’ he said. They had only been frightened. When Hoja had asked questions after his lecture, one of the children replied that Hell was on the other side of the sky and began to cry.

    He spent the next week bolstering his confidence in the sovereign’s intelligence; he went over with me one by one every moment that we had spent in the second courtyard, getting my support for his interpretations: the child was clever, yes; he already knew how to think, yes; he was already possessed of enough character to withstand the pressure put upon him by those around him at court, yes! Thus long before the sultan began to dream for us, as he would in later years, we began to dream for him. Hoja was working on the clock, too, at this time; I believed he was also thinking a bit about the weapon, because he said so to the pasha when he was called to see him. But I could tell that he’d given up on the pasha. ‘He’s become like the others,’ he said. ‘He no longer wants to know that he doesn’t know.’ A week later the sovereign summoned Hoja again, and he went.

    The sultan had received Hoja in good spirits. ‘My lion is better,’ he’d said, ‘it is as you predicted.’ Later they’d gone out into the courtyard with his retinue. The sovereign, showing him the fish in the pool, had asked what he thought of them. ‘They were red,’ Hoja said when he told me about it. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to say.’ Then he’d noticed a pattern to the movements of the fish; it was as if they were actually discussing the pattern among themselves, trying to perfect it. Hoja had said he found the fish to be intelligent. When a dwarf, standing next to one of the harem eunuchs who continually reminded the sovereign of his mother’s admonitions, laughed at this, the sultan rebuked him. As punishment he didn’t allow the red-headed dwarf to sit next to him when he ascended to his carriage.

    They’d gone by carriage to the hippodrome, to the lion-house. The lions, leopards, and panthers the sultan showed Hoja one by one were chained to the columns of an ancient church. They stopped in front of the lion Hoja had predicted would get well, the child spoke to it, introducing the lion to Hoja. Then they’d gone to another lion lying in a corner, this animal, not filthy-smelling like the others, was pregnant. The sovereign, his eyes shining, asked, ‘How many cubs will this lion give birth to, how many will be male, how many female?’

    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