White Castle by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online Page B

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