White Castle (7 page)

I’d never been so close to his naked body; I didn’t like it. At first I wanted to believe it was for this reason that I could not approach him, but I knew I was afraid of the pustule. He knew it as well. Yet, wanting to conceal my fear I brought my head near and muttered something, my eyes fixed upon that swelling, that inflammation, with the air of a doctor. ‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ Hoja said at last. Trying to prove that I was not, I brought my head even closer. ‘You’re afraid it’s a plague bubo.’ I pretended not to have heard, and was about to say an insect had bitten him, probably the same strange insect that bit me too once, somewhere, but the creature’s name still did not come to mind. ‘Touch it, will you!’ said Hoja. ‘Without touching it how will you know? Touch me!’

When he saw I wouldn’t, he brightened up. He stretched out the fingers with which he’d touched the swelling towards my face. When he saw me start back with revulsion he laughed out loud, made fun of me for being afraid of a simple insect bite, but this merriment did not last long. ‘I’m afraid to die,’ he said suddenly. It was as if he were speaking of something else; he was more angry than ashamed; it was the anger of someone who felt betrayed. ‘Don’t you have a pustule like this? Are you sure? Take off your shirt, now!’ At his insistence I pulled off my shirt like a child who hates to be washed. The room was hot, the window was shut, but a cool breeze blew in from somewhere; perhaps it was the coldness of the mirror that made my flesh creep, I don’t know. Ashamed of how I must look, I stepped outside of the mirror’s frame. Now I saw Hoja’s face reflected obliquely as he brought his head near my torso in the mirror; he’d bent that huge head everyone said resembled mine straight towards my body. He’s doing this to poison my spirit, I thought all of a sudden; but I’d never done that to him, on the contrary, all these years I’d taken pride in being his teacher. Absurd as it was, for a moment I believed that bearded head, grotesque in the shadows of the lamplight, intended to suck my blood! Apparently I’d been much affected by those horror stories I’d loved to listen to as a child. While thinking this I felt his fingers on my abdomen; I wanted to run away, wanted to hit him over the head with something. ‘You don’t have one,’ he said. He went behind me and examined my armpits, my neck, the backs of my ears. ‘There are none here either, it seems the insect has not bitten you.’

Putting his hands on my shoulders he came forward and stood next to me. He acted like a dear old friend who had shared my deepest secrets. Squeezing the nape of my neck from both sides with his fingers, he pulled me towards him. ‘Come, let us look in the mirror together.’ I looked, and under the raw light of the lamp saw once more how much we resembled one another. I recalled how I’d been overwhelmed by this when I’d first seen him as I waited at Sadik Pasha’s door. At that time I had seen someone I must be; and now I thought he too must be someone like me. The two of us were one person! This now seemed to me an obvious truth. It was as if I were bound fast, my hands tied, unable to budge. I made a movement to save myself, as if to verify that I was myself. I quickly ran my hands through my hair. But he imitated my gesture and did it perfectly, without disturbing the symmetry of the mirror image at all. He also imitated my look, the attitude of my head, he mimicked my terror I could not endure to see in the mirror but from which, transfixed by fear, I could not tear my eyes away; then he was gleeful like a child who teases a friend by mimicking his words and movements. He shouted that we would die together! What nonsense, I thought. But I was also afraid. It was the most terrifying of all the nights I spent with him.

Then he claimed he’d been afraid of the plague all along, everything he’d done had been done in order to test me, as when he’d watched Sadik Pasha’s executioners lead me away to kill me, or when people had likened us to one another. Then he said he had taken possession of my spirit; just as a moment before he’d mirrored my movements, whatever I was thinking now, he knew it, and whatever I knew, he was thinking it! When he asked me what I was thinking at this moment, I couldn’t think of anything but him and said I couldn’t think of anything at all, but he wasn’t listening to me, he was talking not to discover something but only to frighten me, to play upon his own fear, to make me share the burden of that fear. I sensed that the more he felt his loneliness the more he wanted to do me harm; as he ran his fingers over our faces, as he tried to bewitch me with the horror of that uncanny resemblance and himself grew even more excited and agitated than I was, I thought that he wanted to do something evil. I told myself that he kept holding me in front of the mirror, squeezing the nape of my neck, because his heart couldn’t bear to commit this evil right away, but he seemed neither absurd nor helpless. He was right, I too wanted to say and do the things he said and did, I envied him because he could take action when I could not, because he could play upon the fear in the plague and the mirror.

But despite the intensity of my fear, although I believed I’d just seen things about myself I’d never noticed before, I somehow could not shake off the feeling that it was all a game. His fingers on my neck had relaxed, but I did not step out of the frame of the mirror. ‘Now I am like you,’ he said. ‘I know your fear. I have become you!’ I understood what he was saying but tried to convince myself that this prophecy, half of which I now have no doubt is true, was silly and childish. He claimed he could see the world as I did; ‘they’, he was saying again, now at last he understood how ‘they’ thought, how ‘they’ felt. Letting his gaze wander beyond the mirror-frame, he talked for a while, glancing around in the shadows at the table, the glasses, the chairs and objects half illuminated by the lamplight. He declared he could now say things he couldn’t before because he had not been able to see them, but I thought he was mistaken: the words were the same, and so were the objects. The only thing new was his fear; no, not that either; the form of his experience of it; but it seemed to me that even this, which I cannot clearly describe now, was something he put on in front of the mirror, a new trick of his. And unwillingly putting aside this game too, his mind seemed to whirl back to dwell upon that red pustule, asking: was it an insect or was it plague?

He spoke for a while about how he wanted to pick up from where I had left off. We were still standing half-naked in front of the mirror. He was going to take my place, I his, and to accomplish this it would be enough for us to exchange clothes and for him to cut his beard while I left mine to grow. This thought made our resemblance in the mirror even more horrible, and my nerves grew taut as I heard him say that I would then make a freedman of him: he spoke exultantly of what he would do when he returned to my country in my place. I was terrified to realize he remembered everything I had told him about my childhood and youth, down to the smallest detail, and from these details had constructed an odd and fantastical land to his own taste. My life was beyond my control, it was being dragged elsewhere in his hands, and I felt there was nothing for me to do but passively watch what happened to me from the outside, as if I were dreaming. But the trip he was going to take to my country as me and the life he was going to live there had a strangeness and naïveté that prevented me from believing it completely. At the same time I was surprised by the logic in the details of his fantasy: I felt like saying that this too could have been, my life could have been lived like this. Then I understood I’d sensed something more profound about Hoja’s life for the first time, but wasn’t able to say what this was just yet. All I could do, as I listened in confusion to what ‘I’ would do in my old world I’d longed for all these years, was to forget the fear of plague.

But this didn’t last long. Hoja now wanted me to say what I would do when I took his place. My nerves were so exhausted from holding myself rigid in that bizarre pose, trying to believe we didn’t look alike and that the swelling was only an insect bite, that nothing at all came to mind. When he insisted, I remembered I’d once planned to write my memoirs when I returned to my country: when I said I might one day make a good story of his adventures, he looked at me in disgust. I didn’t know him as well as he knew me – in fact not at all! Shoving me out of the way, he stood alone in front of the mirror: when he took my place he would decide what would happen to me! He said the swelling was a plague bubo; I was going to die. He described how horribly I would suffer before I died; the fear, for which I was unprepared since I had not yet realized it would come, would be worse than death. While he was saying how I would be strangled by the torments of the disease, Hoja had stepped out of the mirror’s frame; when I looked again he was stretched out on his bed that he had rolled out untidily on the floor, describing the torments I would suffer. His hand was on his belly, as if, it occurred to me, to touch the pain he was describing. Just then he called out, and when I, trembling, went to his side, I immediately regretted it; he tried to lay his hand on me again. Whatever the reason, I now thought it was just an insect bite, but still I was afraid.

The whole night passed like this. While he tried to infect me with the disease and the fear of it, he kept repeating that I was he and he was I. He’s doing this because he enjoys going outside himself, observing himself from a distance, I thought, and kept on repeating to myself, like someone struggling to awake from a dream: it’s a game; for he was using this word ‘game’ himself, but he was sweating heavily like someone physically ill rather than like a person suffocated by malignant thoughts in a hot room.

As the sun rose he was talking about stars and death, about his false predictions, the sultan’s stupidity and worse, his ingratitude, about his own beloved fools, ‘us’ and ‘them’, about how he wanted to be someone else. I wasn’t listening anymore, I went out into the garden. For some reason my mind was preoccupied with the ideas about immortality I’d read of in an ancient book. There was no movement outside other than that of the sparrows chirping and fluttering from branch to branch among the linden trees. How bewildering was the stillness! I thought of other rooms in Istanbul where victims of the plague lay dying. If Hoja’s illness was plague it would go on like this till he died, I reflected, and if not, until that red swelling disappeared. By now I had realized I wouldn’t be able to stay in this house much longer. When I went inside I had no idea where I could escape to, where I would hide. I was dreaming of a place far from Hoja, far from the plague. As I stuffed a few pieces of my clothing into a bag, I only knew this place must be near enough for me to reach without being caught.

7

I had put aside a little money by stealing a bit from Hoja whenever I could, and had some I’d earned here and there. Before I left the house I took this money from the chest where I’d hidden it in a sock among the books he now never looked at. Seized by curiosity, I then went into Hoja’s room, where he had fallen asleep, sweating profusely, with the lamp burning. I was surprised by how small the mirror was which had terrified me all night long with that bewitching resemblance I had never been able completely to believe in. Without touching anything, I left the house in a hurry. A light breeze blew as I walked down the empty streets of the neighbourhood. I had an impulse to wash my hands, I knew where I would go, I was content. I was enjoying walking in the streets in the silence of dawn, descending the hills towards the sea, washing my hands at the fountains, taking in the view of the Golden Horn.

I’d first heard of Heybeli Island from a young monk who’d come to Istanbul from there; when we met in the European quarter of Galata he had enthusiastically described the beauty of the islands. It must have made an impression on me, for as I left our district I knew it was there I would go. The ferrymen and fishermen I spoke with wanted incredible amounts of money to take me to the island, and I became depressed thinking they knew I was a runaway – they’ll betray me to the men Hoja will send after me! Later I decided this was how they intimidated the Christians they looked down on for being afraid of the plague. Trying not to attract attention, I struck a bargain with the second boat-man I spoke with. He was not a strong man, and he spent less effort on rowing than he did on talking about the plague and the sins which it had been sent to punish. For good measure he added that it was no use trying to escape the plague by taking refuge on the island. As he talked I realized he must have been as afraid as I was. The journey took six hours.

It was only later that I thought of my days on the island as happy. I paid little to stay in the home of a lone Greek fisherman, and tried to keep out of sight for I did not feel altogether safe. Sometimes I’d think that Hoja was dead, sometimes that he would send men after me. On the island there were many Christians like me fleeing the plague, but I didn’t want them to notice me.

I’d go to sea with the fisherman every morning and return in the evening. For a while I took up spearing lobster and crab. If the weather was too bad for fishing I’d walk around the island, and there were times when I’d go to the garden of the monastery and sleep peacefully under the vines. There was one bower supported by a fig-tree from which you could see as far as Hagia Sofia in fine weather, where I’d sit in the shade gazing at Istanbul, daydreaming for hours on end. In one dream I was sailing to the island and saw Hoja among the dolphins swimming alongside the boat, he’d made friends with them and was asking about me; another time my mother was with them and they scolded me for being late. When I woke up sweating with the sun on my face I’d want to return to these dreams, but unable to, I’d force myself to think: sometimes I’d imagine that Hoja had died and I could see the dead body inside the empty house I’d abandoned, I could feel the silence of the funeral which no one would come to; then I’d think of his predictions, of the amusing things he’d invented happily as well as those he’d concocted in disgust and rage; of the sultan and his animals. Accompanying these day-dreams with the heavy dancing of their claws were the lobsters and crabs I speared through their backs.

I tried to convince myself that sooner or later I would be able to escape to my own country. I only had to steal from the open doors on the island, but before that it was essential that I forget Hoja. For I had fallen unawares under the spell of what had happened to me, of the temptation of memory; I could almost blame myself for abandoning a man who looked so much like me. Just as I do now, I longed for him passionately; did he actually resemble me as much as he did in memory or was I fooling myself? It was as though I’d not once really looked into his face in these eleven years; in fact I’d often done so. I even felt the urge to go to Istanbul and see his corpse one last time. I decided that if I were to be free I must convince myself that the uncanny resemblance between us was a blunder of memory, a bitter illusion that should be forgotten, and I must get used to this fact.

Luckily I did not get used to it. For one day I suddenly saw Hoja before me. I had stretched out in the fisherman’s backyard daydreaming, my closed eyes turned towards the sun, when I felt his shadow. He was facing me, smiling like someone who loved me rather than someone who’d beaten me in a game. I had an extraordinary feeling of security, so much that it alarmed me. Perhaps I had secretly been waiting for this, for I immediately retreated into the guilty feelings of a lazy slave, a humble, bowing servant. While I gathered my things together, instead of hating Hoja I reviled myself. And it was he who paid my debt to the fisherman. He’d brought two men with him and we returned swiftly with double oars. We were home before nightfall. I’d missed the smell of home. And the mirror had been taken down from the wall.

The next morning Hoja confronted me: my crime was very serious and he was burning to punish me, not only for running away but because I’d abandoned him on his deathbed believing an insect bite was a plague bubo, but now was not the time. He explained that the previous week the sultan had finally called for him and asked when this plague would end, how many more lives it would take, whether or not his own life was in danger. Hoja, very excited, had given evasive answers because he wasn’t prepared, and had begged for time saying he needed to work from the stars. He’d danced home wild with victory, but wasn’t sure how to manipulate the sultan’s interest to his own advantage. So he had decided to bring me back.

He’d known for a long time that I was on the island; after I’d run away he’d gone down with a cold, gone after me three days later, picked up my trail from the fishermen, and when he opened his purse a little the talkative boatman revealed he’d taken me to Heybeli. Since Hoja knew I could not escape further than the islands, he hadn’t followed me. When he said this meeting with the sultan was the crucial opportunity of his life I agreed with him. And he said frankly that he had need of my knowledge.

We began work immediately. Hoja had the decisive air of a man who knows what he wants; I was delighted at this sense of determination I had rarely observed in him before. Since we knew he would be called again the next day we decided to stall for time. We agreed at once that we should not give much information and mention only what was likely to be confirmed. Hoja’s acuity, which I so admired, had brought him straightaway to the opinion ‘prediction is buffoonery, but it can be well used to influence fools’. As he listened to me talk he seemed to agree the plague was a disaster which could only be arrested by health precautions. Like me he did not deny that the disaster was God’s will, but only indirectly; for this reason even we mortals could take stock and act to protect ourselves without offending God’s pride. Hadn’t the Caliph Omar the Rightly Guided recalled General Ebu Ubeyde from Syria to Medina in order to protect his army from the plague? Hoja would ask the sultan to reduce his contacts with others to an absolute minimum for his own protection. It was not that we didn’t think of persuading the sovereign to take these precautions by putting the fear of death in his heart, but this was dangerous. It was not simply a matter of frightening the sultan with a rhetorical description of death; even if Hoja’s chattering impressed him, he had a crowd of fools around him to share his fear and help him conquer it; later these unscrupulous fools could always accuse Hoja of irreligion. So, relying on my knowledge of literature, we concocted a tale to tell the sultan.

The thing that most daunted Hoja was how to decide when the plague might end. I realized that we had to start from the figures of the daily death-toll; when I told Hoja this he didn’t seem very impressed, he agreed to ask the sultan for help in obtaining these figures but would mask the real intention of his request. I am not a great believer in mathematics, but our hands were tied.

The next morning he went to the palace, and I into the plague-stricken city. I was just as afraid of the plague as before, but the raucous movement of ordinary life, the ubiquitous desire to gain something of the world, even if only some small share, made my head spin. It was a cool, breezy summer day; as I wandered among the dead and the dying I thought how it had been years since I had been able to love life this much. I went into the mosque courtyards, wrote down the number of coffins on a piece of paper, and walking through the various neighbourhoods, tried to establish a relationship between what I saw and the death-count: it was not easy to find a meaning in all the houses, the people, the crowds, the gaiety and sorrow and joy. And oddly enough my eye hungered only for the details, the lives of others, the happiness, helplessness, indifference of people living in their own homes with their own families and friends.

Towards noon I crossed over to the other shore of the Golden Horn, to the European quarter of Galata, and intoxicated by the crowds and the corpses I wandered through poor coffee-houses, around the dockyards, shyly smoked tobacco, ate in a humble cookshop simply out of a desire to understand, strolled in bazaars and stores. I wanted to engrave every single detail on my mind so I could reach some sort of conclusion. I returned home after twilight, exhausted, and listened to Hoja’s news from the palace.

Things had gone well. The story we invented had affected the sultan deeply. His mind accepted the idea that the plague was like a devil trying to deceive him by taking on human form; he decided not to allow strangers into the palace; comings and goings were kept under strict supervision. When Hoja was asked when and how the plague would end, he had talked up such a storm that the sultan said fearfully that he could see Azrael, the angel of death, wandering the city like a drunkard; he’d take by the hand who ever he fixed his eye on and drag him away. Hoja was quick to correct him, it was not Azrael but Satan who lured men to their deaths: and he wasn’t drunk but extremely cunning. Hoja, as we planned, had made clear that it was imperative to make war on Satan. To understand when the plague would leave the city in peace, it was crucial to observe its movements. Although among his retinue there were those who said that to make war on the plague was to oppose God, the sultan paid no attention; and later he asked about his animals; would the plague-devil harm his falcons, his hawks, his lions, his monkeys? Hoja had immediately replied that the devil came to men in the form of a man and to animals in the form of a mouse. The sultan ordered that five hundred cats be brought from a far away city untouched by plague, and that Hoja be given as many men as he wanted.

Straightaway we scattered the twelve men given to our command to the four corners of Istanbul to patrol every district and report to us the death-count and whatever else they observed. We’d spread out on our table a rough map of Istanbul I had drawn, copied from books. With dread and delight, at night we marked on the map where the plague had spread, outlining the results we would present to the sultan.

We were not optimistic at first. The plague was roving the city like an aimless vagabond, not a cunning devil. One day it took forty lives in the district of Aksaray, the next day struck Fatih, appeared suddenly on the other shore, in Tophane, Jihangir, and the following day when we looked again it had barely touched those places and after passing through Zeyrek entered our district overlooking the Golden Horn, taking twenty lives. We could understand nothing from the death-tolls; one day five hundred went, the next day one hundred. We wasted much time before realizing we needed to know not where the plague killed its victims but where the infection was first caught. The sultan was calling for Hoja again. We thought it over carefully and decided he should say the plague roved in crowded marketplaces, in the bazaars where people cheated each other, the coffee-houses where they sat down close to one another and gossiped. He left, returning in the evening.

Hoja had told him. ‘What shall we do?’ the sultan had asked. Hoja advised that the to and fro in the market-places and the city be reduced by physical force: the simpletons around the sovereign opposed this immediately, of course: how would the city be fed, if business stopped life also stopped, news of a plague wandering in the form of a man would terrify those who heard of it, they would believe the Day of Judgement had come and would grab the bit between their teeth; no one wanted to be imprisoned in a neighbourhood where the plague devil roamed, they would raise a rebellion. ‘And they are right,’ said Hoja. At that moment some fool had asked where one would find enough men to control the populace to this degree, and the sultan became furious; he frightened everyone by saying he’d punish anyone who doubted his power. In his rage he ordered that Hoja’s recommendations be carried out, but not without consulting his circle first. The Imperial Astrologer Sitki Efendi, whose teeth were sharp where Hoja was concerned, reminded him that he still had not said when the plague would leave Istanbul. Afraid the sultan would defer to him, Hoja said he would bring a calendar on his next visit.

We had filled the map on the table with marks and figures, but we hadn’t found any logic in the plague’s movements about the city. By now the sultan had put the recommended prohibitions in force and they had been observed for more than three days. Janissaries guarded the entrances to the market-places, the avenues, the boat landings, halting passers-by, interrogating them: ‘Who are you? Where are you going? Where are you coming from?’ They sent the timid, surprised travellers and idlers back to their homes so that they should not be taken in by the plague. By the time we learned that activity had slowed in the Grand Bazaar and Unkapi, we were pondering the death-toll figures we’d collected the past month, written on scraps of paper and pinned up on the wall. In Hoja’s opinion we were waiting in vain for the plague to move according to some logic and if we were to save our heads we must invent something to put the sultan off.