Free White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

by watching him. Then again, perhaps this time I would genuinely be able to respect him; if he could do this, something real might now happen in both our lives. ‘So what should I do?’ he asked helplessly at last. I told him he should think about why he was what he was, and that I did not say this because I presumed to give him advice; I wouldn’t be able to help him, this was something he had to do for himself. ‘So what should I do, look in the mirror?’ he said sarcastically. But he didn’t seem any less upset. I said nothing, to give him time to think. ‘Should I look in the mirror?’ he repeated. Suddenly I was angry, I felt Hoja would never be able to achieve anything on his own. I wanted him to realize this, I wanted to tell him to his face that without me he could not think at all, but I didn’t dare; with an air of indifference I told him to go ahead and look in the mirror. No, it wasn’t courage I lacked, I just didn’t feel like it. He flew into a rage and slammed the door, shouting as he left: You are a fool.

    Three days later when I brought up the subject again and saw he still wanted to talk about ‘them’, it pleased me to continue the game; whatever might come of it, it gave me hope just to see him occupied with something. I said ‘they’ did look in the mirror, and in fact much more often than people here did. Not only the palaces of kings, princes, and noblemen, but the homes of ordinary people as well were full of mirrors carefully framed and hung upon the walls; it wasn’t only because of this but because ‘they’ constantly thought about themselves that ‘they’ had progressed in this respect. ‘In what?’ he asked, with an eagerness and innocence that surprised me. I thought he was taking what I said seriously, but then he grinned: ‘So you mean that they gaze in mirrors from morning till night!’ For the first time he was mocking my country and what I had left behind. Angrily, I searched for something to say to hurt him, and suddenly, without thinking, without believing it, I declared that only he could discover who he was, but he wasn’t man enough to try. It gave me pleasure to see his face contort with pain.

    But this pleasure would cost me dear. Not because he threatened to poison me; a few days later, he demanded that I demonstrate the courage I’d said he lacked. At first I tried to make a joke of it; of course, a person could no more discover who he was by thinking about it than by looking in a mirror; I’d said that in anger to annoy him; but he seemed not to believe me: he threatened to feed me less, even to lock me in the room if I did not prove my courage. I must work out who I was and write it down; he would see how it was done, see how much courage I had.

5

    At first I wrote a few pages about my happy childhood with my brothers and sisters, my mother and grandmother on our estate at Empoli. I didn’t know just why I chose to write about these memories in particular as a way of discovering why I was who I was; perhaps I was prompted by the longing I must have felt for the happiness of that life I’d lost; and Hoja had so pressed me after what I’d said in anger that I was obliged, just as I am now, to dream up something my reader would find believable and to try to make the details enjoyable. But at first Hoja didn’t like what I wrote; anyone could write things like this, he said; he doubted this was what people thought about when they contemplated themselves in the mirror, for this could not be the courage I had said he lacked. His response was the same when he read about how I suddenly came face to face with a bear on a hunting expedition in the Alps with my father and brothers, and we’d stood still staring at one another for a long time, or how I’d felt at the deathbed of our beloved coachman who was trampled by his own horses before our eyes: anyone could write these things.

    To this I replied that people there did no more than this, what I’d