Free White Castle by Orhan Pamuk Page B

him, perhaps because I already sensed then that I would later adopt his manner and his life-story as my own. There was something in his language and his turn of mind that I loved and wanted to master. A person should love the life he has chosen enough to call it his own in the end; and I do. He thought all his brothers were fools, of course; they only sought him out to get money from him; he, however, had given himself over to study. Accepted at the Selimiye seminary, he’d been falsely accused just as he was about to graduate. He never referred to this incident again, nor did he ever speak of women. At the very beginning he wrote that he’d once been on the point of marrying, then angrily ripped up everything he’d written. There was a filthy rain falling that night. It was the first of many terrifying nights I would later endure. He insulted me, said what he’d written was a lie, and began all over again; and since he required that I sit facing him and write also, I went for two days without sleep. He no longer took any notice of what I wrote; I sat at the other end of the table, copying what I had written, without bothering to use my imagination, and watched him out of the corner of my eye.

    A few days later, on that expensive, immaculate paper imported from the East, he began with the title ‘Why I Am What I Am’, but under this heading, every morning, he wrote nothing but reasons why ‘they’ were so inferior and stupid. Still, I did learn that after his mother’s death he’d been cheated, had come to Istanbul with what money he salvaged from his inheritance, stayed at a dervish house for a while but left when he decided that all the people there were base and false. I wanted to get him to tell me more about his experiences at the dervish house; I thought that breaking away from them had been a real success for him: he’d been able to set himself apart from them. When I said this he became angry, said I wanted to hear sordid things so I could use them against him some day; I had already learned too much anyway, and on top of this it made him suspicious that I wanted to learn those details – here he used one of those sexual expressions considered coarse. Then he talked for a long time about his sister Semra, of how virtuous she was and how wicked her husband had been; he spoke of his regret at not seeing her for so many years, but when I showed interest in this he became suspicious again, and passed on to another topic: after he’d spent what money he had on books, he did nothing but study for a long time, later found work as a scribe here and there – but people were so shameless – and then he remembered Sadik Pasha, whose death had just been reported from Erzinjan. Hoja had met him for the first time then, and immediately had caught his eye with his love of science. The pasha had found Hoja his teaching job at the primary school, but he was just another fool. At the end of this bout of writing, which lasted a month, one night, ashamed, he tore to shreds everything he’d written. It’s because of that, as I try to reconstruct his scribblings and my own experiences, relying only on my imagination, I’m not frightened any more of being overwhelmed by details that fascinate me so much. In a last burst of enthusiasm he wrote a few pages organized under the heading ‘Fools I Have Known Well’, but then flew into a rage: all of this writing had got him nowhere; he’d learned nothing new, and he still didn’t know why he was what he was. I had deceived him, I’d made him think pointlessly about things he didn’t want to remember. He was going to punish me.

    I don’t know why this idea of punishment, which recalled our first days together, so preoccupied him. Sometimes I thought my cowardly obedience had made him bold. Yet the moment he spoke of punishment, I made the decision to stand up to him. When Hoja had become completely fed up with writing about the past, he paced up and down the house for a