The White Castle Part 2

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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sionately; 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 G.o.d's will, but only indirectly; for this reason even we mortals could take stock and act to protect ourselves without offending G.o.d'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 relations.h.i.+p 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 sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d, 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 sh.o.r.e, in Tophane, Jihangir, and the following day when we looked again it had barely touched those places and after pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sers-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 sc.r.a.ps 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.

It was around this time too that the permit system was inst.i.tuted. The Aga of the Janissaries distributed permits to those whose work was considered essential for commerce to continue and the city to be fed. When I was beginning to see a pattern in the death-counts for the first time, we learned the Aga was collecting a great deal of money from this, and that the small tradesmen, unwilling to pay, had begun preparations for a rebellion. While Hoja was saying the Grand Vizier Koprulu planned to mount a conspiracy in league with the small tradesmen, I interrupted him to tell him about the pattern and tried to make him believe the plague had slowly withdrawn from the outer neighbourhoods and poor districts.

What I said did not quite convince him, but he left the work of preparing the calendar to me. He said he'd written a story to distract the sultan which was so meaningless that no one would be able to conclude anything from it. A few days later he asked if it were possible to make up a story that had no moral or meaning other than the pleasure of reading or listening to it. 'Like music?' I suggested, and Hoja looked surprised. We discussed how the ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation. The night before he went to the palace we sat up chattering happily, working in haste. In the next room our left-handed calligrapher friend was writing out a clean copy of the beginning of the story Hoja had still not managed to finish. Towards morning, working with the limited figures I had in hand, I had concluded from the equations I'd struggled for days to produce that the plague would take its last victims in the markets and leave the city in twenty days. Hoja didn't ask me what I based this conclusion on, and remarking only that the day of salvation was too far off he told me to revise the calendar for a two-week period and conceal the duration with other figures. I doubted this would succeed, but I did what he said. Hoja then and there composed verse chronograms for some of the dates and thrust them into the hand of the calligrapher who was just about to finish his work; he told me to draw pictures ill.u.s.trating some of the verses. Towards noon, irritable, depressed, and frightened, he hurriedly bound the treatise with a blue marbled cover and left with it. He said he had less faith in the calendar than in those pelicans, winged bulls, red ants and talking monkeys he'd crammed into his story.

When he returned in the evening he was exhilarated, and this exuberance dominated the three weeks during which he completely convinced the sultan of the soundness of his prediction: at the beginning he'd said, 'Anything can happen', the first day he was not at all hopeful; a few in the crowd gathered around the sultan had even laughed while listening to his story recited by a youth with a beautiful voice. Of course they did this on purpose to belittle Hoja, to put him out of favour with the sultan, but the sovereign demanded silence and reprimanded them; he asked Hoja only on what signs he had based his conclusion that the plague would end in two weeks. Hoja replied that everything was contained in the story, which no one had been able to understand. Then, in order to please the sultan, he'd made a show of affection for the cats of every colour brought by s.h.i.+p from Trabzon which were now swarming over the inner courtyards and into every room of the palace.

He said that by the time he had arrived on the second day the palace was divided into two camps; one group, which included the Imperial Astrologer Sitki Efendi, wanted to lift all the precautions imposed on the city; the others taking Hoja's part said, 'Let the city not even breathe, let it not inhale the plague devil roving within.' I was hopeful as I watched the death-counts fall day by day, but Hoja was still anxious, it was whispered that the first group, reaching an understanding with Koprulu, had begun preparations for a revolt; their goal was not to conquer the plague but to be free of their rivals.

At the end of the first week there was a visible reduction in the number of deaths, but my calculations showed that the epidemic would not disappear in just one more week. I grumbled at Hoja for changing my calendar, but now he was hopeful; he told me excitedly that the whisperings about the grand vizier had ceased. On top of this Hoja's party had spread the news that Koprulu was collaborating with them. As for the sultan, he was thoroughly frightened by all these machinations and sought peace of mind with his cats.

As the second week came to an end the city was suffocating more from the precautions than from the plague; with each pa.s.sing day fewer people died, but only we and those who like us followed the death-counts realized this. Rumours of famine had broken out, mighty Istanbul was like an abandoned city; Hoja told me about it, for I never left the neighbourhood: a man could feel the desperation of people being strangled by plague behind all those closed windows and courtyard gates, waiting for some reprieve from plague and death. The palace too was in a state of suspense, every time a cup fell on the floor or someone coughed loudly, that crowd of wiseacres burst their bladders in antic.i.p.ation, whispering all at once 'Let us see what decision the sultan will make today', hysterical like all helpless souls who yearn for something to happen, whatever it might be. Hoja was swept away by this agitation; he'd tried to explain to the sultan that the plague had gradually withdrawn, that his predictions had proved correct, but he hadn't been able to make much of an impression on him, and in the end was forced again to talk about animals.

Two days later he'd been able to conclude from a count made at the mosques that the epidemic had thoroughly receded, but Hoja's happiness that Friday was due more to the fact that a group among the despairing tradesmen had clashed with the janissaries guarding the roads, and that another group of janissaries discontented with the preventive measures had joined forces with a couple of idiot imams preaching in the mosques, some vagrants eager for loot and other idlers who said the plague was G.o.d's will and no one should interfere with it. But this turmoil was suppressed before it got out of hand. When a judgement was obtained from the sheikh of Islam, twenty men were executed immediately, perhaps to make these events seem more momentous than they were. Hoja was delighted.

The following evening he announced his victory. No longer could anyone in the palace complain that the preventive measures should be lifted; when the Aga of the Janissaries was summoned, he'd made mention of the rebel partisans in the palace; the sultan had been angered; that group whose enmities had for a while made life hard for Hoja, scattered like a covey of partridges. For a time it was whispered that Koprulu would take harsh measures against the rebels with whom it was believed he had collaborated. Hoja announced with evident pleasure that he'd influenced the sultan in this regard as well. Those who put down the revolt had been trying to convince the sultan that the plague had subsided. And what they said was true. The sovereign praised Hoja as he'd never done before; he took him to see the monkeys he'd had brought from Africa in a cage made specially to his order. While they watched the monkeys, whose filth and impertinence disgusted Hoja, the sovereign asked whether they could learn to speak like parrots could. Turning towards his retinue the sultan had declared that in future he wanted to see Hoja at his side more often, the calendar he'd devised had proved correct.

One Friday a month later Hoja was appointed Imperial Astrologer; he became even more than that: as the sultan went to the Hagia Sophia Mosque for the Friday prayers in which the entire city partic.i.p.ated to celebrate the end of the plague, Hoja followed directly behind him; the precautions had been lifted, and I too was among the cheering crowds giving thanks to G.o.d and the sultan. While the sovereign pa.s.sed before us on horseback, the populace screamed with all their might; they became ecstatic, there was pus.h.i.+ng and shoving, the crowd rose up in a wave and the janissaries pushed us back, for a moment I was squeezed against a tree by the people who surged over me, and when, elbowing the crowd, I threw myself to the front, I came face to face with Hoja, walking four or five steps away from me looking pleased and happy. He glanced away as if he didn't know me. In that incredible uproar, suddenly, stupidly swept up in the general enthusiasm, I believed Hoja had not seen me at that moment, that if I shouted out to him with all my strength he would be made aware of my existence and rescue me from the crowd, and I would join that happy parade of those who held the reins of victory and power! It wasn't that I wished to seize a share in the triumph or to receive a reward for what I had done; the feeling I had was quite different: I should be by his side, I was Hoja's very self! I had become separated from my real self and was seeing myself from the outside, just as in the nightmares I often had. I didn't even want to learn the ident.i.ty of this other person I was inside of; I only wanted, while I fearfully watched my self pa.s.s by without recognizing me, to rejoin him as soon as I could. But a brute of a soldier pushed me back with all his strength into the crowd.

8.

In the weeks after the plague subsided Hoja was not only raised to the position of imperial astrologer, but also developed a more intimate relations.h.i.+p with the sultan than we had ever hoped for: the grand vizier, after the failure of that minor uprising, persuaded the sovereign's mother that her son should now be rescued from those buffoons he kept around him; for both the tradesmen and the janissaries held that crowd of wiseacres, who misled the sultan with their idle nonsense, responsible for the troubles. So when the faction of the former Imperial Astrologer Sitki Efendi, who was said to have had a hand in the plot, was driven from the palace into exile or a change of position, their duties were left to Hoja as well.

By now he was going every day to one of the palaces where the sultan was in residence, conversing with him during hours the sultan regularly set aside for their talks. When Hoja returned home he'd tell me, elated and triumphant, how every morning the sultan would first of all have him interpret his dream of the night before. Of all the functions Hoja had a.s.sumed he perhaps loved this one most: when the sultan admitted sadly one morning that he'd had no dream the night before, Hoja proposed he interpret someone else's dream, and when the sovereign enthusiastically accepted this, the imperial guards rushed to find someone who'd had a good dream and brought him into the sovereign's presence, and thus it became an abiding custom that a dream be interpreted every morning. The rest of the time, as they strolled through the gardens shaded by flowering erguvan and great plane-trees, or sailed the Bosphorus in caiques, they would talk of the sultan's beloved animals and, of course, the creatures we had imagined. But he was broaching other subjects with the sultan as well, which he exuberantly recounted to me: what was the cause of the Bosphorus currents? What valuable knowledge could be learned from observing the methodical habits of ants? From whence did the magnet derive its power, other than from G.o.d? What significance was there in the hither and thither of the stars? Could anything be found in the customs of infidels but infidelity, anything that was worth knowing? Could one invent a weapon that would scatter their armies in fear and dread? After telling me how attentively the sultan had listened to him, Hoja would dash to the table and draw designs on expensive, heavy paper for the weapon: long-barrelled cannon, firing mechanisms that detonated by themselves, engines of war, apparitions making one think of satanic beasts, calling me to the table to bear witness to the violence of these images he said would very soon be realized.

Yet I wanted to share in these dreams with Hoja. Perhaps this was why my mind still lingered on the plague that had made us experience those dreadful days of brotherhood. All Istanbul had prayed at Hagia Sophia in thanks for deliverance from the plague-devil, but the disease had still not completely withdrawn from the city. In the mornings, while Hoja hurried to the sultan's palace, I wandered the city anxiously, keeping count of the funerals still taking place in the neighbourhood mosques with their squat minarets, the poor little mosques with red-tiled roofs overgrown with moss, hoping out of motives I could not understand, that the disease would not leave the city and us.

While Hoja talked of how he had influenced the sultan, of his victory, I would explain to him that the epidemic was still not over and that since the preventive restrictions had been lifted it could flare up anew any day. He would silence me angrily, claiming I was jealous of his triumph. I saw his point: he was now imperial astrologer, the sultan told him his dreams every morning, he could make the sultan listen to him in private without that whole crowd of fools around, these were things we'd waited fifteen years for, it was a victory; but why did he speak as if the victory were his alone? He seemed to have forgotten that it was I who had proposed the measures against the plague, I who had prepared the calendar that didn't quite prove accurate but had been received as if it were; what I resented even more was that he remembered only that I'd fled to the island, not the circ.u.mstances under which he'd hurriedly brought me back.

Perhaps he was right, perhaps what I felt could be called jealousy, but what he didn't realize was that this was a fraternal feeling. I wanted him to understand this, but when I made him recall how in the days before the plague we used to sit at the two ends of a table like two bachelors trying to forget the boredom of lonely nights, when I reminded him of how sometimes he or I had been afraid but we had learned so much from these fears, and confessed that I had missed those nights even while I was alone on the island, he listened contemptuously to everything I said as if he were merely a witness to my hypocrisy surfacing in a game he himself took no part in, he gave me no hope, he said nothing to hint that we would return to those days when we lived together as brothers.

As I wandered from district to district I could now see that, despite the lifting of restrictions, the plague, as if it didn't want to cast a shadow over this thing Hoja called 'victory', was slowly receding from the city. Sometimes I wondered why it made me lonely to think the dark fear of death was withdrawing from our midst and going away. Sometimes I wanted us to talk, not about the sultan's dreams or the projects Hoja described to him, but about our earlier days together: I'd long been ready to stand together with him, even with the fear of death, and face the dreadful mirror he'd taken down from the wall. But for a long time now Hoja had been treating me with contempt, or pretending to; what's worse, at times I believed he could not be bothered to do even that.

Now and then, trying to draw him back to our former happy life, I'd say the time had come for us to sit down at the table again. So as to set an example, I tried once or twice to write; when I read him the pages I'd filled with exaggerated accounts of the terror of plague, of that desire to do evil born of fear, of my sins left half-told, he didn't even listen to me. He said mockingly, with a force he perhaps derived more from my helplessness than from his own triumph, that he'd realized even then that our writings were nothing but nonsense, at the time he'd played those games out of boredom, just to see where they would end, and because he'd wanted to test me: in any case he'd known what kind of man I was the day I ran away believing he'd been infected by the plague. I was an evil-doer! There were two types of men; the righteous like him and the guilty like me.

I made no reply to these words of his, which I tried to attribute to the intoxication of victory. My mind was as sharp as ever, and when I caught myself becoming angry at trivialities I knew I had not lost my ability to feel rage, but I seemed not to know how to respond to his provocations, nor how to lead him on, how to catch him in a trap. During the days I spent in flight from him on Heybeli Island I realized that I had lost sight of my goal. What difference would it make if I returned to Venice? After fifteen years my mind had long accepted that my mother had died, my fiancee was lost to me, married, with a family; I didn't want to think of them, they appeared less and less in my dreams; moreover I no longer saw myself among them in Venice as in my first years, but dreamt of their living in Istanbul, in our midst. I knew that if I should return to Venice I would not be able to pick up my life where I'd left it. At most I might be able to begin anew with another life. I no longer felt any enthusiasm for the details of that previous life, unless for the sake of one or two books I'd once planned to write about the Turks and my years of slavery.

Sometimes I thought Hoja treated me with contempt because he sensed I had no country and no purpose, because he knew I was weak, and sometimes I doubted he understood even this much. Each day he was so intoxicated by the stories he'd told the sultan, by the image and the triumph of that incredible weapon he dreamed about and said would definitely win over the sultan, that perhaps he did not even realize what I was thinking. I'd catch myself observing this totally self-absorbed contentment of Hoja's with envy. I loved him, I loved that false exhilaration he got from his exaggerated sense of victory, his never-ending plans, and the way he said he'd soon have the sultan in the palm of his hand. I couldn't have admitted, even to myself, that I had thoughts like these, but while I followed his movements, his daily actions, I was sometimes overcome by the feeling that I was watching myself. Looking at a child, a youth, a man will sometimes see his own childhood and youth and observe him with love and curiosity: the fear and curiosity I felt was of that kind; it often came back to me how he had grasped the nape of my neck and said, 'I have become you', but when I reminded him of those days, Hoja would cut me short and talk about what he had said that day to the sultan to make him believe in the unbelievable weapon, or describe in detail how that morning he had seduced the sovereign's mind while interpreting his dream.

I, too, wanted to be able to believe in the brilliance of these successes he made sound so sweet as he recounted them. Sometimes it happened that, carried away by my boundless fantasies, I gladly put myself in his place and did believe in them. Then I would love him and myself, us, and with my mouth hanging open like a simpleton listening to an engrossing fairy-tale, lost in what he was saying, I'd believe that he spoke of those wonderful days to come as a goal we would pursue together.

This was how I came to join him in interpreting the sultan's dreams. Hoja had decided to provoke the twenty-one-year-old sovereign to a.s.sert greater control over the government. Thus he explained to him that the lone horses the sultan often saw galloping wildly in his dreams were sad because they were riderless; and that the wolves who sank their merciless teeth into their quarries' throats were happy because they were self-sufficient; that the weeping old women and beautiful blind girls and the trees whose leaves were stripped off in black rains were calling out to him for help; that the sacred spiders and the proud falcons symbolized the virtues of independence. We wanted the sultan to be interested in our science after he took control of the government; we even exploited his nightmares towards this end. During the long, exhausting nights on hunting excursions the sultan, like most who love the hunt, would dream that he himself was the prey, or, in his fear of losing the throne, that he saw himself sitting on the throne as a child, and Hoja would explain that on the throne he would remain forever young, but only by making weapons superior to those of our ever-vigilant enemies could he be safe from their treachery. The sultan dreamt that his grandfather Sultan Murat had proved his strength by striking a donkey in two with a single blow of his sword so swiftly that its two halves galloped away from one another; that the shrew called Kosem Sultana, his grandmother, rose from the grave to strangle him and his mother, and leapt upon him stark naked; that instead of the plane-trees in the hippodrome, there grew fig-trees from which b.l.o.o.d.y corpses dangled instead of fruit; that evil men whose faces resembled his own were chasing him in order to thrust him into the sacks they carried and smother him; or that an army of turtles with candles on their backs whose flames were somehow not blown out by the wind, entered the sea from Uskudar and was marching straight for the palace, and we tried to interpret these dreams, which I patiently and cheerfully wrote down in a book and cla.s.sified, to the advantage of science and the incredible weapon which must be built, thinking how wrong were the courtiers who whispered that the sultan neglected the affairs of government and had nothing in his head but hunting and animals.

According to Hoja we were gradually influencing him, but I no longer believed we would succeed. Hoja would obtain his promise regarding a new weapon or the establishment of an observatory or a house of sciences, and after nights of enthusiastically dreaming up projects, months would pa.s.s without his speaking again seriously even once about these subjects with the sultan. A year after the plague, when Grand Vizier Koprulu died, Hoja found another pretext for optimism: the sultan had hesitated to put his plans into practice because he'd feared Koprulu's power and personality, and now that the grand vizier had died and his son, less powerful than the father, had taken his place, it was time to expect courageous decisions from the sultan.

But we spent the next three years waiting for them. What bewildered me now was not the inactivity of the sultan, who was dazzled by his dreams and his hunting excursions, but that Hoja could still fix his hopes on him. All these years I'd been waiting for the day when he would lose hope and become like me! Although he no longer talked as much as he used to about 'victory', and didn't feel that exhilaration he had during the months following the plague, he was still able to keep alive his dream of a day when he would be able to manipulate the sultan with what he called his 'grand plan'. He could always find an excuse: right after that great fire that reduced Istanbul to rubble, the sultan's lavish investments in grand plans gave his enemies their opportunity of conspiring to put his brother on the throne; the sultan's hands were tied for the time being because the army had left on an expedition to the land of the Huns; the following year we expected them to begin an offensive against the Germans; then there was still the completion of the New Valide Mosque on the sh.o.r.es of the Golden Horn where Hoja often went with the sovereign and his mother Turhan Sultana, and for which great sums were being spent; there were also those endless hunting excursions in which I didn't take part. While I waited at home for Hoja to return from the hunt, I'd try to follow his instructions and come up with bright ideas for that 'grand plan' or 'science', dozing lazily as I turned the pages of his books.

It no longer amused me even to daydream about these projects; I cared little about the results they would yield should they ever be realized. Hoja knew as well as I did that there was nothing of substance in our thoughts about astronomy, geography, or even natural science during the years we first knew each other; the clocks, instruments, and models had been forgotten in a corner and long since gone to rust. We had postponed everything till the day when we would practise this obscure business he called 'science'; we had in hand not a grand plan that would save us from ruin, but only the dream of such a plan. In order to believe in this drab illusion, which didn't deceive me at all, and to feel a sense of camaraderie with Hoja, I tried sometimes to look with his eyes at the pages I turned, or put myself in his place as thoughts occurred to me at random. When he'd return from the hunt, I'd act as if I had discovered a new truth about whatever subject he'd left me to wear out my mind on, and that we could change everything in its light: when I said: 'The cause of the rising and falling of the sea is related to the heat of the rivers emptying into it', or, 'The plague is spread by tiny dust-motes in the air, and when the weather changes, it goes away', or, 'The Earth revolves around the sun, and the sun around the moon', Hoja, changing out of his dusty hunting costume, always gave me the same answer, making me smile with love: 'And the idiots here don't even realize this!'

Then he'd explode in a fit of rage which dragged me along in its fury, rave for hours about how the sovereign had chased after a stunned boar, or what nonsense it was for him to shed tears over a rabbit he'd had the greyhounds catch, admit against his will that what he'd said to the sultan during the hunt went in one ear and out the other, and ask rancorously over and over again when these idiots were going to realize the truth. Was it mere coincidence that so many fools were collected together in one place or was it inevitable? Why were they so stupid?

Thus he gradually came to feel he must begin anew with the thing he called 'science', this time in order to understand the nature of their minds. Since it reminded me of those days I loved when we had sat at the same table and, despising each other, been so alike, I was as enthusiastic as Hoja to start again on our 'science', but after some initial attempts we understood that things were not as they had been.

First of all, since I didn't know how to lead him on or why I should, I just couldn't pressure him. More important, I felt as if his sufferings and defeats were my own. On one occasion I reminded him of the folly of the people here, giving exaggerated examples, and made him feel he was as doomed to failure as they were although I didn't believe this and then observed his reaction. Although he disagreed with me violently, saying failure was not an inevitability if we acted first and devoted ourselves to this task if, for example, we could realize the project of that weapon, we could still turn the tide of this river of history that was pus.h.i.+ng us backwards and although he made me happy by speaking not of his plans but of 'our' plans, as he did when he despaired, nevertheless he dreaded the approach of an inescapable defeat. I thought of him as an orphaned child, I loved his rage and sadness that reminded me of my first years of slavery; and I wanted to be like him. While he paced up and down the room looking out at the filthy, muddy streets under a dark rain or the washed-out, trembling lamps still burning from a couple of houses on the sh.o.r.es of the Golden Horn, as if he were searching there for some indication of a new sign he could pin his hopes on, it seemed for a moment that what paced, agonized, inside this room was not Hoja, but my own youth. The person I once had been had left me and was gone, and the I that was now dozing in a corner jealously desired him, as if in him I could recover the enthusiasm I had lost.

But I had also finally grown weary of this enthusiasm that never tired of regenerating itself. After Hoja became imperial astrologer his property at Gebze had increased and our income had grown. There was no need for him to do anything more than chat with the sultan now and then. Once in a while we'd go to Gebze, tour the dilapidated mills and villages where wild sheepdogs were the first to greet us, check on the income, rummage through the accounts and try to figure out how much the overseer had cheated us. We'd write entertaining treatises for the sovereign, sometimes laughing but most of the time groaning with boredom, and that was all we did. If I hadn't insisted, he probably would not have arranged for those interludes when we'd lie with luxuriously perfumed prost.i.tutes after idling away our days.

What unnerved him more was that the sovereign, encouraged by the absence of the army and the pashas who abandoned the city for the German campaign or the Cretan fortress, and because his mother couldn't force him to listen to her, had gathered around him again all those chattering wiseacres, buffoons, and impersonators who'd been driven from the palace. So as to set himself apart from these fakes whom he viewed with hatred and disgust and make them accept his superiority, Hoja was determined not to mingle with them, but when the sovereign insisted then he had no recourse but to talk with them and listen to their debates. After these gatherings discussing such questions as whether or not animals had souls, if so which ones, and which would go to heaven and which to h.e.l.l, whether mussels were male or female, whether the sun that rises each morning is a new sun or simply the same sun that sets in the morning on the other side, he'd emerge despairing of the future, saying that if we did not take action the sultan would soon be beyond his grasp.

Because he talked about 'our' plans, 'our' future, I happily went along with him. Once, to try to grasp what was on the sultan's mind, we went through the notebooks I'd kept for years, our dreams, our memories. As if we were enumerating the contents of the drawers of a chest, we tried to tally the contents of the sovereign's mind; the result was not at all encouraging: although Hoja was still able to chatter enthusiastically about the incredible weapon that would be our salvation, or about the mysteries to be solved still hidden in the recesses of our minds, now he could no longer behave as if he didn't antic.i.p.ate some catastrophic defeat drawing near. For months we wore ourselves out discussing this subject.

Did we understand 'defeat' to mean that the empire would lose all of its territories one by one? We'd lay out our maps on the table and mournfully determine first which territories, then which mountains or rivers would be lost. Or did defeat mean that people would change and alter their beliefs without noticing it? We imagined how everyone in Istanbul might rise from their warm beds one morning as changed people; they wouldn't know how to wear their clothes, wouldn't be able to remember what minarets were for. Or perhaps defeat meant to accept the superiority of others and try to emulate them: then he would recount some episode from my life in Venice, and we would imagine how acquaintances of ours here would act out my experiences dressed up with foreign hats on their heads and pants on their legs.

As a last resort we decided to present the sultan with these dreams that made us forget how we pa.s.sed the time as we invented them. We thought that perhaps all these visions of defeat, brought to life in the vivid shades of our fantasies, might spur him to action. So, during the silent, dark nights, we filled a book with all the visions that flowed from the fantasies of defeat and failure we had dreamed up with a sad, despairing joy: those paupers with heads bowed, muddy roads, buildings left half-finished, dark, strange streets, people pleading that everything might be as it once was while they recited prayers they didn't understand, grieving mothers and fathers, unhappy men whose lives were too short for them to pa.s.s on to us what had been accomplished and recorded in other lands, machines left idle, souls whose eyes were moist from lamenting for the good old days, stray dogs reduced to skin and bones, villagers without any land, vagabonds wandering wildly through the city, illiterate Muslims wearing pants and all the wars ending in defeat. We put my faded memories in another part of the book: a few scenes from the happy and instructive experiences of my schooldays in Venice with my mother, father, and brothers and sisters: those who would conquer us live like this, and we must take action before they do and emulate them! In the conclusion our left-handed calligrapher copied out there was a well-measured verse which, using the metaphor of the cluttered cupboard Hoja loved so well, could be considered a door opening into the black puzzle of our minds' intricate mysteries. The finely woven mist of this poetry, majestic and silent in its own way, caught the sad essence of all the books and treatises I had written with Hoja.

Only a month after Hoja had submitted this book, the sultan ordered us to start work on that incredible weapon. We were bewildered by his command, and could never decide how far our success was due to this book.

9.

When the sultan said, 'Let us see this incredible weapon that will ruin our enemies', perhaps he was testing Hoja, perhaps he'd had a dream he'd kept from Hoja, perhaps he wanted to show his domineering mother and the pashas who hara.s.sed him that the 'philosophers' he kept around were good for something, perhaps he thought Hoja might work another miracle after the plague, perhaps he'd truly been affected by those images of defeat we'd filled our book with, or perhaps it was the few actual military failures he'd suffered rather than our images of defeat which had alarmed him with the thought that, as he'd feared, those who wanted to put his brother in his place would drive him from the throne. We considered all these possibilities as we calculated in a daze the tremendous income that would come from the villages, caravansarays, and olive-groves the sovereign had granted us to finance the weapon.

Hoja decided that we should be surprised only by our own surprise: were they false, all those stories he'd told the sultan year after year, the treatises and books we'd written, that we should now have doubts when he believed them? And there was more: the sovereign had begun to be curious about what went on in the darkness of our minds. Hoja excitedly asked me if this wasn't the victory we'd waited for so long.

It was, and this time we had begun work as partners; since I was less anxious than he was about the result, I too was happy. During the next six years, while he worked to develop the weapon, we were in constant danger. Not because we worked with gunpowder, but because we drew upon ourselves the envy of our enemies; because everyone waited impatiently for us to triumph or fail; and we were in danger because we, too, waited in fear for the same things.

First we wasted a winter just working at the table. We were excited, enthusiastic, but had nothing more to hand than the idea of the weapon and the obscure and formless notions that haunted us when we imagined how it would crush our enemies. Later we decided to go out in the open air and experiment with gunpowder. Just as in the weeks of preparing the fireworks display, our men mixed the compounds in proportions we prescribed, then touched them off from a safe distance while we withdrew into the cool shadows under the tall trees. Curiosity-seekers came from the four corners of Istanbul to watch the colourful smoke exploding with various levels of noise. With time the crowds made a fairground of the field where we set up our tents, our targets and the short and long-barrelled cannon we had cast. One day at the end of summer, the sultan himself appeared without warning.

We put on a display for him, rocking earth and sky with sound; one by one we displayed the cartridge cases and sh.e.l.ls we'd had prepared with well-primed gunpowder mixtures, the plans for the moulds of new guns and long-barrelled cannon not yet cast, the timed firing mechanisms that seemed to detonate by themselves. He showed more interest in me than he did in them. Hoja had wanted to keep me away from the sultan at first but when the display began and the sovereign saw that I gave the orders as often as Hoja, that our men looked to me as much as to him, he became curious.

As I was ushered into his presence for the second time after fifteen years, the sultan looked at me as if I were someone he'd met before but could not immediately place. He was like someone trying to identify a fruit he was tasting with his eyes shut. I kissed the hem of his skirt. He was not disturbed when he learned that I'd been here for twenty years but still had not become a Muslim. He had something else on his mind: 'Twenty years?' he said, 'How strange!' Then he suddenly asked me that question: 'Is it you who are teaching him all this?' He apparently hadn't asked this in order to learn my answer, for he left our tattered tent which smelled of gunpowder and saltpetre, and was walking towards his beautiful white horse when suddenly he stopped, turned towards the two of us just then standing side by side, and smiled all at once as if he'd seen one of those matchless wonders G.o.d created to break the pride of mankind, to make them sense their absurdity a perfect dwarf or twin brothers alike as peas in a pod.

That night I was thinking about the sultan, but not in the way Hoja wanted me to. He continued to speak of him with disgust, but I had realized I would not be able to feel hatred or contempt: I was charmed by his informality, his sweetness, that air of a spoiled child who said whatever came to his mind. I wanted to be like him or to be his friend. After Hoja's angry outburst I lay in my bed trying to sleep, reflecting that the sultan did not seem to be someone who deserved to be duped; I wanted to tell him everything. But what exactly was everything?

My interest didn't go unreciprocated. One day when Hoja grudgingly said that the sovereign expected me too that morning, I went with him. It was one of those autumn days that smell of the sea. We spent the whole morning by a lily-pond under the plane-trees in a great forest covered with fallen red leaves. The sultan wanted to talk about the wriggling frogs that filled the pond. Hoja wouldn't indulge him, and only repeated a few cliches devoid of imagery and colour. The sultan didn't even notice the rudeness that shocked me so much. He was more interested in me.

So I spoke at length about the mechanics of how frogs jumped, about their circulatory systems, how their hearts continued to beat for a long time if carefully removed from their bodies, about the flies and insects they ate. I asked for pen and paper to demonstrate more clearly the stages an egg underwent to become a mature frog in the pond. The sovereign watched attentively while I drew pictures with the set of reed pens brought in a silver case inlaid with rubies. He listened with obvious pleasure to the stories I remembered about frogs and when I came to the part about the princess kissing the frog he gagged and made a sour face, but still did not resemble the foolish adolescent Hoja had described; he was more like a serious-minded adult who insisted on starting each day with science and art. At the end of those serene hours that Hoja frowned his way through, the sultan looked at the pictures of frogs in his hand and said 'I had always suspected it was you who made up his stories. So you drew the pictures as well!' Then he asked me about mustachioed frogs.

This was how my relations.h.i.+p with the sultan began. Now I accompanied Hoja every time he went to the palace. In the beginning Hoja said little, I did most of the talking to the sultan. While I spoke with him about his dreams, his enthusiasms, his fears, about the past and future, I'd wonder to what degree this good-humoured, intelligent man in front of me resembled the sultan Hoja had talked about year after year. I could tell from the clever questions he asked, from his shrewdness, that ever since he'd received the books we presented to him the sultan had been speculating how much of Hoja was me, and how much of me was Hoja. As for Hoja, at that time he was too busy with the cannon and the long barrels he was trying to get cast to be interested in these speculations, which he found idiotic anyway.

Six months after we began work on the cannon Hoja was alarmed to learn that the imperial master-general of artillery was furious that we were poking our noses into these affairs, and the man demanded either to be removed from office himself or to have crazy fools like us, who brought the craft of gunnery into disrepute with our belief that we were inventing something new, run out of Istanbul. But Hoja didn't look for a compromise, even though the imperial master-general did seem willing to reach an agreement. A month later, when the sultan ordered us to develop the weapon in a way that would not involve cannon, Hoja was not terribly disturbed. We both knew now that the new guns and long-barrelled cannon we'd had cast were no better than the old sort that had been used for years.

So according to Hoja we had entered yet another new phase in which we would dream up everything anew from the beginning, but because I'd now grown used to his rages and his dreams, the only thing that was new for me was getting to know the sovereign. And the sultan enjoyed our company. Like an attentive father who separates two brothers arguing over their marbles, saying "this one is yours, and this one is yours', he disentangled us with his observations about our speech and behaviour. These observations, which I found sometimes childish and sometimes clever, started to worry me: I began to believe that my personality had split itself off from me and united with Hoja's, and vice versa, without our perceiving it, and that the sultan, by evaluating this imaginary creature, had come to know us better than we knew ourselves.

While we interpreted his dreams, or talked about the new weapon and in those days we had only our own dreams of it to struggle with the sovereign would stop suddenly and, turning to one of us, say, 'No, this is his thought, not yours.' And sometimes he'd distinguish between our actions: 'Now you are glancing around just as he does. Be yourself!' When I laughed in surprise he'd continue, 'That's better, bravo. Have you two never looked at yourselves in the mirror together?' He'd ask which of us could stand to be himself when we did look in the mirror. On one occasion he'd ordered that all those treatises, bestiaries, and calendars we'd written for him over the years be brought out, and said that when he'd first read them, he'd tried to imagine as he turned the pages one by one which of us had written which parts, and even which parts one of us had written by putting himself in the other's place. But it was that impersonator he had summoned while we attended him who really made Hoja angry, and enchanted me while utterly bewildering me as well.

This man resembled us neither in face nor form, he was short and fat, and his dress completely different, but when he began to speak I was shocked; it was as if Hoja, not he, were talking. Like Hoja, he'd lean towards the sovereign's ear as if whispering a secret, like Hoja he made his voice grow grave with a studied, thoughtful air when he discussed finer points, and suddenly, just like Hoja, he'd be swept up in the excitement of what he was saying, pa.s.sionately wave his hands and arms in order to persuade his interlocutor and be left breathless; but although he spoke with Hoja's accent he didn't describe projects related to the stars or incredible weapons, he merely enumerated the dishes he'd learned in the palace kitchen and the ingredients and spices necessary to prepare them. While the sultan smiled, the mimic continued with his impersonation, which turned Hoja's face upside-down, by listing the caravansarays between Istanbul and Aleppo one by one. Then the sultan asked the mimic to imitate me. That man who looked at me with his mouth hanging open in shock was me: I was stupefied. When the sovereign asked him to impersonate someone who was half Hoja and half me, I was totally bewitched. Watching the man's movements I felt like saying, just as the sultan had, 'This is me, and this is Hoja', but the mimic did this himself by pointing with his finger at each of us in turn. After the sultan praised the man and sent him away, he ordered us to reflect on what we'd seen.

What did he mean? That evening when I told Hoja that the sultan was a much cleverer man than the person he'd been describing to me for years, and said the sultan had found for himself the direction Hoja wanted to lead him in, Hoja flew into a rage once more. This time I felt he had cause: the mimic's art was not to be endured. Hoja said he would not set foot in the palace again unless he was forced to. He had no intention, now the opportunity he'd waited for all these years had at last come within his grasp, of humiliating himself by wasting time with those fools. Since I knew the sultan's enthusiasms and had the wit to play the buffoon, I would go to the palace in his place.

When I told the sovereign that Hoja was ill, he didn't believe me. 'Let him work on the weapon,' he said. Thus during those four years while Hoja planned and brought the weapon to completion, I went to the palace and he stayed at home with his dreams as I used to do.

In these four years I learned that life was to be enjoyed rather than merely endured. Those who saw that the sovereign esteemed me as he did Hoja soon invited me to the ceremonies and celebrations which were the daily palace fare. One day a vizier's daughter was getting married, the next day one more child was born to the sovereign, his sons' circ.u.mcisions were marked by festival, another day they celebrated the recapture of a castle from the Hungarians, then ceremonies were arranged to mark the prince's first day at school, while Ramadan and other holiday festivities began. I quickly grew fat from stuffing myself with rich meats and pilaus and gobbling down sugar lions, ostriches, mermaids and nuts at these festivities, most of which lasted for days. The greater part of my time was spent watching spectacles: wrestlers, their skin glistening with oil, struggling till they fainted, or tightrope-walkers on high-wires stretched between the minarets of mosques who juggled with the clubs they carried on their backs, crushed horseshoe nails with their teeth, and stabbed themselves with knives and skewers, or conjurors who produced snakes, doves, and monkeys from their robes, making the coffee cups in our hands and the money in our pockets disappear in the twinkling of an eye, or the shadow-plays of Karagoz and Hajivat whose obscenities I adored. At night, if there were no fireworks display, I'd follow my new friends, most of whom I'd met that same day, to one of those palaces or mansions where everyone went and after drinking raki or wine and listening to music for hours, I'd enjoy myself clinking gla.s.ses with beautiful girl dancers who imitated languorous gazelles, handsome boys who walked on water, vocalists with their burning voices who sang sensitive and joyous songs.

I'd often go to the mansions of the amba.s.sadors who were so curious about me, and after watching a ballet of girls and boys stretching their lovely limbs, or listening to the latest pretentious nonsense played by an orchestra brought from Venice, I would enjoy the benefits of my gradually increasing fame. The Europeans gathered at the emba.s.sies would ask me about the terrifying adventures I'd lived through, they wondered how much I'd suffered, how I'd endured, how I was still able to go on. I'd conceal the fact that I had pa.s.sed my whole life dozing within four walls writing silly books, and tell them incredible stories which I'd learned to extemporize, just as I did with the sultan, about this exotic land which so fascinated them. Not only the young women making their pre-nuptial appearances before their fathers, and the amba.s.sadors' wives who flirted with me, but all those dignified amba.s.sadors and officials listened full of admiration to the b.l.o.o.d.y tales of religion and violence, intrigues of love and the harem, that I invented. If they pressed me, I'd whisper one or two state secrets or describe some strange habits of the sultan no one could know of which I'd make up on the spot. When they wanted more information, I'd enjoy giving myself a secretive air; I'd act as if I couldn't say everything I knew, I'd take refuge in a silence which inflamed the curiosity of these fools Hoja wanted us to emulate. But I knew they whispered amongst themselves that I was involved in some grand and mysterious project requiring mastery of science, some design for an obscure weapon requiring a stupendous amount of money.

When I returned in the evenings from these mansions, these palaces, my mind filled with the images of the beautiful bodies I'd seen, and fogged by the vapours of the spirits I'd drunk, I would find Hoja sitting at our twenty-year-old table. He'd thrown himself into his work with an urgency I had never seen in him before, the table loaded with strange models I couldn't make sense of, drawings, pages covered with desperate scribblings. He'd ask me to recount what I'd seen and done all day, but he was soon disgusted by these pastimes which he found shameless and stupid, so he'd interrupt me and begin to describe his plan, speaking of 'us' and 'them'.

He'd repeat once again that everything was connected with the unknown inner landscape of our minds, he'd based his whole project on this, he talked excitedly about the symmetry, or the chaos, of the cupboard full of junk we call the brain, but I could not understand how this might serve as a point of departure for designing the weapon on which he'd set all his hopes, all our hopes. I doubted that anyone including him, contrary to what I'd once thought would be capable of fathoming this. He declared that one day someone would open up our heads and prove all these ideas of his. He spoke of a great truth he'd perceived during the days of the plague when we had contemplated ourselves in the mirror together: now all of it had achieved clarity in his mind, you see, the weapon had its genesis in this moment of truth! Then he would point out to me moved as I was, without understanding a bizarre, obscure, ambiguous shape on paper with the tips of his trembling fingers.

This shape, which I saw slightly more developed each time he showed it to me, seemed to remind me of something. While I looked at that black stain I will call the 'devil' of the drawing, I would be on the point of suddenly saying what it reminded me of, but suffering a moment's hesitation, or thinking my mind was playing tricks on me, I'd keep silent. All during those four years I never clearly perceived this shape he scattered over pages, giving it a sharper definition as it developed a little more each time, and which, after consuming all that effort and money acc.u.mulated over the years, he was at last able to bring to life. Sometimes I likened it to things in our daily life, sometimes to images in our dreams, once or twice to things we saw or talked about in the old days when we recounted our memories to one another, but I was unable to take the final step of clarifying the images that pa.s.sed through my mind, so I'd submit to the confusion of my thoughts, and waited in vain for the weapon itself to reveal its mystery. Even four years later, when that little stain had been transformed into a bizarre creature as tall as a grand mosque, a terrifying apparition which all Istanbul talked about and Hoja called a real machine of war, and while everyone likened it to one thing or another, I was still lost in the details of what