Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  I smiled when it dawned on me that he reminded me of myself—evasive, goofy, slightly moody, ill at ease in a crowd, uncomfortable at formal occasions. Latins look a lot like Turks: I felt he physically resembled me, and he had my oblique habit of affecting to be ignorant and a bit gauche in order to elicit information.

  "What do you mean by that?" was his frequent question, demanding that you explain what you just said.

  His mother loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.

  "She didn't like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce." He smiled. "She wasn't happy about that. But I put her in a book—My Name Is Red. Then she was happy."

  "I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy," I said. "She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! 'Thanks, Mom!'"

  Pamuk became interested. "You must have been sad about that."

  "Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she'd praised the book—I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I'm not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me."

  We were at the dinner table, being served a Turkish meal. While listening attentively to me, Pamuk was absorbing the reactions of the other people, his eyes darting.

  "Why did you make a face?" he said to the woman next to me.

  She denied she had made a face.

  "Was it because we were talking about mothers, and you are a mother?"

  "Of course not."

  "You did this," Pamuk said, and squinted and showed his teeth and compressed his face into a comic mask.

  He spoke about his years as a student, studying English, reading English books, and how as an anonymous Turk with a fluency in English he had taken Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Istanbul, pointing out the sights, explaining the history.

  "I showed them the city. I was the translator. I was next to them, helping, listening. They had no idea who I was, but they were great writers to me."

  Talk of Arthur Miller turned to talk of Marilyn Monroe. I said that I had written an essay about the Sotheby auction of Marilyn's personal effects.

  "Expensive things?" Pamuk asked.

  "Everything—dresses, books, shoes, broken mirrors, her capri pants, a copy of The Joy of Cooking with her scribbles in it, her wobbly dressing table, her junk jewelry. She had a yellow pad of paper and, in her writing, the words 'He doesn't love me.' A cigarette lighter that Frank Sinatra had given her. Also her 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress. And her toaster."

  Pamuk was delighted by the inventory. He said, "I love catalogues of people's lives. Did you see the auction of Jackie Kennedy's possessions?"

  "Yes, but no toasters in that one."

  He said he loved minutiae, the revelation in everyday objects. Not the treasures but the yard-sale items, always more telling. It was a novelist's passion, a need to know secrets, to intrude—without seeming to—on other people's lives.

  Still eating, he sized me up and said, "You went swimming with Yashar Kemal."

  "That's right—thirty-three years ago."

  "He is away, in south Anatolia," the host said, because I had also asked how I might get in touch with him. "He is sorry to miss you. He remembered you from that time long ago."

  It seemed to me amazing that he was alive and writing, at the age of eighty-two, this man who'd boasted of his Gypsy blood and his upbringing in the wild hinterland of Turkey among bandits and peasants. He had been inspired by Faulkner, another writer who boasted of being a rustic. But Pamuk was a metropolitan, a man on the frontier as all writers are, but essentially a city dweller.

  "I read your book about South America," Pamuk said. "I liked the part about Argentina, especially Borges."

  Pamuk had much in common with Borges, not just his writing but his personality—an inwardness, a gift for the magical in his prose, wide and even arcane learning combined with a sense of comedy. Borges had been very funny in conversation, and often self-mocking, pretending to jeer at his own writing, insincerely remarking on how short his stories were—"and probably full of howlers!" as he said to me of "The Wall and the Books," his Chinese story.

  The most endearing trait that Pamuk and Borges shared was a passion for the cities of their birth. Throughout Borges's writing is a nuanced history of Buenos Aires, and Borges would have nodded in agreement at Pamuk's judgment of a life in Istanbul, because it was so similar to that of a Buenos Aires person, a porteño: "When Istanbullus grow a bit older and feel their fates intertwining with that of the city, they come to welcome the cloak of melancholy that brings their lives a contentment, an emotional depth, that almost looks like happiness. Until then they rage against their fate."

  In his writing, Borges extolled the violence, the music, the steamy secrets of Buenos Aires while at the same time bemoaning its philistinisms and pomposities and backward-looking conceits. Pamuk, it seemed to me, was no different.

  "You read to him," Pamuk said. "That was nice."

  "He enjoyed being read to. He had a little glimmer of eyesight—I mean, he signed a book for me—but he couldn't read."

  "Did he do this?" Pamuk shut his eyes and threw his head back in an imitation of Stevie Wonder lost in a rapture of appreciation, grinning and shaking his head. It was a sudden and unexpected turn. Everyone laughed.

  "You're wicked," I said.

  "What do you mean by that?"

  I said, "He didn't wag his head. He sat there and often finished the sentences in the stories. He seemed to know most of them by heart."

  "Which stories? What did you read?"

  "Kipling. He liked Plain Tales from the Hills. 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows'—about opium smoking. 'Beyond the Pale'—a doomed love affair. Borges was a connoisseur of unrequited love."

  "What else?"

  "Parts of the Arabian Nights in the Burton translation. He owned a first edition, about twenty volumes."

  "Some of it is sexy. You read him those parts too, eh?"

  Querying, mocking, needling, teasing, then all at once attentive. Pamuk approached a subject like a city dweller, darting up this alley and down that street, and then he was at an upstairs window calling down, raising a laugh, before his confrontation with a direct question. He also had a writer's gift for risking the sort of overfrank childish questions that can be disarming.

  Talk of Borges and love led him to speak candidly about his father's mysterious other life and the loud battles between his father and mother: the turbulent household—evasive husband, agitated wife.

  A woman sitting next to Pamuk said, "My mother once bumped into my father when he was with his mistress."

  "That's a nightmare," I said.

  "Good answer!" Pamuk said, smirking at me.

  His indirection, the manner of his teasing, his posturing and prodding, finishing with a trenchant remark, was proof of Pamuk's seriousness. I thought of how all writers, when they are alone, talk to themselves. "When the inner history of any writer's mind is written," V. S. Pritchett once said, "we find (I believe) that there is a break at some point in his life. At some point he splits off from the people who surround him and he discovers the necessity of talking to himself and not to them."

  In Istanbul it is possible to observe this process taking place in Pamuk's restless mind, his discovering that his inner life is unknown to his family, his relief in talking to himself. He finds solace away from his family, in solitary walks and mumbling meditation, because, among others things—as a portrait of a city, about growing up in a conflicted family, the joy of reading, famous visitors, a love of solitude, the melancholy of an ancient place—the book is about how he abandoned all other ambitions to become a writer, or more than a writer.

  He was in the news. This reclusive man seemed an unlikely hero, but a few months earlier he had been in court
as the defendant in one of those national trials that is like a morality play, a lion being judged by donkeys. Around that time he wrote in The New Yorker, "Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, its saints, and policemen at every opportunity, but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and prisons, I cannot say that I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last 'a real Turkish writer.' "

  Outsiders complain that Turkey is repressive. Turks complain too. Every shade of Islamic opinion is present in Turkish society, ranging from the most benign to the most fanatical, and every shade of secular opin ion as well. This, I think, is the reason every visitor to Turkey finds something to like in the country and always finds a Turk to agree with.

  The odd but probably provable fact is that repression often has a salutary effect on writers, strengthening them by challenging them, making them resist, making their voices important, for at their best, writers are rebellious, and repression is the whetstone that keeps them sharp, even if the repression makes their lives miserable. A free country cannot guarantee great writing, and a public intellectual (albeit a reluctant one) like Pamuk hardly exists in Britain and the United States.

  Pamuk's crime was his mentioning to a Swiss journalist that "a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it." This remark resulted in death threats, newspaper attacks, vilification, and a criminal charge of insulting the state. At his trial Pamuk faced a possible three-year sentence if he was found guilty, but the case was dropped. He was set free. He'd made his bones as a Turkish writer and he disappeared—Istanbul has that big-city quality of being a place in which you can vanish without a trace.

  Pamuk does agree to be interviewed now and then. His voice is distinctive, his manner inimitable. Here is his response to a woman from a British paper badgering him on the subject of free speech in Turkey: "Look," he said to her, "I never had any trouble writing novels. I talked about this with my publisher when we were publishing Snow, which was my own explicitly political novel—but then nothing happened to it. The only time I had trouble, I had trouble because of interviews, madam." Then he waggled his finger at the woman and laughed.

  He was waggling his finger now, at this dinner party, indicating one person, then another. "What do you mean by that?" "Why are you smiling?" "I find that ridiculous"

  "How did you get to Turkey?" he asked me. "Someone said, what, you took a train?"

  "Train from London. Well, four of them. Via Romania."

  When Pamuk made a face he looked years younger, indeed like a disgusted child, his glasses shifting on his wrinkled nose.

  "I was in Romania," he said. "A writers' conference, but on a boat—a sort of cruise. A whole week just sailing around with other writers."

  "It sounds awful."

  "Good answer!"

  He smiled at the news that I had glided in from Bulgaria, through the boondocks of Turkey, habituating myself, and was planning to glide east again in a few days, to Ankara and Trabzon and Hopa to Georgia.

  He said, "I have read your book about Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow"

  "What do you think?"

  "A very affectionate book."

  "That's true, but not many people saw it."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know. Maybe quarrels are more interesting. People said it was cruel. I'd say unsparing. The quarrelsome part of it was played up as a writers' feud. But Naipaul was an important figure in my writing life."

  "How can we know what he thought of the book."

  "No way of telling. He's not talking."

  "I can't believe he didn't read it."

  "I don't think he did. His wife did, though, I'm sure of that."

  "The wife was part of your problem," Pamuk said. "Second wife, yes?"

  "Right"

  Pamuk leaned over and looked across the top of his glasses and said, "Am I a good reader of Paul Theroux?"

  "Very astute."

  "And wasn't there another woman?"

  "Naipaul's mistress of twenty-three years. He ditched her after his wife died and married a woman he had just met in Pakistan. It's a strange tale."

  "Maybe not so strange," Pamuk said.

  We talked about writers' lovers and pieced together the odd love life of Graham Greene, who remained married to a woman he had not cohabited with for sixty years or more, while chasing women and suffering through three or four grand passions, all of them with married women. His last affair was like a marriage. The woman visited him at his apartment every noontime and prepared his lunch, after which they made love. Then they had a drink, and at nightfall the woman returned home to her husband. This went on for years. The husband knew about it, but his wife said something like "Don't make me choose."

  Pamuk said, "It sounds perfect."

  "After Greene died, the woman divorced her husband."

  "Ah." Pamuk looked happy, contemplating the complexity of this.

  Over dessert, the other guests who were writers talked about the bur den of being a Turkish writer abroad. Westerners whose knowledge of Turkey was limited to Midnight Express and döner kebabs would challenge them, saying, What about the Armenians? What about the Kurds? How come you torture people?

  A writer named Yusof said that he had been an admirer of the Anglophile critic George Steiner.

  "I was in London," Yusof said. "I had five books I wanted George Steiner to sign. I went to one of his lectures, and afterwards he took a seat at a table to sign people's books. He signed two of mine and said, 'Where do you come from?' I told him Turkey. He pushed the rest of my books away—he wouldn't sign them. He said, 'Go home and take care of your people.' He meant the Kurds."

  On my way back to the hotel, it occurred to me that though the United States had supported the Kurds, tolerating Kurdish terrorism in both Turkey and Iraq, and were still fighting a war in Iraq, no Turk had blamed me for this slaughter, or even raised the matter with me.

  ***

  THE OTHER WRITER I HAD wished to meet in Istanbul was Elif Shafak. We met at the Ciragan Palas, on another rainy day. She was so beautiful I forgot her books, writing seemed irrelevant, I was bewitched. I was reminded of the Kipling line "Much that is written about Oriental passion and impulsiveness is exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true," and Elif Shafak seemed the embodiment of it. She was about thirty, with gray-blue eyes and the face of a brilliant child, which is also the pedomorphic face of a Renaissance Madonna, framed by wisps of light hair. All over her hands and fingers were thin silver chains, looped and dangling, attached to a mass of silver rings, as though she'd just escaped from a harem.

  I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying, so distracted was I by her loveliness. But her passion and impulsiveness were unmistakable, and I reminded myself that she had written five highly praised novels.

  Unlike most other Turkish writers, she was cosmopolitan. She had either taught or studied, or both, in universities in Michigan and Arizona and at Mount Holyoke. Her mother had been a Turkish diplomat, so she had lived in many capital cities. Her father had vanished from her life; she was aware of his being present in Istanbul but never saw him. This absent father was the subject of her new novel, Baba and the Bastard, which was kept hidden in many Istanbul bookstores because of its racy title.

  "Shafak" was an invented surname, the word meaning aurora or dawn in Turkish. The name suited her, since she glowed with life, and dawn in Asia does not come by degrees, the sky slowly lightening, but is like something switched on, filling the new day with a sudden brightness that seems complete. Elif Shafak had that radiance.

  She was also unexpectedly combative—you don't expect such fight in a beauty, but it was attractive as, jingling the chains and silver filigree on her hands, she denounced various Turkish attitudes.

  "Turkey has amnesia," she said. "Turks are indifferent to the past, to old words, to old customs."


  "I thought that Turkish reformers were generally a good thing."

  "No, they erased a lot that we need to know," she said. "The Kemalists and the reformers changed the culture. They threw away old words, they got rid of foreign words. But these words are part of who we are. We need to know them."

  I was transfixed by her eyes, by her slender fingers, a silver chain swinging from a ring on each finger.

  "We need to know about the Armenians," she said.

  "You say these things in public?" I asked.

  "Yes, though it's hard, especially for a woman here."

  "I'm interested that you have public intellectuals, speaking their mind. Most countries don't have them."

  "We have many. We fight and disagree all the time."

  "How do you get on in the United States?"

  "I like it, but I had to start all over there. I am someone here. There, I am no one."

  She talked about her studies in Sufi literature and culture, not the dervishes of Istanbul but the cults and practitioners in remotest Turkey. I offered her my memory of Sufis dancing at sunset at a mosque in Omdurman, in Sudan, one of the most dramatic encounters I'd had on my Dark Star Safari through Africa. Mine had been a happy accident, hers were both vivid and cerebral; Sufism was a study for her. I was nonetheless distracted—her beauty was like a curse that prevented me from understanding the nuances of what she was saying. Still, I felt that meeting Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, I was looking at the future of Turkish literature.*

  * Later that year, Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in literature.

  In a casual conversation with a Turkish scholar I mentioned how impressed I was with the work of writers like Pamuk and Shafak. And there were many others who'd not been translated. How to explain this literary excellence?