第 96 页

When I eagerly leafed through the thick, yellow, fragrant pages of the third volume of the edition of The Count of Monte Cristo printed in 1912 by the Bedrosyan Press, and found that chapter 52 was missing, I was filled with renewed admiration for my beloved great-grandmother and rejoiced in the knowledge that all the years I had devoted to preparing her letters for publication had been worth the effort.

The volume didn’t even carry a note to say “This chapter has been removed.” So to my mind, the promotional note at the beginning of the novel indicating that it had been translated for Abdul Hamid took on the significance of one of Sherlock Holmes’s clues. My heart raced with exhilaration.

But I did not know any of this on that day nearly sixty years before, and the only thing I could think of to say was this:

“When we were walking with Grandmother the other day, we saw Abdul Hamid’s name written in a watchmaker’s window!”

“Did you hear that, my dear?”

“Where did you see Abdul Hamid’s name?” they said, looking visibly animated.

This exchange had taken place on our last day. But to better talk about that unforgettable day, I must introduce another subject first.

Live Television. “It’s too hot outside!” Princess Pakize would say to explain why they never left the hotel. “Doctor Nuri is a little tired, anyway!”

Toward the end of the week, my great-grandfather (who would pass away eight months later) spent some time in the hotel lobby every afternoon except for their last Sunday there watching the boat races being broadcast on the black-and-white television. The races took place between two bridges in the choppy waters where the River Rhône flows into Lac Léman. The jovial spectators gathered on both bridges would watch the oarsmen battling against the powerful currents, and falling into the water when their boats capsized. When we crossed the first bridge with my grandmother Princess Melike in the mornings, we would see them too, and stop to watch.

But what was even more fun, and felt to me like a metaphysical experience, was coming off the bridge only to see the same scene being broadcast live on the television screens of the city’s coffeehouses, which were always switched on. What I wanted to do was to wave at the television cameras so that my great-grandparents could see me on their screens in real time. But I did not yet have the words to articulate this childish yearning, and in any case, even if they had understood my wish to wave at them from the television, they would not have been able to help me fulfill it. Not to mention that I really did not want to tell them that we did not yet have televisions in Arkaz.

So on that last afternoon, as I sat in their hotel room and opened my great-grandfather’s gift, my mind was on the rich and ineffable links between reality and projection.

I excitedly unwrapped the gift to discover a book (as thick as the one you are holding now), and when I lifted its cover, it turned into a children’s pop-up, transforming into a three-dimensional reproduction of Mingheria. How glorious, how lovely, how real it was! The city I had lived in all my life was laid out before me now, in carefully trimmed and exceptionally detailed rows of cardboard cutouts.

I could tell straightaway that this was not the Arkaz where I had grown up, but the city as it must have been in 1901. The new apartment blocks, concrete hotels, and “ministries” were all missing. But everything else was perfectly realistic and precisely where it should be. Yet there was some quality to this marvelous landscape, in the puffs of cloud in the sky, in the red of its roofs and the green of its trees, and in the spires of the Castle, that made you feel at once as if it were your home, and some place out of a fairy tale.

I have always carried Doctor Nuri’s beautiful present with me. I wrote the novel you are about to finish with one eye constantly on that three-dimensional fairy tale. To those who might say that this has caused my book to read too much like a fairy tale, I would like to point out my other main source of inspiration in writing this novel: the eighty-three somber, black-and-white photographs of the mostly empty streets of Arkaz, which the Queen had commissioned from the Vanyas Photo Studio at the start of September 1901, and whose influence lies at the heart of this book’s “realism.” Only when Mingheria officially became a candidate for European Union membership in 2008, and after my childhood friend Rina was named Minister for Culture, was I was finally allowed to return to the state archives whose doors had previously been closed to me.

In the hotel room, my great-grandmother gestured at her husband to look at the Castle situated on the cardboard Arkaz. Back then, the Castle—whose shadow still hangs over me today, and where the history of the city and the whole island first began—was a place I saw every day of my life, so it troubled me that I couldn’t quite understand what the Doctor and the Queen were so animatedly discussing.

When I read Princess Pakize’s letters years later, I finally understood what they had talked about that day, and what they had remembered. Princess Pakize drew her husband’s attention to Hrisopolitissa Square, to the place where Pharmacist Nikiforos had his shop, and to the spot where Bonkowski Pasha’s corpse had been found. The lodges of the Halifiye, Rifai, and Gülerenler sects, all of which I have mentioned in this book, had also been re-created in the cardboard-sculpted landscape in meticulous detail, down to the trees that grew in their gardens.

“Have you ever visited this lodge?” said the Queen, looking at me.

These places, secreted behind their walls, were of no interest to my mother, and at the time I hadn’t even been aware that they existed. I did not feel any embarrassment when I replied: “I haven’t!”

They kept talking, studying the perfectly placed reproductions of Donkey’s Bane Hill, Hamidiye Bridge, the garrison, and the Customhouse. My parents would sometimes talk to each other in a strange sort of whispered English, so that I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and I would always get upset when they did that and worry that they might be about to have another one of their fights. Seized now by that same fear of loneliness, I went to sit next to Doctor Nuri.

The Queen had placed the cardboard landscape on the coffee table in front of her husband. As they had been talking about the Splendid Palace, I pointed out that it wasn’t the best hotel on the island (my mother’s words), and that there were better hotels in Mingheria, then noted that the island’s best ice-cream parlor was the Splendid’s Rome gelateria, and told them about the little Museum of the Commander on the hotel’s second floor.

They had not heard about this museum before. They asked me many questions about it, and had me describe its small display in lengthy detail. Now that the conversation had turned to our Heroic Commander—a subject I knew very well indeed—I showed them the house where the Great Savior was born and grew up, and where the real Museum of the Commander was situated. Then I told them about all the things I had seen there.

Noticing how impressed they seemed by my knowledge of the Commander’s life, I told them about the Commander’s mausoleum, where the teacher would take our whole class on a school trip twice a year (there were checks to make sure), and which did not appear on the postcards or on the cardboard landscape. I told them that the year before, I had written a homework assignment on this tomb using the Encyclopaedia Mingheriana for reference and recited Aşkan the Elder’s poems “Oh Commander, Great Commander” and “I Am Mingherian.”

“Make sure you go to Istanbul too at the first opportunity!” said Doctor Nuri cryptically.

“Why would you say that?” said the Queen. “We mustn’t discourage our little Mingherian. She has been paying attention to her studies, and knows so many things.”

I was thrilled by this praise. It helped that we were talking about the Great Commander, the topic I knew best.

“If it hadn’t been for our Great Commander, we would still have been prisoners of the Greeks, the Turks, and maybe even the Italians!” I said. “The Commander declared Mingheria free and independent, bringing us and lifting us into the fold of civilized nations.”

“Well done!” said Princess Pakize. “Now show us where he did that!”

I suddenly felt very shy, just as I had before the blonde-haired inspector. I wasn’t even sure what the question was.

“Look over here, see? This is the balcony of the Governor’s Residence,” my great-granny said. “What did the Commander do there?”

Now that I had understood the question, I was delighted, for I knew the answer by heart.

“There were thousands of people down in the square, Mingherians of all ages, who had bravely gathered from the farthest reaches of the island!” I intoned. “The Commander told them, ‘Long live Mingheria!’”

But in my excitement, I had left out some of the Commander’s words, which were quoted in every schoolbook. “And also …,” I continued, stammering a little. “He was holding a flag of Mingheria sewn by some village girls.”

“Have some of this water, my little Mingherian!” said my great-granny. She gave me a glass of water from the coffee table, and picked up the small tablecloth beneath it, holding it like a flag. “Perhaps if we go out onto the balcony, you’ll feel the words and remember them better.”

After my great-granny kissed her little Mingherian on both cheeks, I felt relieved and contented. Of course I remembered what the Commander had said, those words I’d gone over thousands of times.

With my great-grandmother Queen Pakize still holding the flag, we went out onto the hotel room’s balcony, whose door was always left open. Filled with the same profound, unshakable conviction with which I write those same words down today, we waved our flag in the air and shouted together:

“Long live Mingheria! Long live Mingherians! Long live liberty!”

2016–2021

About the Author

Orhan Pamuk is the author of many celebrated books of fiction, nonfiction, and photography. In 2003 he won the IMPAC prize for My Name Is Red, and in 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has since been described as ‘that rare author who writes his best books after winning the Nobel Prize’ (Independent). His work has been translated into sixty-four languages.

Ekin Oklap was born in Turkey, and grew up in Italy. She translates from Turkish and Italian, and currently lives in London. As a translator, she was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

By the Same Author

ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK

Orange

The Innocence of Memories

Balkon

The Red-Haired Woman

A Strangeness in My Mind

The Innocence of Objects

Silent House

The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist

The Museum of Innocence

Other Colors

Istanbul

Snow

My Name Is Red

The New Life

The Black Book

The White Castle

Copyright

I would like to thank my historian friend Edhem Eldem, who

offered suggestions and corrections as I worked to finish the book.

First published in 2022

by Faber & Faber Limited

Bloomsbury House

74–77 Great Russell Street

London WC1B 3DA

First published in the USA in 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York

Originally published in Turkey as Veba Geceleri by Yapı Kredi

Yayınları, Istanbul, in 2021. Copyright © 2021 Orhan Pamuk

This ebook edition first published in the UK in 2022

All rights reserved

© Orhan Pamuk, 2022

English language translation © Ekin Oklap, 2022

Design by Faber

Cover photo © Donald Jean / Arcangel

The right of Orhan Pamuk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All characters, names, places and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, places or events is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978–0–571–35296–8