A CONVERSATION WITH ORHAN PAMUK

1.
Last December—three days before he went on trial for 'publicly denigrating Turkishness'—I interviewed Orhan Pamuk. It was not and could never have been the usual sort of exchange, because we speak often: over the past three years, I have translated three of his books. We have known each other a lot longer than that. I grew up in Istanbul, on the campus of what was then Robert College and is now called Bogazici University; my father still teaches there. Pamuk attended Robert Academy, which in those days was on the same campus; I went to the sister school on the neighbouring hill. So the Istanbul that Pamuk describes in his books is the lost city of our youth.

We met at two in the afternoon in the apartment he has used as his office for the past ten years. It is located in Cihangir, on Susam Sokak, which means Sesame Street. Like all the other places where Pamuk spends his days, it is a temple to the book. In the middle of the front room there was a large desk piled high with them. Bookshelves lined the walls from ceiling to floor. There was one armchair between the desk and the window, another in the far corner, next to the large plateglass window; both were positioned so that the occupant could raise his eyes from the book to take in the sweeping view.

To the right was the Golden Horn, the silhouette of the old city and the humpbacked contours of the Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara. Were it not for the derelict apartments to the right, we would also have been able to see the first Bosphorus bridge. Directly ahead of us there was a mosque with two minarets and a dome crowned by a crescent. Between the minarets we could see the sprawling city on the Asian shore. Halfway across the Bosphorus, flecked as always with boats and ships of all sizes, were the dry docks that marked the path of the tunnel soon to link the two shores.

As I looked through the mosque's two minarets, Pamuk told me how, when the mosque was lit up for evening prayers during the month of Ramadan, he could see right through its beautiful large arched windows to the sea. The haze rising from the Bosphorus gave it the dreamlike beauty of my memories. But this was my first day back in Istanbul, and on such days I always looked for what was new in the view. When I told him so, Pamuk pointed over at the Asian shore, where a gigantic Turkish flag flapped at the top of the tallest flagpole I had ever seen.
There was a cloud hanging over Pamuk that day. From the outside, the case against him made no sense at all. Inside Turkey, it was fraught with significance. Even the date—December 16, 2005—had an ominous resonance to some: Pamuk's trial had been scheduled to begin exactly a year after the EU agreed to set a date for accession talks for Turkey, and on the day that Britain, Turkey's strongest friend in Europe, handed over the EU presidency to Austria, Turkey's most vocal opponent.

Why would Turkey want to play into its enemies' hands? Most European observers thought it must have something to do with Islam. Though Turkey's ruling party was officially pro-Europe, it was also overtly Islamist. Did this strange action against Pamuk signal a turn to the East?
This was not the question people were asking in Turkey. For them this was a struggle between what some call 'tutelary democracy' (in which the army holds the reins, stepping in whenever it sees 'the nation' straying from the righteous path) and something more in line with the social democracies of Europe.

It looked as if the democratizers were winning. The death penalty had been abolished. Some cultural rights had been accorded to Kurds. Turkey's old penal code (based on Mussolini's and designed to curb free expression of views deemed dangerous to the state) was to be replaced with a new code reflecting European norms. The EU was funding initiatives to teach judges and policemen what to do if they could not resort to torture, and the army seemed willing to lessen its role in politics. With the new freedoms had come an opening up of the public space, as previously silenced minorities began for the first time to participate in national debates. The burning question was not whether Turkey should face East or West, but whether it was now mature enough to allow for more diversity of opinion, stable enough to tolerate cultural difference—and confident enough to face up to its historical ghosts.

We in Europe like to shiver at the memory of the Siege of Vienna. Had the Habsburgs not been able to beat back the Ottoman army, would all of Europe have fallen into Muslim hands? In Turkey, they shiver at the memory of the Treaty of Sevres, when the victors of the First World War parcelled out what was left of the Ottoman Empire among themselves. Had Atatuerk not risen from the ashes to drive them out of Anatolia, might Turkey have become a European colony?

All countries beginning negotiations with the EU have seen a rise in anti-European and/or nationalist sentiment. In Turkey last year, the matter was complicated by the referenda in France and Holland and the rise of anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim sentiment in the same countries. It was further compounded by more general fears and anxieties about modernization, especially in the more traditional parts of Anatolia—which Pamuk himself explored in his novels The New Life and Snow, and which he has called the 'Dostoevskian feelings of love and hate towards the West'.

But Turkey has a well-established Western-educated intelligentsia that, far from being cut off from the West, is fully conversant with European debates on Turkey. They were aware of the other obstacles that stood in Turkey's way: the Kurdish issue, the Cyprus issue, human rights abuses and Turkey's continuing refusal to accept that what happened to Anatolia's Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide. By last year it seemed clear to some of them that Turkey was never going to get into Europe unless the taboo against discussing the fate of the Ottoman Armenians was resolved or debated with dignity.

A group of Turkish scholars, some in US and European universities, and others in Turkey's more westward-looking universities, had already decided that the time had come to hold a conference in Turkey that might bring to an end the ban on open public discussion of the issue. The conference was to have been held at Bogazici University. Though it is now owned and run by the Turkish state, it was for its first hundred years an American-owned institution providing tuition in English for the city's elites. It has long been a stronghold of secularism. Since the founding of the Republic in 1923, its graduates have played a key role in building bridges between Turkey and the West. Those behind the Armenian conference may have seen themselves in the same light. Even at Bogazici, the questions that gave rise to the conference were still hugely divisive. But at least people were talking about it. Fiery though their arguments were, they were doing what people in a secular democracy are meant to do.

Enter Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most celebrated novelist. Born in 1952, he has dominated the literary scene in Turkey for the past twenty-five years. But it was only with the publication of his third novel, The White Castle, in 1990 that he became available in English. It attracted a small but dedicated following that grew with the publication of The Black Book in 1995 and The New Life in 1997. In 2003 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his sixth novel, My Name is Red. Though he had by then won several prestigious European prizes, it was this book that won him a place in the literary pantheon. His two most recent books, Snow and Istanbul: Memories of a City, have confirmed that place and brought him admiring readers throughout the world.

But the better he has done in the outside world, the more controversial he has become at home. This is partly due to a powerful ambivalence about Turks who do well in the West, but also due to Pamuk's controversial and widely covered views on human rights, the Kurds and Turkey's power elites. His high profile in Europe and the United States meant that he could sometimes say things that might land a lesser-known writer in deep trouble. But whenever he was interviewed in the West, journalists were inclined to dramatize the political context, especially after 9/11. Sooner or later, these pieces would end up in rather dubious translations in the Turkish media. The increasingly nationalist right-wing press would go on to quote from them out of context and accuse him of making Turkey look bad abroad. It was in their interest, too, to present Pamuk as an anomaly and a lone voice. This was hardly true: as Pamuk himself had pointed out on numerous occasions, there was a long tradition of dissent in Turkey—a tradition for which many writers, journalists and scholars have had to pay with lengthy prison sentences, and sometimes even death.

But in recent years, there had been a gradual easing of sanctions and many in the intelligentsia had seized the moment. It was in the same spirit that Pamuk made his infamous remark to a Swiss journalist who interviewed him in Istanbul in February last year. The conversation turned to Turkey's EU bid and its attitude to freedom of expression. Knowing that there was soon to be a conference on the Ottoman Armenians, he remarked that 'thirty-thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands' and went on to suggest that the time had come to break the silence.

Either this was the last straw for Turkey's nationalists—a looseknit coalition dominated by old-guard secularists but also drawing support from fringe Islamist groups, the far left and the fascist right— or it was the opportunity they had been waiting for. Their supporters in the nationalist press went mad the next day, with some columnists going so far as to brand Pamuk a traitor and to invite 'civil society' to take steps to silence him. This translated into death threats that may or may not have been linked to fascist-nationalist paramilitaries. During this time Pamuk stayed abroad for a few months, returning from New York when the hate campaign seemed to be dying down. Then, last summer, he was called in for questioning by two public prosecutors. One decided that there was no case to be made, and the other charged him under Article 301 of the new penal code for 'publicly denigrating Turkish identity'.

The news caused a furore in Europe, and it quickly became clear that it had done huge and perhaps irreparable damage to Turkey's dreams of joining the EU. This was just as the nationalist lawyers and prosecutors behind the prosecution had hoped. Though the tabloid press and its nameless, faceless sponsors scared many of his potential allies into silence, the nationalists had a less pronounced effect on public opinion. The majority of Turks still wanted the country in the EU. Moderate voices still insisted that EU membership was the only rational way forward. But as the debate raged on, so too did the hate campaign against Pamuk. Running in parallel were other vicious campaigns against the organizers of the Armenian conference, which finally took place last September after several efforts on the part of the judiciary to shut it down. Perhaps because its organizers opened up public discussion of the Armenian question, they too were subjected to hate mail, death threats and a disinformation campaign. Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist who had played a role in the conference, was also tried under Article 301; shortly after he was given a suspended sentence, five other journalists who'd written columns criticizing the courts for trying to close down the conference were charged under the same article for insulting the judiciary. By then several publishers and scholars had also been charged for insulting the state, or the army, or Turkishness itself. According to some sources, the overall tally of Article 301 cases was more than sixty.

2.
This was the state of play, then, when I walked into Pamuk's office on December 13, 2005. My first question was how it had affected his work. In this atmosphere, how could he write?
Pamuk: Unfortunately, I have hardly been able to write for the last three months. I am still trying. I am extra-pressing myself. I have even set a deadline to finish my novel. But I know my imagination. I need certain things to write with some pleasure and intensity. If we leave aside paper and fountain pen, tea and coffee, what I need most is a certain irresponsibility. It is essential for writing fiction, at least for me: I need a playful irresponsibility, to twist everything in life, to turn situations around, to look for childish irony in the gravest drama, to organize the subtle ambiguities from which fiction arises. But now, I'm expected to be clarifying, clarifying, clarifying my statements. This lost spirit of irresponsibility—this childish freedom—is what I'm hoping to gain back. Because the more this affair grows, the greater the social responsibility that I have to face, and it is suffocating. I really want to do the right thing, to be seen to do the right thing. No author wants to lose the respect, the interest or the love of the nation. Especially when the nation in question is so troubled with its self-image.

This is a central problem for me, something I care deeply about. That's why I always try to clarify, clarify, clarify. And why I fight back when they spread disinformation and lies about me, hoping to damage my reputation here. I always make it clear that what I am criticizing are these laws that prohibit freedom of expression—and the culture that tolerates them, that allows this suppression to continue. The tabloids have the power to manipulate things in such a way that the man in the street may hate you.

But the whole affair is not as bad as it was. It has mellowed so much. Perhaps many of us now realize that the real issue here is tolerance, freedom of expression.

Freely: How do you hold your own in such a climate?

Last spring, when I was in New York, in order not to be sucked in by this, I imposed an ultra-discipline. I would wake up early so I'd be more disciplined and focused on what I'm doing. Here I have an office, and a home, and every day I wake up early and try to write for three, four hours, where no one can reach me, and first do something, write something, for the novel I'm trying to finish. In my view most authors do not write to reflect reality but to invent a second world with a complicated set of rules—the more complicated the better. Though this second world is derived from the first, it is somehow more meaningful, more satisfying, than the real world. If I can accomplish that—if I can visit this imaginary second world and write a few paragraphs, I feel so much self-respect, and so much happier. Just like a child who has played with his toys and exhausted his imagination. If I have been in this imaginary world for a while, if I have enjoyed this happiness, then I can take anything. But if I can't do that, then the void is filled by all the little daily worries of this event, which never finish.

The real punishment will not be the trial or whatever will come of it, but this court case, the dramatization of all this. What I have been through over the last three months has made me forget this second world, and my responsibility to it, so to speak. I am grateful for the international attention, and the backing of the liberal-leftist intellectuals here. It definitely makes me protected. But on the other hand, I feel that I have to answer this attention. One feels obliged. And that affects your imagination. And slowly this responsibility may convert you into a political commentator, or an activist, or a person with strong ideas. I'm not like that and I don't want to be a person who cares about ideas more than life.

So you've been forced into the shoes of a diplomat?

That is the last thing I wanted. But I don't want to misrepresent the nation. I don't want this trial to give an excuse to the conservatives in Europe for not taking Turkey in to the EU, for example. More than anything else this hurts and worries me.

Reading about you in the European press, it's easy to have the impression that you are the only pro-European in Turkey.

In the polls sixty-five per cent of the nation is still for the EU. I take every opportunity to emphasize that I am not the only one here. In interviews and articles I always refer to friends, always making clear I am not alone, that there is solidarity in the opposition among intellectuals, radicals, writers...all these people who have been harassed over the last thirty years. They are not represented in the Turkish media, and unfortunately not in the international media either. I always make sure to mention this—to refer to this tradition of resisting the state.

I know that you never set out to become involved in politics. How did it happen?

As a teenager, I was interested in leftist ideas. Leftism was very prestigious then, and also meant modernity, secularism and democracy. I read all the books. But then I was, as they would say, an 'apartment boy'. Now we all live in apartments, but in my childhood the apartment was a novelty, a Western, modern thing. The other word was 'pudding boy', which means a boy who will not be brave and strong and love his sword and fight through the streets or wherever. I preferred reading Faulkner or Virginia Woolf to politics. Even when I was seventeen or eighteen, I could see that politics, the more radical it was, the more communitarian it seemed. You had to belong to a community. So if you were a leftist, if you were serious, then you had to join these various Marxist, leftist factions. Which was not the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I always said, I will write novels, and postpone that. Or hide myself.

I had good Marxist friends who would come to my house and see lots of books. This won me some respect, but after a while a sort of a resentment, too. Probably they thought that a book-reading person like me who was not interested in politics was wasting his talents, even dishonouring his culture, if he was not serving the cause or the nation. In most people's eyes, art was a minor thing. Naive, proud sentiments like this are, I believe, quite typical in poor countries. But for me, Turkey with its Ottoman legacy was not just a poor country. I felt it was much more complicated and troubled precisely because of its simplistic cultural outlook.

In Turkey at the time, it was commonly thought that if you were not serving a cause, or a community, you would perhaps end up making a lot of money, for example in advertising. There are no Philip Larkin-types being librarians here. You cannot sustain your life... You have to go into advertising or some other profession. But I didn't go into advertising. So eventually I gained respect for being committed to writing novels—even during those years when I was not being published even in Turkey.

I shouldn't have had anything to do with politics. But then there was the war that the Turkish state waged against the Kurdish separatist guerrillas. The state wanted to hush freedom of speech, they thought it would serve them better if we had a quiet country.

After The New Life, which came out in Turkey in 1994, people began to ask me to do things. I did not know why the book was so popular; The New Life is my most experimental and poetic book, I would say. Perhaps it tapped into national sentiments, the anxieties of losing tradition and impatience with Westernization and modernity. Anyway, it was selling a record number of copies, so some good people I trust and admire began to ask, would I come here, would I sign this petition, would I come to this meeting to defend this magazine or that person who was in trouble... I think the dramatic moment that everyone remembers took place after a Kurdish newspaper was bombed during the war with the separatist guerrillas. Many of us went out to Beyoglu, the centre of the Westernized city, a la Jean-Paul Sartre, and distributed newspapers there. I was on television with all the others, doing something unexpected for the first time. That was the beginning of my political persona.

Once I'd done that, the establishment, the nationalist media, denounced me as a sort of enemy. This was the beginning of the character-killing campaign. Of course this gets personal, and you get angry. And you gain lots of personal enemies, eternally jealous men full of resentment. It continued from that day to today.

3.
Throughout Pamuk's ordeal, I had been working on a retranslation of The Black Book. This was the novel in which he broke with the nineteenth-century realism that most Turkish novelists still espoused; it was also, according to many of his literary admirers, the book in which he found his voice. Set in Istanbul in 1980, nine months before the most brutal coup in Turkey's recent history, it follows a young husband as he combs the city for his missing wife, whom he suspects of having gone into hiding with a relation who also happens to be Turkey's most celebrated and controversial columnist. (Daily columnists exert an unusually powerful influence on public opinion in Turkey; in Pamuk's words, they are 'professors of everything'.) Following the husband-narrator are various shadowy figures who harbour personal and political grievances against the columnist and seem to want him dead.

Despite the darkness of the plot and its ominous echoes, I'd found great comfort in The Black Book. Much of it takes place in the streets of old Istanbul; I'd walked these streets myself as a child with my father, when he was writing his first guide to the city. I had so much enjoyed revisiting these streets with Galip, the book's hero. Every day, when I had translated my quota and gone back online to face the sea of emails that campaigns for unjustly prosecuted writers inevitably entail, I'd wonder how long it had been since Pamuk had been able to walk these streets in peace, or even imagine them.

This was why I found it particularly appealing when Pamuk suggested that instead of staying inside all afternoon, surrounded by phones and computers, we follow Galip's steps through the old city and see how much had changed in the twenty-five years since he'd walked these streets.
We headed towards what I still think of as the 'old city' and what the Turks call the Historic Peninsula. This was where the Byzantine Empire built their great monuments and where the Ottomans, after they took the city in 1453, built theirs. From the hills of Beyoglu, its famous silhouette recalled both empires: on the tip on the peninsula, where the Bosphorus merged with the Golden Horn, we could see the buildings and gardens of Topkapi Palace spilling down to the Byzantine city walls. Rising above the hills to their right were the domes and minarets of Haghia Eirene, Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the New Mosque and (most magnificent of all) Sueleymaniye.

But as our taxi crossed the Galata Bridge, the grand contours of history gave way to surging crowds and narrow, tangled streets that— though modernized and concretized and pedestrianized—still sparkle with the lost objects and forgotten details of other ages. In a neighbourhood called Babiali—Istanbul's Fleet Street until about ten years ago—Pamuk pointed out the building where his uncle once worked as editor of Hayat, Turkey's most popular magazine in the 1950s and 1960s. Many details from that lost age—the minutiae of newspaper production and the secret codes of Istanbul's feuilletonistes— went into The Black Book.
In Beyazid Square, he pointed out the locations of various famous bombings. Most dated back to the late 1970s, when Istanbul University was a war zone and there were almost daily pitched battles between rightist and leftist students. Walking through the flea market that now dominated the square—this being the centre of the booming 'suitcase trade' with the former Eastern Bloc—we headed for Sahaflar, the old second-hand book market just next to the entrance to the Covered Bazaar. This, too, had become more touristic.

'I used to spend so much time here,' Pamuk said. 'I'd come here with my mother's car, and park it around Sueleymaniye Mosque, and I bought so much. I remember buying the entire Encyclopaedia of Islamand carrying it to the car...'

We stepped into a small bookshop, where the bookseller greeted him warmly. He showed us a set of a Turkish magazine from the 1930s called Seven Days, the complete works of Walter Scott and a huge nineteenth-century treatise on the construction of tramways. In the quiet, dusty room, the noise of the city seemed far away. Thanking the bookseller for his trouble, we moved on to a stall where they were selling what I took to be bad reproductions of miniatures.
'These things are fakes,' Pamuk said. 'But they're strangely beautiful and original fakes. I was curious to find out how they were made. I had a long and friendly conversation with some of their makers. I thought of writing a scholarly article about their art, because they have unselfconsciously invented a genre. These artists— and they have to be called artists—have realized that when they did accurate copies, the tourists weren't buying them. Miniatures lack perspective and though a picture without perspective is pleasing for the Westernized, it is also in ways disturbing. So they decided to add something to make it more appealing to Westerners. They found a sort of Dadaist solution. They took the old European engravings of Istanbul—which were based on watercolour landscapes by artists like Keith Melling—and combined them with miniatures. So what we have is an inspired collage of engraving and miniature, done with photocopying and colouring. A sort of postmodern cut-and-paste.'

'Look at this one,' he said, pointing at a scene from old Istanbul. 'Ferries like this only came to Istanbul in the 1950s... Details from the recent past are combined with Western images of the Ottoman past and Ottoman miniatures. These bookshops had been fading away, but now they are selling souvenirs for tourists and doing a good business. The sad thing, perhaps, is that they are doing so as replicas of themselves.'

As we continued through the market, he pointed out a bookshop that was once run by a famous sheikh. This was where an old and peaceable Sufi society would once hold its discreet gatherings. 'I mentioned this in The Black Book,' Pamuk said. 'His name is still on the door, I think. He was a great bookseller, but when I was a teenager, I'd go in and ask, do you have such and such a book? And they would not have the book I was looking for.'

We went into one last bookshop, where most of the books were foreign translations. He almost bought one. But his rule was only to buy a book if he went home and couldn't stop thinking about it.

As we headed out of the market, a man standing next to an archway asked Pamuk if he was from Iran. 'We're Turks, brother,' Pamuk replied. Pointing at the archway, he added, 'Look at that crack. No one's repairing these things.'

We walked past the building where he studied journalism in his twenties. 'But I never attended. At that time in Turkey you could have a university diploma even if you didn't attend the school but just took the examination. I was busy at home writing my first novel, which took me four years to write and another four to publish.' Pointing at the gate through which students swarmed in and out (quite a few of them doing a double-take when they recognized him). he added, 'The real improvement is that this gate is now open. In my time they had only one gate open so that the police and security could control everything. There was so much political violence among the students.'

We had now arrived at a street where they sold kitchenware. Pamuk pointed out a shop nearby that sold police uniforms. 'There is so much more variety now,' he said. 'There was so little when I was a child, but your eye picked up certain things and enjoyed them. But now, with this flourishing of production, objects of your childhood disappear and you are a bit sad, a bit nostalgic, and you don't feel you belong here. I think each generation is defined by the objects around it. This feeling that we all had the same things! We were living in a detached national culture, unified ideologically, but protected by the state. There was no international infiltration. I'm not referring to books and art and ideology here but to objects. If none are allowed, then your eye gets adjusted. Now, for me, nostalgia is nostalgia for those objects. To be surrounded by those objects is a comfort. And the world is more like a home. The objects to which you are attached are still all around you. The galaxy of objects is your home more than the spaces in which they sit. If you lose them, the feeling of being at home is also lost.

'But there is a second consolation. Objects may leave, objects may change, but they may just come together in particular ways, traditional ways and styles which still carry the memories in a strange way.' He waved his arms, to indicate that it was happening in this very street.
We walked into the courtyard of Sueleymaniye Mosque, where the call to prayer was blasting from all minarets. After buying six pink spinning tops from five small boys, we left the courtyard to walk past the Sueleymaniye Library, down a well-preserved street much used, Pamuk said, in historical films, and from there into a more ramshackle neighbourhood.

We stopped to look at old houses that had rods running vertically to keep them from collapsing in an earthquake. And restored houses rebuilt around concrete shells. We passed two infamous student hostels—in the 1970s, one had been taken over by rightists and the other by leftists. Gunfire had followed. After passing another beautiful Sinan mosque (Sehzade Cami) and losing our way, and finding a path leading us back to it at the far end of a car park, we arrived at Vefa Bozacisi, where Atatuerk had once come to drink its famous fermented-millet drink, and where his glass had stood thereafter on a tiny red velvet throne inside a glass case on the wall.
Before we went in, we stopped to buy a bag of chickpeas. It was, he said, unthinkable to drink bozawithout first speckling it with chickpeas. 'You don't have to drink it if you don't like it, as my mother used to say. Do you like it?'

I liked it. It was smooth and thick and nutty, with a slight kick to it—familiar enough to make me wonder if I'd tasted (and forgotten) it as a child. There was a small amount of alcohol in boza, Pamuk told me, which might explain why it had been so popular in Ottoman times. 'The Ottomans pretended that twenty bottles was equivalent to half a glass of wine. This meant they could say it did not really count as alcohol.' But for him it seemed to be the wrong time of day for drinking boza. 'I like to have it at night, after dinner. That's what I'm used to. Do you want another one?'

Before I could answer, a man who had just settled down at the next table with three female relatives, all modestly dressed in headscarves, came over to Pamuk. 'You've been in all the papers lately,' he said. After indicating that they were both on the same side, he added, 'I said that softly, just in case one of themhappens to be around.' On our way out, the cashier asked Pamuk if he really was Orhan Pamuk and then asked for his autograph. Pamuk gave him the copy of The Black Book that he'd brought out with him.

By now it was dark outside, and a cold wind was getting colder. Pamuk suggested going to his house for some tea. We took a taxi and moved slowly through the traffic towardsthe district of Nisantasi, where Pamuk grew up and lives now. Pamuk Apartments was built by Pamuk's family in the early 1950s after deciding that their old stone mansion was too Ottoman, and therefore not in keeping with Atatuerk's Westward-looking dream. As Pamuk described in Istanbul, the family was very wealthy then, though Pamuk's father and uncle (who were both engineers and both given to investing in large schemes that never quite got off the ground) would whittle away the fortune in years to come. For a time, every floor was inhabited by different branches of the family. The interior doors were never locked, and as a child Pamuk wandered freely from household to household.

He now lives in the attic apartment, which is another temple to the written word: white furniture, bare parquet floors, bookcases rising eleven and twelve shelves high, and in the centre of the sitting room, another sturdy old desk. I asked if I was right in thinking that this was where Celal (the famous columnist in The Black Book) had his secret flat?

Pamuk: Yes. I had this space in mind. It was different then, but the humming and murmuring of the radiator, the old lift, the cracking of the parquet floor and the slight trembling of the windowpanes when buses pass by—these things give me a sense that this fictional past is still with me.

I think something changed with that book—that everything interesting you've done since stems from what you started there. Is that how you understand it?

In 1982 I published my second novel. At that time there was horror going on in Turkish prisons. And no freedom of speech at all, except that if you wrote a historical novel or a novel which didn't say much about politics, it was permissible. Around that time, in 1985, I met Harold Pinter. He came on a human rights mission to Istanbul with Arthur Miller and other foreign observers. I was their guide. The military proposed a constitution, the whole nation was going to vote for it. Ninety per cent was in favour... But that was not a free referendum by Western standards. One of my cousins was working for an advertising agency at the time, and he called me and told me that some Swiss newspaper people were here and that they were looking for a person who could criticize the proposed constitution on TV. We are still being run by that constitution, by the way, but in those days no one dared to publicly criticize it, and here were these Swiss TV people, looking for a Turk living in Turkey to criticize it, and my cousin didn't know any left-wing intellectuals, so he asked me if I did. He said they didn't necessarily need to see his face. (I used this in the ending of The Black Book, when, instead of giving the desired political message, the narrator tells a long story. This may be a good solution for my problems, too!)

Anyway, I said okay, I will find someone. With a friend, for two days, we went to see other friends—professors who had been kicked out of university but were not in jail. We couldn't use the phone, so we went to visit them, to ask them. I hated my position, which made it easy to moralize. These were all good guys whom I respected, but then they were making the right decision not to talk, because if they talked they would get into trouble.

That stayed with me—a man, an upper-middle-class, educated liberal who was going from house to house, making phone calls, a troubled and confused hero who was looking for someone in Istanbul. It was a good frame for a story. But we were frustrated, we couldn't find anyone to speak. My friend said, okay, Orhan, you talk. But at that time I was timid, I was not politically outspoken, I did not know how to criticize the constitution then. They were looking for someone working in human rights. So I did not talk in the end. But Galip, my hero, does.

I was going to include a football match with a major European team. Everywhere my hero Galip went, the whole nation would be there, listening. In those days, Germany-Turkey games would end 7-0. I thought that would be good to demonstrate the national defeat, the anger, the frustration... While Galip searched for someone to make a political comment, not only could he not find them, but on the radio, the whole of Istanbul would be listening to the score. One to zero, three to zero, five to zero...

So The Black Book began as a sort of quest novel, set in a big city. But the city is not a Western Cartesian construct. It is a place full of arabesques, twists and turns. I began to write the novel in 1985, and it was published in Turkey in 1990, and in between I managed to invent this texture. Not the story. The storyline is very simple. The wife disappears, and the confused hero, a man who shares my culture and sentiments, walks through the streets of Istanbul. I got the idea of changing Istanbul to an ocean of signs, some of which my hero can read, some of which he cannot understand. And if he doesn't understand them, all the better, because it adds a layer of mystery, which is already there, because of all the layers of history in Istanbul. Later I read that this was called a 'palimpsest', but I did not know that word then.

It is in my character to make a text over-rich, over-abundant. I have a tendency to add more and more. I like to observe details in a space, in a room, in a shop, where the details do not necessarily illustrate the drama in an organic way but eat away at the central story, slyly pulling the story to another corner. Not like Zola's naturalist details. The over-abundance of details is not encyclopaedic, but strange.

The objects become like characters?

I don't know. But it's also related to writing habits. If you are a fast writer—I am jealous of these fast writers—you write lean prose. Which I sometimes do, but which sometimes I cannot do. I have a regressive mind; on the other hand, I'm concerned that the story doesn't go off the track. Every time I have a chapter that I think will be seven or eight pages, it becomes eighteen pages. What happens in those eighteen pages is what would happen in the seven pages. But there are so many signs and symbols that pop up. I like to do that, and to work in various melodies that are related to other things in the book.

But one year after I wrote The Black Book, a Turkish director whom I admired and who is dead now, Oemer Kavur, came to me and said, let's make a movie. I told him many stories. But he didn't like them. So finally I told him a story from The Black Book—the one about the photographer. I based it on Attar's The Conference of the Birds. He said, let's make that into a film. We worked together on the script. But each time I came back to him with my pages, he'd say, 'Orhan you have a tendency to'—he was French-educated— 'surcharge.' That stayed with me. Because he was saying, don't surcharge. Don't overload!

This was a movie and you had to be quick, lean. I learned so many things about writing from Kavur. He had a sense of drama, that something should happen. I would say: so my characters go up the street, and then something happens eventually? He'd say no, they go out, something happens right then. Maybe he was exaggerating. But that word surchargestayed with me. I am a surchargeperson. I know its literary problems and sometimes I try to avoid overloading, but character, I think, is destiny and so I continue to overload.

Borges, incidentally, was interested in The Conference of the Birds. He was interested in classical Islamic texts more than is generally known. It is a very simple story, a group of birds is looking for their king, who is lost. They travel, and each bird has an experience, a story. Finally they reach Mount Kaf, which is a sort of Eastern Mount Olympus, and they realize that the king, the god, the person they are looking for, is in themselves. They are the very person they are looking for.

I'd read the book before I read Borges. But Borges's touch made classical Islamic literature look different and new for me. I needed Borges's help for this new approach to classical Islamic literature. Once I had this new outlook, everything, especially old culture, looked new. Galip in my book is in search of something, and he finds it in himself. It's a very Sufi thing: don't look for worldly things, it's all inside.

What was it about Borges that opened things up for you?

It was a sort of literary revelation. He taught me to look at those essential religious texts with a radically detached and so inevitably secular eye. Borges taught me that there was something we can call the 'metaphysics of literature'. By following the path of Poe, Coleridge and Valery, tracing the line from one text to the next, he taught me a liberating way of looking at the old texts which carried so much sentimental weight of tradition and religion. I like the fact that Borges was not influenced by the sentimental content of literary texts, but by the metaphysical joys. He talked about the patterns of literary texts, and that taught me to look at Sufi texts in that light.
Not only Borges but my readings of Poe, Kafka and Calvino also gave me the opportunity to make a distinction between religion and parable, between story and philosophy. I read all these Sufi texts in the early and mid-1980s in Turkey and the United States. My whole Sufi experience was nothing but reading Rumi with Borges and Calvino in mind. But once I had a taste for it...

For Turks, novel writing was a whole political and perhaps ideological package. Reading Balzac, reading Western classics, had a leftist, modernist, occidentalist connotation here, while reading old Sufi or Islamic classics was something very conservative.

You mean it got lost between the cracks of the two ideologies?

Today you can go into a bookshop and find all sorts of religious and modern books. But in my youth a bookshop would either be Western, modern and left-leaning, or Islamic and conservative. The country was more divided culturally then. For the likes of me, religion was almost a hidden thing. Except for this or that religious uncle or neighbour. And the old guys did not wish to interfere with modernity. They were never propagating their religion. The so-called public space was less religious in my youth, while inside the houses life was more pious, I think.
And what about Sufism?

In my circle Rumi went hand in hand with the spiritualists. They had magazines which mixed Islam with some metaphysics or parapsychology. I later learned that these spiritualists were also involved with sects, and that spiritualism was perhaps a cover for a modernized version of moderate non-parochial sects. In fact, in the 1950s spiritualist sects were occasionally raided as if they were running a brothel. Unless you were protected by some powerful institution, you couldn't be involved in sects safely. All the religious sects that survived had connections with people in power.

Atatuerk shut them all down, didn't he?

Atatuerk's version of secularism drew a strong line between religious and state affairs. To cut down the strength of religion, especially in the social sphere. He wanted religion to be apolitical, and not radical. But of course to cut the social strength of Islam—that was a very political thing. And not a secular thing. But this is not a subject that exercises my imagination. I like to talk about things and stories.

What about religion and the past? You've written two historical novels.

Look, to put it simply: once you have a major empire, like the Ottoman Empire, you know you can't run it on religion alone. You can run a provincial xenophobic nation like that, but you cannot run an empire. There are so many details that cannot be addressed through religion in an empire. An empire—with its diverse cultures, religions, nations, tribes—has to be worldly. The Ottoman elite was worldly and the ruling elite was close to the military. Later there was the wish to be Westernized, to run the empire along Western lines. After five generations of this, the Ottomans themselves had changed
.
During the Republic, Turkey was openly, even aggressively not religious. To prove you belonged to the elite, you had to be Westernized and not religious—at least not openly. These are subjects I described in Istanbul. My grandmother used to recite Tevfik Fikret's poetry, which was partly atheistic, saying religion did this, religion did that. Fikret's poetry was very critical of religion. My family would call themselves Muslim, but they were definitely not very religious people.
The paradox is that Turkey presents itself to the world as ninety-nine per cent Muslim, but then it's a secular state, so it's a double definition. People outside Turkey don't understand how the two definitions fit together.

Yes. The bureaucrats—they're still sixty per cent of the ruling elite— are always upset when some American or European says it is an Islamic country. Because we Turks are very proud that we are the only 'secular' Islamic state. It's part of our identity. It's part of nationalism, too, unfortunately. Because we can divide establishment conservatives into two now. There are the Turkish anti-Western nationalists. And the Islamists, they are also nationalists. The Islamists are taking us into Europe, while the ultra-nationalists, some of whom are very secular, are using the prestige of secularism and Atatuerk as a way of blocking Turkey's road to the EU.

In Istanbul you also made the point that when you were growing up, even in secular households there was still a morality of asceticism, of humility—in other words, Sufi values.

Of course those things change more slowly. I think most morality comes to us through the virtues we learn at home and in school, so yes, Sufism lived on in Westernized houses. You had to be humble. You had to show respect to your elders. You had to do things not for money, but for the thing itself. Now of course all this is fading away, or we are getting old and complaining, perhaps. But I always wanted to make it clear that this old wonderful morality had its very repressive side too. You shouldn't be critical, you shouldn't enjoy glory. This is against the idea of the Renaissance, which is all about worshipping a person's glory. The Renaissance was about Italian princes who, cruel and repressive though they were, also opened a new way of seeing things. Some of this I explored in My Name is Red, and I shall also be touching on this culture of ostentation in my new novel, The Museum of Innocence. But until recently, as I wrote in Istanbul, the culture of ostentation—displaying your wealth, hanging pictures of the wall—was considered to be very unethical. The right thing was to hide your money, and your riches, and objects and images that may represent them, and never say that you're successful. If you did that you were shameless or nouveau riche.

This is your mother speaking...

The whole culture speaks to us through our mothers anyway!

Do you walk around the city as much as you used to do?

I do. After I started doing TV to promote my books, I was slightly self-conscious and of course these days it continues. Some people recognize me on the street. Taxi drivers immediately open up the controversy—but in a much gentler and more friendly way than the right-wing media—though they may disagree with me, we can still give each other respect. For example, a taxi driver this morning: after he recognized me, he made sympathetic noises. Then I complained a bit. He said, 'They made you look like a traitor. They exaggerated everything.' In five minutes we were friends. Although this guy was also an angry nationalist, complaining that the government was selling Cyprus out, we parted friends.

I don't say the things I used to say to such people, I don't like to argue. I prefer to listen. So I just nod and say, yes... yes... yes...

4.
At the trial three days later, Pamuk had no chance to speak and no choice but to listen. For the better part of an hour he stood in the middle of the small, airless, crowded courtroom while six nationalist lawyers explained how he had impugned their Turkishness. There were nasty scuffles between them and the dozen EU parliamentarians who had come to observe the proceedings. Though the judge did not accede to their request that the court be cleared of Europeans, he seemed unable to control their behaviour. He was also unable to decide whether or not to let the case proceed, and in the end he ordered a postponement while he sought the opinion of the Ministry of Justice. Meanwhile, in the corridors outside, 200 people who had not made it into the courtroom were hemmed in by a ring of riot police, while a gang of fascist agitators (said by some to be aided and abetted by plain-clothes policemen) worked their way through the crowd, rounding on Article 301 defendants and other targets, kicking and shoving them and denouncing them as traitors and Jews. Among us were many leading Turkish writers and human rights activists. The most prominent was Yashar Kemal, Turkey's other internationally celebrated novelist, who has himself been prosecuted for speaking about the Kurds.

Another group had planted themselves outside the court with a banner denouncing Pamuk and six other Article 301 defendants as 'missionary children' (the implication being that they had been led astray by their scheming European and American teachers in 'missionary' schools like Robert Academy). Though the banner got a lot of play on Turkish television, the motley crew of fifty-somethings standing behind it was so unimpressive that one Turkish writer next to me joked, 'Where have all our fascists gone?' They seemed to have the protection of the riot police, who did little to protect the rest of us, least of all Pamuk. He was rapped on the head by one agitator on his way into the courtroom and, though he was able to leave the building unscathed, his car was pelted with eggs and stones by a professional-looking rabble. In the nationalist tabloid press the next day, the agitators were applauded ('Again the iron fist!'; 'Again, pelted with eggs!'). Pamuk's face was circled in red and described, though the photograph showed him with normal complexion, as 'ghostly white'.

The case against Pamuk was dropped on January 22, 2006, almost certainly because of fierce pressure from Europe, although the hate campaign goes on. Many other Article 301 defendants are yet to be tried. The law still stands and the nationalist agitators continue to enjoy mysterious privileges.