Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I palmed some Turkish lire and put the notes into her hand, a gesture that shut her up but did not calm her. She looked at me as though I might be weird, but the money was in the meter.

"You have family?" I asked. She nodded. "Husband?" She nodded, but more slowly. "Children?"

At first she simply stared; then she began to cry, pressing her knuckles against her eyes. She shook her head and looked miserable. I hung my head, and when I saw her shoes—high heels, scuffed and twisted and damp from the wet streets of Taksim—I felt miserable myself at the sight of her tormented toes.

A hard-faced woman loomed over her and began to mutter. She was plump, in a tight dress, and her potbelly was at the level of my eyes. I recognized the word prablyema. Marjana was still sniffling in sorrow.

"What you say to Marjana?" the woman demanded.

"Nothing," I said lamely.

"She cry," the woman said.

Marjana tried to wave the woman away.

"I didn't do anything," I said, and sounded like a ten-year-old. But I had made her remember her small children.

The woman muttered again to Marjana. Tears, recrimination, defiance, accusation, more tears—this was as far from sex as it was possible to be. And at the periphery was a suggestion of violence in the smoldering gaze and threatening posture of the Turkish man.

The woman flicked her fat hand at me, grazing my face with her big fingernails. Though they were plastic glue-ons, they were sharp and claw-like, and could have served as weapons.

"Maybe you go, eh?"

Gladly, I thought. I stood up and backed away, a bit too quickly, but happy to go, saying goodbye. I had guessed that Marjana was one of many women lured to Istanbul and kept against her will—with a family elsewhere, unable to help her. I had wanted to talk, but in such circumstances, in most circumstances, talk is trouble.

***

I GOT MORE NEWS of the dinner party: "Pamuk said he's coming." I was eager to meet him, not merely because of his well-made novels and his personal history in Istanbul, but because, as a passionate writer and self-described graphomaniac, he was probably eccentric, someone who lived at the edge of the world, the solitary soul that all writers must be in order to do their work and live their lives. Writers are always readers, and though they are usually unbalanced, they are always noticers of the world. From an early age I have not been able to rid myself of the notion that the best writers are deeply flawed heroes.

Among the Turkish guests at the party, some of whom were writers, all of whom were polite, patient, and deferential, Pamuk was restless. Rather gangly and bespectacled, he thrashed around as he spoke. He reminded me of someone I knew. He was a taunter, hunching his shoulders, throwing his head back to laugh—and he had a loud, appreciative guffaw. He pulled faces, often clownish ones that his scholar's eyeglasses exaggerated. He was both a mocker and a self-mocker, a buttonholer, a finger wagger, and his consistent mode of inquiry was teasing. He was a needler, a joker, not a speechifier but a maker of deflating remarks in a smiling and mildly prosecutorial way, like a courtroom wit.

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.