Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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.