Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

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?"