Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"I don't know. Maybe quarrels are more interesting. People said it was cruel. I'd say unsparing. The quarrelsome part of it was played up as a writers' feud. But Naipaul was an important figure in my writing life."

"How can we know what he thought of the book."

"No way of telling. He's not talking."

"I can't believe he didn't read it."

"I don't think he did. His wife did, though, I'm sure of that."

"The wife was part of your problem," Pamuk said. "Second wife, yes?"

"Right"

Pamuk leaned over and looked across the top of his glasses and said, "Am I a good reader of Paul Theroux?"

"Very astute."

"And wasn't there another woman?"

"Naipaul's mistress of twenty-three years. He ditched her after his wife died and married a woman he had just met in Pakistan. It's a strange tale."

"Maybe not so strange," Pamuk said.

We talked about writers' lovers and pieced together the odd love life of Graham Greene, who remained married to a woman he had not cohabited with for sixty years or more, while chasing women and suffering through three or four grand passions, all of them with married women. His last affair was like a marriage. The woman visited him at his apartment every noontime and prepared his lunch, after which they made love. Then they had a drink, and at nightfall the woman returned home to her husband. This went on for years. The husband knew about it, but his wife said something like "Don't make me choose."

Pamuk said, "It sounds perfect."

"After Greene died, the woman divorced her husband."

"Ah." Pamuk looked happy, contemplating the complexity of this.

Over dessert, the other guests who were writers talked about the bur den of being a Turkish writer abroad. Westerners whose knowledge of Turkey was limited to

Midnight Express and döner kebabs would challenge them, saying, What about the Armenians? What about the Kurds? How come you torture people?

A writer named Yusof said that he had been an admirer of the Anglophile critic George Steiner.

"I was in London," Yusof said. "I had five books I wanted George Steiner to sign. I went to one of his lectures, and afterwards he took a seat at a table to sign people's books. He signed two of mine and said, 'Where do you come from?' I told him Turkey. He pushed the rest of my books away—he wouldn't sign them. He said, 'Go home and take care of your people.' He meant the Kurds."

On my way back to the hotel, it occurred to me that though the United States had supported the Kurds, tolerating Kurdish terrorism in both Turkey and Iraq, and were still fighting a war in Iraq, no Turk had blamed me for this slaughter, or even raised the matter with me.

***

THE OTHER WRITER I HAD wished to meet in Istanbul was Elif Shafak. We met at the Ciragan Palas, on another rainy day. She was so beautiful I forgot her books, writing seemed irrelevant, I was bewitched. I was reminded of the Kipling line "Much that is written about Oriental passion and impulsiveness is exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true," and Elif Shafak seemed the embodiment of it. She was about thirty, with gray-blue eyes and the face of a brilliant child, which is also the pedomorphic face of a Renaissance Madonna, framed by wisps of light hair. All over her hands and fingers were thin silver chains, looped and dangling, attached to a mass of silver rings, as though she'd just escaped from a harem.

I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying, so distracted was I by her loveliness. But her passion and impulsiveness were unmistakable, and I reminded myself that she had written five highly praised novels.

Unlike most other Turkish writers, she was cosmopolitan. She had either taught or studied, or both, in universities in Michigan and Arizona and at Mount Holyoke. Her mother had been a Turkish diplomat, so she had lived in many capital cities. Her father had vanished from her life; she was aware of his being present in Istanbul but never saw him. This absent father was the subject of her new novel, Baba and the Bastard, which was kept hidden in many Istanbul bookstores because of its racy title.

"Shafak" was an invented surname, the word meaning aurora or dawn in Turkish. The name suited her, since she glowed with life, and dawn in Asia does not come by degrees, the sky slowly lightening, but is like something switched on, filling the new day with a sudden brightness that seems complete. Elif Shafak had that radiance.

She was also unexpectedly combative—you don't expect such fight in a beauty, but it was attractive as, jingling the chains and silver filigree on her hands, she denounced various Turkish attitudes.

"Turkey has amnesia," she said. "Turks are indifferent to the past, to old words, to old customs."

"I thought that Turkish reformers were generally a good thing."