Chapter 4 White Castle 2

2(1) It's unbelievable how similar I am to the man who entered the house!I was there... that was the first thought that jumped into my mind.It was like someone was teasing me, taking me in again through the door opposite the one I just came in, and saying, listen, you should go in like this, you should go in like this, hands and arms should move like this, should Looking at the other you sitting in the room like this.When our eyes meet, we greet each other.However, he didn't seem surprised at all.So I decided he wasn't really that much like me, he had a beard and I seemed to have forgotten what my face looked like.When he sat down and faced me, I remembered that I hadn't looked in the mirror in a year.

After a while, the door through which I had just passed opened again, and he was called in.While I waited, I figured this must be the figment of a confused mind, not an elaborate joke.Because in those days I kept fantasizing that I was home, welcomed by everyone, and they would release me immediately; or that I was actually still sleeping in a cabin on the ship, and all this was just a dream—something like this Kind of comforting thoughts.I almost decided that this was one of those daydreams too, just coming to life, or a sign that everything was going to suddenly change and go back to the way it was.Just then, the door opened and I was summoned inside.

Pasha got up, stood beside the man who looked like me, and let me kiss the hem of his shirt.When he greeted me, I wanted to talk about my ordeal in prison and my desire to return home, but he didn't even listen.The pasha seemed to remember me telling him that I had knowledge of science, astronomy, and engineering—do I know, then, about fireworks and gunpowder shooting into the sky?I answered right away.But when I looked into the other man's eyes, for a split second, I wondered if they had a trap in store for me. Pasha said his wedding would be unparalleled, with a firework display, but it would have to be quite different.When the Sultan was born, a dead Maltese prepared a show with fire magicians. The man who looked like me—the Pasha simply called him Hoja, meaning "Masters" -- have worked with them too, know a thing or two about these matters.The pasha thought I could assist him, saying we could complement each other.If good performances are shown, the Pasha rewards us.I felt that the time was ripe, so I boldly stated that I wanted to return to China.The pasha asked me if I had slept with a woman since I came here.After hearing my answer, he said, what use is freedom to me if I don't even do that kind of thing?He was speaking the guard's vulgar language, and I must have looked silly because he burst out laughing.Then he turned to my likeness he called "Hoja": he was responsible.We left with it.

In the morning, when I walked to the home of someone like me, I thought I had nothing to teach him.However, his knowledge is obviously not better than mine.Besides, we all agree: making a good camphor mixture is the whole problem.Therefore, all we have to do is carefully prepare an experimental mixture in proportion and quantity, launch it into the night sky near the high walls of Surdibi, and then draw conclusions from observation.Children watched in awe as workers ignited the rockets we prepared, and we stood under shadowy trees anxiously awaiting the results; and years later, when we tested that incredible weapon in daylight, such a scenario.Afterwards some experiments were carried out by moonlight, others in the dark of night, and I wrote down the observations in a little booklet.Before dawn, we will return to Hoja's house facing the Golden Horn to discuss the results of the experiment in detail.

His house is small and oppressive, unremarkable.The gate of the house was in a crooked street muddy with a dirty stream, the source of which I have never been able to locate.There was little furniture in the house, but every time I entered it, I felt a sense of urgency and was overwhelmed by a strange sense of apprehension.Perhaps the feeling came from the man: He was spying on me, seemed to want to learn something from me, but wasn't sure what it was.He wanted me to call him "Hoja" because he didn't like having the same name as his grandfather.As I was not used to sitting on the low couches that lined the walls, I discussed our experiments with him standing up, sometimes pacing up and down the room restlessly.I believe Hoja enjoyed the situation.Just by the dim light of the oil lamp, he could sit and watch me to his heart's content.

When I felt his eyes on me, I felt even more uncomfortable that he didn't notice our resemblance.I have thought several times that he actually found out and was just pretending not to.It was as if he was playing with me, running a little experiment on me, getting some information that I didn't understand.Because in the first few days, he always looked at me like that: as if he was learning something, and the more he learned, the more curious he became.However, he seemed a bit hesitant to take the next step and delve further into this strange knowledge.It's this unresolved feeling that oppresses me and makes this house so suffocating!True, I gained some confidence from his hesitation, but it did not reassure me.Once, when we were discussing the experiment, and another time he asked me why I hadn't converted to Islam, I realized he was quietly trying to draw me into some sort of argument, so I held back.He sensed my repression, and I knew he looked down on me for it, and the thought of it pissed me off.In those days, the two of us could agree on one problem: We despised each other.I held myself back, thinking that if we managed to deliver the fireworks show without incident, they might allow me to return home.

Inspired one night by a firework that had successfully soared to an unusual height, Hoja said that one day he would create a firework that could fly as high as the moon; the only problem was finding the necessary proportions of powder and casting A box that can hold this mixture.I said, the moon is very far away.He interrupted me to say that he knew about it as well as I did, but isn't it also the closest planet to Earth?When I admitted that he was right, instead of relaxing as I expected, he became even more agitated, but said nothing more. Two days later, at midnight, he repeated the question: How can I be so sure that the moon is the nearest planet?Perhaps we are all deceived by some kind of optical illusion.That was the first time I talked to him about the astronomy I had studied and briefly explained to him Ptolemy's principles of cosmology.I found him listening with interest, but reluctant to say anything that might show curiosity.Shortly after I finished talking, he said that he also knew a little about Bartramius, but that didn't change his idea that there might be a planet closer than the moon.Until the early hours of the morning he spoke of such a planet as if he had obtained proof of its existence.

The next day he shoved a poorly translated manuscript into my hands.Although my Turkish is not good, I can still read it: I don't think it's a summary of Almagest, but a rewritten summary based on that summary; only the Arabic names of the planets caught my attention. interest, but was in no mood to get excited about it at the time.Seeing my indifferent reaction and putting the book aside quickly, Hoja felt very angry.He spent seven gold coins for this book, and he said that the only thing I should do is to give up my arrogance, open the book and study it.Like an obedient student, I opened the book again and read it patiently.Then I saw a simple diagram.The planets in the picture are roughly drawn spheres, arranged in relation to the Earth.Although the positions of the spheres are correct, the drawer has no idea of ​​the order of the planets.Then, I noticed a small planet between the moon and the earth.On closer inspection, it can be seen from its rather clear ink that it was added to the manuscript at a later date.After reading the entire manuscript, I returned it to Hoja.He told me he'd find the planet: not at all joking.I said nothing, and there was a silence that irritated both him and me.Since we were never able to create another pyrotechnic that flew high enough to start an astronomy conversation, the subject was not revisited.Our small success remains a mere coincidence, the mystery of which we have not been able to answer.

2(2) However, as far as the light and the intensity and brightness of the flames were concerned, we achieved very good results, and we understood the secret of this success: Hoja searched through the herb shops in Istanbul and in one of them found a A medicinal powder whose name the store doesn't know; we believe the super-bright yellowish powder is a mixture of sulfur and copper sulfate.Later, we mixed with this powder any substance we thought might enhance brightness, but at best we got a coffee-toned brown, and an almost indistinguishable pale green.According to Hoja, this is already very good, and it has never been seen in Istanbul.

The same goes for our performance on the second night of the festival, which everyone said was very good, even the opponents who were plotting behind our backs.When I learned that the Sultan had arrived from the far shore of the Golden Horn to watch, I was very excited and nervous, afraid that something might go wrong and I would have to wait many years before returning home.When I got the order to start the show, I said a prayer.First, to welcome the guests and announce the start of the show, we launched a colorless pyrotechnic into the sky; this was immediately followed by what Hoja and I called the "mill" in a circle.The sky turned red, yellow, and green in an instant, accompanied by an astonishing booming explosion.It's even more beautiful than we expected.The fireworks flew in circles, spinning and spinning, and suddenly suspended in the air, illuminating the surrounding area like daylight.For a moment, I felt like I was back in Venice, that eight-year-old boy watching fireworks for the first time, unhappy that his new red coat was being worn by his brother.My brother's jacket was torn from a fight the day before, he was wearing a red button-down jacket that I couldn't wear that night and swore I'd never wear it again, the fireworks in the sky were the same color as the jacket and the matching buttons Same bright red.The coat was a little too tight for my brother.

Then, we started a show called "Fountain".The flames gushed out from the opening of the five-person-high platform, and people standing on the far shore should have a good view of the jetting flames.They must have been as excited as we were when the fireworks were launched from the mouth of the "fountain", and we had no intention of letting their excitement fade: the rafts on the Golden Horn began to move, first the papier-mâché towers and fortresses as the fireworks passed through the battlements Afterwards a fire was set up and a blaze was set up - they said it was meant to symbolize the victories of previous years.When they released a model of the ship from the year I was captured, the other ships attacked our ship with showers of fireworks.I relived my days as a slave.Cries of "Allah, O Allah!" resounded from both sides of the bank as the ship caught fire and sank.Then, we released the fire dragons one by one.Flames burst from their huge nostrils, wide mouths, and pointed ears.We had the dragons fight each other, as we planned, and at first they couldn't knock each other down, and we fired rockets from the shore to make the sky redder.When the sky darkened slightly, the crew on the raft turned the winch, and the fire dragon began to rise slowly into the sky.Everyone screamed in awe now, and all the fireworks on the raft fired in salvo as the dragons fought fiercely against each other.The wicks we put inside the dragon must have ignited at the same time, because the whole scene became, as we expected, a burning hell.I knew we had succeeded when I heard the screams and cries of a child nearby; his father, gaping at the menacing sky, forgot that the boy was there.I thought I could finally be allowed to return home.Just then, on a clearly visible black raft, the monster I called "Demon" glided into hell.We tied so many fireworks to it that there was concern that the whole raft would take to the sky with our crew, but everything was going according to plan.When the fighting fire dragons burned and disappeared into the sky, the "demon" suddenly flew into the air with the fireworks.Fireballs scattered from various parts of the exploding body, rumbling through the air.I rejoice at the thought that we have terrorized all of Istanbul.I was also terrified because I seemed to finally find the courage to do what I really wanted to do with my life.At that moment, it didn't seem to matter which city I was in.I want that demon to float in the air and shower fire on the crowd all night long.It began to sway from side to side, and finally, accompanied by ecstatic cries from both sides, it floated down in the Golden Horn without endangering anyone.It still spews sparks when submerged. The next morning, just like in a fairy tale, the pasha sent a bag of gold through Hoja.He was very pleased with the performance, but found it a bit odd that "The Devil" won.We performed another ten nights.During the day we repaired burnt-out models, planned new shows, and had captives brought in from prison to reload rockets.Ten bags of gunpowder exploded in the face of a slave, blinding him in both eyes. After the wedding celebrations, I did not see Hoja again.I felt much more at ease away from the probing eyes of this oddball man who kept watching me, but that didn't mean I didn't think about the exciting times I'd spent with him.When I get back to my country, I will tell everyone about this man who looks so much like me but never mentions the resemblance.I stayed in the cell and passed the time by nursing the sick.When I heard the pasha summoned me, I felt a shudder almost of joy and hurried to it.He first praised me perfunctorily, saying that everyone was very satisfied with the fireworks show, and everyone was very happy, saying that I was very talented, and so on.All of a sudden, he said that if I become a Muslim, he will set me free immediately.I was so shocked that I became stupid, said that I wanted to go back to my country, and even stupidly stammered about my mother and fiancée.The Pasha didn't seem to hear me, and just repeated what he just said.I was silent for a while.For some reason, I was reminded of some lazy, wimpy boys I knew as a child, kids who hated and rebelled against their fathers.When I said I would not give up my beliefs, the pasha flew into a rage.I'm back in prison. Three days later, the pasha summoned me again.This time he was in a good mood.I haven't made up my mind yet, because I'm not sure if changing my religion will help me escape.Pasha asked me what I thought, and said that he would personally arrange for me to marry a beautiful local woman.Taking advantage of a moment of courage, I said that I would not change my beliefs.Pasha was a little surprised and called me an idiot.After all, I don't have anyone close to me that would make me ashamed to say I had converted.Next, he introduced Islam.After speaking, he sent me back to prison. On my third visit, I was not brought before the pasha.A housekeeper asked about my decision.Maybe I'll change my mind, but not because a housekeeper asked me!I said I wasn't ready to give up my beliefs.The butler grabbed my arm and led me downstairs to another man.It was a tall man, as thin as someone I've often dreamed about.He took my arm, as if gently helping a debilitated patient.He took me to a corner of the garden, and another person came to us. This person had a huge body, so real that he didn't seem like someone who would appear in a dream.Two people stopped by a wall and tied my hands. One of them was carrying a not too big axe.They said the Pasha had ordered that if I did not become a Muslim, I would be beheaded immediately.I was stunned. Maybe not so fast, I thought.They looked at me sympathetically.I said nothing.After a while, just when I said to myself, please don't ask me again, they did.All of a sudden, my religion seemed like something to be easily dedicated to.I valued myself and pitied myself as much as those two men who repeatedly forced me to convert.As I tried to think about something else, the view I had seen from my window facing the back garden came to mind: peaches and cherries on a plate inlaid with mother-of-pearl on the table, and a cushion behind the table. Seats of straw mats, with feather pillows the same color as the green window frames; farther off, I saw a sparrow perched by a well among olive and cherry groves.A swing hung by long cables from a high branch of a walnut tree, swaying gently in a barely perceptible breeze.When they questioned me again, I said, I will not convert.There was a stump and they made me kneel down and put my head on it.I closed my eyes, but then opened them again.One of them raised an axe.Another said maybe I regretted my decision; they pulled me up and said I should think again. 2(3) While making me reconsider, they dug a hole in the ground next to the stump.I thought to myself that they might soon bury me here; besides the fear of death, I felt the fear of being buried.I told myself I would make up my mind when they dug the grave and came toward me.But they only dug a shallow hole.At that moment, I thought it would be an extremely stupid thing to die here.I think I can become a Muslim, but I don't have time to make up my mind.If I could go back to prison, to the lovely cell I'm finally getting used to, I could sleepless nights thinking about it, and I could make the decision to convert to Islam before dawn, but not now, not right away. Suddenly they grabbed me and pushed me to my knees.Putting my head on the tree stump, I was startled to see someone passing through the woods quickly: I, with a beard, walked there quietly without touching the ground.I wanted to call out to my own shadow walking through the woods, but my head was pressed against the stump and I couldn't.I thought to myself, this is no different from sleeping, so I relaxed and waited.There was a chill on my back and the nape of my neck. I didn't want to think, but the coolness on my neck kept me thinking.Then they pulled me to my feet, muttering that the pasha would be very angry.When they untied my hands, they rebuked me and said: I am the enemy of Allah and Muhammad.They took me back to the mansion. Pasha comforted me after letting me kiss the hem of his clothes.He said he started liking me because I didn't give up my faith to survive, but it didn't take long before he started yelling and ranting about my stubbornness for no reason and that Islam was a superior religion and so on.The more he scolded, the more angry he became, saying that he had decided to punish me.Then he said that he had a promise to someone, and I understood that promise saved me from a disaster that I might have otherwise suffered.From what he said, I felt that the object of his promise was a strange person, and at last I realized that it was Hoja.Then the Pasha suddenly said that he had given me to Hoja as a gift.I looked at him blankly.The pasha explained that I am now Hoja's slave.He gave Hoja a document, and now Hoja has the right to decide whether to set me free or not, and from now on he can do with me as he pleases.The pasha left the room and walked away. They told me that Hoja was also at the mansion, waiting for me downstairs.Then I understood that the person I saw in the garden and forest was him.We walked back to his house.He said he knew from the beginning that I would not give up my faith.He has even prepared a room for me at home.He asked me if I was hungry.The fear of death still lingers in me and I can't eat anything.However, I still swallowed a few mouthfuls of the bread and yoghurt he put in front of me.Hoja watched me happily as I chewed the bread.He looked at me with the happy expression of a farmer feeding a horse he just bought from the market and thinking about all the things it will do for him in the future.I used to think of that look until he forgot my existence and buried himself in the details of his cosmography theory and the clock he was planning to give to the pasha. Then he said that I would teach him everything; that's why he asked the pasha to give me to him, and only then would he set me free.It was months before I learned what this "everything" was.This "everything" is all I learned in social school and religious school, that is, all astronomy, medicine, engineering, science taught in my country!Including everything recorded in the book he asked the servant to go to my cell to retrieve the next day, all the things I have heard and seen, all my views on rivers, bridges, lakes, caves, clouds, seas, the causes of earthquakes and lightning... ... At midnight, he added that the stars and planets were what interested him most.With moonlight streaming in through open windows, he said, we must at least find definitive evidence of the existence of a planet between the moon and Earth.When I couldn't help noticing our frightening resemblance again with the weary eyes of a man on the brink of death, Hoja gradually stopped using the word "teach": we will explore together, discover together, and progress together . In this way, like two responsible students, they can still do their homework seriously even if no adults are at home to listen through the cracked door.We sat down and started studying, like two good brothers.At first, I felt like the well-intentioned older brother willing to go over old lessons to help the lazy little one catch up; Hoja acted like the bright boy trying to prove that his older brother really didn't know much more than he did.To him, the gap in knowledge between us was nothing more than the number of books he brought from my cell and lined up on a shelf, and what I remembered about them.With astonishing diligence and intelligence, he had a basic understanding of Italian within six months, and continued to refine it later.During this time he also read all my books, and made me recount to him all that I remembered.At this point, I am no longer better than him.However, he acted as if he already had knowledge more natural and deeper than books, which he himself considered mostly unworthy.After six months, we are no longer companions who study together and make progress together.He is the one who comes up with ideas, and I just remind him of certain details to assist him, or to help him review what he already knows. 2(4) He often finds these "thoughts" that I've mostly forgotten at night, long after we've had a makeshift dinner, when all the lights in the block have gone out and everything around us has fallen into silence.Every morning he taught at the elementary school attached to the mosque two blocks away, and two days a week he traveled to faraway places I had never been to, visiting a mosque’s timekeeping room where prayer times were calculated.The rest of the time, we were either preparing for our evening "thoughts" or chasing them.At the time, I still held out hope that I could return home soon.Also, for "ideas" that didn't interest me much, I thought arguing with him about the details would only delay getting home, so I never directly contradicted Hoja. So we spent the first year, buried in astronomy, trying to find evidence for the existence or non-existence of that imaginary planet.Hoja spent a fortune importing mirrors from Flemish to make a telescope, but while he was working with telescopes, scopes, and charts, he forgot the problem of the planet and got involved in deeper problems.He said he wanted to discuss the arrangement of the planets by Bartramius, but we didn't discuss that.He was talking, and I was just listening: he said it was foolish to believe that planets hang from transparent celestial bodies, that maybe there is something holding them up there, like an invisible force, maybe a gravitational pull .He then suggested that the earth might revolve around something like the sun, and that all the planets might revolve around a center of the sky whose existence we know nothing about.Later, he declared that his thought would be more comprehensive than that of Bartramius, and in order to create a broader theory of cosmology, he studied a bunch of newly observed stars and proposed many new concepts with which to arrange new Celestial system: maybe the moon revolves around the earth, and the earth revolves around the sun, maybe the center is Venus.But he soon tired of the theories.Later, he said that the problem now is not to come up with these new theories, but to make people here understand the planet and its motion. He will start with Pasha, but we learn that Sadek Pasha has Exiled to Erzurum.People were saying he was involved in a failed conspiracy. During the years waiting for the pasha to return from exile, we conducted research for a dissertation in which Hoja was to write about the causes of the Bosporus current.We spent months watching the tides and walking the cliffs overlooking the Channel in freezing winds.The two walked down the valley with various containers to measure the temperature and direction of the water flowing into the strait. At Pasha's request, we went to Gebze, a town not far from Istanbul, for three months to take care of some things for him.At this time, the inconsistent prayer times of the mosques in Gebze triggered Hoja's new idea: he wanted to build a clock that could accurately display the prayer time.It was at this time that I taught him what a real table is.Hoja was not pleased at first when I brought home the piece of furniture that the carpenter had made to the dimensions I had instructed.He compared it to a four-legged coffin and said it was unlucky, but later he got used to these tables and chairs.He said it made him think and write better.We had to go back to Istanbul to find the equipment for the oval prayer clock to be cast to follow the arc of the setting sun.On the return journey, our table was placed on the back of the donkey and followed us all the way back home. Hoja tried to figure out how to count prayer and fasting times in the cold northern countries during the first few months when we sat across the table and worked.Since the Earth is a sphere, the length of day and night varies greatly in these places.Another question is whether, other than Mecca, there is such a place on earth where people can face the Kaaba no matter where they turn.The more he realized my indifference to these matters, the more contemptuous he became.But I thought at the time that he understood my "excellence and difference," and perhaps his impatience came from believing that I knew this too: that he talked about wisdom as well as science; Plan, influence Pasha with his developed cosmography theory and new clock, whose cosmography theory will be presented in the form of a model, so that it can be better understood; here, his inner curiosity and enthusiasm will be Infect everyone and sow the seeds of a new revival: we both are waiting.