Chapter 8 White Castle 6

6(1) The plague spread quickly, but I could never learn what Hoja said to be fearless.At the same time, I'm not as cautious as I was when I first started.I can no longer stand being locked up in a room like a sick old woman, looking out the window all day.At times, I rushed out into the streets as if drunk, watching the women shopping in the markets, the merchants bustling in their shops, and the people gathering in cafés after burying loved ones, trying to adjust to the plague-ravaged environment.I might have adapted a little, but Hoja kept scaring me. Every night, he would reach out to me with his hands and declare that he had been touching people all day with them.And I waited with bated breath, motionless.Just like when you wake up and suddenly find a scorpion crawling on your body, and you will freeze, every time this happens, I will do this!His fingers are different from mine.Hoja ran his fingers over me indifferently and asked, "Are you afraid?" I didn't move. "You're scared. What are you afraid of?" Sometimes, I have the urge to push him away and get into a fight with him, but I know it will only make him more irritated and fanatical. "I'll tell you why you're afraid. You're afraid because you're guilty. You're afraid because you're guilty. You're afraid because you believe in me more than I believe in you."

It was also he who insisted that we have to sit across the table and write something together.Now is the time to write about why we are who we are.Still, he ends up just writing again why "the others" are the way they are.For the first time he proudly showed me what he had written.I couldn't hide my revulsion at the thought of how much he expected me to be humbled by reading these words.I told him he was no different than the idiot he wrote about and that he would die before me. From this time on, I decided that this sentence is my most effective weapon.Then I reminded him of his ten years of hard work, the years he had devoted to his theory of cosmography, the days he had lost his eyesight to observe the sky, and the days when he could not take his eyes off his books.This time, it was my turn to frighten him.I said how absurd and foolish it was to die in vain when there was hope of escaping the plague and continuing to live.These words of mine not only strengthened his suspicion, but also increased his punishment of me.And I noticed that, when he looked at what he wrote, he seemed to be reluctantly rediscovering a reverence for me that had vanished.

So, in order to forget my misfortunes, I wrote sheet after sheet of paper in those days the sweet dreams I often had at night and during naps.In order to forget everything, as soon as I wake up, I try to write in poetic language these dreams that are consistent in scene and meaning: I dreamed that someone lived in the forest near our house, and they knew what we wanted for many years. Know the secrets that you can be their friend if you dare enter the dark forest; our shadows no longer fade with the sun; Is tirelessly examining the thousands of little things we must learn and experience; the people I draw in my dreams, not just three-dimensional figures, step out of the frame, and we Merging together; mother, father and I working together to set up steel machines in the back garden and let them do the work for us...  

It's not that Hoja doesn't know that these dreams are a trap for the devil, he doesn't know that these dreams will drag him into the darkness of immortal science, but he still continues to ask me, knowing that every time he asks a question, he will lose a little more confidence Question: What do these ridiculous dreams mean, did I really dream them?In this way, what we did to the Sultan together many years later, I did to him for the first time. From our dreams, we deduced the end of the future of the two of us: once people get addicted, like the plague, Obviously there is no escape from science; it is not difficult to find that Hoja has taken up this habit, but one still wonders about Hoja's dreams!As he listened, he openly mocked me.However, since asking questions hurt his self-esteem, he couldn't ask me too many questions; moreover, I found that what I said aroused his curiosity even more.Seeing Hoja's feigned poise in the face of the plague begin to falter did not lessen my fear of death, but at least I no longer felt alone in my own fears.Of course, I paid the price for this too, bearing his torment every night, but now I see that my struggle was not in vain: when Hoja stretched out his hands to me, I told him again that he would die before me, and reminded He, those who are not afraid are ignorant, besides, his essay is only half finished, and the dream I wrote to him that day was full of happiness.

However, it was not my words that made him intolerable, but other things.One day, a student's father came to visit him at home.He seemed like an aloof guy, claiming to live in the same neighborhood as us.Like a lazy house cat, I curled up in a corner and listened.They chatted for a while.Then our guest finally couldn't resist saying what he had been wanting to say: his aunt's daughter, widowed when her husband fell to his death while reshingling the roof last summer.She had many suitors now, and our visitor thought of Hoja, because he had heard from a neighbor that Hoja was planning to marry.Hoja's reaction was rougher than I expected: he said he didn't want to marry, and if he did, he wouldn't marry a widow.To Hoja's response, the guest reminded us that the Prophet Muhammad did not mind Khatij's widowhood and accepted her as his first wife.Hoja said that he had heard about the widow who was not even worthy of the venerable Khatij's little finger.In response to this, our insanely proud neighbor wanted Hoja to understand that he was no good himself.He said that although he didn't believe it, the neighbors said that Hoja was completely crazy, and no one thought it was a good thing for him to observe the stars, play with mirrors, and make strange clocks.With the tone of a businessman deliberately belittling the goods he wanted to buy, our guest added: The neighbors said that Hoja, like a pagan, did not sit cross-legged on the ground, but sat on the table to eat; After paying sums of money to buy books, he discarded them on the floor and trampled on the pages with the names of the prophets; meanwhile, Hoja could not calm his inner demons by staring at the sky for a long time, and could only lie in bed in broad daylight Staring at the dirty ceiling and finding pleasure not in women but in young boys; I am his twin brother; he did not fast during Ramadan; and because of him Allah sent the plague.

After dismissing the visitors, Hoja lost his temper.I think that the peace he felt in having the same feelings as other people, or pretending to be so, was gone.To give him a final blow, I say that those who are not afraid of the plague are as stupid as this fellow.He began to worry, but he also claimed that he was not afraid of the plague.Whatever the reason, I think he meant it from the bottom of his heart.He's extremely irritable, confused, and keeps repeating his recently forgotten catchphrase, "stupid."When night fell, he lit a lamp, placed it in the center of the table, and asked me to sit down with him.We must write something.

Like two bachelors looking at each other for endless winter nights, we sat at the table facing each other, scratching something on the white paper in front of us.I think we are ridiculous!In the morning, reading Hoja's "dreams," I found him even more ridiculous than I was.He wrote one after mine, but it was a made-up dream that was evident in everything he hid: he said we were brothers!He dressed himself up as a brother, and I obediently listened to his scientific lectures.As we were having breakfast the next morning, he asked me what I thought of the gossip that the neighbors in the neighborhood said we were twins.The question pleased me, but not my ego.I did not say anything.Two days later, he woke me up in the middle of the night and told me that I really had the dream he had just written about.Maybe it was true, but somehow I didn't care.The next night he confessed to me that he was afraid of dying of the plague.

Tired of being locked in the house all day, I went out to the street at dusk: In a garden, the children climbed up the trees and took off their colorful shoes on the ground; The gossiping women are no longer silent because I pass by; the market and bazaar are full of shoppers; there are people pushing and fighting in the street, some are busy trying to persuade the fight, while others are watching the show.I tried to convince myself that the contagion had gone away on its own, but when I saw the coffins being carried out one after another from the courtyard of the Beyazit Mosque, my nerves tensed immediately, and I hurried back home in a hurry .As soon as he entered his room, Hoja called out, "Come here and have a look at this." With his shirt unbuttoned, he pointed to a small red lump under his navel and said, "This place is full of mosquitoes." I went up to Scrutinize.It was a slightly swollen red spot, like the bite mark of a large mosquito.But why is he showing me this?I dare not come any closer. "A mosquito bite," said Hoja, "isn't it?" He felt the lump with his fingertips. "If it wasn't a flea bite?" I kept silent, not saying that I had never seen a flea bite like this.

6(2) I made excuses to stay in the garden until sunset.I know I shouldn't be in this house anymore, but I can't think of anywhere else to go.And that spot really looks like a mosquito bite, not as obvious and large as the lymphatic lumps of the plague.But soon, I thought of another thing: maybe because I was walking among the grasses that were rapidly turning green in the garden, I felt that the red spot seemed to swell up in two days, bloom like a flower, burst and ooze pus, Hoja died a painful death.I thought it was a nocturnal tropical insect, but I couldn't remember the name of the ghostly creature.

As we sat down to dinner, Hoja tried to feign high spirits, cracking jokes and teasing me, but the mood didn't last long.We finished our dinner in peace, and night fell in windless stillness.After a long time, Hoja said: "I'm so bored and depressed, let's sit at the table and write something." Obviously that was the only way he could pass the time. However, he couldn't write it.He just sat idly, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, while I wrote comfortably. "What are you writing?" I read to him what I had written. It was a past event after finishing my first year of engineering study: As soon as I was on vacation, I was eager to return home and hitched a horse to drive him. However, I also like my school and my classmates very much. During the holidays, when I sat alone by the river and read the books I brought home, I missed them so much.After a short silence, Hoja suddenly whispered as if confiding a secret: "Do people always live so happily there?" I thought he would back off if he asked, but he still had a child looked at me with curiosity.I also whispered back like him: "I was very happy then!" His face flashed a look of envy, but it was not a frightening kind.He coyly told his story.

He said that when he lived in Edirne, he was twelve years old, and for a while he often went to the hospital of the Beyazit Mosque with his mother and sister to visit his grandfather who had stomach problems.In the morning, his mother entrusted his younger brother who could not walk to a neighbor, took Hoja and his sister, and took a pot of pudding prepared in advance, and went out together.They walked along the road shaded by poplar trees, a short but interesting walk.Grandpa often told them stories.Hoja liked the stories, and he liked the hospital even more, so he would often run away and walk around the hospital.Once he was listening to music for the mentally ill under the great arches lit by the lantern light; there was also the sound of water—the sound of running water.Then he wandered into other rooms filled with grotesque, multicolored, shining bottles and jars.Once, when he lost his way, he burst into tears.So people took him to every room in the hospital until they found his grandfather, Mr. Abdullah.His mother sometimes cried and sometimes listened to his father tell stories with her daughter.Then, they left the hospital with the empty pot returned by their grandfather.On the way home, mother would buy them halwa and whisper, "Let's eat it before anyone else sees." The three of them would go to a secret place under the poplar trees by the river, While no one else was looking, I dangled my feet in the water while eating dessert. After all this was said, we both fell into a silence that made both of us uncomfortable; at the same time, an indescribable sense of brotherhood brought us closer together.For a moment Hoja sank into the tension.Afterwards, after a nearby family recklessly slammed the rough door of their house, he added: It was at that time that he first became interested in science because of sick people and all kinds of things that healed them. Bottles and jars and scales.However, after their grandfather died, they never went there again.Hoja had always dreamed of going back there by himself when he grew up, but one year, the Dunga River flooded, and the patients were washed away from their beds, and the dirty and muddy water flooded all the wards of the hospital. Did not recede.After the flood finally receded, this beautiful hospital was buried in fetid sludge for many years because it could not be cleaned up. When Hoja fell silent again, we were no longer so close.He got up from the table, and out of the corner of my eye I could see him pacing around the room.Then he picked up the lamp in the center of the table and walked behind me.I couldn't see Hoja, and I couldn't see his shadow.I wanted to turn to look at him, but I didn't dare; it seemed that I was worried, worried that he might do something wrong to me.After a while, I heard the rustle of undressing, and turned around in fear.He stood in front of the mirror, naked from the upper body, carefully examining his chest and abdomen under the light. "My God," he said, "what kind of pustule is this?" I said nothing. "Come over and have a look, okay?" I didn't dare to move.He growled: "I tell you to come here quickly!" Like a student who was about to be punished by him, I approached him with trepidation. I've never been this close to his naked body; I don't like it.At first, I wanted to believe that was the reason I couldn't get close to him, but I knew in my heart that I was actually afraid of the pustule.He also understands this.However, to hide my fear, I leaned closer in a doctor's pose, muttering words, keeping my eyes on the lump, on the inflamed area. "You're afraid, aren't you?" said Hoja at last.To prove that I wasn't afraid, I moved my head closer. "You're afraid it's a plague lump." I pretended I didn't hear the word, and was about to say it was a bug bite, maybe some weird bug that bit me somewhere, but couldn't figure it out name. "Touch it and see!" Hoja said, "How would you know if you didn't touch it? Touch and see!" He looked pleased to see me standing still.He brought his fingers, which had just touched the lump, to my face.Seeing me back away in disgust, he laughed out loud, teasing me for my fear of an ordinary mosquito bite.But the joy didn't last long. "I'm afraid of death now," he said suddenly.As if it wasn't about death, he was more angry than ashamed, an angry feeling that he had been treated unfairly. "You don't have a pustule like that? Are you sure? Take your clothes off, right now!" At his insistence, I took off my shirt like I hate a child caught taking a bath.It was hot in the room, the windows were closed, but there was a cold draft coming from nowhere; I don't know, maybe it was the coldness of the mirror that gave me goosebumps.Embarrassed by my appearance, I took a step and stepped outside the reflection of the mirror.Now, when Hoja brought his head close to my body, I saw his face reflected in the mirror from the side.That person said it looked like my big head, bent down towards my body.It suddenly occurred to me that he was doing this to poison my spirit; on the contrary, I never did it to him.I have been proud to be his teacher all these years.It was ridiculous to even think of it, but for a moment I thought that this bearded head, grotesquely affected by the lights, was about to suck my blood!Obviously I was deeply influenced by the horror stories I loved to hear as a child.Thinking of this, I felt his fingers on my stomach.I wanted to run away and hit him on the head with something. "Not on you," he said.He came up behind me and checked my armpits, neck and behind my ears. "Not here either. You don't seem to have been bitten by this kind of mosquito." He put his hands on my shoulders and stepped forward to stand by my side, as if I were a childhood friend to share his worries.He grabbed my neck by the sides and pulled me over. "Come on, let's look in the mirror together." I looked at the mirror, and under the invisible light, I saw how similar we were again.I thought back to waiting at Sodik Pasha's mansion, seeing him for the first time, and how overwhelmed I was by the resemblance.Then, I saw someone who should be me; now, I think he should be someone like me.The two of us are one!Now, this is an obvious fact to me.It was as if I was firmly bound, with my hands tied, unable to move.As if to prove that I was who I was, I made a movement to save myself.I hastily ran my hands through my hair.But he did the same thing, and he did it seamlessly, so perfectly that he didn't disturb the balance of the reflection in the mirror.He also imitated my expression, the position of my head, my unbearable terror that I couldn't take my eyes off the mirror out of curiosity.Then, like a child who teases his partner by imitating his words and actions, he rejoices.He shouted loudly!We will die together!What nonsense, I thought.But also scared.It was the scariest night I've ever spent with him. 6(3) Then, he claimed that he had been afraid of the plague all along, and that everything he had done in the past was to test me.It was the same when he watched Sodik Pasha's executioner take me away for execution, and it was the same when people compared us to each other.Then he said that he had captured my soul: just as he did when imitating my movements, whatever I was thinking now, he knew; whatever I knew, he was thinking about it too!Afterwards he asked me what I was thinking at the moment and I said that in fact I had nothing on my mind but him, but he wasn't listening to me at all because he didn't really want to know, he just wanted to To frighten me, to play with his own fear, and to share the feeling of it with me.I realized that the more alone he felt, the more he wanted to hurt me.He himself was even more excited and agitated than I was when he ran his fingers over our faces, or tried to confuse me with this unearthly horror of resemblance, and I thought he was planning to do something bad.I told myself that he kept making me stand in front of the mirror and squeeze my neck because his heart couldn't bear to do such a bad thing right away.But I found him not completely absurd, nor completely helpless.He was right, and I wanted to say and do what he said and did.I envied him because he acted before me and could play with the plague and fear in the mirror. But as much as I was terrified, and as much as I thought I was feeling something about myself that I hadn't thought about before, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was all just a game.He had already let go of the fingers pinching my neck, but I didn't leave the front of the mirror. "Now, I am like you," he said, "I already know how scared you are. I have become you!" I understood what he was saying, but I was still trying to convince myself that this prophecy was stupid and naive , and now I believe half of this prophecy.He claims to see the world the way I do; he mentions "them" again, and now he finally understands what "they" think and how "they" feel.He talked for a while longer, his eyes wandering beyond the mirror, scanning the table, glasses, chairs and other objects illuminated by the lights.Then he claims that he can now say things that he couldn't say because he couldn't see them, but I think he's wrong: the words are still the same, and so are the objects.The only new thing was his fear.No, not even that.It is the form of his feeling of fear.But I think even this, in a way that I can't even describe exactly what it is, is something he's putting on in front of the mirror, a new trick of his.He seemed to reluctantly give up the game, and his mind was always around the red pustule, asking constantly: Is this a mosquito bite or the plague? For a while, he said he wanted to pick up where I left off.We were still standing half naked in front of the mirror.He wants to replace me and I replace him.To do this, for us it was only necessary to exchange clothes, while he shaved off his beard and I grew it.The thought made our similarity in the mirror all the more frightening, and my nerves really tensed, as I listened to him say: Then I'll set him free.He triumphantly talked about what he planned to do after returning to the country as me.I was horrified to find that he remembered everything I told him about my childhood and boyhood, down to the tiniest detail, and constructed out of them a strange fantasyland to his liking.My life was out of my own control and pulled into other places under his control.And I, like a dream, could do nothing but passively watch what happened to me from a distance.But there was something quaint and naive about the journey he wanted to make into my return home, and the life he planned to spend there, that kept me from fully believing it.At the same time, the reasonable logic in the details of his fantasies surprised me: I have an impulse to say that these things could have happened, and my life might have been like this in the first place.At this moment, I knew that for the first time I felt something deeper in Hoja's life, but I couldn't tell what it was.Only, listening to what I've done over the years in the old world I've longed for, I've also forgotten my fear of the plague. However, that didn't last long either.Now Hoja wants me to tell you what I would like to do if I were him.Staying stiff in this weird position all the time, and trying to convince myself that we didn't look alike, that the bump was just a bug bite, nearly broke my nerves and left me blank.At his insistence, I remembered that at one point I had planned to write a memoir when I returned home, and I told him: If that were the case, I might someday write a good story about his experience.Hearing this, he despised me with disgust.I don't know him as well as he knows me--in fact, I don't know him at all!He pushed me away and stood alone in front of the mirror: had he been in my place, he would have told what would have happened to me!First, he said, this lump is a lymphoid lump of the plague; I'm dying.Then he described how I would struggle in pain before I died.I have not discovered this so far, so in the unprepared state, the fear is worse than death itself.He was away from the mirror when it came to how I would wrestle with the pain of my disease.After a while, when I looked again, he was already lying on the bed spread out on the floor, and continued to describe the pain and pain I would suffer.His hands were on his stomach, I thought, as if he was in this pain right now.At this moment, he yelled out.After walking up to him with trepidation, I immediately regretted it.He tried to touch me again.For some reason, I now think it was just a bug bite, but still feel scared. The whole night passed like this.As he tried to infect me with the disease and the fear of it, he kept saying I was him and he was me.I think he does it because he likes to look at himself apart from himself.And like someone trying to wake up from a dream, I kept saying to myself: This is a game.Because, he also uses the word "game".But he was sweating like a man in bad health, not like a man choked with fear of suffocating words in a stuffy room. As the sun rose he was talking of the stars and death, of his false prophecies, of the sultan's folly, and of ingratitude worse than that, of his favorite fools, of "us" and "them," and How he would have liked to be someone else!I stopped listening to him and walked outside to the garden.For some reason, the idea of ​​immortality, which I had read in an old book, now filled my thoughts.There was no movement outside, only the sparrows chirping and changing positions among the lime trees.The stillness is bewildering!I thought about other homes in Istanbul and those who were suffering from the plague.If Hoggard had the plague, I thought, it would go on like this until he died; if not, it wouldn't change until the swelling went away.By now, I understand that I can no longer stay in this home.When I walked back into the house, I didn't know where I could run, where I could hide.I dreamed of a place far from Hoja, far from the plague.When I stuff some laundry into the bag, I know it has to be close enough to get there before I get caught, and that's enough.