splintered to smithereens where it stood, and to answer the sovereign’s questions about the animals in the last treatise we had written. When he came home he would say that the sovereign was entering puberty; this was the most impressionable stage of a man’s life, he would have that child in the palm of his hand.
With this goal in mind he started afresh on a completely new book. He had learned from me of the fall of the Aztecs and the memoirs of Cortez, and had in mind even before that the story of a pathetic child-king who was impaled at the stake because he paid no heed to science. He often talked of the immoral wretches who, with their cannon and machines of war, their deceiving tales and their weapons, ambushed honourable men while they slept and forced them to submit to their rule; but for a long time he hid from me whatever it was he shut himself up to write. I could tell that at first he expected me to show interest, but in those days my intense longing for home, which would suddenly plunge me into the most extraordinary gloom, had increased my hatred for him; I suppressed my curiosity, pretended not to care about the dusty books with torn bindings he read because he got them cheap, and to disdain the conclusions his creative intellect derived from what I had taught him. Day by day he gradually lost confidence, first in himself, then in what he was trying to write, while I watched with vindictive pleasure.
He’d go upstairs to the little room he’d made his private study, sit at our table which I’d had built, and think, but I sensed that he wasn’t writing, I knew he could not; I knew he didn’t have the courage to write without first hearing my opinion of his ideas. It was not exactly want of my humble thoughts, which he pretended to scorn, that made him lose faith in himself: what he really wanted was to learn what ‘they’ thought, those like me, the ‘others’ who had taught me all that science, placed those compartments, those drawers full of learning inside my head. What would they think were they in his situation? It was this he was dying to ask, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. How long I waited for him to swallow his pride and find the courage to ask me this question! But he didn’t ask. He soon abandoned this book. I could not tell whether he’d finished writing or not, and resumed his old refrain about the ‘fools’. He would renounce his belief that the fundamental science worthy of practice was the one which would analyse the causes of their folly; renounce the desire to know why the insides of their heads were like they were, and stop thinking about it! I believed these broodings were born of his despair because the signs of favour he expected from the palace did not appear. Time passed in vain, the sovereign’s puberty wasn’t much help after all.
But in the summer before Koprulu Mehmet Pasha became grand vizir, Hoja received the grant at last; and it was one he might have chosen himself: he’d been granted the combined income from two mills near Gebze and two villages an hour’s ride from that town. We went to Gebze at harvest time, taking our old house which by chance stood empty, but Hoja had forgotten the months we’d passed there, the days when he looked with distaste at the table I brought home from the carpenter. His memories seemed to have grown old and ugly along with the house: in any case he was consumed with an impatience that made it impossible for him to care for anything in the past. On a few occasions he went to inspect the villages; he calculated the income earned in previous years, and influenced by Tarhunju Ahmet Pasha, whom he’d heard about from his friends’ gossip at the mosque clock-room, he announced that he’d found a new system for keeping an accounts’ ledger in a much simpler and more readily understandable fashion.
But the originality and usefulness of this innovation, in which even he did not believe, was not enough for him: the
With this goal in mind he started afresh on a completely new book. He had learned from me of the fall of the Aztecs and the memoirs of Cortez, and had in mind even before that the story of a pathetic child-king who was impaled at the stake because he paid no heed to science. He often talked of the immoral wretches who, with their cannon and machines of war, their deceiving tales and their weapons, ambushed honourable men while they slept and forced them to submit to their rule; but for a long time he hid from me whatever it was he shut himself up to write. I could tell that at first he expected me to show interest, but in those days my intense longing for home, which would suddenly plunge me into the most extraordinary gloom, had increased my hatred for him; I suppressed my curiosity, pretended not to care about the dusty books with torn bindings he read because he got them cheap, and to disdain the conclusions his creative intellect derived from what I had taught him. Day by day he gradually lost confidence, first in himself, then in what he was trying to write, while I watched with vindictive pleasure.
He’d go upstairs to the little room he’d made his private study, sit at our table which I’d had built, and think, but I sensed that he wasn’t writing, I knew he could not; I knew he didn’t have the courage to write without first hearing my opinion of his ideas. It was not exactly want of my humble thoughts, which he pretended to scorn, that made him lose faith in himself: what he really wanted was to learn what ‘they’ thought, those like me, the ‘others’ who had taught me all that science, placed those compartments, those drawers full of learning inside my head. What would they think were they in his situation? It was this he was dying to ask, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. How long I waited for him to swallow his pride and find the courage to ask me this question! But he didn’t ask. He soon abandoned this book. I could not tell whether he’d finished writing or not, and resumed his old refrain about the ‘fools’. He would renounce his belief that the fundamental science worthy of practice was the one which would analyse the causes of their folly; renounce the desire to know why the insides of their heads were like they were, and stop thinking about it! I believed these broodings were born of his despair because the signs of favour he expected from the palace did not appear. Time passed in vain, the sovereign’s puberty wasn’t much help after all.
But in the summer before Koprulu Mehmet Pasha became grand vizir, Hoja received the grant at last; and it was one he might have chosen himself: he’d been granted the combined income from two mills near Gebze and two villages an hour’s ride from that town. We went to Gebze at harvest time, taking our old house which by chance stood empty, but Hoja had forgotten the months we’d passed there, the days when he looked with distaste at the table I brought home from the carpenter. His memories seemed to have grown old and ugly along with the house: in any case he was consumed with an impatience that made it impossible for him to care for anything in the past. On a few occasions he went to inspect the villages; he calculated the income earned in previous years, and influenced by Tarhunju Ahmet Pasha, whom he’d heard about from his friends’ gossip at the mosque clock-room, he announced that he’d found a new system for keeping an accounts’ ledger in a much simpler and more readily understandable fashion.
But the originality and usefulness of this innovation, in which even he did not believe, was not enough for him: the