wasted nights he spent sitting in the garden behind the old house looking at the sky rekindled his passion for astronomy. I encouraged him for a while, believing he’d take his theories a step further; but his intention was not to make observations or use his mind: he invited the most intelligent youths he knew from the village and from Gebze to the house, saying he’d teach them the highest science, set up for them in the back garden the orrery he’d sent me to Istanbul to retrieve, repaired the bells, oiled it, and one evening, with an enthusiasm and energy he got from I don’t know where, passionately repeated, without omission or error, that theory of the heavens he’d expounded years before first to the pasha and then to the sultan. But when the next morning we found a sheep’s heart on our doorstep, still warm and bleeding, with a spell written upon it, this was enough to make him finally give up all hope both in the youths who’d left the house at midnight without asking one question, and in astronomy.
But he did not dwell on this setback either: surely they were not the ones to understand the turning of the earth and stars; for now it was not necessary that they should understand; the one who must understand was about to grow out of puberty, and perhaps he had sought us in our absence, we were missing our opportunity for the sake of the few pennies we’d receive here after the harvest. We settled our affairs, hired the most intelligent-looking of those bright youths as overseer, and returned to Istanbul.
The next three years were our worst. Every day, every month, was like the one before, every season a sickening, nerve-racking repetition of some other season we’d lived through: it was as if we painfully, desperately, watched the same things happening again, waiting in vain for some disaster we could not name. He was still called to the palace now and then, where they expected him to provide his inoffensive interpretations, and still gathered with his friends in science at the mosque clock-room on Thursday afternoons, still saw his students in the mornings and beat them, even if not as regularly as before, still resisted those who came to the house now and then with offers of marriage, even if not quite as decisively as he used to, still was obliged to listen to that music he said he didn’t like anymore in order to lie with the women, still sometimes seemed about to choke on the hatred he felt for his fools, still would shut himself in his room, lie down on the bed he spread out, thumb irritably through the pages of the manuscripts and books stacked all around him and wait, staring at the ceiling for hours on end.
What made him even more miserable were the victories of Koprulu Mehmet Pasha he heard about from his friends at the mosque clock-room. When he told me the fleet had routed the Venetians, or that the islands of Tenedos and Limnos had been recaptured, or that the rebel Abaza Hasan Pasha had been crushed, he’d add that these were the last of merely fleeting successes, the pathetic wrigglings of a cripple soon to be buried in the slime of idiocy and incompetence: he seemed to be waiting for some disaster to change the monotony of these days that exhausted us all the more as they repeated one another. Worse, since he no longer had the patience and confidence to concentrate on the thing he obstinately called ‘science’, he had nothing to distract him: he could not keep his enthusiasm for a new idea for more than one week, he soon remembered his fools and forgot all else. Wasn’t the thought he’d devoted to them till now enough? Was it worth wearing himself out over them? Worth getting so angry? And perhaps, since he had only just learned to set himself apart from them, he could muster neither the strength nor desire to investigate this science in detail. He had begun, however, to believe he was different from the others.
His first impression was born of sheer frustration. By now, because
But he did not dwell on this setback either: surely they were not the ones to understand the turning of the earth and stars; for now it was not necessary that they should understand; the one who must understand was about to grow out of puberty, and perhaps he had sought us in our absence, we were missing our opportunity for the sake of the few pennies we’d receive here after the harvest. We settled our affairs, hired the most intelligent-looking of those bright youths as overseer, and returned to Istanbul.
The next three years were our worst. Every day, every month, was like the one before, every season a sickening, nerve-racking repetition of some other season we’d lived through: it was as if we painfully, desperately, watched the same things happening again, waiting in vain for some disaster we could not name. He was still called to the palace now and then, where they expected him to provide his inoffensive interpretations, and still gathered with his friends in science at the mosque clock-room on Thursday afternoons, still saw his students in the mornings and beat them, even if not as regularly as before, still resisted those who came to the house now and then with offers of marriage, even if not quite as decisively as he used to, still was obliged to listen to that music he said he didn’t like anymore in order to lie with the women, still sometimes seemed about to choke on the hatred he felt for his fools, still would shut himself in his room, lie down on the bed he spread out, thumb irritably through the pages of the manuscripts and books stacked all around him and wait, staring at the ceiling for hours on end.
What made him even more miserable were the victories of Koprulu Mehmet Pasha he heard about from his friends at the mosque clock-room. When he told me the fleet had routed the Venetians, or that the islands of Tenedos and Limnos had been recaptured, or that the rebel Abaza Hasan Pasha had been crushed, he’d add that these were the last of merely fleeting successes, the pathetic wrigglings of a cripple soon to be buried in the slime of idiocy and incompetence: he seemed to be waiting for some disaster to change the monotony of these days that exhausted us all the more as they repeated one another. Worse, since he no longer had the patience and confidence to concentrate on the thing he obstinately called ‘science’, he had nothing to distract him: he could not keep his enthusiasm for a new idea for more than one week, he soon remembered his fools and forgot all else. Wasn’t the thought he’d devoted to them till now enough? Was it worth wearing himself out over them? Worth getting so angry? And perhaps, since he had only just learned to set himself apart from them, he could muster neither the strength nor desire to investigate this science in detail. He had begun, however, to believe he was different from the others.
His first impression was born of sheer frustration. By now, because
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