The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk - Abrams

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introduction

the story of the last ottoman prince The idea for my museum came to me when I met His Imperial Highness Prince Ali Vâsib for the first time in 1982 at a family reunion in Istanbul.

The prince, who was Sultan Murad V’s only great-grandson, would have been sitting on the throne at that time had the sultanate still existed and the Ottoman Dynasty been in power. But this octogenarian had just obtained leave to return to Turkey as a tourist after being forced to leave in 1924 following the collapse of the Ottoman state and the foundation of the Turkish Republic, and that too on a foreign passport. He cared neither for the throne nor for political power; he wished only to be able to remain permanently in the country that his ancestors had ruled for more than six centuries. He lived in Alexandria, spending his summers in Portugal where he had made friends and killed time with the dethroned and retired kings and princes of Europe and the Middle East. (He was able to tell me why the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, had separated from his first wife, Fawzia.)

His memoirs, published posthumously in 2004 as Memoirs of a Prince: What I Saw and Heard at Home and in Exile and edited by his son Osman Selaheddin Osmanoglu, reveal that the prince ’s constant worry in life was indigence. For many years he made a living by working as a ticket taker and then as director of the Antoniadis Palace and Museum in Alexandria.

“I was charged with the administration and cleaning of the palace, and with the conservation of its objects. The silverware, crystal, and furniture were my responsibility,” he proudly recounts. I had written about one of the last Ottoman princes in The Black Book; the topic was of interest. My curiosity at the family table prompted the elderly prince to share some stories. Among them was King Farouk’s kleptomania. During a visit to the

A view of the second floor of the Museum of Innocence. The sequence of boxes begins on the far wall across the stairwell with Box 2, “The Sanzelize Boutique,” and continues along the wall at right. Visible in the photograph are Box 68, “4,213 Cigarette Stubs,” (on the rear wall of the entrance hall on the floor below) and Box 73, “Füsun’s Driver’s License,” (at the top of the stairs on the museum’s third floor).

The museum’s entrance hall. Inscribed on the floor is a time spiral, symbolizing ideas about time and memory that are carried through to the clocks exhibited in the central stairwell that comprise Box 54, “Time.”

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2 The Sanzelize Boutique

A fascinating fashion show at the Hilton. The caption underneath the photograph reads: “Two fashion shows have recently been organized at the Istanbul Hilton in aid of an antipoverty charity and a children’s charity. One of our city’s well-known fashion workshops presented various ensembles at this show. The event, a showcase of our local textile industry and of Turkish taste, was followed with great interest by six hundred invitees, all high-society ladies. Above, some of the young and beautiful models who took part in the show: from left to right, Aylâ, Suna, Elgin, Güle,r and Lâle Belkıs.”

I didn’t worry too much about making the first box, which I built around the earring Füsun dropped, but the main problem I would face throughout the making of the museum became immediately clear when I got to this second box: what kind of compositional logic should I use to place the objects in the box? What shape should each box take? I had already collected some objects before and during the writing of the novel, such as Füsun’s yellow shoes and the cowbell. I worked on making the “fake” Jenny Colon bag—named after the Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval’s lover—with Istanbul’s artisans; and I had found the Sanselize Butik’s old signboard. So now, I asked myself, should I put the objects in the box according to the order in which they appear in the book or should I make a different tableau out of them? It was while imagining this box that I made the decision that would delay the completion of the museum for months—nay, years— and bring me both joy and sadness. No, I couldn’t just display the objects in order, like books on a shelf. The boxes had to have a special structure and an aura; they each had to have a particular soul. One day I was inspired and sketched this box with a pencil. We put the objects in the box according to that design, moving things around by the tiniest of fractions and relying on trial and error to get it right. Imagining the boxes one by one as objects beautiful in their own right has added a touch of lyricism to the museum.

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This wallpaper design was inspired by the border illumination of a Mughal manuscript in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. the sanselize boutique 59

Poppy Apartments

Seagull Apartments

Solar Apartments

Union Apartments

Pearl Apartments

Dikra Apartments

Lucky Apartments

Birthright Apartments

Pure Apartments

Angelic Apartments

Bouquet Apartments

Little Pamuk Apartments

Ariman Apartments

Sirman Apartments

Graceful Apartments

Hümeyra Apartments

Apartments of Light

Snow Apartments

H. Erel Apartments

Lucky Apartments

Desire Apartments

Dawn Apartments

Hacıorhan Apartments

Lilac Apartments

Azizbey Apartments

Impetuous Apartments

Wellness Apartments

Lovely Apartments

Spring Apartments

Pink Apartments

Honey Apartments

Rana Apartments

Modern Apartments

Akasya Apartments

Gallipoli Apartments

Atlas Apartments

Pearl Apartments

Virgo Apartments

Sar-An Apartments

Rose Apartments

Anatolia Apartments

Hamdi Bey Apartments

Charming Apartments

Model Apartments

Muhsine Palace

Crystal Palace

Bosphorus Apartments

Charity Apartments

Meriç Aparments

Seda Apartments

The Three’s Apartments

Youthful Apartments

Jolly Apartments

Murat Apartments

Honorable Apartments

Exchange Apartments

After Atatürk instructed the Turkish people to take surnames for themselves in 1934, it became fashionable to attach one’s new name to one’s newly constructed apartment building.

Since in those days there was no consistent system for street

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names and numbers, and large, wealthy families tended to live collectively under one roof, just as they had done in the days of the Ottoman Empire, it made sense for the sake of navigating the city that these new apartment buildings be

known by the name of the owners. (Many of the rich families I shall mention own eponymous apartment buildings.)

Another aspirational fashion was for people to name buildings after high-minded principles; but my mother would

say that those who gave their buildings names like Hürriyet (freedom), Inayet (benevolence), or Fazilet (charity) were generally the ones who had spent their entire lives making a mockery of those same virtues.

—Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence the merhamet apartments 75

17 My Whole Life Depends on You Now

the taxis of istanbul In the mid-1970s, around the time Kemal fell in love with Füsun, all the taxis in Istanbul were equipped with mechanical meters. But because of periodic increases in the price of petrol, constant changes in fares, and the fact that most of the meters were broken, nobody ever really used them. A customer might occasionally suggest to a driver: “Why won’t you switch the meter on?” But otherwise the taximeter’s main function was—not unlike that of the black-and-white-checked stripe that ran along the bottom of the window frames—to mark cars as taxis, shared or otherwise.

If being modern means being able to feel at ease in a city among people we’ve never met before and being able to peacefully share with these people a common purpose, whether real or imagined, then the places where the people of Istanbul are most modern are the seats of the shared taxis. Amid the chaos of a constant exchange of spare change—and imbued with the pleasant feeling of being part of a community rather than among strangers—passengers in shared taxis (produced in America or Europe with their own unique door handles) will always help and chat with one another and the driver. I love sitting in a shared taxi and looking out of the window at the city’s countless vistas, its odd little corners, and at the views of the sea that emerge from between sloping roads while listening to other passengers telling complete strangers about why they argued with their wives the night before, why the things they watched on television yesterday were so disgraceful, about the worsening state of the nation and the world, or about their time in the military. For years, I have been thinking of a novel based on a taxi driver’s comings and goings in the city.

To activate the meter, the driver stretched his arm from where he was seated to lift the red lever, but this was very rarely done.

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my whole life depends on you now 107

from oriental street dog to occidental dog on top of the radio Historians and Western commentators have often observed that street dogs are the one group that has best resisted the Westernization of Istanbul. From the sixteenth century onward, the city’s neighborhoods have been ruled by packs of street dogs after nightfall. The residents of Istanbul genuinely love these dogs, who act as both night watchmen and street sweepers because of their appetite for litter. This love stems not from religious reasons, but from the familiarity bred by living cheek by jowl with street dogs on a daily basis. In the nineteenth century, when Western cities wiped out packs of street dogs in an attempt to achieve better hygiene and health standards, Westernizing and modernizing Ottoman sultans tried to do the same in Istanbul. Mahmud II (1808–1839), who massacred thousands of soldiers in order to replace the old Janissary units with a modern military, made plans to drive the dogs out of Istanbul, but he was unsuccessful. During Abdülaziz’s reign (1861–1876) and also in 1908, the street dogs were ruthlessly rounded up and exiled to the tiny island of Sivriada, but this plan, like many attempts at modernizing reform, floundered because the public petitioned to get the dogs back.

Edmondo De Amicis, the Italian writer whose brilliant 1877 writings on Istanbul’s street dogs remain unsurpassed, describes how people in old Istanbul’s Muslim neighborhoods would alter their paths during the day to avoid disturbing sleeping dogs and how nobody in the Pera and Galata areas even bothered to throw the dogs any scraps, making life for them on these Christian streets hard. Dogs have thus been used to further illustrate the infamous East-West divide. In the East, you have untamed packs of dogs taking over the streets; in the West, you have tame dogs accustomed to living inside homes.

These dogs, popular everywhere in the 1970s, made their first appearances in Istanbul in the front and back windows of taxicabs. Their heads would wag in time with the wobbling of the car as it passed over potholes and flagstones. Later, some of these figurines made the leap from dashboards to the tops of radios and televisions, only to then slowly disappear as so many other objects did.

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the dogs 217

During my childhood, municipal officers, doctors, and chemists in Galata and Cihangir used poison to slaughter the dogs (modernity is always a good excuse for a massacre) in an attempt to break their hold on the streets. But in the city’s newer and poorer neighborhoods in the slums where the municipality left rubbish uncollected and to which it couldn’t send any night watchmen, new and powerful packs of dogs were formed and were lovingly embraced by the immigrant population streaming in from Anatolia. The packs of dogs I came across during the 1960s in Cihangir were nowhere near as strong or aggressive as the huge packs of Ottoman times. And when I walked home from my writing studio around three or four a.m., I learned—as every Istanbul resident does—to be unafraid of the packs that roamed in the dark—or at least to hide my fear.

But the strength of the packs was weakening by then, in any case.

Although dogs might be a constant presence in our lives in Istanbul— even invading our dreams with their barking and howling—all the little dog statues I have displayed here, most of which once sat in private homes, were produced outside of Turkey (with the exception of the dog at the bottom of this page, which was produced in Turkey by Kütahya Seramik).

This must be in part because the laws of Islam discourage the art of sculpture. But a likelier reason is that it is not the domesticated house dogs that the people of Istanbul love, but the muddy, dirty, shabby street dogs. The measuring tape in the shape of a dog is a trinket Kemal brought back for Nesibe Hala from a trip to Europe; twisting the dog’s tail rolls the tape in or out. The dog figurines Kemal brought back from overseas to place on top of the television allowed the Keskins to do what many other families did the world over—to taste the pleasure of middle-class familial happiness and of loving a dog as if it were a person in its own right.

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chapter title here 219

Füsun's blue bathing suit. The '56 Chevrolet's speedometer. Füsun's textbook for her driving test, full of questions and answers. Some Istanbul soil I scraped up from an empty lot. A rotting blue-painted plank torn out of one of Çukurcuma's old wooden houses. A photograph of one of those old neighborhoods that is still full of wooden houses (when the man steps on the pedal, the cotton candy begins to gather around the stick like the children have gathered around him). A globe used in geography classes in the 1960s.

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Cars lined up on the Bosphorus as their owners drink tea in Emirgan. Flies buzzing around plates of fried mussels and meatballs. In order to remember and be able to tell me about it, Kemal went back to the streets he and Füsun had walked in order to collect all the documents she needed for her driver's license, and he saw that all the wooden houses had been knocked down and the rough cobblestone streets covered with asphalt. The jewelry and butterflies Kemal bought Füsun.

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