1In 964, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I spent the summer in a house by the sea a good 35 miles from Istanbul. I liked to jump over the low garden wall, run to the beach and roam through the rocks and open corridors along the coast, I loved to devote myself to the wonderful little things that untouched nature offered me. One day I came across a small pool of water in the middle of the rocks. It wasn’t a real basin, but rather the sea seeped into it between stones and rocks. But like a basin, with a circumference of six or seven meters, it was thirty centimeters deep, and above all it was safe from the attack of the choppy swell. Soon after, I discovered that beneath the smooth, completely transparent surface of my “basin” there was a world, yes, a culture. From then on I went there by myself again and again and watched the fascinating hustle and bustle in the sea water, which was warm due to the summer heat.
Orhan Pamuk’s guest contribution in the Turkish original
Yazının Türkçe orijinalini okumak için tıklayın
I liked the young crabs, half white, half transparent and no bigger than my fingernail, which ran sideways in great excitement. Speckled stone fish of various colors, avoiding the sunlight, scurried out from under one rock, only to disappear again under the next. They were ugly. Larger stonefish got caught in fishing nets, as did scorpion fish with their poisonous sting on their backs. I didn’t like them. Occasionally a garfish that had strayed into the basin would appear and patiently plow through the water with its slender black nose like a submarine in search of the exit. I was surprised that the pike could not find the exit at all; as I watched him, I clearly felt the dilemmas of my own life as well.
In this little pool of water I discovered the whole world
Unexpectedly, between all the mussels, sea urchins and horse actines that dwelt in the cracks in the rock, a crab, almost as big as my – twelve – year – old – hand, stuck out his scissors in a brownish porcelain shine. In the face of this advance, I, along with all the other creatures in the saltwater pool, froze and expected the crab to appear, but it never did. Like the slime fish-like flickering back and forth like lightning, snaking not only with their tails but with their whole bodies, the crab was very seldom seen. Sometimes a shoal of sand ink got into the pool, each no bigger than a match, like garfish lost or washed in by a wave, and lingered. I was surprised at how calm the tiny smelts stayed instead of panicking out of the pool.
I usually wore short plastic shorts and flip-flops, called “Tokyo” in Turkey because of their Japanese look. Every now and then I waded into the pool up to my knees on the muddy ground and stood right in the middle of the culture. Small white prawns sped away like grasshoppers. I waited until the cloud of mud, resembling a mushroom cloud, that was kicked up by my feet gradually subsided, then leaned down until my nose almost touched the water level. For hours I could watch the sea snails at the bottom of the basin, the tiny tower snails with their hairy, spider-legged feet hastily dragging their shells, the traces of all these creatures, the strange holes in the bottom that looked like ant nests, the air sacs, theirs Origin was a mystery to me. The sun burned my neck. In the distance, the joyful noise of children and happy people romping about on the beach could be heard from across the street.
During these two summers something terrible happened in the otherwise quiet pool: suddenly a seagull shot down from the sky, only to rise again with a cleverly picked, pitiful stone fish in its beak. I never forgot the horror that gripped me.
Sometimes my mother called to me from the distant house: “Ooorhaaaan, Orhaaaaan!” For fear of revealing where I was, I did not react. I wanted to be part of the world in the pool, so I stayed there, still and still.
How I lost my childhood place by the sea
This world is lost today. In 1964, two and a half million people lived around the Sea of Marmara. Today there are twenty-five million, and around half of Turkish industry is located. In 1976 the basin was filled in and a concrete pier was built on it, on which the summer guests of the nearby apartment house can sunbathe. When a mysterious, disgusting white crust – the population disgustedly called it “sea slime” – covered the Sea of Marmara, the public beaches of Istanbul and the surrounding Marmara region, which, like the cinemas of yesteryear, had been a world of their own, closed Tower snails and sea shrimp that have long since disappeared.
The Turkish Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk lives in istanbul. In February 2022 his novel “The Nights of the Plague” will be published by Hanser.
From the Turkish of Sabine Adatepe.
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