White Castle Read Online Free

room. I believe Hoja enjoyed this. He could sit and watch me to his heart’s content, if only by the dim light of a lamp.

    As I felt his eyes following me it made me all the more uneasy that he didn’t notice the resemblance between us. Once or twice I thought he saw it but was pretending not to. It was as if he were toying with me; he was performing a small experiment on me, obtaining information I couldn’t comprehend. For in those first days he continually scrutinized me as if he were learning something and the more he learned the more curious he became. But he seemed hesitant to take any further steps to penetrate the meaning of this strange knowledge. It was this inconclusiveness that oppressed me, that made the house so suffocating! True, I gained some confidence from his hesitation, but it did not reassure me. Once, while we were discussing our experiments, and another time when he asked me why I still had not become a Muslim, I felt he was covertly trying to draw me into an argument so I did not respond. He sensed my restraint; I realized he thought less of me for it, and this made me angry. In those days it was perhaps only in this way we understood each other: each of us looked down on the other. I held myself in check, thinking that if we succeeded in putting on the fireworks display without mishap, they would grant me permission to return home.

    One night, elated by the success of a rocket that had climbed to an extraordinary height, Hoja said that someday he would be able to make one that would shoot as high as the moon; the only problem was to find the requisite proportions of gunpowder and cast a chamber that could tolerate the mixture. I remarked that the moon was very far away but he interrupted me, saying he knew that as well as I, but wasn’t it also the planet nearest the Earth? When I admitted he was right, he didn’t relax as I expected, he became even more agitated, but said nothing more.

    Two days later, at midnight, he took up the question again: how could I be so sure that the moon was the closest planet? Perhaps we were letting ourselves be taken in by an optical illusion. It was then I spoke to him for the first time about my studies in astronomy and explained briefly the basic principles of Ptolemaic cosmography. I saw that he listened with interest, but was reluctant to say anything that would reveal his curiosity. A little later, when I stopped talking, he said he too had knowledge of Ptolemy but this did not change his suspicion that there might be a planet nearer than the moon. Towards morning he was talking about that planet as if he had already obtained proofs of its existence.

    The next day he thrust a badly translated manuscript into my hand. In spite of my poor Turkish I was able to decipher it: I believe it was a second-hand summary of Almageist drawn up not from the original but from another summary; only the Arabic names of the planets interested me, and I was in no mood to get excited about them at that time. When Hoja saw I was unimpressed and soon put the book aside, he was angry. He’d paid seven gold pieces for this volume, it was only right that I should set aside my conceit, turn the pages and take a look at it. Like an obedient student, I opened the book again and while patiently turning its pages came across a primitive diagram. It showed the planets in crudely drawn spheres arranged in relation to the Earth. Although the positions of the spheres were correct the illustrator had no idea of the distances between them. Then my eye was caught by a tiny planet between the moon and the Earth; examining it a little more carefully, I could tell from the relative freshness of the ink that it had been added to the manuscript later. I went over the entire manuscript and gave it back to Hoja. He told me he was going to find that planet: he did not seem at all to be joking. I said nothing, and there was a silence that unnerved him as much as it did me. Since we were never able to