White Castle Read Online Free PDF

the trees in the garden. We walked to his house. He said he’d known all along I wouldn’t abandon my faith. He’d even made ready a room in his house for me. He asked if I were hungry. The fear of death was still upon me, I was in no state to eat anything. Still I was able to get down a few mouthfuls of the bread and yogurt he put before me. Hoja watched happily while I chewed my food. He looked at me with the pleasure of a peasant feeding a fine horse he’d just bought from the bazaar, thinking of all the work it would do for him in future. Until the days when he forgot me, submerged in the details of his theory of cosmography and designs for the clock he planned to present to the pasha, I had many occasions to remember that look.

    Later he said I would teach him everything; that’s why he’d asked the pasha to give me to him, and only after I had done this would he make me a freedman. It would take me months to find out what this ‘everything’ was. ‘Everything’ meant all that I’d learned in primary and secondary school; all the astronomy, medicine, engineering, everything that was taught in my country. It was what was written in the books in my cell he had a servant go and fetch the following day, all I’d heard and seen, all I had to say about rivers, bridges, lakes, caves and clouds and seas, the causes of earthquakes and thunder... Around midnight he added that it was the stars and planets which most interested him. Moonlight was shining in through the open window, he said we must at least find definite proof regarding the existence or non-existence of that planet between the moon and the Earth. With the ravaged eyes of a man who’d spent a day standing side by side with death, I couldn’t help but notice the unnerving likeness between us again as Hoja gradually ceased to use the word ‘teach’: we were going to search together, discover together, progress together.

    So, like two dutiful students who work faithfully at their lessons even when the grown-ups are not at home listening through a cracked door, like two obedient brothers, we sat down to work. In the beginning I felt more like the solicitous elder who agrees to review his old lessons so as to help his lazy little brother catch up; and Hoja behaved like a clever boy who tries to prove that the things his big brother knows are really not all that much. According to him, the gap between his knowledge and mine was no greater than the number of volumes he’d had brought from my cell and lined up on a shelf and the books whose contents I remembered. With his phenomenal diligence and quickness of mind, in six months he’d acquired a basic grasp of Italian which he’d improve upon later, read all of my books, and by the time he’d made me repeat to him everything I remembered, there was no longer any way in which I was superior to him. However, he acted as if he had access to a knowledge that transcended what was in books – he himself agreed most of them were worthless – a knowledge more natural and more profound than things that could be learned. At the end of six months we were no longer companions who studied together, progressed together. It was he who came up with ideas, and I would only remind him of certain details to help him along or review what he already knew.

    He more often found these ‘ideas’, most of which I have forgotten, at night, long after we’d finished the improvised meal we ate in the evening and all the lamps in the neighbourhood had gone out, leaving everything around us wrapped in silence. In the mornings he’d go to teach at the primary school in the mosque a couple of neighbourhoods away, and two days a week he’d go to a faraway district I’d never set foot in and stop by the clock-room of a mosque, where the times of prayer are calculated. The rest of our time we spent either preparing for the night’s ‘ideas’ or chasing after them in pursuit. At that time I still had hope, I believed I would soon