Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux

buttonholer, a finger wagger, and his consistent mode of inquiry was teasing. He was a
needler, a joker, not a speechifier but a maker of deflating remarks in a smiling and mildly prosecutorial way, like a courtroom wit.
    I smiled when it dawned on me that he reminded me of myself—evasive, goofy, slightly moody, ill at ease in a crowd, uncomfortable at formal occasions. Latins look a lot like Turks: I felt he physically resembled me, and he had my oblique habit of affecting to be ignorant and a bit gauche in order to elicit information.
    "What do you mean by that?" was his frequent question, demanding that you explain what you just said.
    His mother loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.
    "She didn't like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce." He smiled. "She wasn't happy about that. But I put her in a book—
My Name Is Red.
Then she was happy."
    "I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy," I said. "She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! 'Thanks, Mom!'"
    Pamuk became interested. "You must have been sad about that."
    "Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she'd praised the book—I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I'm not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me."
    We were at the dinner table, being served a Turkish meal. While listening attentively to me, Pamuk was absorbing the reactions of the other people, his eyes darting.
    "Why did you make a face?" he said to the woman next to me.
    She denied she had made a face.
    "Was it because we were talking about mothers, and you are a mother?"
    "Of course not."
    "You did this," Pamuk said, and squinted and showed his teeth and compressed his face into a comic mask.
    He spoke about his years as a student, studying English, reading English books, and how as an anonymous Turk with a fluency in English he had taken Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Istanbul, pointing out the sights, explaining the history.
    "I showed them the city. I was the translator. I was next to them, helping, listening. They had no idea who I was, but they were great writers to me."
    Talk of Arthur Miller turned to talk of Marilyn Monroe. I said that I had written an essay about the Sotheby auction of Marilyn's personal effects.
    "Expensive things?" Pamuk asked.
    "Everything—dresses, books, shoes, broken mirrors, her capri pants, a copy of
The Joy of Cooking
with her scribbles in it, her wobbly dressing table, her junk jewelry. She had a yellow pad of paper and, in her writing, the words 'He doesn't love me.' A cigarette lighter that Frank Sinatra had given her. Also her 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' dress. And her toaster."
    Pamuk was delighted by the inventory. He said, "I love catalogues of people's lives. Did you see the auction of Jackie Kennedy's possessions?"
    "Yes, but no toasters in that one."
    He said he loved minutiae, the revelation in everyday objects. Not the treasures but the yard-sale items, always more telling. It was a novelist's passion, a need to know secrets, to intrude—without seeming to—on other people's lives.
    Still eating, he sized me up and said, "You went swimming with Yashar Kemal."
    "That's right—thirty-three years ago."
    "He is away, in south Anatolia," the host said, because I had also asked how I might get in touch with him. "He is sorry to miss you. He remembered you from that time long ago."
    It seemed to me amazing that he was alive and writing, at the age of eighty-two, this man who'd boasted of his Gypsy blood and his upbringing in the wild hinterland of Turkey among bandits and peasants. He had been inspired by Faulkner, another writer who boasted of being a rustic. But Pamuk was a metropolitan, a man on the frontier as