Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux Page A

all writers are, but essentially a city dweller.
    "I read your book about South America," Pamuk said. "I liked the part about Argentina, especially Borges."
    Pamuk had much in common with Borges, not just his writing but his personality—an inwardness, a gift for the magical in his prose, wide and even arcane learning combined with a sense of comedy. Borges had been very funny in conversation, and often self-mocking, pretending to
jeer at his own writing, insincerely remarking on how short his stories were—"and probably full of howlers!" as he said to me of "The Wall and the Books," his Chinese story.
    The most endearing trait that Pamuk and Borges shared was a passion for the cities of their birth. Throughout Borges's writing is a nuanced history of Buenos Aires, and Borges would have nodded in agreement at Pamuk's judgment of a life in Istanbul, because it was so similar to that of a Buenos Aires person, a
porteño:
"When
Istanbullus
grow a bit older and feel their fates intertwining with that of the city, they come to welcome the cloak of melancholy that brings their lives a contentment, an emotional depth, that almost looks like happiness. Until then they rage against their fate."
    In his writing, Borges extolled the violence, the music, the steamy secrets of Buenos Aires while at the same time bemoaning its philistinisms and pomposities and backward-looking conceits. Pamuk, it seemed to me, was no different.
    "You read to him," Pamuk said. "That was nice."
    "He enjoyed being read to. He had a little glimmer of eyesight—I mean, he signed a book for me—but he couldn't read."
    "Did he do this?" Pamuk shut his eyes and threw his head back in an imitation of Stevie Wonder lost in a rapture of appreciation, grinning and shaking his head. It was a sudden and unexpected turn. Everyone laughed.
    "You're wicked," I said.
    "What do you mean by that?"
    I said, "He didn't wag his head. He sat there and often finished the sentences in the stories. He seemed to know most of them by heart."
    "Which stories? What did you read?"
    "Kipling. He liked
Plain Tales from the Hills.
'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows'—about opium smoking. 'Beyond the Pale'—a doomed love affair. Borges was a connoisseur of unrequited love."
    "What else?"
    "Parts of the
Arabian Nights
in the Burton translation. He owned a first edition, about twenty volumes."
    "Some of it is sexy. You read him those parts too, eh?"
    Querying, mocking, needling, teasing, then all at once attentive. Pamuk approached a subject like a city dweller, darting up this alley and down that street, and then he was at an upstairs window calling down,
raising a laugh, before his confrontation with a direct question. He also had a writer's gift for risking the sort of overfrank childish questions that can be disarming.
    Talk of Borges and love led him to speak candidly about his father's mysterious other life and the loud battles between his father and mother: the turbulent household—evasive husband, agitated wife.
    A woman sitting next to Pamuk said, "My mother once bumped into my father when he was with his mistress."
    "That's a nightmare," I said.
    "Good answer!" Pamuk said, smirking at me.
    His indirection, the manner of his teasing, his posturing and prodding, finishing with a trenchant remark, was proof of Pamuk's seriousness. I thought of how all writers, when they are alone, talk to themselves. "When the inner history of any writer's mind is written," V. S. Pritchett once said, "we find (I believe) that there is a break at some point in his life. At some point he splits off from the people who surround him and he discovers the necessity of talking to himself and not to them."
    In
Istanbul
it is possible to observe this process taking place in Pamuk's restless mind, his discovering that his inner life is unknown to his family, his relief in talking to himself. He finds solace away from his family, in solitary walks and mumbling meditation, because, among others things—as a