The Photographs in the Dark Museum House

Orhan Pamuk

《伊斯坦布爾：一座城市的記憶》

土耳其著名作家奧爾罕·帕慕克（Orhan Pamuk，1952— ）出生于一個富裕的西化的家庭，祖父因辦工廠發(fā)家，死后將大筆家產(chǎn)留給兩個兒子。然而作者的父親和叔叔并不擅長經(jīng)營，導(dǎo)致家道敗落。高中時父母離異，作者隨母親一起生活。帕慕克不顧整個家庭的反對毅然走上創(chuàng)作的道路。七年后，他出版了第一部小說《塞夫得特州長和他的兒子們》，并獲得《土耳其日報》小說首獎和奧爾罕·凱馬爾小說獎。2006年因《伊斯坦布爾：一座城市的記憶》（Istanbul: Memories and the City）一書獲諾貝爾文學(xué)獎，本文節(jié)選自該部作品。

帕慕克以其獨特的個人視角及歷史感講述了他的家族史——從祖父的顯赫到父輩的逐漸沒落。三代人住在一棟五層的公寓樓里，每一家都有自己的傭人，親戚們聚在一起時表面上熱鬧喜慶，暗地里卻為了金錢和爭家產(chǎn)鉤心斗角、互相指責(zé)。盡管家道逐漸沒落，祖母仍恪守往日上層社會的規(guī)矩和習(xí)俗，在她眼里，客廳就是一個家族的博物館，主人在這里接待假想中的客人，因此在客廳里必須正襟危坐，不允許懶散怠慢。而客廳里的那一張張照片更是將往日生活的瞬間定格在一幅幅相框里，供后代們品味和遐想，這些正好給作者提供了豐富的寫作素材，于是便有了下面的文字。

My mother, my father, my older brother, my grandmother, my uncles, and my aunts—we all lived on different floors of the same fivestory apartment house. Until the year before I was born,the different branches of the family had [as with so many large Ottoman（土耳其人的）families] lived together in a stone mansion; in 1951 they rented it out（出租）to a private elementary school and built on the empty lot（一塊地）next door the modern structure I would know as home; on the fa?ade（正面）, in keeping with（與……一致）the custom of the time, they proudly put up a plaque（牌匾）that said PAMUK APT（帕穆克公寓）. We lived on the fourth floor,but I had the run of（在……自由活動）the entire building from the time I was old enough to climb off my mother’s lap and can recall that on each floor there was at least one piano. When my last bachelor（單身）uncle put his newspaper down long enough to get married, and his new wife moved into the first-floor apartment, from which she was to spend the next half century gazing out the window,she brought her piano with her. No one ever played, on this one or any of the others; this may be why they made me feel so sad.

But it wasn’t just the unplayed piano; in each apartment porcelains（瓷器）, teacups, silver sets（銀器）, sugar bowls,snuffboxes（鼻煙盒）, crystal glasses, rosewater ewers（有玫瑰香水味的大口水壺）, plates, and censers（香爐）that no one ever touched, although among them I sometimes found hiding places for miniature cars（模型車）. There were the unused desks inlaid with mother-of-pearl（鑲嵌著珍珠母）, the turban（穆斯林頭巾，狹邊帽）shelves on which there were no turbans, and the Japanese and Art Nouveau（新藝術(shù)）screens behind which nothing was hidden. There, in the library, gathering dust behind the glass, were my doctor uncle’s medical books; in the 20 years since he’d emigrated（移居國外）to America, no human hand had touched them. To my childish mind, these rooms were furnished not for the living, but for the dead. [Every once in a while a coffee table or a carved chest（有雕刻的柜子）would disappear from one sitting room only to appear in another sitting room on another floor.]

If she thought we weren’t sitting properly on her silver-threaded chairs, our grandmother would bring us to attention.“Sit up straight!”Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could lounge（懶洋洋地坐著或躺著）comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical visitor（想象的客人）that the householders were westernized（西化的）. A person who was not fasting（齋戒，禁食）during Ramadan1. Ramadan: 齋月，伊斯蘭教歷的九月，該月名字意為“禁月”，是穆斯林封齋的一個月，是真主安拉（Allah）將古蘭經(jīng)（Quran）下降給穆罕默德圣人的月份。would perhaps suffer fewer pangs of conscience（良心上的折磨）among these glass cupboards and dead pianos than he might if he were still sitting cross-legged in a room full of cushions and divans（長沙發(fā)椅）. Although everyone knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else westernization was good for. So it was not just in the affluent（富裕的）homes of Istanbul（伊斯坦布爾，土耳其城市）that you saw sitting-room museums; over the next 50 years you could find these haphazard（偶然的）and gloomy（暗淡的）(but sometimes also poetic) displays of western influence in sitting rooms all over Turkey; only with the arrival of television in the 1970s did they go out of fashion. Once people had discovered how pleasurable it was to sit together to watch the evening news, their sitting rooms changed from little museums to little cinemas—although you still hear of old families who put their televisions in their central hallways（走廊，門廳）, locking up their museum sitting rooms and opening them only for holidays or special guests.

Because the traffic（這里指在走廊和樓梯之間過往穿梭的家人和親戚）between floors was incessant（不斷的）, as it had been in the Ottoman mansion, doors in our modern apartment building were usually left open. Once my brother had started school, my mother would let me go upstairs alone, or else we would walk up together to visit my paternal grandmother in her bed. The tulle（薄紗）curtains in her sitting room were closed, but it made little difference; the building next door was so close as to make the room very dark anyway, especially in the morning, so I’d sit on the large heavy carpets and invent a game to play on my own. Arranging the miniature cars that someone had brought me from Europe into an obsessively（強迫性地）neat line, I would admit them one by one into my garage. Then, pretending the carpets were seas and the chairs and tables islands, I would catapult（快速移動）myself from one to the other without ever touching water(much as Calvino’s Baron2. Italo Calvino: 伊塔洛·卡爾維諾（1923—1985），意大利新聞工作者、短篇小說家、作家，他奇特和充滿想象的寓言作品使他成為20世紀最重要的意大利小說家之一。這里引用的是其作品《樹上的公爵》一書中的公爵（Baron）。spent his life jumping from tree to tree without ever touching ground). When I was tired of this airborne（空中的）adventure or of riding the arms of the sofas like horses (a game that may have been inspired by memories of the horse-drawn carriages of Heybeliada3. Heybeliada: 王子群島最大的兩個島之一，位于離伊斯坦布爾不遠的馬爾馬拉海面上。),I had another game that I would continue to play as an adult whenever I got bored: I’d imagine that the place in which I was sitting [this bedroom, this sitting room, this classroom,this barracks（兵營）, this hospital room, this government office] was really somewhere else; when I had exhausted the energy to daydream, I would take refuge（躲避）in the photographs that sat on every table, desk, and wall.

Never having seen them put to any other use, I assumed pianos were stands（架子）for exhibiting photographs.There was not a single surface in my grandmother’s sitting room that wasn’t covered with frames of all sizes. The most imposing（威風(fēng)的，給人深刻印象的）were two enormous portraits that hung over never-used fireplace: One was a retouched（修補潤色過的）photograph of my grandmother,the other of my grandfather, who died in 1934. From the way the pictures were positioned on the wall and the way my grandparents had been posed (turned slightly toward each other in the manner still favored by European kings and queens on stamps), anyone walking into this museum room to meet their haughty（高傲的）gaze would know at once that the story began with them.

They were both from a town near Manisa（馬尼薩，土耳其一座城市）called G?rdes; their family was known as Pamuk (cotton) because of their pale（發(fā)白的）skins and white hair. My paternal grandmother was Circassian（切爾克斯人）[Circassian girls, famous for being tall and beautiful, were very popular in Ottoman harems（閨房）]. My grandmother’s father had immigrated to Anatolia during the Russian-Ottoman War (1877—78), settling first in Izmir (from time to time there was talk of an empty house there)and later in Istanbul,4. Russian-Ottoman War: 是指17—19世紀俄國與奧斯曼土耳其帝國之間的一系列戰(zhàn)爭，是歐洲歷史上最長的戰(zhàn)爭系列，其結(jié)果是俄國擴大了疆土，土耳其逐漸衰落，1877—1878年為第10次俄土爭奪勢力范圍進行的戰(zhàn)爭；Izmir: 伊茲密爾，是土耳其第三大城市。where my grandfather had studied civil engineering（土木工程）. Having made a great deal of money during the early 1930s, when the new Turkish Republic was investing heavily in railroad building, he built a large factory that made everything from rope to a sort of twine（麻線，細繩）to dry tobacco; the factory was located on the banks of the G?ksü（各克蘇河）, a stream that fed into the Bosphorus（博斯普魯斯海峽）. When he died in 1934 at the age of 52, he left a fortune so large that my father and my uncle never managed to find their way to the end of it, in spite of a long succession of failed business ventures.

Moving on to the library, we find large portraits（肖像，畫像）of the new generation arranged in careful symmetry（對稱）along the walls; from their pastel（粉蠟筆）coloring we can take them to be the work of the same photographer... My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving（保存）certain moments for posterity（子孫后代）, and in time I also came to see what a powerful influence these famed scenes exerted（施以影響）over us as we went about our daily lives. To watch my uncle pose my brother a math problem（給我哥哥出一道數(shù)學(xué)題）, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken 32 years earlier;to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying,with a half smile, to catch the tail of a joke（抓住笑話的結(jié)尾）rippling across（席卷，波及）the crowded room,and at that very same moment to see a picture of him at five years old—my age—mother had framed and frozen these memories so we could weave them into the present.5. 母親把這些瞬間記憶定格在相框里，以便我們把這些回憶編織進當(dāng)下的生活。When, in tones ordinarily reserved（以平時只在……的時候才使用的聲調(diào)）for discussing the founding of a nation,my grandmother spoke of my grandfather, who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she—like me—was pulled in two directions, wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture（捕捉）the moment of perfection, savoring（盡情享受）the ordinary but still honoring the ideal. But even as I pondered（沉思）these dilemmas（困境）— if you pluck（采摘）a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying（反抗）death, decay（衰退）, and the passage of time（時光流逝）or are you submitting to（屈服于）it?—I grew very bored with them.

In time I would come to dread（懼怕）those long festive（節(jié)日的）lunches, those endless evening celebrations, those New Year’s feasts when the whole family would linger（消磨時光）after the meal to play lotto（一種對號碼的牌戲，樂透）; every year, I would swear it was the last time I’d go, but somehow I never managed to break the habit. When I was little, though, I loved these meals. As I watched the jokes travel around the crowded table, my uncles laughing [under the influence of vodka（伏特加酒）or rak? (拉克酒）] and my grandmother smiling (under the influence of the tiny glass of beer she allowed herself), I could not help but notice how much more fun life was outside the picture frame. I felt the security of belonging to a large and happy family and could bask in the illusion（沐浴在幻想中）that we were put on earth to take pleasure in it. Not that I was unaware that these relatives of mine who could laugh, dine, and joke together on holidays were also merciless and unforgiving in quarrels over money and property. By ourselves, in the privacy of our own apartment, my mother was always complaining to my brother and me about the cruelties of“your aunt”, “your uncle”, “your grandmother”. In the event of a disagreement over who owned what, or how to divide the shares of the rope factory, or who would live on which floor of the apartment house, the only certainty was that there would never be a resolution（解決方案）. These rifts（裂痕）may have faded（逐漸消失）for holiday meals,but from an early age I knew that behind the gaiety（喜慶的氣氛）there was a mounting pile of unsettled scores（堆積如山且懸而未決的爭端）and a sea of recriminations（大量的互相指責(zé)）.

Each branch of our large family had its own maid,and each maid considered it her duty to take sides（站在誰的一邊）in the wars. Esma Hanim, who worked for my mother, would pay a visit to ?kal, who worked for my aunt. Later, at breakfast, my mother would say, “Did you hear what Aydin’s saying?”

If I was too young to understand the underlying（潛在的）cause of these disputes—that my family, still living as it had done in the days of the Ottoman mansion, was slowly falling apart—I could not fail to notice my father’s bankruptcies（破產(chǎn)）and his ever-morefrequent absences... Apart from the occasional show of temper, my father found little to complain about;he took a childish delight in his good looks, his brains, and the good fortune he never tried to hide. Inside, he was always whistling, inspecting his reflection in the mirror, rubbing a wedge of lemon（一片檸檬）like brilliantine（潤發(fā)油）on his hair. He loved jokes, word games, surprises, reciting poetry,showing off his cleverness, taking planes to faraway places.He was never a father to scold（責(zé)罵）, forbid, or punish.When he took us out, we would wander all over the city,making friends wherever we went; it was during these excursions（游覽）that I came to think of the world as a place made for taking pleasure.

If evil ever encroached（侵蝕）, if boredom loomed（若隱若現(xiàn)）, my father’s response was to turn his back on it and remain silent. My mother, who set the rules, was the one to raise her eyebrows and instruct us in life’s darker side. If she was less fun to be with, I was still very dependent on her love and attention, for she gave us far more time than did our father, who seized every opportunity to escape from the apartment. My harshest（最嚴酷的）lesson in life was to learn I was in competition with my brother for my mother’s affections.

作者奧爾罕·帕慕克

Although my brother’s adventure comics（漫畫）may have inspired this dream, so too did my thoughts about God. God had chosen not to bind us to the city’s fate, I thought, simply because we were rich. But as my father and my uncle stumbled（絆倒）from one bankruptcy（破產(chǎn)）to the next, as our fortune dwindled（減少）and our family disintegrated（瓦解）and the quarrels over money grew more intense, every visit to my grandmother’s apartment became a sorrow and took me a step closer to a realization: It was a long time coming, arriving by a circuitous（迂回的）route, but the cloud of gloom（憂郁）and loss spread over Istanbul by the fall of the Ottoman Empire had finally claimed（奪走）my family too.