Two-The Photographs in the Dark Museum House(1)

  My mother, mr father, my older brother, my grandmother, my uncles, and my aunts--we all lived on different floors of the same five-story apartment house. Until the year before I was born, the different branches of the family had (as with so many large Ottoman families) lived together in a stone mansion; in 1951 thet rented it out to a private elementary school and built on the empty lot next door the modern structure I would know as home; on the facade, in keeping with the custom of the time, they proudly put up a plaque that said PAMUK APT.  We lived on the fourth floor, but I had the run of the entire building from 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 uncle put his newspapaer 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 pianos; in each apartment there was also a locked glass cabnet displaying Chinese porcelains, teacups, silver sets, sugar bowls, snuffboxes, crystal glasses, rosewater ewers, plates, and censers that no one ever touched, although among them I sometimes found hiding places for miniature cars. There were the unused inlaid desk with mother-of-pearl, the turban shelves on which there were no turbans, and the Japanese and Art Nouveau screens behind which nothing was hidden. There, in the library, gathering dust behind the glass, were my doctor uncle's medical books; in the twenty years since he'd emigrated 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 would disappear from one sitting room only to appear in another sitting room on another floor.)