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The Pamuk Apartments were built at the edge of a large lot in Nisantasi that had been the garden of a pasha's mansion. The name itself, meaning "target stone," comes from the days of the reformist westernizing sultans of the late eighteen and early nineteenth century (Selim III and Mahmud II), who placed stone tablets in the empty hills above the city in those areas where they practiced shootin..

If I had cause for complaint, it was my inability to see through walls. When looking out the sindow, I hated seeing nothing of the building next door, nothing of the street below, and only the narrowest strip of sky. At the smelly butcher shop across from us (I'd forget about the smell, only to remember it the moment I stepped into the cool street), it vexed me to be too short to see the butche..

Keeping the second world secret made it easier for me to come and go. When I was sitting across from my grandmother, and a shaft of light came through her curtains--just like searchlights on the ships passing through the Bosphorus at night--I could, if I stared right into it and blinked, will myself to see a fleet of red spaceships floating past me. After that I could summon up the same armada ..

The only person who seemed at all aware of my secret fantasy world was my father. I'd be thinking of my bear--whose only eye I'd snapped off in a moment of angry excitement and who was getting thiner and thinner as I pulled more and more stuffing out of its chest--or I'd be thinking of the finger-sized soccer player who kicked when you pressed a button in his head; it was my third soccer player..

One afternoon, as I was threatening my bear in the usual way but also feeding him with a strange compassion, the door opened, and my father caught me with my underpants down. He closed the door just a bit more softly than he had opened it, and (even I could tell) with some respect. Until then, when he came home for lunch and a brief rest, hw had been in the habit of coming in to give me a jiss ..

When I was four, my brother, then six, started school, and over the next two years the intense ambivalent companionship that had built up between us began to fade. I was free of our rivalry and of the oppression of his superior strength; now that I had the Pamuk Apartment and my mother's undivided attention for the entire day, I grew happier, discovering the joys of solitude. While my brother w..

If evil ever encroached, if boredom loomed, 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 th..

If I was too young to understand the underlying cause of these disputes--that my family, still living as it had done in the days of the Ottman mansion, was slowly falling apart--I could not fail to notice my father's bankcruptcies and his ever-more-frequent absences. I could hear in more detail how bad things were whenever my mother took my brother and me to visit our other grandmother in her g..

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for posterity, and in time I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives. To watch my uncle pose my brother a math problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father sca..

Never having seen them put to any other use, I assumed pianos were stands 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 were two enormous portraits that hung over the never-used fireplace; One was a retouched photograph of my grandmother, the other of my grandfather, who died in 1934. F..