The Architect's Apprentice

by Elif Shafak

It’s odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.

But Istanbul is a city of easy forgettings.

‘Sometimes, for the soul to thrive, the heart needs to be broken, son.’

‘In order to gain mastery, you need to dismantle as much as you put together.’

‘When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.’

When the plague had gone, only then would kin and kith beat their breasts and shed their tears to their heart’s content. For now, grief was pickled and preserved, kept next to the salted meat and dried peppers in the cellars, to be partaken of in better times.

foibles, just so as to be able to punish them afterwards?

‘When you master a language, you are given the key to a castle. What you’ll find inside depends on you.’

‘Can you catch the wind, mahout? Can you bring down the moon? There are things we cannot change. I have accepted this truth, and, one day, so will you.’

‘Does what we do in life matter so much? Or is it what we don’t do that carries weight?’

It was after this incident that Jahan understood his master’s secret resided not in his toughness, for he was not tough, nor in his indestructibility, for he was not indestructible, but in his ability to adapt to change and calamity, and to rebuild himself, again and again, out of the ruins. While Jahan was made of wood, and Davud of metal, and Nikola of stone, and Yusuf of glass, Sinan was made of flowing water. When anything blocked his course, he would flow under, around, above it, however he could; he found his way through the cracks, and kept flowing forward.

Never before had he thought that among an architect’s tasks would be the protection of the city from its inhabitants and the protection of the past from the future.

Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one’s faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.

In that moment Jahan understood that life was the sum of the choices one did not make; the paths yearned for but not taken.

He joined the team of builders and, even though he was in a foreign land where he knew not a single soul and had no past to recall should the present prove too gruelling, he felt strangely at home.