What to wear? I had gone to bed to escape the question, and more serious ones, too. When I woke—too early, nervous, excited—I had to smile. Worrying about my clothes? Apart from my street-bought J’Aime Paris sweatshirt and old gray sweatpants I had only two options, the purple dress and the black, neither what a Parisienne would call chic. Black had too many undesirable connotations, so the other it would have to be, a slightly faded but respectable purple, plain, unflattering, with nothing imperial about it. If I’d had more time before fleeing, would I have taken more clothes? If I’d had more money, would I have gone shopping the previous afternoon, maybe picking out a serious Clinton-Merkel pantsuit, but one tailored to within an inch of its life? A sequined jumper would have been eye-catching. Or, still better, a cool, dangerously form-fitting leather jacket. Well, I didn’t have the time or the money so it was just a case of imaginary lèche-vitrine, another way to distract myself from the day’s ordeal. Even my vanity was another diversion because I knew the purple or the black were enough for the likes of me. I wasn’t auditioning for stardom; yet in a few hours I was likely to be seen by thousands of people. It requires a lot of modesty and humility to be equal to that prospect. My feelings were the same I had before my first recital. What was I then? Seven or eight? Did this emotional regression cheapen my current emotions or lend more solemnity to my childish ones? Just another distraction. Dread of humiliation, exposure, fear of failure—don’t these carry the same weight at any age, like hate and love?
It was just my second day in Paris. I enjoyed speaking school French. I thought of the Racine we had to read and the Baudelaire that was forbidden. The day before, on the street, I heard a vendor speaking Italian and a couple speaking Spanish. The Romance languages all have their own music, as do the countries that speak them. Vivaldi’s nothing like de Falla; you’d never mistake Debussy for Respighi. Yet all these languages were once Latin and all these countries part of an Empire they’ve never gotten out of their system. Spanish, Italian, French—what a triumph for mispronunciation!
Sumru and I took French and English together, likewise literature, math and history—everything except the courses about which we cared the most— political economy for Sumru, music for me. We sometimes spoke French with one another, pretending we were in Paris ordering elaborate banquets or in Cannes raving about Truffaut. How I wished she were with me, though it was just because she wasn’t in Paris that I was.
Sumru Erkat’s name is known to many and I’m about to try to make it known to many more. My name is Veta Demirkan. I am now an ex-public-school music teacher and quondam mediocre performer on the violin and viola. There is no reason you should take the slightest interest in me. The list of things that I’m not—beautiful, smart, rich, talented, strong—dwarfs the modest catalogue of what I am—ordinary, craven, plain, less than clever. And yet I am a significant character in the story I’m attempting to tell. Not the protagonist, hardly the heroine, though. That’s Sumru. She is and always has been a princess, a glass of fashion, a star from a prominent family, noble and outspoken—“Who by?” I once joked, admiringly. She is all that I am not.
The Erkat family are among the aristocrats of the city. They had wealth, an old name, an established reputation for philanthropy and probity. The Erkats have furnished the republic with some of its most distinguished public officials, including the brave public prosecutor whose assassination led to the fall of a government and whose death is still commemorated annually, or was until this year.
At school, Sumru was a star. I was from an obscure family, at my schoolwork more diligent than talented. It was a mystery why Sumru should have plucked me from the subterranean social stratum reserved for scholarship girls at Lady Mihri Academy and promote me to being her best friend. I couldn’t possibly ask at the time but, years later, I did. I’m still not sure how seriously to take her answer. “Oh, that? It was simply because I saw at once how unlike me you are,” said Sumru.
“You mean not pretty or rich?”
Sumru scoffed. “Don’t be offensive. No, I mean you keep off emotional rollercoasters. I admired that. You’ve always been so sane and—oh, what’s the word?—equable. You’re logical and I liked that because my own logic so often breaks down.”
Equable and logical I may have been. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to music and mathematics and not Sumru’s penchant for passionate causes. But I was grateful. Maybe she sensed that she would find in me not just a kind of alter-ego but also a faithful, if tongue-tied, loyalist.
The first words Sumru Erkat spoke to me were an invitation. After history class one day, she left the group of girls that was always gathered around her, strode right up to me and said, “Can you get permission to come home with me after school on Thursday?” The Can you was superfluous, but I appreciated the dignity Sumru afforded me with this courtesy.
Our school, the best girls’ school in the city, was named for Mihri Hatun, the “Sappho of the Ottomans” who died in 1506. It’s not surprising that I would come to identify my friend with Lady Mihri. In my mind, they were of the same type. True, Mihri grew up to write poetry and Sumru editorials; but, though their subjects and genres were different, their passion was the same, likewise their beauty. I remember entertaining the fantasy that Mihri was reborn in my friend. Mihri Hatun was the daughter of a judge, “beautiful and ardent” declares the official biography—ardent but never married. We are given to understand that she “fell in love many times but all these loves were chaste.” Mihri’s poems certainly confirm the first part, anyway:
At one glance
I love you
With a thousand hearts. . .
My body, whirling, is a lighthouse
Illuminated by your image.
Let zealots think
Loving is sinful
Never mind
Let me burn in the hellfire
Of that sin.
Sumru too was quick to fall in love and relished burning, though I’m sure she never thought the fire infernal or love a sin. Her adolescent infatuations were like so many jabs, sharp and short. She would fixate on a boy glimpsed on a street, a new teacher, David Beckham, the nephew of one of her father’s business associates, Johnny Depp—even, for a few weeks, Lord Byron. She could be just as passionate about football, movies, and deceased social theorists. Her father, though a businessman rather than a judge, could certainly be judgmental. Mr. Erkat was unsettled by his daughter’s blazing enthusiasms and naturally anxious about her sinning. He might have saved himself the worry; for Sumru was unlikely to engage physically with the boy on the street or the new teacher as with Ludwig Feuerbach or Lord Byron. What was true in her wasn’t her feeling for its ostensible object but the feeling itself. Her passionate nature would later find another, more consequential, outlet, and in this she too was as chaste as Mihri. You could even say that Sumru’s passion is what led to my being in a room rented for me by a Parisian press organization, steeling myself to face cameras and speak into microphones.
I went to the Teachers College and studied music. Sumru went to the University and, to please her father, registered to concentrate in business, though she took all the political science courses she could. We saw each other often, still the faithful dyad we had been since girlhood.
We often spoke of our families, of course, especially our fathers. They were of distinct classes, with different origins, yet they resembled each other. Both were conservative, religious, content with the status-quo, proud of us and determined to see us have a good future. The unusual thing was that they wanted to see us educated no less than they wanted us married.
“My father says I should go off to London or Frankfurt after the degree. In a general way, he even has my husband picked out. He’ll be some boy from a good family doing the same thing.”
“Would you like to?”
“Marry an expat capitalist? No, not particularly.”
“I meant go to Europe.”
“Oh, Europe’s like this museum. Half the people there don’t want people like us even to visit.”
“So, you don’t want to go then?”
“To get called names? To get fixed up in Germany or the UK with somebody’s precious son?”
“Well, if you don’t want to go abroad, what would you like to do?”
“I wish I knew, Veta. I want to do something I can throw myself into, that’ll make me hate to get into bed at night and leap out of it every morning.” She laughed at herself then grinned at me—no need for her to say that her best friend wouldn’t want any such a frantic life, that I preferred to keep my emotional chart flat.
Sumru often talked to me brilliantly about the authors she read both in and out of class, writers about whom I knew only what she told me. She favored disturbers of the peace, abstract, difficult thinkers with outlandish names like Antonio Gramsci, Luce Iragary, Max Horkheimer. She liked radicals, the flaming kind who wrote in complex sentences. It was the way it was with her old crushes; she embraced trends but didn’t stick with them very long. I would try to keep up by talking about my own enthusiasms, but did it clumsily. I can play music, but that’s nothing like talking about it. I worked at it, though, preparing things to say like, “If differential equations could sing and dance, they’d sound like Bach.” Lame.
I remember her saying once as we sat in our favorite café, “I wish I could hear music the way you do. I mean serious music. Your music.”
It was as if she had made me the proprietor of Debussy, Chopin, and Mahler.
“Why don’t you?”
“Oh, why,” she said with the impatient toss of her head I knew so well. “Don’t know, really. I suppose it’s the way it makes me feel.”
“How?”
“Caged. Big cages, gorgeous ones, but still cages. And also manipulated. When I try listening to a symphony it’s overwhelming. It’s as if the music’s saying things I can’t grasp and forcing me to swallow them whole. Wagner, for instance. A total totalitarian. Pop tunes don’t mean anything but they set me free. I mean, you can’t really dance to that what’s-his-name, Bruckner, can you?”
Sumru graduated a week before I did. She came to my ceremony and took me to lunch two days later. She was exhilarated. She had reached a decision about her future.
“I’m going to get my father to turn over that second-rate newspaper he owns to me. The Salah Gazete. You know it?
“No, not really.”
“Not surprising. The rag’s so dull and dusty that nobody reads it. It’s failing. But I’ve got some ideas.”
“Will he give it to you?”
She smiled and looked fifteen again. “Before it folds? Maybe. If I can keep from being sent into exile and nag him enough.”
The nagging took three months.
Sumru did have ideas for the Gazete. She added cartoons. Flashy fashion pieces with color photographs. She recruited two decent columnists, one a feisty and funny middle-aged feminist, the other one of her classmates who—with self-mocking irony—called himself an anarchist and tried to dress the part. Sumru produced lively editorials too, liberal rather than radical. Sales of the Gazete picked up. Mr. Erkat mentioned Frankfurt and London less often but did harp on marriage, exactly like my own father. Our mothers were less tedious on the matter. It wasn’t that either disagreed, just that they were content to leave the pestering to our fathers.
In my first year teaching music in a primary school, I got a serious boyfriend, a colleague. He’d looked at me too long when we met and constantly during faculty meetings. Ihsan taught history but his real love was classical poetry. He knew all about Lady Mihri. Whenever I performed with some amateur trio or quartet he always came and, at the end, jumped to his feet and applauded louder than anybody else. It didn’t matter how awful we were.
With a good deal of trepidation, I introduced Ihsan and Sumru. They didn’t hit it off. Neither would say anything bad about the other to me, but I could see that they were inimical just from their body language. They actually leaned away from one another. I considered that Sumru was probably too critical, mercurial, too intellectual, and perhaps just too contemporary for Ihsan. For his part, I supposed that Ihsan might appear too complacent and too devoted to the past for Sumru, for whom history was just dead politics and classical poetry antiquated. We didn’t meet together more than a few times and I can’t recall either ever asking after the other.
Then came the changes. A new government came to power and the new President called a vote to change the constitution to vastly augment the powers of his office, to be followed, if approved, by a general election. To all this the military silently acceded. The conservatives in the countryside liked the President because he never had a good word for the city or its young people. They also approved of his invoking the Deity before and after every speech. The new constitution was narrowly approved. A few demonstrations were organized and one of them got out of hand. There were arrests. Sumru wrote a caustic editorial that provoked her father to remind her that he was also her publisher. “My darling baba believes he can accommodate himself to any government because any government will have to accommodate itself to people like him.” Sumru put her wrath into her hands, making fists on the iron café table, but her face suggested that she was perfectly happy.
I looked at her carefully and did something rare for me. I ventured a joke. “You look like an indignant saint.”
“An indignant saint? Well, you’re half right anyway.”
Then came the general election campaign and the country split like a ripe pomegranate. You’d be hard pressed to find anybody who hadn’t taken a side. Even conversations that began over the price of peppers, praise of a new grandchild, the dry weather up north, ended being about politics. At one faculty meeting, as everybody around me argued and fretted, I proposed that for every minute spent watching the news, we should all devote two to looking at trees.
The liberal parties unified behind one candidate under the banner of popular government, human rights, and personal freedom. The President’s party preached fear and piety. The campaign was bitter and sometimes violent. There were a few deaths. People from both sides were arrested, but those of the President’s party were immediately released.
Of course, The Sabah Gazete stood firmly against the President. Sumru’s editorials, never less than forceful but patiently argued, grew less restrained, then downright strident. Her columnists barked more loudly; the cartoonists bit deeper. She showed up regularly at rallies and, on two occasions, took the microphone herself, to speak on the rights of women. There were rows with her father. “He wants me to keep my head below the parapet. His exact words. As if this were the First World War.” While she wouldn’t give in to his pleas, she wasn’t angry with him because she understood that her baba was torn. He was reluctant to close down the Gazete for fear of alienating her, but also because he didn’t believe she was wrong. On the other hand, Mr. Erkat no longer felt so confident about those smooth accommodations between business and politics. Like many other men of affairs, he grew anxious about what might happen. I suppose he moved money out of the country a little at a time.
Sumru phoned me just after the results of the vote were announced by the Electoral Commission.
“Can you believe it? 84%! What a joke.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” I said weakly.
“Everybody knew the Commission was crooked. The foreign observers don’t believe it. And they’ve already said so.”
“Will that matter?”
“It ought to.”
Listening to her tone, that of an indignant saint, I began to worry about Sumru, like her father. “What are you going to do?”
“Pick up a copy of the paper, Veta.”
A week later, one of my erudite colleagues explained that the headline Sumru stuck atop her front-page editorial was a play on a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, converting the Frenchman’s cynicism into her idealism. In bold face, the Gazete proclaimed Rigged Elections are The Tribute Paid by Tyranny to Democracy.
What came next came with shattering swiftness. Clearly, the government had laid their plans. All the liberal journals and three radio stations were closed down at once, and the only independent television channel taken over by the state. Sumru’s father was persuaded to sell the Gazete to a friend of the President for a ridiculously low price. In my one telephone conversation with Mr. Erkat he told me what had happened. The leverage was his daughter’s freedom—but that was a lie. Sumru disappeared the day after the papers were signed. The police claimed they had no idea where she was. “Perhaps she’s gone to London—or to Frankfurt,” an intelligence officer suggested to Mr. Erkat, with a knowing smirk.
I wrote a petition, found a place to run off a thousand copies, and circulated them to everybody I could think of. I gave copies to colleagues, neighbors, cousins, even some of my older students. The opposition called for a protest demonstration and I was asked to be one of the speakers, an utterly terrifying prospect. But I did it. I read out the words of my petition calling for Sumru’s immediate release. Hundreds signed it before the police broke things up.
That afternoon Ihsan showed up at my door. He looked stricken and also a little sheepish, a man doing what he felt obliged to do but not wanting to do it. I didn’t have to wait to find out how things stood.
His first words were a rhetorical question, most likely not what he had planned to say. It just broke from him as I opened the door. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
I asked him to come in and sit down. To retain my composure, I went to the kitchen and made tea, barely paying attention to the panicked chatter from the next room. Ihsan spoke a mile a minute; he was that keen to get away from a dangerous situation.
I brought in the tea, making myself walk as slowly as possible. Then I sat beside him and picked up his hand. I spoke gently but to the point.
“Ihsan, you live in those old poems you love so much. I know you try to love me as if I were in them, too. How could I not be charmed?” I thought of Sumru and her favorite authors. “You live to read when it ought to be the other way around. But times have changed.”
The situation had its comical side. He was scared, frightened of being found in my apartment; but male pride prevented him from admitting it. So I did it for him, and rather cruelly.
“I understand. You’re afraid that because of me you’ll lose your job—or worse.”
He remonstrated, of course, claimed to be insulted, that I had completely misconstrued things. Nevertheless, he was gone in fifteen minutes.
My parents phoned around dinner time. They had seen footage of the demonstration on the news. They had seen me. Their lyrics weren’t the same as Ihsan’s or Mr. Erkat’s, but the melody was the same. There’s a parapet, Veta; for God’s sake keep your head below it.
I couldn’t sit still, but I didn’t want to go out on the streets. So, I was pacing my little apartment when the knock came on the door. It was a soft sort of knock, almost tentative, an exceedingly polite knock.
The man at my door was about forty, dressed in an expensive business suit with a vest and a strikingly bright red tie. He was good-looking, prepossessing, and he never raised his voice. But he had a mustache that unsettled me. It was just like the President’s.
He asked if he could speak with me. “Just for a short while, Veta.” That he addressed me so familiarly, by my first name, was creepy, like his mustache.
He sat just where Ihsan had and smiled at me, as Ihsan had not. He didn’t give his name and I didn’t ask. His manner was avuncular, practically parental, yet at the same time menacing.
“Look, Veta, we both know this isn’t you. Yes, we both know it. You’re a musician, a music teacher, not a political person at all. This petition of yours,” he scoffed. “And today’s spectacle. I expect that cost you a good deal, didn’t it? Of course it did. It’s against your nature. Surely you know that you’ll not only fail; you’ll make yourself ridiculous. Give it up; go back to your life, to music, to the children.”
There was no open threat. Had there been one I think the interview would have been less sinister.
He shook my hand, patted my shoulder, and left. I sat for an hour, outwardly tranquil, inwardly trembling, trying to decide what to do. I had to go to the bathroom twice. I put my disk of Ashkenazy playing the Études on the CD player. I fetched my passport, stuffed my knapsack, called my parents, hung up on my father, decided not to call my headmistress, went down to the street and found a taxi to take me to the airport. My credit card covered a one-way ticket to Paris where, if I’m not mistaken, Chopin composed Opus 10, no. 12, that elegiac and wrathful paean to a crushed revolution.
My mind was vacant during the flight, couldn’t see beyond the back of the seat in front of me. When I got off the plane, I didn’t know what to do or where to go. All airports resemble each other in being both somewhere and nowhere, functional as toaster-ovens. The place glared fluorescently, was big and bustling but it felt empty, as if all the people in it were ghosts. But, of course, I was the ghost, disconnected from everyone and everything.
I asked how to get into the city where I found a storefront that was just closing where I exchanged my little bit of cash for Euros. Then I looked for someplace cheap to get something filling—it was pasta—and found a room in a rather spectacularly disreputable hotel and went right to sleep. I was exhausted.
The following morning, after coffee and a brioche, I bought a street map and took the Métro to the headquarters of the press organization Sumru had often mentioned approvingly. It was in an old building suggesting the Belle Époque, but the inside looked as if it had been set up the day before. Open-plan with cubicles, computer screens, metal trays overflowing with folders, and neglected house plants. The receptionist was a sleek young woman dressed like a model or a cat burglar, in a stylish jet-black top and tight black jeans. She wore oversized silver earrings with leather fringe. I explained who I was and then why I was there. She was polite but indifferent until I mentioned Sumru’s name. That galvanized her. She took me at once to the Director’s office, a quite disorderly one, as was its occupant, the formidable, busy, bald, beetle-browed Monsieur Henri Sayard. He knew all about what was going on back home. He knew far more than I did.
Monsieur Sayard began by asking after my accommodations, and it was he himself who secured my hotel room, offered me a coffee and, not without impatience, held himself in check as I talked about Sumru until I could say no more and crossed my legs to indicate as much. Then he began what I suppose is called a debriefing. His questions were precise; my answers were not.
He nodded and rubbed his forehead. “Very well. The next thing is we’ll want to hold a press conference,” he said. “And as soon as possible. Tomorrow, in fact. Are you up to it?”
Well, was I?
I raised my chin. “But, Monsieur Sayard,” I said, “why else should I be here?”
The offices of the press organization included a conference room at the back. The receptionist took me to see the room in advance, so as to get the feel of the space. There were only a glass-topped table, six blue chairs, and a good deal of empty floor. The far wall had three wide windows that looked out over a small garden. There was a round iron table and two curly chairs from which the white paint was flaking off. They sat under an attractive, vibrant tree.
My guide pointed to the flimsy wall on the left side of the room. “It opens up,” she said. “We can fit fifty people plus the equipment.” I asked the receptionist-model-cat burglar her name. “I’m called Madeleine,” she said. I thought momentarily of little girls in Catholic boarding schools, of Proust shot into the past. I fancied Madeleine must be like Sumru, a committed crusader, armed in self-conscious virtue and black denim. I wondered if my friend might have dressed that way had she chosen to go to London or Frankfurt. I went to the windows and looked down into the garden and the tree. I was reminded of my gentleman-caller; its leaves were the same red color as his tie.
“That tree. Do you know what it is, what kind?”
Madeleine looked at me with French astonishment. “A Japanese maple, I believe.”
“Thank you.”
The press conference was to take place at mid-morning. The conference room had been opened up and it was almost full when I arrived. The space, the seats, the people milling around—it all reminded me of recitals I had given; however, on this occasion I wouldn’t be interpreting the scores of others but offering the audience my own words, an accounting and a plea. I’d hardly slept. I kept thinking of that assured look above the telltale mustache. You will make yourself ridiculous. But, though I had to speak for myself, it was Sumru’s tale I would tell, her plight, which stood for a more general one.
I didn’t take my petition with me. I hadn’t translated it. Overnight I wrote out instead a speech in longhand and in French. I focused on the hum of the air-conditioning, the top of the Japanese maple. The six pages of hotel stationery trembled in my hand. I reminded myself of what Madeleine had told me. “When the red light comes on, look straight at the camera,” she had instructed me, then told me where I was to sit. “Monsieur Sayard will be beside you. He will be introducing you. Then you speak. You’ll be expected to take questions.”
“Do you think there will be any?”
Madeleine gave a little Gallic shrug, then wished me good luck and retreated to the back of the room.
Director Sayard didn’t introduce me at once, as I’d expected. He spoke at length, first about his organization and its mission, then about the arrests in my country, the closed newspapers, the anger of journalists in France and everywhere, their professional solidarity, and their demands. Then he finally got to me. I felt like an afterthought.
He mispronounced my name. Vita instead of Veta. Life.
I rose, lowered the microphone and raised the pages of my speech. I’d have preferred a violin. I cleared my throat. The red light came on. It was brighter than the maple, than the tie.
I believe the speech came off well enough. At least everybody was quiet while I read it. I was able to answer a few questions—the ones about Sumru. Monsieur Sayard answered the rest.
I’ve found work and an apartment in the 11th arrondissement. Twice each week I phone my parents. They say they miss me and I say the same.
There is still no word on Sumru’s whereabouts.
Yesterday, I re-read Hamlet—not the whole of it, just Horatio’s scenes. I wonder about Horatio. Why, in a play with the most famous self-revealing soliloquies, did the Master feel the need to give the Prince a confidant? Horatio seems hardly more than that, a kind of prop, really, like Gertrude’s arras or Yorick’s skull. You’d think a mannequin might serve as well. I couldn’t make out what Shakespeare wanted with him. But this is, after all, Shakespeare—and Shakespeare at the acme of his powers. You’ve got to trust him.
One difference between a fine storyteller and a poor one is the reasons behind their choices. The good author is likely to have more than one reason, especially if you count the unconscious as well as the deliberate ones. A bad writer will likely have a single reason, and it will be perfectly transparent. For example, she may stick in a gratuitous romantic scene just to titillate readers, or he might concoct a murder so improbably baroque in its complexity that the purpose is obviously to mystify, like an infuriatingly recherché clue in a crossword. Such things are cheap and shallow. Shakespeare is neither and will have more than a single reason for his choices. Obviously, a play requires dialogue and Horatio is there for Hamlet to talk to; yet the Prince’s nature is so complex and varied that he never seems wholly disclosed even to himself. To what sort of person would Hamlet open his heart? Who would he choose as his best friend? Perhaps one reason Horatio’s in the play is to answer these questions.
What do I know of Horatio? I know he is what Sumru thought me to be—equable, dispassionate, logical—a Stoic in short. That’s how Horatio sees himself at the end, calling himself “more an antique Roman than a Dane.” He is a fatalist loyally prepared to share the fate his friend has struggled against for five acts.
Except that he keeps the secret of Hamlet’s pretended madness and helping arrange for the playing of The Murder of Gonzago, Horatio is detached from the action of the play, unentangled in the political intrigue. We hear nothing of his family, a girlfriend, other pals. He has no official position at court and hardly interacts with anybody but Hamlet. He is the Prince’s friend—his true and only one, nothing like the treacherous Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Everybody else mostly ignores him. Yet he seems tied to the royal family. He was present when Hamlet’s father defeated Fortinbras; he is the one who explains the context of the King’s death. He has been studying alongside Hamlet at Wittenberg, the first to learn of Hamlet’s return from England. He’s with the Prince when he learns of Ophelia’s death. Horatio is steady and skeptical. When applied to by the guards in Act One, he dismisses the Ghost as their “fantasy”. His philosophy—if he’s indeed a Stoic—is pantheistic, not supernatural. Of all the significant characters, Horatio alone survives the play’s final massacre. He outlasts the tragedy but only to perform a service for his friend.
When Horatio loyally proposes finishing off the poison, Hamlet calls death “felicity” and the world “harsh” but begs him to defer the former and endure the latter. The Prince’s dissatisfaction with life and the world hasn’t improved since “To be or not to be”. Why would it when things have gone from bad to catastrophic, when he’s dying surrounded by corpses and about to hand Denmark over to Fortinbras—Superman to his Clark Kent—undoing his father’s work, incidentally. Hamlet’s last words are addressed to his friend.
What is it about Horatio that so appeals to the Prince?
Well, Hamlet tells us straight out. I wonder: did Sumru think the same of me?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal’d thee for herself, for thou hast been
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast tak’n with equal thanks. . .
. . .Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
So, why Horatio? Maybe there’s a clue in his name. Horatio is a kind of amalgam of the Latin ratio and orator. Ratio. It is Horatio’s imperturbable reasonableness that drew the more passionate Prince, his composed acceptance of what comes without any of the resistance and whining in which the Prince indulges. And what of orator? This foretells the final charge imposed on him by his dying friend, which is to preserve his own life and go sorrowfully into the world “To tell my story.”
