Other Colors

by Orhan Pamuk

  Just as strange is how that the advertisements, radio slogans, billboards, and beautiful models on television will deceive you so openly. You know that the red chunks in the ice cream are artificially colored and are not strawberries, you know that not even the writers believe the blurbs on the backs of their books, you know that the famous actress who has been in the public eye for forty years is no longer so young as her face-lift suggests, and you know that someone else writes Ronald Reagan’s speeches for him. But I don’t get the impression that many people mind. The tired citizen walking down Fifth Avenue would explain it like this, perhaps: “Should I worry if this flower delighting my eyes is really plastic? It’s a pleasure to look at, and it cheers my heart, and that’s all that matters to me.”

  A person who has newly arrived in New York may read more into all this. What if the people here are like the cinnamon rolls; what if they are not sincere in their helpful smiles and friendly little questions; what if they’re trying to fool me? During one of those long journeys in a lift, if one of the other passengers suddenly asks me how I am, does this man really want to know? After she has checked my reservation, is the girl in the travel agency genuinely interested in the details of my plans or does she simply feel she must act as if she is? Do they ask me these silly questions about Turkey just to make conversation, or because they are really curious? Why do they keep smiling at me, why are they always apologizing, why are they so solicitous?

  After that rainy afternoon when we ate the flavorless cinnamon rolls, my friends had little patience for my theories on tastelessness. I must come from a country that put too great an emphasis on Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Tasty and Flavorless. I was reading too much into things about which I knew little; I seemed to be expecting anonymous organizations, unfamiliar enterprises, television voiceovers, and the advertisements plastered all over every avenue to speak to me as sincerely as a neighbor or friend. Then, remembering a particular friend in common, we all burst into cruel laughter.

  He had a doctorate, he was an expert in his field, he babbled, he devoured books. He’d lick his lips like a monkey and devour as well all the latest ideas coming out of sociology, psychology, and philosophy. We did acknowledge, albeit with a smile, that he was better than most of the lackluster boors who taught at neighboring universities, but he just couldn’t find a job. Then we repeated what his wife had so mournfully told us: To those who now told him that to find work he would have to go from door to door, make himself known, and send out letters, he replied, “I’m not going to them; they should come to me.” By now, most of his other friends had given up trying to change his mind. These friends soon gave up too, falling into a respectful silence that he appreciated.

  This is when we returned to the question of the university party. We all knew that the moment we walked into that brightly lit room we would be overwhelmed again by the absence of flavor. At the entrance, someone trying to help us negotiate the crowd would write our names on big labels and stick them onto our lapels. The room would be bathed in a light as yellow as fried potatoes. I could already see the helpless searching faces of the other guests as they stood there clutching their drinks. Like products on a supermarket shelf we would let ourselves be introduced, and to this same end we would engage in short conversations; we would advertise ourselves by pointing out our distinguishing features, our areas of interest, our manner of speaking, our intellects, our sense of humor, our resilience, as well as generalizations and in-depth information about our culture. Just as an egg shampoo might be distinguished from an apple shampoo, we would then begin to take the places to which we had been assigned on New York’s social shelf.

  My two friends (who were husband and wife) screwed up their faces as if to agree with me. But earlier on we’d been laughing about how dazzling the supermarkets were here, with all their varied merchandise. Tens of thousands of different brands, colors, boxes, pictures, numbers, all sitting in these spacious, fragrant stores awaiting eyes to feast on them.

  As your eyes travel over their colorful surfaces, you don’t spend much time worrying that they might be about to deceive you; it is as if you’ve forgotten the old philosophical distinction between appearance and reality. You give yourself over to the beauties of this shopping heaven and you feast your eyes. With time, you learn that it doesn’t matter if cinnamon rolls don’t smell the same at home as they did in the bakery.

  “I’m in the mood now,” said my friend’s wife. “At least we’ll have gone out and seen people.”

  This is how we decided we should go.

  People might leave stores and parties empty-handed, but in New York there is no reason not to feast your eyes.

  An Encounter in the Subway; or, Missing, Presumed Dead

  I rushed through the barrier and ran down the stairs, but I didn’t make it. The doors had closed. The subway cars were speeding away. It was a time in the afternoon when trains passed less frequently, so I sat down on one of the benches on the platform to wait for the next one. Outdoors it was oppressively hot and bright, so I was happy to be sitting on this cool and empty bench. There was a warm and dusty shaft of light pouring through the grill from the Broadway sidewalk above. It was triangular in shape, like a ray of sunlight in a prehistoric cave; when people walked through it, they looked like ghosts. For a while I listened to a couple who sat down next to me.

  “But they’re still so little,” the woman was saying.

  “So be it,” said the man, who was swinging his legs. “It’s time we clamped down on them.”

  “They’re such little babies, though,” the woman said in a soft voice.

  It was perhaps then that I first saw that face passing through the shaft of light, but I didn’t take it in. It was only when I saw his tense silhouette pacing the full length of the platform that I recognized him. He was a classmate from my lycée days; he’d studied at a university in Istanbul for two years, got a bit involved with politics, and had suddenly gone missing. It was only later that we found out he’d gone to America; the word was that his wealthy parents had begun to worry about his political activities and sent him away, but I knew his parents were not that wealthy. Then—I don’t remember who told me this—I heard he had died, in a car crash or a plane crash or something along those lines. As I watched him from the corner of my eye, and without feeling much excitement, I recalled that a New York acquaintance of mine had mentioned that he knew someone else from Istanbul; he’d given me the name, saying he worked for the power company. That had happened fairly recently. For some reason I had not remembered having previously heard of his death. Had I remembered, I don’t think I would have been so surprised, I would simply have thought, as I was thinking now, that only one of these two rumors could be true.

  When he went into a corner to lean against one of those giant steel pillars holding up the wide avenue above us, I stood and went over to him.

  When I called to him by name, he looked surprised.

  “Yes?”

  He’d grown a Turkish-style mustache, but in New York it looked Mexican.

  “So do you recognize me?” I asked in Turkish, but I could tell from the blank look on his face that he didn’t. I had remained behind, in the life he had left fourteen years earlier.

  When I told him my name, he remembered. In an instant he could see me as I’d been fourteen years before. Then we exchanged information, as if we had to explain to each other how we both came to be standing under 116th Street in a Manhattan subway station. He was married; he worked in telecommunications—not at the power company; he was an engineer; his wife was American; his home was far from here, in Brooklyn, but he owned it.

  “Is it true what they say, that you’re writing novels?” he asked me.

  At that moment, the train came rattling into the station, a noise that still shocked me. When the doors opened up, there was a moment of silence, and he asked me something else.

  “Have they really finished the Bosphorus Bridge?”

  As we walke
d into the car, I smiled and answered his question. Inside it was hot and crowded: people of all races, youths in sneakers, coming down from the Bronx and Harlem. We stood there side by side like two brothers, holding on to the same pole, but as we were tossed this way and that, we looked into each other’s faces like strangers. When I’d known him, there had been nothing strange about him, except that he didn’t eat garlic and seldom cut his nails. He told me a few things that got lost in the noise of the train. It was when we stopped at 109th Street that I realized what he’d asked.

  “Do the horse carts go over the Bosphorus Bridge too?”

  I said a few more things, this time without smiling. What shocked me were not his questions but the attention he gave my answers; before long, the noise of the train made it impossible for him to hear me, but he still looked at me with a face full of understanding, as if he’d heard everything I’d said. When the train stopped at 103rd Street, there was a tense silence. Then, in a sudden burst of anger, he asked, “Do they still tap the phones?” Then, with a wild laugh that sent chills down my spine, he shouted, “Stupid idiots!”

  He began excitedly to tell me a few more things, which I could not hear above the roar of the train. When I looked at our hands side by side on the pole, I was not at all happy to see how alike they looked. On his wrist was a watch that showed the time in New York, London, Moscow, Dubai, and Tokyo, just like mine.

  At Ninety-sixth Street, there was some pushing and shoving. There was an express train on the other side of the platform. He quickly took my number, and then disappeared into the crowds jostling between the two trains. Both trains left the station at the same time, and when I looked into the windows of the express train as it slowly overtook us, I could see him looking at me: curious, suspicious, and full of contempt.

  I was glad that he didn’t phone me, thinking he must have lost my number, but a month later, in the middle of the night, he did call. He bombarded me with annoying questions: Did I want to take up American citizenship, why was I in New York, and had I heard why the Mafia had committed its most recent murder, and did I know why the stock prices for telephone and electric companies were falling on Wall Street? I answered his torrent of questions, and he listened carefully to my answers, accusing me of inconsistencies from time to time, like a policeman trying to catch out a suspect in a lie.

  When he rang me again ten days later, it was even later at night and he was drunker. He recited a long and detailed version of the story of Anatoli Zurlinsky, a KGB agent who had defected to America: Having discovered from newspaper accounts the building on Forty-second Street where he’d met with CIA agents, my caller had gone to inspect it; to do this, he’d gone into a barbershop to have a shave and caught the spy in a few small lies. When I tried to point out the inconsistencies in his own story, as he’d done with me, he got angry. He asked what I was doing in New York and, with the same wild laugh he’d used to mock the Bosphorus Bridge, he put down the phone.

  When he called me again, not long afterward, he spent half the time talking to me and half the time arguing with his wife, who was telling him how late it was. He talked about the telecommunications company at which he worked, and about how he could listen in on any conversation in the world, how his own phone was tapped too. Then, without warning, he asked after a number of girls he’d known at university: Who was with whom, and how were they getting on, if they could at all? I told him a few colorless stories that ended in marriage, and after listening carefully, he laughed again with contempt.

  “Nothing good can ever happen in that place,” he said. “Nothing!” I must have been taken aback, because before I could say anything, he triumphantly announced, “Do you hear me, brother? Nothing good can happen there. Nothing ever will.”

  He repeated this sentence with relish during our next two telephone conversations, pressing his point. He talked about spies, Mafia tricks, tapped telephones, and the latest developments in electronics. From time to time I’d also hear his wife’s faint voice. Once she tried to take either a drink or the telephone receiver from her husband’s hand. I imagined one of those small apartments in a high-rise on the far side of Brooklyn; you paid in installments for thirty years and then it was yours. A friend of mine had told me that when you flushed the toilet, the pipes let out a mournful wail that could be heard not just in your own apartment but in all eight symmetrically arranged apartments sharing the same plumbing, and the sound of the cascading water caused all the cockroaches to come scuttling out of their hiding places. Later on, I was sorry I hadn’t asked him about this. What he did ask me at about three in the morning was this.

  “Do they have cornflakes in Turkey yet?”

  “They tried to sell them as corn fritters, but they failed,” I said. “The consumers poured hot milk over them.”

  He let out one of his wild laughs. “Right now it’s eleven in the morning in Dubai!” he shouted. “In Dubai, in Istanbul …” He sounded happy when he hung up.

  I thought he would call again. When he didn’t call, for some reason I felt uneasy. After a month had passed, when I happened to see that ghostly triangular funnel of light coming through the grill onto the subway platform, I decided to look for him: partly because I wanted to shake him up, upset his peace of mind, and partly because I was curious. I found his name in the Brooklyn directory. A woman answered the phone, but she was not his wife. She asked me never to call that number again. The person who had had this number previously had died in a traffic accident.

  The Fear of Cigarettes

  I was probably lost in thought, dreaming up my novel; I must have been sitting in a room, chain smoking, so I didn’t see him; they told me about it later. Just before the great Yul Brynner died, his image appeared on the TV screen. This bald actor, whom I’d never really liked and whose films I didn’t much like either, was lying in disarray on his hospital bed; breathing painfully and looking straight into the viewers’ eyes, he said something like:

  “By the time you see this, I will be dead. I am about to die from lung cancer. It’s all my fault. Now I’m dying a painful death. Though I was rich and successful, I could have lived longer, I could have enjoyed life, but I won’t, and all because of cigarettes. Please don’t do as I did; give up smoking now. If you don’t, you’ll never enjoy life to the fullest, you’ll die an unnecessary death.”

  When my friend had finished telling me about this taped message that had made such a deep impression on him, I smiled and offered him one of my Marlboros and we both lit up. Then we looked into each other’s faces, but we couldn’t manage to smile. I had always been able to smoke in Turkey without giving it much thought, and though I had known it would cause me some trouble in New York, I had not expected this much trouble.

  It wasn’t what I heard on television and the radio or read in magazines and newspapers that caused me the most difficulty. I was already used to such campaigns, had already seen plenty of terrifying images of lungs clogged with tar, models of lungs so full of tar they looked like yellow sponges, nicotine plaques that obstructed veins to the point of causing heart attacks, and color illustrations of luckless hearts that were failing because they had been inside smokers. I’d look blankly at magazine columns that railed against idiots who still smoked and pregnant women who poisoned their unborn children with cigarettes, and as I gazed at pictures of tombstones wreathed in cigarette smoke, I would smoke my own cigarette in peaceful resignation. The promise of death by cigarettes did not affect me any more than the promises of pleasure offered by the advertisements for Marlboros and Pan Am that you used to see on the sides of old apartment buildings, or by the images of Coca-Cola and Hawaii that I’d see flashing on my TV screen. This death had been thoroughly illuminated. I had seen all the images, but it still hadn’t registered in my mind. Cigarettes caused me another sort of problem in New York: I’d be at one of those parties with beer, chips, and salsa, but when I thoughtlessly lit up a cigarette I would see people racing away from me as if I were about to infect them w
ith AIDS.

  They were not running away from the cancer that cigarette smoke might cause, but from the smoker. I would only gradually come to understand that my cigarette to them represented a lack of willpower and of culture, a disordered life, indifference, and (America’s worst nightmare) failure. Later on, an acquaintance (who claimed to have changed from head to toe during his five years in America but who was still Turk enough that he could not resist the national habits of inventing unnecessary categories and propounding tactless theories) told me there were two classes of New Yorker: smokers and nonsmokers. Apart from the times when those belonging to the first class went out into the streets armed with knives, guns, and cigarette packs to rob those belonging to the second class as they walked anxiously through dark streets and sometimes even in broad daylight, you rarely saw the two groups involved in any sort of class conflict. Quite the contrary, newspapers and television companies were working very hard to unite these two distinct classes by means of cigarettes—which were a different price in every store and neighborhood—and in their advertisements. The models puffing on cigarettes in advertisements looked nothing like nicotine addicts and a lot like the class of people who worked hard, had plenty of willpower and culture, and didn’t smoke. You’d hear inspiring and happy stories about people who’d made it from the smoking class into the nonsmoking class.

  The acquaintance who’d changed from head to toe told me how he’d once got in touch with an organization that helped people give up smoking. When during the first days the nicotine withdrawal became almost impossible to bear, he’d called the help line. The sweet and compassionate voice on the phone told him how happy he’d be once he’d kicked the habit and how all he needed to do was grit his teeth a little longer, and when this acquaintance went on to tell me how this voice had informed him that there was meaning, perhaps even spiritual meaning, in the agony he was going through, he did not so much as smile. I lit up a cigarette, instantly sending him into a panic and lowering his opinion of me. By now I knew that the black man bumming cigarettes on Madison Avenue was an object of pity not because he did not have the money to buy cigarettes but because he smoked in the first place: This man had no willpower and no culture and expected little from life. If a man was of a smoking disposition, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he had become a beggar. Pity was slowly coming into fashion in New York.