by Orhan Pamuk
If wine excuses love in a mad poem,
Does not death fit the same theorem?
Drunk on the wine of hazard
You are thirsty like a buzzard.
He did not wait for my response but went out of the café, leaving behind him a dense smell of OP brand shaving soap.
On my walks that always took me impatiently to the bus depot, I wondered why every nice little town must have its own merry little madman. Our friend with the penchant for wine and rhyme was present in neither of the two taverns in town where I had begun to feel the aforementioned intoxicating thirst as deeply as my thoughts of love for you, Janan. Somnolent drivers, fatigued buses, unshaven cabin attendants! Take me to that unknown realm where I want to go! Take me to death’s door, unconscious and my forehead bleeding, so I may become someone else! That was my state of mind when I left the town called Şirinyer on the long back row of a dilapidated Maigrus bus, with a couple of stitches on my body and a dead man’s fat wallet in my pocket.
Night! A long, very long and windy night. Dark villages and even darker sheepfolds, immortal trees, sorry service stations, empty restaurants, silent mountains, and anxious rabbits went past the dark mirror of my window. At times I would study a distant light flickering beneath the stars, and contemplating the sort of life I imagined being led moment to moment under that light, I would find a place in it for Janan and myself; and when the bus sped away from the flickering light, I wished I were under that roof instead of sitting in my uncontrollably vibrating seat. My eyes would sometimes regard the passengers on buses that we encountered at service stations, rest stops, crossroads where trees respectfully wait on each other, or on narrow bridges, and I would imagine that I saw Janan sitting among them; and totally taken over by my imagination, I would fantasize catching up with the other bus, boarding it, and taking Janan in my arms. But sometimes I felt so hopeless and so weary that I wished I were the man I saw through the half-closed curtains who was sitting at a table and smoking when our angry bus went by past midnight through the narrow streets of some secluded town.
But I still knew that I really wanted to be someplace else, in a time other than this, like that felicitous moment of being when one has not yet chosen between life and death, there among the dead who died in the heartrending eruption of chance … Before ascending to the seven spheres of heaven, trying to accustom my eyes to the obscure sight with pools of blood and shards of broken glass at the threshold of that realm from which there is no return, I might contemplate with pleasure whether to enter, or not. Should I turn back? Or proceed? What were mornings like in the nether world? What would it be like to abandon this journey altogether and lose oneself in that bottomless night? I would shiver thinking about the unique time in that realm where I might shed my being and perhaps unite with Janan, and I would feel in my legs and in my stitched forehead the urgency to achieve the unexpected happiness that would follow.
Ah, you who ride the night buses! My abject brethren! I know you too are seeking the hour of zero gravity. Ah, to be neither here nor there! To become someone else and roam the peaceful garden that exists between the two worlds! How well I know that the soccer fan in the leather jacket is not waiting for the game to start but anticipating the hour of hazard when bleeding copiously he becomes a blood-red hero. And I also know that the elderly woman who keeps taking something out of her plastic bag and stuffing it in her mouth is not in reality dying to reunite with her sisters and nieces but to reach the threshold of the nether world. The surveyor who has one eye on the road and the other on his dreams is not reckoning the cadastration of the town hall but calculating the point in the crossroads where all towns become history. And I am sure that the pasty-faced high school kid dozing in his seat up front is not dreaming of kissing his sweetheart but of the forceful impact when he kisses the windshield with passion and vehemence. Is it not the same rapture that besets us, after all? Whenever the driver slams on the brakes or the bus whips around in the wind, we open our eyes instantly to stare into the dark road, trying to figure out if the zero hour is upon us. No, not yet!
I spent eighty-nine nights in bus seats without once hearing the tolling of the blissful hour in my soul. There was one time when the bus came to a screeching halt and bumped into a poultry truck, but not even a single one of the bewildered chickens received a bloody nose let alone any of the drowsy passengers. Another night, the bus was skidding pleasurably on an ice-covered highway when I looked out of my frozen window and felt the radiance of coming face to face with God. I was about to discover the single element common to all existence, love, life, and time, but the prankish bus hung on the edge of the dark void, suspended.
I had read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don’t know probability and statistics. The rear exit was where I descended on earth, where I returned to life; the rear exit is where I meet the hurly-burly life in bus terminals: Hello there, roasted-seed vendors, cassette-tape peddlers, bingo captains, elderly fellows with suitcases, elderly dames with plastic bags, hello! So as not to leave the matter to luck, I looked for the least safe bus, chose the route with the most curves, and canvassed the personnel coffee shops for the driver who was the most sleep-deprived, for bus lines with names like SAFEWAY, TRUE SAFEWAY, EXPRESS SAFEWAY, FLYING SAFEWAY, GREASED LIGHTNING. Bus attendants poured bottles of cologne on my hands, but none had the fragrance of the face I was seeking; they brought around arrowroot biscuits on fake silver trays, but none tasted like those my mother served at tea. I ate domestic chocolates made without real cocoa, but my legs didn’t get cramps like they used to when I was a kid. Sometimes the attendant offered all manner of candy and caramels in baskets, but among brands like Golden, Mabel, Fruito, I never came across any of those Uncle Rıfkı liked, the ones called New Life Caramels. I counted the miles in my sleep and dreamed when I was awake. I scrunched into my seat, I shrank and shrank and turned into a wrinkle, I wedged my legs into the seat, I dreamed that I made love to my seatmate. When I awoke, I found his bald pate on my shoulder, his pitiful hand in my lap. Every night I initially played the part of the reserved neighbor to some hapless passenger, then quite the fellow conversationalist, but by morning we would be on such intimate terms that I was his brazen confidant. Cigarette? Where are you going? What’s your line of work? On one bus I was a junior traveling insurance salesman; on another, where it was freezingly cold, I claimed I was soon to marry my cousin who was the love of my life. Behaving like someone who watches UFOs, I divulged to a grandfatherly type that I was anticipating an angel; another time I said my boss and I would be happy to fix all your broken timepieces. Mine is a Movado, said the elderly man with the false teeth; it never misses. While the owner slept with his mouth open, I thought I heard the ticking of the watch that kept perfect time. What is time? An accident! What is life? Time! What is accident? A life, a new life! Submitting to this simple logic, which I was surprised no one had proposed before, I resolved to forego bus terminals, O Angel, and go straight to the scenes of accidents.
I observed passengers who had been cruelly speared into the front seats when their bus had heedlessly and treacherously slammed into the back of a truck loaded with steel bars the tips of which projected out. I saw a driver who in an effort to miss a tabby cat had driven his clumsy bus into a ravine; his corpse was so jammed in, it couldn’t be pried out. I saw heads that had been ripped to pieces, bodies that were rent, hands sundered; I saw drivers who had tenderly taken the wheel into their guts, brains that had exploded like heads of cabbage, bloody ears that still wore earrings, eyeglasses both broken and intact, mirrors, florid bowels carefully laid out on newspapers, combs, squashed fruit, coins, broken teeth, baby bottles, shoes—all manner of matter and spirit that had been eagerly sacrificed to the moment of truth.
One cold spring morning I was tipped off by the traffic police and caught up with a pair of buses that had butted heads in the silence of the steppe. Already half an hour had passed since t
he moment of ardent and blissful collision that had tumultuously exploded, but the magic that makes life meaningful and bearable still hung in the air. I was standing between vehicles that belonged to the police and to the gendarmerie, studying the black tires of one of the buses that had turned over, when I caught the pleasant whiff of new life and death. My legs trembling and the stitches on my forehead smarting, I pressed forward with determination as if I had an appointment, making my way among the bewildered survivors in the misty dusk.
I climbed into the bus, the door handle of which was somewhat hard to reach, and I was going past all the upended seats, gratified to be stepping on eyeglasses, glassware, chains, and fruit that had succumbed to gravity and spilled on the ceiling, when it seemed that I remembered something. I used to be someone else once, and that someone used to desire to become me. I had dreamed of a life where time was blissfully concentrated and compressed and where colors flowed in my mind like waterfalls, hadn’t I? The book I had left behind on my table came to my mind, and I imagined the book staring at the ceiling like the dead staring open-mouthed at the sky. I imagined my mother keeping the book on my table among all the things left over from my previous life which had been interrupted. I was imagining myself say, Look, Mom, what I am searching for among shards of glass, drops of blood, and the dead is the threshold of another kind of life, when I spied a wallet. Before expiring, a body had climbed over the seat and up toward the window, but it had come to rest at the point of equilibrium, and presented to full view the wallet in its back pocket.
I took the wallet and slipped it in my own pocket, but this was not what I had recalled only a moment ago and yet pretended not to remember. What was on my mind was the other bus; where I stood looking through the shattered glass and the cute little curtains that wafted gently in the windows, I now read the Marlboro-red and lethal blue lettering on the other bus that said SAFEST SAFEWAY.
I jumped out of one of the window frames in which the glass had been totally smashed and began to run, stepping on bloody shards of broken glass strewn between the bodies that the gendarmes had yet to carry away. I was not mistaken, the other bus was indeed the same SAFEST SAFEWAY that had safely carried me from a trifling city to an obscure town. I climbed into this old acquaintance and sat in the same seat where I had ridden six weeks ago, and I began to wait like a patient passenger whose trust in this world is optimistic. What was I waiting for? Perhaps for a wind, an appointed hour, or perhaps for a wayfarer. Twilight began to fade. I felt the presence of other living or dead souls who like me were ensconced in the seats, and I heard them calling out to some enigmatic spirits; they were gasping as if talking to beauties in their nightmares or else, in their dreams of paradise, they were having a spat with death. Then my attentive soul sensed something even more profound: I focused on the driver’s station where everything had vanished except for the radio, where, along with the sighs and cries, there was music playing that was enveloped in a sweetly exquisite aura.
Silence fell for a brief moment, and I observed that the light was growing denser. In the mist I saw the blissful ghosts of the dead and the dying. You have gone as far as you may, thou wayfarer! But I think you can go farther! You are pleasantly swaying in anticipation, not knowing whether there is another door and another secret garden where life and death, meaning and motion, time and chance, light and happiness come together. Suddenly that same impatient desire rose once more from deeper depths and besieged my entire body, the desire to be both here and there. It seemed as if I heard several words, I shivered, and it was then, my beauty, that you came through the door, my Janan, clad in that same white dress you were wearing in the corridor at Taşkışla Hall where I saw you last. Your face was drenched in blood.
I did not ask you, “What are you doing here?” And you, Janan, neither did you ask me what I was doing here. We knew.
I took you by the hand and seated you next to me, in seat No. 38. And with the checkered handkerchief I’d got in Şirinyer I tenderly wiped the blood off your face and your forehead. Then, my sweetheart, I held your hand, and for a while we sat thus silently. It was getting lighter; the ambulances arrived, and on the dead driver’s radio they were playing and singing our song.
5
We caught the first bus out of town soon after Janan had had four stitches on her forehead in Rumi’s moribund Konya, where we walked along the low garden walls, somber buildings, and treeless avenues, conscious of the mechanical rise and fall of our feet on the pavement. I sort of remember the next three towns: one was the capital of chimney stacks, the other the capital of lentil soup, and the last, the capital city of bad taste. But after that, as we were driven from town to town, sleeping and waking on buses, everything blurred together. I saw walls where the plaster had crumbled off, where posters left over from the youth of antediluvian performers were still being displayed; I saw bridges that had been swept away by floods, and refugees from Afghanistan peddling Holy Korans no bigger than my thumb. I must have seen other things besides Janan’s light brown hair falling on her shoulders, such as the multitudes at bus terminals, the purple mountains, glossy plastic billboards, frisky dogs playfully chasing our bus out of town, abject peddlers hawking their wares through the bus. At some obscure rest stop when Janan had lost hope of finding any clue for what she called her “investigations,” she set up repasts on our laps with foodstuffs she bought from these peddlers, such as hard-boiled eggs, meat pies, peeled cucumbers, and some no-name provincial soda pop. Then it was morning, then night, then a cloudy morning, then the bus changed gears, then a night darker than dark was upon us, and the video screen above the driver’s seat radiated red-orange light the color of cheap lipstick, when Janan began to relate her story.
Janan’s “relationship” (her word) with Mehmet had begun a year and a half ago. She had a vague apprehension of having perhaps seen him before in Taşkışla Hall milling about among students of architecture and engineering, but the first time she had actually noticed him was at a reception being held for a relative who had recently returned from Germany at a hotel in Taksim. Around midnight, she and her parents had gone down to the lobby, where the pale, tall, and slender man behind the reception desk had made an impression on her mind. “Perhaps because I couldn’t figure out just where I had seen him before,” Janan said, giving me an affectionate smile, but I knew it was not the case.
When school started in the fall, she had seen him again in the hallways in Taşkışla, and soon after they had “fallen in love.” They took long walks together in the streets of Istanbul, went to the movies, frequented student canteens and cafés. “At the beginning we didn’t talk too much about things,” Janan said, using the voice she reserved for serious explanations. But it wasn’t because Mehmet was shy or didn’t like talking. The longer she knew him, the longer she shared her life with him, the more she observed how gregarious, tenacious, articulate, even aggressive he could be. “His silence came from sadness,” she said one night, not looking at me but at the chase scene on the TV screen, and then she added, with the hint of a smile on her lips, “It came from grief.” The police cars speeding on the screen that had been flying over each other and off bridges into rivers had now crashed together and tangled into a knot.
Janan had tried hard to untangle the knot of his grief and sorrow, and she had been successful to a certain degree in penetrating into the life that lay behind it. Mehmet had initially mentioned a previous life when he was someone else and lived in a mansion somewhere in some province. But as he grew bolder, he had said he had left that life behind him, that he desired a new life, and that his past meant nothing to him. He was once someone else, but then he had willed himself to become another person. Since Janan knew only his new self, he advised her to relate only to his present identity and leave his past alone. The terrors he had encountered on his quest were not part of his previous existence but part of the new life that he had once been seeking ardently. “That was the life…” Janan had said to me in some dingy bus termina
l where we had been amicably, even playfully, arguing about which bus to take, sitting at a table over a can of ten-year-old food which she had managed to locate on the shelves of some mice-infested grocery in this shabby town, as well as the watch movement discovered in an old clock repair shop and the children’s comics on the dusty shelves in the Sport Toto shop. “… That was the life he had encountered in the book.”
It was the first time we had mentioned the book in the nineteen days after we ran into each other on the crashed bus. Janan told me that getting Mehmet to discuss the book was as difficult as getting him to talk about the reasons for his melancholy and the life he had left behind him. There had been times when they had been dejectedly walking the streets of Istanbul, or having tea at some café on the Bosphorus, or studying together, when she had demanded the book from him, asking him for that magical object, but he would refuse her in no uncertain terms, telling her that it was not right for a girl like Janan even to imagine the land of perdition, heartbreak, and bloodshed because in that twilight land illuminated by the book, Death, Love, and Terror wandered like hapless ghosts in the guise of downtrodden, heartbroken men with frozen faces who packed guns.