by Orhan Pamuk
It was through her perseverance and protestations of anxiety that Janan had been able to beguile Mehmet, even if only modestly. “Perhaps he wanted me to read the book and rescue him from its enchantment and its virulence,” she said. “After all, I was sure by then that he loved me.” Then, while our bus waited patiently at a railroad crossing for a train that seemed to be in no hurry to go by, “Or perhaps,” she added, “he unconsciously wished that we could enter together into that life which was still viable in some corner of his mind.” Clattering like the trains whose locomotives screamed through my old neighborhood, a string of boxcars loaded with wheat, machinery, and broken glass went by our bus window, one after the other, like illegal and chastened ghosts from another country.
Janan and I said little about the influence that the book exerted on us. The influence was so powerful, so indisputable, and so right that talking about it would turn the book’s content into a kind of prattling, idle chatter. The book was something whose necessity was so indisputable in both our lives that it existed palpably between us, basic like sunlight and water. We had set out on the road in response to the light that surged from its pages into our faces, and we attempted to progress on this road by virtue of our instincts, but without wishing to know for sure where it was that we were headed.
Even so, we often disputed long and hard over which bus to take. There was an instance when the metallic voice announced the time of departure and the destination on the loudspeaker in the passengers’ lounge (which was too much of a cavernous hanger for a town that small), inspiring in Janan such a longing to go there that, despite my opposition, we had complied with her desire. Another time we followed a young man carrying a plastic suitcase to the bus lanes, flanked by his teary-eyed mother and his cigarette-puffing father, just because the young man’s size and his slight stoop reminded her of Mehmet, and we boarded his bus, where a sign informed us that Turkish Airlines was the bus line’s main competition, only to observe our young man get off three towns and two dirty rivers later and make his way to some barracks surrounded by a barbed-wire stockade and observation posts, where the lettering on the ramparts proclaimed that HAPPINESS IS BEING A TURK. We took many and sundry buses that went to the very heart of the steppes, sometimes just because Janan took a fancy to some felt-green and brick-red bus, or else, look! how the tail of the R in GREASED LIGHTNING on the side of the bus seems to have become tapered from the vibrations and speed, zigzagging like a bolt of lightning. When Janan’s investigations proved inconclusive in dirty terminals and sleepy marketplaces in the dusty towns where we arrived, I would question her as to why and wherefore we were traveling; and reminding her that the money I had lifted from the pockets of dead passengers was dwindling, I would pretend that I was trying to comprehend the illogical logic of our investigations.
Janan was not at all surprised when I told her about looking out of the window in the classroom in Taşkışla Hall and seeing Mehmet get shot. According to her, life was full of distinct, even intentional, convergences that some obtuse fools called “coincidences.” Shortly after Mehmet was shot, Janan had sensed that something extraordinary had taken place from the movements of the fellow who ran the hamburger stand across the street, and remembering she had heard gunshots, she intuited all that had transpired and run to Mehmet, who lay wounded. If it were up to some others, they might consider it coincidental that there was a cab immediately on the spot where Mehmet had been shot, and the fact that they were taken to the Kasımpaşa Naval Hospital was merely contingent on the fact that the cabby had recently done his military service in the navy. The wound in Mehmet’s shoulder was not too serious, and he was to be discharged in a day or two, but when Janan arrived at the hospital the next morning, she found that he had taken off and vanished.
“I went to the hotel, gave Taşkışla Hall a quick once-over, stopped at his favorite haunts, then waited at home for his phone call, although I knew it was all in vain,” she said with a cool clarity that left me full of admiration. “But I realized he had gone back there, to that realm; he had long since returned to the book.”
I was her “traveling companion” on her journey to that realm; we were to “support” each other in rediscovering that place. It was not wrong to think that in our quest for the new life two heads were “better” than one. We were not merely traveling companions but soulmates; we were each other’s unconditional support; we were as creative as Marie and Ali who started a campfire with a pair of eyeglasses; and so it was that for weeks we sat next to each other on night buses, pressing our bodies together.
Some nights, long after the second film on the VCR came to an end resounding with the high-spirited noises of gunshots and exploding helicopters, long after we tired and seedy passengers departed for the land of dreams, our breaths resigned to death on our restless journey as we sat over jogging wheels, I would be shaken awake by a ditch, or a sudden braking, and I would stare long and hard at Janan sleeping like a baby next to the window, her head resting on the short curtains she rolled together to make a pillow, her light brown hair making a sweet mound on this pillow that fell to her shoulders. Her long beautiful arms sometimes reached toward my eager knees like a pair of fragile branches that were parallel; sometimes one arm steadied the hand that held her head like a second pillow, the other hand gracefully holding the elbow of the steadying arm. When I looked into her face I saw there a pain that creased her brow, sometimes her light brown eyebrows were so furrowed that question marks that alarmed me appeared in the middle of her forehead. Then I’d see a radiance in her pale complexion, and I would dream of a velvet paradise where roses were blooming and squirrels gamboling in the sunset, calling me to the wondrous country where her cheekbone met her slender throat, or if her head was bent forward, on the inaccessible spot where her hair fell on the nape of her neck. I would behold that golden realm in her face and, if she had managed to smile even just a little in her sleep, on her lips that were so very full and so very pale, and sometimes lightly chapped because she so often bit those lips, and I would say to myself: I was not taught it at school, and I did not read it in any book, but how sweet it is, O Angel, to watch the beloved sleep!
We did talk about the angel and also about Death who seemed to be the angel’s dignified and ponderous stepbrother, but we did it through words that were fragile and flimsy like the friable things Janan bargained for at market stalls, the corner hardware, or sleepy dry-goods stores and, after playing with them for a bit, left behind at terminal cafés or on bus seats. Death was everywhere, especially There because it radiated out from That Place. We were looking for clues to get us There and find Mehmet, but we left tracks behind us. We had learned all this from the book—just as we had learned about unique moments of accident, the threshold where the other world was visible, about cinema vestibules, New Life Caramels, assassins who might kill Mehmet and maybe even us, about hotel marquees where my steps were arrested, about prolonged silences, about nights and badly lit restaurants. I must put it like this: After all that was said and done, we boarded some bus once again; after all that was said and done, we set out once more on the road; sometimes even before night fell, the bus attendant would be checking the tickets, the passengers making acquaintances, and the children and the more anxious passengers watching the smooth asphalt mountain road as if watching the video screen, when a sudden gleam would appear in Janan’s eyes and she would begin to speak.
“When I was young, sometimes I would get up in the middle of the night,” she said on one occasion. “I would part the curtains and look outside. There would be a man walking in the street, a drunk, a hunchback, a fat man, the night watchman. Always a man … I was afraid, and I liked my bed, but I wished I were out there too.”
Later that night, she said, “I learned about boys playing hide-and-seek with my brother’s friends at our summer place. Or in middle school, watching them look at something they took out of their desks. Or when I was much younger, when we were right in the middle of the game a
nd they suddenly had to pee, the way they wiggled their legs.”
And later still, “I was nine years old. I fell down at the seashore and wounded my knee. My mother shrieked and cried. We went to see the hotel doctor. What a pretty girl you are, he said, what a sweet girl. He washed my wound with peroxide, saying, what a smart girl. The way he looked at my hair, I had an idea the doctor liked looking at me. He had enchanted eyes that regarded me from another world. His lids were slightly heavy, making him appear somewhat somnolent perhaps, but still, he saw me fully and everything around me.”
On another night, we were talking again of the angel. “The angel’s eyes are everywhere,” she said. “On everything, always present. Yet, wretched humans that we are, we still suffer from the absence of those eyes. Is it because we are forgetful? Because our will is slack? Or because we cannot love life? I know that I will look out the bus window some day, or some night on the road, going from town to town, and my eyes will meet the eyes of the angel. I must learn how to look, so that I may see. I have faith in buses. And I also have faith in the angel … sometimes … no, always. Yes, always. Well, sometimes.
“The angel I am looking for comes out of the book. There the angel seemed to be someone else’s idea, like a guest of some sort, but still I identified with him. I am sure that the moment I see him, life’s mystery will become manifested to me. I felt his presence at the sites of accidents and also riding on the bus. Everything that Mehmet has said has come true. Wherever Mehmet goes, Death radiates brilliantly around him, you know? Perhaps it is so because he carries the book inside him. But I have also heard accident victims mention the angel when they knew absolutely nothing about the book or the new life. I am on his trail. I am putting together the signs he has left behind.
“One rainy night, Mehmet told me the people who want to kill him were on the move. They could be anywhere at all, they could even be listening to us this very minute. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you yourself could be one of them. Many times one does exactly the opposite of what one thinks, or thinks one is doing. You are on the road to that realm, but you are turning inwards. You think you are reading the book, yet you are rewriting it. When you imagine you are helping, you inflict harm. Most people want neither a new life nor a new world. So they kill the book’s author.”
This was how Janan first brought up the writer, or the old man to whom she referred to as the “author,” talking to me in a language that was none too clear but spoken in a style that excited me, not because of the content but because of the mysterious quality of what she said. She was sitting in one of the front-row seats on a fairly new bus, her eyes were fixed on the luminescent white median line on the asphalt road; but, for some odd reason, what was absent in the purple night were the oncoming headlights belonging to other buses, trucks, and cars.
“I know that when Mehmet and the old writer talked, they understood everything in each other’s eyes. Mehmet had been looking for him and had looked him up. When they met, they didn’t talk very much, they were quiet; they argued a little and then fell silent. The old man had either written the book when he was young or else he called the time he’d written it his youth. A young man’s book, he had said sadly. Later, ‘they’ had terrorized the old man and made him renounce what he’d written with his own hand, looking into his own soul. Nothing surprising about that. Not even about ‘their’ killing him in the end … Nor about it being Mehmet’s turn now that the old man is dead … But we will find Mehmet before the killers do … What is significant is this: There are others who have read the book and who believe in it. I have met them walking around towns, bus terminals, shops; I know them, I recognize them from their eyes. The faces of those who have read the book and have faith in it are distinct; they all have the same melancholy desire in their eyes, as you too will understand some day, maybe you already do. If you comprehend the mystery, and if you are making progress toward it, Life is awesome.”
If we were in some depressing, fly-infested restaurant at a desolate rest stop when Janan was telling me all this, we would be smoking cigarettes with the complimentary tea served by some sleepy busboy, and spooning up the strawberry compote that had a plastic taste. If we were vibrating in the front seats of a ramshackle bus, my eyes would be fixed on Janan’s full lips and generous mouth, but her eyes were always fixed on the uneven headlights of trucks that went by occasionally. If we were in a jam-packed bus terminal among the multitudes carrying plastic bags, cardboard suitcases, and gunnysacks, Janan would suddenly cut short what she was saying and, oops! she’d bolt from the table and disappear, leaving me stone-cold and alone in the crush of people.
Sometimes I would count the minutes for hours on end, only to find her in a second-hand shop in the back alley of some town where we were waiting to catch a bus; she would be anxiously studying a broken flatiron or one of those old coal-burning stoves that are no longer made. Sometimes she’d turn to me with a mysterious smile on her face and an odd provincial newspaper in her hand, and she would read to me the municipal ordinance passed to prevent livestock from using the main street on their way home in the evening, or the notice put in by the Crescent Gas dealership, advertising the innovations in the local store brought in fresh from Istanbul. Many a time I found her chatting away intimately with some people in the crowd; she’d be in deep conversation with some elderly woman wearing a kerchief, or repeatedly kissing the little duck-faced girl on her lap, or expending her surprising knowledge concerning bus lines and terminals to help out ill-willed strangers who reeked of OP shaving soap. When I came up to her hesitantly and all out of breath, she would act as if we were out on the road just to solve other people’s difficulties. “This dear woman was to meet her son here after he got discharged from the army,” she would inform me, “but he wasn’t on the bus from Van.” We inquired about bus schedules on behalf of other people, we exchanged their tickets for them, we calmed down their crying children, we kept an eye on their cases and bundles when they went to the toilet. “May God reward you,” a plump older woman with gold teeth had once said, and then turning to me, she had raised her eyebrow and added, “You do know your wife is awfully pretty, don’t you?”
* * *
Once the lights and the luminous video screen had been turned off after midnight, and all movement on the bus ceased other than the smoke that rose quivering from the cigarettes of the most melancholic and wakeful of the passengers, our bodies gradually moved together on our gently swaying seats. I felt your hair on my face, Janan, your slender hands on my knees and, on my neck, your breath that smelled of slumber. The tires spun around and the diesel engine kept repeating its constant moan, and time pervaded the space between us like a dark, warm, and heavy liquid. A nascent sensitivity to this primordial time in the bones of our benumbed, lethargic, stiffened legs stirred our flesh with desire.
Sometimes, when my arm burst into flames at the very touch of her arm, sometimes waiting all night for her head to fall on my shoulder (please God let it!), sometimes going rigid in my seat for fear of disturbing the strands of her hair on my throat, I counted her breaths reverently and with awe, wondering about the meaning of some sorrow fleeting by on her brow. When her face, pale in a sudden flash of light, was startled awake under my gaze, how thrilled I was that she did not glance out the window in her initial confusion to see where she was, but looking into my reassuring eyes, she smiled. I kept vigil all the night long, making sure her head did not lean against the icy window and get chilled. I took off the maroon jacket I bought in Erzinjan and laid it over her knees. When the driver careened exuberantly down mountain roads, I guarded her contorted sleeping form, lest she be thrown out of the seat and get hurt. Sometimes, though, somewhere in the thick of my vigil, listening to engine noises, passengers’ sighs and yearnings for death, my eyes focused on some spot between the smooth skin of her neck and the convolutions of her tender ears, I lost myself in a childhood reverie of a boat ride or a snowball fight which then melted into dreams of the marita
l bliss that would one day be our life.
And then, hours later, when I was bidden awake by a prankish ray of sunlight that was as cold and refracted as cut glass, I realized that the lavender-scented sultry garden cradling my head had all along been her neck; and remaining there quietly a while longer between sleep and wakefulness, I blinked my greetings to the resplendent morning outside, the mauve mountains and incipient signs of the new life, only to behold with grief how very remote from me were her eyes.
“Love,” she began saying one evening like some adept voiceover narrator, blowing fire into the word that stuck in my throat like a hot coal, “points the way, empties you of the stuff of life, carries you at last to the mystery of creation. I understand it now. We are on the way There.
“The moment I saw Mehmet,” she went on, oblivious to Clint Eastwood staring at her from the cover of some old magazine left on a table in a bus terminal somewhere, “I knew my whole life would change. Before I saw him, I had a life, but after I knew him, my life was altered. It was as if everything around me had changed its color and shape—human beings, beds, lamps, ashtrays, streets, clouds, chimneys, everything but everything. It was with awe and wonder that I set out to discover this new world. I bought the book thinking I no longer needed books and fictions. To really know the world that opened to me, I had to do the work of looking, of seeing each and every thing with my own eyes. But once I read the book itself, I apprehended instantly what lay behind everything that I must see. I encouraged Mehmet, who had returned disconsolate from the country where he’d gone in search of the new life, and I convinced him that together we’d make it there. Back in those days, we read the book over and over again, but each time with new eyes. Sometimes we spent weeks on a passage, other times everything was clear as a bell the instant we read it. We went to the movies, read other books and newspapers, walked through the streets. The times when the book was on our minds, when we knew it by heart, the streets in Istanbul glowed with such an extraordinary luminescence that the city belonged to us. We had a way of knowing that the old man we saw on a street corner leaning on his cane planned to idle away his time at the coffeehouse until it was time to pick up his grandchild after school. We knew that the mare pulling the last cart of the three carts that went by was the mother of the two skinny horses that pulled the first two. We knew the reason why more men were now wearing blue socks; we knew how to decipher train timetables read upside down, or that the suitcase the fat and sweaty man who boarded the bus carried was full of underwear taken from the house he’d just robbed. We’d go in a café to read the book again and then discuss it for hours. It was love. Sometimes I thought love was the only way of apprehending a distant world, like in the movies, and being transported there.