The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  Mehmet’s second interview with Uncle Rıfkı had taken place right under Serkisof’s eyes. Serkisof, who had peeped into the lighted window from the opposite sidewalk first and then standing on a low garden wall, had in several subsequent letters given alternate interpretations of the interview—which he sometimes called a rendezvous—but his initial impressions had been more accurate, considering that these were more closely founded on the facts and what he had actually seen.

  At first the old writer and the young man had sat without speaking for seven or eight minutes in armchairs placed across from each other, with a television set between them on which a cowboy film was being shown. The old man’s wife had at some point brought them coffee. Then Mehmet had risen to his feet, and gesturing wildly he had spoken with such passion and rage that Serkisof had thought the young man was about to raise his hand against the old fellow. The gentleman called Rıfkı, who at first had only been smiling sadly, had also risen to his feet himself in response to the increased force of the young man’s words, and he had counterblasted the young man just as impetuously. And then both of them sat back in their armchairs, followed by their faithful shadows mimicking them on the walls, and they had patiently listened to each other before falling silent and sorrowfully watching the TV for a while, only to strike up a conversation again, with the old man holding forth and the young man listening, then both of them falling silent once more and looking out the window without ever becoming aware of Serkisof.

  But the shrew next door, who spied Serkisof peeping into the window, began to screech with all her might, “Help! Damn you, you lousy pervert,” forcing the unfortunate investigator to leave on the double, without being able to observe the last three minutes of the interview which in his subsequent letters he conjectured had to do with a secret organization, a political fraternity of international dimensions; he also offered a conspiracy theory.

  The next file indicated that during that period Doctor Fine wanted his son followed assiduously, and his investigators had responded by bombarding him with reports. After his interview with the gentleman called Rıfkı, Mehmet, who seemed half crazed to Omega and extraordinarily saddened and resolute according to Serkisof, had bought all the available copies of the book and tried distributing “the work” in all sorts of possible places all over town, such as at the Kadırga student dormitory (Movado), in student hangouts (Zenith and Serkisof), and in bus stops and movie foyers and on ferry gangplanks (Omega). He was only partially successful in this task. Movado was all too aware that the young man was reckless in his efforts to influence other students in his dormitory; it had also been established that in and around other student hangouts the subject attempted rallying other young people around him, but having always been a loner up to this point, he was not sufficiently effective. I had just read that he had been able to enlist a few students he met at the refectory and in school—where he showed up just for this end—and that he had successfully cajoled them into reading the book, when I came across the following news clipping:

  MURDER IN ERENKÖY (Ankara News Agency): Rıfkı Ray, a former chief inspector retired from the State Railroads Administration, was shot and killed around nine o’clock last night by an unknown person. On his way to his coffeehouse from his apartment on Silver Poplar Street, he was accosted by someone who fired on him three times. The assailant, whose identity it has not been possible to establish immediately, departed the scene. Found dead on the spot as a result of the wounds he sustained, Ray (67) had served actively with the State Railroads Administration in various capacities until retiring from his last post as chief inspector. Ray’s death has been deplored in circles where he was much appreciated.

  I raised my head from the files, remembering: My father had returned home very late, looking distraught. Everyone had cried at the funeral. There had been gossip that the murder had been a crime of passion. Who was the jealous guy? Rifling through Doctor Fine’s meticulous files, I tried to discover him. Was he the serviceable Serkisof? Flimsy Zenith? Punctual Omega?

  In another file, I found out that the investigations Doctor Fine had commissioned at tremendous expense had reached a different conclusion. An agent called Hamilton Watch who in all probability also worked for the National Investigation Bureau had sent a short letter providing Doctor Fine with the following information:

  Rıfkı Ray was the author of the book. He had written the book twelve years ago, but, diffident amateur that he was, he had not been able to muster the courage to publish the book under his own name. National Bureau of Investigation agents, who always had an ear trained on tales carried by fathers and teachers motivated by fear for their sons’ and students’ futures during those troubled times, had got wind that the book had led some youths astray; and dragging the writer’s identity out of the publishing house, they let the matter take its course in the able hands of the prosecutor in charge of the press. The prosecutor had the book impounded quietly twelve years ago, but it had not been necessary to put the fear of God into the greenhorn writer by threatening to prosecute him. When the author, one Rıfkı Ray, a retired State Railroads inspector, was initially summoned to the prosecutor’s office, he had expressed, using language that almost openly displayed his satisfaction, that not only was he not against the confiscation of his book, he would not contest the action; besides, he had signed without further ado the statement he himself had suggested that he make, and had never again written another book. Hamilton’s report had been written eleven days before Uncle Rıfkı was killed.

  Considering what Mehmet’s reaction was, it was clear that he had found out about Uncle Rıfkı’s death within a short period of time. According to Movado, “the obsessive young man” who was in a bad way had shut himself in his room and, as if in a religious trance, he had begun to read the book continuously from morning to night. Then both Serkisof and Movado, who observed him leave his quarters, pretty much agreed that our youth’s activities did not show any rhyme or reason. One day he would hang around the back streets in Zeyrek like an idle bum, then the next day he would watch porno movies all afternoon in some Beyoğlu theater. Serkisof indicated that he left the dormitory sometimes in the middle of the night but was unable to ascertain the destination. Zenith had seen him in a terrible condition in the middle of the day; his beard and hair were overgrown, his appearance was disheveled, and he was staring at the people in the street “like an owl spooked by daylight.” He stayed away completely from his acquaintances, from the student locales and hallways in school where he used to try pushing the book. He had no relationship with any female, nor did he seem to try anything in that direction. Movado, the dormitory supervisor, had found several nudie magazines when he had gone through Mehmet’s room in his absence, but he added that this was stuff of which most normal students availed themselves. In the light of the work Zenith and Omega did without knowledge of each other, it was obvious that Mehmet was for a period drinking quite hard. Later, following a brawl he was involved in set off by some taunting in a students’ beer hall called the Three Merry Crows, he had come to prefer the more out-of-the-way and run-down taverns located in back alleys. For a period, he had tried renewing contact with other students and crazies he had met in taverns, but it was of no avail. After that, he had loitered for hours in front of book stalls, looking for the soulmate who might show up to buy and read the book. He had located the few young people whom he had once managed to befriend and prevail on to read the book, but according to Zenith he was so ill-tempered that he would soon pick a fight. Omega had been able to eavesdrop on an argument that took place at a tavern situated in some Aksaray back alley, and he was successful in overhearing our young man, who no longer appeared so young, enthusiastically spout about the world in the book, arriving there, the threshold, stillness, the unique moment, and hazard. But these enthusiasms must also have been temporary because, as Movado had indicated, Mehmet, who was so unkempt, dirty, and messy that he had become a nuisance to his friends—if in fact he had any friends left�
�was no longer reading the book. “If you ask me, sir,” Movado had written regarding our young man’s aimless ramblings and walks that ended nowhere, “this young man is searching for something that will lighten his burden, and although I am not entirely sure I know what he is looking for, I don’t think he knows it for sure either.”

  On one of those days on which he aimlessly walked the streets of Istanbul, our young man, whom Serkisof was following closely, had found the “something” that might relieve his grief and bring peace to his soul at the bus terminal. That is, he had found the bus. Without packing a suitcase, without buying a ticket that indicated a destination, he had spontaneously boarded some departing bus at random; and Serkisof, who was thrown for a moment, had also jumped on the next Magirus bus and taken off in pursuit.

  From then on they had traveled on the same buses for weeks without a destination, from town to town, terminal to terminal, from one bus to the next, Serkisof always in hot pursuit. The records written in a cramped hand which Serkisof had kept while sitting in vibrating bus seats were heartfelt testimonials to the magic and vibrancy of these precarious and aimless journeys. They had observed travelers who had lost their luggage and their way, lunatics who had lost track of time; they had met retired souls selling calendars, gung-ho boys going off to the army, young men announcing the Judgment Day. They had sat down in terminal restaurants and taken their meals with young engaged couples, repair shop apprentices, soccer players, purveyors of contraband cigarettes, hired killers, primary school teachers, movie theater managers; and they had slept pressed against hundreds of people curled up in bus seats and waiting rooms. They had not spent even a single night in a hotel. They had never established a permanent bond or any sort of friendship. They had not traveled even once where they had known their destination.

  “All we do, actually, is to get off one bus and get on another,” Serkisof had written. “We are expecting something, perhaps a miracle, or some kind of light, perhaps an angel, or an accident; I just don’t know what, but this is all that comes to me … It is as if we are looking for some sign that will take us to an uncharted realm, but so far we have had no luck. The fact that we have not had even the slightest mishap so far indicates that perhaps an angel is keeping watch over us. I can’t tell if the young man remains altogether unaware of my motives. I don’t know if I can last it out to the bitter end.”

  He had not been able to last it out. A week after Serkisof had written the halting letter, Mehmet had left his soup half finished at a rest stop where they had stopped at midnight and he had bolted into a BLUE SAFEWAY bus, leaving Serkisof, who had been spooning up a bowl of the same soup, to stare in amazement while Mehmet got away and disappeared. So he had calmly finished his soup, and he had reported it to Doctor Fine, saying that in all honesty he was not in the least embarrassed. What should he do next?

  After that, neither Serkisof, who had been told to continue with his investigations, nor Doctor Fine had been able to learn anything further about Mehmet’s activities for some weeks.

  Until the moment Serkisof encountered the corpse of another young man whom he took to be Mehmet, for more than a month he had been killing time at bus terminals, traffic bureaus, and driver hangouts, hurrying to the sites of traffic accidents where his instincts led him to look for our young man among the dead. I understood from other letters written on other buses that Doctor Fine had also dispatched other watches after his son. One of these letters was being written when the bus Zenith was on had plowed into the rear of a horse cart, and Zenith’s punctilious heart had stopped from the loss of blood; it had been the management of the PROMPT SAFEWAY bus company that had mailed Doctor Fine the bloodstained letter, which remained unfinished.

  It had taken Serkisof four hours to reach the traffic accident where Mehmet had victoriously brought to a close his life as Nahit. A SAFETY EXPRESS bus had rear-ended a tanker truck carrying printer’s ink, and for a while the bus, which was rife with screams, had glowed under a pitch-black substance, only to go up in the middle of the night, consumed by brilliant flames. Serkisof had written that he had been unable to make a positive identification of “the poor obsessive boy who had been burned beyond recognition,” and the only evidence he had in hand was the young man’s identification card, which, as luck would have it, had not been consumed. Those who had lived through the incident had verified that the dead young man had been sitting in seat number 37. Had Nahit been in number 38, he would have survived without a scratch. Serkisof, having learned from a survivor that the young man in seat 38 was about the same age, a student of architecture called Mehmet who was studying at the Technical University in Istanbul, had tracked the young man down to his home in Kayseri to hear about Nahit’s last hours, but he had been unable to get hold of the young man called Mehmet. Considering that he ought to have gone to see his parents after the horrible accident he had survived, but hadn’t, Serkisof surmised the young Mehmet must have been terribly affected by the mishap; yet he was not Serkisof’s immediate problem. Now that the subject whom he had followed all these months was dead, he was waiting for further orders and money from Doctor Fine. After all, his investigations had revealed that the whole of Anatolia, not to mention the Middle East and the Balkans, was seething with enraged young people who had read books of this sort.

  After the news of his son’s death and then the charcoaled body’s arrival home, Doctor Fine was so beside himself with anger that he fired the surviving watches. The fact that Uncle Rıfkı had been killed did not lessen his ire but only clouded its focus, diffusing it against the whole of society. In the days following the funeral Doctor Fine hired seven new investigators with the aid of a well-connected retired police officer who took care of Doctor Fine’s affairs in Istanbul; and he bestowed code names on the new crew taken from all sorts of watches. Besides that, he had further developed his ties to the heartsick dealers whose common enemy was the Great Conspiracy; and he had begun to receive from them occasional tips. These persons—whose businesses had failed because of competition from specific international companies that were in such things as heaters, ice cream, refrigerators, soda pop, usury, and hamburgers—suspected and reviled young people who read not only Uncle Rıfkı’s book but, in general, any books that seemed to these dealers odd, different, or foreign; and if they received encouragement from Doctor Fine, they were all too keen on tailing these youths and keeping an eye on them, gladly making it their duty to write paranoid and irate reports.

  Just to see if someone who had read the book in a provincial town, or in some stuffy dormitory, or in a dinky neighborhood like mine, had been informed on by one of Doctor Fine’s spies, I skimmed through these reports while eating the dinner Rosebud had brought on a tray, saying, “Father did not think you would want to interrupt your work.” In the pages I quickly flipped through eager to chance upon a soulmate, I came across a couple of intriguing incidents that made my hair stand on end; but I could not make out to what extent these people were my soulmates.

  Upon reading the book, a student of veterinary medicine, for example, whose father labored as a coal miner in Zonguldak, had ceased to attend to anything other than basic human requirements like eating and sleeping, and spent all his time reading the book. This young man would some days read one single page over and over a thousand times, thereby failing to do anything else with his time. One alcoholic high school math teacher, who did not conceal his suicidal tendencies, kept spending the last ten minutes of every class period—that is, until his students rose up in arms—with readings from the book which he accompanied with irritating peals of laughter. As for a young man from Erzurum who was studying economics, he had papered the walls of his room with pages from the book, which had led to a terrible fight with his roommates when one of them claimed there was a slur against Prophet Mohammad in the pages; whereupon a dorm resident who was half blind had climbed on a chair trying to read the corner between the stovepipe and the ceiling with a magnifying glass, which had resulted in some heartsi
ck handyman getting wind of the book and reporting the incident back to Doctor Fine; but I could not be sure if the book that had ruined the life of the student from Erzurum with debates over “whether or not he should be turned in to the prosecutor” was in fact the one written by Uncle Rıfkı.

  As it turns out, the book was traveling like a loose mine by virtue of a hundred or a hundred and fifty copies which were changing hands through chance meetings, or being mentioned by half-curious readers, or attracting attention in bookstalls; or similar books which performed the same magical function were sometimes instilling in one of the readers a current of excitement or some sort of inspiration. Some went into solitude with the book, but at the threshold of a serious breakdown they were able to open up to the world and shake off their affliction. There were also those who had crises or tantrums upon reading the book, accusing their friends and lovers of being oblivious to the world in the book, of not knowing or desiring the book, and thereby criticizing them mercilessly for not being anything like the persons in the book’s universe. There was another set of organizer types who read the book in order to apply themselves to humanity rather than to the text. These enthusiasts settled down to search for others like themselves who had read the book, and if they were unsuccessful in this task—which was always the case—they prevailed on others to read the book, hoping to engage in activism shared by the people they had ensnared. Neither these activists nor the informants who informed on them had any idea as to what sort of activism these people held in common.

  During the next couple of hours, as I pieced out the facts from news clips that had been filed meticulously among the informants’ letters, I learned that five such readers who had been inspired by the book had been killed by Doctor Fine’s watches. It was not clear what watch had committed which murders at what time and for what reason. It was just that the short news items clipped from the newspapers had been placed in chronological order among the records of denunciation. There were, however, some details available on a couple of the killings. Since one of the murdered persons was a student of journalism who had done translations for the foreign news service of the Sun papers, the Journalists Association for Patriotic Action pretended to have taken an interest in the incident, announcing that the Turkish press would never bow down before senseless terrorism. The other killing involved a waiter who had been gunned down when his hands were full of empty bottles of a popular yogurt drink; Islamic Youth Raiders had disclosed that the dead waiter had been a member, declaring at their press conference that the homicide had been perpetrated by the agents of the CIA and Coca-Cola.