The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  It was the fifth day I was on the road. I had drunk the raki offered me in a tea glass by the publisher of the Çorum Free Press, so that I might all the better understand the poems of his that he read me; and I had learned that the publisher would no longer print excerpts from his book in the “home and family” section because he had understood it neither helped the railroad problem nor furthered the building of the Çorum-Amasya line; then in the next town, after having spent six hours running around looking for addresses and trails, I had been furious to discover that for the sake of worming some money out of Doctor Fine, some local heartsick informer had invented a nonexistent reader of the book and placed him on a nonexistent street; and I had beat it to Amasya where night falls quickly, the city being situated between craggy and steep mountains. I was halfway through the Mehmets on my list, so far to no avail, and my legs were twitching with the anxiety of imagining Janan still burning with fever in bed, so I had been planning to get on the first bus to the Black Sea coast immediately after going to the requisite address in town, inquiring after my army buddy, only to find out he was not that Mehmet.

  I crossed a bridge spanning a murky stream—which turned out to be the renowned Green River which was not in the least green—and went into a neighborhood situated below tombs cut into the rock on the face of a cliff. The old and stately mansions indicated that at one time people who had seen better times—who knows what pashas or landed agas—had once lived in this dusty quarter. I knocked on the door of one of these mansions and inquired after my army buddy; they told me he was out driving his car, but they let me in and presented to me scenes from a blissfully happy family life.

  1. The patriarch, a lawyer who took the cases of the poor pro bono, saw to the door his client whose troubles grieved him deeply; and taking a volume of jurisprudence out of his magnificent library, he settled down to review it. 2. When the matriarch who was apprised of the case introduced me to the distracted father, the sister with the impish eyes, the grandmother wearing her reading glasses, and the little brother who was studying his stamp collection—the homeland series—they were all excited and overjoyed, exhibiting the kind of true Turkish hospitality extolled so much in travel books written by Western explorers. 3. The mother and the impish girl questioned me affably while they waited for the oven to brown the delicious-smelling börek Aunt Süveyde had made, then they had a discussion about André Maurois’ novel Climats. 4. Their hardworking son Mehmet who had spent the whole day taking care of things at their apple orchard told me candidly that he didn’t remember me at all from the time he spent doing his military duty, but he expended considerable goodwill looking for topics of conversation we might have in common, and eventually he came across the subject, so we had a chance to discuss how detrimental it had been for the country that political incentive for building railroads and encouraging village farm cooperatives had been dropped.

  When I left the blissful mansion to drown in the darkness of the street, I thought to myself these people probably never got laid. I had known as soon as I knocked on the door and saw them that the Mehmet in question did not live here. So why had I stayed to get myself charmed by the picture of bliss that came right out of the commercials advertising homes on credit? Because of the Walther, I said to myself, feeling the presence of my gun in my belt. I wondered if I should just turn around and spray my 9-millimeter rounds into the peaceful windows of the mansion; but I knew it wasn’t a real thought, it was more of a whisper to put to sleep the black wolf deep in the dark forest of my mind. Sleep, black wolf, sleep. Ah, yes, let’s go to sleep. A store, a store window, an advertisement: My feet, which were as meek as a lamb that fears the wolf, were taking me somewhere now. Where? Pleasure Theater, Spring Pharmacy, Death Dry-Fruits and Nuts. Why is the salesboy smoking and staring at me like that? Then a grocery store, a pastry shop, and eventually I found myself looking at the Humble-Steel refrigerators in a good-size window, the Crescent Gas stoves, bread boxes, armchairs, sofas, enameled steel cookware, lamps, Modern brand stoves, and when I saw the lucky dog with the thick coat, that is, the figurine of the dog perched on the Humble-Steel brand radio, I knew I could no longer control myself.

  That’s how I stood in front of a store window in the city of Amasya stuck between two mountains, Angel, and I wept, breaking into big sobs. You ask a child why he is crying; he weeps because of a deep wound inside him but he tells you he’s crying because he has lost his blue pencil sharpener; that was the kind of grief that overcame me looking at all the stuff in the window. What was the sense in turning into a murderer for naught? To live with that pain in my soul for the rest of my life? I might buy some roasted seeds in the dry-fruits-and-nuts store, or look into the mirror of some grocer to see myself, or be living the life of bliss replete with refrigerators and stoves, but still the accursed sinister voice inside me, the black wolf, would snarl and accuse me of my guilt. Whereas I, Angel, I had so completely believed in life once and in good works. Now, caught between Janan whom I couldn’t trust, and Mehmet whom I would kill in a minute if I could trust her, I had nothing to hold on to but my Walther and the dreams of a blissful life up on cloud nine that depended on schemes which were intricate beyond belief and sinister to the extreme. The images of refrigerators, orange juice machines, armchairs bought on time flowed by parading in my mind, accompanied by a soundless wail.

  The elderly man in domestic films who assuages the pain of the sniffling little boy or beautiful weeping woman came to my aid momentarily, me the tough rooster. “Son,” he said, “why are you crying, my boy? Is something the matter? Don’t cry.”

  This bearded clever uncle was either on his way to the mosque to pray, or else to throttle someone.

  I said, “Sir, my father died yesterday.”

  He must have suspected something. “Who are your folks, son?” he said. “You’re surely not from here.”

  “My stepfather never wanted us coming around,” I said and I wondered if I should also say: Sir, I am going to Mecca on pilgrimage, but I missed my bus. Can you loan me some money?

  Acting as if I were dying of grief, I walked into the darkness, dying of grief. Still, it had helped to come up with a couple of lies out of the blue. Later, I was amply soothed on the TRUSTED SAFEWAY bus I could always trust, seeing on the video screen a dainty lady driving her car pitilessly and without any hesitation into a crowd of evil guys. I arrived on the shore of the Black Sea by morning, and I called my mother from the Black Sea Grocery and told her I was about to conclude my affairs and come home with her angelic daughter-in-law. If she insists on crying, let her cry out of happiness. I sat down in a pastry shop in the old shopping district, and opening my notes, I made some calculations to finish the job as soon as possible.

  The reader of the book in Samsun was a young doctor doing his residency at the Social Security Hospital. As soon as I determined he was not that Mehmet, something hit me for no explicable reason, perhaps it was his clean-shaven face, or his physically fit and self-confident manner. Unlike people like me whose lives had slipped off the track, this man had found a sound way to absorb the book into his system and he could live with it in peace as well as with passion. I hated him immediately. How could the very book that had changed my world and screwed up my destiny have affected this man as if it were a vitamin pill? I knew I would die of curiosity if I didn’t ask, so I brought up the subject with the wide-shouldered doctor and his nurse, who looked like a third-class Kim Novak with her large eyes and chiseled features, pointing at the book that was sitting in all its deceptive innocence among the pharmaceutical catalogues on the desk, as if it too was something about pharmacy.

  “Oh, the doctor just loves to read!” chuckled this willing and able Kim Novak.

  When the nurse left, the doctor locked the door behind her. He sat in his chair with the deliberation of a mature man. And while we smoked man to man, he explained everything.

  There was a time in his early youth when under the influence of his family he had been religi
ous, he went to the mosque on Fridays and fasted during the month of Ramadan. Then he had fallen in love with a girl; a while later he had lost his faith; following that, he had become a Marxist. He had felt an emptiness in his soul after these storms had abated, having left there their mark. But when he’d seen the book in a friend’s library and read it, “everything had fallen into place.” He now comprehended the place of death in our lives; he had accepted its reality like an undeniable tree in the garden, or a friend in the street; he quit being rebellious. He had comprehended the importance of his childhood. He had learned to remember and love all the little things from the past, like bubble gum and comics, and the proper place in his life for his first love as well as for the first book he had ever read. He had always loved his wild homeland anyway, and those mad and sad buses too. As to the angel, he had understood this miraculous angel’s existence through reason and believed it by virtue of his emotions. After all this synthesis, he knew the angel would find him someday, and together they would ascend to the heavens; he would, for example, land a job in Germany.

  He had told me all this as if he were explaining to me how to effect a cure by giving me a prescription for bliss. The doctor rose, having assured himself that his patient had understood the prescription, and all that was left for the incurable patient was to see himself to the door. I was just leaving when he said, as if telling me to take the pills after meals, “I always underline as I read; I recommend you do the same.”

  I took the first bus going south, Angel, as if I were running away. I told myself never again! I would never again venture to the coast of the Black Sea, adding that Janan and I would have never been happy on the Black Sea, as if there had been such a clear-cut and boldly painted fantasy among my plans involving my future happiness. Dark villages, dark sheep pens, deathless trees, sad filling stations, empty restaurants, silent mountains, and anxious rabbits went through the looking-glass of my window. I told myself I had seen similar things before; in the film that was playing on the screen, it was only long after the nice young man with good intentions discovered he had been badly deceived that he first took the bad guys to task and then turned the gun on them. Before he killed them, he interrogated them one by one, getting them to beg for mercy, considered forgiving them, hesitating long enough to give them the chance to do something treacherous; and it was only after we, the viewers, also decided that the bad guy was a blackguard who deserved to be put out of his misery that gunshots were heard on the screen placed above the driver’s seat. That is when I looked out of the window like someone who finds seeing bloodshed and killing distasteful, feeling as if I were hearing the lyrics of a curious song made up of gunshots, the noise of the engine and the tires; and I wondered, Angel, why I had not asked the handsome doctor, when he was prescribing me the book, your identity.

  The lyrics went like this: “Doctor, Doctor, give me the news…” Who is the angel? asks the young patient. The angel? says the doctor full of himself, takes a map, spreads it on the table, and as if showing the pitiful patient the X-rays of his hopeless organs, he points out the Mount of Meaning, and the City of the Unique Moment; and if this is the Valley of Naïveté, and this the Point of Accident, then this here has to be Death. Must one love meeting Death, Doctor, as one does the angel?

  According to my notes, next on my list of people who had read the book was the local newspaper distributor in the town of Ikizler. Ten minutes after I got off the bus, I saw him sitting in his store in the middle of the shopping district, scratching his thick and short body through his shirt with pleasure—nothing like Janan’s lover; being the ready and able detective that I am, I was out of there in ten minutes on the first bus out of town. Two buses and four hours later, my next suspect in the capital of the province put me through even less trouble; there he was in the barber shop right across from the bus terminal, regarding the lucky passengers get off the bus with a deep sadness in his eyes, a dustpan in one hand and a spanking-clean apron in the other, waiting on his boss who was industriously shaving someone. I felt like singing a verse that went through my head, “Come, brother, come with us / let’s you and I on the bus / go to a land that’s fabulous.” I wanted to push through to the end before my muse left me. So, in the next town which was an hour’s ride on the bus, thinking that the unemployed suspect was very suspect indeed, I was forced to inspect the old birdcages, flashlights, scissors, cigarette holders made of rosewood, and oddly enough, gloves, parasols, and a Browning that the heartsick informant had hidden in a dry well in his backyard. This dealer with a broken heart and broken tooth presented me with a Serkisof watch as an insignificant expression of his respect and admiration for Doctor Fine. As he was explaining how he and his three friends met after Friday prayer in the backroom of the pastry shop to discuss the Day of Independence, I reflected that not only the evening but also autumn was suddenly upon us. My mind was overcast with dark and low clouds when a light went on in the house next door, and suddenly among the autumn leaves the honey-colored shoulders of a well-built half-naked woman appeared in the window, only to disappear like a shudder. Following that, I saw black horses galloping through the sky, Angel, and impatient monsters, gas pumps, dreams of bliss, closed movie theaters, other buses, other people, other towns.

  Later on that evening, I felt more upbeat than disappointed talking to the cassette tape dealer even after I understood he was not the Mehmet in question, skipping from subject to subject talking about the good cheer his wares provided for people, about the rainy season being over, about the sadness of the town I had come from, when I heard a dolorous train whistle and became anxious. I had to immediately leave this town, which did not have even a name in my memory, and return to the dear velvet night where the bus would take me.

  I was walking toward the bus terminal, which was in the direction of the train whistle, when I saw myself in the rearview mirror on a bright and shiny bicycle parked on the sidewalk. There I am, with my concealed gun, my new purple jacket, the Serkisof watch presented for Doctor Fine in the pocket, blue jeans on my legs, my clumsy hands, my fleeting strides; then the shops and windows backed off and were gone, and what I saw in the night was a circus tent which had a picture of an angel over the entrance way. The angel was a hybrid between a Persian miniature and domestic film star, but still, my heart leapt. Not only does this student who cuts his classes smoke, sir, but look how he sneaks into the circus tent!

  I bought a ticket and entered the tent, where it smelled of mold, sweat, and earth, sat down and, having decided to take time off from everything, I began to wait along with some crazy conscripts who had failed to return to their squadrons, a few fellows out to kill some time, sad and elderly persons, and a couple of children and their families who seemed to be in the wrong place. This was not like the circuses I saw on television; there were no marvelous trapeze artists, no bears riding bicycles, not even some domestic jugglers. A man pulled off a dirty gray cloth and materialized a radio, which was then levitated to dematerialize into music. We heard a piece of à la turca music, then the young woman who was singing it appeared and sang a second song with her plaintive voice and left. Our tickets were numbered, there would be a drawing, we were to sit patiently; that’s what we were told.

  The woman who had sung before put in another appearance; this time she was an angel, she had lined the corners of her eyes, which made them appear slanted. She had on a modest two-piece swimsuit like the kind my mother wore to Süreyya Beach. Then around her neck was an odd piece of apparel, something I assumed at first was some sort of a strange shawl until I saw that it was a snake she had wrapped around her neck, flinging the two ends over her delicate shoulders. Was I seeing some sort of unusual light that I had never seen before? Or was I merely anticipating such a light? Or perhaps I was only imagining it. I was so happy to be there in that tent watching the angel and the snake with the other twenty-five people or so, I thought tears would pour out of my eyes.

  Later, when the woman was having a conversation wit
h the snake, I thought of something. Sometimes you suddenly remember a distant memory seemingly long forgotten, and you wonder why of all times you’re remembering it now and your mind becomes utterly confused; that’s how I felt, but it was more a feeling of peace than confusion. One time my father and I were visiting Uncle Rıfkı. “I could live anywhere at all, provided trains go there, even if it is a whistle stop at the end of the world,” he had told us. “I cannot even imagine a life where one cannot hear a train whistle before dropping off to sleep.” I could easily imagine spending the rest of my life here in this town, with these people. Nothing can be worth more than the peace that comes from oblivion. Those are the things I thought as I beheld the angel speaking sweetly to the snake.

  The lights went down for a moment, the angel withdrew from the stage. When the lights went up again, it was announced that there would be a ten-minute intermission. I had a mind to go out and mill around with my fellow townspeople with whom I was to spend my whole life.

  I was just threading my way among wooden chairs when I saw someone sitting three or four rows from the so-called stage which was nothing more than a rise in the ground, reading the Viran Bağ Post, and my heart began to beat wildly. It was that Mehmet, Janan’s lover, Doctor Fine’s son who was presumed dead; he had crossed his legs and, in full possession of the peace I so longed for, he was reading his paper, oblivious to the world.

  13

  When I stepped outside the tent, a light wind blew into my collar, down my back and then all over my body, giving me goose bumps. My prospective fellow citizens changed into mistrustful enemies. My heart kept beating wildly, I felt the weight of the gun in my belt, and it wasn’t just my cigarette I was sending up in smoke but the whole world.

  A bell rang, I looked in: still reading his paper. I returned to the tent with the rest of the audience. I sat down three rows directly behind him. The “program” began. I felt dizzy. I don’t remember what I saw, what I didn’t see, what I heard, what I listened to. My mind was on the back of a neck. It was a clean-shaven humble neck that belonged to a decent human being.