The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  He observed with attentiveness that verged on esteem the locomotive that was returning from the almond orchard on a different track. The killer could have sworn that his victim, who was engrossed in the locomotive brightly shimmering in the sunlight, had become totally oblivious to the whole world. But not quite. The cool morning air was being replaced by the oppressiveness of a warm and sunny day.

  “It’s past nine o’clock,” said my rival. “Time for me to get to work … Where are you off to?”

  Knowing full well what I was doing, anxious and hapless but not without thought, I begged someone in all sincerity for the first time in my life: please, stay a while longer; let’s talk a little longer; let’s get to know each other better.

  He was surprised and perhaps a little worried, but he had understood me. Not the gun in my belt, but my thirst. He smiled so indulgently that even the feeling of equal footing I thought the Walther afforded me was blasted into smithereens. That is how the unfortunate traveler who was able to reach merely the frontiers of his own misery rather than reaching the heart of life was gripped by enough anxiety to question the wise master at this frontier about the meaning of everything from life to the book, time, writing, and the angel.

  I kept questioning him as to what all this meant, and he kept asking me what it was that I meant by “all this.” That is when I questioned him as to what might be the initial question to ask, so that I might put it to him. And he kept telling me I had to discover that place which had no beginning and no end. So then, perhaps there was not even a question to ask him. No, there was not. So what was there? What a person was depended on how he looked at things. Sometimes there was a stillness from which one attempted to retrieve something. Other times, one sat and had tea and a pleasant conversation in a café in the morning, as we were presently doing, watching the locomotive and the train, and listening to the cooing of the turtledoves. Perhaps these things were not everything, but they were not, after all, nothing. Well, then, was there not a place beyond, a new realm to be seen after all that travel? If there was a place beyond, it was within the text; but he had determined that it was futile to search for what he discovered in the text outside of the text, in actual life. After all, the world was at least as limitless, flawed, and incomplete as the text.

  In that case, why had we both been so affected by the book? He told me that was a question only a person who was not in the least affected by the book might ask. The world was full of such people, but was I one of them? I no longer knew what kind of person I was. I was someone who had prodigally squandered and lost the core of his soul on the road, trying to make Janan fall in love with him, to locate that realm, and to dispatch his rival. I did not ask him about this, O Angel, I asked him who you are.

  “I have never encountered the angel the book talks about,” he said to me. “It might be that you behold the angel at the moment of death, in the window of some bus.”

  How beautiful was his smile, so merciless. I would kill him. But not just yet. First I must drag it out of him how I might find and retrieve the focal point of my lost soul. But the misery I had fallen into would absolutely not allow me to ask the right questions. The ordinary morning in Eastern Anatolia for which the radio weather forecast was partially cloudy with scattered showers, the bright light in the peaceful train station, the pair of hens scratching around absentmindedly at one end of the platform, a pair of happy young men chatting and carrying cases of soda pop out of a hand wagon into the station snack bar, the stationmaster who was smoking a cigarette—all these had impressed the existing day as it progressed into my consciousness so completely there was no room left in my scattered brain to ask a proper question on the subject of life or the book.

  We were silent for a long time. I kept wondering which question to put to him. And perhaps he was wondering how he was going to peel himself away from me and my questions. We stayed some more. Presently, the moment of reckoning put in an appearance. He paid for the tea. He threw his arms around me and kissed me on the cheeks. How delighted he had been to see me! How I hated him! Well, no, I liked him. But why should I like him? I meant to kill him.

  But not just yet. He would pass the tent theater on his way home to the room where he performed his crackpot task, in that rat’s nest on the street which had submitted to the order and composure of the rules of perspective. I would take the shortcut along the railroad tracks and catch up with him, and I would kill him under the gaze of the Angel of Desire whom he had disparaged.

  I let the self-satisfied bastard go. I felt irritated with Janan for bringing herself to love him. But just glancing at his pensive and vulnerable shadow in the distance was enough to know Janan was right. How indecisive was this Osman, the protagonist of the book you are reading! And how pitiful! He knew in the depths of his being that the man he wanted to hate was “right.” He also knew he couldn’t quite bring himself to kill him yet. I sat moping for a couple of hours on the dilapidated café chair, swinging my legs, thinking over what other traps Uncle Rıfkı might have set for me in the course of the rest of my life.

  Toward noon I returned, crestfallen, back to the Ease Inn, looking for all the world like a prospective murderer. The clerk was pleased enough with the guest from Istanbul who was staying an extra night to offer him tea. So I listened to his military service reminiscences for an extremely long time because I was afraid of the solitude in my room; when the subject turned to me, I was content with telling him I had an “account to settle” but hadn’t yet been able to “finish the job.”

  As soon as I stepped into the room, I turned on the TV, which had been turned off. On the black-and-white screen, a shadow was walking along a white wall, pointing a gun, and upon reaching the corner, emptied the clip into the target. I wondered if Janan and I hadn’t seen the color version of the same scene on some bus. I sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting patiently to see the rest of the homicide scenes. Presently, I found myself staring out my window into his window. There he was writing, although I could not quite make out if the shadow I saw was indeed him. But there he sat writing in peace just to give me grief. I sat and was lost watching TV for a while, but when I rose I had already forgotten what it was that I had seen. Then I found myself watching his window again. He had reached the point of stillness at the end of the road, and I was stuck among black-and-white shadows that fired on each other. He had arrived and crossed to the other side; he was in possession of the wisdom of the new life which was concealed from me; and I had nothing but the vague hope that I might yet possess Janan.

  Why don’t these films ever show us how sorry these pathetic killers are, mired in their own bathos in some hotel room? If I were the director, I would show the messed-up bedspread, the chipped paint on the window frames, the filthy curtains, the dirty and wrinkled shirt on the man studying to be a murderer, the insides of the pockets of his purple jacket that he keeps poking through, the way he sits on the edge of the bed with his back hunched, wondering whether to masturbate to pass the time.

  For quite a while I started up open discussions with the many voices in my head on the following themes: Why do sensitive and beautiful women always fall in love with abject men whose lives have gone off the track? If I did manage to become a murderer and if the traces of murder could always be read in my eyes for the rest of my life, would I have the appearance of a miserable man, or a pensive man? Could Janan ever truly love me, even if it were only half of what she feels for the man I will soon dispatch? Could I do what Nahit-Mehmet-Osman had done, give myself over to writing again and again Uncle Rıfkı’s book into school notebooks?

  Once the sun disappeared behind the street in perspective, and the cool of the evening and long shadows began wandering around the streets insidiously like a cat, I started to watch his window without any respite. I could not see him, but thinking that I did, I focused my gaze on the window and the room behind it without paying the slightest attention to the occasional person in the street, trying to believe that I could indee
d see someone there.

  I don’t know how long this went on. It was still not quite dark and the light in his room was not yet on, when I found myself in the street under his window, calling out to him. Someone appeared in the blurred window and disappeared at once upon seeing me. I went into the building, climbed the stairs in a rage; the door opened without my having to set the doorbell twittering; but for a moment I could not see him there.

  I went into the flat. A green felt cloth had been spread on the table. On it I saw an open notebook, and the book. Pencils, erasers, cigarette pack, shreds of tobacco, a watch next to the ashtray, matches, a cup of coffee that had gone cold. There, these were the tools of the trade that belonged to a pitiful person condemned to write for the rest of his life.

  He came out from somewhere inside the flat. I began reading what he had written because I was loath to look into his face. “Sometimes I miss a comma,” he said, “or write the wrong letter or word. That’s when I realize I am writing without conviction or feeling, so I stop. Returning to work with the same concentration sometimes takes hours, even days. I wait patiently for the inspiration to come because I don’t wish to write a single word the power of which I don’t feel inside me.”

  “Listen to me,” I said coolly, as if I were talking about someone else instead of myself. “I cannot be myself. I cannot be anything. Help me. Help me get this room, the book, and what you are writing out of my mind, so I can return to my old life in peace.”

  Like some mature guy who had caught a glimpse of what life and the world was about, he said he knew what I meant. I suppose he thought he understood everything. Why didn’t I just shoot him then and there? Well, because he had said, “Let’s go to the Railway Restaurant and talk.”

  When we sat down at the restaurant, he informed me that there was a train at a quarter to nine. After I left, he would take in a movie. So he had already made up his mind to send me packing.

  “When I met Janan, I had already given up on proselytizing for the book,” he said. “Like everybody else, I wanted a life. But I had to have more books than anyone else. Besides, all that I had lived through hoping to reach the world that the book had opened for me would provide me with extra advantages. But Janan inflamed me. She promised she would unlock me to life. She was convinced of the existence of a garden that I concealed from her, not telling her although I knew it was somewhere behind me, or beyond me. She demanded the key to that garden with such conviction that I was forced to talk about the book and eventually to give it to her. She read the book, read it again, and again. I was seduced by her devotion to the book, by her passionate desire for the world that she perceived in it. For a period of time, I was oblivious to the stillness in the book or—how shall I put it?—the internal music of the text. As in the days when I had first read the book, I was carried away stupidly by the hope of hearing the music in the streets, or someplace far away, or wherever in the world it happened to be. Passing the book to someone else was her idea just then. I was frightened by how quickly you read and fell for the book. I was about to forget the nature of the book when, thank God, they shot me.”

  Naturally I asked him what he thought was the nature of the book.

  “A good book is something that reminds us of the whole world,” he said. “Perhaps that’s how every book is, or what each and every book ought to be.” He paused. “The book is part of something the presence and duration of which I sense through what the book says, without it actually existing in the book,” he said, but I could see he wasn’t pleased with how he expressed it. “Perhaps it is something that has been distilled from the stillness or the noise of the world, but it’s not the stillness or the noise itself.” Then he said I might think he was talking nonsense, so he would try putting it into different words. “A good book is a piece of writing that implies things that don’t exist, a kind of absence, or death … But it is futile to look outside the book for a realm that is located beyond the words.” He said he had realized this while writing and rewriting the book, that he had learned it and he had learned it well. It was useless to look for the new life and the new realm beyond the text. He had richly deserved to be punished for having done just that. “But my killer turned out to be inept,” he said. “He merely wounded me in the shoulder.”

  I told him I had been watching him from a window in Taşkışla Hall when he was shot in the vicinity of the minibus stop.

  “All my travels, my expeditions, my bus trips have shown me that some sort of plot has been formed against the book,” he said. “Some madman wants anyone who has a serious interest in the book dead. Who he is and why he’s doing it, I just don’t know. It is as if he is doing it to strengthen my resolve not to broach the subject of the book to anyone else. I don’t want to bring damnation on anyone, or cause someone’s life to slip off course. I ran away from Janan. Not only did I know we would never find the realm she desired, I had understood all too well that along with me she too might be caught in the glare of death that radiates from the book.”

  I brought up Uncle Rıfkı to ambush him and take him by surprise for a moment, in order to drag out of him the information he was withholding from me. I said this man might very well be the author. I mentioned that I had known him in my childhood when I used to read madly his illustrated fictions. After reading the book, I had once more carefully examined these comics, for example, Pertev and Peter, where I had seen that many of the topics had already been promulgated.

  “Was this disappointing for you?”

  “No,” I said. “Tell me about meeting him.”

  What he told me completed in a logical fashion the information provided in Serkisof’s reports. After having read the book thousands of times, he had seemed to remember something reminiscent of it in the children’s comics he had read. He had located these comics in the libraries, and pinpointing the astonishing similarities, he had detected the identity of the author. He had been unable to talk to Rıfkı Ray much the first time, having been forestalled by the wife. During the interview that took place at the entrance, Rıfkı Ray had tried closing the subject as soon as he realized the strange young man at his door was interested in the book, responding to Mehmet’s entreaties by saying that he had no further concern with the subject himself. A touching interview could have possibly taken place there at the door between the youthful fan and the elderly writer, but for Rıfkı Ray’s wife—that’s Aunt Ratibe, I interjected—who had interfered, as I had done just now, and had pulled her husband inside, slamming the door in the face of this uninvited guest who was a fan.

  “I was so disappointed, I couldn’t believe it,” said my rival whom I couldn’t decide whether I should call Nahit, or Mehmet, or Osman. “For a while I kept going back to the neighborhood and spying on him from a distance. Then one day I screwed up my courage again and rang the doorbell.”

  Rıfkı Ray had this time responded to him more positively. He had said that he still had no further interest in the book, but the insistent young man might stay and have some coffee. He had inquired where in the world the young man had obtained and read the book which had been published so many years before, and wanted to know why he had chosen this book when there were so many wonderful books to read; where was our young man going to school, and what did he want to do with his life, etc., etc. “Although I demanded several times that he reveal to me the secrets of the book, he didn’t take me seriously,” said our erstwhile Mehmet. “He was right, though. Now I know he had no secret to reveal.”

  He had insisted because he hadn’t understood this back then. The old man had explained that he had been in deep trouble on account of the book, he had been pressured by the police and the prosecutor. “It all happened just because I thought I might provide some diversion and entertainment for a few grownups as I have diverted and entertained the kids,” he had said. And if that were not enough, Uncle Railman Rıfkı had gone on to say, “I certainly could not allow my whole life to be destroyed for the sake of a book I wrote to amuse myself.�
� Nahit hadn’t realized in his anger then how grief-stricken the old man had become when he explained that he had repudiated the book and had promised the prosecutor he would neither get another edition printed nor would he ever write anything more in that vein; but now, when he was neither Nahit nor Mehmet, but Osman, he understood the old man’s grief so well he was mortified every time he remembered his own tactlessness.

  As any young man who was bonded to the book with deep conviction might end up doing, he had accused the old writer of irresponsibility, vicissitude, treachery, and cowardice. “I was trembling with anger, yelling and insulting him, but he was understanding and indulgent.” At some point, Uncle Rıfkı had also risen to his feet and said, “You will understand it some day, but you might be too old by then for it to be of any use.” “I have understood it,” said the man whom Janan loved madly, “but I can’t tell if I am of any use or not. Besides I think the people who murdered the old man were the minions of that madman who was having me followed.”

  The prospective killer asked the prospective victim whether causing the murder of someone was an unbearable burden for him to carry the rest of his life. The prospective victim said nothing, but the prospective murderer saw the sorrow in his eyes and feared for his own future. They were drinking raki at a slow pace like a pair of gentlemen; and among the pictures of trains, scenes of the homeland, and photographs of film stars, the portrait of Atatürk was smiling down with the assurance of having safeguarded the Republic by entrusting it to the crowd getting drunk in the tavern.

  I consulted my watch. There was an hour and a quarter before the time of departure for the scheduled train on which he wanted to ship me off, and there was a feeling between us that we had managed to talk things over more than enough; as it says in books, “whatever needed to be said had been said.” We kept quiet for quite a while like a pair of old friends who aren’t troubled by silence falling between them, feeling it might be empty; on the contrary, we considered the silence, at least as far as I was concerned, the most eloquent form of conversation.