The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  I removed with extreme care and difficulty the wrappers on the caramels which had turned into marble with age, making sure I did not harm the angels. There was a doggerel rhyme inside each wrapper, but it could not be said that they were of any help in understanding either life or the book. For example:

  Behind the canteen

  The grass grows green;

  What I want from you

  Is a sewing machine.

  What’s more, I even began repeating this nonsensical stuff to myself in the still of the night. Before I completely lost my mind, I sneaked into my old room as a last resort, and quietly pulling out the bottom drawer in the old dresser, I found by feel the plastic multipurpose thingamajig from my childhood which was a ruler on one side, on the other a letter opener, with the blunt end a magnifying glass; and like some Treasury Department agent examining counterfeit money under the light of the desk lamp, I gave the angels on the caramel wrappers a thorough examination: they bore no resemblance either to the Angel of Desire or the four-winged angels standing statically in Persian miniatures; nor were they anything like the angels which many years ago I anticipated seeing any minute in the bus window, or their photocopied versions in black and white. My memory, in an effort to look busy, reminded me uselessly that when I was little, vendors who were children themselves used to hawk these caramels on trains. I was about to conclude that the figure of the angel had been appropriated from some European publication, when I focused on the manufacturer who kept signaling to me from the corner of the wrapper.

  Ingredients: glucose, sugar, vegetable oil,

  butter, milk, and vanilla.

  New Life Caramels are a product of

  Angel Candy and Chewing Gum, Inc.

  18 Bloomingdale Street

  Eskişehir

  Next evening I was on the bus to Eskişehir. I had told my superiors at City Hall that a distant and forlorn relative had fallen ill; and I had explained to my wife that my mentally ill bosses were sending me out to distant and forlorn towns. You do get me, don’t you? If life is not a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, if life is not just a haphazard bunch of scratches on a piece of paper made by a kid who’s got hold of a pencil as my three-year-old daughter sometimes does, if life is not just a cruel chain of idiocies completely devoid of any sense, then there must be some sort of logic to all the fun and games that appeared coincidental but which Uncle Rıfkı had placed there when he was writing The New Life. If so, then the great planner would have had to have some purpose in putting the angel in my way, hither and yon, all these many years, in which case if an ordinary and broken hero such as myself succeeded in finding out from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, by talking directly to the candyman who had decided why the picture of an angel was put on the wrapper of the caramel the hero loved in his childhood, then he might possibly be able to find consolation, on autumn evenings when sorrow descended on his being, in the meaning of what was left of his life, instead of carping about the cruelty of coincidences.

  Speaking of coincidences, it was my pounding heart and not my eyes that had first registered that the driver of the late model Mercedes bus which took me to Eskişehir was the same one who fourteen years ago had driven Janan and me from a tiny steppe town with minarets to a city that rain floods had turned into a swamp. My eyes, as well as the rest of my body, were busy trying to adjust themselves to all the modern comforts available on buses lately, such as the drone of the air-conditioning, individual reading lights over the seats, bus attendants dressed in hotel valet’s getups, the plastic taste of the food wrapped in gaily colored plastic pouches and served on trays, and napkins carrying the winged insignia of the tourism agency. At the touch of a button the seats could now be converted into beds that reclined over the laps of the unfortunates sitting in the seats behind them. Now that the “express” buses were scheduled to travel directly from one specific terminal to another and no stops were made at any fly-infested restaurants along the way, some buses had been fitted with toilet stalls reminiscent of electric chairs where one would hate to be stuck at the time of an accident. Half the time what appeared on the TV monitor were commercials featuring the tourism agency’s vehicles which dragged us toward the asphalt-paved heart of the steppe, so that as one traveled on the bus napping or watching TV, one could watch umpteen times how pleasant it was to travel on this bus while napping or watching TV. The wild and desolate steppe Janan and I had once watched out of the bus window had now been rendered “people friendly” by virtue of having been riddled with billboards advertising cigarettes and tires, and the steppe took on various hues at the pleasure of the color the bus windows had been tinted to cut out the sun—sometimes a muddy brown, sometimes the green of Islam, sometimes the color of crude oil that reminded me of graveyards. But even so, drawing closer to the secrets of my life which had slipped away and to the desolate towns buried in oblivion as far as the rest of civilization was concerned, I felt that I was still alive, still breathing with rage, and still pursuing—let me put it this way, borrowing a word from the past—certain desires.

  I suppose it has already been guessed that my journey did not end in the city of Eskişehir. On the site where the offices and production facility of the Angel Candy and Chewing Gum, Inc. were formerly situated at 18 Bloomingdale Street, there now stood a six-story building used as dormitories for students at the Imam-Preacher School. The elderly fellow in the archives of the Eskişehir Chamber of Commerce, who offered me linden tea laced with Health brand soda pop, informed me after spending hours rifling through the books that Angel Candy and Chewing Gum had closed down their operations in Eskişehir with the object of relocating their business, which was now registered with the Kütahya Chamber of Commerce.

  In Kütahya it soon became apparent that the company had ceased their operations there after seven years of production. Had I not thought of going to the Public Registry Office in the Town Hall and followed it up in the quarter called Stage-House, I wouldn’t have found out that the founder of Angel Candy and Chewing Gum, a gentleman by the name of Süreyya, had moved fifteen years ago halfway across the country to Malatya, which was the hometown of the man his only daughter had married. In Malatya, I learned that Angel Candy and Gum had thrived for a final couple of years some fourteen years ago, and I remembered that Janan and I had come across these last-ditch-effort caramels in bus terminals.

  When New Life Caramels had once more found favor in Malatya and its vicinity, the Chamber of Commerce, in an effort much like stamping a final coin for a collapsing empire, had published an article in its newsletter concerning the history of the company that had made the caramels once consumed all over Turkey, reminiscing how New Life Caramels had once been used in lieu of small change at groceries and tobacconists; then a few advertisements featuring angels had appeared in the Malatya Express; and just as the caramels were about to resume their status as coins in people’s pockets once more, everything had come to an end when the well-advertised fruit-flavored products produced by a big international company were seen on TV, being consumed very attractively by an American starlet with beautiful lips. It was in a local paper that I found out about the sale of the vats, the packaging apparatus, and the trademark. I tried piecing together from the information provided by the relatives of the son-in-law the whereabouts of the manufacturer of New Life Caramels, the gentleman by the name of Süreyya, after he left Malatya. My investigations took me even farther East, to distant obscure towns that don’t even show up in secondary school atlases. Like people who used to flee the plague once upon a time, the gentleman called Süreyya and his family had fled far away to tenuous towns, as if they were trying to escape from the gaudy consumer products with foreign names which, thanks to the support of advertisements and TV, arrived from the West and infected the whole country like a deadly contagious disease.

  I got on buses, got off buses, went around terminals, walked through shopping districts, I poked around registries, precinct offices, back alleys, neighborhood
squares that sported fountains, trees, cats, coffeehouses. For a while, in every town where I set foot, on every sidewalk I walked, in every coffeehouse I stopped for a glass of tea, I thought I came across the traces of a relentless conspiracy that linked these places to the Crusaders, to Byzantium, and to the Ottomans. I smiled indulgently at streetwise kids who attempted to sell me newly stamped Byzantine coins, thinking I was some sort of tourist; I took it in my stride when the barber dumped down my neck a urine-colored cologne called New Urartu; and I was not surprised to observe that the magnificent gateway to one of those fairgrounds that have sprung up like mushrooms all over the place had been dismantled and brought over from a Hittite ruin. It was not necessary that my power of imagination soften like the asphalt pavement on which I walked in the heat of midday for me to suppose there was something of the dust raised by the Crusader horsemen settled on the man-size spectacles that served as the sign for Zeki’s Scientific Optometry.

  Yet, at other times I sensed that those historical and conservative conspiracies that rendered this land resistant to change were going bankrupt, realizing that the marketplaces and neighborhood groceries and streets hung with laundry, which fourteen years ago had seemed to Janan and me as sturdy and static as a Seljuk fort, were being blown away in the predominant wind that blew from the West. All those aquariums, as well as the fish inside them, the contemplative silence of which used to distinguish the place of honor in restaurants in the provincial capitals, had suddenly disappeared as if in response to a hidden command. Who had decided in the last fourteen years that not only the main streets but even the dusty back alleys were to burgeon with messages screaming on glossy plastic billboards? Who had the trees on town squares felled? Looking at the concrete apartment buildings that besiege the statues of Atatürk like prison walls, I wondered who had ordered that the iron railing on the balconies be made monotonously uniform. Who had instructed the children to pelt the buses with stones? Who was it that came up with the notion of using some poisonous antiseptic to stink up hotel rooms? Who distributed all over the country those calendars on which Anglo-Saxon beauties grasp truck tires between their long legs? And who had determined that it was obligatory for citizens to give each other hostile looks in order to feel safe in novel spaces such as elevators, currency exchange counters, waiting rooms?

  I had become old before my time. I tired quickly, walked as little as possible, and I was unaware how my body was being dragged along by the incredible throngs of people and gradually disappearing among them; I did not look into the faces of those who elbowed me as I elbowed back on the narrow sidewalks, forgetting them the instant I saw them as I did the names on the plastic signs of countless lawyers, dentists, and financial advisors streaming by overhead. I could not understand how those innocent little towns and neighborhood streets that seemed to have come out of miniatures, where Janan and I walked around feeling playful and enchanted as if we had been allowed into a tenderhearted elderly lady’s backyard garden, had now turned into scary stage sets that were carbon copies of each other, rife with danger signs and exclamation points.

  I saw dark bars and beerhalls operating in the unlikeliest of places, around the corner from mosques and retirement homes. I witnessed a slant-eyed Russian model who went about from town to town with a suitcase of clothes in her hand and gave one-woman fashion shows on buses, in local movie theaters, or at marketplaces, and then sold the clothes she displayed to veiled and turbaned women. I observed that the Afghan immigrants who used to peddle Korans that were smaller than my little finger had been replaced on buses by families of Russians and Georgians who were peddling plastic chess sets, Bakelite binoculars, battle medals, and Caspian caviar. I ran across a man I imagined to be the father still looking for his daughter, the girl in blue jeans who had died holding hands with her dead sweetheart after the traffic accident Janan and I lived through on a rainy night. I saw ghostly Kurdish villages deserted on account of a war that remained undeclared, and I saw infantry regiments pounding the dark areas in distant craggy mountains. In a video arcade where truants, unemployed young men, and local geniuses gather to test their capabilities, their luck, and their rage, I witnessed a video game which required twenty-five thousand points before a pink videogame angel, which had been designed by a Japanese and realized by an Italian, would put in an appearance and smile sweetly as if promising good fortune to us unfortunates pushing buttons in the darkness of some musty and dusty game room. I saw a man who reeked of OP shaving soap, moving his lips, sounding out the columns of the deceased journalist Jelal Salik which had been posthumously discovered. I saw newly transferred Albanian and Bosnian soccer players sitting and drinking Coca-Cola with their pretty blond wives in coffeehouses on the square in newly rich towns where old wood-frame mansions had been torn down to put up concrete-and-steel apartment buildings. I also saw apprehensively shadows whom I took to be Seiko or Serkisof in hovellike taverns, in marketplaces where people teem thick as fleas, or reflected on the pharmacy window where the window of the store across the street was reflected and in which elastic bandages for sufferers of hernia were being displayed; and at night I was buried in my colorful dreams of happiness or else in my nightmares either in some hotel room or in my seat on a bus.

  While we are on the subject, I must mention that before I ended up in Son Pazar, which was my final destination, I stopped briefly in the remote town of Çatık that Doctor Fine had wished to place in the heart of the country. But there I found the town so changed due to war, migration, some odd loss of memory, hordes of people, fear and smells—you must have guessed from my inability to put it into words, how my mind had lost its bearings among the aimless masses in the streets—that I became anxious, fearing that the memories of Janan, which were all that was left to me, might be damaged. The digital Japanese-made watches lined up in the pharmacy window attested, in fact and in image, that Doctor Fine’s Great Counterconspiracy and the organization of watches in his service had long since collapsed; and to add insult to injury, dealers with concessions for soft drinks, cars, ice cream, and television sets had lined up in the shopping district, displaying in row after row their signs with foreign trade names.

  Even so, unfortunate and foolish hero that I am, trying to discover the meaning of life in this land suffering from amnesia, I thought I might find a cool and quiet shady spot that would provide me with a happy refuge for my dreams, where I might rekindle what remained in my memory of Janan’s visage, her smile, and the things she said; so I walked toward the mansion where Doctor Fine once lived with his lovely daughters, and the mulberry tree that was to be the site of my reminiscences. Power lines and electric poles had brought electricity to the valley, but there was no house in the vicinity, and nothing was visible other than some ruins. It appeared these ruins were not the work of time but the result of a series of disasters.

  It was when I saw the letters advertising AK BANK placed prominently on one of the hills Doctor Fine and I had once climbed that I first began thinking, in bewilderment, that I had done a good deed in killing Janan’s former lover, who had believed he could attain the peace of eternal time and the mystery of life—whatever you want to call it—through the act of writing and rewriting the same lines for years on end. I had saved his son, after all, from having to witness all these filthy sights, from drowning in a deluge of videos and billboards, from having to go blind in a world that lacked illumination and radiance. But then, who was to wrap me in light and rescue me from this land of circumscribed freakishness and diffident cruelty? That angel whose incredibly resplendent colors I could once dream on the screen of my imagination and whose words I could hear in my heart now gave me no sign.

  The train scheduled to Viran Bağ had been suspended on account of Kurdish rebels. The murderer had no intention of returning to the scene of his crime, even after all these years, but since I had to go through Viran Bağ in order to reach Son Pazar which was the town where, according to my information, the gentleman called Süreyya, who had conce
ived of putting an angel on his caramels, lived with his grandchild, it was critical that I take the day bus across this region where Kurdish guerrillas were resurgent. Going on what I could see of Viran Bağ through the bus window, this place too had lost all that might be worthy of remembering; but just in case someone might see the murderer and remember something, I buried my head in the Milliyet newspaper while waiting for the bus to depart.

  When the bus started going up north, the mountains became sharply pointed and dominant in the first light of morning, and I couldn’t decide whether the silence inside the bus was due to fear, or whether we were all somewhat dizzy from going round and round these severe mountains. We stopped from time to time either on account of the military checkpoints where our identification cards were inspected, or to drop off some fellow who would have to walk with only the clouds for company all the way to his village which would be so out of the way that even birds did not stop there. I could not stop staring with awe at the mountains which were so self-possessed that they were inured to all the cruelty they had witnessed for centuries. Before the reader who has raised an eyebrow reading the previous sentence tosses aside in disgust this book which is almost at an end, let me just say that a murderer who has gotten away with murder is allowed to write this kind of vulgar sentence.

  I assumed Son Pazar was beyond the influence of the Kurdish guerrillas. It could be said the town was also beyond the influence of modern civilization because the moment I stepped off the bus, I was met with an enchanted silence that came out of some obscure fairytale about felicitous sultans and peaceful cities. Not one thing to make me think, “Here I go round and round,” arriving, as I always had before, seemingly at the same place where I was overwhelmed with billboard greetings from all those banks, and those dealers in ice cream, refrigerators, cigarettes, and television sets. Here I saw a cat. It was licking itself with a leisurely rhythm and seemed exceedingly self-satisfied in the peaceful shade of the trellis attached to the café overlooking the intersection that must be the town square. A happy butcher in front of the butcher shop, a carefree grocer in front of the grocery, a sleepy produce man and his sleepy flies in front of the produce stand, they were all sitting in the mellow morning light, peacefully dissolving into the golden light in the street as if they were fully cognizant that the most ordinary activity of simply being alive is the greatest blessing. As to the stranger in their town whom they took in out of the corner of their eyes, he was instantly caught up in this fairytale scene, imagining that Janan with whom he had been madly in love once would appear to him around the first corner, carrying in her hands some timepieces that had belonged to our forefathers, a roll of old comics, and a teasing smile on her lips.