by Orhan Pamuk
Perhaps because the bus was one of the last of the durable, burly but noisy old Magirus buses that Janan and I used to take, perhaps because we were on rough asphalt pavement where the tires rotated eight times a second making that special moaning sound, perhaps because my past and my future appeared in the purple and leaden colors on the screen where the lovers who misunderstood each other wept in a movie made by Yesilçam Studios—I don’t know why, I didn’t know why—perhaps because some instinct guided me to find the meaning I couldn’t find in life in the hidden pattern of chance, I sat in seat No. 37—perhaps because leaning into the seat where she would have sat, I beheld the dark velvet night that had once appeared so mysterious and magnetic to us that it seemed as if it was as endless as time, dreams, life, and the book. When rain that seemed even more sorrowful than me began pattering on the windows, I leaned back into my seat completely and abandoned myself to the music of my memories.
It began raining increasingly harder, parallel to the sorrow that increased in my heart, then turned into a downpour sometime around midnight, accompanied by wind that hurled our bus around and lightning the same color purple as the flowers of sorrow blooming in my mind. The old bus which leaked around the windows into the seats went by a filling station blurred in the downpour and mud villages beset with phantoms of water, and slowed down to take the curve into a rest stop. When the neon sign that said MEMORY LANE RESTAURANT bathed us in its blue light, “Thirty minutes,” the tired driver announced. “Compulsory rest stop.”
I was intending not to move out of my seat but to watch alone the sorrowful movie I called my memories; yet the rain that pelted the roof of the old Magirus was thickening the heavy sadness in my heart so intensely, I was afraid I might not be able to endure it. I ducked out along with the other passengers hopping through the mud, newspapers and plastic bags shielding their heads.
I thought mixing with the crowd might do me good; I’d have some soup and a pudding, distracting myself with tangible pleasures of the world, so that instead of getting emotional surveying the past portion of my life that was left behind, I might pull myself together, turning the rational high beams of my mind on the portion that stretched out before me. I went up the two steps, dried my hair with my handkerchief, and entering the brightly lit room that smelled of grease and cigarettes, I heard some music that left me shaken.
Like an experienced invalid who can sense a heart attack coming, I remember floundering helplessly in my attempt to take precautions, to stave off the crisis. But what could I do? I couldn’t very well demand—could I?—that they turn off the radio, just because when Janan and I first chanced upon each other following the accident, we had heard the same tune, holding hands. I could not cry out telling them to take down the photos of the movie stars, just because Janan and I had such a good time looking at the pictures, laughing and eating our meal here in this very restaurant called MEMORY LANE. Since I did not have in my pocket a nitrate tablet against my crisis of the heart, I picked up in my tray a bowl of lentil soup, a little bread, and a glass of double raki, and I retreated to a table in the corner. Salt tears began dripping into the soup I stirred with my spoon.
Don’t let me carry on like those writers who imitate Chekhov, trying to draw out of my pain the dignity of being human which all readers can share; instead, like a writer from the East, let me take the opportunity to tell a cautionary tale. In short: I had desired to set myself apart from others, someone special who had a goal that was entirely different. Around here, this is considered a crime which can never be forgiven. I told myself I had received this impossible dream from Uncle Rıfkı’s comics which I had read in my childhood. So I considered once again what the reader who likes extracting the moral of the story has been thinking all along; it was because the reading material in my childhood had preconditioned me that I had been so mightily affected by The New Life. But like the great old tellers of exemplary tales, I did not believe the moral of the story myself, so my life story remained merely my own individual tale and failed to assuage my pain. This merciless conclusion that had slowly been dawning on my mind had long been guessed by my heart. I was weeping uncontrollably to the music on the radio.
I realized my state did not make a favorable impression on my fellow passengers who were spooning up their soup and gobbling up their pilaf, so I sneaked into the washroom. I splashed my face with some warmish and murky water that came sputtering out of the spigot, drenching my clothes; I wiped my nose, took my time. Then I returned to my table.
Shortly, when I glanced at them out of the corner of my eye, I saw that my fellow travelers watching me out of the corner of their eyes seemed somewhat relieved. Presently, an old peddler who had also been peering at me came up carrying a straw basket and looking me straight in the eye.
“Take it easy!” he said. “This too shall pass. Here, take some mint candy, it’s good for whatever ails you.”
He placed on my table a small pouch of mints that carried the tradename BLISS.
“How much?”
“No, no, it’s a present from me.”
Something like being consoled by a good-intentioned “uncle” handing some candy to a child crying in the street … I stared at the avuncular candyman’s face like that child, looking guilty. Calling him an uncle is a figure of speech, perhaps he was not even that much older than me.
“Today we are altogether defeated,” he said. “The West has swallowed us up, trampled on us in passing. They have invaded us down to our soup, our candy, our underpants; they have finished us off. But someday, someday perhaps a thousand years from now, we will avenge ourselves; we will bring an end to this conspiracy by taking them out of our soup, our chewing gum, our souls. Now go ahead and eat your mints, don’t cry over spilt milk.”
Was this the consolation I had been looking for? I don’t know. But like the child crying in the street seriously listening to the story told by the nice man, for a while I reflected on the words of consolation. Then recalling a notion kicked around by early Renaissance writers as well as Ismail Hakkı of Erzurum, I came upon a thought to console myself. I considered that they might have been right in thinking that sorrow is a substance that spreads from the stomach to the brain, and I made a decision to pay more attention to what I ate and drank.
I broke up the bread into the soup and then spooned it up; I took careful sips of my raki and asked for another along with a slice of melon. Like some cautious old man concerned with what goes on in his stomach, I diverted myself with food and drink until it was time for the bus. I got on and sat any old where. I imagine it is obvious: I wanted to leave behind me the usual Number 37 where I preferred to sit, along with everything else connected to my past. It seems I dropped off to sleep.
After a long and uninterrupted snooze when I slept like a baby, I woke up when the bus stopped toward morning and went into one of those modern rest places which are an outpost of civilization. I was somewhat cheered seeing the pretty and congenial girls in the bank and Coca-Cola ads on the wall, the scenes on the calendars, the bright hodgepodge of colors in the words of advertisement that invited me loudly, the plump “hamburgers” spilling out of their buns in glass cases on one corner of which there was a sign pointing out shrewdly in English “SELF SERVICE,” and the pictures of ice cream that came in colors like lipstick red, daisy yellow, dreamy blue.
I served myself some coffee and sat in a corner. In the bright light in the place, while three television sets were on, I watched a smartly dressed little girl who couldn’t manage to pour on her french fries a new brand of “ketchup” that came in a plastic bottle and required the help of her mother. There was a plastic bottle of the same TASTEE brand of ketchup sitting on my table, and the golden yellow letters on the bottle promised me that if I collected within a span of three months thirty of those bottle caps, which were so difficult to open that they made a mess of little girls’ dresses when they finally did, and sent them to the address below, I would be eligible to enter the contest that would
take the winner for a week’s excursion to Disney World in Florida. Presently, one of the soccer teams on the TV set in the middle scored a goal.
I watched the same goal being scored again in slow motion along with all the other males sitting at the tables or waiting in the “hamburger” line, feeling an optimism that was not at all on the surface but was quite as rational as it was appropriate to the life that awaited me. I liked watching soccer games on TV, lazing around home on Sundays, getting soused some evenings, going to the station with my daughter to watch the trains, trying out new brands of ketchup, reading, gossiping with my wife and making love, puffing on cigarettes, and sitting in peace and drinking coffee someplace or other, as I was doing just now, and a thousand other things besides. If I took care of myself and managed to live as long as, say, the old caramel maker who was named for the Pleiades, I had almost another half century before me to enjoy all these things … For a moment I felt an intense longing for my home, my wife, and my daughter. I dreamed how I would play with my daughter when I got home around noon Saturday, what I would get her at the candy store in the station, and while she played outside in the afternoon, how my wife and I would make love genuinely, ardently, and without being slipshod, then how we would all watch TV later, tickling my daughter and laughing together.
The coffee had really waked me up. In the deep silence that descends on a bus just before morning, the only other person awake aside from the driver was myself, sitting just behind him, a little to his right. A mint candy in my mouth, my eyes wide open, staring at the perfectly smooth asphalt road paved across the steppe that seemed infinite, concentrating on the dashes in the median line and the headlights of trucks that passed by now and then, I was impatiently waiting for daybreak.
It took no more than a half hour before I began distinguishing the first signs of morning in the window to my right, which meant we were traveling in a northerly direction. First the outline of the land against the sky seemed to become vaguely, indistinctly visible. Then the outline of the frontier between the earth and the sky took on a silken crimson color which invaded the dark sky in one corner yet without lighting the steppe; but the rosy-red demarcation line was so fine, so delicate and so extraordinary that both the tireless Magirus, which tore through the steppe like a wild horse speeding willy-nilly toward the darkness, and the passengers being carried along were plunged into a mechanical frenzy that was of no avail. No one was aware of this, not even the driver.
A few minutes later, due to the faint light emanating from the line of the horizon which had turned slightly more crimson, the dark clouds in the east seemed to be illuminated from below and along the edges. I realized something looking at the wondrous shapes assumed in the faint light by these ferocious clouds that had kept it raining without respite on the roof of the bus all night long: Since the steppe was still pitch dark, I could see in the faint light inside the bus my own face and body reflected on the windshield directly in front of me, and simultaneously I could see the magical crimson flush, the wondrous clouds, and the broken lines in the highway that tirelessly repeated themselves.
Looking at the broken median line in the high beams of the bus, I was reminded of the refrain, that same refrain that rises out of the very soul of the tired and dejected traveler riding on the weary bus to the rhythm of the tires going around at the same rate, the engine whining at the same tempo, and life reiterating itself with the same measure, which is then repeated by the power poles along the highway: What is life? A period of time. What is time? An accident. What is accident? A life. A new life … So that was my refrain. At the same time, I was wondering when my reflection would disappear off the windshield and when the first ghost of a tree or the shadow of a sheep pen would be visible on the steppe; it was at that magic moment of equilibrium between the light inside the bus and the light outside that suddenly my eyes were dazzled by a bright light.
In that new light on the right side of the windshield, I beheld the angel.
The angel was so close to me and yet how far. Even so, I still knew this: the profound, plain, and powerful light was there for me. Even though the Magirus hurtled through the steppe with all its might, the angel would neither draw close nor draw back. The brilliant light kept me from seeing what the angel looked like for sure, but I knew from the sense of playfulness, the sense of lightness, the sense of freedom I felt inside me that I had recognized the angel.
The angel looked nothing like those in the Persian miniatures, nor like the ones on the wrappers of the caramels, not anything like the photocopied angels or even the presence in my dreams all those years whose voice I longed to hear.
For a moment, I yearned to say something, to speak with the angel … perhaps because of the vague sense of playfulness and surprise I still felt. But I made no sound; I became anxious. The sense of camaraderie, affinity, and tenderness I had felt from the first moment was still alive inside me; I hoped to find peace in this, thinking it was the moment I had been anticipating all this time, but to allay the fear that grew inside me even faster than the speed of the bus, I wished the moment would provide me with the answers to time, accident, peace, writing, life, and the new life.
The angel was as pitiless as it was distant and wondrous. Not because it wished to be so, but because it was only a witness and could do nothing more. In the incredible light of daybreak, it saw me sitting bewildered and anxious in my seat in the front, riding on the tin can of a Magirus hurtling through the half-lit steppe; that was all. I felt the unbearable power of what was merciless and inevitable.
When I instinctively turned to the driver, I saw the entire windshield surging with an extraordinarily powerful light. Two trucks were passing each other about sixty or seventy yards from us, both had us in their high beams and were fast approaching on a collision course with our bus. I knew the accident was unavoidable.
I remembered the anticipation of peace following the accidents I had lived through years ago … the feeling of transition after an accident which seemed filmed in slow motion. I remembered the passengers who were neither here nor there stirring blissfully, as if sharing together time that had come out of paradise. Shortly all the sleepy travelers would be awake, and the stillness of the morning would be broken with happy screams and thoughtless cries; and on the threshold between the two worlds, as if discovering the eternal jokes existent in a space without gravity, we would collectively discover with confusion and excitement the presence of bloody internal organs, spilled fruits, sundered bodies, and all those combs, shoes, children’s books that spilled out of torn suitcases.
No, not quite collectively. The fortunate ones who were to live through the unique moment that followed the incredible tumult of the accident would be among those passengers left alive sitting in the seats in the back. As to myself, ensconced in the first seat in the front, looking straight into the light of the approaching trucks, my eyes dazzled in amazement and fear, just as I had once looked into the incredible light that surged from the book, I would be instantly transported into a new world.
I knew it was the end of my life. And yet I had only wanted to return home; I absolutely had no wish for death, nor for crossing over into the new life.
Istanbul
1992–1994
ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK
The White Castle
The Black Book
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 1997 by Orhan Pamuk
Translation copyright © 1997 by Güneli Gün
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd
First published in 1994 by Ilepşim Yaymlan, as Yeni Hayat
First American edition, 1997
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The translations of passages
from Dante’s La Vita Nuova in Chapter 15 are by Barbara Reynolds (Penguin Classics, 1969) and that from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies is by David Young (Norton, 1978). The other translations are my own, by way of the Turkish version. Neşati Akkalen and his book are Orhan Pamuk’s invention.
eISBN 9781466887640
First eBook edition: November 2014