by Orhan Pamuk
The night concealed me, it kept me and showed me the way. I proceeded into the inner organs of the city that vibrated steadily, its concrete highways rigid as the arteries of a paralyzed patient, its neon boulevards reverberating with the whine of rowdy trucks carrying meat, milk, and canned food. I consecrated the garbage pails that belched the swill in their maws out on the wet sidewalks that reflected the lights; I asked the gruesome trees that never stand still for directions; I blinked seeing fellow citizens in dimly lit stores who still sat up at cash registers going over their accounts; I steered clear of the police on duty in front of precinct stations; I smiled forlornly at drunks, vagrants, unbelievers, and outcasts who had no tidings of a glowing new life; I exchanged dark glances with Checker Cab drivers who sneaked up on me like sleepless sinners in the stillness of blinking red lights; I was not deceived by the beautiful women smiling down on me from soap billboards, nor did I put my trust in the good-looking men in the cigarette advertisements, nor even in the statues of Atatürk, or the early editions of tomorrow’s papers being scrambled up by drunks and insomniacs, or the lottery man drinking tea at an all-night café, nor his friend who waved and called out to me, “Take a load off, young man.” The innermost stench of the rotting city led me to the bus terminal that reeked of the sea and hamburgers, latrines and exhaust, gasoline and filth.
Trying to avoid becoming intoxicated by the plastic lettering on top of bus line offices that promised me new venues, new hearts, new lives, and hundreds of colorful cities and towns, I took myself into a small restaurant. There, I turned away from the semolina cakes, the puddings and salads being displayed in the ample refrigerated case, wondering in whose stomachs and how many hundreds of miles away they would finally be digested. Right now they were just standing there in neat rows like the plastic letters in the names of towns and bus companies. And then I forgot for whom I had begun to wait. Perhaps I was waiting for you, Angel, to pull me away, tenderly and graciously cautioning me, putting me gently on the right track. But there was no one in the restaurant aside from a mother holding a child and a couple of obdurate travelers who were stuffing their sleepy faces. My eyes were searching for signs of the new life when a sign on the wall warned: “Do not tamper with the light,” and another announced: “There is a charge for using the facilities,” and yet a third proclaimed in stern and deliberate lettering: “No alcoholic beverages allowed.” I had an impression that dark crows were taking wing across the windows of my mind; then I seemed to have a presentiment that my death would follow from this point of departure. I wish I could describe to you, Angel, the grief in that restaurant slowly closing in upon itself, but I was so terribly tired; I heard the whine of the centuries resonating in my ears like the sleepless woods; I loved the turbulent spirit gurgling in the engines of dauntless buses that each took off to another clime; I heard Janan call out to me from a place far away where she was searching for the access point that would take her to the threshold. Yet I was silent, a passive spectator who was willing, due to a technical difficulty, to watch a film without the sound because my head had dropped on the table and I had fallen asleep.
I slept on I don’t know for how long. When I woke up I was still in the same restaurant but in the presence of a different clientele, yet I felt I was now capable of communicating to the angel the point of departure for the great journey that would take me to unique experiences. Across from me were three young men who were boisterously settling their money and bus fare accounts. A thoroughly forlorn old man had placed his coat and his plastic bag on the table next to his soup bowl in which he was stirring and smelling his own grievous life; and a waiter read the paper, yawning in the dimly lit area where the tables were lined up. Next to me the frosted glass wall extended all the way from the ceiling down to the dirty floor tiles, behind it was the dark blue night, and in the dark were the revving bus engines that invited me to another realm.
I boarded one randomly at an indeterminate hour. It wasn’t yet morning but the day broke as we progressed, the sun rose, and my eyes were filled with light and sleep. Then, it seems, I dozed off.
I got on buses, I got off buses; I loitered in bus terminals only to board more buses, sleeping in my seat, turning my days into nights, embarking and disembarking in small towns, traveling for days in the dark, and I said to myself: the young traveler was so determined to find the unknown realm, he let himself be transported without respite on roads that would take him to the threshold.
4
It was a cold winter’s night, O Angel, and I had been traveling for days; I was on one of the several buses I took each day, not knowing where I departed from, where I was destined, or how fast I was going. I was sitting on the tired and noisy bus, somewhere back on the right-hand side in the darkened interior, half asleep and half awake, more dreaming than sleeping, and closer to the ghosts in the darkness outside than to my own dreams. I could see through my half-closed eyelids a single puny tree on the interminable steppe lit by the cross-eyed headlights on high beam, the boulder with a cologne ad painted on it, the power poles, the threatening headlights of the trucks that we encountered sporadically, but I was also watching the movie on the video screen placed high above the driver’s seat. Whenever the female lead spoke, the screen took on a purplish hue like Janan’s winter coat, and when the fast-talking, impetuous male actor came back with his rejoinder, the screen turned that dull blue which had at some time or other penetrated somehow into my very marrow. As it often happens, I was thinking of you, and remembering you, when that purple and that dull blue came together in the same frame; and yet, alas, they did not kiss.
It was at that very moment, in the third week of my journey as I was watching the movie, that I remember being overwhelmed by an astonishingly powerful feeling of incompleteness, of apprehension and expectation. I was nervously tapping my cigarette ash into the ashtray, the lid of which I would very soon close with a sharp and decisive blow of my forehead. The angry impatience rising inside me against the indecisiveness of the lovers who still had not managed to kiss turned into a deeper and more significant feeling of edginess. I had a sense of something profound and authentic approaching, there it comes, now!—like the magical silence that falls over everyone including the audience the moment before the king is crowned. In that silence preceding the coronation the only sound heard is the flutter of the wings of a pair of doves flying across the royal scene. Then I heard the old man next to me moan, and I turned toward him. His bald head was peacefully bouncing on the dark, frozen window on which it rested, the same head that contained the raging pains he had described to me a hundred miles and a couple of miserable towns back which were carbon copies of each other. I conjectured that maybe the doctor at the hospital he was going to see when he got there in the morning had advised that he press his head against icy-cold panes as a remedy for his brain tumor; but turning my eyes back to the dark highway, I was gripped by a panic that I had not felt in days. What was this deep and irresistible anticipation? Why now this impatient urgency that overwhelmed me?
I was jolted by the crashing sound of a distinct force that wrenched my inner organs. I was heaved out of my seat and was about to tumble over into the one in front when I was rammed into components of steel, tin, aluminum, and glass, angrily striking objects and being hit, hurt, crumpled. At that very instant, I fell back once more into the same bus seat as someone who was altogether different.
Yet neither was the bus any longer the same bus. I could see through a blue fog from where I still sat in confusion that the driver’s station plus the seats immediately behind it had disintegrated into smithereens and disappeared.
It must have been this that I had been looking for; it was what I wanted. How aware I was of what I discovered in my heart! Peace, sleep, death, time! I was both here and there, in peace and waging a bloody war, insomniac as a restless ghost and also interminably somnolent, present in an eternal night and also in time that flowed away inexorably. Consequently, I went into slow motion, ju
st as in the movies, and rose from my seat, skirted the corpse of the young bus attendant who had migrated into the land of the dead, still holding a bottle in his hand. I went out the rear exit and stepped into the dark garden of the night.
One end of this arid and limitless garden was the asphalt highway that now lay covered with shards of glass, the other end a realm from which there was no return. I proceeded fearlessly into the velvet night, convinced that this was the halcyon land which had for weeks wafted balmy as paradise in my imagination. It was as if I were sleepwalking, but I was awake, walking but with my feet not touching the ground. Perhaps I had no feet, but perhaps I no longer remember since I was there all by myself. I was there by myself and I was myself alone, my numbed body and my consciousness. I was brimming with my own being.
I sat down somewhere next to a rock in the paradisical darkness and stretched out on the ground. Stars here and there above me and an actual rock beside me. I touched it with longing, feeling the unbelievable pleasure of a touch that was real. Once upon a time, there was a real world where a touch was a touch, smells were smells, and sounds were sounds. Can it be, O star, that the other time has given this present time a glimpse of itself? I could see my own life in the dark. I read a book and found you. If this be death, then I am born again. I am here, in this world, a brand-new being with no memory and no past. I am like some new attractive TV star appearing in a new serial, or childishly astonished like a fugitive who sees the stars for the first time after years of being incarcerated in a dungeon. I heard the call of silence, the like of which I had never before experienced, and I kept asking: Why buses, nights, towns? Why all these roads, bridges, faces? Why solitude that like a hawk overwhelms the night? Why words that get caught in appearances? Why time that has no return? I could hear the crackling in the earth and the ticking of my watch. Time is three-dimensional silence, the book said. I said to myself: So I am to die without understanding the three dimensions in the slightest, without comprehending life, the world, and the book, without, even, seeing you once more, Janan. That was how I was talking to the stars, these brand-new stars, when a childish thought came to me childishly: I was still too much of a child to die. And feeling the warmth of the blood that trickled from my forehead down on my hands, I felt the happiness of discovering, once again, the tactual, olfactory, and visual properties of things. I regarded this world, happy and loving you, Janan.
Back where I left the unfortunate bus on the spot where it had rammed with all its might into a cement truck, a cloud of cement dust hung like a miraculous umbrella over the dying. A stubborn blue light was leaking out of the bus. Hapless passengers who were still alive and others who would not stay alive much longer were coming out the rear exit, cautiously as if stepping on the surface of a strange planet. Mom, Mom, you’re still in there, but I got out. Mom, Mom, blood is filling my pockets like coins. I wished to communicate with them, with the avuncular man crawling along the ground, his hat on his head, a plastic bag in his hand; the fastidious soldier who was bent over carefully examining the rip in his trousers; the old lady who had abandoned herself to jubilant chatter now that she had been granted the chance to address God directly. I wished to impart the significance of this unique and impeccable time to the virulent insurance agent who was counting the stars, to the dumbfounded daughter of the mother who was pleading with the dead driver, to the men with mustaches who were strangers to each other yet holding hands and dancing for the joy of being alive, swaying gently like people who have fallen in love at first sight. I wished I could tell them that this unique moment was a felicity granted all too rarely to God’s creatures like us, saying that you, O Angel, would appear only once in a lifetime in this wondrous time beneath the miraculous umbrella of cement dust, and ask them why it was that now we were all so very happy. You, mother and son clutching each other hard like a pair of dauntless lovers and freely weeping for the first time in your lives, you, the sweet woman who has discovered that blood is redder than lipstick and death kinder than life, you, the spared child standing over your dead father clutching your doll and watching the stars, I ask you: Who was it that granted us this fulfillment, this contentment, this happiness? The voice inside me gave one word as an answer: Departure … departure … But I had already understood I was not yet to die. The elderly woman who was soon to expire asked me the whereabouts of the cabin attendant to get her luggage out of the hold immediately because, although her face was crimson with blood, she was hoping to get to the next town where she was to catch the train in the morning. I was left holding her blood-soaked train ticket.
I boarded the bus through the rear to avoid looking at the front-row passengers whose dead faces had been plastered on the windshield. I became aware of the sound of the motor running, reminding me of the horrible engine noise on all the buses I had ridden; what I heard was not deathly silence but living voices that were grappling with recollections, desires, and ghosts. The bus attendant was still holding the same bottle and a teary-eyed mother her peacefully sleeping baby. It was cold outside. I too sat down, feeling the pain in my legs. My seatmate with the aching brain had left this world along with the rash crowd in the front rows, but he was still sitting patiently. His eyes had been closed while he slept, now they were open in death. Two men appeared out of somewhere in the front, and lifting a bloody body roughly over their shoulders, they carried it out into the cold.
It was then that I became aware of the most magical coincidence or impeccable fortune: the TV screen over the driver’s seat was still intact and the lovers on the video were finally in each other’s arms. I wiped the blood off my forehead, my face and neck with my handkerchief, and I flipped up the lid of the ashtray which I had slammed down with my forehead only a little while ago; I lit up contentedly and began watching the film.
They kissed and kissed again, sucking lipstick and life. I wondered why in my childhood I used to hold my breath during the kissing scenes, why I used to swing my legs and focus on a point on the screen that was slightly above the lovers. Ah, the kiss! How well I had retained the memory of the taste that had touched my lips that day in the white light that came through the icy windowpanes. Only one kiss in my entire lifetime. I wept repeating Janan’s name.
When the film came to an end, I first noticed the headlights then the truck itself standing respectfully in the presence of the unhappy scene where the cold corpses were chilled even further by the cold outside. As it happened, there was a fat wallet in the pocket of my seatmate, whose blank eyes were still fixed on the blank video screen. His given name was Mahmut, his last name Mahler. His identification papers. The photo of his soldier son who looked like me. And a dilapidated news item about cockfighting clipped from the Denizli Post, 1966. The money would see me through many weeks ahead. The marriage certificate too might come in handy. Thanks.
We prudent survivors were transported to town stretched out like the meek dead beside us, trying to keep warm against the cold in the truck bed, contemplating the stars. Stay calm, the stars seemed to tell us, as if we were not calm; see how well we bide our time. Vibrating in concert with the truck where I was lying down watching some rushing clouds and anxious trees intermediate between us and the velvet night, I considered that this animated, dimly lit revelry in which the living were locked in a close embrace with the dead was a scene fit for a perfect Cinemascope film in which my dear angel, whom I imagined as being humorous and cheerful, would descend from the sky and reveal to me my life’s and heart’s secrets; however, the scene I had appropriated from one of Uncle Rıfkı’s illustrated story lines failed to materialize. Thus, I was left alone with the North Star, the Big Dipper, and the symbol Π, counting the dark power poles and tree branches that flowed over us. Then it occurred to me that this was not a perfect moment after all, that something was missing. But as long as I had a new soul in my body, a new life before me, wads of money in my pocket, and these stars just out in the sky, what of it? I would seek out the missing element.
What
was it that made one’s life incomplete?
A missing leg, answered the green-eyed nurse who put some stitches on my knee. I was told not to resist. All right, will you marry me, then? There are no fractures or hairline cracks in the leg or the foot. All right, then, will you make love to me? A few horrible stitches on my forehead too. Tears of pain in my eyes, I knew what had been awry all along; I should have put it together seeing the ring on the ring finger of the attending nurse. She was probably betrothed to someone working in Germany. I was a new being, but not altogether new. It was in this condition that I left the hospital and the sleepy nurse.
I arrived at the New Light Hotel just as the summons to morning prayer was being called, and I asked the night clerk for the best room in the house. I masturbated looking at an old Hürriyet I found in a dusty closet in the room. It was a color print supplement of the Sunday edition in which the proprietress of a Nişantaşı restaurant in Istanbul had exposed parts of her anatomy for the camera, as well as both her neutered cats and all the furniture she had ordered from Milan. I fell asleep.
The town called Şirinyer where I stayed almost sixty hours, thirty-three of which were spent sleeping at the New Light Hotel, was as charming a place as its given name. 1. The barbershop: on the counter sits a stick of OP brand shaving soap in an aluminum wrap. 2. Youth Reading Room: they shuffle kings of hearts and spades made of paper pulp, watching the Atatürk statue on the square where distracted old men hang out, watching the passing tractors and my slightly limping person, as well as the TV, which runs constantly, keeping an eye out for women, soccer players, murders, soaps, and kissing scenes. 3. At the tobacconist’s with the Marlboro sign: besides cigarettes, it has old cassettes of karate and soft porno films, National Lottery and Sport Toto tickets, pulp novels, rat poison, and a calendar on the wall with a smiling beauty who reminds me of my Janan. 4. The restaurant: beans, meatballs; edible. 5. Post Office: I phone home. Mother cannot comprehend, cries. Şirinyer Coffeehouse: I sat down and once more began reading with pleasure the short news item in Hürriyet that I had been carrying on me about the happy traffic accident (TWELVE DEAD!) which I had by now memorized, when a man in his mid-thirties or early forties who seemed to be a cross between a hired killer and an undercover cop approached me from behind like a shadow; and having read for me the brand name of the watch he pulled out of his pocket (Zenith), he versified:
