The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  I pressed myself close to Janan on our way back to the hotel like all the provincials and district appliance dealers who had taken their wives’ arms. Who was that high school boy? How does he know you? The stork must be watching us from the tower where it was perched. We had just been given the key for Room 19 by the night clerk as if we were really husband and wife, when someone who looked like he knew what he was doing and was more determined than anyone else thrust his large and sweaty body between us and waylaid me.

  “Mr. Kara,” he said, “if you have a moment…”

  Police! I thought; he is on to us that we inherited the identifications and the marriage certificate from the victims of a traffic accident.

  “I wonder if it’s possible for us to talk?” the man went on. He acted as if he wanted to talk man to man. How delicately Janan left us alone, how graceful she was in her print skirt, going up the stairs with the key to Room 19 in her hand!

  The man was not a native of the town of Güdül, but I forgot his name as soon as he mentioned it; let us say his name was Mr. Owl, based on the fact that he was talking to me so late at night, but perhaps Owl was associated in my mind with the caged canary in the lobby which had been hopping up and down and against the wires when Mr. Owl began to speak.

  “They are wining and dining us now,” he said, “but tomorrow they will ask us to vote. Have you thought about it? Tonight I canvassed not only the dealers from this district but each and every one that came from all over the country. All hell might break loose tomorrow, so I want you to think about it now. Have you thought it through? You are the youngest dealer among us. Who has your vote?”

  “Who do you think I should vote for?”

  “Not for Doctor Fine, that’s for sure! Believe me, brother—if I may call you brother—it’s all nothing but a misadventure. Can angels be said to commit sin? Is it possible to deal with all the difficulties that trouble us? There is no way that we can be ourselves any longer, a fact that even the well-known columnist Jelal Salik realized, which led to his suicide; it’s someone else who’s writing the column under his name. Every rock you lift, there they are, the Americans. Sure it’s sad to realize we will never be ourselves again, but mature assessment may save us from disaster. So our sons and grandsons no longer understand us, so what? Civilizations come and civilizations go. What are you going to do? Believe you are all set when your civilization is on the move? And then, when things begin to run down, grab your gun like some loudmouth kid? Who do you kill when it’s the whole population assuming a different guise? How can the angel be an accessory to the crime? Besides, who is this angel anyway? What’s this business of collecting old stoves, compasses, children’s magazines, clothespins? Why is the angel supposedly against books and print? We all try to live meaningful lives, but we are all stymied at some point. Who among us can be himself? Who’s the lucky person that hears the angels whisper? It’s all speculation, empty words meant to dupe the unwary. Things are getting out of hand. Have you heard? They say Koç is on his way, Vehbi Koç. The authorities won’t let it happen. The innocent will suffer along with the guilty. The demonstration of Doctor Fine’s television has been put off until tomorrow. Why do you suppose he’s getting special treatment? He’s the one herding us into this misadventure. They say he will explain the Cola affair; it’s madness; this is not why we came to this convention.”

  He was ready to say more, but a man wearing a scarlet tie came into the space, which didn’t deserve to be called a lobby. Owl said, “They will be all night now, tackling and blocking,” and he took off. I saw him follow another dealer out into the dark night.

  I stood at the foot of the stairs where Janan had gone up. I felt feverish, my legs were shaking; perhaps it was the alcohol or the coffee, but I was having palpitations and there was perspiration on my forehead. I didn’t go up the stairs but ran to the phone booth in the corner, dialed, the line was busy, I dialed again, got the wrong number, I dialed your number, Mom: “Mom, I said, I’m getting married, Mom, do you hear me? I am getting married tonight, in a little while, now, in fact we’re already married, she’s upstairs in the room, there’s a staircase, I married an angel, Mom, don’t cry, I swear I will come home, don’t you cry, Mom, I will come back with an angel on my arm.”

  Why hadn’t I realized before that there was a mirror right behind the canary cage? It was odd seeing it as I went up the stairs.

  Room 19, it was the room where Janan opened the door, greeted me holding a cigarette in her hand, then went back to the open window where she had been watching the town square; the room seemed like someone else’s hometown which had suddenly become hospitable to us. Quiet. Warm. Low light. Twin beds.

  The town’s somber light came through the open window, defining Janan’s long neck and her hair, and a nervous and impatient wisp of cigarette smoke (or did it only seem so?) rose out of Janan’s mouth, which I couldn’t see, up toward a kind of dolorous darkness that insomniacs, restless sleepers, and the dead in the town of Güdül had for many years been breathing into the sky. A drunk laughed downstairs; someone, perhaps a dealer, slammed a door. I saw Janan toss her cigarette out the window without putting it out, and then like a child she watched the cigarette’s orange tip doing somersaults as it fell. I too went to the window and glanced down into the street and the town square, but without seeing anything. Then we both looked out the window for a long time as if contemplating the cover of a new book.

  “You too were drinking, weren’t you?” I said.

  “I was drinking,” Janan said congenially.

  “How long will this go on?”

  “Do you mean the road?” Janan said lightly, indicating the route leading from the town square to the cemetery before it reached the bus terminal.

  “Where do you think it will end?”

  “I don’t know,” said Janan. “But I want to go as far as it goes. Isn’t that better than sitting around waiting?”

  “The money is almost all gone,” I said.

  The dark corners in the road Janan had pointed out a moment ago were now completely lit by the powerful headlights of some vehicle which drove into the town square and parked in a vacant space.

  “We will never get there,” I said.

  “You’re even more drunk than I am,” said Janan.

  The man who emerged from the car locked the door and walked toward the hotel without becoming aware of us; he first stepped on Janan’s cigarette stub like someone thoughtlessly squashing out someone else’s life, and then he entered the Hotel Trump.

  A prolonged silence fell over Güdül, as if this charming little town were completely deserted. A few dogs exchanged barks in the distance, then everything grew silent once more. The leaves of the plane and chestnut trees on the square moved in the breeze now and then, but there was no sound of rustling. We must have stood silently at the window for a long time, looking out like children anticipating something that was going to be fun. It was some sort of perceptual illusion, but though I was aware of every second I couldn’t say if time was passing or if it was on hold.

  It was much later when Janan said, “No! Please don’t touch me! I have never been with a man.”

  As sometimes happens in real life or when remembering the past, I felt for a moment as if the situation and the town I was seeing out the window were not actual but in my imagination. Perhaps the small town of Güdül I saw before me was not a real town, perhaps I was only looking at the picture of a town on a stamp, like one issued by the postal service administration in their homeland series. Just as with the towns on those stamps, the town square made Güdül appear to be more like a souvenir than a place with streets to walk in, where a pack of cigarettes could be bought or dusty windows inspected.

  Fantasytown, I reflected; Souvenir City. I knew that my eyes were searching for that indelible objective correlative for a bitter memory that can never be forgotten, which arises from someplace very deep and arrives of its own volition. I scanned the dark space under the trees nex
t to the square, the tractor fenders gleaming in light that came from a mysterious source, the lettering in the names of the pharmacy and the bank partially obscured from sight, the back of an old man in the street, and some windows in particular. Then, like some cinematography enthusiast who has located the vantage point of the camera and the photographer who filmed the town square, I began to see my own image looking out of the second-story window in the Hotel Trump. I was standing there and looking out of a window in this remote and secluded hotel, and you were stretched out on the bed next to the window, when I zoomed in on the images in my head, starting with the countryside, the route we traveled, the town, the town square, the hotel, the window, the two of us—just like the camera in the opening scenes of foreign films we saw on the buses, zooming in on the city first, then the neighborhood, then a yard, a house, a window. It seemed as if all the towns, villages, films, filling stations, and passengers that I imagined and remembered inadequately had been fused with the pain and longing I felt somewhere deep inside me, but I couldn’t determine whether the sorrow of the towns, broken-down objects, and passengers had infected me, or if I was the one who spread the sorrow in my heart all over the country and the map.

  The purple wallpaper around the window reminded me of a map. The trade name on the electric heater in the corner was VESUVIUS, the regional dealer for which I had met earlier in the evening. The faucet in the sink on the wall across from me was dripping. The mirror on the door to the closet was ajar, reflecting the bedside table between the two beds and the little lamp that stood on top of it. The light from the lamp softly washed over the sleeping form of Janan, who had lain down on the bedspread with purple leaves without taking off her dusty clothes.

  Her light brown hair had turned somewhat auburn. How was it that I hadn’t noticed the reddish highlights?

  Then I thought there were a great many things I still had to notice. My mind was brightly lit like the restaurants at rest stops where we got off to have some soup, but it also was, at the same time, in total disarray. Weary thoughts crossed the confusion in my mind, changing gears, huffing and puffing like the sleepy phantom trucks that kept going by one of those crossroads restaurants, and I could hear immediately behind me the girl of my dreams breathe as she slept dreaming of someone else.

  Lay yourself down beside her and wrap her in your arms! After all this time together, bodies can’t help longing for one another. Who was this Doctor Fine anyway? When I could no longer bear it and turned around to behold her beautiful legs, I remembered, brothers (brothers, brothers!), that they were conspiring out there in the still of the night, and lying in wait for me. A moth that had seeped in from the stillness was circling the light bulb, painfully shedding itself in flakes. Kiss her long and hard until both our bodies are consumed with fire. Did I hear the sound of music? Or was my mind playing the piece called “The Call of the Night” that had been requested by the listeners? As any young man my age whose sexual passion remains ungratified knows all too well, the call of the night is actually nothing more than finding oneself in some dark dismal alley and howling bitterly in the night in the company of a couple of hopeless characters in the same predicament, bringing down invectives on other people and making bombs that will blow them up, and—have pity on us, O Angel—cursing those who deal in the international conspiracy that has condemned us to this miserable existence. I believe gossip of this sort is called “history.”

  I watched Janan sleep for half an hour, perhaps forty-five minutes, all right, all right, an hour at most. Then I opened the door and stepped out, locked the door, and pocketed the key. My Janan remained inside. And I, I had been turned down and exiled.

  Walk up and down the street, then go back and embrace her. Smoke a cigarette, go back and embrace her. Find someplace open, get soused, take courage, go back and embrace her.

  The conspirators in the night pounced on me as I descended the stairs. “So you’re Ali Kara,” one of them said. “My congratulations, you made it all the way here, and you are so young.” “Join us,” said the second thug who was about the same age, same height, and wore roughly the same narrow tie and the same black jacket, “and we’ll let you know what’s going to happen when the ruckus starts tomorrow.”

  They held their cigarettes as if the red tips were gunpoints aimed at my forehead, and they smiled provocatively. “Not to scare you or anything,” added the first, “but we just wanted to warn you.” I could see that they were conducting some sort of gossip session in the middle of the night, doing the footwork to catch converts.

  We went out into the street where the stork was no longer keeping watch, and we passed by the shop window with the liqueur bottles and the stuffed rats. We went into a back alley where we had only taken a few steps when a door was opened and we were confronted with a dense tavern smell reeking of raki. We sat down at a table covered with a filthy oilcloth and in quick succession tossed down a couple of glasses of raki—in lieu of medication, please!—and soon I learned quite a few things about my new acquaintances as well as the subject of life and happiness.

  The one who first accosted me, let’s call him Mr. Sıtkı, was a beer salesman from Seydişehir who told me his story as to why there was no contradiction between his occupation and his creed because it was all too obvious, if you thought about it, that beer was not really an alcoholic beverage like raki. He called for a bottle of Ephesus beer and pouring it into a glass demonstrated that the bubbles were nothing but carbonation. My second buddy paid scant attention to such dilemmas, sensibilities, and distinctions, perhaps because he was a sewing machine dealer, plunging instead into the heart of things like those drunk and sleepless truck drivers who in the middle of the night blindly meet up with purblind power poles.

  Here was peace; peace existed here, in this peaceful town, here in this tiny tavern. We were here and now, three faithful cronies in the heart of life, sharing a table. When we thought over everything that happened to us and all that would happen tomorrow, we were well aware how precious was this unique moment which existed in between our victorious past and our gruesome and miserable future. We swore we would always tell each other the truth. We hugged and kissed. We laughed with tears in our eyes. We exalted the magnificence of the world and life. We raised our glasses in honor of a party of crazy dealers and a coterie of mindful subversives who were in the tavern. This was life in its essence; it was neither one thing nor the other, neither in heaven nor in hell. It was right here, in the present, in the moment, life in all its glory. What madman had the nerve to contradict us? Where was the idiot who would put us down? Who had the right to call us pitiful and wretched trash? We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skyscrapers and supersonic transports. Let them have their radio and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don’t we? But we have something they don’t have: heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart!

  I remember gathering my wits for a moment, O Angel, and wondering why, if all you have to do is drink down the panacea against unhappiness, then why isn’t everybody drinking? Out of the tavern and into the summer night with his bosom friends, the person walking under the pseudonym of Ali Kara keeps asking: Why all this pain, all this sorrow and misery? Why, oh why?

  In the second floor of the Hotel Trump a bedside lamp casts reddish highlights on Janan’s hair.

  Then I remember being pulled into a milieu of the Republic, Atatürk, and legal stamps. It was in the government building, where we went all the way to the inner sanctum, the office that belonged to the district governor, who kissed me on the forehead. He was one of us. He told us an edict had been dispatched from Ankara, no nose was to be bloodied tomorrow. He had already singled me out, he trusted me, and if I felt like it, I might as well go ahead and read the missive which was still damp out of the brand-new duplicating machine.

  “Esteemed denizens of Güdül, notables, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and devout young me
mbers of the Imam-Preacher School. Some people are apparently oblivious to the fact that they are in our town as our guests. What is it that they want? Are they here to insult everything that is held sacred in our town? Our devotion to our religion, our prophet, our sheiks, and the statue of Atatürk has for centuries been demonstrated amply in our mosques and on our holy holidays. Not only do we refuse to drink wine, we will not succumb to drinking Coca-Cola. We worship Allah, not the Cross, or America, or Satan. We cannot understand why our peaceful town has been chosen as the convention site for these certified madmen, copycat versions of Marie and Ali, and the Jewish agent Max Rulo, whose only aim is belittling our Field Marshall Fevzi Çakmak. Who is the angel? And who has the temerity to put the angel up for ridicule on TV? Are we to watch idly while insolence is perpetrated against our conscientious firefighters and our Hadji Stork who has watched over our town for the last twenty years? Was it for this that Atatürk chased out the Greek army? If we do not put these impudent so-called guests in their place, if we don’t teach the lesson they deserve to the derelicts who are responsible for inviting these people to our town, how are we to face ourselves tomorrow? There will be a rally at ten in the Firehouse Square. We prefer death to life without honor.”

  I read the announcement once more. If it were to be read backwards, or if an anagram were formed by the capital letters, would one get an entirely different version? Apparently not. The district governor said that the fire trucks had been loading up water from the stream since morning. There was a possibility, however small, that things could get out of control tomorrow, fires could get out of hand, and in the heat the mob might not be so easily deterred by the pressure hoses. The mayor had assured our supporters that the mayor’s office would provide full cooperation, and the gendarme units dispatched from the provincial capital were to put an immediate lid on any and all disturbance that might ensue. “When things calm down and provocateurs and enemies of the Republic and the nation are unmasked,” said the district governor, “let’s see who is left around to deface soap ads and billboards featuring women. Let’s see who swaggers out of the tailor shop dead drunk, cursing the governor up and down, not to mention the stork.”