The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  His son was very intelligent, in fact, brilliant. Not only had he begun to read at the age of four and a half, he could make out the letters and read the newspaper even when it was held upside down. He thought up rules for children’s games he invented; he beat his father at chess; he instantly committed to memory a three-stanza poem after a couple of readings. I realized these were only the stories of a father who had lost his son but who himself was not a good chess player, yet I still took the bait. When he told me how he and Nahit rode horseback, I too imagined myself riding with them; when he spoke of Nahit’s devout religious practices during his years in middle school, I imagined getting up during Ramadan with the old grandma in the dead of night and having a bite to eat before the fast from daybreak to sundown began; in just the way his father told me that Nahit had responded, I too had been pained and angry in the face of the poverty, ignorance, and stupidity that was all around me; yes, I had! Listening to Doctor Fine, I remembered how I too was a young man who, in spite of his brilliant qualities, still had a deep inner life like Nahit. Yes, sometimes when others were smoking and drinking at some gathering, busy trying to make jokes and attract attention that was all too brief, Nahit would withdraw into a corner and be lost in sensitive thoughts that softened the severe expression in his eyes. Yes, he would intuit most unexpectedly the merit of some nondescript person whom he would encourage and make friends with, be it the son of the janitor at the high school, or the idiot-poet projectionist at the movie theater who always got the reels mixed up. But these friendships did not mean that he had abandoned his own world; after all, everyone wanted to be his friend, his buddy, or some sort of close companion to him. He was honest and handsome, he gave his elders respect, and his juniors …

  I kept thinking of Janan. I was tuned to her like a television set constantly on the same channel, but now I was thinking of her sitting in a different kind of chair, perhaps because I was seeing myself in a different light.

  “Then suddenly, he turned against me,” said Doctor Fine when we had reached the top of the hill. “Just because he had read some book.”

  The cypress trees on top of the hill were moving in a wind that was cool and light but carried no scent. Beyond the cypresses there was an outcropping of rocks and stones. At first I had thought it was a graveyard, but when we got there and began to walk among the large, carefully dressed stones, Doctor Fine explained that it was the ruins of a Seljuk fort. He pointed out the slopes across from us, and a dark hill with its cypresses that was actually a graveyard, all the fields golden with wheat, the heights obscured by rain clouds where the winds blew heavily, and an entire village as well. All was his now, including the fort.

  Why would a young man turn his back on all this land that was alive with life, all these cypresses, these poplars, these wonderful apple orchards and conifers, all the food for thought that his father had provided for him, as well as the storeful of merchandise that was in complete accord with all the above mentioned? Why would a young man write his father that he never wanted to see him again, telling him not to send anyone after him, or have him followed? Why would he want to disappear? There was one particular look that appeared at times on Doctor Fine’s face, and I could never figure out whether it meant that he wanted to stick a needle in me, others like me, or the world as a whole, or whether he was just a disgruntled and oblivious man who had renounced this whole damn world. “It’s all a conspiracy,” he said. There was a great conspiracy against him, his way of thinking, the products to which he had devoted his life, against everything that was vital for this country.

  He asked me to listen carefully to what he was going to tell me. I must make sure I did not think that the things he had to say were the ravings of a senile old man stuck in some out-of-the-way town, or fantasies prompted by the pain felt by a father who had lost his son. I said I was sure. I listened carefully, although I slipped away as anyone might when my mind wandered, thinking of his son or Janan.

  He discussed for a while the memory of objects; as if he were talking about something tangible, he explained with passionate conviction the concept of time fixed fast inside matter. The Great Conspiracy had taken hold around the same time he had first become aware of the presence of a magical, necessary, and poetic concept of time that was transmitted to us from objects when we came into contact using or touching some simple thing like a spoon or a pair of scissors. Speaking specifically, it was around the time that their humdrum sidewalks had been besieged by vendors who sold the sort of dull and flat stuff that was displayed in the odorless, colorless stores. At first he had paid scant attention to either the CRESCENT GAS dealer who sold the bottled gas that powered those gas burners, those thingamajigs with knobs, or the AEG dealer who sold refrigerators that were white as synthetic snow. But when, instead of the nice creamy yogurt that we are all familiar with, vendors began to bring around some sort of yogurt called PERT (he said it as if he were saying DIRT), or instead of the traditional cool yogurt drinks or sour cherry sherbets, drivers wearing open-neck shirts brought, on trim and spanking-clean trucks, the imitation stuff called Mr. Turk Cola which was soon replaced by the real Coca-Cola being sold by honest-to-goodness gentlemen with ties around their necks, out of some stupid impulse he had thought of getting a dealership himself, such as for that UHU glue licensed under the German trademark of a darling little owl that promised it could stick together anything you wanted, rather than our glues that are made out of pine resin, or else something to take the place of our clay soap like Lux hand soap, which had a scent as polluting as its box. But as soon as he put these articles in his store which was so serene that it seemed to exist in a former time, he realized that not only could he no longer tell the time, he didn’t know what time it was. Not only he but also his merchandise had been distressed—much like nightingales who are perturbed by the presumptuous finches in the next cage—by the presence of these lackluster, prosaic objects; and that is why he had abandoned the idea of a dealership. He was unconcerned that only old men and flies dropped by his store, he continued stocking only those products which had traditionally been available to his forefathers.

  Like those people who lose their minds from drinking Coca-Cola but do not realize it, given that the whole populace has gone crazy on Coca-Cola, he too might have come to disregard or even accept the Great Conspiracy; after all, he did have dealings and friendships with some of the dealers who were the tools. Not only that, his merchandise resisted the Dealer’s Conspiracy, perhaps due to the magical harmony objects establish between themselves, including everything in his store, all of them his sort of things—his flatirons, his lighters, his odor-free stoves, his bird cages, his wooden ashtrays, clothespins, fans, his whatnots. There were others like him who had closed ranks against the conspiracy, such as the dark and dapper fellow from Konya, a retired general from Sivas, dealers who were heartbroken but still true believers from Trabzon and, you name it, even from Teheran, Damascus, Edirne, and the Balkans, who had joined him in forming an organization of heartsick dealers who arranged for their own kind of merchandise. He had received right about that time those letters from his son who was away in Istanbul studying medicine. “Don’t look for me; don’t have me followed; I am dropping out.” Doctor Fine repeated sarcastically his dead son’s rebellious words, the words that had angered him.

  He had soon understood that when the powers who were involved in the Great Conspiracy could not contend with his store, his ideas, and his taste, they had tried to go the way of winning over his son in order to undermine him. “Me, Doctor Fine!” he said with pride. So he had gone against what his son had requested in his letter, hoping to turn the whole business around. He had hired someone to tail his son, asking him to keep Nahit under surveillance and write reports on his behavior. Then realizing that one spy was not enough, he had sent a second of his minions after his son, and then a third. They too wrote their reports. And so had others he dispatched after them. Reading the reports, he was once more convinced of the real
ity of the Great Conspiracy, fostered by those who wanted to destroy our country and our spirit, and to eradicate our collective memory.

  “When you read the reports yourself, you will see what I mean,” he said. “Everything and everybody that is involved with them must be tracked down. I have undertaken the work that should rightfully be done by the government. I am up to it. I now have many sympathizers, many heartsick individuals who have put their total trust in me.”

  The vista before us which we could see like a postcard, and which was all Doctor Fine’s property, was now covered over by dove-gray clouds. Starting at the hill where the graveyard was located, the clear and brilliant view was disappearing inside some sort of pale, saffron-colored oscillation. “It’s raining there,” said Doctor Fine, “but it won’t come here.” He had spoken it like a god who was standing on a hill and regarding the creation that was animated by his own volition, but at the same time his voice possessed a note of irony, or even self-deprecatory humor, which indicated he was well aware of how he had spoken. I decided his son didn’t possess a single iota of this kind of subtle humor. I was beginning to like Doctor Fine.

  Thin, fragile lightning bolts were flashing back and forth in the clouds when Doctor Fine repeated once more that what had turned his son against him had been a book. His son had read a book one day and thought his whole world had changed. “Ali, my boy,” he said to me, “you are also the son of a dealer, and you are also in your early twenties. Tell me, is this possible in this day and age? Can a book change someone’s whole life?” I kept quiet, regarding Doctor Fine out of the corner of my eye. “By what power can such a strong spell be cast in this day and age?” He was not merely trying to strengthen his own conviction, but for the first time he truly wanted an answer from me. I kept quiet out of fear. For a moment I thought he was coming at me instead of walking toward the ruins of the fort. But he suddenly stopped and picked something off the ground.

  “Come see what I found,” he said. He showed me what was in the palm of his hand. “A four-leaf clover,” he said, smiling.

  In order to counteract the book and literature in general, Doctor Fine had soldered his relations with the dapper fellow from Konya, the retired general in Sivas, the gentleman called Halis in Trabzon, and his other heartsick friends who hailed from Damascus, Edirne, and the Balkans. In response to the Great Conspiracy, they began to trade with each other exclusively and to confide in others whose hearts had also been broken, and to organize—carefully, humanely, modestly—against the tools of the Great Conspiracy. Doctor Fine had requested that all his friends preserve the products that were real to them, products which were like the extensions of their hands and arms and which like poetry made their souls complete, “in other words, whatever object it was that rendered them whole”—like their hourglass-shaped tea glasses, their oil censers, their pencil boxes, their quilts—as a measure to prevent being rendered helpless like hopeless boobs who had lost their collective memory, which was “our greatest treasure,” so that despite having suffered through all the misery and oblivion foisted on us, we might establish victoriously anew “the sovereignty of our own unadulterated annals of time which were in danger of being annihilated.” And everyone had squirreled away to the best of his ability old adding machines, stoves, dye-free soap, mosquito netting, grandfather clocks, etc., in their stores, and if keeping these products in the stores was prohibited by the state terrorism called the laws of the land, then in their houses, their basements, even in pits dug in their gardens.

  Since Doctor Fine was pacing up and down, at times he put some distance between us, disappearing behind some cypresses among the ruins of the fort, which required that I wait for him. But when I saw him walk toward a hill that was concealed behind some tall brush and the cypresses, I ran to catch up. First we went down a slight grade that was covered with bracken and thistles, then we started up the hill, which was quite steep. Doctor Fine led the way, stopping to wait for me at times so I would not miss hearing his narrative.

  Considering that the pawns and tools of the Great Conspiracy assail us, either knowingly or unknowingly, through books and literature, he said to his friends, we ought to take precautions against printed matter. “What literature?” he asked me, leaping from one rock to another like some nimble Boy Scout. “What book?” He had reflected on it. He fell silent for a while, as if to demonstrate how meticulously and in what great detail he had reflected upon it, and how long the process had taken him. He explained it as he helped me out of a patch of brambles where I was caught by the cuffs of my trousers. “The culprit is not only that particular book, the book that snared my son, but all the books that have been printed by printing presses; they are all enemies of the annals of our time, our former existence.”

  He was not against literature that was scripted by hand, which was an integral part of the hand holding the pen—the kind of literature that moved the hand, and in expressing the sorrows, the curiosity and affections of the soul, pleased and enlightened the mind. Nor was he against the kind of books that informed the farmer how to deal with his mice, steered in the right direction some absentminded person who had lost his way, reminded the misguided of their own traditions, or informed and educated the naïve child about the nature of the world through illustrated adventures; he was all for these kinds of books which were as necessary now as they had once been, and it would be a good thing if they were written in greater numbers. The books Doctor Fine opposed were those that had lost their glow, clarity, and truth but pretended to be glowing, clear, and true. These were the books that promised us the serenity and enchantment of paradise within the limitations set by the world, those which the pawns of the Great Conspiracy mass-produced and disseminated—at this point a field mouse zipped past us and was gone in the blink of an eye—in their concerted effort to make us forget the poetry of our lives. “Where’s the proof?” he said, looking at me suspiciously as if I were the one who had asked the question. “Where’s the proof?” He was climbing quickly among spindly trees and rocks covered with bird droppings.

  For the proof, I must read the records kept by his men all over the country, the spies he had dispatched to do the investigations in Istanbul. After reading the book, his son had lost his bearings; not only had he turned his back on his family—which one could attribute to youthful rebellion—but he had closed his eyes to the wealth of life, that is, the “unmanifested symmetry of time,” carried away by some kind of “blindness” against the “totality of details reposited in each object,” having succumbed to some kind of “death wish.”

  “Can one book accomplish all this?” asked Doctor Fine. “That book is merely a tool in the hands of the Great Conspiracy.”

  Still, he underestimated neither the book nor the writer. I would see for myself, when I read the reports his friends and spies had made and the records they had kept, that the use made of the book was not consistent with the writer’s aims. The writer had been a poor retired bureaucrat, a weak personality who didn’t even have the courage of his own convictions. “The sort of weak personality we are required to produce by those who infect us with the plague of forgetfulness that blows here on the winds from the West, erasing our collective memory. Someone feeble, someone wishy-washy, a nothing! He is gone, destroyed, rubbed out.” Doctor Fine made it clear that he didn’t feel in the least sorry for the writer’s death.

  For quite some time we climbed up a goat path without speaking. Silken thunderbolts flashed through the rain clouds that kept changing places without either approaching or departing; but the thunderclaps were inaudible, as if we were watching a TV set with the sound set on mute. When we got to the top of the hill, we could see not only Doctor Fine’s holdings but also the town that stood neatly on the plain like a table set by an industrious housewife, the red tile roofs, the mosque with the slim minarets, the streets spreading out freely, and outside the town limits, the sharp boundaries of the wheat fields and fruit orchards.

  “In the morning I get up
and greet the day before the day has a chance to wake me,” Doctor Fine said, studying the view. “The sun comes up from behind the mountains, but one knows by the swallows that in other places the sun has already been up for hours. Sometimes in the mornings I walk all the way up here to welcome the sun who greets me. Nature is bestilled; bees and snakes are not yet stirring about. The earth and I ask each other why we are here at this hour, for what purpose, for what grand purpose. Very few mortals think these things through in concert with nature. If human beings think at all, there are only a few pitiful ideas in their heads which they have acquired from others but think are original with them; they never discover something by contemplating nature themselves. They are all feeble, wishy-washy, fragile.

  “Even before I discovered the Great Conspiracy that came from the West, I had already comprehended the fact that to remain unvanquished one must have strength and determination,” said Doctor Fine. “Our melancholy streets, long-suffering trees, ghostly lights held out nothing to me but indifference; so I put my stuff in order, pulled my time concept together, refusing to submit either to history or those who want to govern it. Why should I submit? I trust in myself. It was because I trusted in myself that others too put their trust in my willpower and the poetic justice of my life. I made sure they were bonded to me, so they too discovered the annals of our own time. We were bonded to each other. We communicated through ciphers, corresponded like lovers, held clandestine meetings. This first dealers’ convention in Güdül, my dear boy Ali, is the fruit of a long and hard struggle, well-planned action that has required the patience of digging a well with a needle, and organization that has been meticulously constructed like a spider’s web. No matter what, the West can no longer deter us.”

  After a silence he added this information: Hours after my pretty young wife and I had left Güdül, fires had broken out all over town. It was not coincidental that the fire department had been unable to cope despite the help they received from the government. No wonder that the tears, the flashes of anger, to be seen in the eyes of the insurgents, that rabble roused by the newspapers, were the same as those of his heartsick friends who had intuited that they had been robbed of their souls, their poetry, their memory. Had I known that cars had been set on fire, that guns had been discharged, and that one person—one of their own—had lost his life? The whole thing had been instigated by the district governor himself with the aid of the local political parties, when he forbade the convention of the heartsick dealers to continue on the pretext that it threatened law and order.