The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  “It’s a done deal,” said Doctor Fine. “I am not about to acquiesce. I was the one who requested that the subject of angels be debated on the floor. I was also the one who put in the request for building the television set that reflected our hearts and our childhood, I was the one who had that device built. I was the one who demanded that all wicked things, like the book that took my son away from me, be chased back to the hole they emerged from, back to the evil pit where they seethe and roil. We found out that hundreds of our young people had ‘their whole lives changed’ through this sort of subterfuge every year, ‘their worlds deranged’ by having a book or two put in their hands. I gave everything thorough consideration. It is not coincidental that I did not attend the convention. That the convention brought me a young man like you is not a mere stroke of good fortune, either. Everything has been falling in place just as I premeditated it. When my son was taken from me by the traffic accident, he was the same age as yourself. This is the fourteenth of the month. I lost my son on the fourteenth.”

  When Doctor Fine opened his large fist, I saw there the four-leaf clover. He picked it up by the stem and studied it before he let it drift away on a light breeze. Air was wafting from the direction of the rain clouds but so imperceptibly that I felt it only by the coolness on my face. Dove-gray clouds tarried where they were situated, as if by indecision. Light that had a yellowish cast seemed to simmer somewhere in the distance beyond the town. Doctor Fine said it was “now” raining over there. When we reached the rocky cliffs on the other side of the hill, we saw that the clouds over the graveyard had scattered. A kite had nested among the rocks which were rough in places; the moment it realized we were approaching, it fluttered off in alarm and began to soar, defining a wide arc over Doctor Fine’s territory. Silently, respectfully, and with a kind of admiration, we watched the bird glide in the air.

  “This land has the power and wealth,” Doctor Fine said, “to support the great movement inspired by the single-minded grand idea that I have been nurturing all these years. If my son had had the strength and the willpower to resist the ruse perpetrated by the Great Conspiracy and had not allowed himself to be taken in by a mere book despite his great intellect, he would have felt the creativity and strength I feel today, surveying the land from these heights. I know that you yourself have perceived today the same inspiration, the same horizon. I knew from the beginning that what was communicated to me about your resolution was not in the least exaggerated. When I found out your age, I had no remaining reservations; there was not even any necessity to dig up your background. Even though you are only at the age when my son was so mercilessly and underhandedly taken from me, you have already comprehended everything thoroughly enough to want to take part in the dealers’ convention. Our acquaintance of a single day has already shown me that a manifest destiny aborted in one individual can be reactivated through another. It was not for nothing that I gave you access to the little museum I established in memory of my son. You and your wife are the only persons who have visited it aside from his mother and his sisters. You were able to appreciate your own self there, your own past and your future. And now you are becoming cognizant of our next step as you contemplate me, Doctor Fine. Become my son. Take his place. Carry on my work after me. I am growing old, but my passions have not in the least abated. I want to be sure that the movement will survive. I have connections in the government. Those who report to me are still active. I am keeping track of hundreds of young people who have been hoodwinked. I will make the dossiers available to you, all of them without any exception, even the records of my son’s activities. Just read them. So many young people have been taken off the course of their lives! It’s not necessary that you renounce your own father, your family. I also want you to see my gun collection. Just say ‘Yes!’ Say yes to your destiny. I am not a decadent person, I am aware of everything. I didn’t get a male heir for years on end, I suffered; when they took him away from me, I suffered even more; but nothing can be more painful than leaving behind my inheritance without someone to inherit it.”

  The thunder clouds were being scattered here and there, and sunlight flooded Doctor Fine’s realm like the lights that illuminate a stage set. When a piece of land was momentarily brightened up, colors changed quickly in the level ground covered with apple and oleaster trees, the graveyard where he told me his son was buried, the arid earth around a sheep pen; and we observed a conical beam of light swiftly proceed over the fields like a restless spirit which does not respect boundaries, only to vanish. When I realized that we could see most of the area we had covered on our walk from this vantage point, I looked back, observing the rocky cliff, the goat path, the cypresses, the first hill, the woods and the wheat fields, and, astonished as an airplane passenger seeing his own house from above for the first time, I recognized Doctor Fine’s mansion. It stood in the middle of an ample plain that was surrounded by trees; and I saw there in that clearing five miniature individuals walking toward the pinewood and the road to town, recognizing one of them as Janan by the maroon print cotton dress she had bought recently—no, not just by that fact alone, but by her walk, her stance, her delicacy, her grace—no, by the beating of my own heart. Then suddenly, materializing afar in the distance beyond the mountains at the edge of Doctor Fine’s wondrous realm, I saw a spectacular rainbow.

  “Others observe nature,” Doctor Fine said, “only to see there their own limitations, their own inadequacies, their own fears. Then, fearful of their own frailties, they ascribe their fear to nature’s boundlessness, its grandness. As for me, I observe in nature a powerful statement which speaks to me, reminding me of my own willpower that I must sustain; I see there a rich manuscript which I read resolutely, mercilessly, fearlessly. Similar to great eras and great states, great men too are those who can accumulate in themselves power so great that it is at the point of exploding. When the time is ripe, when opportunities present themselves, when history gets rewritten, this great power moves as pitilessly and decisively as the great man who has been mobilized. Then fate is also set mercilessly into motion. On that great day, no quarter shall be given to public opinion, to newspapers, or to current ideas, none to petty morality and insignificant consumer products, like their bottled gas and Lux Soap, their Coca-Cola and Marlboros with which the West has duped our pitiful compatriots.”

  “When can I read the records, sir?” I asked.

  There was a long silence. The rainbow shimmered brilliantly on Doctor Fine’s dusty and spotted spectacles like two symmetrical rainbows.

  “I am a genius,” said Doctor Fine.

  10

  We returned to the mansion. Following a quiet lunch with the family, Doctor Fine let me into his study, unlocking it with a key very similar to the one with which Rosamund had in the morning opened Mehmet’s childhood room. Showing me the notebooks he pulled out of drawers and dossiers he brought down from cabinets, he told me that he did not disregard the possibility that the directive which had commissioned these intelligence reports and testimonials might one day materialize in the form of a state. If his efforts were successful, as attested to by the espionage network he had organized, Doctor Fine meant to found a new state.

  The reports had in fact been meticulously dated and filed, which made it easy for me to get to the heart of the matter. Doctor Fine had kept the identities of the informants he sent after his son secret from each other, supplying each agent with a code name that was a watch trademark. Although most of these watches were made in the West, Doctor Fine considered them “ours,” given that they had been keeping our time for over a century.

  The initial informant, code name Zenith, had filed his first report four years ago in March. Nahit—he had not yet assumed a new identity—was then a student at the University of Istanbul in Çapa, in his third year of the six-year program of studies leading to an M.D. degree that begins in Turkey right after high school. Zenith had determined that ever since school started in the fall, this third-year student had been a te
rrible failure in his classes; then he went on to summarize his investigations: “The subject’s failure in school the last few months is the direct result of his rarely venturing out of his dormitory, cutting his classes, and not even showing up for his practicum hours at the clinic and the hospital.” The dossier was chock-full of reports, showing in great detail what time Nahit left the student dormitory and went into which fast-food place, kebab or pudding shop, what bank and what barber he patronized. Each and every time Mehmet took care of his errands, he did not tarry but returned swiftly back to his dormitory, and each and every time Zenith concluded his intelligence report he asked Doctor Fine for more money to continue his “investigations.”

  The next agent after Zenith that Doctor Fine had assigned was Movado, who apparently was a supervisor at the student dormitory in Kadırga; and like most supervisors of student housing, he had ties to the police. I imagined that this experienced man, who was able to keep an eye on Mehmet hour by hour, had probably written reports on other students previously for the benefit of anxious parents in the provinces or for the National Bureau of Investigation, seeing how he had sketched the balance of power in the dormitory so astutely that his assessment had a professional edge, sharp and succinct. Conclusion: Nahit had no association with the student factions who were struggling to gain ascendancy in the dormitory; two of these factions were fundamentalist extremists, one had ties to a Nakshi-bend Sufi order, and the orientation of the last was moderately leftist. Our young man kept to himself, had no brushes with the factions, lived quietly with three compatriots with whom he shared a room, and he read and read without even raising his head, reading nothing but one particular book as if he were some hafiz (“if I may use the term, my worthy sir”) employed from morning to night in memorizing the Koran. Other dormitory staff whose grasp of political and ideological matters Movado trusted completely, the police, and our young man’s roommates as well had ascertained this book was not of the type that young fundamentalists or politicos committed to memory. To show he did not take the situation too seriously, Movado had added a few observations such as the young man sitting for hours at his desk reading in his room and then absentmindedly staring out the window, or smiling good-naturedly or making some perfunctory remark in response to the teasing he took in the refectory, or not shaving every morning as usual; and he had gone on to give his patron the assurance that in his experience this sort of youthful fancy was nothing but a “passing phase,” not unlike always watching the same porno film, or listening a thousand times to the same cassette, or always ordering the same dish of braised leeks with ground meat.

  Seeing how Omega, the third agent, who went on duty in May, was more in pursuit of the book than of Nahit, he must have received a directive on the subject from Doctor Fine. This showed that his father had accurately determined that in fact what took Mehmet, that is Nahit, off the track had been the book.

  Omega had surveyed many of the booksellers in Istanbul including the sidewalk stall that had sold me my copy some three and a half years later. As a result of his patient probing, he had come across the book at two different sidewalk stalls, and the information he gleaned from the booksellers had sent him to a secondhand bookstore, where the facts he received had led him to draw these conclusions: A small number of these books, maybe 150 to 200 copies, had been made available from an unknown source, most probably sold by weight to some junk dealer when some musty warehouse had either been cleared out or gone out of business, and from there the books had ended up at a couple of sidewalk stalls and the shop in the secondhand bookstore district. The supplier who bought books by weight had a falling out with his partner, closed his business, and left Istanbul. It had not been possible to find him and get a fix on the original purveyor. The idea that the police might have had a hand in the redistribution of the book had been suggested to Omega by the owner of the shop in the secondhand bookstore district. The book had at one time been published legitimately, only to be confiscated by the prosecutor’s office and placed in a warehouse that belonged to Internal Security, and from there, as happens so often, the confiscated books were probably pinched by some impecunious police officer and sold by weight to a junk dealer, thereby once more going back into circulation.

  When diligent Omega had not come across any other work by the same author at the library, and what’s more had not found the name in the phone book, he had offered this speculation: “Although our citizens who cannot even afford a telephone have the temerity to write books, I respectfully submit my opinion that this book has been published under a pseudonym.”

  Mehmet, who had spent the whole summer reading the book again and again, had in the fall begun the investigations that would take him to the original source of the book. The new man his father added to the three already on his tail had been named after a brand of Soviet-made watches and clocks popular in Istanbul during the early years of the Turkish Republic: Serkisof.

  Serkisof, after verifying that Mehmet had totally immersed himself in reading at the Beyazıt National Library, had initially given Doctor Fine the good news that the young man was merely studying to make up his incomplete work at school. Then, realizing that our young man had been reading children’s comics such as Pertev and Peter or Ali and Mary, Serkisof had abandoned his optimistic conclusion and had put forth this conjecture by way of consolation: Perhaps by returning to his childhood memories, the young man was hoping to pull himself out of his depression.

  According to the reports, during the month of October Mehmet had been paying visits to Babıali publishers who had once produced or were still producing children’s comics, as well as the sort of unscrupulous writers—like Neşati, for example—who had scribbled for such magazines. Serkisof, who assumed Doctor Fine was having the young man investigated to find out his ideological and political leanings, said the following about certain people: “I tell you, sir, no matter how interested they pretend they are in politics, and no matter how often they hold forth about the political and ideological issues of the day, these polemicists do not have any real convictions. They write for the money, and if they can’t get that, they write to annoy people they don’t like.”

  I saw in both Serkisof’s and Omega’s reports that one autumn morning Mehmet had visited the personnel department of the State Railroad Administration in Haydar-Pasha. Of the two investigators, who were not aware of each other, Omega was the one who had come up with the correct information: “The young man wanted to obtain information on a retired official.”

  I flipped quickly through the pages of reports that had been put in binders. My eyes were scanning for the names of my own neighborhood, my street, my childhood. My heart began to beat fast when I read that Mehmet had walked in my street and had one evening studied the second-story window in some house. It was as if those who prepared the wondrous world where I was soon to be summoned had decided to make things easier for me by displaying their skill right under my nose, but the high school student that I was back then had never been any the wiser.

  Mehmet had met Uncle Rıfkı the following day, which was the conclusion I personally drew from the material. Both the agents who were following Mehmet had verified that the young man had entered 28 Silver Poplar Street in Erenköy and stayed five, more like six minutes, but neither had found out whom he had visited in what apartment. Omega, who was the more diligent of the two watches, had at least pumped the errand boy at the corner grocery and received information on the three families who lived in the building. I assume this was the first time ever that Doctor Fine had got wind of Uncle Rıfkı.

  After his interview with the gentleman called Rıfkı, Mehmet had a crisis that even Zenith didn’t fail to notice. Movado had noted that the young man did not stir from his room at all, not even to go down to the refectory, and was not seen reading the book, not even once. According to Serkisof, his forays out of the dormitory were irregular as well as aimless. He had spent an entire night trudging around the back streets in Sultan-Ahmet and sat smoking
in a park for hours. Another evening Omega had observed him with a bunch of grapes in a paper sack which he had taken out one by one to scrutinize as if the grapes were jewels before chewing them each very slowly; he had gone on doing this for four hours before returning to his dormitory. His hair and beard had grown too long, he paid no attention to his appearance. The informants all felt they needed more pay, complaining about the irregular hours kept by the young man.

  One afternoon in November, Mehmet had taken the ferry to Haydar-Pasha, then gone to Erenköy on the train, where he had walked around the streets for a long time. According to Omega, who was on his tail, the young man had pounded the streets in the whole district, had gone by my window three times—most probably while I was sitting inside—and by the time it began to get dark, he had taken up his post across from 28 Silver Poplar Street and begun to watch the windows. Mehmet, who had kept watch for a couple of hours in the dark under a light rain without getting the signal he wanted from the lighted windows, according to Omega, had gotten terribly drunk at one of the taverns in Kadıköy before returning to his dormitory. Later, Omega and Serkisof had both mentioned that the young man had made the same trip six more times; Serkisof, who was the more astute, had correctly identified the person in the room with the lighted window that the young man had watched.