The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  11

  The pleasure of reading, which natty older gentlemen complain is lacking in our culture, must be in the musical harmony I heard reading the documents and murder reports in Doctor Fine’s mad and orderly archive. On my arms I felt the cool night air, in my ears I heard night music that was not actually playing; meanwhile, I tried to figure out what I must do to act like a young person who had decided to be resolute in the face of the wonders he has come across at his tender age. Since I had decided to be a responsible young person who prepared for his future, I pulled a piece of paper out of Doctor Fine’s stock and began to write down small clues that might come in handy.

  I left the archive room when I was still hearing that music in my ears, at an hour when I felt deep inside me how cold and calculating were both the world and the philosophically inclined patriarch of the house. It was as if I could hear the encouraging provocation of some blithe spirit. I felt something tingling inside like that playful feeling people like me get when we leave the theater after seeing a fun and upbeat movie, a feeling which is as light as the music that goes through our heads. You know what I mean: we identify with the hero, as if we were the guy with the clever jokes, the spontaneous levity, the incredible ready wit.

  “May I have this dance?” I was about to ask Janan, who was watching me with concern.

  She was sitting at the dinner table with the three rosy sisters, looking at some balls of yarn in all manner of colors which had spilled out from a wicker basket on the table top like ripe apples and oranges out of a cornucopia of felicity and plenty. Next to these were the knitting and embroidery patterns that came with the magazine called Home and Women that my mother also used to take at one time, flowers to needlepoint, cute little ducks, cats, dogs, besides the mosque motifs which must have been contributed by the publisher, who lifted all the rest from German women’s magazines and foisted it on Turkish women. I too studied all that color in the light of the kerosene lamps, remembering that the actual life drama I had just been reading about had been constructed with equally vivid raw materials. Then turning to Rosamund’s two little daughters who came up to their mother, melting into this scene of family happiness, yawning and blinking their eyes, I said to them, “What, your mother hasn’t put you to bed yet?”

  They were taken aback and a little frightened when they nestled against their mother. My mood was improving. I could even have regaled Rosebud and Rosabelle, who were eyeing me suspiciously, with something like, “You are both blooms that have not yet faded.”

  Yet I didn’t manage to say anything until I entered the quarters reserved for receiving male guests. “Sir,” I said to Doctor Fine, “I read your son’s story with great sorrow.”

  “It has all been documented,” he replied.

  He introduced me to two semiobscured men in the darkened room. No, these gentlemen were not watches, seeing how they weren’t ticking. One was a notary, but since in murky situations like this my mind does not record things, I didn’t get what the other one did; I was more concerned with how Doctor Fine had introduced me: I was a young man destined to do great things, who was levelheaded, serious, and passionate; I could already be considered to be very close to him. There was nothing about me that smelled of those pseudo longhairs who aped characters in American films. He had great trust in me, very great.

  How quickly I identified with all the praise! I didn’t know what to do with my hands, but I wanted to look refined, so I bent my head down as befits a modest young man like me and changed the subject, all too aware that my changing the subject would be observed and appreciated.

  “How quiet it is here at night, sir,” I said.

  “Yet there’s a rustling in the mulberry tree,” said Doctor Fine, “even when the night is all quiet and there’s not even a hint of a breeze. Listen.”

  We all listened. I was more discomfited by the chilling darkness in the room than by the tree rustling out there somewhere. Listening to the silence I realized that since I had come to this house I hadn’t once heard people speak in anything but whispers.

  Doctor Fine took me aside. “We were just sitting down to play a few hands of bezique,” he said. “Now I want you to tell me, my son, which would you prefer to see? My guns, or my timepieces?”

  “I’d like to see the timepieces, sir,” I said without a thought.

  In the next room, which was even darker, all three of us were shown two old-time Zenith table models that banged away like gunshots. We saw the drawer horologe made by the Galata clockmakers’ colony, which was encased in wood, played a tune of its own accord, and had to be wound only once a week; according to Doctor Fine, there was one just like it in the harem section of the Topkapı Palace. Then we were trying to figure out in which Levantine port lived Simon S. Simonien who had made and signed the pendulum clock with the carved walnut cabinet, when we made out the words “à Smyrne” on the enameled dial. We noted that the Universal clock that sported a moon and a calendar showed the days of the full moon. When Doctor Fine took a huge key and wound the pendulum of the skeleton clock, the dial of which had been fashioned like a Mevlevi turban at the instigation of Sultan Selim the Third, we tensed, realizing that it was the inner organs of the skeleton that were being wound up. We remembered having seen and heard in so many places ever since our childhood the Junghans pendulum wall clocks that still clicked sadly like caged canaries in so many houses. It gave us shivers to see the locomotive and under it the words Made in USSR on the dial of the crude Serkisof clock.

  “For our people, the ticking of clocks is not just a means of apprising the mundane, but the resonance that brings us in line with our inner world, like the sound of splashing water in fountains in the courtyards of our mosques,” Doctor Fine said. “We pray five times a day; then in Ramadan, we have the time for iftar, the breaking of fast at sundown, and the time for sahur, the meal taken just before sunup. Our timetables and timepieces are our vehicles to reach God, not the means of rushing to keep up with the world as they are in the West. There never was a nation on earth as devoted to timepieces as we have been; we were the greatest patrons of European clock makers. Timepieces are the only product of theirs that has been acceptable to our souls. That is why clocks are the only things other than guns that cannot be classified as foreign or domestic. For us there are two venues that lead to God. Armaments are the vehicles of Jihad; timepieces are the vehicles for prayer. They have managed to silence our guns. Now they have hatched these trains so that our time will also be silenced. Everyone knows that the greatest enemy of the timetable for prayers is the timetable for trains. My dead son was well aware of this fact, and that’s why he spent months on buses to retrieve our lost time. Those who wanted to estrange him from me used the bus to take the life of my son and heir, but Doctor Fine is not naïve enough to be duped by their machinations. Remember this: when our people get some money together, the first thing they buy is always a watch.”

  Perhaps Doctor Fine was going to continue whispering his harangue, but he was interrupted by an English-made ormolu Prior clock fitted with an enameled dial, ornamented with ruby roses, and graced by the sound of a nightingale, which began to play the melody of the old Ottoman song, “My Scribe.”

  While his bezique buddies pricked their ears to the sweet song about the scribe’s excursion to Üsküdar, Doctor Fine whispered into my ear: “Have you come to a decision, my child?”

  At the same instant I saw through the open door in the next room Janan’s shimmering reflection in the mirror on the console, and I was distracted.

  “I need to do some more work in the archives, sir,” I said.

  I said it in order to avoid making a decision rather than in the hope of coming to one. I was passing through the next room when I felt the eyes of the three roses on me, the fastidious Rosebud, high-strung Rosabelle, and Rosamund who had come back from putting her daughters to bed. How curious and how determined were Janan’s honey-colored eyes! I felt as if I had achieved something important, as I suspect
many a man feels when he is associated with a beautiful and lively woman.

  Yet how far I was from being that man! Here I was, sitting in Doctor Fine’s archives, with files upon files of intelligence reports in front of me, and having jealously internalized the beauty of Janan’s visage augmented by the mirror on the console in the other room, I was turning the pages rapidly with the hope that my increasing jealousy might finally impel me to come to a decision.

  I did not have to continue my research for too long. After the funeral of the luckless youth from Kayseri whom Doctor Fine had buried believing that he was his son, he had phased out the remaining old watches Movado, Omega, and Serkisof, and Zenith was dead. Seiko, the most reliable and timely of the new watches Doctor Fine had hired in order to track down every soul who had ever read the book, had managed to put his finger on a certain Mehmet and his girlfriend Janan, students of architecture whom he had come across during his forays into the student dormitories, cafés, clubs, and school lounges in the hope of encountering someone who was familiar with the book. His discovery had taken place sixteen months earlier. It was in the spring. Janan and Mehmet were in love, and they carried a book which they read to each other intimately. They had no clue as to the existence of Seiko, who continued to watch them, even though not too closely, for some eight months.

  Seiko had submitted to Doctor Fine twenty-two reports, written at random intervals during the eight months from the time he discovered the pair until I read the book and Mehmet was shot at the minibus stop. It was with patience and mounting jealousy that I read these reports again and again, way past the midnight hour, trying to absorb the poisonous conclusions I drew by virtue of the logic provided by the archive where I was working.

  1. What Janan told me looking out the window in Room 19 where we spent the night in the town of Güdül, saying something to the effect that no man had ever touched her, was not true. Seiko, who had followed them not only in the spring but also throughout the summer when he had observed the two young people go into the hotel where Mehmet worked, had determined that they had stayed in his room for many hours. It’s not that I did not suspect this, but when someone else has witnessed what we merely suspected, and has written it down, one feels even more foolish.

  2. No one including Seiko had suspected that Mehmet might be the new identity Nahit assumed after closing out his former life, not his father, not the management at the hotel where he worked, not the registrar’s office at the school of architecture.

  3. The lovers displayed no social anomaly to attract attention other than their being in love. If the last ten days of Seiko’s surveillance were discounted, they had not even attempted to pass their copy of the book to others. Besides, they did not read the book all the time, which was the reason why Seiko had not made a point of watching what it was that they did with the book. They appeared to be a couple of university students headed for an ordinary marital life. Their association with classmates was well-balanced, their grades fine, their enthusiasms prudent. They had no relationship with any political group, and had no zealous involvement that was worth noting. Seiko had even written that, among all those who had read the book, Mehmet was the most even-tempered, the least obsessive and passionate of the lot. Perhaps that was why Seiko was caught by surprise later; he might even have been pleased with the way things turned out.

  4. Seiko envied them. When I made comparisons with his other reports, I initially noticed that he described Janan in language that was overly considered and poetic. “Reading the book, the young woman knits her brows delicately, and her countenance assumes a limpid grace and dignity.” “She then made the gesture that is special to her, pulling her hair with one tiny swoop behind her ears.” “Sometimes if she is reading the book standing in line at the cafeteria, she sticks out her upper lip slightly, and her eyes begin to glimmer so, one imagines two large teardrops may appear any moment in the corners of those beautiful eyes.” And what about these astonishing lines? “Well, sir, the young woman’s visage over the book became so tender after a half hour’s reading, and the expression on her face was so strange and unparalleled, that for a moment I thought the magical light did not stream in the windows but surged from the pages of the book into this angelic countenance.” In contrast to Janan’s celestial virtues the young man in her company was seen as being too much of the world. “This thing is nothing more than an affair of the heart between the daughter of a fine family and a penniless young man whose antecedents are obscure.” “Our young man is forever the one who’s more cautious, anxious, and parsimonious.” “The young woman has the inclination to open up to friends, to get close to them, and even to share the book, but the hotel clerk keeps her in check.” “Obviously he avoids her circle of friends because he himself comes from a low-class family.” “Come to think of it, it’s hard to imagine what the young woman sees in this cold and lackluster fellow.” “He is far too arrogant for a mere hotel clerk.” “He’s one of those crafty people who manage to seem wise because they’re tight-lipped and uncommunicative.” “Effete upstart!” “He has nothing to recommend him, I must say.” I was beginning to like this Seiko. If only I could rely on his accuracy. He did, however, persuade me of something else.

  5. How happy they were! After class, they went up to a Beyoğlu theater, and they held hands all through a movie called Endless Nights. They sat at a corner table in the student canteen, watching people and talking animatedly to each other. Always together, whether window shopping in uptown Beyoğlu, or taking the bus, or going to class and on outings throughout the city, or sitting up on stools at sandwich bars, knee to knee, watching themselves eat their sandwiches in the mirror; and there they are again, reading the book the young woman has pulled out of her tote bag. And then there was that summer’s day! Seiko began following Mehmet from the moment he left the hotel; and then observing him meet Janan, who was carrying a plastic bag, he assumed that something was up and took off after them. They rode the ferry to Princess Island, rented a rowboat and went swimming; they hired a hansom cab, had corn on the cob and ice cream; and when they got back to town, they went up to the young man’s room. It was difficult reading all this. They had spats and their share of arguments, and at times Seiko read these as bad signs, but until the fall there had been no real strain between them.

  6. Seiko must have been the person who pulled the gun out of the pink plastic bag and shot Mehmet on that snowy December day in the vicinity of the minibus stop. But I was not entirely sure of it. Yet his anger and jealousy attested to that. Remembering the image of the shadowy person whom I’d seen out of the window sprinting away through the snow-covered park, I imagined Seiko must be around thirty years old, an ambitious officer who was a graduate of the police academy, who moonlighted doing private investigation jobs in order to supplement his income, someone who considered students of architecture “effete.” Well then, what was his assessment of me?

  7. I was an abject victim of entrapment. Seiko had reached this conclusion so handily that he had even felt somewhat sorry for me. And yet he had been unable to deduce that the source of the strain between the young woman and the young man had been Janan’s desire to do something with the book. But then, it must have been on Janan’s insistence that they decided to draft someone into whose hands they would put the book. They had looked over the students in the halls of the Technical University like headhunters for a private firm sifting through the talent pool for the right candidate to fill a vacant position. It was not at all clear why I was the one they had chosen. But soon Seiko had accurately determined that they had indeed been watching me, following me, and talking about me. Then, the scene of my falling into the trap had gone even more easily than their singling me out. How easy? Well, Janan had walked close to me several times in the hallway, carrying the book in her hand. She had once given me a sweet smile. Then it was with great relish that she had indeed set me up: She had become aware of me watching her in line at the canteen, and pretending that she had to put down what
she had in her hand so that she could rifle through her bag for her wallet, she had placed the book on the table before me; and after ten seconds or so, her delicate hand had spirited it away. Then assured that I, the poor fish, had taken the bait, the two of them had placed the book free of charge at the sidewalk stall which they had already determined was on my route, so that I would see the book on my way home and recognizing it bemusedly—“Ah, there’s that book!”—I would buy it. Which is exactly what happened. Saddened by the situation on my account, Seiko accurately made this observation about me: “a dreamy kid with nothing special to recommend him.”

  Not only did I not mind it too much, since he had pretty much the same assessment of Mehmet, I even found enough consolation in it to work up the courage to ask myself this question: Why had I not ever confessed to myself that I had bought and read the book as a means of getting to the beautiful girl?