by Orhan Pamuk
What was truly unbearable, however, was the fact that while I was gazing at Janan with open admiration, staring at her without even being aware that I was staring, while the book lighted on my table like a timid magic bird—that is, while I was living the most entrancing moment of my life—not only was Mehmet watching the two of us, in the distance there was Seiko, watching all three of us.
“The coincidence that I loved and accepted with joy, thinking it was life itself, turns out to be mere fiction constructed by someone else,” said the hoodwinked hero, deciding to leave the room for the purpose of seeing Doctor Fine’s arsenal. But he still had to figure out a few more things and do some more research, that is, he needed to put in another hour’s work.
I worked as hard as I could and came up with an inventory of all the young Mehmets who were seen reading the book, which had been made by Doctor Fine’s punctilious watches and the heartsick dealers all over Anatolia. Seeing that Serkisof had not disclosed our Mehmet’s surname, I ended up with a fairly long list which I did not yet know how to evaluate.
It was quite late, but I was certain Doctor Fine was waiting up for me. I walked toward the room where the games of bezique were played against the background ticking of all the clocks. Janan and Doctor Fine’s daughters had retired to their rooms, and the bezique cronies had long gone home. Doctor Fine had retreated into the farthest corner of the room, where he was reading sunk deep in an overstuffed chair as if to shield himself from the light of the kerosene lamps.
When he became aware of my presence, he slipped a letter opener inlaid with mother-of-pearl into the book he had been reading, closed it, and rose to his feet, saying he was ready and had been waiting up for me. I might want to rest a bit first, in case my eyes were too fatigued from all that reading. But he was certain that I was pleased with all that I had read and gleaned. Wasn’t life just rife with sly sonsobitches and mind-boggling happenstances? And yet he was resolved that it was his duty to bring order to all this chaos.
“The dossiers and the indexes have been prepared by Rosabelle with the care of a girl working at an embroidery frame,” he said. “As for Rosebud, it is as much a pleasure for her to direct the correspondence as it is to be a dutiful daughter, writing the letters to my obedient watches in line with my general wishes and responses. Every afternoon we take tea listening to Rosamund’s beautiful voice read us the letters we receive. Sometimes we work in this room, sometimes we move into the archive room where you have been studying. On warm spring days and in the summer, we sit for hours around the table under the mulberry tree. For a man who likes solitude as I do, those are hours spent in true happiness.”
My mind kept searching for appropriate words to praise all this love and devotion, all this care and refinement, and all this peace and order. Having seen the cover of the book he put down when he saw me, I knew he had been reading a volume of Zagor. Did he have any knowledge that Uncle Rıfkı, whose death he had ordered, had at one time attempted a nationalistic version of this illustrated novel? But I was in no mind to fuss with the finer points of these coincidences.
“May I see the guns now, sir?”
His fond response was spoken with an affectionate tone that gave me confidence: I was welcome to call him Doctor, or else Father.
Doctor Fine showed me a Browning semiautomatic pistol which had been imported by the department of internal security from Belgium in 1956 on a contract bid, explaining that until recently these had been issued only to top echelon police. Then he told me about the time the German-make Parabellum pistol, which could be converted into a rifle by virtue of the wooden holster that doubled as a stock, had gone off by accident, and the 9-millimeter bullet had pierced through two massive Hungarian draft horses, then gone in one window of the house and out the other, and lodged in the trunk of the mulberry; he went on to say that it was, however, an awkward firearm to carry. If I wanted something practical and reliable, he recommended the Smith & Wesson with a safety grip. And then there was the shiny Colt revolver that would thrill any gun enthusiast, which did not have a safety, so even if one were to freeze up, all one had to remember was to pull the trigger; and yet one might possibly feel too much like an American cowboy carrying one of these babies. So our attention was directed to a series of the German-made Walthers, which was the one make that had been successfully absorbed into our national consciousness, and its patented domestic look-alike, the Kırıkkale model. These guns were special in my eyes too by virtue of their widespread use in the last forty years, having been tried hundreds of thousands of times by gun enthusiasts ranging from army officers to night watchmen, from bread bakers to policemen, on the bodies of many a rebel, thief, Casanova, politician, and starving citizen.
On Doctor Fine’s assurance that there was nary a difference between the Walther and the Kırıkkale and after he had asserted several times that they were both part of our bodies as well as our souls, I settled on a Walther 9-millimeter with a hammer, a gun that could be easily concealed and did not need to be fired at close range to do the trick. And, of course, there was no need for me to say anything before Doctor Fine made me a present of the gun as well as a couple of clips, kissing me on the forehead, which was the fitting gesture that lightly alluded to our forefathers’ obsession with guns. He said that he still had some more work to do, but I ought to go to bed now and get my rest.
Sleep was the last thing on my mind. Walking the seventeen steps from the gun cabinet to our room, seventeen different scenarios went through my head. I had stored all of them in one corner of my mind as I read, and had at the last moment settled on the synthesis that fit in with the final scene. I remember knocking three times on the door Janan had locked, reviewing once again the wonder wrought by my mind which had been intoxicated by so much reading, but I have no notion of what that synthesis was. As soon as I knocked on the door, a voice inside me said “Password!” perhaps because I thought Janan might have asked for the password, so I came back with: “Long live the Sultan!”
When Janan turned the lock and then opened the door, I was unnerved by the expression on her face which was half-cheerful, no, half-sad, no, totally mysterious, and I felt like some amateur actor who forgets the lines he had been memorizing for weeks the moment he steps into the lights. It was not all that difficult to calculate that someone who had his wits about him would trust his instincts in a situation like this rather than trying to come up with a bunch of derelict words that he barely remembers. Which is what I did. I tried to forget that I was a prey, at best, who had fallen into a trap.
I kissed Janan on the lips like some young husband back from a long trip. Here we were at last, after all the unforeseen dangers, at home in our room. I loved her so much I thought nothing else was important. If life presented a rough spot or two, I was the seasoned traveler who had the courage to take things in my stride. Her lips smelled of mulberries. The two of us, we were the two people who were meant to hold on to each other, turning our backs on the summons of a dogmatic and unattainable life and all those who tried to distress us with their self-sacrifices, all those esteemed and passionate fools who try projecting their obsessions on the world, all the people who have slipped off the course of their lives, lured by ideas that have been thought of some place far away. When two people have shared great dreams, when they’ve been comrades from morning to night for months on end, when they’ve covered such great distances together, what could possibly be the impediment to their forgetting the world in an embrace, O Angel? And most of all, what could stop them from becoming their authentic selves and finding that unique moment of truth?
The ghost of the third lover.
Please let me again kiss you on the lips, for the ghost who remains a mere name in all those intelligence reports shuns becoming an actual person. Whereas I am here and, look, I know time is slowly running out. Look how all those highways we traveled exist as themselves without being in the least aware of us once we have traveled over them, stretching out full of themselves, made
of stones and asphalt and warmth on summer nights under the stars. Let us too, here, without further ado lie down together … Please, sweetheart, when my hands touch your beautiful shoulders, your slender and fragile arms, when I come so close to you, look how slowly and joyfully we approach that unique time so sought after by all the voyagers who travel on the bus. When I press my lips on that semitransparent skin between your ear and your hair, when the electricity of your hair gives fright to the birds that suddenly swoop past my forehead and face, raising the scent of autumn in the air, and when your breast stiffens like a stubborn bird taking wing in my palm, look, I see in your eyes how full and right is the unattainable time that reawakens between us: now we are neither here nor there, not in the land you have been dreaming about, not on some bus or in a dim hotel room somewhere, not even in some sort of future that can only exist within the pages of a book. Now we are here in this room, as if existing in a time that is open-ended, you with your sighs and I with my hurried kisses, we are holding on to each other, awaiting a miracle that might happen. A time for fullness! Embrace me, so that time will not flow away, come, embrace me, my soul, so that the miracle will not end. Please, don’t resist, but remember: the nights in bus seats when our bodies would slowly lose themselves in each other, when our dreams and our hair tangled together; remember before you turn away your lips, remember seeing the inside of houses in the back streets of small towns we passed through, our heads pressed against the cold and dark windowpane; remember all the films we watched hand in hand: the bullets that poured like rain, blondes descending staircases, all the cool dudes you so adored. Remember all the kisses we watched quietly as if we were committing a sin, forgetting a crime, dreaming of a different land. Remember those lips drawing together while the eyes were averted from the camera; remember how we were able to sit completely still for a moment even as the bus tires revolved seven and a half times per minute. But she did not remember. I kissed her hopelessly for the last time. The bed had been rumpled. Was it possible that she felt on me the hard form of the Walther? Janan had stretched out on the bed, staring at the ceiling thoughtfully as if contemplating the stars. Even so, I couldn’t help saying, “Janan, were we not happy on our bus trips? Let us go back to riding the buses.”
Of course, it made no sense.
“What were you reading?” she asked me. “What have you found out today?”
“Many things about life,” I said, using the language of dubbed films and the tone of soap operas. “Very useful things really. There are so many who have read the book, all rushing toward some place or other … Everything is confused and the light that the book inspires in people is as dazzling as death. Life is so astounding.”
I had a feeling I could go on in this vein; if I could not create miracles through love, then I could at least do it by speaking the sort of words that fascinate children. Forgive my naïveté, Angel, and the trickery I resorted to out of my need, for this was the first time in seventy days that I had felt this close to Janan, lying beside her on the bed; as anyone who has done a bit of reading knows, imitating childlike wonderment is the immediate ruse attempted by people like me who have had the doors of true love slammed in their faces. On a night it rained like a deluge as we rode from Afyon to Kütahya on a bus that leaked in torrents through the ceiling and the windows, the film we saw was False Paradise; but Seiko had recently informed me—had he not?—that Janan had watched the same film in happier and calmer circumstances a year before that, her hand in the hand of her lover.
“So who’s the angel?” she asked me now.
“Appears to be related to the book,” I said. “We are not the only ones who know about it. There are others pursuing the angel.”
“So who does the angel appear to?”
“Those who have faith in the book, those who read it with care.”
“Then what?”
“Then you keep reading until you become transformed. One morning you wake up and people who see you say, my, my, this girl has turned into an angel in the light that emanates from the book. Then it means that the angel must have been a girl all along. It makes you wonder then how such an angel could lure someone into a trap. Is it possible for angels to pull nasty stunts?”
“Don’t know.”
“I don’t either. I am also doing some thinking, and searching.” That is what I said, Angel, perhaps because I was loath to step out of line into zones of danger and uncertainty, thinking that the only piece of heaven I was sure of was the bed where I was lying next to Janan. Let the unique moment have its reign. There was a faint smell of woodwork in the room, and also a cool scent that was reminiscent of the sort of soap and chewing gum we bought when we were children but no longer do because the packaging is so poor.
I, who had neither the ability to delve deep into the book nor to rise to Janan’s level of seriousness, I felt that in the wee hours of the night I might be able to come up with the words that would mediate some points. So I told Janan that the most horrifying thing was time itself; without knowing it, we had embarked on this journey to escape time. That was the reason why we were in constant motion, looking for the moment when time stood still. Which was the unique moment of fulfillment. When we got close to it, we could sense the time of departure, our own eyes having witnessed, along with the dead and the dying, the miracle of this incredible zone. The seeds of the wisdom in the book also existed in their most childlike form in the comics we had thumbed through all morning, and it was high time we used our heads and got the point. There was nothing there, in that distant place. The beginning and the end of our journey was wherever we happened to be. He was right: the road and all the dark rooms were rife with killers carrying guns. Death seeped into life through the book, through books.
I held her, saying, Sweetheart, let’s do stay here, in this beautiful room, cherishing it. Look, a table, a clock, a lamp, a window. When we rise in the morning, the mulberry tree will be there for us to admire. So what if he is there and we are here? Here’s the windowsill, the table leg, the wick in the lamp: light and scent. The world is so simple! Do forget the book. He too wants us to forget it. To be is to be embracing you. But Janan was not having any of it.
“Where is Mehmet?”
She was looking at the ceiling with rapt attention, as if the answer to her question was inscribed there. She knit her brows. Her forehead seemed higher. Her lips twitched for a split second as if about to reveal a secret. Under the parchment-colored light in the room her skin had assumed a pink hue which I had never before seen. What with decent meals and a place to sleep in peaceful surroundings after all those nights traveling on some bus, at last Janan had some color in her face. I mentioned this to her, hoping that, like some girls who will marry out of a sudden longing for a happily settled married life, she would marry me.
“I am getting sick, that’s why,” she said. “I was chilled in the rain. I’m running a fever.”
How beautiful she was! She was stretched out and staring at the ceiling, and I was lying next to her, admiring the color in her face, keeping my hand pressed as objectively as a doctor’s on her noble forehead. My hand remained there as if to make sure she would not escape from me. I was reviewing my childhood memories, how she had completely transformed ordinary objects in the sphere of the pleasure of touch, like beds, rooms, smells. Other thoughts and calculations were also running through my head. When she turned her face slightly, her eyes questioning me, I pulled my hand away from her forehead and told her the truth.
“You do have a fever.”
Suddenly a lot of possibilities that were not part of my plans appeared before me. I went down to the kitchen at one in the morning. Negotiating among hulking pots and phantoms in the half light, I came upon a saucepan in which I made tea with the dried linden flowers I found in a jar, imagining all the while how I was going to tell Janan that the best way to ward off a cold was to crawl under the blanket with someone. And later, as I rifled through the medicine bottles on the sideboard where
Janan had directed me, looking for an aspirin, I was thinking that if I too were to get sick, then we wouldn’t have to leave the room for days. A curtain moved and some slippers sounded on the floor. The shadow of Doctor Fine’s wife appeared first and then her nervous self. “No, ma’am,” I said, “it’s nothing serious; she has just caught a cold.”
She took me upstairs. She had me take down a heavy blanket from a storage space, and slipping a duvet cover over it, she said: “The poor sweetheart, she’s an angel! Don’t give her any trouble, you hear? You take care.” Then she mentioned something else which would always stay in my mind: How beautiful was my wife’s neck!
Back in the room I gazed at her neck for a long time. Had I not noticed it before? Yes, I had and I loved it. But now the length of her neck seemed so striking, I could think of nothing else for quite some time. I watched her drink her linden tea slowly and then take her aspirin, wrapping herself in the blanket like some good-natured child expecting to “get well.”
There were long stretches of silence. Shielding my eyes with my hands, I looked out the window. The mulberry tree stirred ever so slightly. Dear One, our mulberry tree rustles even in the faintest breeze. Silence. Janan was trembling, and how quickly time was passing.
So it didn’t take long for our room to acquire that special climate and character known as a “sick room.” I paced up and down, apprehensive that the table, the glass, the side table were being gradually transformed into objects that were overly familiar, overly intimate. The hour struck three. Will you sit here next to me on the edge of the bed? she asked. I gripped her feet through the blanket. She smiled, telling me I was so sweet. She closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. No, she actually fell asleep, slept. Was she asleep? She was asleep.
I found myself pacing. Looking at the time, pouring water out of the pitcher, gazing at Janan, floundering. Taking an aspirin for the hell of it. Placing my hand on her forehead to gauge her temperature again and again whenever she opened her eyes.
