The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  Quite a while later I watched the lottery being drawn from a purple pouch; then the winning number was announced. A toothless old man leapt up on the stage, overjoyed. The angel, who was wearing the same two-piece bathing suit and a bridal veil, congratulated him. Without further ado, the man who sold the tickets showed up with a huge chandelier in his hand.

  “My God!” cried the toothless old man. “It’s the Pleiades with Seven Branches!”

  Listening to the audience in the back shouting their protests, I realized the same man must win the lottery every time, and the chandelier must be the same one that reappeared every evening under its plastic wraps.

  The angel had in her hand a cordless microphone, or some sort of fake microphone that did not amplify her voice. “What are your feelings?” she said. “How does it feel to be so lucky? Are you excited?”

  “I am very excited, very happy, God bless you!” the old man said to the microphone. “Life is something beautiful. Despite all the troubles and sorrows that abound, I am neither afraid nor ashamed of being so happy.”

  A few people applauded him.

  “Where are you going to hang your chandelier?” asked the angel.

  “This was a stroke of fortune,” said the old man, leaning over the microphone as if it were viable. “I am in love. Also my fiancée loves me very much. We will soon get married and move into our new house. That’s where we will hang this piece with seven branches.”

  Some applause was offered. Then I heard shouts of “Kiss, kiss.”

  Everyone fell silent when the angel bussed the old man on the cheeks. The old man took advantage of the silence and slipped away carrying the chandelier.

  “But the rest of us never win anything!” said an angry voice in the back.

  “Quiet!” said the angel. “Now listen to me.” The same odd silence that had ensued during the kiss again fell over the audience. “Your lucky number too will come up one of these days, don’t you forget it! Your hour of happiness will also strike,” the angel said. “Do not become impatient, do not be cross with your life, cease and desist envying others! If you learn to love your life, you will know the course of action you are to take for your happiness. Whether you have lost your way or not, you will see me then.” She raised one eyebrow seductively. “After all, the Angel of Desire is here every evening, here in the charming town of Viran Bağ!”

  The magical lighting that illuminated her went down. A naked light bulb lit up. Keeping a distance between myself and my quarry, I left with the crowd. The wind had risen. I looked left and right; there was a bottleneck up ahead, so I found myself standing a couple of steps behind him.

  “How was it, Osman? Did you enjoy it?” said a man who was wearing a melon hat.

  “Oh, so-so,” said he. He sped along, his newspaper tucked under his arm.

  Why had I never considered the possibility that he would resign his identity as Mehmet just as he had fled from being Nahit? And what about this particular name he’d adopted for his new pseudonym? If I could have considered it, would I have considered it? I didn’t even consider it. I stayed behind, waiting for him to put some distance between us. I took pains studying his lean body with a slight stoop. Yes, this was the guy all right, the one with whom my Janan was madly in love. I began to follow him.

  The town of Viran Bağ had more streets lined with trees than any of the small towns where I had been. My quarry was moving right along; when he came to a street light, he seemed to step onto a dimly lit stage; then, approaching a chestnut or linden tree, he would vanish into a darkness where the leaves and the wind were in commotion. We went past the town square, past the New World Theater, went through a strip of neon lights that belonged to the pastry shop, post office, pharmacy, teahouse which cast consecutively a pale yellow, then sort of orange, then blue, then reddish hue on my quarry’s white shirt; and presently we entered an alley. When I became aware of the impeccable perspective presented by the three-story row houses, the street lights, and the rustling trees, I shivered with the thrill of the chase which I imagined was a turn-on for all those Serkisof, Zenith, and Seiko types, and I began to approach my quarry’s undistinctive white shirt quickly with the object of getting the job done.

  Then all hell broke loose, there was a crash; I was forced to skulk into a corner, unnerved for a moment, fearing that one of those watches was tailing me. But it was only a window that had slammed in the wind, smashing the pane; and my quarry turned around in the dark and paused briefly; I assumed he was going to proceed without having seen me when, before I could even release my Walther’s safety, he suddenly pulled out his key, opened the door, and disappeared into one of the row houses. I waited around until a light went on in a window on the second floor.

  Then I took stock of myself, feeling all alone in the world like a murderer, or an aspiring murderer. One street down from the street that had respectfully submitted to the rules of perspective, the modest neon letters of the Ease Inn swayed back and forth in the wind, promising me a little patience, a little advice, a little peace, a bed, and a long night in which to think over my life, my decision to become a killer, and my Janan. There was no help for it but to go in, and I asked for a room with a TV just because the clerk had inquired if I wanted one.

  I went in the room and turned on the TV; when the black-and-white picture came on, I told myself I had made a good choice. I would not be spending the night with the abjectness of an incorrigible murderer, but I would be in the company of my black-and-white friends gleefully joshing away because they rubbed people out so often they considered it trivial. I increased the volume. I felt relieved when men with pistols started to yell at each other, and American-make cars began to speed along, gliding into the curves in the road; I looked out on the world outside my window, calmly watching the chestnut trees snarling in the wind.

  I was nowhere and everywhere; and that is why it seemed to me I was in the nonexistent center of the world. From the window of my cutesy-cute and deadly-dead hotel room which was located in this center, I could see the lights in the room of the man I wanted to kill. I could not actually see him, but I was pleased that he was over there for now, and I was over here for the night; besides, my friends on TV had already commenced spraying each other with bullets. A little while after my quarry’s lights went out, I too dropped off to sleep without reflecting on the meaning of life, love, and the book, but listening to the sound of gunshots.

  In the morning I got up, bathed, shaved, and left without turning off the TV set, which was forecasting rain for the entire country. I had neither checked my Walther nor checked myself in the mirror with irritation like some young man inducing himself to kill for love and the love of a book. In my purple jacket I must have looked like an optimistic university student, traveling from town to town during his summer vacation, trying to sell door to door the New World Encyclopedia. A university student who fit the description would expect to have a long chat on life and literature with a bibliophile he chanced upon in the provinces, would he not? I had already known for some time that I couldn’t kill him right off the bat. I went up a flight of stairs, I rang the bell, rrringg! but no, some electrical mechanism went twitter-twitter, imitating a canary. The latest fads somehow make their way even to towns like Viran Bağ, and killers find their victims even if they have to go to the ends of the earth. In situations like this in films, victims assume an attitude that implies their omniscience and say, “I knew you would come.” But it didn’t happen like that.

  He was amazed. Yet he was not amazed by his amazement but experienced it as something not quite out of the ordinary. His face had nice features, all right, although not as deeply meaningful as I had imagined they would be on this occasion, and he was indeed—oh, all right—handsome.

  “Osman, I have come,” I said.

  Silence.

  Then we both composed ourselves. He looked at me for a moment and then at the door with embarrassment, as if he had no intention of letting me in, and he said, “Let�
�s leave together.”

  He put on a dun-colored jacket which was not bullet-proof, and together we stepped out into the street which was an excuse for a street. A distrustful dog on the sidewalk looked us over and the turtledoves on top of a chestnut tree fell silent. Look, Janan, we two have become good friends! He was slightly shorter than me and I was thinking that there must be something in my walking style that was reminiscent of his, which is the most obvious personal attribute of guys like us—that is, the confluence of the way the shoulders go up and down and the forward motion of the strides—when he asked me if I had eaten anything by way of breakfast. Would I like something to eat? There was a café at the station. How about some tea?

  He bought a couple of warm savory buns at the bakery, stopped by a grocery and had a quarter pound of kaşar cheese sliced and wrapped in wax paper. Presently, we were hailed by the angel in the poster on the circus entrance. We went in the café, where he ordered two teas; we stepped out the back door into a courtyard garden with a view of the station and sat down. The turtledoves, which had perched either in the chestnut tree or in the eaves, kept right on sighing without paying us any heed. The cool morning air was soft, it was silent, and in the distance there was music on a radio that was barely audible.

  “Every morning before I begin working, I come and have my tea here,” he said as he unwrapped the cheese. “This place is nice in the spring. And also when it’s snowing. In the morning I like watching the crows walk in the snow on the platform, and the trees lined with snow. The other nice café is the Homeland on the square, a good-size place which has a large stove that gives a lot of heat. I read my paper there, listen to the radio if it’s on, and sometimes I just sit there, doing nothing.

  “My new life is ordered, disciplined, and punctual … Every morning I leave the café before nine and return to my worktable. By the time the clock strikes nine, I will have my coffee prepared and already be hard at work, writing. What I do might appear simple, but it requires great care. I keep rewriting the book without missing a single comma, a single letter, or a period. I want everything to be identical, right down to the last period and comma. And this can only be achieved through inspiration and desire that is analogous to the original author’s. Someone else might call what I do copying, but my work goes beyond simple duplication. Whenever I am writing, I feel and I understand every letter, every word, every sentence as if each and every one were my own novel discovery. So, this is how I work arduously from nine in the morning until one o’clock, doing nothing else, and nothing can keep me from working. I generally put out better work in the morning.

  “Then I go out for lunch. There are two restaurants in this town. Asım’s place tends to be crowded. The food in the Railway Restaurant is heavy and the place serves alcohol. I go in one sometimes, and sometimes the other. And there are times when I have some bread and cheese at some café, and times I don’t leave home at all. I never have anything alcoholic at noon. I might have a little nap sometimes, but that’s all. The important thing is to sit down to work by two-thirty. I work straight through to six-thirty or seven. If the work is going well, I may keep at it even longer. If one likes what he is writing and is pleased with his vocation, he should not miss the opportunity to write all he can. Life is short, this is how things are, and you know the rest. Don’t let your tea get cold now.

  “After a day’s work, I view with satisfaction whatever I have done, and I go out again. I like to chat with a couple of people while I look through the papers or catch some TV. It is a necessity for me because I live alone and intend to continue living alone. I like to meet people, chew the fat, toss down a few, hear a couple of stories, and perhaps even tell one. Then I sometimes go to the movies, or see some program on TV; there are some evenings when I play cards at the coffeehouse, and others when I return home early, bringing the daily papers with me.”

  “You were at the tent theater last night,” I said.

  “These people showed up about a month ago and stayed on. Some of the townspeople still go to see them.”

  “The woman there,” I said, “she looked a little like an angel.”

  “She is no angel,” he said. “She sleeps with the town biggies, and any soldier boy who comes up with the cash. Got that?”

  There was silence. The expression “Got that?” swept me away from the easy chair of sarcastic anger where I had been luxuriating with the hedonism of a drunk and placed me on a hard and uncomfortable wooden chair where I was perched uneasily in a garden overlooking the train station.

  “What it says in the book,” he said, “is all behind me now.”

  “But you are still writing the book all day,” I said.

  “I do it for the money.”

  He said it without seeming to feel either victorious or ashamed, but more as if he were apologizing for having to spell it out. He was writing the book over and over into ordinary school notebooks in longhand. Since he worked eight to ten hours a day on the average, hitting about three pages per hour, he was done with a handwritten edition of a three-hundred-page book within ten days, easy. There were people here who paid “reasonable” wages for this sort of labor, such as notables in town, traditionalists, folks who liked him, those who admired his effort, conviction, devotion, patience, or felt a kind of happiness that a fool who insisted on his folly lived contentedly among themselves … What’s more, the fact that he had dedicated his life to such a modest enterprise had created around him unwittingly—and he said this with great hesitation—a “flimsy legend” of sorts. They respected him, perceiving in his work an aspect—he too said “how shall I put it?”—which was sacred.

  He explained all this at my insistence in response to my probing questions; otherwise, he didn’t at all appear to enjoy talking about himself. After speaking of his gratitude to his customers, the goodwill of enthusiasts who bought handwritten versions of the book, and the respect they accorded him, he said, “Anyway, I am providing them with a service. I offer them something that’s real. A book written by hand word for word, written with conviction, body and soul. They compensate me with a day’s wages for a day’s work. In the final reckoning, everyone’s life goes along the same lines.”

  We were silent. Eating the fresh savory bun with the slices of kaşar cheese, I thought his life had now fallen into place; his life was, to quote the book, “on track.” Like me, he had set out on the road that began with the book, but through his quest, the voyages and adventures replete with death, love, and disaster, he had achieved what I could not; he had found the equilibrium where things would remain in stasis for good; he had discovered his inner peace. I was taking careful bites of the slices of cheese and relishing the last swallow of tea in the bottom of the tea glass, when I sensed that he must repeat daily his routine of small gestures involving his hands, fingers, mouth, chin, and head. The composure that came from the equilibrium he had discovered had granted him infinite time, whereas I, inquisitive and unhappy, was swinging my legs under the table.

  Jealousy towered inside me momentarily, the desire to perpetrate something evil. But I became aware of something even more dreadful. If I pulled out my gun and shot him in the pupil of his eye, I still would not have affected this man who had arrived at the stillness of eternal time through the act of writing. He would only proceed on his way, albeit in a different form, within time that was at a standstill. My restless soul which did not know respite was struggling to get somewhere or other, like some bus driver who had forgotten his destination.

  I asked him many things. His responses of “yes,” “no,” “naturally” were so short that I realized with every instance that I had already known the answer myself. He was contented with his life. He expected nothing more. He still loved the book and believed it. He felt no rancor toward anyone. He had understood the meaning of life. But he couldn’t explain what it was. He had naturally been surprised to see me. He didn’t think he could teach anything to anyone. Everyone had a life of his own and, according to him, all l
ives had equal validity. He liked solitude, but this in itself was not all that essential because he happened to enjoy company quite a lot, too. He had loved Janan very much. Yes, he had fallen in love with her. But then he had succeeded in escaping from her. He was not surprised that I had managed to find him. I was to take his deepest regards to Janan. Writing was the sole activity of his life, but not his sole happiness. He knew he had to work like everybody else. He could enjoy doing other work. Yes, if it provided a livelihood, he could do any kind of work. Looking at the world, so to speak, actually seeing the world in its true guise, gave him great pleasure.

  A locomotive was maneuvering in the station. We watched it. Our heads followed it going past us huffing and puffing, putting out great billows of smoke, elderly, tired, but still sound, making metallic noises and moaning noises like some rinky-dink municipal band.

  When the locomotive disappeared into a grove of almond trees, there was melancholy in the eyes of the man whose heart I shortly planned to plug with a bullet in hopes of finding in Janan the repose he had found in rewriting the book over and over again. Caught up for a moment in the spirit of brotherhood, I was observing the childlike pensiveness in these eyes when I understood why Janan had loved this man so very much. My perception seemed so right and true that I revered Janan for her love; but only moments later, the overly burdensome feeling of reverence gave place to a feeling of jealousy which I fell into as if tumbling down a well.

  The killer then asked his victim why he had settled on the name of Osman, which was also the killer’s name, at the time he had decided to join oblivion in this obscure little town.

  “I don’t know,” said the pseudo-Osman without noticing the clouds of jealousy in the eyes of the real Osman; then, smiling sweetly, he added, “I had immediately liked you when I first met you, perhaps that was why.”