The New Life

by Orhan Pamuk

  Even so, although I fluctuated between admiring him enough to emulate him and wanting to finish him off in order to possess Janan, I thought for a moment I’d tell him that the madman who was having the author and the readers of the book killed was none other than his own father, Doctor Fine. I wanted to inflict this pain on him, just because I felt oppressed, that’s all. But I didn’t tell him. All right, all right, I thought to myself; you never know, of course; don’t upset the apple cart.

  He must have had an inkling of my thoughts, or at least picked up some sort of vague echo concerning them, so he related to me the story of the bus accident that had led him to shake off the men his father had set after him. His face lit up for the first time. He had known at once that the young man sitting next to him on the bus that was covered in black ink had died in the accident. He had picked the identification card out of the pocket of this youth whose name was Mehmet and appropriated it. When the bus began to go up in flames, he got out. After the fire died down, he had this bright idea. He slipped his own identification card into the pocket of the burned body, and moving it into his own seat, he fled away to his new life. His eyes gleamed like a kid’s when he was telling me about all this; but, naturally, I kept it to myself that I saw the same joyous face now as in his childhood photographs that I had seen in the museum his father had dedicated to his memory.

  Another silence, and silence, and silence. Waiter, bring us some stuffed eggplant.

  Just to pass the time, you know. For the hell of it, we went into generalizing on the topic of our situation, that is, our lives, his eye on his watch, my eye on his, expressing back and forth this sort of stuff: Well, life was like that. Actually, everything was quite simple. A fanatical old guy who wrote for the railway magazine and who despised bus travel and bus accidents had written some sort of a book, inspired by the children’s comics he had penned himself. Then, some years later, optimistic young men such as ourselves who had read those comics in our childhood happened to read the book, and believing that our whole lives were changed from top to bottom, we slipped off the course of our lives. The magic in this book! The miracle of life! How had it happened?

  I mentioned once more that I had known Railman Uncle Rıfkı in my childhood.

  “Seems strange to hear that, somehow,” he said.

  But we knew nothing was strange. Everything was like that, and that’s how everything was.

  “It’s even more so in the town of Viran Bağ,” said my dear mate.

  This must have jogged my memory. “You know,” I said, deliberately enunciating each syllable and staring in his face, “many times I was under the impression that the book was about me, that the story was my story.”

  Silence. Death rattle of a soul giving up the ghost, a tavern, a town, a world. Clattering of knives and forks. Evening news on TV. Twenty-five more minutes.

  “You know,” I said again, “I have come across New Life brand caramels in many places during my Anatolian sojourn. Many years ago, they were available in Istanbul too. But they are still out there in remote places, in the bottom of tin boxes and candy jars.”

  “You are really after the Original Cause, aren’t you?” said my rival, who had had his fill of scenes from the other life. “You are questing for things that are pure, uncorrupted, and clear. But there is no prime mover. It’s futile to search for the key, the word, the source, the original of which we are all mere copies.”

  So it was no longer because I wanted to possess Janan, but because he did not believe in you, O Angel, that on my way to the station I contemplated plugging him.

  For some reason he broke the fractured silences by saying some things, but I could not even give my undivided attention to this good-looking sorrowful man.

  “When I was a kid, reading seemed like a career to me which one might take up someday in the future along with other professions.

  “Rousseau, who worked as a music copyist, knew what it meant to write over and over what other people had created.”

  Presently, not only the silences but everything else also seemed fractured. Someone had turned off the TV and tuned the radio to an intensely melancholic song about love-sickness and separation. How many times in one’s life has mutual silence given one such pleasure? He had just asked for the bill when a middle-aged uninvited guest plopped himself down at our table and looked me over. When he understood I was Osman’s army buddy Osman, “We are very fond of our Osman here,” he said, making conversation. “So you were army buddies!” Then carefully, as if he were revealing a secret, he mentioned a customer who had turned up for a handwritten copy of the book. When I realized my clever companion paid a commission to go-betweens such as this one, once more, for the last time, I realized you had to love the guy.

  I assumed the parting scene, aside from the report of my Walther, would go along the lines of the conclusion in Pertev and Peter, but it turned out I was wrong. In that final adventure, when the two bosom friends who have gone through many a battle together realize that they are in love with the same girl with the same goal, they sit down and solve the problem amicably. Pertev, who is more sensitive and taciturn, knows that the girl will be happier with Peter whose nature is optimistic and outgoing, so he quietly relinquishes the girl to Peter; and, accompanied by sniffling from teary-eyed readers like me, the heroes take their leave of each other at the train station which they had once heroically defended. In our case, we had a literary agent sitting between us who didn’t give two hoots about outpourings of sensitivity or spleen.

  Together, the three of us walked to the station. I bought my ticket. I picked out a couple of savory buns like those I had in the morning. Pertev had them weigh for me a kilo of the famous large white grapes grown in Viran Bağ. While I selected some humor magazines, he went into the can to wash the grapes. The agent and I stared at each other. The train took two days to arrive in Istanbul. When Pertev returned, the stationmaster signaled the go-ahead with a firm but graceful gesture that reminded me of my father. We kissed each other on the cheeks and parted.

  The rest was more in keeping with the suspense videotapes Janan loved watching on the bus, rather than with Uncle Rıfkı’s comics. The frenzied young man who has made up his mind to kill for love flings the plastic bag full of wet grapes and the magazines into a corner in the compartment, and before the train gathers speed, he leaps out of the railway car on the farthest side of the platform. Making sure he has not been observed, he stays at a distance and watches with eagle eyes his victim and Mr. Ten Percent. The two talk for a while and then amble together through the sad and deserted streets before taking leave of each other in front of the post office. The killer observes his victim go into the New World Theater, and he lights a cigarette. We never know what the killer is thinking in this genre of film, but we watch him throw down the cigarette he has finished smoking, as I just did, and step on the butt, buy a ticket for the feature called Endless Nights, and walk into the theater with steps that appear confident, but before he enters the hall, we see him check out the bathroom, making sure he has an escape route.

  The rest was fractured like the silences that accompany the night. I pulled out my Walther, released the safety, and entered the theater hall where the film was playing. It was hot and humid in there, and the ceiling was low. My silhouette carrying the gun appeared on the screen and the Technicolor film was projected on my purple jacket. The light from the projector glared into my eyes, but the seats were fairly empty, so I immediately located my victim.

  Perhaps he was surprised, perhaps he did not understand, perhaps he didn’t recognize me, perhaps he had expected it, but he stayed seated.

  “You find someone of my ilk, you give him a book you make sure he will read, you cause him to slip off the course of his life,” I said, but more to myself.

  To make completely sure I hit him, I fired three times at point blank range into his chest and his face which I could not see. Following the Walther’s report, I announced to the viewers sitting in the dar
k, “I killed a man.”

  While I was walking out of there, still watching my own silhouette on the screen and Endless Nights playing all around it, someone kept shouting, “Projectionist! Projectionist.”

  I boarded the first bus out of town, where I considered many a life-and-death question. I also wondered why in our language the same French loanword, makinist, designates both the person who runs films and the person who runs railway engines.

  14

  I changed buses twice, spending the sleepless night of the assassin, and then, in the cracked mirror of a rest-stop washroom, caught a glimpse of myself. No one would believe me if I said the person I saw in the mirror resembled the ghost of the assassinated more than he did the assassin. But the inner peace that the one now dead had found through writing was very far indeed from the one in the washroom, the one later riding on restlessly, carried along over the wheels of a bus.

  Early in the morning before returning to Doctor Fine’s mansion I went into the town barbershop and had a haircut and a shave, so that I might present myself to my Janan in the guise of the good-natured and dauntless young man who for the sake of building a happy family nest had gone through many an ordeal successfully and had come face to face with death. When I set foot on Doctor Fine’s property and saw the windows of the mansion, the thought of Janan waiting for me in her warm bed set my heart pounding, thump-thump, for two measures, and a sparrow in the plane tree went twitter-twitter in counterpoint.

  Rosebud opened the door. I didn’t register the surprise on her face, perhaps because only half a day before I had bumped off her brother in the middle of a movie. Maybe that was why I hadn’t noticed her raising her troubled eyebrows, why I hardly listened to what she was saying; instead, as if I were in my own father’s house, I walked directly to our room, the room where I had left my Janan in her sickbed. I opened the door without knocking so that I could surprise my sweetheart. When I saw that the bed in the corner was unoccupied, completely empty, I began to understand what Rosebud had been telling me as I entered the room.

  Janan had burned with a fever for three whole days, but then she had recuperated. When she was up and about, she had gone down to town and made a phone call to Istanbul, talked to her mother, and when there was no word from me for several days she had suddenly decided to go home.

  My eyes stared out of the window of the unoccupied room at the mulberry tree in the backyard shimmering in the morning light, but now and then I couldn’t help glancing back at the bed, which had been meticulously made. The copy of the Güdül Post she had used like a fan on the way here had been placed on the deserted bed. A voice inside me declared that my Janan had already understood that I was a lousy murderer, and that I would never see her again, so I might just as well close the door and throw myself on the bed that still smelled of Janan and cry my eyes out until I fell asleep. Another voice spoke in opposition to the first one, saying a killer must act like a killer and behave coldbloodedly and without undue agitation: Janan was undoubtedly waiting for me at her parents’ place in Nişantaşı. Before leaving the room, I saw that treacherous mosquito at the edge of the windowsill and, yes, I dispatched it with one swipe of my hand. I was sure the blood in the mosquito’s belly which was smeared on the love line in my palm must be Janan’s sweet blood.

  I had to get together with Janan back in Istanbul, but before beating it out of the mansion in the heart of the counterplot against the Great Conspiracy, I thought it would be beneficial and in the interests of Janan’s and my future together to see Doctor Fine. Doctor Fine was sitting at a table placed a little past the mulberry tree, where he was eating a bunch of grapes with much gusto, looking up from the book in front of him at the hills where we had hiked together.

  Placid as a pair of people who have all the time in the world, he and I talked about life’s cruelty, about how nature actually determined man’s fate surreptitiously, about the way serenity and stillness were instilled into the human heart by the compressed concept we called time, about how one could not relish the pleasure of even these juicy grapes unless one exercised great willpower and resolution, about the high level of consciousness and desire necessary to reach the source of real life that was free of any trace of travesty, and whether it was a sign of the great order in the universe or the ludic manifestation of some random coincidence which had brought a humble porcupine to scurry past us rustling. Killing a man must endow one with maturity; I was able to link the admiration that I continued to feel for Doctor Fine, much to my amazement, with the feeling of sympathy and tolerance that suddenly rose from the depths of my being like a latent disease. For this reason, when he suggested that I accompany him on his visit to the grave of his dead son, I was able to refuse him firmly without offending him: The long days of concentrated effort had really tuckered me out; I should by all means go back home to my wife and rest up, during which time I must pull my wits together and decide whether to accept the great responsibility that he had offered to me.

  When Doctor Fine inquired if I had had a chance to try out the present he had given me, I told him I had certainly put the Walther to a test and was terribly pleased with its performance; then remembering the Serkisof watch in my pocket, I pulled it out. I placed it next to the golden bowl that held the grapes, conveying to him that this was the expression of the respect and admiration that a dealer with a broken heart and broken teeth felt for him.

  “All these heartsick unfortunates, these wretches, these weaklings!” he said, casting a sidelong glance at the watch. “They want to live the life they are accustomed to and keep their cherished objects. For that end, they bond themselves passionately to someone like me. Just because I give them hope for a just world! How cruel the external powers have proved to be in their determination to destroy our lives and our memories! Before you make your decision back in Istanbul, consider how you might be able to help with these people’s broken lives.”

  I considered for a moment the prospect of finding Janan in Istanbul quickly, sweet-talking her back here to the mansion, where we might live happily ever after in the heart of the Great Counterconspiracy …

  “Before returning to your charming wife,” Doctor Fine said, employing the language of French novels in translation, “please divest yourself of that purple jacket that makes you look more like an assassin than a hero, eh?”

  I immediately headed back by bus to Istanbul. Morning prayer was being called when my mother opened the door; I offered her no word of explanation about the Eldorado I had been seeking nor her angelic daughter-in-law.

  “Don’t you ever leave your mother like that!” she said, turning on the gas heater and running hot water in the bathtub.

  We breakfasted quietly as in the old days, mother and son. I realized my mother, like many mothers whose sons are swept into political and fundamentalist currents, was keeping her mouth shut, thinking I had been attracted to some magnetic pole in the hinterland, and that if she asked, I might tell her something that would terrify her. When my mother’s quick and light hand rested for a moment next to the red currant jam, I saw the spots on the back of her hand, making me think I had returned to my old life. Was it possible for everything to go on as if nothing had happened?

  After breakfast I sat at my desk and looked for a long time at the book, which was open at the place where I had left it. But what I was doing could not be called reading, it was something more like remembering, or some kind of suffering …

  I was just leaving to go find Janan when my mother accosted me.

  “Swear you’ll be back by nightfall.”

  I did. I swore for two whole months every time I left home in the morning, but Janan could be found nowhere. I went to Nişantaşı, I pounded the streets, waited in front of their door, I rang their bell, I crossed bridges, took ferryboats, went to the movies, made phone calls, but I got no word. I convinced myself she would show up at Taşkışla Hall when classes started at the end of October, but she did not come. I walked the hallways in the buildin
g all day long; sometimes, thinking that a shadow which looked like hers went by the windows that looked on the hallway, I bolted out of class and broke into a run, and sometimes I went into a vacant classroom and lost in thought watched the foot traffic on the sidewalk and in the street.

  It was on the day central heating was first turned on and people lit their stoves that, armed with a scenario that I had cleverly concocted, I rang the doorbell of my “missing classmate’s” parents’ apartment, and I managed to disgrace myself totally giving them the bullshit I had prepared in great detail. Not only did they not provide me with any information on Janan’s whereabouts, they offered no clue as to where any information might be obtained. Even so, on the second visit I made to their place one Sunday afternoon when color TV was amiably gurgling away with a soccer match, I deduced from their attempt to get information out of me by questioning my motives that they knew a lot they were not telling. I got nowhere trying to pump information out of their relatives whose names I located in the phone book. The only conclusion that could be drawn from the conversations I had with all the testy uncles, inquisitive aunts, cautious maids, and snotty nephews and nieces was that Janan was at the university studying architecture.

  As to her classmates in the school of architecture, they had long come to believe the myths they had dreamed up themselves in connection with Janan as well as with the news of Mehmet being shot in the vicinity of the minibus stop. I heard some say that Mehmet had been shot due to some settling of accounts between the dope pushers at the hotel where he worked, and I also heard it whispered that he had fallen victim to fanatic fundamentalists. There were those who said that Janan had been sent to school somewhere in Europe, a stratagem upper-class families often resort to with daughters who fall for some shady character, but the bit of investigative work I did at the registrar’s office proved that this was not the case.