by Orhan Pamuk
15
I was so stricken one night with a terrible desire to hear the whispering that I turned off the TV, and without waking my wife who went to bed early I removed the book quietly from my night stand, and I sat down at the table where we ate our supper every evening watching TV; and I began to read the book with renewed ardor. That is how I remembered first reading the book many years ago in the same room where my daughter now slept. My desire for the same light to surge from the pages and illuminate my face was so intense, I felt for a moment the image of the new world stir inside me. I sensed some movement, some sort of urgency, a stirring that might impart the secret of the whispering that would take me to the heart of the book.
As on the night when I had first read the book, I again found myself walking in neighborhood streets. On this fall night, the streets were dark and wet; on the sidewalks there were a few people on their way home. When I reached the square at Erenköy Station, I observed the window displays of the familiar grocery stores, the ramshackle trucks, the battered tarpaulin with which the greengrocer had covered his orange and apple crates on the sidewalk, the blue light that exuded from the butcher’s window, the large old-fashioned stove in the pharmacy, and I was satisfied that everything was in its usual place. There were a couple of young men watching color TV in the student hangout where, in my university days, I used to get together with my pals from the neighborhood. As I walked through the streets, I could see the colored light of the same TV program seeping through the half-drawn curtains in the living rooms of families who were still up, light that was sometimes blue, or green, or reddish, as it was reflected on the plane trees, on the wet light poles, and on the iron railing on the balconies.
I was proceeding with my eyes on the television light emanating through half-drawn curtains when I stopped in front of Uncle Rıfkı’s old place and stared for quite some time at the windows on the second floor. I felt a momentary sense of being free and venturesome, as if Janan and I had randomly got off some bus we had taken at random. I could see in between the curtains the room lit by the light from the television set but not Uncle Rıfkı’s widow whose form I could imagine sitting in her chair. The room was lighted in keeping with the images on the screen, sometimes a gaudy pink, sometimes a ghastly yellow. I was seized by a notion that the secret of the book and my life lay there in that room.
I raised myself up peremptorily on the wall between the front yard and the sidewalk. I saw Aunt Ratibe’s head and the TV set she was watching. She had sat herself down at a forty-five degree angle to her dead husband’s empty chair, and she was watching TV with her head hunched between her shoulders just like my mother used to do, but unlike my mother she was not knitting but smoking up a storm. I watched her for quite a long time, remembering two other persons who had climbed on this wall previously and peeped in the window.
I pushed the button at the entrance which said Rıfkı Ray. The woman called down from the window that opened presently.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, Aunt Ratibe,” I said, stepping back a few steps so that she could see me in the light cast by the street lamp. “It’s me, Railman Akif’s son, Osman.”
“Heavens, it’s Osman!” she said, withdrawing inside. She pushed the buzzer and the door was opened.
She greeted me with smiles at the apartment door and kissed me on my cheeks. “Let’s have the top of your head too,” she said. When I bent my head down, she kissed me there, smelling my hair exaggeratedly as she used to do when I was a child.
Her gesture first reminded me of the sorrow she and Uncle Rıfkı shared all their lives together, the fact that they never had a child; then I remembered that ever since my mother died, for the last seven years no one had treated me as if I were a child. Suddenly I felt so at ease that as we walked in, I wanted to say something before she began to ask questions.
“Aunt Ratibe, I was going by when I saw your light; I know the hour is late, but I thought I would stop and say hello.”
“Good for you!” she said. “Take the seat across from the TV. I just can’t get to sleep at night, so I watch this stuff. See that woman at the typewriter, she’s a real snake. Terrible things keep happening to our young man, that’s the cop. These people are going to blow up the whole town … Can I get you some tea?”
But she didn’t immediately leave the room to make the tea; for a while we watched TV together. “Look at that shameless hussy,” she said, pointing at an American beauty in red. The beauty took off some of her clothes, she and some guy kissed for a long time; and we watched them make love through the clouds of cigarette smoke that Aunt Ratibe and I put out. Presently, she too vanished out of sight along with many of the cars on the screen, bridges, guns, nights, cops, and beauties. I had absolutely no recollection of seeing this flick with Janan, but I felt the memories of all the movies Janan and I had watched together flipping through my consciousness, excruciating me.
When Aunt Ratibe turned up with the tea, I realized the necessity of finding something or other in this place if I were ever to solve the secrets of the book and my broken life and thereby perhaps ease some of the pain I suffered. Was the canary dozing in his cage in the corner the same bird that impatiently hopped up and down in my childhood when Uncle Rıfkı entertained me in this room? Or was it a new one bought and caged following the demise of that one, and the ones after that? Meticulously framed pictures of railway cars and locomotives were still hanging in their former places, but in my childhood I had always seen them in cheerful daylight, listening to Uncle Rıfkı’s jokes and trying to solve his puzzles, so it made me sad seeing these tired and long-retired vehicles in their neglected and dusty frames in the light from the TV set. In one half of the mirrored breakfront, there were cordial sets and half a bottle of raspberry liqueur. Next to these between railroad service medals and a locomotive-shaped lighter stood Uncle Rıfkı’s conductor’s punch, which he used to let me play with when my father and I visited him. When I saw the thirty books or so in the other half of the breakfront where miniature railway cars, a fake crystal ashtray, and twenty-five years’ worth of train schedules were reflected in the mirror on the back, my heart began to pound loudly.
These had to be the books Uncle Rıfkı must have been reading during the years when he wrote The New Life. A wave of excitement overtook me as if I had come across a tangible trace of Janan after all these years and all these bus trips.
We were having our tea watching television when Aunt Ratibe asked after my daughter, then she questioned me as to my wife’s person. I was mumbling something or other, feeling guilty about not having invited her to the wedding, telling her that my wife’s family actually lived on our street, when I remembered that I had first laid eyes on the girl who was later to become my wife during the first few hours when I first read the book. Which of these coincidences, then, was the more intrinsic and astonishing? Was it that I had first seen that dolorous girl I was to marry years later on the first day I had ever read the book? Or that I remembered the coincidence and discovered years after my marriage the concealed pattern in my life while sitting in Uncle Rıfkı’s chair? She was the daughter of the family that had moved into the vacant apartment across the street from ours, whom I saw eating their evening meal watching TV under the light of a powerful naked bulb. I remembered observing that the girl’s hair was light brown, the TV screen green.
I was transported by a sweet confusion involving life, coincidence, and memory, but Aunt Ratibe and I kept talking about neighborhood gossip, the new butcher shop, my barber, old movies, and a friend of mine who left the neighborhood after expanding his father’s shoe business into a shoe factory and getting rich. While we were having a fractured conversation which was interrupted by silences, revolving around the topic “Life is so fractured,” the TV abounded in gunshots, passionate lovemaking, shouts and screams, planes falling out of the sky, exploding gas tankers, all sending the message, “No matter what, things must be smashed and broken”; and yet we did not as
sume it pertained to us.
In the wee hours of the morning when the moaning, the murmurs in the night, and death throes were replaced by an educational film on the lives of red and black crabs on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, I, the crackerjack detective, approached the topic sideways like the sensible crab on the screen.
“How wonderful things were back in the good old days,” I had the temerity to say.
“Life is wonderful for the young,” Aunt Ratibe said. But she had nothing wonderful to say about her youth which she had spent with her husband—perhaps because I questioned her on the children’s comics, the spirit of railmanship, Uncle Rıfkı’s fiction and his illustrated romances. “Your Uncle Rıfkı took the pleasure out of our youth with his hobby, scribbling and doodling.”
Actually, she had initially responded positively to the idea of his writing for the Rail magazine and putting a lot of effort into the publication. For one thing, this way Uncle Rıfkı was somewhat spared the long trips railway inspectors have to make, and Aunt Ratibe didn’t have to wait all alone for days on end, her eye on the door, for her husband to come home. Pretty soon, he had come up with the idea of putting illustrated adventures at the end of the magazine for the children of railway enthusiasts, so that the children would come to believe in the cause of the railways which were to be our country’s salvation. “Some children really loved them, didn’t they?” Aunt Ratibe said, smiling for the first time; so I told her how transported I was, reading the adventures, and that I knew the Pertev and Peter series almost by heart.
“But he should have left it at that!” she interrupted me. “He should not have taken it so seriously.” According to her, when the illustrated adventure supplement enjoyed quite a success, her husband’s mistake had been deciding to put out a separate children’s magazine, having fallen for the proposal made by some shrewd Babıali publisher. “From then on, he had to work day and night; he’d return dead tired from some tour of inspection or his job at the directorate, only to head immediately to his desk where he worked until daybreak.”
These magazines had become popular reading for a while, but after their initial success, they had soon lost their appeal in favor of all those illustrated historical romances, such as Kaan, Karaoğlan, and Hakan, created in response to the fad for Turkish warriors battling the Byzantines. “Pertev and Peter caught on for a while, so we made a bit of money,” Aunt Ratibe said. “But the one who made a real fortune was, naturally, that bandit of a publisher.” The grasping publisher had insisted that Uncle Rıfkı put aside his stories of Turkish children playing cowboys and robbers on behalf of American railways, and start drawing popular stuff on the order of Karaoğlan, or Kaan, or Blade of Justice. “I will not draw any illustrated adventure that does not include at least one frame sporting the picture of a train,” maintained Uncle Rıfkı, and that’s how his association with the faithless publisher had ended. For a while he had drawn the comics at home and looked for other publishers, but he had given up after a period of being rejected.
“So where are those unpublished adventures now?” I said, running my eyes over the room.
She did not answer me. She concentrated for a while on the difficult journey the long-suffering female black crab has to make crossing the entire island in order to lay the fertilized eggs in her belly at the most auspicious moment during high tide.
“I threw out the lot of them,” she said. “Cupboards full of pictures, magazines, cowboy stories, books on America and the heroes of the West, movie magazines out of which he copied the costumes, oh, and all the stuff on Pertev and Peter, God knows what all … He loved them and not me.”
“Uncle Rıfkı adored children.”
“Yes, he did; he did, indeed,” she said. “He was a good man, he loved everyone. Where do you find a man like that these days?”
She shed a few tears, perhaps prodded by the feeling of guilt about having said a couple of bitter things about her dead husband. While she watched the few crabs that were able to make it back to the beach without falling victim to the seagulls or the rough sea, she dried her eyes with a handkerchief she produced with an astonishing sleight of hand, and she wiped her nose.
“And so it seems,” said the cautious detective at that particular moment, “that Uncle Rıfkı also wrote a book called The New Life for adults, and he apparently had it published under a pseudonym.”
“Wherever did you hear that?” she interrupted me. “There’s no truth to it.”
She gave me such a look and assumed such an air of quiet rage, blowing roughly the smoke of the cigarette she lighted with indignation, that the crackerjack detective was forced to stifle it.
We did not talk for quite some time. Still I could not bring myself to take my leave, waiting for something to happen, hoping that life’s hidden pattern might finally manifest itself.
The educational film on TV was over, and I was trying to console myself by imagining that a crab’s life was far worse than a human’s, when Aunt Ratibe rose from her seat with a severe and determined gesture, and grasping me by the arm pulled me toward the breakfront. “Look,” she said. When she turned on a gooseneck lamp, it lighted a framed photograph on the wall.
Thirty-five or forty men who were wearing the same kind of jackets, the same tie, and similar trousers, and most of whom were sporting identical mustaches, had smiled into the camera where they stood on the steps leading to the Haydar-Pasha train station.
“Railroad inspectors, one and all,” Aunt Ratibe said. “They were all so convinced that the development of this country depended on the railroads.” Her finger pointed someone out: “Rıfkı.”
He looked just like I remembered him from my childhood and just like I had imagined him all these years. He was taller than average. Slender. Somewhat handsome, somewhat pensive. Pleased to be with the group, pleased to look like the rest of them. Smiling slightly.
“I have no one in the world, you know,” Aunt Ratibe said. “I couldn’t come to your wedding, so here, at least take this.” She stuck into my hand the silver candy dish she took out of the breakfront. “The other day I saw you with your wife and daughter at the station. What a good-looking woman. One hopes you give your wife her due.”
I kept looking at the candy dish in my hand. If I claimed I was stricken with feelings of guilt and inadequacy, the reader might perhaps not believe me. Let me just say, I remembered something—without really being conscious of what it was that I remembered. The reflections of Aunt Ratibe, myself, and the room became diminutive, rotund, and flattened in the mirror-like surface of the candy dish. How magical it is to see the world not through the keyholes we call our eyes but for an instant through the logic of another sort of lens. Smart children intuit this, and it makes smart adults smile. Half of my mind was elsewhere, Reader, and the other half was stuck on something else. I don’t know if it happens to you, but you are about to remember something, yet just before you figure out what you remember, for some unknown reason you postpone remembering.
“Aunt Ratibe,” I said, neglecting even to thank her for the candy dish. I pointed at the books in the other half of the breakfront. “May I take these books home with me?”
“What for?”
“To read them,” I said. I didn’t mention I could not sleep nights because I was a murderer. “I read at night,” I said. “The TV tires my eyes, I can’t watch it too long.”
“Oh, all right then,” she said suspiciously. “But when you’re done reading, bring them back. So that part of the breakfront won’t have to stay empty. My late husband read them all the time.”
So, after Aunt Ratibe and I finished watching the film on the late late show about some bad guys in the city of angels called Los Angeles, unhappy aspiring actresses who didn’t seem to mind turning tricks, zealous cops, and pretty young people who at the drop of a hat made love with the innocence of children in paradise but then said some incredibly awful and shameful stuff about one another behind each other’s backs, I returned home at a ve
ry late hour with two plastic bags full of books in my hands, the silver candy dish on top of one bag reflecting the bag of books, the world, streetlights, the denuded poplar trees, the dark sky, the melancholy night, the wet pavement, and my hand carrying the bag, my arm, and my legs pumping up and down.
I lined up the books meticulously on the desk that used to be in the back room, my daughter’s room, when my mother was alive but which was now in the living room, the same desk on which I did my school and university homework for years and read for the first time The New Life. The cover of the candy dish was stuck and could not be pried open, so I put it next to the books too; and lighting a cigarette, I viewed everything with pleasure. There were thirty-three books. Among them there were reference books such as The Principles of Mysticism, Child Psychology, A Short History of the World, Great Philosophers and Great Martyrs, Illustrated and Annotated Dream Interpretations, translated works of Dante, Ib’n Arabi, and Rilke from the world classics series published by the Ministry of Education and sometimes distributed free of charge to directorates and ministries, anthologies such as Best Love Poems, Tales from the Homeland, translations of Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, and Mark Twain in brightly colored covers, and some stuff like Kon-Tiki, Geniuses Were Also Children, The Last Station, Domestic Birds, Tell Me a Secret, A Thousand and One Puzzles.
