by Orhan Pamuk
I began reading the books that very night. And from then on, I kept observing that some of the scenes in The New Life, some expressions, and some fantasies were either inspired by things in these books or else had been lifted outright. Uncle Rıfkı had availed himself of these books while he was writing The New Life with the same ease and routine he had developed when he appropriated for his own illustrated children’s stories illustrated and written material from comics like Tom Mix, Pecos Bill, or The Lone Ranger.
Let me give a few examples:
“The Angels were unable to divine the mystery in the creation of the viceroy called Man.”
—Ib’n Arabi, The Seals of Wisdom
“We are soul mates and traveling companions; we were each other’s unconditional allies.”
—Neşati Akkalem, Geniuses Were Also Children
“So I returned to the loneliness of my room and began to think about this gracious person. As I thought of her I fell asleep and a marvelous vision appeared to me.”
—Dante, La Vita Nuova, III
“Are we on this earth to say: House, Bridge, Fountain, Jug, Gate, Fruit Tree, Window—at best: Column, Tower…? but to say these words you understand with an intensity the things themselves never dreamed they’d express.”
—Rilke, Duino Elegies, The Ninth Elegy
“But there was no house in the vicinity, and nothing was visible other than some ruins. It appeared these ruins were not the work of time but the result of a series of disasters.”
—Jules Verne, Famille-Sans-Nom
“I came across a book. If you were reading it, it appeared to be a bound volume, but if you were not, it turned into a bolt of cloth that was of green silk … Presently, I found myself examining the numbers and letters in the book, and I knew from the handwriting that the text had been written by the son of His Honor Abd-ur-Rahman, the Chief Magistrate of Aleppo. When I came back to my senses, I found myself writing the section you are presently reading. And suddenly I knew that the section written by His Honor’s son, which I had read in a trance, was identical to the section I am writing in this book.”
—Ib’n Arabi, The Meccan Openings
“Love’s influence was such that my body, which was then utterly given over to his governance, often moved like a heavy, inanimate object.”
—Dante, La Vita Nuova, XI
“I had set foot in that part of life beyond which one cannot go with any hope of returning.”
—Dante, La Vita Nuova, XIV
16
I assume we have arrived at the apologia section of our book. For months on end I read over and over the thirty-three books lined up on my desk. I underlined words and sentences in the yellowed pages; I took notes in notebooks and on pieces of paper; I frequented libraries where janitors stare at readers with a look that says, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Like many a broken fellow who for a period of time has eagerly plunged himself in the thick of the commotion called Life, when I compared the various fantasies and expressions in my readings, I discerned encoded whisperings between texts from which I could detect their secrets; and putting these secrets in order, I constructed connections between them, and proud of the complexity of the network of connections I made, I worked away patiently like someone digging a well with a needle, in an effort to atone for my having shrugged off so much in life. Instead of being amazed that library shelves in Islamic countries are crammed full of handwritten interpretations and commentaries, all one has to do is take a look at the multitudes of broken men in the street to know the reason why.
All through my struggles, whenever I came across a new sentence or image or idea that had seeped into Uncle Rıfkı’s slim volume from another source, I was initially disappointed, like the young man who discovers the angel of his dreams is not the angel she seems; but then, like the unmitigated slave of love that I was, I wanted to believe that what did not look pure at first sight was in fact the sign of a profoundly enchanting secret or a unique significance.
I had been reading and rereading The Duino Elegies, as well as the other books, when I made up my mind that all could be solved through the intercession of the angel, perhaps for the reason that I missed the nights I spent in Janan’s company hearing her talk about the angel, rather than that the angel in the elegies reminded me of the angel Uncle Rıfkı had mentioned in his book. In the stillness of the night, long after the long freight trains went past the neighborhood interminably clattering on the tracks on their way East, I longed to hear the summons of a light, a stirring, a life the memory of which I liked recollecting; I turned my back on the silver candy dish which reflected the television that was playing as well as me sitting and smoking at my desk which was cluttered with papers and notebooks, and I walked to the window where from in between the curtains I looked out into the dark night. A faint light cast by a streetlamp or one of the apartments across the street would momentarily be reflected in the water droplets on the windowpane.
Who was this angel I wished would call out to me from the heart of stillness? Like Uncle Rıfkı himself, I knew no other language besides Turkish, but I paid scant attention to the fact that I was beset with poor and slipshod translations which were garbled by fortuitous fleeting fads in an obscure language. I presented myself at universities, asking questions of professors and translators who snapped at me for my amateurishness; I obtained addresses in Germany where I sent letters; and when some kind and gentle persons responded to me, I tried convincing myself that I was making progress toward the locus of some enigma.
In his famous letter to his Polish translator, Rilke says the “angel” of the Elegies has less to do with the angel of the Christian heaven than with the angelic figure in Islam, which was a fact Uncle Rıfkı had gleaned from the translator’s short foreword. Having learned, from a letter that he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé from Spain the very year he began writing the Elegies, that Rilke had read the Koran, which “astounded, astounded” him, I was engrossed for a time with the angels of Islam, but I did not find in the Koran any of the accounts I had heard from my mother, the elderly women in the neighborhood, nor from any of my know-it-all friends. Although Azrael’s likeness was available to us from many sources, be it in cartoons in the newspapers or in traffic posters or in natural science class, he was not even named in the Koran; he was simply referred to as the Angel of Death. I couldn’t find anything more than what I already knew about Archangel Michael nor about Israphel who was to play the trumpet on Judgment Day. A German correspondent closed the subject by sending me a pile of likenesses of Christian angels, which had been photocopied from books of art, in response to my question as to whether the distinction made in the beginning of the thirty-fifth surah in the Koran in terms of those angels possessing “two, three, or four wings” was peculiar to Islam. Aside from trivial differences such as the Koran referring to angels as a separate class of beings, or that the fiendish crew in Hell was also considered to be of angelic descent, or that the Biblical angels provided a stronger connection between God and His creatures, there was little else to prove Rilke right about his distinction concerning the angels of Islam versus those in the Christian heaven.
Even so, I thought it possible that even if Rilke were not alluding to Archangel Gabriel appearing to Mohammad “on the clear horizon,” witnessed by the stars “running their course and setting” at the very moment between the darkness of night and the light of day, as it is told in some of the verses in the surah called Al Takwir, Uncle Rıfkı, when he was in the process of giving his own book its final shape, could have been thinking of the divinely revealed Book in which “everything is written.” But that was during the time I considered Uncle Rıfkı’s slim volume as having been brought into existence not only from the thirty-three books under his hand but from all the books there are. The more I reflected on those poor translations piled on my desk, the photocopies and the notes mentioning Rilke’s angel, or the reasons for the beauty of angels, the absolute beauty that excl
udes what is causal and accidental, on Ib’n Arabi, on the superior qualities of angels that exceed human limitations and sins, their ability to be simultaneously here and there, on time, death, and life after death, the more I remembered having read of these not only in Uncle Rıfkı’s slim volume but also in the adventures of Pertev and Peter.
Toward spring one evening after supper, I was reading in one of Rilke’s letters for the nth time—only heaven knows how many—where it said, “Even for our forefathers, a house, a well, a familiar tower, their own clothes, their jackets: these were beyond reckoning, they were more personal than can be reckoned.”
I remember looking around me for a moment and feeling pleasantly giddy. Hundreds of black-and-white shades of angels were looking on me not only from among the books on my old desk, but from places where my disruptive little daughter had carried them, on the windowsills, the dusty radiator, the rug, the side table with one short leg, which were then reflected on the silver candy dish: they were the photocopies of the reproductions of the actual oil paintings of angels done in Europe hundreds of years ago. I thought I liked these better than the originals.
“Pick up the angels,” I said to my three-year-old daughter. “Let’s go to the station and watch the trains.”
“Can we get some caramels too?”
I took her up in my arms and we went to see her mother in the kitchen, which smelled of detergent and grilled food, telling her we were on our way to see the trains. She looked up from the dishes she was doing and gave us a smile.
It pleased me to walk to our local station in the cool spring air, holding my daughter close. I thought cheerfully that when we got back home, I would watch the soccer game, then my wife and I would catch the Sunday Night Movie. The candy store called Life at the station square had dispensed with winter by lowering the store windows and installing up front their ice-cream counter sporting ice-cream cones. We had them weigh us a hundred grams of Mabelle caramels. I took the wrapper off one and placed it into my daughter’s impatient mouth. We went up on the platform.
Exactly at nine-sixteen, the Southbound Express that came through without stopping announced itself first with the heavy roar of engines that came from somewhere deep down, as if from the very soul of the earth, and presently its searchlight was being reflected on the walls of the bridge and the steel pylons; then, as it drew into the station, it seemed to grow quieter, only to raise a ruckus with the full power of its jarring and inexorable engines as it went by us two puny mortals holding on to each other. Inside the brilliantly lit cars being pulled along clattering with a more humane noise, we saw the passengers who were leaning back in their seats, leaning up against the windows, hanging up their coats, lighting their cigarettes, all completely unaware of us watching them slide by in the blink of an eye. We stood in the faint breeze and stillness left behind by the train, staring for a long time at the red light at the back of the train.
“Do you know where this train goes?” I asked my daughter on an impulse.
“The train goes where?”
“First to Izmit, then Bilecik.”
“Then?”
“Then Eskişehir. Then Ankara.”
“Then?”
“Then to Kayseri, to Sivas, to Malatya.”
“Then?” said my daughter with the light brown hair, happy to be repeating herself and still watching the barely visible red light on the caboose with a sense of play and mystery.
And her father recalled his own childhood calling out the names of the stations he remembered where the train stopped—and then, and then—as well as those he did not remember.
I must have been eleven or twelve. My father and I had gone to Uncle Rıfkı’s one afternoon. While Uncle Rıfkı and my father played backgammon, I had the sugar cookie Aunt Ratibe had given me in my hand, and I was watching the canary in the cage, then tapping on the barometer I had yet to learn to read; I had just pulled out one of the old comics on the shelf and was getting absorbed in an old adventure of Pertev and Peter when Uncle Rıfkı called me, and, as he always did on our visits, he began quizzing me.
“Run through the stations between Yolçatı and Kurtalan.”
I had begun with “Yolçatı, Uluova, Kürk, Sivrice, Gezin, Maden,” and had named the rest without any omission.
“And those between Amasya and Sivas?”
I had reeled them off without a hitch because I had memorized the train schedules Uncle Rıfkı maintained every intelligent Turkish child must know by heart.
“Why does the train departing from Kütahya en route to Uşak have to go by way of Afyon?”
This was the question I knew the answer to by way of Uncle Rıfkı and not the train schedules.
“Because the government has unfortunately abandoned its railroad policy.”
“And here’s the final question,” Uncle Rıfkı had said, his eyes gleaming. “We’re going from Çetinkaya to Malatya.”
“Çetinkaya, Demiriz, Akgedik, Ulugüney, Hasançelebi, Hekimhan, Kesikköprü…” I had begun, but I drew a blank before I was through.
“Then?”
I was silent. My father had the dice in his hand, and he was studying the pieces on the board, looking for his way out of a tight spot.
“What comes after Kesikköprü?”
The canary in the cage went click, click.
I backtracked some and then started up with renewed hope, “Hekimhan, Kesikköprü,” but I got stuck again on the next station.
“Then?”
There was a long pause. I thought I was about to cry when Uncle Rıfkı said, “Ratibe, go ahead and give him a caramel; he might just remember.”
Aunt Ratibe offered me the caramels. As Uncle Rıfkı had suggested, I remembered the next station after Kesikköprü the moment I popped the caramel in my mouth.
Twenty-five years after the incident, there he was with his pretty daughter in his arms, watching the red light on the rear of the Southbound Express, and our stupid Osman once more couldn’t remember the name of the same station. But I forced myself to remember for quite some time, trying to stroke and prod my associations into action, telling myself: What a coincidence! 1) The train that has just gone past us will pass tomorrow through the same station the name of which I cannot remember. 2) Aunt Ratibe had offered me the caramels in the same silver dish she had given me as a gift. 3) There is one caramel in my daughter’s mouth, and in my pocket a little less than a hundred grams of caramels.
Dear Reader, I derived such pleasure from my memory getting stuck fast where my past and future intersected on this spring evening at a point that was so far removed from what’s accidental that I was stuck where I was standing, trying to recall the name of the station.
After a long interval, my daughter in my arms said, “Dog.”
The dirtiest and the most pathetic of stray dogs was sniffing the cuffs of my pants, and a light breeze was cooling the modest evening that had settled over the neighborhood. Soon we were back home, but I did not immediately rush to the silver candy dish. My daughter had to be tickled first, nuzzled, and put to bed; then my wife and I had to settle down to watch the kisses and murders on the Sunday Night Movie; and then I had to bring some order to the books, papers, and angels on my desk before I could begin to wait, my heart pounding, for my memories to thicken and reach the right consistency.
The heartsick man who had fallen victim to love as well as to a book summoned his associations: Speak, Memory. And I raised the silver candy dish in my hands. My gesture had something in it of a Municipal Playhouse actor raising pretentiously the skull of some poor peasant passing for Poor Yorick’s, but if you consider the result, it was not a fake gesture. How docile the enigma called Memory was after all: I remembered instantly.
Those readers who believe in chance and accident, as well as those readers who believe Uncle Rıfkı would not leave things to chance and accident, probably have already guessed that the name of the station was Viran Bağ.
I remembered even more. When I look
ed at the silver candy dish with the caramel in my mouth twenty-three years ago and piped up, “Viran Bağ,” Uncle Rıfkı had said, “Bravo!”
Then, then the dice he had thrown had come up five and six, hitting two of my father’s pieces with one throw, and he had said, “Akif, this boy of yours is awfully smart. You know what I am going to do one of these days?” But my father whose attention was on his captured pieces was not even listening, so Uncle Rıfkı had addressed me directly. “I am going to write a book someday, and I will give the hero your name.”
“A book like Pertev and Peter?” I had asked, my heart pounding.
“No, not an illustrated book, but one where I will tell your story.”
I had kept silent, unconvinced. I couldn’t imagine what sort of thing that book might be.
That was when Aunt Ratibe had called out, “There you go again putting children on!”
Was this a real scene? Or was it a fiction that my well-intentioned and good-natured memory had made up on the spot to console a broken man like me? I just couldn’t figure it out. But I had no desire to rush out at once and question Aunt Ratibe, either. I walked up to the window with the silver candy dish in my hand, and I was lost in thought looking out on the street, although I don’t know if I could rightly call it thinking, or just talking in my sleep. 1) Lights went on in three different homes simultaneously. 2) The pathetic dog at the station went by looking high and mighty. 3) Whatever possessed my fingers through all this mental confusion, they got into the act and removed—oh, look!—the stuck lid from the candy dish without too much trouble.
I admit to thinking for a moment that like in fairy tales the candy dish might produce amulets, or magic rings, or poisoned grapes. But what it contained were seven of the New Life brand caramels I remembered from my childhood which no longer appeared in groceries and candy stores even in the remotest of provincial towns. On the wrapper of each there was the trademark angel, adding up to seven angels in all, sitting politely on the edge of the letter L for Life, their beautiful legs slightly extended into the space between New and Life, looking at me with gratitude and smiling sweetly for having released them from the darkness of the candy dish which they had endured for these past twenty years.
