The New Life Read online

  The girl seemed to approach the bus not out of sorrow but more out of a sense of duty and necessity. “He was my boyfriend,” she said. “I was the one who read the book first, and I was spellbound, and scared. It was a mistake giving him the book to read. He too was spellbound, but that was not sufficient for him; he wanted to go to that land. I kept telling him it was only a book, but he would not be persuaded. I loved him. So we embarked on the road, traveling from town to town, touching life’s appearances, looking for what is hidden under its colors, searching for reality but not finding it. When we began having fights, I left him to his investigations and returned home to my parents and waited. My beloved returned to me at last, but he had become someone else. He told me the book had led astray too many people, taken too many unlucky persons off the course of their lives, and it was the source of too many evils. Now he had sworn an oath to avenge himself on the book for being the cause of much disappointment and so many broken lives. I told him the book was innocent, explaining to him that there were a great many books much like it. I told him what was important is your own perception, what you read into it, but I couldn’t make him listen. He had already been stricken by the vengeful rage that besets unfortunates who have been deceived. He brought up the subject of Doctor Fine, touching on his struggle against the book, against foreign cultures that annihilate us, against the newfangled stuff that comes from the West, and his all-out battle against printed matter. He mentioned all manner of timepieces, and antique objects, canary cages, hand grinders, windlasses. I did not understand any of it, but I loved him. He was beset with a deep resentment, but he was still the life of my life. That was why I was following him to the town called Güdül where he said there was a secret convention being held by dealers united under the cause of ‘our goals.’ His henchmen were supposed to locate us and convey us to Doctor Fine, but now you have to go there in our stead. Stop the betrayal of life and the book. Doctor Fine is expecting us—two young cookstove dealers who have committed themselves to the struggle. Our identification papers are in my boyfriend’s breast pocket. The man who comes to get us will smell of OP shaving soap.”

  Her face was again streaked with blood; she kissed and caressed the hand she was holding, and she began to weep. Janan took her by the shoulders.

  “I too am to blame,” said the girl. “I don’t deserve your love. I was persuaded by my lover to follow him, I betrayed the book. He had to die without getting to see you because he was more to blame. My father will be very angry, but I am happy I am dying in your arms.”

  Janan assured her she would not die. Yet we were willing to believe in the reality of her death, given that the dying never disclosed their impending demise in all the movies that we had seen. In her role as the angel, Janan joined the girl’s hand with the dead young man’s as in those films, then the girl died, hand in hand with her lover.

  Janan drew near to the dead young man who was regarding the world upside down and stuck her head into the bus where the window had been smashed. She looked through his pockets and then emerged into the rain with a pleased smile on her face, holding up our new identification papers.

  How I loved seeing Janan’s elated smile! I could see the two dark triangles on either corner of her full lips where they softly met her beautiful teeth. The two darling triangles that formed in the corners of her mouth when she laughed! She had kissed me once, and I had kissed her once; now I yearned for us to kiss once more standing in the rain, but she took a small step away from me.

  “In our new life together, your name is Ali Kara,” she said, reading the identification cards in her hand, “and mine is Efsun Kara. We even have a marriage certificate.” Then, using the instructive tones of an affectionate and sympathetic teacher of English, she added, smiling, “Mr. and Mrs. Kara are on their way to a dealers’ convention in the town of Güdül.”

  7

  After a period of endless summer rains, two different towns, and three buses, we arrived in the town called Güdül. We had just left the muddy terminal and were approaching the narrow sidewalks in the shopping district when I looked up to the sky and saw something odd, a cloth banner summoning children to summer Koran school. In the window of the State Monopolies and Sport Toto dealer, placed between gaudy bottles of liqueurs there were three stuffed rats smiling with their teeth bared. The photographs that had been posted on the door of the pharmacy looked like the kind mourners wear on their lapels at funerals occasioned by political assassinations, showing the dates of birth and death of the deceased below faces that reminded Janan of the proper upper-class characters in the old domestic films. We went in a store and bought a plastic suitcase and nylon shirts, hoping to pass ourselves off as two proper young dealers. The chestnut trees along the sidewalks that took us up to the hotel had been planted in surprisingly even rows. Janan read the sign under one of the trees advertising “Circumcisions performed the good old way, not by laser,” and she said: “They are expecting us.” I kept the papers of the deceased Ali and Efsun Kara ready in my pocket, but the slightly built hotel clerk with the Hitler mustache gave only a casual glance at the marriage certificate.

  “Are you here for the dealers’ convention?” he said. “They’re all at the high school building for the opening session. Any other luggage besides this case?”

  “Our luggage burned in the fire on a bus,” I said, “so did the other passengers. Where is this high school?”

  “Buses have a way of burning, sir,” the clerk said. “The boy will take you to the high school.”

  Janan spoke to the boy in a sweet way that she never used with me. “What’s with those dark glasses?” she teased him. “They turn your world black, don’t they?”

  “They don’t either!” the boy said. “Because I am Michael Jackson.”

  “What does your mother say to that?” Janan said. “Look what a nice vest she has knit for you!”

  “None of my mother’s business!” said the boy.

  By the time we reached the Kenan Evren High School, the name of which was up in a flashing neon sign, we had gleaned these pertinent facts from Michael Jackson: He was in the sixth grade; his father worked at the movie theater which belonged to the same owner as the hotel, but he was busy with the convention; all the town was busy with the convention; there were some people who were against all this business; after all, the district governor had given voice to something that went like this: “I won’t let disgrace be associated with any town where I am the governor!”

  There, in the exhibits set up in the cafeteria of the Kenan Evren High School, we saw the displays of a device that cloaks time, a magic glass that transforms black-and-white into color, the first Turkish-made gizmo that detects pork in any given product, an unscented shaving lotion, scissors that automatically clip newspaper coupons, a heater that lights whenever the owner steps into the house, a windup clock that provides the answer to the problem of the call to prayer, that is, whether it should be broadcast by loudspeakers or by a muezzin calling from the minaret by the powers of his own lungs. This clock automatically settled the Westernization-versus-Islamization question through a modern device: Instead of the usual cuckoo bird, two other figures had been employed, a tiny imam who appeared on the lower balcony at the proper time for prayer to announce three times that “God is Great!” and a minute toy gentleman wearing a tie but no mustache who showed up in the upper balcony on the hour, asserting that “Happiness is being a Turk, a Turk, a Turk.”

  When we saw a version of the camera obscura, we too had to agree with the suspicion that the inventions must entirely be the work of local high school students in the area, although the fathers, uncles, and teachers milling in the crowd must also have had a finger in creating all these science projects. Hundreds of pocket mirrors had been lined up across from each other in the space between an automobile tire and the inner rim, thereby creating a labyrinth of reflections. When the lid was closed on light from external objects that entered from an aperture into the labyrinth of mi
rrors, the captive light image was forced to go round and round, being reflected in the mirrors until the end of time. Then, whenever you felt like it, you could fit your eye to the aperture and see the virtual image that had been imprisoned there in the chamber, be it a plane tree, or the shrewish school teacher taking in the science fair, the fat appliance dealer, a pimply student, the land-deeds official tossing down a glass of lemonade, the portrait of General Evren, a toothless janitor smiling into the device, a shady character, your own eye, and even the beautiful and intellectually curious Janan whose skin was still fresh in spite of her travels on the bus.

  We observed other things at the fair aside from the devices; for example, the white-collar gentleman in the checked jacket making a speech. The crowd was comprised of small groups that gave us, as well as each other, appraising looks. A small redheaded girl with a ribbon in her hair was going over the poem she was soon to recite, nestled in her kerchiefed mother’s skirt. Janan drew close to me; she was wearing the pistachio-green print skirt we had bought in Kastamonu. I loved her, O Angel, I loved her very much, as you know so very well. We bought iced yogurt drinks at a stand and stood on the edge of the crowd in the dusty afternoon light in the cafeteria, feeling dazed, tired, and sleepy, just taking in the scene. What we were watching seemed to make up a kind of music of existence, or a science of life. Then we saw a television set of sorts which we approached for a closer examination.

  “This novel television happens to be Doctor Fine’s contribution,” said a man who wore a bow tie. Was he a Freemason? I had read in the paper that Freemasons sported bow ties. “Who do I have the pleasure of meeting?” he said, carefully examining my forehead, perhaps to avoid staring at Janan more than necessary.

  “Ali and Efsun Kara,” I said.

  “You are so young! It gives us hope to see such young people among all these disgruntled entrepreneurs.”

  “We are not here to represent youth, sir,” I said, “but to represent new life.”

  “We aren’t disgruntled, we have true faith,” said a large person, a pleasant avuncular man, proper enough for a high school girl to ask him the time.

  So we joined the assembly. The girl with the ribbon in her hair recited her poem, mumbling her way through it like a light summer breeze. A young man handsome enough to play the singer in a domestic film discussed the region with the categorical fastidiousness of a military man, talking about Seljuk minarets, storks, the new power station under construction, and the high milk production of the local cows. As students explained their projects placed on the cafeteria tables, their fathers or teachers stood next to them and gazed proudly into the audience. We met the others in the room who were having either yogurt drinks or lemonade, bumping into each other and shaking hands. I caught a whiff of alcohol, and of OP shaving soap, but where did the smell come from, or from whom? We took another look at Doctor Fine’s television. The talk was mostly about this Doctor Fine, but he himself was nowhere around.

  When evening fell, we all left the high school building, men leading the women, and made our way to a restaurant. A tacit sense of hostility was palpable in the streets throughout the town. We were being observed from the doorways of barber shops and grocery stores which were still open for business, the coffeehouse where the TV was going, and the lighted windows of the government building. One of the storks mentioned by the handsome fellow was watching us enter the restaurant from the tower in the square where it was perched. Was it with curiosity? Or hostility?

  The restaurant was a proper place with an aquarium and flower pots, the walls were hung with pictures of eminent Turks, a historical submarine that had gone down in honor, soccer players with lopsided heads, purple figs, golden pears, and frolicking sheep. When the place had quickly filled with the dealers and their wives, high school students and teachers, and all those who loved and had faith in us, I felt as if I had been anticipating this congregation and preparing for a night such as this all these many months. I began drinking along with others but then ended up drinking more than anyone else. I sat with the men, clinking raki glasses with those who kept coming to sit next to me, talking hungrily of honor, the missing meaning of life, of things that had been lost.

  Well, it was because they brought up the subject first, but I found myself in such total agreement with a friendly man that we were both terribly surprised; he had pulled a pack of playing cards out of his pocket and proudly showed me the face cards on which he had drawn with his own hand, changing the king into “sheik” and the jack into “disciple,” and explained at length the reason why it was high time that cards like these should be distributed in the hundred and seventy thousand coffeehouses where card games are played in our country at close to two and a half million card tables.

  Hope was among us in some form this evening, but was hope the same as the angel? It is a form of light, they said. They said: we dwindle a little each time we draw a breath. They said: we are digging up the things we have buried. One of them showed a picture of a stove. Another fellow said: A bicycle that fits our size perfectly. The man with the bow tie produced a bottle of liquid: works like toothpaste. A toothless old man regretted that he was forced to abstain from drink but he told us his dream: He tells us, never fear; you won’t disappear. Who was He? Doctor Fine who was privy to abstruse matters had not yet put in an appearance. Why was he not here? If truth be told, a voice said, had Doctor Fine met this fine young man, he would have loved him like his own son. Whose voice was it? He had disappeared by the time I turned around. Ssssh! they said; don’t throw around Doctor Fine’s name! When the angel appears on TV sooner or later, there will be hell to pay. All this is the district governor’s doing, all this fear, they said; but he is not totally against us either. The richest man in Turkey, Vehbi Koç himself, could very well arrive here as our invited guest. Why not? someone commented; Koç is after all the king of all us entrepreneurs.

  I remember being kissed on the cheeks, congratulated for being so young, and after I explained to them about TV screens, colors and time, being hugged for being so candid. You just wait, said the pleasant man who ran the State Monopolies store; our television screen will be the final curtain for those who are after us; the new screen means, after all, the new life. People kept coming to sit next to me; I also kept changing seats and telling people all about accidents, death, peace, the book, and that moment … I sensed I had gone too far when I began saying, “Love…” I rose to see Janan where she sat being interviewed by school teachers and teachers’ wives. I sat down and said, “Time is an accident; we are here in this world by accident.” They called out to a farmer who wore a leather jacket, telling me here was the fellow I must hear out, seeing how I was interested in time. “You give me too much credit,” the fellow said, breathing like an old man although he did not seem very old, and he produced from the inner pocket of his jacket his “modest” invention. It was just a pocket watch, but one sensitive to bliss; it stopped when you were happy so that your blissful hour could persist for all eternity; and conversely, when you were in despair, the small and big hand speeded up tremendously, making you remark how quickly time had passed and how your sorrows had ended in the blink of an eye. Then at night while you slept peacefully, the watch—this little object that patiently ticked away in the palm of the man, who was quite old—adjusted time by subtracting it from your lifetime, and when you rose in the morning along with everybody else, you were not any older.

  “Time,” I said and stared for a moment at the fish gliding ever so slowly in the aquarium. Someone came up to me like a shadow. “They accuse us,” he said, “of being hostile to Western culture. In fact, it’s not true. Did you know, for example, that leftover Crusaders lived for centuries in the rock-cut dwellings in Cappadocia?” Who was the speaking fish who spoke to me when I had been only talking to the fish? When I turned around, he was gone. At first I said to myself it had been just a shadow, then I was frightened when I caught a whiff of that formidable smell: OP shaving soap.


  As soon as I sank into a chair, an avuncular man with a handlebar mustache began interrogating me, nervously winding around one of his fingers the chain of his key ring: Who were my folks, how did I vote, which invention had caught my fancy, what would be my decision in the morning? I was still thinking about the fish and I was going to offer him another glass of raki when I heard voices, voices, voices. I kept quiet and then found myself next to the good-natured Monopolies dealer. He told me he no longer feared anyone, not even the district governor who had a problem with the stuffed rats in his shop window. Why was there only one company selling liquor in this country, a state monopoly? I remembered something which frightened me, and the fear made me say the first thing that came to my mind. “If life is a journey,” I said, “I have been on the road for six months, and I learned a thing or two which, with your permission, I would like to impart.” I had read a book, and I had lost my whole world. I had set out on the road to find a new world. What had I found? It felt as if you were about to say, O Angel, what it was that I had found. I fell silent for a moment and pondered, but I didn’t know what I was saying when I blurted out: “Angel.” And, as if waking up from a dream, I began to look for you in the crowd, suddenly having remembered: Love. There she was among appliance dealers and their wives, the man with the bow tie and his daughters, it was Janan dancing with some presumptuous overgrown high school boy to the music from a radio somewhere while school teachers and senile geriatric cases looked on temperately.

  I sat down and smoked a cigarette. If only I knew how to dance … like the bride and groom in the movies. I had some coffee. Time according to the watch that gauged happiness must have been going full speed ahead. Another cigarette. Applause for the dancing couples. More coffee. Janan went back to be with the women. Yet another coffee.