The New Life (16 page)

I pulled myself together when I realized Janan was becoming alienated from these pages where all Americans of good will were blond and freckled, all the evil ones had crooked mouths, where everyone thanked each other for every little thing, where vultures always picked all the corpses to shreds, and where cactus juice saved the lives of people who were dying of thirst.

Instead of fantasizing that I might start life anew as another Nahit, I said to myself I had better disabuse Janan of her false dreams. She was getting sentimental looking at Nahit's middle-school reports and the picture on his identification card. Just then Rosebud came in the room suddenly, like Uncle Rıfkı coming to the aid of his characters cornered by ill luck and adversity by inserting the small box that said
SUDDENLY
! She informed us that her father was expecting us.

I had absolutely no idea what would happen to us next, neither did I have the least notion on what to base my calculations in order to get closer to Janan. Coming out of the museum dedicated to the Nahit period of Mehmet's life, two instinctive thoughts occurred to me: I wanted to leave the scene, or I wanted to become Nahit.

9

Later, when the two of us went on a long walk on his estate, Doctor Fine generously offered me a choice between the two alternative lives, both of which I wanted. It is entirely coincidental when fathers seem to know, as if they were gods in possession of an infinite memory and books of records, the thoughts on their sons' minds. In reality, they are merely projecting their own unrealized desires on their sons, or on perfect strangers that remind them of their sons. That's all there is to it.

I had been given to understand that once I had been shown the museum, Doctor Fine wanted us to go on a walk together and have a talk. We walked along the edges of fields where the wheat was waving in the breezes; we crossed fallow ground where a few sheep and cows were nuzzling the scarce herbage under apple trees on which the fruit was small and unripe. Doctor Fine showed me dens that had been excavated by moles; he drew my attention to tracks made by wild boars, and explained how the thrushes called fieldfares flying from the southern outskirts of the town toward the fruit orchards could be recognized by the small irregular beat of their wings. He explained a great many things besides, speaking in a voice that was instructive, patient, and not too far from being affectionate.

He was not really a doctor. His cronies when he was doing his military service had nicknamed him Doctor just because he was cognizant of details that came in handy for small repairs, such as the eight-thread nut required for a certain bolt or the cranking speed of a field telephone. He had identified with the nickname because he loved equipment and enjoyed taking care of it, and because he had recognized that discovering the unique properties of each object constitutes the highest good. He had not studied medicine but the law in accordance with the wishes of his father, who had been a deputy member of parliament, and he had pursued a law practice in town; but when his father died and he inherited all the trees and lands to which he pointed with his index finger, he had decided to live as he pleased. Just as he pleased! Among products he had chosen himself, products he was accustomed to, products he himself knew. He had opened the store in town with this goal in mind.

We were going up a hill that was partially warmed by rather hesitant sunlight when Doctor Fine divulged to me that objects had the capacity to remember. Just like ourselves, objects also had the faculty to record what happened to them and preserve their memories, but most of us were not even aware of it. “Substances inquire after each other, come to an agreement, whisper to one another, and strike up a harmony, constituting the music we call the world,” said Doctor Fine. “Those who are attentive hear it, see it, and comprehend it.” He could tell fieldfares had been nesting around the area by looking at the limy stains on the dried branch he had picked up; and having studied the signs in the mud, he explained to me how the branch had been broken two weeks ago by a certain storm.

It seems that he sold merchandise he brought not only from Istanbul and Ankara but from manufacturers all over Anatolia, such as whetting stones that never wore down, handwoven rugs, locks made out of hammered iron, sweet-smelling wicks for kerosene stoves, simple versions of refrigeration, beanies made of fine grade felt,
RONSON
trademark flintstones, door handles, stoves made out of recycled gasoline barrels, small aquariums—anything at all that made sense to him, or anything that was sensible. The years he spent in the store where all sorts of basic human needs were supplied in a humane way had been the happiest years of his life. When he was granted a son after he had fathered three daughters, his happiness had been complete. He asked my age, and I told him. He said when his son died he had been the same age as me.

From somewhere below the hill there came the sounds of children who were not visible to us. When the sun disappeared behind several insistent and dark clouds that traveled fast, we could see in the distance kids playing soccer on a bald playing field. There was a time lapse between seeing the ball being kicked and the moment we heard the sound. Doctor Fine said there were some among the children who perpetrated petty theft, and that the downfall of all great civilizations and the disintegration of their memories was first signaled by the moral degradation of the young. The young had the capacity to forget the old as quickly and painlessly as they could imagine the new. He added that the kids lived in town.

When he was talking about his son, I felt enraged. Why were fathers so full of pride? How could they be so unconsciously cruel? I realized that his lenses made his eyes behind his glasses look unusually small. I remembered his son too had the same eyes.

His son was very intelligent, in fact, brilliant. Not only had he begun to read at the age of four and a half, he could make out the letters and read the newspaper even when it was held upside down. He thought up rules for children's games he invented; he beat his father at chess; he instantly committed to memory a three-stanza poem after a couple of readings. I realized these were only the stories of a father who had lost his son but who himself was not a good chess player, yet I still took the bait. When he told me how he and Nahit rode horseback, I too imagined myself riding with them; when he spoke of Nahit's devout religious practices during his years in middle school, I imagined getting up during Ramadan with the old grandma in the dead of night and having a bite to eat before the fast from daybreak to sundown began; in just the way his father told me that Nahit had responded, I too had been pained and angry in the face of the poverty, ignorance, and stupidity that was all around me; yes, I had! Listening to Doctor Fine, I remembered how I too was a young man who, in spite of his brilliant qualities, still had a deep inner life like Nahit. Yes, sometimes when others were smoking and drinking at some gathering, busy trying to make jokes and attract attention that was all too brief, Nahit would withdraw into a corner and be lost in sensitive thoughts that softened the severe expression in his eyes. Yes, he would intuit most unexpectedly the merit of some nondescript person whom he would encourage and make friends with, be it the son of the janitor at the high school, or the idiot-poet projectionist at the movie theater who always got the reels mixed up. But these friendships did not mean that he had abandoned his own world; after all, everyone wanted to be his friend, his buddy, or some sort of close companion to him. He was honest and handsome, he gave his elders respect, and his juniors …

I kept thinking of Janan. I was tuned to her like a television set constantly on the same channel, but now I was thinking of her sitting in a different kind of chair, perhaps because I was seeing myself in a different light.

“Then suddenly, he turned against me,” said Doctor Fine when we had reached the top of the hill. “Just because he had read some book.”

The cypress trees on top of the hill were moving in a wind that was cool and light but carried no scent. Beyond the cypresses there was an outcropping of rocks and stones. At first I had thought it was a graveyard, but when we got there and began to walk among the large, carefully dressed stones, Doctor Fine explained that it was the ruins of a Seljuk fort. He pointed out the slopes across from us, and a dark hill with its cypresses that was actually a graveyard, all the fields golden with wheat, the heights obscured by rain clouds where the winds blew heavily, and an entire village as well. All was his now, including the fort.

Why would a young man turn his back on all this land that was alive with life, all these cypresses, these poplars, these wonderful apple orchards and conifers, all the food for thought that his father had provided for him, as well as the storeful of merchandise that was in complete accord with all the above mentioned? Why would a young man write his father that he never wanted to see him again, telling him not to send anyone after him, or have him followed? Why would he want to disappear? There was one particular look that appeared at times on Doctor Fine's face, and I could never figure out whether it meant that he wanted to stick a needle in me, others like me, or the world as a whole, or whether he was just a disgruntled and oblivious man who had renounced this whole damn world. “It's all a conspiracy,” he said. There was a great conspiracy against him, his way of thinking, the products to which he had devoted his life, against everything that was vital for this country.

He asked me to listen carefully to what he was going to tell me. I must make sure I did not think that the things he had to say were the ravings of a senile old man stuck in some out-of-the-way town, or fantasies prompted by the pain felt by a father who had lost his son. I said I was sure. I listened carefully, although I slipped away as anyone might when my mind wandered, thinking of his son or Janan.

He discussed for a while the memory of objects; as if he were talking about something tangible, he explained with passionate conviction the concept of time fixed fast inside matter. The Great Conspiracy had taken hold around the same time he had first become aware of the presence of a magical, necessary, and poetic concept of time that was transmitted to us from objects when we came into contact using or touching some simple thing like a spoon or a pair of scissors. Speaking specifically, it was around the time that their humdrum sidewalks had been besieged by vendors who sold the sort of dull and flat stuff that was displayed in the odorless, colorless stores. At first he had paid scant attention to either the
CRESCENT GAS
dealer who sold the bottled gas that powered those gas burners, those thingamajigs with knobs, or the AEG dealer who sold refrigerators that were white as synthetic snow. But when, instead of the nice creamy yogurt that we are all familiar with, vendors began to bring around some sort of yogurt called
PERT
(he said it as if he were saying
DIRT
), or instead of the traditional cool yogurt drinks or sour cherry sherbets, drivers wearing open-neck shirts brought, on trim and spanking-clean trucks, the imitation stuff called Mr. Turk Cola which was soon replaced by the real Coca-Cola being sold by honest-to-goodness gentlemen with ties around their necks, out of some stupid impulse he had thought of getting a dealership himself, such as for that UHU glue licensed under the German trademark of a darling little owl that promised it could stick together anything you wanted, rather than our glues that are made out of pine resin, or else something to take the place of our clay soap like Lux hand soap, which had a scent as polluting as its box. But as soon as he put these articles in his store which was so serene that it seemed to exist in a former time, he realized that not only could he no longer tell the time, he didn't know what time it was. Not only he but also his merchandise had been distressed—much like nightingales who are perturbed by the presumptuous finches in the next cage—by the presence of these lackluster, prosaic objects; and that is why he had abandoned the idea of a dealership. He was unconcerned that only old men and flies dropped by his store, he continued stocking only those products which had traditionally been available to his forefathers.

Like those people who lose their minds from drinking Coca-Cola but do not realize it, given that the whole populace has gone crazy on Coca-Cola, he too might have come to disregard or even accept the Great Conspiracy; after all, he did have dealings and friendships with some of the dealers who were the tools. Not only that, his merchandise resisted the Dealer's Conspiracy, perhaps due to the magical harmony objects establish between themselves, including everything in his store, all of them his sort of things—his flatirons, his lighters, his odor-free stoves, his bird cages, his wooden ashtrays, clothespins, fans, his whatnots. There were others like him who had closed ranks against the conspiracy, such as the dark and dapper fellow from Konya, a retired general from Sivas, dealers who were heartbroken but still true believers from Trabzon and, you name it, even from Teheran, Damascus, Edirne, and the Balkans, who had joined him in forming an organization of heartsick dealers who arranged for their own kind of merchandise. He had received right about that time those letters from his son who was away in Istanbul studying medicine. “Don't look for me; don't have me followed; I am dropping out.” Doctor Fine repeated sarcastically his dead son's rebellious words, the words that had angered him.

He had soon understood that when the powers who were involved in the Great Conspiracy could not contend with his store, his ideas, and his taste, they had tried to go the way of winning over his son in order to undermine him. “Me, Doctor Fine!” he said with pride. So he had gone against what his son had requested in his letter, hoping to turn the whole business around. He had hired someone to tail his son, asking him to keep Nahit under surveillance and write reports on his behavior. Then realizing that one spy was not enough, he had sent a second of his minions after his son, and then a third. They too wrote their reports. And so had others he dispatched after them. Reading the reports, he was once more convinced of the reality of the Great Conspiracy, fostered by those who wanted to destroy our country and our spirit, and to eradicate our collective memory.