The New Life (25 page)

Let's take, for example, the town of Incir Paşa where all the streets smelled of tobacco; it was not only the traduced young fireman who had read the book, but the whole municipal fire team had read it with a kind of seriousness that was surprising. The town was busy preparing for the Liberation Day festivities marking the day Greek occupation forces were thrown out, when I had the opportunity to watch, in the company of some children and one chummy mastiff dog, these firefighting confreres wearing steel helmets with ornaments on top that were tiny gas jets, running lockstep across the training grounds with flames leaping from the tops of their heads, singing flawlessly in unison the song that goes “Fire, fire, our homeland is on fire.” Afterwards we all sat down together to a meal of braised goat meat. The firemen in their bright yellow and red short-sleeved uniform shirts occasionally mumbled some words they quoted from the book, either as a joke or else to acknowledge my presence. As to the book, they showed me later that they kept it in the cab of their only fire truck as if it were the holy Koran. Was it me who had misread the book? Or was it the firemen who believed that angels—not one solitary angel—descended from heaven on summer nights brilliantly lit with stars, sniffed the smell of tobacco, and showed the grief-stricken and the careworn the road to happiness?

I had my picture taken by the town photographer in one town; in another, I had the doctor listen to my lungs; in a third, I didn't buy the ring I tried on at the local goldsmith; and each time I left these sad, dusty, and ramshackle places, I fantasized about the day when Janan and I would come here and actually have our picture taken, or get her two beautiful clusters of lung taken care of, or buy the ring that would bind us till death do us part, and not merely to find out about the photographer Mehmet, or Dr. Mehmet, or Mehmet the goldsmith, who they really were, and why they read the book with such passion.

Then I would go around the town for a while, chide the town pigeons for dropping on the Atatürk statue, consult my watch, check my Walther, and then make my way to the bus terminal, which was the moment when I sometimes had an apprehension that those evil men, the fellows in raincoats, that punctilious Seiko and the ghosts of watches, were after me. Might that tall and thin shadow possibly be Movado from the National Bureau of Intelligence? Because the moment he saw me, he got off the Adana bus which he had just boarded. Yes, it had to be him; that's who it was, and I had better quick change my destination, which is what I did; and I hid in some foul-smelling john, and hoping without hope to see the angel in the window of the
IMMEDIATE SAFEWAY
bus I boarded on the sly, I felt the presence of a pair of eyes that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, which made me conclude that it must be Serkisof this time who had me under his perfidious watch. So, in the Formica-paneled restaurants at the rest stops where we halted in the middle of the night, I would leave my tea half finished and make for the cornfields to wait until the departure time of the bus, watching the stars in the dark blue velvet sky; or, during the day, I would go into some local store wearing a white outfit and a smiling face, and leave the store in a red shirt, a purple jacket, corduroy pants, and a scowling face; several times I found myself running in a swelter through the local crowds toward the bus terminal.

After all the running around, when I was convinced that I had lost the armed ghost tailing me, or had concluded that there was indeed no earthly reason for Doctor Fine's watches to shoot me full of holes, then the evil eyes that watched me from afar would be replaced by friendly townspeople regarding me with eyes that were pleased to see me among themselves.

One time, just to make sure the Mehmet in question who had gone to see his uncle in Istanbul was not our Mehmet, I accompanied the garrulous lady who lived in the apartment across from his on her way back from market day. In her mesh string bags and the plastic pouches we carried together, chubby eggplants, lush tomatoes, and pointed peppers gleamed robustly under the sun, and she went on about how wonderful it was to look up one's army buddy, and how very lovely life was, not at all troubled that my wife was lying sick at home.

Perhaps life was like that. In the garden of the Tasty Treats Restaurant in the town of Kara Çalı, I sat at a table under a grand plane tree and had a delightful kebab redolent with thyme, served on a bed of creamed purée of smoked eggplant. The light wind, which turned the leaves this way and that, brought from the kitchen an aroma of pastry dough that was as pleasant as cherished memories. In a troubled town near Afyon the name of which I don't recall, my legs had carried me out of their own volition, as they so often did, to a candy store where I stopped dead in my tracks on seeing a mamma who was as round and smooth as the sparkling jars that were full of candies the color of old rose and the skin of tangerines, and I turned to the cash register, shaken. The mamma's smaller and paler version, who seemed to be sweet sixteen, a peerless little beauty with tiny hands, tiny mouth, high cheekbones, and slightly slanted eyes, looked up from the photoromance magazine she was reading and smiled frankly, unbelievable as it was, giving me the eye like those liberated vamps in American films.

One night, I was waiting for the bus in a terminal that was lit with soft lights as in the peaceful and quiet living room of a fashionable home in Istanbul, sitting there with three reserve officers I had met and playing a card game that they had made up and elaborated among themselves which they called Shah Trumped. They had cut the cards out of Yenice cigarette boxes on which they had drawn the pictures of shahs, dragons, sultans, djins, lovers, angels; and the angels, which were female counterparts of jokers, each represented either the girl next door, or someone's one and only love, or some domestic movie star or cabaret singer who could only be slept with in these fellows' masturbatory dreams, as was the case for the one among them who was the biggest prankster. They let me designate the fourth angel, and they showed me the courtesy of not even asking me who it represented, which is something even intelligent and considerate friends are seldom capable of doing.

There was one scene of bliss that particularly distressed me to witness during the period I was listening to all the bunk that the heartsick informers fed me, gleaning whatever I could from all those many Mehmets, each tucked away in his inaccessible corner, doors closed, the hedges thorny, walls covered with ivy, and the road winding—or else, I was fleeing to avoid all those raincoated, evil imaginary watches after me at the bus terminals, town squares, and terminal restaurants.

It was the fifth day I was on the road. I had drunk the raki offered me in a tea glass by the publisher of the
Çorum Free Press,
so that I might all the better understand the poems of his that he read me; and I had learned that the publisher would no longer print excerpts from his book in the “home and family” section because he had understood it neither helped the railroad problem nor furthered the building of the Çorum-Amasya line; then in the next town, after having spent six hours running around looking for addresses and trails, I had been furious to discover that for the sake of worming some money out of Doctor Fine, some local heartsick informer had invented a nonexistent reader of the book and placed him on a nonexistent street; and I had beat it to Amasya where night falls quickly, the city being situated between craggy and steep mountains. I was halfway through the Mehmets on my list, so far to no avail, and my legs were twitching with the anxiety of imagining Janan still burning with fever in bed, so I had been planning to get on the first bus to the Black Sea coast immediately after going to the requisite address in town, inquiring after my army buddy, only to find out he was not that Mehmet.

I crossed a bridge spanning a murky stream—which turned out to be the renowned Green River which was not in the least green—and went into a neighborhood situated below tombs cut into the rock on the face of a cliff. The old and stately mansions indicated that at one time people who had seen better times—who knows what pashas or landed agas—had once lived in this dusty quarter. I knocked on the door of one of these mansions and inquired after my army buddy; they told me he was out driving his car, but they let me in and presented to me scenes from a blissfully happy family life.

1. The patriarch, a lawyer who took the cases of the poor pro bono, saw to the door his client whose troubles grieved him deeply; and taking a volume of jurisprudence out of his magnificent library, he settled down to review it. 2. When the matriarch who was apprised of the case introduced me to the distracted father, the sister with the impish eyes, the grandmother wearing her reading glasses, and the little brother who was studying his stamp collection—the homeland series—they were all excited and overjoyed, exhibiting the kind of true Turkish hospitality extolled so much in travel books written by Western explorers. 3. The mother and the impish girl questioned me affably while they waited for the oven to brown the delicious-smelling
börek
Aunt Süveyde had made, then they had a discussion about André Maurois' novel
Climats.
4. Their hardworking son Mehmet who had spent the whole day taking care of things at their apple orchard told me candidly that he didn't remember me at all from the time he spent doing his military duty, but he expended considerable goodwill looking for topics of conversation we might have in common, and eventually he came across the subject, so we had a chance to discuss how detrimental it had been for the country that political incentive for building railroads and encouraging village farm cooperatives had been dropped.

When I left the blissful mansion to drown in the darkness of the street, I thought to myself these people probably never got laid. I had known as soon as I knocked on the door and saw them that the Mehmet in question did not live here. So why had I stayed to get myself charmed by the picture of bliss that came right out of the commercials advertising homes on credit? Because of the Walther, I said to myself, feeling the presence of my gun in my belt. I wondered if I should just turn around and spray my 9-millimeter rounds into the peaceful windows of the mansion; but I knew it wasn't a real thought, it was more of a whisper to put to sleep the black wolf deep in the dark forest of my mind. Sleep, black wolf, sleep. Ah, yes, let's go to sleep. A store, a store window, an advertisement: My feet, which were as meek as a lamb that fears the wolf, were taking me somewhere now. Where? Pleasure Theater, Spring Pharmacy, Death Dry-Fruits and Nuts. Why is the salesboy smoking and staring at me like that? Then a grocery store, a pastry shop, and eventually I found myself looking at the Humble-Steel refrigerators in a good-size window, the Crescent Gas stoves, bread boxes, armchairs, sofas, enameled steel cookware, lamps, Modern brand stoves, and when I saw the lucky dog with the thick coat, that is, the figurine of the dog perched on the Humble-Steel brand radio, I knew I could no longer control myself.

That's how I stood in front of a store window in the city of Amasya stuck between two mountains, Angel, and I wept, breaking into big sobs. You ask a child why he is crying; he weeps because of a deep wound inside him but he tells you he's crying because he has lost his blue pencil sharpener; that was the kind of grief that overcame me looking at all the stuff in the window. What was the sense in turning into a murderer for naught? To live with that pain in my soul for the rest of my life? I might buy some roasted seeds in the dry-fruits-and-nuts store, or look into the mirror of some grocer to see myself, or be living the life of bliss replete with refrigerators and stoves, but still the accursed sinister voice inside me, the black wolf, would snarl and accuse me of my guilt. Whereas I, Angel, I had so completely believed in life once and in good works. Now, caught between Janan whom I couldn't trust, and Mehmet whom I would kill in a minute if I could trust her, I had nothing to hold on to but my Walther and the dreams of a blissful life up on cloud nine that depended on schemes which were intricate beyond belief and sinister to the extreme. The images of refrigerators, orange juice machines, armchairs bought on time flowed by parading in my mind, accompanied by a soundless wail.

The elderly man in domestic films who assuages the pain of the sniffling little boy or beautiful weeping woman came to my aid momentarily, me the tough rooster. “Son,” he said, “why are you crying, my boy? Is something the matter? Don't cry.”

This bearded clever uncle was either on his way to the mosque to pray, or else to throttle someone.

I said, “Sir, my father died yesterday.”

He must have suspected something. “Who are your folks, son?” he said. “You're surely not from here.”

“My stepfather never wanted us coming around,” I said and I wondered if I should also say: Sir, I am going to Mecca on pilgrimage, but I missed my bus. Can you loan me some money?

Acting as if I were dying of grief, I walked into the darkness, dying of grief. Still, it had helped to come up with a couple of lies out of the blue. Later, I was amply soothed on the
TRUSTED SAFEWAY
bus I could always trust, seeing on the video screen a dainty lady driving her car pitilessly and without any hesitation into a crowd of evil guys. I arrived on the shore of the Black Sea by morning, and I called my mother from the Black Sea Grocery and told her I was about to conclude my affairs and come home with her angelic daughter-in-law. If she insists on crying, let her cry out of happiness. I sat down in a pastry shop in the old shopping district, and opening my notes, I made some calculations to finish the job as soon as possible.

The reader of the book in Samsun was a young doctor doing his residency at the Social Security Hospital. As soon as I determined he was not that Mehmet, something hit me for no explicable reason, perhaps it was his clean-shaven face, or his physically fit and self-confident manner. Unlike people like me whose lives had slipped off the track, this man had found a sound way to absorb the book into his system and he could live with it in peace as well as with passion. I hated him immediately. How could the very book that had changed my world and screwed up my destiny have affected this man as if it were a vitamin pill? I knew I would die of curiosity if I didn't ask, so I brought up the subject with the wide-shouldered doctor and his nurse, who looked like a third-class Kim Novak with her large eyes and chiseled features, pointing at the book that was sitting in all its deceptive innocence among the pharmaceutical catalogues on the desk, as if it too was something about pharmacy.