Authors: Orhan Pamuk
I changed buses twice, spending the sleepless night of the assassin, and then, in the cracked mirror of a rest-stop washroom, caught a glimpse of myself. No one would believe me if I said the person I saw in the mirror resembled the ghost of the assassinated more than he did the assassin. But the inner peace that the one now dead had found through writing was very far indeed from the one in the washroom, the one later riding on restlessly, carried along over the wheels of a bus.
Early in the morning before returning to Doctor Fine's mansion I went into the town barbershop and had a haircut and a shave, so that I might present myself to my Janan in the guise of the good-natured and dauntless young man who for the sake of building a happy family nest had gone through many an ordeal successfully and had come face to face with death. When I set foot on Doctor Fine's property and saw the windows of the mansion, the thought of Janan waiting for me in her warm bed set my heart pounding, thump-thump, for two measures, and a sparrow in the plane tree went twitter-twitter in counterpoint.
Rosebud opened the door. I didn't register the surprise on her face, perhaps because only half a day before I had bumped off her brother in the middle of a movie. Maybe that was why I hadn't noticed her raising her troubled eyebrows, why I hardly listened to what she was saying; instead, as if I were in my own father's house, I walked directly to our room, the room where I had left my Janan in her sickbed. I opened the door without knocking so that I could surprise my sweetheart. When I saw that the bed in the corner was unoccupied, completely empty, I began to understand what Rosebud had been telling me as I entered the room.
Janan had burned with a fever for three whole days, but then she had recuperated. When she was up and about, she had gone down to town and made a phone call to Istanbul, talked to her mother, and when there was no word from me for several days she had suddenly decided to go home.
My eyes stared out of the window of the unoccupied room at the mulberry tree in the backyard shimmering in the morning light, but now and then I couldn't help glancing back at the bed, which had been meticulously made. The copy of the
Güdül Post
she had used like a fan on the way here had been placed on the deserted bed. A voice inside me declared that my Janan had already understood that I was a lousy murderer, and that I would never see her again, so I might just as well close the door and throw myself on the bed that still smelled of Janan and cry my eyes out until I fell asleep. Another voice spoke in opposition to the first one, saying a killer must act like a killer and behave coldbloodedly and without undue agitation: Janan was undoubtedly waiting for me at her parents' place in NiÅantaÅı. Before leaving the room, I saw that treacherous mosquito at the edge of the windowsill and, yes, I dispatched it with one swipe of my hand. I was sure the blood in the mosquito's belly which was smeared on the love line in my palm must be Janan's sweet blood.
I had to get together with Janan back in Istanbul, but before beating it out of the mansion in the heart of the counterplot against the Great Conspiracy, I thought it would be beneficial and in the interests of Janan's and my future together to see Doctor Fine. Doctor Fine was sitting at a table placed a little past the mulberry tree, where he was eating a bunch of grapes with much gusto, looking up from the book in front of him at the hills where we had hiked together.
Placid as a pair of people who have all the time in the world, he and I talked about life's cruelty, about how nature actually determined man's fate surreptitiously, about the way serenity and stillness were instilled into the human heart by the compressed concept we called time, about how one could not relish the pleasure of even these juicy grapes unless one exercised great willpower and resolution, about the high level of consciousness and desire necessary to reach the source of real life that was free of any trace of travesty, and whether it was a sign of the great order in the universe or the ludic manifestation of some random coincidence which had brought a humble porcupine to scurry past us rustling. Killing a man must endow one with maturity; I was able to link the admiration that I continued to feel for Doctor Fine, much to my amazement, with the feeling of sympathy and tolerance that suddenly rose from the depths of my being like a latent disease. For this reason, when he suggested that I accompany him on his visit to the grave of his dead son, I was able to refuse him firmly without offending him: The long days of concentrated effort had really tuckered me out; I should by all means go back home to my wife and rest up, during which time I must pull my wits together and decide whether to accept the great responsibility that he had offered to me.
When Doctor Fine inquired if I had had a chance to try out the present he had given me, I told him I had certainly put the Walther to a test and was terribly pleased with its performance; then remembering the Serkisof watch in my pocket, I pulled it out. I placed it next to the golden bowl that held the grapes, conveying to him that this was the expression of the respect and admiration that a dealer with a broken heart and broken teeth felt for him.
“All these heartsick unfortunates, these wretches, these weaklings!” he said, casting a sidelong glance at the watch. “They want to live the life they are accustomed to and keep their cherished objects. For that end, they bond themselves passionately to someone like me. Just because I give them hope for a just world! How cruel the external powers have proved to be in their determination to destroy our lives and our memories! Before you make your decision back in Istanbul, consider how you might be able to help with these people's broken lives.”
I considered for a moment the prospect of finding Janan in Istanbul quickly, sweet-talking her back here to the mansion, where we might live happily ever after in the heart of the Great Counterconspiracy â¦
“Before returning to your charming wife,” Doctor Fine said, employing the language of French novels in translation, “please divest yourself of that purple jacket that makes you look more like an assassin than a hero, eh?”
I immediately headed back by bus to Istanbul. Morning prayer was being called when my mother opened the door; I offered her no word of explanation about the Eldorado I had been seeking nor her angelic daughter-in-law.
“Don't you ever leave your mother like that!” she said, turning on the gas heater and running hot water in the bathtub.
We breakfasted quietly as in the old days, mother and son. I realized my mother, like many mothers whose sons are swept into political and fundamentalist currents, was keeping her mouth shut, thinking I had been attracted to some magnetic pole in the hinterland, and that if she asked, I might tell her something that would terrify her. When my mother's quick and light hand rested for a moment next to the red currant jam, I saw the spots on the back of her hand, making me think I had returned to my old life. Was it possible for everything to go on as if nothing had happened?
After breakfast I sat at my desk and looked for a long time at the book, which was open at the place where I had left it. But what I was doing could not be called reading, it was something more like remembering, or some kind of suffering â¦
I was just leaving to go find Janan when my mother accosted me.
“Swear you'll be back by nightfall.”
I did. I swore for two whole months every time I left home in the morning, but Janan could be found nowhere. I went to NiÅantaÅı, I pounded the streets, waited in front of their door, I rang their bell, I crossed bridges, took ferryboats, went to the movies, made phone calls, but I got no word. I convinced myself she would show up at TaÅkıÅla Hall when classes started at the end of October, but she did not come. I walked the hallways in the building all day long; sometimes, thinking that a shadow which looked like hers went by the windows that looked on the hallway, I bolted out of class and broke into a run, and sometimes I went into a vacant classroom and lost in thought watched the foot traffic on the sidewalk and in the street.
It was on the day central heating was first turned on and people lit their stoves that, armed with a scenario that I had cleverly concocted, I rang the doorbell of my “missing classmate's” parents' apartment, and I managed to disgrace myself totally giving them the bullshit I had prepared in great detail. Not only did they not provide me with any information on Janan's whereabouts, they offered no clue as to where any information might be obtained. Even so, on the second visit I made to their place one Sunday afternoon when color TV was amiably gurgling away with a soccer match, I deduced from their attempt to get information out of me by questioning my motives that they knew a lot they were not telling. I got nowhere trying to pump information out of their relatives whose names I located in the phone book. The only conclusion that could be drawn from the conversations I had with all the testy uncles, inquisitive aunts, cautious maids, and snotty nephews and nieces was that Janan was at the university studying architecture.
As to her classmates in the school of architecture, they had long come to believe the myths they had dreamed up themselves in connection with Janan as well as with the news of Mehmet being shot in the vicinity of the minibus stop. I heard some say that Mehmet had been shot due to some settling of accounts between the dope pushers at the hotel where he worked, and I also heard it whispered that he had fallen victim to fanatic fundamentalists. There were those who said that Janan had been sent to school somewhere in Europe, a stratagem upper-class families often resort to with daughters who fall for some shady character, but the bit of investigative work I did at the registrar's office proved that this was not the case.
It's best that I don't even talk about the ingenious details of the snooping I did for months and years, nor about the cold-blooded calculations worthy of a murderer, and the colors reminiscent of an unfortunate's dreams. In essence, Janan was nowhere around, I had no news of her, nor did I come across her trail. I took the course of studies that I'd missed for a semester, and then also completed the next one. Neither I nor Doctor Fine's minions got back in touch. I had no idea whether they were still busy with their assassinations. Along with Janan they too had absconded from my dreams as well as from my nightmares. Then it was summer; then the new academic year began in the fall, which I completed, and also the one after that. Then I headed off to do my military service.
Two months before I was done with my patriotic duty, I had word that my mother had died. I was granted a furlough and made it to Istanbul in time for the funeral. My mother was interred. After the night I spent at some friends', I went home; and when I felt the emptiness of the place, I became apprehensive. I was looking at the pots and pans hanging on the kitchen wall when I heard the refrigerator sighing sadly and lamenting through its familiar hum. I had been left all alone in this life. I lay down on my mother's bed and wept a little, then I turned on the TV and sat across from it like my mom, watching it for quite some time with resignation and some sort of joy of living. Before I went to sleep, I took the book out of its hiding place; I placed it on the desk and I began to read, hoping to be as affected as I was on the day when I had first read it. Although I did not sense a light surging on my face, or feel my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book, I felt an inner peace.
That is how I began to read the book anew. But I no longer imagined with each new reading that my life was being swept away by a powerful wind toward an unknown realm. I was trying to capture the concealed pattern of a long-settled account, or the finer points of the story, the internal logic which I had not perceived while I was living through it. You do understand, don't you? Even before I was done with my military duty, I had already become an old man.
And so I devoted myself to other books in the same way. I did not read to assuage the desire for a soul other than the one which coiled inside me at the hour of dusk, or to fan the joy of connecting felicitously with the secret festival taking place in a metaphysical world, or evenâoh, I don't knowâto hasten toward a new life within which I might meet up with Janan. I read to face up to my lot in life with wisdom, with sobriety, like a gentleman, as well as to endure Janan's absence, which I felt profoundly. I harbored no hope that the Angel of Desire would ever offer me a candelabra with seven branches as a consolation prize with which to grace my home with Janan. At times, when I lifted my head from a book I read into the wee hours of the night with some sort of spiritual equilibrium and equanimity, I would become aware of the profound silence in the neighborhood, and that was when suddenly before my eyes appeared the image of Janan sleeping beside me on those bus rides which I had thought would never come to an end.
On one of those trips, which was refreshed in my imagination in full color like a dream of paradise each time I remembered it, I had observed that Janan's forehead and temples were covered in perspiration and her hair was wet and stuck together due to the air on the bus being unexpectedly hot, and I was dabbing the beads of perspiration with a Kütahya tile-design handkerchief I had bought in the town with the same name, when I perceived in my beloved's faceâthanks to the mauve light from a filling station that was momentarily reflected on usâan expression of intense happiness and surprise. Later, at a rest-stop restaurant, Janan had cheered up sitting in her sweat-drenched State-store-bought print cotton dress and drinking down several glasses of tea, and she was all smiles telling me that she had dreamed of her father placing kisses on her forehead, but a while later she had realized it wasn't her father but a messenger from a realm created out of light. After she smiled, she often pulled her hair behind her ears with a supple gesture which each time she did it melted a piece of my heart, my soul, my mind before disappearing into the dark night.