The New Life (33 page)

“Railroad inspectors, one and all,” Aunt Ratibe said. “They were all so convinced that the development of this country depended on the railroads.” Her finger pointed someone out: “Rıfkı.”

He looked just like I remembered him from my childhood and just like I had imagined him all these years. He was taller than average. Slender. Somewhat handsome, somewhat pensive. Pleased to be with the group, pleased to look like the rest of them. Smiling slightly.

“I have no one in the world, you know,” Aunt Ratibe said. “I couldn't come to your wedding, so here, at least take this.” She stuck into my hand the silver candy dish she took out of the breakfront. “The other day I saw you with your wife and daughter at the station. What a good-looking woman. One hopes you give your wife her due.”

I kept looking at the candy dish in my hand. If I claimed I was stricken with feelings of guilt and inadequacy, the reader might perhaps not believe me. Let me just say, I remembered something—without really being conscious of what it was that I remembered. The reflections of Aunt Ratibe, myself, and the room became diminutive, rotund, and flattened in the mirror-like surface of the candy dish. How magical it is to see the world not through the keyholes we call our eyes but for an instant through the logic of another sort of lens. Smart children intuit this, and it makes smart adults smile. Half of my mind was elsewhere, Reader, and the other half was stuck on something else. I don't know if it happens to you, but you are about to remember something, yet just before you figure out what you remember, for some unknown reason you postpone remembering.

“Aunt Ratibe,” I said, neglecting even to thank her for the candy dish. I pointed at the books in the other half of the breakfront. “May I take these books home with me?”

“What for?”

“To read them,” I said. I didn't mention I could not sleep nights because I was a murderer. “I read at night,” I said. “The TV tires my eyes, I can't watch it too long.”

“Oh, all right then,” she said suspiciously. “But when you're done reading, bring them back. So that part of the breakfront won't have to stay empty. My late husband read them all the time.”

So, after Aunt Ratibe and I finished watching the film on the late late show about some bad guys in the city of angels called Los Angeles, unhappy aspiring actresses who didn't seem to mind turning tricks, zealous cops, and pretty young people who at the drop of a hat made love with the innocence of children in paradise but then said some incredibly awful and shameful stuff about one another behind each other's backs, I returned home at a very late hour with two plastic bags full of books in my hands, the silver candy dish on top of one bag reflecting the bag of books, the world, streetlights, the denuded poplar trees, the dark sky, the melancholy night, the wet pavement, and my hand carrying the bag, my arm, and my legs pumping up and down.

I lined up the books meticulously on the desk that used to be in the back room, my daughter's room, when my mother was alive but which was now in the living room, the same desk on which I did my school and university homework for years and read for the first time
The New Life.
The cover of the candy dish was stuck and could not be pried open, so I put it next to the books too; and lighting a cigarette, I viewed everything with pleasure. There were thirty-three books. Among them there were reference books such as
The Principles of Mysticism, Child Psychology, A Short History of the World, Great Philosophers and Great Martyrs, Illustrated and Annotated Dream Interpretations,
translated works of Dante, Ib'n Arabi, and Rilke from the world classics series published by the Ministry of Education and sometimes distributed free of charge to directorates and ministries, anthologies such as
Best Love Poems, Tales from the Homeland,
translations of Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, and Mark Twain in brightly colored covers, and some stuff like
Kon-Tiki, Geniuses Were Also Children, The Last Station, Domestic Birds, Tell Me a Secret, A Thousand and One Puzzles.

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 excludes 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.