The New Life (37 page)

In the silence, he sensed my sorrow through the sort of perceptiveness that comes with blindness, and he attempted to expiate it: So that was life; there was accident, there was luck, there was love, there was loneliness; there was joy; there was sorrow; there was light, death, also happiness that was dimly there; it was necessary one didn't disregard all that. At eight o'clock there was a newscast on the radio which his grandson would turn on presently; and would I please stay and share with them their evening meal.

I made my apologies, claiming an awful lot of people were waiting to take out life insurance policies in the town of Viran Bağ. Soon enough, before anybody knew what was going on, I was out the door, down the garden path, and in the street. Once outside, seeing how chilly the air was on this spring evening, I guessed how rough the winters must be out here, and I found myself standing more solitary than the dark cypress trees out in the yard.

What was I to do henceforth? I had learned what was necessary—as well as what was unnecessary—and I had arrived at the end of all the adventures, voyages, and mysteries I could possibly invent for myself. The slice of life I might call my future was cloaked in darkness just like the town of Son Pazar below the hill which, aside from a few dim streetlights, was in oblivion, existing cut off from sparkling night life, effervescent crowds, and well-lit streets. But when some dog who meant business began growling in earnest, I took off down the hill.

Waiting for the bus that would take me back to the hustle and bustle of billboards for banks, cigarettes, soft drinks, and television sets, I wandered aimlessly through the streets in this tiny town at the end of the world. Now that I had no more hope and desire to attain the meaning and the unified reality of the world, the book, and my life, I found myself among fancy-free appearances that neither signified nor implied anything. I watched through an open window a family gathered around a table eating their supper. That's how they were, just the way you know them. I learned the hours for the Koran course being given from a poster tacked on the mosque wall. At the café with the trellis, I observed without too much concern that Branch soda pop still persisted here against all sorts of assaults from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Schweppes. I watched the repairman in front of the bicycle shop across the street tune up a bicycle wheel in the light coming from inside the shop, and his friend who hung around with him, smoking and gabbing away. Why did I think they were friends? They were perhaps embroiled in conflict and seething with enmity toward each other. In either case, they were neither excessively interesting nor excessively uninteresting. For those readers who think I am much too pessimistic, let me make it perfectly clear that sitting in a café with a nice trellis, I preferred watching them to not watching them.

The bus arrived and I left the town of Son Pazar with this feeling. We went round and round up craggy mountains, and then we listened anxiously to the grinding of the brakes going downhill. We were stopped several times at checkpoints where we pulled out our identifications for the benefit of the military patrol. It was when the mountains, the military zone, and identity checks were over that our bus began to speed up as it pleased, going like crazy and out of control across the dark and wide plains, and my ears began to pick out the sorrowful notes in the familiar old music made by the growl of the engine and the gaily twittering tires.

Perhaps because the bus was one of the last of the durable, burly but noisy old Magirus buses that Janan and I used to take, perhaps because we were on rough asphalt pavement where the tires rotated eight times a second making that special moaning sound, perhaps because my past and my future appeared in the purple and leaden colors on the screen where the lovers who misunderstood each other wept in a movie made by Yesilçam Studios—I don't know why, I didn't know why—perhaps because some instinct guided me to find the meaning I couldn't find in life in the hidden pattern of chance, I sat in seat No. 37—perhaps because leaning into the seat where she would have sat, I beheld the dark velvet night that had once appeared so mysterious and magnetic to us that it seemed as if it was as endless as time, dreams, life, and the book. When rain that seemed even more sorrowful than me began pattering on the windows, I leaned back into my seat completely and abandoned myself to the music of my memories.

It began raining increasingly harder, parallel to the sorrow that increased in my heart, then turned into a downpour sometime around midnight, accompanied by wind that hurled our bus around and lightning the same color purple as the flowers of sorrow blooming in my mind. The old bus which leaked around the windows into the seats went by a filling station blurred in the downpour and mud villages beset with phantoms of water, and slowed down to take the curve into a rest stop. When the neon sign that said
MEMORY LANE RESTAURANT
bathed us in its blue light, “Thirty minutes,” the tired driver announced. “Compulsory rest stop.”

I was intending not to move out of my seat but to watch alone the sorrowful movie I called my memories; yet the rain that pelted the roof of the old Magirus was thickening the heavy sadness in my heart so intensely, I was afraid I might not be able to endure it. I ducked out along with the other passengers hopping through the mud, newspapers and plastic bags shielding their heads.

I thought mixing with the crowd might do me good; I'd have some soup and a pudding, distracting myself with tangible pleasures of the world, so that instead of getting emotional surveying the past portion of my life that was left behind, I might pull myself together, turning the rational high beams of my mind on the portion that stretched out before me. I went up the two steps, dried my hair with my handkerchief, and entering the brightly lit room that smelled of grease and cigarettes, I heard some music that left me shaken.

Like an experienced invalid who can sense a heart attack coming, I remember floundering helplessly in my attempt to take precautions, to stave off the crisis. But what could I do? I couldn't very well demand—could I?—that they turn off the radio, just because when Janan and I first chanced upon each other following the accident, we had heard the same tune, holding hands. I could not cry out telling them to take down the photos of the movie stars, just because Janan and I had such a good time looking at the pictures, laughing and eating our meal here in this very restaurant called
MEMORY LANE
. Since I did not have in my pocket a nitrate tablet against my crisis of the heart, I picked up in my tray a bowl of lentil soup, a little bread, and a glass of double raki, and I retreated to a table in the corner. Salt tears began dripping into the soup I stirred with my spoon.

Don't let me carry on like those writers who imitate Chekhov, trying to draw out of my pain the dignity of being human which all readers can share; instead, like a writer from the East, let me take the opportunity to tell a cautionary tale. In short: I had desired to set myself apart from others, someone special who had a goal that was entirely different. Around here, this is considered a crime which can never be forgiven. I told myself I had received this impossible dream from Uncle Rıfkı's comics which I had read in my childhood. So I considered once again what the reader who likes extracting the moral of the story has been thinking all along; it was because the reading material in my childhood had preconditioned me that I had been so mightily affected by
The New Life.
But like the great old tellers of exemplary tales, I did not believe the moral of the story myself, so my life story remained merely my own individual tale and failed to assuage my pain. This merciless conclusion that had slowly been dawning on my mind had long been guessed by my heart. I was weeping uncontrollably to the music on the radio.

I realized my state did not make a favorable impression on my fellow passengers who were spooning up their soup and gobbling up their pilaf, so I sneaked into the washroom. I splashed my face with some warmish and murky water that came sputtering out of the spigot, drenching my clothes; I wiped my nose, took my time. Then I returned to my table.

Shortly, when I glanced at them out of the corner of my eye, I saw that my fellow travelers watching me out of the corner of their eyes seemed somewhat relieved. Presently, an old peddler who had also been peering at me came up carrying a straw basket and looking me straight in the eye.

“Take it easy!” he said. “This too shall pass. Here, take some mint candy, it's good for whatever ails you.”

He placed on my table a small pouch of mints that carried the tradename
BLISS
.

“How much?”

“No, no, it's a present from me.”

Something like being consoled by a good-intentioned “uncle” handing some candy to a child crying in the street … I stared at the avuncular candyman's face like that child, looking guilty. Calling him an uncle is a figure of speech, perhaps he was not even that much older than me.

“Today we are altogether defeated,” he said. “The West has swallowed us up, trampled on us in passing. They have invaded us down to our soup, our candy, our underpants; they have finished us off. But someday, someday perhaps a thousand years from now, we will avenge ourselves; we will bring an end to this conspiracy by taking them out of our soup, our chewing gum, our souls. Now go ahead and eat your mints, don't cry over spilt milk.”

Was this the consolation I had been looking for? I don't know. But like the child crying in the street seriously listening to the story told by the nice man, for a while I reflected on the words of consolation. Then recalling a notion kicked around by early Renaissance writers as well as Ismail Hakkı of Erzurum, I came upon a thought to console myself. I considered that they might have been right in thinking that sorrow is a substance that spreads from the stomach to the brain, and I made a decision to pay more attention to what I ate and drank.

I broke up the bread into the soup and then spooned it up; I took careful sips of my raki and asked for another along with a slice of melon. Like some cautious old man concerned with what goes on in his stomach, I diverted myself with food and drink until it was time for the bus. I got on and sat any old where. I imagine it is obvious: I wanted to leave behind me the usual Number 37 where I preferred to sit, along with everything else connected to my past. It seems I dropped off to sleep.

After a long and uninterrupted snooze when I slept like a baby, I woke up when the bus stopped toward morning and went into one of those modern rest places which are an outpost of civilization. I was somewhat cheered seeing the pretty and congenial girls in the bank and Coca-Cola ads on the wall, the scenes on the calendars, the bright hodgepodge of colors in the words of advertisement that invited me loudly, the plump “hamburgers” spilling out of their buns in glass cases on one corner of which there was a sign pointing out shrewdly in English “
SELF SERVICE
,” and the pictures of ice cream that came in colors like lipstick red, daisy yellow, dreamy blue.

I served myself some coffee and sat in a corner. In the bright light in the place, while three television sets were on, I watched a smartly dressed little girl who couldn't manage to pour on her french fries a new brand of “ketchup” that came in a plastic bottle and required the help of her mother. There was a plastic bottle of the same
TASTEE
brand of ketchup sitting on my table, and the golden yellow letters on the bottle promised me that if I collected within a span of three months thirty of those bottle caps, which were so difficult to open that they made a mess of little girls' dresses when they finally did, and sent them to the address below, I would be eligible to enter the contest that would take the winner for a week's excursion to Disney World in Florida. Presently, one of the soccer teams on the TV set in the middle scored a goal.

I watched the same goal being scored again in slow motion along with all the other males sitting at the tables or waiting in the “hamburger” line, feeling an optimism that was not at all on the surface but was quite as rational as it was appropriate to the life that awaited me. I liked watching soccer games on TV, lazing around home on Sundays, getting soused some evenings, going to the station with my daughter to watch the trains, trying out new brands of ketchup, reading, gossiping with my wife and making love, puffing on cigarettes, and sitting in peace and drinking coffee someplace or other, as I was doing just now, and a thousand other things besides. If I took care of myself and managed to live as long as, say, the old caramel maker who was named for the Pleiades, I had almost another half century before me to enjoy all these things … For a moment I felt an intense longing for my home, my wife, and my daughter. I dreamed how I would play with my daughter when I got home around noon Saturday, what I would get her at the candy store in the station, and while she played outside in the afternoon, how my wife and I would make love genuinely, ardently, and without being slipshod, then how we would all watch TV later, tickling my daughter and laughing together.

The coffee had really waked me up. In the deep silence that descends on a bus just before morning, the only other person awake aside from the driver was myself, sitting just behind him, a little to his right. A mint candy in my mouth, my eyes wide open, staring at the perfectly smooth asphalt road paved across the steppe that seemed infinite, concentrating on the dashes in the median line and the headlights of trucks that passed by now and then, I was impatiently waiting for daybreak.

It took no more than a half hour before I began distinguishing the first signs of morning in the window to my right, which meant we were traveling in a northerly direction. First the outline of the land against the sky seemed to become vaguely, indistinctly visible. Then the outline of the frontier between the earth and the sky took on a silken crimson color which invaded the dark sky in one corner yet without lighting the steppe; but the rosy-red demarcation line was so fine, so delicate and so extraordinary that both the tireless Magirus, which tore through the steppe like a wild horse speeding willy-nilly toward the darkness, and the passengers being carried along were plunged into a mechanical frenzy that was of no avail. No one was aware of this, not even the driver.