Authors: Orhan Pamuk
I was returning home one midnight, having patiently won the numerical and fortuitous games I played, double or nothing, which brought Janan a little closer to me in my fondest dreams, when I noticed lights burning in my room. Either my mother was worried that I was so late, or else she was looking for something; but a completely different picture appeared in my mind.
I imagined myself sitting at my table, up there in my room where I saw the lights. I imagined it with such passion and force of will that I thought I could almost see for a brief moment my own head in the faint orange glow of my table lamp, against the little segment of dingy white wall that was barely visible between the parted drapes. At the same moment, such an amazing feeling of freedom manifested itself in the electric sensation I experienced that I was amazed. It had been so simple all along, I said to myself: the man in the room that I saw out of another's eyes must remain there in that room; I, on the other hand, must run away from home, away from the room, away from everything, including my mother's smell, my bed, my twenty-two years of lived life. New life could begin only by my leaving that room; if I were to keep leaving that room in the morning only to return to it at night, I could never reach Janan nor that land.
When I entered my room, I looked at my bed as if I were seeing someone else's belongings, the books that were piled on one corner of my table, the nudie magazines I had not touched since I first saw Janan, the carton of cigarettes drying on the radiator, the change I kept in a dish, my key ring, my wardrobe that didn't close right; and regarding all my stuff that bound me to my old world, I understood I had to make good my escape.
Later, when I was reading and copying the book, I perceived that what I was writing signaled a certain tendency in the world. It seemed I should not be in one place but simultaneously in every place. My room was somewhere; it was one place. It was not everywhere. “Why go to TaÅkıÅla in the morning,” I asked myself, “when Janan won't be there?” There were other places Janan would not be either, places where I had been going in vain but where I would no longer go. I would only go where the text took me, where Janan and the new life must be. As I copied down all that the book imparted, the knowledge of the places where I must go gradually filtered into me, and I was gratified that I was gradually becoming someone else. Much later, when I was reviewing the pages I had filled like a traveler satisfied with the progress he has made, I could see with clarity the new human being into whom I was in the process of being transformed.
I was the person who oriented himself on the road leading to the new life he sought by sitting down and copying the book sentence by sentence into his notebook. I was the person who had read a book that changed his whole life, who had fallen in love, and who had a feeling he was progressing on the road to a new life. I was the person whose mother tapped on his door and said, “You sit up all night writing, but please don't smoke, at least.” I was the person who rose from the table past the witching hour when the only noises heard in the district are the dogs howling across great distances, and took a final look at the book he had been poring over for many nights and the pages he had filled under its influence. I was the person who removed his savings from his sock drawer and, without turning off the lights in his room, stood at his mother's bedroom door listening fondly to the sound of her breathing. It was I, Angel, who long past the midnight hour slipped out of his own house like a timorous stranger and blended into the darkness in the streets. I was the one on the sidewalk, his eyes fixed on his own lighted windows as if he were contemplating with tears and pathos someone else's fragile and depleted life. It was me who was running to his new life eagerly, listening to the reverberations of his own footsteps in the silence of the night.
The only light in the neighborhood still burning was the ghastly glow in the windows of Uncle Railman Rıfkı's house. I was up on the garden wall in an instant and looking in between the partially closed curtains to see under the feeble light his wife, Aunt Ratibe, sitting up and smoking. In one of Uncle Rıfkı's stories for children, there's an intrepid hero who, like myself, takes to the disconsolate streets of his own childhood in search of the Land of Gold, hearkening to the call of obscure venues, the clamor of faraway countries, and the roaring sound in trees that remained invisible. Wearing on my back the overcoat my dead father who retired from the State Railroads left me, I walked into the heart of darkness.
The night concealed me, it kept me and showed me the way. I proceeded into the inner organs of the city that vibrated steadily, its concrete highways rigid as the arteries of a paralyzed patient, its neon boulevards reverberating with the whine of rowdy trucks carrying meat, milk, and canned food. I consecrated the garbage pails that belched the swill in their maws out on the wet sidewalks that reflected the lights; I asked the gruesome trees that never stand still for directions; I blinked seeing fellow citizens in dimly lit stores who still sat up at cash registers going over their accounts; I steered clear of the police on duty in front of precinct stations; I smiled forlornly at drunks, vagrants, unbelievers, and outcasts who had no tidings of a glowing new life; I exchanged dark glances with Checker Cab drivers who sneaked up on me like sleepless sinners in the stillness of blinking red lights; I was not deceived by the beautiful women smiling down on me from soap billboards, nor did I put my trust in the good-looking men in the cigarette advertisements, nor even in the statues of Atatürk, or the early editions of tomorrow's papers being scrambled up by drunks and insomniacs, or the lottery man drinking tea at an all-night café, nor his friend who waved and called out to me, “Take a load off, young man.” The innermost stench of the rotting city led me to the bus terminal that reeked of the sea and hamburgers, latrines and exhaust, gasoline and filth.
Trying to avoid becoming intoxicated by the plastic lettering on top of bus line offices that promised me new venues, new hearts, new lives, and hundreds of colorful cities and towns, I took myself into a small restaurant. There, I turned away from the semolina cakes, the puddings and salads being displayed in the ample refrigerated case, wondering in whose stomachs and how many hundreds of miles away they would finally be digested. Right now they were just standing there in neat rows like the plastic letters in the names of towns and bus companies. And then I forgot for whom I had begun to wait. Perhaps I was waiting for you, Angel, to pull me away, tenderly and graciously cautioning me, putting me gently on the right track. But there was no one in the restaurant aside from a mother holding a child and a couple of obdurate travelers who were stuffing their sleepy faces. My eyes were searching for signs of the new life when a sign on the wall warned: “Do not tamper with the light,” and another announced: “There is a charge for using the facilities,” and yet a third proclaimed in stern and deliberate lettering: “No alcoholic beverages allowed.” I had an impression that dark crows were taking wing across the windows of my mind; then I seemed to have a presentiment that my death would follow from this point of departure. I wish I could describe to you, Angel, the grief in that restaurant slowly closing in upon itself, but I was so terribly tired; I heard the whine of the centuries resonating in my ears like the sleepless woods; I loved the turbulent spirit gurgling in the engines of dauntless buses that each took off to another clime; I heard Janan call out to me from a place far away where she was searching for the access point that would take her to the threshold. Yet I was silent, a passive spectator who was willing, due to a technical difficulty, to watch a film without the sound because my head had dropped on the table and I had fallen asleep.
I slept on I don't know for how long. When I woke up I was still in the same restaurant but in the presence of a different clientele, yet I felt I was now capable of communicating to the angel the point of departure for the great journey that would take me to unique experiences. Across from me were three young men who were boisterously settling their money and bus fare accounts. A thoroughly forlorn old man had placed his coat and his plastic bag on the table next to his soup bowl in which he was stirring and smelling his own grievous life; and a waiter read the paper, yawning in the dimly lit area where the tables were lined up. Next to me the frosted glass wall extended all the way from the ceiling down to the dirty floor tiles, behind it was the dark blue night, and in the dark were the revving bus engines that invited me to another realm.
I boarded one randomly at an indeterminate hour. It wasn't yet morning but the day broke as we progressed, the sun rose, and my eyes were filled with light and sleep. Then, it seems, I dozed off.
I got on buses, I got off buses; I loitered in bus terminals only to board more buses, sleeping in my seat, turning my days into nights, embarking and disembarking in small towns, traveling for days in the dark, and I said to myself: the young traveler was so determined to find the unknown realm, he let himself be transported without respite on roads that would take him to the threshold.
It was a cold winter's night, O Angel, and I had been traveling for days; I was on one of the several buses I took each day, not knowing where I departed from, where I was destined, or how fast I was going. I was sitting on the tired and noisy bus, somewhere back on the right-hand side in the darkened interior, half asleep and half awake, more dreaming than sleeping, and closer to the ghosts in the darkness outside than to my own dreams. I could see through my half-closed eyelids a single puny tree on the interminable steppe lit by the cross-eyed headlights on high beam, the boulder with a cologne ad painted on it, the power poles, the threatening headlights of the trucks that we encountered sporadically, but I was also watching the movie on the video screen placed high above the driver's seat. Whenever the female lead spoke, the screen took on a purplish hue like Janan's winter coat, and when the fast-talking, impetuous male actor came back with his rejoinder, the screen turned that dull blue which had at some time or other penetrated somehow into my very marrow. As it often happens, I was thinking of you, and remembering you, when that purple and that dull blue came together in the same frame; and yet, alas, they did not kiss.
It was at that very moment, in the third week of my journey as I was watching the movie, that I remember being overwhelmed by an astonishingly powerful feeling of incompleteness, of apprehension and expectation. I was nervously tapping my cigarette ash into the ashtray, the lid of which I would very soon close with a sharp and decisive blow of my forehead. The angry impatience rising inside me against the indecisiveness of the lovers who still had not managed to kiss turned into a deeper and more significant feeling of edginess. I had a sense of something profound and authentic approaching, there it comes, now!âlike the magical silence that falls over everyone including the audience the moment before the king is crowned. In that silence preceding the coronation the only sound heard is the flutter of the wings of a pair of doves flying across the royal scene. Then I heard the old man next to me moan, and I turned toward him. His bald head was peacefully bouncing on the dark, frozen window on which it rested, the same head that contained the raging pains he had described to me a hundred miles and a couple of miserable towns back which were carbon copies of each other. I conjectured that maybe the doctor at the hospital he was going to see when he got there in the morning had advised that he press his head against icy-cold panes as a remedy for his brain tumor; but turning my eyes back to the dark highway, I was gripped by a panic that I had not felt in days. What was this deep and irresistible anticipation? Why now this impatient urgency that overwhelmed me?
I was jolted by the crashing sound of a distinct force that wrenched my inner organs. I was heaved out of my seat and was about to tumble over into the one in front when I was rammed into components of steel, tin, aluminum, and glass, angrily striking objects and being hit, hurt, crumpled. At that very instant, I fell back once more into the same bus seat as someone who was altogether different.
Yet neither was the bus any longer the same bus. I could see through a blue fog from where I still sat in confusion that the driver's station plus the seats immediately behind it had disintegrated into smithereens and disappeared.
It must have been this that I had been looking for; it was what I wanted. How aware I was of what I discovered in my heart! Peace, sleep, death, time! I was both here and there, in peace and waging a bloody war, insomniac as a restless ghost and also interminably somnolent, present in an eternal night and also in time that flowed away inexorably. Consequently, I went into slow motion, just as in the movies, and rose from my seat, skirted the corpse of the young bus attendant who had migrated into the land of the dead, still holding a bottle in his hand. I went out the rear exit and stepped into the dark garden of the night.
One end of this arid and limitless garden was the asphalt highway that now lay covered with shards of glass, the other end a realm from which there was no return. I proceeded fearlessly into the velvet night, convinced that this was the halcyon land which had for weeks wafted balmy as paradise in my imagination. It was as if I were sleepwalking, but I was awake, walking but with my feet not touching the ground. Perhaps I had no feet, but perhaps I no longer remember since I was there all by myself. I was there by myself and I was myself alone, my numbed body and my consciousness. I was brimming with my own being.
I sat down somewhere next to a rock in the paradisical darkness and stretched out on the ground. Stars here and there above me and an actual rock beside me. I touched it with longing, feeling the unbelievable pleasure of a touch that was real. Once upon a time, there was a real world where a touch was a touch, smells were smells, and sounds were sounds. Can it be, O star, that the other time has given this present time a glimpse of itself? I could see my own life in the dark. I read a book and found you. If this be death, then I am born again. I am here, in this world, a brand-new being with no memory and no past. I am like some new attractive TV star appearing in a new serial, or childishly astonished like a fugitive who sees the stars for the first time after years of being incarcerated in a dungeon. I heard the call of silence, the like of which I had never before experienced, and I kept asking: Why buses, nights, towns? Why all these roads, bridges, faces? Why solitude that like a hawk overwhelms the night? Why words that get caught in appearances? Why time that has no return? I could hear the crackling in the earth and the ticking of my watch. Time is three-dimensional silence, the book said. I said to myself: So I am to die without understanding the three dimensions in the slightest, without comprehending life, the world, and the book, without, even, seeing you once more, Janan. That was how I was talking to the stars, these brand-new stars, when a childish thought came to me childishly: I was still too much of a child to die. And feeling the warmth of the blood that trickled from my forehead down on my hands, I felt the happiness of discovering, once again, the tactual, olfactory, and visual properties of things. I regarded this world, happy and loving you, Janan.