The New Life (7 page)

Back where I left the unfortunate bus on the spot where it had rammed with all its might into a cement truck, a cloud of cement dust hung like a miraculous umbrella over the dying. A stubborn blue light was leaking out of the bus. Hapless passengers who were still alive and others who would not stay alive much longer were coming out the rear exit, cautiously as if stepping on the surface of a strange planet. Mom, Mom, you're still in there, but I got out. Mom, Mom, blood is filling my pockets like coins. I wished to communicate with them, with the avuncular man crawling along the ground, his hat on his head, a plastic bag in his hand; the fastidious soldier who was bent over carefully examining the rip in his trousers; the old lady who had abandoned herself to jubilant chatter now that she had been granted the chance to address God directly. I wished to impart the significance of this unique and impeccable time to the virulent insurance agent who was counting the stars, to the dumbfounded daughter of the mother who was pleading with the dead driver, to the men with mustaches who were strangers to each other yet holding hands and dancing for the joy of being alive, swaying gently like people who have fallen in love at first sight. I wished I could tell them that this unique moment was a felicity granted all too rarely to God's creatures like us, saying that you, O Angel, would appear only once in a lifetime in this wondrous time beneath the miraculous umbrella of cement dust, and ask them why it was that now we were all so very happy. You, mother and son clutching each other hard like a pair of dauntless lovers and freely weeping for the first time in your lives, you, the sweet woman who has discovered that blood is redder than lipstick and death kinder than life, you, the spared child standing over your dead father clutching your doll and watching the stars, I ask you: Who was it that granted us this fulfillment, this contentment, this happiness? The voice inside me gave one word as an answer: Departure … departure … But I had already understood I was not yet to die. The elderly woman who was soon to expire asked me the whereabouts of the cabin attendant to get her luggage out of the hold immediately because, although her face was crimson with blood, she was hoping to get to the next town where she was to catch the train in the morning. I was left holding her blood-soaked train ticket.

I boarded the bus through the rear to avoid looking at the front-row passengers whose dead faces had been plastered on the windshield. I became aware of the sound of the motor running, reminding me of the horrible engine noise on all the buses I had ridden; what I heard was not deathly silence but living voices that were grappling with recollections, desires, and ghosts. The bus attendant was still holding the same bottle and a teary-eyed mother her peacefully sleeping baby. It was cold outside. I too sat down, feeling the pain in my legs. My seatmate with the aching brain had left this world along with the rash crowd in the front rows, but he was still sitting patiently. His eyes had been closed while he slept, now they were open in death. Two men appeared out of somewhere in the front, and lifting a bloody body roughly over their shoulders, they carried it out into the cold.

It was then that I became aware of the most magical coincidence or impeccable fortune: the TV screen over the driver's seat was still intact and the lovers on the video were finally in each other's arms. I wiped the blood off my forehead, my face and neck with my handkerchief, and I flipped up the lid of the ashtray which I had slammed down with my forehead only a little while ago; I lit up contentedly and began watching the film.

They kissed and kissed again, sucking lipstick and life. I wondered why in my childhood I used to hold my breath during the kissing scenes, why I used to swing my legs and focus on a point on the screen that was slightly above the lovers. Ah, the kiss! How well I had retained the memory of the taste that had touched my lips that day in the white light that came through the icy windowpanes. Only one kiss in my entire lifetime. I wept repeating Janan's name.

When the film came to an end, I first noticed the headlights then the truck itself standing respectfully in the presence of the unhappy scene where the cold corpses were chilled even further by the cold outside. As it happened, there was a fat wallet in the pocket of my seatmate, whose blank eyes were still fixed on the blank video screen. His given name was Mahmut, his last name Mahler. His identification papers. The photo of his soldier son who looked like me. And a dilapidated news item about cockfighting clipped from the
Denizli Post,
1966. The money would see me through many weeks ahead. The marriage certificate too might come in handy. Thanks.

We prudent survivors were transported to town stretched out like the meek dead beside us, trying to keep warm against the cold in the truck bed, contemplating the stars. Stay calm, the stars seemed to tell us, as if we were not calm; see how well we bide our time. Vibrating in concert with the truck where I was lying down watching some rushing clouds and anxious trees intermediate between us and the velvet night, I considered that this animated, dimly lit revelry in which the living were locked in a close embrace with the dead was a scene fit for a perfect Cinemascope film in which my dear angel, whom I imagined as being humorous and cheerful, would descend from the sky and reveal to me my life's and heart's secrets; however, the scene I had appropriated from one of Uncle Rıfkı's illustrated story lines failed to materialize. Thus, I was left alone with the North Star, the Big Dipper, and the symbol Π, counting the dark power poles and tree branches that flowed over us. Then it occurred to me that this was not a perfect moment after all, that something was missing. But as long as I had a new soul in my body, a new life before me, wads of money in my pocket, and these stars just out in the sky, what of it? I would seek out the missing element.

What was it that made one's life incomplete?

A missing leg, answered the green-eyed nurse who put some stitches on my knee. I was told not to resist. All right, will you marry me, then? There are no fractures or hairline cracks in the leg or the foot. All right, then, will you make love to me? A few horrible stitches on my forehead too. Tears of pain in my eyes, I knew what had been awry all along; I should have put it together seeing the ring on the ring finger of the attending nurse. She was probably betrothed to someone working in Germany. I was a new being, but not altogether new. It was in this condition that I left the hospital and the sleepy nurse.

I arrived at the New Light Hotel just as the summons to morning prayer was being called, and I asked the night clerk for the best room in the house. I masturbated looking at an old
Hürriyet
I found in a dusty closet in the room. It was a color print supplement of the Sunday edition in which the proprietress of a Nişantaşı restaurant in Istanbul had exposed parts of her anatomy for the camera, as well as both her neutered cats and all the furniture she had ordered from Milan. I fell asleep.

The town called Şirinyer where I stayed almost sixty hours, thirty-three of which were spent sleeping at the New Light Hotel, was as charming a place as its given name. 1. The barbershop: on the counter sits a stick of OP brand shaving soap in an aluminum wrap. 2. Youth Reading Room: they shuffle kings of hearts and spades made of paper pulp, watching the Atatürk statue on the square where distracted old men hang out, watching the passing tractors and my slightly limping person, as well as the TV, which runs constantly, keeping an eye out for women, soccer players, murders, soaps, and kissing scenes. 3. At the tobacconist's with the Marlboro sign: besides cigarettes, it has old cassettes of karate and soft porno films, National Lottery and Sport Toto tickets, pulp novels, rat poison, and a calendar on the wall with a smiling beauty who reminds me of my Janan. 4. The restaurant: beans, meatballs; edible. 5. Post Office: I phone home. Mother cannot comprehend, cries. Şirinyer Coffeehouse: I sat down and once more began reading with pleasure the short news item in
Hürriyet
that I had been carrying on me about the happy traffic accident (
TWELVE DEAD
!) which I had by now memorized, when a man in his mid-thirties or early forties who seemed to be a cross between a hired killer and an undercover cop approached me from behind like a shadow; and having read for me the brand name of the watch he pulled out of his pocket (Zenith), he versified:

If wine excuses love in a mad poem,

Does not death fit the same theorem?

Drunk on the wine of hazard

You are thirsty like a buzzard.

He did not wait for my response but went out of the café, leaving behind him a dense smell of OP brand shaving soap.

On my walks that always took me impatiently to the bus depot, I wondered why every nice little town must have its own merry little madman. Our friend with the penchant for wine and rhyme was present in neither of the two taverns in town where I had begun to feel the aforementioned intoxicating thirst as deeply as my thoughts of love for you, Janan. Somnolent drivers, fatigued buses, unshaven cabin attendants! Take me to that unknown realm where I want to go! Take me to death's door, unconscious and my forehead bleeding, so I may become someone else! That was my state of mind when I left the town called Şirinyer on the long back row of a dilapidated Maigrus bus, with a couple of stitches on my body and a dead man's fat wallet in my pocket.

Night! A long, very long and windy night. Dark villages and even darker sheepfolds, immortal trees, sorry service stations, empty restaurants, silent mountains, and anxious rabbits went past the dark mirror of my window. At times I would study a distant light flickering beneath the stars, and contemplating the sort of life I imagined being led moment to moment under that light, I would find a place in it for Janan and myself; and when the bus sped away from the flickering light, I wished I were under that roof instead of sitting in my uncontrollably vibrating seat. My eyes would sometimes regard the passengers on buses that we encountered at service stations, rest stops, crossroads where trees respectfully wait on each other, or on narrow bridges, and I would imagine that I saw Janan sitting among them; and totally taken over by my imagination, I would fantasize catching up with the other bus, boarding it, and taking Janan in my arms. But sometimes I felt so hopeless and so weary that I wished I were the man I saw through the half-closed curtains who was sitting at a table and smoking when our angry bus went by past midnight through the narrow streets of some secluded town.

But I still knew that I really wanted to be someplace else, in a time other than this, like that felicitous moment of being when one has not yet chosen between life and death, there among the dead who died in the heartrending eruption of chance … Before ascending to the seven spheres of heaven, trying to accustom my eyes to the obscure sight with pools of blood and shards of broken glass at the threshold of that realm from which there is no return, I might contemplate with pleasure whether to enter, or not. Should I turn back? Or proceed? What were mornings like in the nether world? What would it be like to abandon this journey altogether and lose oneself in that bottomless night? I would shiver thinking about the unique time in that realm where I might shed my being and perhaps unite with Janan, and I would feel in my legs and in my stitched forehead the urgency to achieve the unexpected happiness that would follow.

Ah, you who ride the night buses! My abject brethren! I know you too are seeking the hour of zero gravity. Ah, to be neither here nor there! To become someone else and roam the peaceful garden that exists between the two worlds! How well I know that the soccer fan in the leather jacket is not waiting for the game to start but anticipating the hour of hazard when bleeding copiously he becomes a blood-red hero. And I also know that the elderly woman who keeps taking something out of her plastic bag and stuffing it in her mouth is not in reality dying to reunite with her sisters and nieces but to reach the threshold of the nether world. The surveyor who has one eye on the road and the other on his dreams is not reckoning the cadastration of the town hall but calculating the point in the crossroads where all towns become history. And I am sure that the pasty-faced high school kid dozing in his seat up front is not dreaming of kissing his sweetheart but of the forceful impact when he kisses the windshield with passion and vehemence. Is it not the same rapture that besets us, after all? Whenever the driver slams on the brakes or the bus whips around in the wind, we open our eyes instantly to stare into the dark road, trying to figure out if the zero hour is upon us. No, not yet!

I spent eighty-nine nights in bus seats without once hearing the tolling of the blissful hour in my soul. There was one time when the bus came to a screeching halt and bumped into a poultry truck, but not even a single one of the bewildered chickens received a bloody nose let alone any of the drowsy passengers. Another night, the bus was skidding pleasurably on an ice-covered highway when I looked out of my frozen window and felt the radiance of coming face to face with God. I was about to discover the single element common to all existence, love, life, and time, but the prankish bus hung on the edge of the dark void, suspended.

I had read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics. The rear exit was where I descended on earth, where I returned to life; the rear exit is where I meet the hurly-burly life in bus terminals: Hello there, roasted-seed vendors, cassette-tape peddlers, bingo captains, elderly fellows with suitcases, elderly dames with plastic bags, hello! So as not to leave the matter to luck, I looked for the least safe bus, chose the route with the most curves, and canvassed the personnel coffee shops for the driver who was the most sleep-deprived, for bus lines with names like
SAFEWAY, TRUE SAFEWAY, EXPRESS SAFEWAY, FLYING SAFEWAY, GREASED LIGHTNING
. Bus attendants poured bottles of cologne on my hands, but none had the fragrance of the face I was seeking; they brought around arrowroot biscuits on fake silver trays, but none tasted like those my mother served at tea. I ate domestic chocolates made without real cocoa, but my legs didn't get cramps like they used to when I was a kid. Sometimes the attendant offered all manner of candy and caramels in baskets, but among brands like Golden, Mabel, Fruito, I never came across any of those Uncle Rıfkı liked, the ones called New Life Caramels. I counted the miles in my sleep and dreamed when I was awake. I scrunched into my seat, I shrank and shrank and turned into a wrinkle, I wedged my legs into the seat, I dreamed that I made love to my seatmate. When I awoke, I found his bald pate on my shoulder, his pitiful hand in my lap. Every night I initially played the part of the reserved neighbor to some hapless passenger, then quite the fellow conversationalist, but by morning we would be on such intimate terms that I was his brazen confidant. Cigarette? Where are you going? What's your line of work? On one bus I was a junior traveling insurance salesman; on another, where it was freezingly cold, I claimed I was soon to marry my cousin who was the love of my life. Behaving like someone who watches UFOs, I divulged to a grandfatherly type that I was anticipating an angel; another time I said my boss and I would be happy to fix all your broken timepieces. Mine is a Movado, said the elderly man with the false teeth; it never misses. While the owner slept with his mouth open, I thought I heard the ticking of the watch that kept perfect time. What is time? An accident! What is life? Time! What is accident? A life, a new life! Submitting to this simple logic, which I was surprised no one had proposed before, I resolved to forego bus terminals, O Angel, and go straight to the scenes of accidents.