The New Life (20 page)

Just to see if someone who had read the book in a provincial town, or in some stuffy dormitory, or in a dinky neighborhood like mine, had been informed on by one of Doctor Fine's spies, I skimmed through these reports while eating the dinner Rosebud had brought on a tray, saying, “Father did not think you would want to interrupt your work.” In the pages I quickly flipped through eager to chance upon a soulmate, I came across a couple of intriguing incidents that made my hair stand on end; but I could not make out to what extent these people were my soulmates.

Upon reading the book, a student of veterinary medicine, for example, whose father labored as a coal miner in Zonguldak, had ceased to attend to anything other than basic human requirements like eating and sleeping, and spent all his time reading the book. This young man would some days read one single page over and over a thousand times, thereby failing to do anything else with his time. One alcoholic high school math teacher, who did not conceal his suicidal tendencies, kept spending the last ten minutes of every class period—that is, until his students rose up in arms—with readings from the book which he accompanied with irritating peals of laughter. As for a young man from Erzurum who was studying economics, he had papered the walls of his room with pages from the book, which had led to a terrible fight with his roommates when one of them claimed there was a slur against Prophet Mohammad in the pages; whereupon a dorm resident who was half blind had climbed on a chair trying to read the corner between the stovepipe and the ceiling with a magnifying glass, which had resulted in some heartsick handyman getting wind of the book and reporting the incident back to Doctor Fine; but I could not be sure if the book that had ruined the life of the student from Erzurum with debates over “whether or not he should be turned in to the prosecutor” was in fact the one written by Uncle Rıfkı.

As it turns out, the book was traveling like a loose mine by virtue of a hundred or a hundred and fifty copies which were changing hands through chance meetings, or being mentioned by half-curious readers, or attracting attention in bookstalls; or similar books which performed the same magical function were sometimes instilling in one of the readers a current of excitement or some sort of inspiration. Some went into solitude with the book, but at the threshold of a serious breakdown they were able to open up to the world and shake off their affliction. There were also those who had crises or tantrums upon reading the book, accusing their friends and lovers of being oblivious to the world in the book, of not knowing or desiring the book, and thereby criticizing them mercilessly for not being anything like the persons in the book's universe. There was another set of organizer types who read the book in order to apply themselves to humanity rather than to the text. These enthusiasts settled down to search for others like themselves who had read the book, and if they were unsuccessful in this task—which was always the case—they prevailed on others to read the book, hoping to engage in activism shared by the people they had ensnared. Neither these activists nor the informants who informed on them had any idea as to what sort of activism these people held in common.

During the next couple of hours, as I pieced out the facts from news clips that had been filed meticulously among the informants' letters, I learned that five such readers who had been inspired by the book had been killed by Doctor Fine's watches. It was not clear what watch had committed which murders at what time and for what reason. It was just that the short news items clipped from the newspapers had been placed in chronological order among the records of denunciation. There were, however, some details available on a couple of the killings. Since one of the murdered persons was a student of journalism who had done translations for the foreign news service of the
Sun
papers, the Journalists Association for Patriotic Action pretended to have taken an interest in the incident, announcing that the Turkish press would never bow down before senseless terrorism. The other killing involved a waiter who had been gunned down when his hands were full of empty bottles of a popular yogurt drink; Islamic Youth Raiders had disclosed that the dead waiter had been a member, declaring at their press conference that the homicide had been perpetrated by the agents of the CIA and Coca-Cola.

11

The pleasure of reading, which natty older gentlemen complain is lacking in our culture, must be in the musical harmony I heard reading the documents and murder reports in Doctor Fine's mad and orderly archive. On my arms I felt the cool night air, in my ears I heard night music that was not actually playing; meanwhile, I tried to figure out what I must do to act like a young person who had decided to be resolute in the face of the wonders he has come across at his tender age. Since I had decided to be a responsible young person who prepared for his future, I pulled a piece of paper out of Doctor Fine's stock and began to write down small clues that might come in handy.

I left the archive room when I was still hearing that music in my ears, at an hour when I felt deep inside me how cold and calculating were both the world and the philosophically inclined patriarch of the house. It was as if I could hear the encouraging provocation of some blithe spirit. I felt something tingling inside like that playful feeling people like me get when we leave the theater after seeing a fun and upbeat movie, a feeling which is as light as the music that goes through our heads. You know what I mean: we identify with the hero, as if we were the guy with the clever jokes, the spontaneous levity, the incredible ready wit.

“May I have this dance?” I was about to ask Janan, who was watching me with concern.

She was sitting at the dinner table with the three rosy sisters, looking at some balls of yarn in all manner of colors which had spilled out from a wicker basket on the table top like ripe apples and oranges out of a cornucopia of felicity and plenty. Next to these were the knitting and embroidery patterns that came with the magazine called
Home and Women
that my mother also used to take at one time, flowers to needlepoint, cute little ducks, cats, dogs, besides the mosque motifs which must have been contributed by the publisher, who lifted all the rest from German women's magazines and foisted it on Turkish women. I too studied all that color in the light of the kerosene lamps, remembering that the actual life drama I had just been reading about had been constructed with equally vivid raw materials. Then turning to Rosamund's two little daughters who came up to their mother, melting into this scene of family happiness, yawning and blinking their eyes, I said to them, “What, your mother hasn't put you to bed yet?”

They were taken aback and a little frightened when they nestled against their mother. My mood was improving. I could even have regaled Rosebud and Rosabelle, who were eyeing me suspiciously, with something like, “You are both blooms that have not yet faded.”

Yet I didn't manage to say anything until I entered the quarters reserved for receiving male guests. “Sir,” I said to Doctor Fine, “I read your son's story with great sorrow.”

“It has all been documented,” he replied.

He introduced me to two semiobscured men in the darkened room. No, these gentlemen were not watches, seeing how they weren't ticking. One was a notary, but since in murky situations like this my mind does not record things, I didn't get what the other one did; I was more concerned with how Doctor Fine had introduced me: I was a young man destined to do great things, who was levelheaded, serious, and passionate; I could already be considered to be very close to him. There was nothing about me that smelled of those pseudo longhairs who aped characters in American films. He had great trust in me, very great.

How quickly I identified with all the praise! I didn't know what to do with my hands, but I wanted to look refined, so I bent my head down as befits a modest young man like me and changed the subject, all too aware that my changing the subject would be observed and appreciated.

“How quiet it is here at night, sir,” I said.

“Yet there's a rustling in the mulberry tree,” said Doctor Fine, “even when the night is all quiet and there's not even a hint of a breeze. Listen.”

We all listened. I was more discomfited by the chilling darkness in the room than by the tree rustling out there somewhere. Listening to the silence I realized that since I had come to this house I hadn't once heard people speak in anything but whispers.

Doctor Fine took me aside. “We were just sitting down to play a few hands of bezique,” he said. “Now I want you to tell me, my son, which would you prefer to see? My guns, or my timepieces?”

“I'd like to see the timepieces, sir,” I said without a thought.

In the next room, which was even darker, all three of us were shown two old-time Zenith table models that banged away like gunshots. We saw the drawer horologe made by the Galata clockmakers' colony, which was encased in wood, played a tune of its own accord, and had to be wound only once a week; according to Doctor Fine, there was one just like it in the harem section of the Topkapı Palace. Then we were trying to figure out in which Levantine port lived Simon S. Simonien who had made and signed the pendulum clock with the carved walnut cabinet, when we made out the words “à Smyrne” on the enameled dial. We noted that the Universal clock that sported a moon and a calendar showed the days of the full moon. When Doctor Fine took a huge key and wound the pendulum of the skeleton clock, the dial of which had been fashioned like a Mevlevi turban at the instigation of Sultan Selim the Third, we tensed, realizing that it was the inner organs of the skeleton that were being wound up. We remembered having seen and heard in so many places ever since our childhood the Junghans pendulum wall clocks that still clicked sadly like caged canaries in so many houses. It gave us shivers to see the locomotive and under it the words Made in USSR on the dial of the crude Serkisof clock.

“For our people, the ticking of clocks is not just a means of apprising the mundane, but the resonance that brings us in line with our inner world, like the sound of splashing water in fountains in the courtyards of our mosques,” Doctor Fine said. “We pray five times a day; then in Ramadan, we have the time for
iftar,
the breaking of fast at sundown, and the time for
sahur,
the meal taken just before sunup. Our timetables and timepieces are our vehicles to reach God, not the means of rushing to keep up with the world as they are in the West. There never was a nation on earth as devoted to timepieces as we have been; we were the greatest patrons of European clock makers. Timepieces are the only product of theirs that has been acceptable to our souls. That is why clocks are the only things other than guns that cannot be classified as foreign or domestic. For us there are two venues that lead to God. Armaments are the vehicles of Jihad; timepieces are the vehicles for prayer. They have managed to silence our guns. Now they have hatched these trains so that our time will also be silenced. Everyone knows that the greatest enemy of the timetable for prayers is the timetable for trains. My dead son was well aware of this fact, and that's why he spent months on buses to retrieve our lost time. Those who wanted to estrange him from me used the bus to take the life of my son and heir, but Doctor Fine is not naïve enough to be duped by their machinations. Remember this: when our people get some money together, the first thing they buy is always a watch.”

Perhaps Doctor Fine was going to continue whispering his harangue, but he was interrupted by an English-made ormolu Prior clock fitted with an enameled dial, ornamented with ruby roses, and graced by the sound of a nightingale, which began to play the melody of the old Ottoman song, “My Scribe.”

While his bezique buddies pricked their ears to the sweet song about the scribe's excursion to Üsküdar, Doctor Fine whispered into my ear: “Have you come to a decision, my child?”

At the same instant I saw through the open door in the next room Janan's shimmering reflection in the mirror on the console, and I was distracted.

“I need to do some more work in the archives, sir,” I said.

I said it in order to avoid making a decision rather than in the hope of coming to one. I was passing through the next room when I felt the eyes of the three roses on me, the fastidious Rosebud, high-strung Rosabelle, and Rosamund who had come back from putting her daughters to bed. How curious and how determined were Janan's honey-colored eyes! I felt as if I had achieved something important, as I suspect many a man feels when he is associated with a beautiful and lively woman.

Yet how far I was from being that man! Here I was, sitting in Doctor Fine's archives, with files upon files of intelligence reports in front of me, and having jealously internalized the beauty of Janan's visage augmented by the mirror on the console in the other room, I was turning the pages rapidly with the hope that my increasing jealousy might finally impel me to come to a decision.

I did not have to continue my research for too long. After the funeral of the luckless youth from Kayseri whom Doctor Fine had buried believing that he was his son, he had phased out the remaining old watches Movado, Omega, and Serkisof, and Zenith was dead. Seiko, the most reliable and timely of the new watches Doctor Fine had hired in order to track down every soul who had ever read the book, had managed to put his finger on a certain Mehmet and his girlfriend Janan, students of architecture whom he had come across during his forays into the student dormitories, cafés, clubs, and school lounges in the hope of encountering someone who was familiar with the book. His discovery had taken place sixteen months earlier. It was in the spring. Janan and Mehmet were in love, and they carried a book which they read to each other intimately. They had no clue as to the existence of Seiko, who continued to watch them, even though not too closely, for some eight months.