The New Life (21 page)

Seiko had submitted to Doctor Fine twenty-two reports, written at random intervals during the eight months from the time he discovered the pair until I read the book and Mehmet was shot at the minibus stop. It was with patience and mounting jealousy that I read these reports again and again, way past the midnight hour, trying to absorb the poisonous conclusions I drew by virtue of the logic provided by the archive where I was working.

1. What Janan told me looking out the window in Room 19 where we spent the night in the town of Güdül, saying something to the effect that no man had ever touched her, was not true. Seiko, who had followed them not only in the spring but also throughout the summer when he had observed the two young people go into the hotel where Mehmet worked, had determined that they had stayed in his room for many hours. It's not that I did not suspect this, but when someone else has witnessed what we merely suspected, and has written it down, one feels even more foolish.

2. No one including Seiko had suspected that Mehmet might be the new identity Nahit assumed after closing out his former life, not his father, not the management at the hotel where he worked, not the registrar's office at the school of architecture.

3. The lovers displayed no social anomaly to attract attention other than their being in love. If the last ten days of Seiko's surveillance were discounted, they had not even attempted to pass their copy of the book to others. Besides, they did not read the book all the time, which was the reason why Seiko had not made a point of watching what it was that they did with the book. They appeared to be a couple of university students headed for an ordinary marital life. Their association with classmates was well-balanced, their grades fine, their enthusiasms prudent. They had no relationship with any political group, and had no zealous involvement that was worth noting. Seiko had even written that, among all those who had read the book, Mehmet was the most even-tempered, the least obsessive and passionate of the lot. Perhaps that was why Seiko was caught by surprise later; he might even have been pleased with the way things turned out.

4. Seiko envied them. When I made comparisons with his other reports, I initially noticed that he described Janan in language that was overly considered and poetic. “Reading the book, the young woman knits her brows delicately, and her countenance assumes a limpid grace and dignity.” “She then made the gesture that is special to her, pulling her hair with one tiny swoop behind her ears.” “Sometimes if she is reading the book standing in line at the cafeteria, she sticks out her upper lip slightly, and her eyes begin to glimmer so, one imagines two large teardrops may appear any moment in the corners of those beautiful eyes.” And what about these astonishing lines? “Well, sir, the young woman's visage over the book became so tender after a half hour's reading, and the expression on her face was so strange and unparalleled, that for a moment I thought the magical light did not stream in the windows but surged from the pages of the book into this angelic countenance.” In contrast to Janan's celestial virtues the young man in her company was seen as being too much of the world. “This thing is nothing more than an affair of the heart between the daughter of a fine family and a penniless young man whose antecedents are obscure.” “Our young man is forever the one who's more cautious, anxious, and parsimonious.” “The young woman has the inclination to open up to friends, to get close to them, and even to share the book, but the hotel clerk keeps her in check.” “Obviously he avoids her circle of friends because he himself comes from a low-class family.” “Come to think of it, it's hard to imagine what the young woman sees in this cold and lackluster fellow.” “He is far too arrogant for a mere hotel clerk.” “He's one of those crafty people who manage to seem wise because they're tight-lipped and uncommunicative.” “Effete upstart!” “He has nothing to recommend him, I must say.” I was beginning to like this Seiko. If only I could rely on his accuracy. He did, however, persuade me of something else.

5. How happy they were! After class, they went up to a Beyoğlu theater, and they held hands all through a movie called
Endless Nights.
They sat at a corner table in the student canteen, watching people and talking animatedly to each other. Always together, whether window shopping in uptown Beyoğlu, or taking the bus, or going to class and on outings throughout the city, or sitting up on stools at sandwich bars, knee to knee, watching themselves eat their sandwiches in the mirror; and there they are again, reading the book the young woman has pulled out of her tote bag. And then there was that summer's day! Seiko began following Mehmet from the moment he left the hotel; and then observing him meet Janan, who was carrying a plastic bag, he assumed that something was up and took off after them. They rode the ferry to Princess Island, rented a rowboat and went swimming; they hired a hansom cab, had corn on the cob and ice cream; and when they got back to town, they went up to the young man's room. It was difficult reading all this. They had spats and their share of arguments, and at times Seiko read these as bad signs, but until the fall there had been no real strain between them.

6. Seiko must have been the person who pulled the gun out of the pink plastic bag and shot Mehmet on that snowy December day in the vicinity of the minibus stop. But I was not entirely sure of it. Yet his anger and jealousy attested to that. Remembering the image of the shadowy person whom I'd seen out of the window sprinting away through the snow-covered park, I imagined Seiko must be around thirty years old, an ambitious officer who was a graduate of the police academy, who moonlighted doing private investigation jobs in order to supplement his income, someone who considered students of architecture “effete.” Well then, what was his assessment of me?

7. I was an abject victim of entrapment. Seiko had reached this conclusion so handily that he had even felt somewhat sorry for me. And yet he had been unable to deduce that the source of the strain between the young woman and the young man had been Janan's desire to do something with the book. But then, it must have been on Janan's insistence that they decided to draft someone into whose hands they would put the book. They had looked over the students in the halls of the Technical University like headhunters for a private firm sifting through the talent pool for the right candidate to fill a vacant position. It was not at all clear why I was the one they had chosen. But soon Seiko had accurately determined that they had indeed been watching me, following me, and talking about me. Then, the scene of my falling into the trap had gone even more easily than their singling me out. How easy? Well, Janan had walked close to me several times in the hallway, carrying the book in her hand. She had once given me a sweet smile. Then it was with great relish that she had indeed set me up: She had become aware of me watching her in line at the canteen, and pretending that she had to put down what she had in her hand so that she could rifle through her bag for her wallet, she had placed the book on the table before me; and after ten seconds or so, her delicate hand had spirited it away. Then assured that I, the poor fish, had taken the bait, the two of them had placed the book free of charge at the sidewalk stall which they had already determined was on my route, so that I would see the book on my way home and recognizing it bemusedly—“Ah, there's that book!”—I would buy it. Which is exactly what happened. Saddened by the situation on my account, Seiko accurately made this observation about me: “a dreamy kid with nothing special to recommend him.”

Not only did I not mind it too much, since he had pretty much the same assessment of Mehmet, I even found enough consolation in it to work up the courage to ask myself this question: Why had I not ever confessed to myself that I had bought and read the book as a means of getting to the beautiful girl?

What was truly unbearable, however, was the fact that while I was gazing at Janan with open admiration, staring at her without even being aware that I was staring, while the book lighted on my table like a timid magic bird—that is, while I was living the most entrancing moment of my life—not only was Mehmet watching the two of us, in the distance there was Seiko, watching all three of us.

“The coincidence that I loved and accepted with joy, thinking it was life itself, turns out to be mere fiction constructed by someone else,” said the hoodwinked hero, deciding to leave the room for the purpose of seeing Doctor Fine's arsenal. But he still had to figure out a few more things and do some more research, that is, he needed to put in another hour's work.

I worked as hard as I could and came up with an inventory of all the young Mehmets who were seen reading the book, which had been made by Doctor Fine's punctilious watches and the heartsick dealers all over Anatolia. Seeing that Serkisof had not disclosed our Mehmet's surname, I ended up with a fairly long list which I did not yet know how to evaluate.

It was quite late, but I was certain Doctor Fine was waiting up for me. I walked toward the room where the games of bezique were played against the background ticking of all the clocks. Janan and Doctor Fine's daughters had retired to their rooms, and the bezique cronies had long gone home. Doctor Fine had retreated into the farthest corner of the room, where he was reading sunk deep in an overstuffed chair as if to shield himself from the light of the kerosene lamps.

When he became aware of my presence, he slipped a letter opener inlaid with mother-of-pearl into the book he had been reading, closed it, and rose to his feet, saying he was ready and had been waiting up for me. I might want to rest a bit first, in case my eyes were too fatigued from all that reading. But he was certain that I was pleased with all that I had read and gleaned. Wasn't life just rife with sly sonsobitches and mind-boggling happenstances? And yet he was resolved that it was his duty to bring order to all this chaos.

“The dossiers and the indexes have been prepared by Rosabelle with the care of a girl working at an embroidery frame,” he said. “As for Rosebud, it is as much a pleasure for her to direct the correspondence as it is to be a dutiful daughter, writing the letters to my obedient watches in line with my general wishes and responses. Every afternoon we take tea listening to Rosamund's beautiful voice read us the letters we receive. Sometimes we work in this room, sometimes we move into the archive room where you have been studying. On warm spring days and in the summer, we sit for hours around the table under the mulberry tree. For a man who likes solitude as I do, those are hours spent in true happiness.”

My mind kept searching for appropriate words to praise all this love and devotion, all this care and refinement, and all this peace and order. Having seen the cover of the book he put down when he saw me, I knew he had been reading a volume of
Zagor.
Did he have any knowledge that Uncle Rıfkı, whose death he had ordered, had at one time attempted a nationalistic version of this illustrated novel? But I was in no mind to fuss with the finer points of these coincidences.

“May I see the guns now, sir?”

His fond response was spoken with an affectionate tone that gave me confidence: I was welcome to call him Doctor, or else Father.

Doctor Fine showed me a Browning semiautomatic pistol which had been imported by the department of internal security from Belgium in 1956 on a contract bid, explaining that until recently these had been issued only to top echelon police. Then he told me about the time the German-make Parabellum pistol, which could be converted into a rifle by virtue of the wooden holster that doubled as a stock, had gone off by accident, and the 9-millimeter bullet had pierced through two massive Hungarian draft horses, then gone in one window of the house and out the other, and lodged in the trunk of the mulberry; he went on to say that it was, however, an awkward firearm to carry. If I wanted something practical and reliable, he recommended the Smith & Wesson with a safety grip. And then there was the shiny Colt revolver that would thrill any gun enthusiast, which did not have a safety, so even if one were to freeze up, all one had to remember was to pull the trigger; and yet one might possibly feel too much like an American cowboy carrying one of these babies. So our attention was directed to a series of the German-made Walthers, which was the one make that had been successfully absorbed into our national consciousness, and its patented domestic look-alike, the Kırıkkale model. These guns were special in my eyes too by virtue of their widespread use in the last forty years, having been tried hundreds of thousands of times by gun enthusiasts ranging from army officers to night watchmen, from bread bakers to policemen, on the bodies of many a rebel, thief, Casanova, politician, and starving citizen.

On Doctor Fine's assurance that there was nary a difference between the Walther and the Kırıkkale and after he had asserted several times that they were both part of our bodies as well as our souls, I settled on a Walther 9-millimeter with a hammer, a gun that could be easily concealed and did not need to be fired at close range to do the trick. And, of course, there was no need for me to say anything before Doctor Fine made me a present of the gun as well as a couple of clips, kissing me on the forehead, which was the fitting gesture that lightly alluded to our forefathers' obsession with guns. He said that he still had some more work to do, but I ought to go to bed now and get my rest.

Sleep was the last thing on my mind. Walking the seventeen steps from the gun cabinet to our room, seventeen different scenarios went through my head. I had stored all of them in one corner of my mind as I read, and had at the last moment settled on the synthesis that fit in with the final scene. I remember knocking three times on the door Janan had locked, reviewing once again the wonder wrought by my mind which had been intoxicated by so much reading, but I have no notion of what that synthesis was. As soon as I knocked on the door, a voice inside me said “Password!” perhaps because I thought Janan might have asked for the password, so I came back with: “Long live the Sultan!”