The New Life (22 page)

When Janan turned the lock and then opened the door, I was unnerved by the expression on her face which was half-cheerful, no, half-sad, no, totally mysterious, and I felt like some amateur actor who forgets the lines he had been memorizing for weeks the moment he steps into the lights. It was not all that difficult to calculate that someone who had his wits about him would trust his instincts in a situation like this rather than trying to come up with a bunch of derelict words that he barely remembers. Which is what I did. I tried to forget that I was a prey, at best, who had fallen into a trap.

I kissed Janan on the lips like some young husband back from a long trip. Here we were at last, after all the unforeseen dangers, at home in our room. I loved her so much I thought nothing else was important. If life presented a rough spot or two, I was the seasoned traveler who had the courage to take things in my stride. Her lips smelled of mulberries. The two of us, we were the two people who were meant to hold on to each other, turning our backs on the summons of a dogmatic and unattainable life and all those who tried to distress us with their self-sacrifices, all those esteemed and passionate fools who try projecting their obsessions on the world, all the people who have slipped off the course of their lives, lured by ideas that have been thought of some place far away. When two people have shared great dreams, when they've been comrades from morning to night for months on end, when they've covered such great distances together, what could possibly be the impediment to their forgetting the world in an embrace, O Angel? And most of all, what could stop them from becoming their authentic selves and finding that unique moment of truth?

The ghost of the third lover.

Please let me again kiss you on the lips, for the ghost who remains a mere name in all those intelligence reports shuns becoming an actual person. Whereas I am here and, look, I know time is slowly running out. Look how all those highways we traveled exist as themselves without being in the least aware of us once we have traveled over them, stretching out full of themselves, made of stones and asphalt and warmth on summer nights under the stars. Let us too, here, without further ado lie down together … Please, sweetheart, when my hands touch your beautiful shoulders, your slender and fragile arms, when I come so close to you, look how slowly and joyfully we approach that unique time so sought after by all the voyagers who travel on the bus. When I press my lips on that semitransparent skin between your ear and your hair, when the electricity of your hair gives fright to the birds that suddenly swoop past my forehead and face, raising the scent of autumn in the air, and when your breast stiffens like a stubborn bird taking wing in my palm, look, I see in your eyes how full and right is the unattainable time that reawakens between us: now we are neither here nor there, not in the land you have been dreaming about, not on some bus or in a dim hotel room somewhere, not even in some sort of future that can only exist within the pages of a book. Now we are here in this room, as if existing in a time that is open-ended, you with your sighs and I with my hurried kisses, we are holding on to each other, awaiting a miracle that might happen. A time for fullness! Embrace me, so that time will not flow away, come, embrace me, my soul, so that the miracle will not end. Please, don't resist, but remember: the nights in bus seats when our bodies would slowly lose themselves in each other, when our dreams and our hair tangled together; remember before you turn away your lips, remember seeing the inside of houses in the back streets of small towns we passed through, our heads pressed against the cold and dark windowpane; remember all the films we watched hand in hand: the bullets that poured like rain, blondes descending staircases, all the cool dudes you so adored. Remember all the kisses we watched quietly as if we were committing a sin, forgetting a crime, dreaming of a different land. Remember those lips drawing together while the eyes were averted from the camera; remember how we were able to sit completely still for a moment even as the bus tires revolved seven and a half times per minute. But she did not remember. I kissed her hopelessly for the last time. The bed had been rumpled. Was it possible that she felt on me the hard form of the Walther? Janan had stretched out on the bed, staring at the ceiling thoughtfully as if contemplating the stars. Even so, I couldn't help saying, “Janan, were we not happy on our bus trips? Let us go back to riding the buses.”

Of course, it made no sense.

“What were you reading?” she asked me. “What have you found out today?”

“Many things about life,” I said, using the language of dubbed films and the tone of soap operas. “Very useful things really. There are so many who have read the book, all rushing toward some place or other … Everything is confused and the light that the book inspires in people is as dazzling as death. Life is so astounding.”

I had a feeling I could go on in this vein; if I could not create miracles through love, then I could at least do it by speaking the sort of words that fascinate children. Forgive my naïveté, Angel, and the trickery I resorted to out of my need, for this was the first time in seventy days that I had felt this close to Janan, lying beside her on the bed; as anyone who has done a bit of reading knows, imitating childlike wonderment is the immediate ruse attempted by people like me who have had the doors of true love slammed in their faces. On a night it rained like a deluge as we rode from Afyon to Kütahya on a bus that leaked in torrents through the ceiling and the windows, the film we saw was
False Paradise;
but Seiko had recently informed me—had he not?—that Janan had watched the same film in happier and calmer circumstances a year before that, her hand in the hand of her lover.

“So who's the angel?” she asked me now.

“Appears to be related to the book,” I said. “We are not the only ones who know about it. There are others pursuing the angel.”

“So who does the angel appear to?”

“Those who have faith in the book, those who read it with care.”

“Then what?”

“Then you keep reading until you become transformed. One morning you wake up and people who see you say, my, my, this girl has turned into an angel in the light that emanates from the book. Then it means that the angel must have been a girl all along. It makes you wonder then how such an angel could lure someone into a trap. Is it possible for angels to pull nasty stunts?”

“Don't know.”

“I don't either. I am also doing some thinking, and searching.” That is what I said, Angel, perhaps because I was loath to step out of line into zones of danger and uncertainty, thinking that the only piece of heaven I was sure of was the bed where I was lying next to Janan. Let the unique moment have its reign. There was a faint smell of woodwork in the room, and also a cool scent that was reminiscent of the sort of soap and chewing gum we bought when we were children but no longer do because the packaging is so poor.

I, who had neither the ability to delve deep into the book nor to rise to Janan's level of seriousness, I felt that in the wee hours of the night I might be able to come up with the words that would mediate some points. So I told Janan that the most horrifying thing was time itself; without knowing it, we had embarked on this journey to escape time. That was the reason why we were in constant motion, looking for the moment when time stood still. Which was the unique moment of fulfillment. When we got close to it, we could sense the time of departure, our own eyes having witnessed, along with the dead and the dying, the miracle of this incredible zone. The seeds of the wisdom in the book also existed in their most childlike form in the comics we had thumbed through all morning, and it was high time we used our heads and got the point. There was nothing there, in that distant place. The beginning and the end of our journey was wherever we happened to be. He was right: the road and all the dark rooms were rife with killers carrying guns. Death seeped into life through the book, through books.

I held her, saying, Sweetheart, let's do stay here, in this beautiful room, cherishing it. Look, a table, a clock, a lamp, a window. When we rise in the morning, the mulberry tree will be there for us to admire. So what if he is there and we are here? Here's the windowsill, the table leg, the wick in the lamp: light and scent. The world is so simple! Do forget the book. He too wants us to forget it. To be is to be embracing you. But Janan was not having any of it.

“Where is Mehmet?”

She was looking at the ceiling with rapt attention, as if the answer to her question was inscribed there. She knit her brows. Her forehead seemed higher. Her lips twitched for a split second as if about to reveal a secret. Under the parchment-colored light in the room her skin had assumed a pink hue which I had never before seen. What with decent meals and a place to sleep in peaceful surroundings after all those nights traveling on some bus, at last Janan had some color in her face. I mentioned this to her, hoping that, like some girls who will marry out of a sudden longing for a happily settled married life, she would marry me.

“I am getting sick, that's why,” she said. “I was chilled in the rain. I'm running a fever.”

How beautiful she was! She was stretched out and staring at the ceiling, and I was lying next to her, admiring the color in her face, keeping my hand pressed as objectively as a doctor's on her noble forehead. My hand remained there as if to make sure she would not escape from me. I was reviewing my childhood memories, how she had completely transformed ordinary objects in the sphere of the pleasure of touch, like beds, rooms, smells. Other thoughts and calculations were also running through my head. When she turned her face slightly, her eyes questioning me, I pulled my hand away from her forehead and told her the truth.

“You do have a fever.”

Suddenly a lot of possibilities that were not part of my plans appeared before me. I went down to the kitchen at one in the morning. Negotiating among hulking pots and phantoms in the half light, I came upon a saucepan in which I made tea with the dried linden flowers I found in a jar, imagining all the while how I was going to tell Janan that the best way to ward off a cold was to crawl under the blanket with someone. And later, as I rifled through the medicine bottles on the sideboard where Janan had directed me, looking for an aspirin, I was thinking that if I too were to get sick, then we wouldn't have to leave the room for days. A curtain moved and some slippers sounded on the floor. The shadow of Doctor Fine's wife appeared first and then her nervous self. “No, ma'am,” I said, “it's nothing serious; she has just caught a cold.”

She took me upstairs. She had me take down a heavy blanket from a storage space, and slipping a duvet cover over it, she said: “The poor sweetheart, she's an angel! Don't give her any trouble, you hear? You take care.” Then she mentioned something else which would always stay in my mind: How beautiful was my wife's neck!

Back in the room I gazed at her neck for a long time. Had I not noticed it before? Yes, I had and I loved it. But now the length of her neck seemed so striking, I could think of nothing else for quite some time. I watched her drink her linden tea slowly and then take her aspirin, wrapping herself in the blanket like some good-natured child expecting to “get well.”

There were long stretches of silence. Shielding my eyes with my hands, I looked out the window. The mulberry tree stirred ever so slightly. Dear One, our mulberry tree rustles even in the faintest breeze. Silence. Janan was trembling, and how quickly time was passing.

So it didn't take long for our room to acquire that special climate and character known as a “sick room.” I paced up and down, apprehensive that the table, the glass, the side table were being gradually transformed into objects that were overly familiar, overly intimate. The hour struck three. Will you sit here next to me on the edge of the bed? she asked. I gripped her feet through the blanket. She smiled, telling me I was so sweet. She closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. No, she actually fell asleep, slept. Was she asleep? She was asleep.

I found myself pacing. Looking at the time, pouring water out of the pitcher, gazing at Janan, floundering. Taking an aspirin for the hell of it. Placing my hand on her forehead to gauge her temperature again and again whenever she opened her eyes.

Time which flowed as if under the compulsion of timepieces came to a stop at a certain point, the semitransparent membrane in which I was being enveloped was torn open, and Janan sat up in bed. All of a sudden we found ourselves hotly discussing bus attendants who were really auxiliary bus drivers; one of them had once said that someday he was going to commandeer the driver's seat and drive the bus to a yet unexplored land. And then there was the one who said, help yourselves to the chewing gum, provided for our valued passengers with the compliments of the bus company; and then unable to hold his tongue, he had added, but don't chew too much, brother, because the gum is laced with opium so that the passengers will sleep like babies, thinking their peaceful sleep is due to good shock absorbers, the skill of the driver who never passes on the right, and the superiority of our vehicles and our bus company. Then how about the one we came across on two different bus lines, Janan, do you remember what he said?—it was so good to laugh! Brother, he said, the first time I laid eyes on you both I just knew you had eloped together, now I see from your ring that you two got hitched, sister, congratulations.

Will you marry me? We had seen so many scenes come alive with the brilliance of these words: when the lovers are walking under the trees, arms around each other, or when they are under a lamppost, or in a car—in the back seat, naturally—or on the bridge that spans the Bosphorus, or in the rain produced under the influence of foreign films, or when the boy and the girl are suddenly left alone by the charming uncle or friends whose intentions are good, or when the rich guy pops the question to the seductive female as he goes splash into the swimming pool: Will you marry me? Since I had never seen a scene in a sick room where the girl with the beautiful neck gets asked the question, I didn't believe my words could awaken in Janan a feeling as magical as those in the movies. Besides, my mind was on a dauntless mosquito that was working the room.