The New Life (34 page)

It pleased me to walk to our local station in the cool spring air, holding my daughter close. I thought cheerfully that when we got back home, I would watch the soccer game, then my wife and I would catch the Sunday Night Movie. The candy store called Life at the station square had dispensed with winter by lowering the store windows and installing up front their ice-cream counter sporting ice-cream cones. We had them weigh us a hundred grams of Mabelle caramels. I took the wrapper off one and placed it into my daughter's impatient mouth. We went up on the platform.

Exactly at nine-sixteen, the Southbound Express that came through without stopping announced itself first with the heavy roar of engines that came from somewhere deep down, as if from the very soul of the earth, and presently its searchlight was being reflected on the walls of the bridge and the steel pylons; then, as it drew into the station, it seemed to grow quieter, only to raise a ruckus with the full power of its jarring and inexorable engines as it went by us two puny mortals holding on to each other. Inside the brilliantly lit cars being pulled along clattering with a more humane noise, we saw the passengers who were leaning back in their seats, leaning up against the windows, hanging up their coats, lighting their cigarettes, all completely unaware of us watching them slide by in the blink of an eye. We stood in the faint breeze and stillness left behind by the train, staring for a long time at the red light at the back of the train.

“Do you know where this train goes?” I asked my daughter on an impulse.

“The train goes where?”

“First to Izmit, then Bilecik.”

“Then?”

“Then Eskişehir. Then Ankara.”

“Then?”

“Then to Kayseri, to Sivas, to Malatya.”

“Then?” said my daughter with the light brown hair, happy to be repeating herself and still watching the barely visible red light on the caboose with a sense of play and mystery.

And her father recalled his own childhood calling out the names of the stations he remembered where the train stopped—and then, and then—as well as those he did not remember.

I must have been eleven or twelve. My father and I had gone to Uncle Rıfkı's one afternoon. While Uncle Rıfkı and my father played backgammon, I had the sugar cookie Aunt Ratibe had given me in my hand, and I was watching the canary in the cage, then tapping on the barometer I had yet to learn to read; I had just pulled out one of the old comics on the shelf and was getting absorbed in an old adventure of Pertev and Peter when Uncle Rıfkı called me, and, as he always did on our visits, he began quizzing me.

“Run through the stations between Yolçatı and Kurtalan.”

I had begun with “Yolçatı, Uluova, Kürk, Sivrice, Gezin, Maden,” and had named the rest without any omission.

“And those between Amasya and Sivas?”

I had reeled them off without a hitch because I had memorized the train schedules Uncle Rıfkı maintained every intelligent Turkish child must know by heart.

“Why does the train departing from Kütahya en route to Uşak have to go by way of Afyon?”

This was the question I knew the answer to by way of Uncle Rıfkı and not the train schedules.

“Because the government has unfortunately abandoned its railroad policy.”

“And here's the final question,” Uncle Rıfkı had said, his eyes gleaming. “We're going from Çetinkaya to Malatya.”

“Çetinkaya, Demiriz, Akgedik, Ulugüney, Hasançelebi, Hekimhan, Kesikköprü…” I had begun, but I drew a blank before I was through.

“Then?”

I was silent. My father had the dice in his hand, and he was studying the pieces on the board, looking for his way out of a tight spot.

“What comes after Kesikköprü?”

The canary in the cage went click, click.

I backtracked some and then started up with renewed hope, “Hekimhan, Kesikköprü,” but I got stuck again on the next station.

“Then?”

There was a long pause. I thought I was about to cry when Uncle Rıfkı said, “Ratibe, go ahead and give him a caramel; he might just remember.”

Aunt Ratibe offered me the caramels. As Uncle Rıfkı had suggested, I remembered the next station after Kesikköprü the moment I popped the caramel in my mouth.

Twenty-five years after the incident, there he was with his pretty daughter in his arms, watching the red light on the rear of the Southbound Express, and our stupid Osman once more couldn't remember the name of the same station. But I forced myself to remember for quite some time, trying to stroke and prod my associations into action, telling myself: What a coincidence! 1) The train that has just gone past us will pass tomorrow through the same station the name of which I cannot remember. 2) Aunt Ratibe had offered me the caramels in the same silver dish she had given me as a gift. 3) There is one caramel in my daughter's mouth, and in my pocket a little less than a hundred grams of caramels.

Dear Reader, I derived such pleasure from my memory getting stuck fast where my past and future intersected on this spring evening at a point that was so far removed from what's accidental that I was stuck where I was standing, trying to recall the name of the station.

After a long interval, my daughter in my arms said, “Dog.”

The dirtiest and the most pathetic of stray dogs was sniffing the cuffs of my pants, and a light breeze was cooling the modest evening that had settled over the neighborhood. Soon we were back home, but I did not immediately rush to the silver candy dish. My daughter had to be tickled first, nuzzled, and put to bed; then my wife and I had to settle down to watch the kisses and murders on the Sunday Night Movie; and then I had to bring some order to the books, papers, and angels on my desk before I could begin to wait, my heart pounding, for my memories to thicken and reach the right consistency.

The heartsick man who had fallen victim to love as well as to a book summoned his associations: Speak, Memory. And I raised the silver candy dish in my hands. My gesture had something in it of a Municipal Playhouse actor raising pretentiously the skull of some poor peasant passing for Poor Yorick's, but if you consider the result, it was not a fake gesture. How docile the enigma called Memory was after all: I remembered instantly.

Those readers who believe in chance and accident, as well as those readers who believe Uncle Rıfkı would not leave things to chance and accident, probably have already guessed that the name of the station was Viran Bağ.

I remembered even more. When I looked at the silver candy dish with the caramel in my mouth twenty-three years ago and piped up, “Viran Bağ,” Uncle Rıfkı had said, “Bravo!”

Then, then the dice he had thrown had come up five and six, hitting two of my father's pieces with one throw, and he had said, “Akif, this boy of yours is awfully smart. You know what I am going to do one of these days?” But my father whose attention was on his captured pieces was not even listening, so Uncle Rıfkı had addressed me directly. “I am going to write a book someday, and I will give the hero your name.”

“A book like
Pertev and Peter?
” I had asked, my heart pounding.

“No, not an illustrated book, but one where I will tell your story.”

I had kept silent, unconvinced. I couldn't imagine what sort of thing that book might be.

That was when Aunt Ratibe had called out, “There you go again putting children on!”

Was this a real scene? Or was it a fiction that my well-intentioned and good-natured memory had made up on the spot to console a broken man like me? I just couldn't figure it out. But I had no desire to rush out at once and question Aunt Ratibe, either. I walked up to the window with the silver candy dish in my hand, and I was lost in thought looking out on the street, although I don't know if I could rightly call it thinking, or just talking in my sleep. 1) Lights went on in three different homes simultaneously. 2) The pathetic dog at the station went by looking high and mighty. 3) Whatever possessed my fingers through all this mental confusion, they got into the act and removed—oh, look!—the stuck lid from the candy dish without too much trouble.

I admit to thinking for a moment that like in fairy tales the candy dish might produce amulets, or magic rings, or poisoned grapes. But what it contained were seven of the New Life brand caramels I remembered from my childhood which no longer appeared in groceries and candy stores even in the remotest of provincial towns. On the wrapper of each there was the trademark angel, adding up to seven angels in all, sitting politely on the edge of the letter L for Life, their beautiful legs slightly extended into the space between New and Life, looking at me with gratitude and smiling sweetly for having released them from the darkness of the candy dish which they had endured for these past twenty years.

I removed with extreme care and difficulty the wrappers on the caramels which had turned into marble with age, making sure I did not harm the angels. There was a doggerel rhyme inside each wrapper, but it could not be said that they were of any help in understanding either life or the book. For example:

Behind the canteen

The grass grows green;

What I want from you

Is a sewing machine.

What's more, I even began repeating this nonsensical stuff to myself in the still of the night. Before I completely lost my mind, I sneaked into my old room as a last resort, and quietly pulling out the bottom drawer in the old dresser, I found by feel the plastic multipurpose thingamajig from my childhood which was a ruler on one side, on the other a letter opener, with the blunt end a magnifying glass; and like some Treasury Department agent examining counterfeit money under the light of the desk lamp, I gave the angels on the caramel wrappers a thorough examination: they bore no resemblance either to the Angel of Desire or the four-winged angels standing statically in Persian miniatures; nor were they anything like the angels which many years ago I anticipated seeing any minute in the bus window, or their photocopied versions in black and white. My memory, in an effort to look busy, reminded me uselessly that when I was little, vendors who were children themselves used to hawk these caramels on trains. I was about to conclude that the figure of the angel had been appropriated from some European publication, when I focused on the manufacturer who kept signaling to me from the corner of the wrapper.

Ingredients: glucose, sugar, vegetable oil,

butter, milk, and vanilla.

New Life
Caramels are a product of

Angel Candy and Chewing Gum, Inc.

18 Bloomingdale Street

Eskişehir

Next evening I was on the bus to Eskişehir. I had told my superiors at City Hall that a distant and forlorn relative had fallen ill; and I had explained to my wife that my mentally ill bosses were sending me out to distant and forlorn towns. You do get me, don't you? If life is not a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, if life is not just a haphazard bunch of scratches on a piece of paper made by a kid who's got hold of a pencil as my three-year-old daughter sometimes does, if life is not just a cruel chain of idiocies completely devoid of any sense, then there must be some sort of logic to all the fun and games that appeared coincidental but which Uncle Rıfkı had placed there when he was writing
The New Life.
If so, then the great planner would have had to have some purpose in putting the angel in my way, hither and yon, all these many years, in which case if an ordinary and broken hero such as myself succeeded in finding out from the horse's mouth, so to speak, by talking directly to the candyman who had decided why the picture of an angel was put on the wrapper of the caramel the hero loved in his childhood, then he might possibly be able to find consolation, on autumn evenings when sorrow descended on his being, in the meaning of what was left of his life, instead of carping about the cruelty of coincidences.

Speaking of coincidences, it was my pounding heart and not my eyes that had first registered that the driver of the late model Mercedes bus which took me to Eskişehir was the same one who fourteen years ago had driven Janan and me from a tiny steppe town with minarets to a city that rain floods had turned into a swamp. My eyes, as well as the rest of my body, were busy trying to adjust themselves to all the modern comforts available on buses lately, such as the drone of the air-conditioning, individual reading lights over the seats, bus attendants dressed in hotel valet's getups, the plastic taste of the food wrapped in gaily colored plastic pouches and served on trays, and napkins carrying the winged insignia of the tourism agency. At the touch of a button the seats could now be converted into beds that reclined over the laps of the unfortunates sitting in the seats behind them. Now that the “express” buses were scheduled to travel directly from one specific terminal to another and no stops were made at any fly-infested restaurants along the way, some buses had been fitted with toilet stalls reminiscent of electric chairs where one would hate to be stuck at the time of an accident. Half the time what appeared on the TV monitor were commercials featuring the tourism agency's vehicles which dragged us toward the asphalt-paved heart of the steppe, so that as one traveled on the bus napping or watching TV, one could watch umpteen times how pleasant it was to travel on this bus while napping or watching TV. The wild and desolate steppe Janan and I had once watched out of the bus window had now been rendered “people friendly” by virtue of having been riddled with billboards advertising cigarettes and tires, and the steppe took on various hues at the pleasure of the color the bus windows had been tinted to cut out the sun—sometimes a muddy brown, sometimes the green of Islam, sometimes the color of crude oil that reminded me of graveyards. But even so, drawing closer to the secrets of my life which had slipped away and to the desolate towns buried in oblivion as far as the rest of civilization was concerned, I felt that I was still alive, still breathing with rage, and still pursuing—let me put it this way, borrowing a word from the past—certain desires.