The New Life Read Free

the pavement. A deep feeling of optimism surged up inside me. If only I could always walk like this, walking fast, without stopping, if only I could go on journeys, it seemed I’d reach the universe in the book. The glow of the new life I felt inside me existed in a faraway place, even in a land that was unattainable, but I sensed that as long as I was in motion, I was getting closer. I could at least leave my old life behind me.
    When I got to the shore, I was astonished that the sea looked pitch-black. Why hadn’t I ever noticed before that the Sea of Marmara was so dark, so stern, and so cruel at night? It was as if objects spoke a language which I was beginning to hear, even if just barely, in the temporal silence into which the book had lured me. For a moment I felt the weight of the gently swaying sea like the flash of my own intractable death that I’d felt inside me while reading the book, but it was not a sensation of “the end has come” brought on by actual death; it was more the curiosity and excitement of someone beginning a new life that animated me.
    I walked up and down the beach. I used to come here with the kids in the neighborhood to look through the piles of stuff the sea deposited along the shore—the tin cans, plastic balls, bottles, plastic flip-flops, clothes pins, light bulbs, plastic dolls—searching for something, a magic talisman from some treasury, a shiny new article the use of which we couldn’t begin to fathom. For a moment I sensed that if any old object from my old world were to be discovered and scrutinized now, from my new viewpoint enlightened by the book, it could be transformed into that magical piece children are always looking for. At the same time I was so besieged by the feeling that the book had isolated me from the world, I thought the dark sea would suddenly swell, pull me into itself, and swallow me. I was beset with anxiety and started walking briskly, not for the sake of observing the new world actualize with every step I took, but to be alone with the book in my room as soon as possible. I almost ran, already envisioning myself as someone who was created out of the light that emanated from the book. This tended to soothe me.
    *   *   *
    My father had had a good friend about his own age who had also worked for the State Railroads for many years and had even risen to the rank of inspector; he wrote articles in Rail magazine for railroad buffs. Besides that, he wrote and illustrated children’s comics which were published in the series called Weekly Adventures for Children. There were many times when I ran home to lose myself in one of the comics like Peter and Pertev or Kamer Visits America that Uncle Railman Rıfkı presented to me, but those children’s books always came to an end. The last page said “The End” just like in the movies and, reading those six letters, not only did I come to the exit point of the country where I’d wanted to remain, I was once again painfully aware that the magic realm was just a place made up by Uncle Railman Rıfkı.
    In contrast, everything in the book I wanted to read again was true; and that’s why I carried the book inside me and why the wet streets I tore through did not appear real but seemed like part of a boring homework assignment I’d been given as punishment. After all, the book revealed, so it seemed to me, the meaning of my existence.
    I’d gone across the railroad tracks and was coming around the mosque when, just as I was about to step in a mud puddle, I leapt away, my foot slipped, and I stumbled and fell to one knee on the muddy pavement. I pulled myself up immediately and was about to go my way.
    â€œOh, my, you almost had a bad fall, my boy!” said a bearded old man who’d seen me take the spill. “You hurt?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “My father died yesterday. We buried him today. He was a shitty guy; he drank,