The New Life Read Free Page A

beat my mother, didn’t want us around. I lived in Viran Bağ all those years.”
    Viran Bağ yet! Where in the world did I come up with this town called Viran Bağ? Perhaps the old guy was on to my lies, but momentarily I convinced myself that I was too clever by half. I couldn’t tell if it was the lies I made up, or the book, or simply the old man’s stupefied face that prompted me, but I kept telling myself: “Never fear, never fear! The world in the book is real!” But I was afraid.
    Why?
    I had heard of others who had read a book only to have their lives disintegrate. I’d read the account of someone who had read a book called Fundamental Principles of Philosophy; in total agreement with the book, which he read in one night, he joined the Revolutionary Proletarian Advance Guard the very next day, only to be nabbed three days later robbing a bank and end up doing time for the next ten years. I also knew about those who had stayed awake the whole night reading books such as Islam and the New Ethos or The Betrayal of Westernization, then immediately abandoned the tavern for the mosque, sat themselves on those ice-cold rugs doused with rosewater, and began preparing patiently for the next life which was not due for another fifty years. I had even met some who got carried away by books with titles like Love Sets You Free or Know Yourself, and although these people were the sort who were capable of believing in astrology, they too could say in all sincerity, “This book changed my life overnight!”
    Actually, the frightening thing on my mind was not even the bathos of these scenarios: I was afraid of isolation. I was afraid of the sorts of things a fool like me might very well end up doing, such as misunderstanding the book, being shallow or, as the case may be, not shallow, being different, drowning in love, being privy to the mysteries of the universe but looking ridiculous all my life explaining the mystery to those who are not in the least interested, going to jail, being considered a crackpot, comprehending at last that the world is even crueler than I’d imagined, being unable to get pretty girls to love me. If the contents of the book were true, if life was indeed like what I read in the book, if such a world was possible, then it was impossible to understand why people needed to go to prayer, why they yakked their lives away at coffeehouses, why they had to sit in front of the TV set in the evening so as not to die of boredom, unwilling to close even their curtains all the way, just in case something halfway interesting in the street might also be watched, like a car speeding by, a horse neighing, or a drunk cutting loose.
    I can’t figure out how long it was before I realized I was standing in front of Uncle Railman Rıfkı’s building and staring up into his second-floor flat through the half-open curtains. I had perhaps realized it without realizing it, and I was instinctively sending him my regards on the eve of my new life. There was an odd wish on my mind. I wanted to take a close look at the objects I’d seen in his house when my father and I had last paid him a visit. The canaries in the cage, the barometer on the wall, the meticulously framed pictures of railroad trains, the breakfront in which cordial sets, miniature railway cars, a silver candy dish, a conductor’s punch, the railroad service medals were placed in one half of the showcase and maybe forty or fifty books in the other half, the unused samovar standing on top of it, the playing cards on the table … Through the half-open curtains, I could see the light emanating from the TV but not the set itself.
    A surge of determination suddenly hit me out of nowhere, prompting me to get on top of the wall around the front yard and see not only the TV set Uncle Railman Rıfkı’s widow Aunt Ratibe was watching but also her head. She was seated in her dead husband’s easy chair