The New Life Read Free Page B

at a forty-five-degree angle to the TV and had hunched her head between her shoulders, just the way my mother does when watching TV, but instead of knitting, this one was smoking up a storm.
    Uncle Railman Rıfkı had died a year ahead of my father, who went of a heart attack last year, but Uncle Rıfkı’s death was not due to natural causes. He was on his way to the coffeehouse one evening, it seems, when he was fired on and killed; the killer was never caught; there was some talk of sexual jealousy, which my father never believed a word of during the last year of his life. The couple had never had any children.
    *   *   *
    Past midnight, long after my mother had gone to sleep, I sat bolt upright at the table staring at the book between my elbows and, gradually, zealously, and wholeheartedly, I put out of my mind everything that identified this neighborhood as my own—the lights that went out all over the neighborhood and the city, the sadness of the wet and empty streets, the cry of the boza vendor going around the block one last time, the premature cawing of a couple of crows, the patient clatter of the freight train on the tracks long after the last commuter train had gone by—and I gave myself over totally to the light that emanated from the book. So everything that constituted my life and expectations—lunches, movies, classmates, daily papers, soda pop, soccer games, desks, ferryboats, pretty girls, dreams of happiness, my future sweetheart, wife, office desk, mornings, breakfast, bus tickets, petty concerns, the statistics assignment that didn’t get done, my old trousers, face, pajamas, night, magazines I masturbated to, my cigarettes, even my faithful bed which awaited me for that most reliable oblivion—all slipped my mind completely. And I found myself wandering in a land of light.

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    The next day I fell in love. Love was every bit as devastating as the light that surged from the book into my face, proving to me how substantially my life had already gone off the track.
    As soon as I woke up in the morning, I reviewed all that had happened to me on the previous day and knew at once that the new realm which had opened before me was not just a momentary reverie but as real as my own torso and my limbs. Finding others who were in the same predicament as myself was of the utmost necessity to save myself from the feeling of unbearable loneliness that beset me in the new world into which I was projected.
    It had snowed in the night, and snow had accumulated on the windowsills, the sidewalks, and the rooftops. In the chilly white light from outside, the open book on the table appeared sparer and more innocent than it was, which gave it a more ominous character.
    Even so, I succeeded in having breakfast with my mother as usual, savoring the smell of toast, thumbing through the morning edition of Milliyet, glancing at Jelal Salik’s column. As if nothing were out of the ordinary, I had some of the cheese and smiled into my mother’s good-natured face. The clatter of cups, spoons, and the teakettle, the noise of the citrus truck in the street were telling me to trust in the normal flow of life, but I wasn’t deceived. When I stepped outside, I was so sure the world had been utterly transformed that I was not embarrassed to be wearing my dead father’s worn and cumbersome overcoat.
    I walked to the station and got on the train; I got off the train and boarded the ferry; at Karaköy I leapt out on the landing; I elbowed my way up the stairs, got on the bus and arrived at Taksim Square; on my way to the university, I stopped briefly and watched some gypsies hawking flowers on the sidewalk. How could I trust life to continue as in the past? Or forget I had ever read the book? For a moment the prospect before me seemed so terrifying that I felt like running away.
    At the lecture session on stress mechanics, I solemnly copied down the schemata, the figures and