The New Life by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online Page B

out of New Life brand caramel candies. I succeeded in predicting the number of lighted windows I counted for an entire week at three in the morning, without exceeding the margin of five percent error that I allowed myself. I repeated Fuzuli’s famous line of poetry, Janan yok ise jan gerekmez, to thirty-nine people, subjecting them to my interpretation, “If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul.” I called up and asked after her under twenty-eight different guises, each time using a different voice; and I would not go home before I said Janan thirty-nine times, forming her name in my imagination with the letters I extracted from billboards, posters, flashing neon signs, in the show windows of pharmacies, kebab and lottery shops. Still, Janan did not come.
    I was returning home one midnight, having patiently won the numerical and fortuitous games I played, double or nothing, which brought Janan a little closer to me in my fondest dreams, when I noticed lights burning in my room. Either my mother was worried that I was so late, or else she was looking for something; but a completely different picture appeared in my mind.
    I imagined myself sitting at my table, up there in my room where I saw the lights. I imagined it with such passion and force of will that I thought I could almost see for a brief moment my own head in the faint orange glow of my table lamp, against the little segment of dingy white wall that was barely visible between the parted drapes. At the same moment, such an amazing feeling of freedom manifested itself in the electric sensation I experienced that I was amazed. It had been so simple all along, I said to myself: the man in the room that I saw out of another’s eyes must remain there in that room; I, on the other hand, must run away from home, away from the room, away from everything, including my mother’s smell, my bed, my twenty-two years of lived life. New life could begin only by my leaving that room; if I were to keep leaving that room in the morning only to return to it at night, I could never reach Janan nor that land.
    When I entered my room, I looked at my bed as if I were seeing someone else’s belongings, the books that were piled on one corner of my table, the nudie magazines I had not touched since I first saw Janan, the carton of cigarettes drying on the radiator, the change I kept in a dish, my key ring, my wardrobe that didn’t close right; and regarding all my stuff that bound me to my old world, I understood I had to make good my escape.
    Later, when I was reading and copying the book, I perceived that what I was writing signaled a certain tendency in the world. It seemed I should not be in one place but simultaneously in every place. My room was somewhere; it was one place. It was not everywhere. “Why go to Taşkışla in the morning,” I asked myself, “when Janan won’t be there?” There were other places Janan would not be either, places where I had been going in vain but where I would no longer go. I would only go where the text took me, where Janan and the new life must be. As I copied down all that the book imparted, the knowledge of the places where I must go gradually filtered into me, and I was gratified that I was gradually becoming someone else. Much later, when I was reviewing the pages I had filled like a traveler satisfied with the progress he has made, I could see with clarity the new human being into whom I was in the process of being transformed.
    I was the person who oriented himself on the road leading to the new life he sought by sitting down and copying the book sentence by sentence into his notebook. I was the person who had read a book that changed his whole life, who had fallen in love, and who had a feeling he was progressing on the road to a new life. I was the person whose mother tapped on his door and said, “You sit up all night writing, but please don’t smoke, at least.” I