The New Life by Orhan Pamuk

of some old magazine left on a table in a bus terminal somewhere, “I knew my whole life would change. Before I saw him, I had a life, but after I knew him, my life was altered. It was as if everything around me had changed its color and shape—human beings, beds, lamps, ashtrays, streets, clouds, chimneys, everything but everything. It was with awe and wonder that I set out to discover this new world. I bought the book thinking I no longer needed books and fictions. To really know the world that opened to me, I had to do the work of looking, of seeing each and every thing with my own eyes. But once I read the book itself, I apprehended instantly what lay behind everything that I must see. I encouraged Mehmet, who had returned disconsolate from the country where he’d gone in search of the new life, and I convinced him that together we’d make it there. Back in those days, we read the book over and over again, but each time with new eyes. Sometimes we spent weeks on a passage, other times everything was clear as a bell the instant we read it. We went to the movies, read other books and newspapers, walked through the streets. The times when the book was on our minds, when we knew it by heart, the streets in Istanbul glowed with such an extraordinary luminescence that the city belonged to us. We had a way of knowing that the old man we saw on a street corner leaning on his cane planned to idle away his time at the coffeehouse until it was time to pick up his grandchild after school. We knew that the mare pulling the last cart of the three carts that went by was the mother of the two skinny horses that pulled the first two. We knew the reason why more men were now wearing blue socks; we knew how to decipher train timetables read upside down, or that the suitcase the fat and sweaty man who boarded the bus carried was full of underwear taken from the house he’d just robbed. We’d go in a café to read the book again and then discuss it for hours. It was love. Sometimes I thought love was the only way of apprehending a distant world, like in the movies, and being transported there.
    â€œBut then,” she had said one rainy night without taking her eyes off the kissing scene on the video screen, “there were things I knew nothing about, things that I would never know.” And after four or five slippery miles when the kissing scene was replaced by one where a bus which looked like ours was traveling across a charming landscape that was so different, she had added, “Now we are going to that place that is unknown to us.”
    When the clothes we were wearing became stiff with dirt and dust, and the history of all the peoples who had stirred up the dust on this terrain since the days of the Crusaders had settled layer after layer on our skin, we would go shopping at random in a random town before we changed buses. Janan would buy herself some of those long poplin skirts that made her look like some well-meaning provincial school teacher, and I would get the sort of shirts worn by pale imitations of former selves. Later if we managed to look past the provincial administration building, the statue of Atatürk, the Arçelik appliance dealership, the pharmacy and the mosque, noticing the delicate white streak left behind by some jet in the crystal-blue sky, seen beyond the sailcloth banners of the Koran school and a circumcision party that was approaching, we would stop where we were, carrying in our hands our paper-wrapped packages and plastic bags, and for a moment we would look up at the sky with ardor before asking some faded bureaucrat wearing a faded tie for directions to the local public bath.
    Since the baths were reserved for women in the mornings, I would while away the time in the streets and in coffeehouses; and when I went past the town hotel, I dreamed of telling Janan that we needed to spend at least one night on solid ground, in a hotel, for instance, instead of riding the tires