The New Life by Orhan Pamuk Page A

again and sleeping on the bus. And some evenings when I managed to tell her what I had been dreaming of, Janan would show me the fruits of the investigations she conducted in the afternoon while I was in the baths: bound volumes of old photo romance magazines, children’s comics which were even older, samples of bubblegum I didn’t remember ever chewing, and a hairpin the significance of which was not immediately apparent. “I’ll tell you on the bus,” she would say, giving me that special smile that appeared on her face when the film on the VCR was one she had already seen.
    One night when, instead of the tawdry video film that was usually shown on our bus, a serious and sober announcer had appeared on the TV screen to give some death notices, Janan had said, “I am making my way to Mehmet’s other life, yet he was not Mehmet but someone else in that other life.” Querulous red neon lights reflected on her face as we sped by a filling station.
    â€œMehmet didn’t divulge much else about the person he used to be, other than mentioning his sisters, a mansion, a mulberry tree, and that he used to have another name and identity. Once he told me how in his childhood he liked reading the periodical called Children’s Weekly. Did you ever read Children’s Weekly? ” Her slender fingers ran over the yellowing editions of bound periodicals stuck in the space between our legs and the ashtray, and watching me look through the pages without looking at them herself, she said, “The reason why I collect these is because Mehmet claimed that everybody would eventually return to a place within these pages. These pages constitute his childhood. They are what make up the book. Do you understand?” I did not fully understand, and sometimes I did not understand at all, but Janan addressed me in such a way that I felt I did indeed understand. “Like you,” Janan said, “Mehmet too read the book and apprehended that his whole life would change; and he pushed his apprehension all the way to its logical end. He had been studying medicine, but he quit it in order to devote all his time to the life in the book. He understood that he must abandon his past totally if he was to become a totally new being. So he cut off all relations with his father and his family … But it was not easy to become free of them. He told me that he had actually achieved the freedom to move toward his new life by virtue of a traffic accident. True: accidents are departures, and departures are accidents. The angel becomes visible at the magical moment of departure, and it is then that we perceive the real meaning of the turmoil called life. Only then can we ever go back home.”
    Hearing these words, I would catch myself dreaming of the mother I had left behind, my room, my things, my bed; and feeling insidiously rational and commensurably guilty, I would construct fantasies of joining together what was in my dreams with Janan’s dreams of the new life.

6
    The TV set was always placed somewhere above the driver’s seat, and some evenings we did not speak but kept our eyes on the screen. Since we had not read the papers for months, the TV—which would be bedecked with boxes, doilies, velvet drapes, varnished woodwork, amulets, evil-eye beads, decals, ornaments, and elevated to the status of a present-day altar—was the only window, other than the bus windows, we had on the world. We watched karate films in which nimble heroes bounce around kicking in simultaneously the faces of hundreds of derelicts, and their slow-motion domestic imitations which are made using clumsy actors. We also saw American films like the one where a smart and engaging black hero puts one over on the police as well as on the mobsters, or aviation films in which good-looking young men perform daredevil acrobatics with their flying machines, and horror films where pretty young girls are scared stiff by vampires