The New Life by Orhan Pamuk Page B

and ghosts. In domestic films, which were mostly about kindly affluent people who just could not manage to find suitable and sincere husbands for their ladylike daughters, all heroes, no matter whether male or female, seemed to have spent time being singers at some point of their lives, and they continuously misunderstood each other so thoroughly that these misunderstandings eventually turned into a kind of understanding. We had become so used to seeing the same faces and bodies in stereotypic roles as the patient postman, the cruel rapist, the kindhearted but plain-looking sister, the bass-voiced judge, the lamebrain, or the intelligent matron, that when we saw at a rest stop the kindhearted sister sitting with the cruel rapist and calmly having rice and red lentil soup along with the rest of the sleepy night passengers in the MEMORY LANE RESTAURANT where the walls were hung with pictures of mosques, Atatürk, wrestlers, and movie stars, we were convinced we were being tricked. While Janan recalled one by one which of the famous actresses in the photographs on the walls had played victims assaulted by the rapist in the films we had seen, I remember absentmindedly regarding the other clients in the gaudy restaurant, thinking we were all passengers on an uncanny ship having soup in the bright and chilly dining room and sailing toward death.
    We saw so many fight scenes on the screen, so many broken windows, glasses, doors, so many cars and planes that disappeared from sight and went up in flames, so many houses, armies, happy families, bad guys, love letters, skyscrapers, treasures that were swallowed up in raging infernos. We saw all the blood that spurted out of wounds, faces, slashed throats, and viewed endless chase scenes where hundreds and thousands of cars tore after each other, negotiating curves with great speed and then blissfully crashing into each other. We watched tens of thousands of desperadoes, male and female, foreign and domestic, with mustache and without mustache, who fired at each other without respite. “I didn’t think the guy would be so easily duped,” Janan would say after one videotape came to a stop and before the next one appeared on the screen. And after the second video ended and gave way to black stains on the blank screen, she would add, “Still, life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere.” Or, “I don’t believe any of it, I am not taken in, but I still love it.” Or, the happy ending in the movie lingering on her face, she would murmur between sleep and wakefulness, “I will dream of connubial bliss.”
    At the end of the third month of our journeys, Janan and I must have seen more than a thousand kissing scenes. With each kiss, silence fell on the seats, no matter what small town or remote city the bus was destined for, no matter who the passengers were, be they the sort who travel with baskets full of eggs or bureaucrats carrying briefcases; I would become aware of Janan’s hands on her knees or her lap, and for a moment I yearned to do something significant that was profoundly forceful and tough. I even succeeded one rainy summer’s eve in doing something I was not totally aware that I wanted to do, or something close to it.
    The darkened bus was half full; we were sitting somewhere in the middle; and on the video screen it was raining in a tropical scene that was very distant and foreign. I had instinctively brought my face closer to the window, thereby closer to Janan, and I noticed it was raining outside. My Janan was smiling at me when I kissed her on the lips as they do in the movies and on TV, or as I imagined they did; I kissed her as she struggled, O Angel, with all my might, desire, and fury, drawing blood.
    â€œNo, my dear, no!” she said to me. “You look so like him but you are not him. He is somewhere else.”
    Was the pink glow on her face a reflection of the most remote, the most fly-spotted, the most