I left the archive room when I was still hearing that music in my ears, at an hour when I felt deep inside me how cold and calculating were both the world and the philosophically inclined patriarch of the house. It was as if I could hear the encouraging provocation of some blithe spirit. I felt something tingling inside like that playful feeling people like me get when we leave the theater after seeing a fun and upbeat movie, a feeling which is as light as the music that goes through our heads. You know what I mean: we identify with the hero, as if we were the guy with the clever jokes, the spontaneous levity, the incredible ready wit.
"May I have this dance?" I was about to ask Janan, who was watching me with concern.
She was sitting at the dinner table with the three rosy sisters, looking at some balls of yarn in all manner of colors which had spilled out from a wicker basket on the table top like ripe apples and oranges out of a cornucopia of felicity and plenty. Next to these were the knitting and embroidery patterns that came with the magazine called Home and Women that my mother also used to take at one time, flowers to needlepoint, cute little ducks, cats, dogs, besides the mosque motifs which must have been contributed by the publisher, who lifted all the rest from German women's magazines and foisted it on Turkish women. I too studied all that color in the light of the kerosene lamps, remembering that the actual life drama I had just been reading about had been constructed with equally vivid raw materials. Then turning to Rosamund's two little daughters who came up to their mother, melting into this scene of family happiness, yawning and blinking their eyes, I said to them, "What, your mother hasn't put you to bed yet?"
They were taken aback and a little frightened when they nestled against their mother. My mood was improving. I could even have regaled Rosebud and Rosabelle, who were eyeing me suspiciously, with something like, "You are both blooms that have not yet faded."
Yet I didn't manage to say anything until I entered the quarters reserved for receiving male guests. "Sir," I said to Doctor Fine, "I read your son's story with great sorrow."
"It has all been documented," he replied.
He introduced me to two semiobscured men in the darkened room. No, these gentlemen were not watches, seeing how they weren't ticking. One was a notary, but since in murky situations like this my mind does not record things, I didn't get what the other one did; I was more concerned with how Doctor Fine had introduced me: I was a young man destined to do great things, who was levelheaded, serious, and passionate; I could already be considered to be very close to him. There was nothing about me that smelled of those pseudo longhairs who aped characters in American films. He had great trust in me, very great.
How quickly I identified with all the praise! I didn't know what to do with my hands, but I wanted to look refined, so I bent my head down as befits a modest young man like me and changed the subject, all too aware that my changing the subject would be observed and appreciated.
"How quiet it is here at night, sir," I said.
"Yet there's a rustling in the mulberry tree," said Doctor Fine, "even when the night is all quiet and there's not even a hint of a breeze. Listen."
We all listened. I was more discomfited by the chilling darkness in the room than by the tree rustling out there somewhere. Listening to the silence I realized that since I had come to this house I hadn't once heard people speak in anything but whispers.
Doctor Fine took me aside. "We were just sitting down to play a few hands of bezique," he said. "Now I want you to tell me, my son, which would you prefer to see? My guns, or my timepieces?"
"I'd like to see the timepieces, sir," I said without a thought.
In the next room, which was even darker, all three of us were shown two old-time Zenith table models that banged away like gunshots. We saw the drawer horologe made by the Galata clock-makers' colony, which was encased in wood, played a tune of its own accord, and had to be wound only once a week; according to Doctor Fine, there was one just like it in the harem section of the Topkapı Palace. Then we were trying to figure out in which Levantine port lived Simon S. Simonien who had made and signed the pendulum clock with the carved walnut cabinet, when we made out the words "à Smyrne" on the enameled dial. We noted that the Universal clock that sported a moon and a calendar showed the days of the full moon. When Doctor Fine took a huge key and wound the pendulum of the skeleton clock, the dial of which had been fashioned like a Mevlevi turban at the instigation of Sultan Selim the Third, we tensed, realizing that it was the inner organs of the skeleton that were being wound up. We remembered having seen and heard in so many places ever since our childhood the Junghans pendulum wall clocks that still clicked sadly like caged canaries in so many houses. It gave us shivers to see the locomotive and under it the words Made in USSR on the dial of the crude Serkisof clock.
"For our people, the ticking of clocks is not just a means of apprising the mundane, but the resonance that brings us in line with our inner world, like the sound of splashing water in fountains in the courtyards of our mosques," Doctor Fine said. "We pray five times a day; then in Ramadan, we have the time for iftar, the breaking of fast at sundown, and the time for sahur, the meal taken just before sunup. Our timetables and timepieces are our vehicles to reach God, not the means of rushing to keep up with the world as they are in the West. There never was a nation on earth as devoted to timepieces as we have been; we were the greatest patrons of European clock makers. Timepieces are the only product of theirs that has been acceptable to our souls. That is why clocks are the only things other than guns that cannot be classified as foreign or domestic. For us there are two venues that lead to God. Armaments are the vehicles of Jihad; timepieces are the vehicles for prayer. They have managed to silence our guns. Now they have hatched these trains so that our time will also be silenced. Everyone knows that the greatest enemy of the timetable for prayers is the timetable for trains. My dead son was well aware of this fact, and that's why he spent months on buses to retrieve our lost time. Those who wanted to estrange him from me used the bus to take the life of my son and heir, but Doctor Fine is not naïve enough to be duped by their machinations. Remember this: when our people get some money together, the first thing they buy is always a watch."
Perhaps Doctor Fine was going to continue whispering his harangue, but he was interrupted by an English-made ormolu Prior clock fitted with an enameled dial, ornamented with ruby roses, and graced by the sound of a nightingale, which began to play the melody of the old Ottoman song, "My Scribe."
While his bezique buddies pricked their ears to the sweet song about the scribe's excursion to Üsküdar, Doctor Fine whispered into my ear: "Have you come to a decision, my child?"
At the same instant I saw through the open door in the next room Janan's shimmering reflection in the mirror on the console, and I was distracted.
"I need to do some more work in the archives, sir," I said.
I said it in order to avoid making a decision rather than in the hope of coming to one. I was passing through the next room when I felt the eyes of the three roses on me, the fastidious Rosebud, high-strung Rosabelle, and Rosamund who had come back from putting her daughters to bed. How curious and how determined were Janan's honey-colored eyes! I felt as if I had achieved something important, as I suspect many a man feels when he is associated with a beautiful and lively woman.
Yet how far I was from being that man! Here I was, sitting in Doctor Fine's archives, with files upon files of intelligence reports in front of me, and having jealously internalized the beauty of Janan's visage augmented by the mirror on the console in the other room, I was turning the pages rapidly with the hope that my increasing jealousy might finally impel me to come to a decision.
I did not have to continue my research for too long. After the funeral of the luckless youth from Kayseri whom Doctor Fine had buried believing that he was his son, he had phased out the remaining old watches Movado, Omega, and Serkisof, and Zenith was dead. Seiko, the most reliable and timely of the new watches Doctor Fine had hired in order to track down every soul who had ever read the book, had managed to put his finger on a certain Mehmet and his girlfriend Janan, students of architecture whom he had come across during his forays into the student dormitories, cafés, clubs, and school lounges in the hope of encountering someone who was familiar with the book. His discovery had taken place sixteen months earlier. It was in the spring. Janan and Mehmet were in love, and they carried a book which they read to each other intimately. They had no clue as to the existence of Seiko, who continued to watch them, even though not too closely, for some eight months.
Seiko had submitted to Doctor Fine twenty-two reports, written at random intervals during the eight months from the time he discovered the pair until I read the book and Mehmet was shot at the minibus stop. It was with patience and mounting jealousy that I read these reports again and again, way past the midnight hour, trying to absorb the poisonous conclusions I drew by virtue of the logic provided by the archive where I was working.
1. What Janan told me looking out the window in Room 19 where we spent the night in the town of Güdül, saying something to the effect that no man had ever touched her, was not true. Seiko, who had followed them not only in the spring but also throughout the summer when he had observed the two young people go into the hotel where Mehmet worked, had determined that they had stayed in his room for many hours. It's not that I did not suspect this, but when someone else has witnessed what we merely suspected, and has written it down, one feels even more foolish.
2. No one including Seiko had suspected that Mehmet might be the new identity Nahit assumed after closing out his former life, not his father, not the management at the hotel where he worked, not the registrar's office at the school of architecture.
3. The lovers displayed no social anomaly to attract attention other than their being in love. If the last ten days of Seiko's surveillance were discounted, they had not even attempted to pass their copy of the book to others. Besides, they did not read the book all the time, which was the reason why Seiko had not made a point of watching what it was that they did with the book. They appeared to be a couple of university students headed for an ordinary marital life. Their association with classmates was well-balanced, their grades fine, their enthusiasms prudent. They had no relationship with any political group, and had no zealous involvement that was worth noting. Seiko had even written that, among all those who had read the book, Mehmet was the most even-tempered, the least obsessive and passionate of the lot. Perhaps that was why Seiko was caught by surprise later; he might even have been pleased with the way things turned out.
4. Seiko envied them. When I made comparisons with his other reports, I initially noticed that he described Janan in language that was overly considered and poetic. "Reading the book, the young woman knits her brows delicately, and her countenance assumes a limpid grace and dignity." "She then made the gesture that is special to her, pulling her hair with one tiny swoop behind her ears." "Sometimes if she is reading the book standing in line at the cafeteria, she sticks out her upper lip slightly, and her eyes begin to glimmer so, one imagines two large teardrops may appear any moment in the corners of those beautiful eyes." And what about these astonishing lines? "Well, sir, the young woman's visage over the book became so tender after a half hour's reading, and the expression on her face was so strange and unparalleled, that for a moment I thought the magical light did not stream in the windows but surged from the pages of the book into this angelic countenance." In contrast to Janan's celestial virtues the young man in her company was seen as being too much of the world. "This thing is nothing more than an affair of the heart between the daughter of a fine family and a penniless young man whose antecedents are obscure." "Our young man is forever the one who's more cautious, anxious, and parsimonious." "The young woman has the inclination to open up to friends, to get close to them, and even to share the book, but the hotel clerk keeps her in check." "Obviously he avoids her circle of friends because he himself comes from a low-class family." "Come to think of it, it's hard to imagine what the young woman sees in this cold and lackluster fellow." "He is far too arrogant for a mere hotel clerk." "He's one of those crafty people who manage to seem wise because they're tight-lipped and uncommunicative." "Effete upstart!" "He has nothing to recommend him, I must say." I was beginning to like this Seiko. If only I could rely on his accuracy. He did, however, persuade me of something else.
5. How happy they were! After class, they went up to a Beyoğlu theater, and they held hands all through a movie called Endless Nights. They sat at a corner table in the student canteen, watching people and talking animatedly to each other. Always together, whether window shopping in uptown Beyoğlu, or taking the bus, or going to class and on outings throughout the city, or sitting up on stools at sandwich bars, knee to knee, watching themselves eat their sandwiches in the mirror; and there they are again, reading the book the young woman has pulled out of her tote bag. And then there was that summer's day! Seiko began following Mehmet from the moment he left the hotel; and then observing him meet Janan, who was carrying a plastic bag, he assumed that something was up and took off after them. They rode the ferry to Princess Island, rented a rowboat and went swimming; they hired a hansom cab, had corn on the cob and ice cream; and when they got back to town, they went up to the young man's room. It was difficult reading all this. They had spats and their share of arguments, and at times Seiko read these as bad signs, but until the fall there had been no real strain between them.
6. Seiko must have been the person who pulled the gun out of the pink plastic bag and shot Mehmet on that snowy December day in the vicinity of the minibus stop. But I was not entirely sure of it. Yet his anger and jealousy attested to that. Remembering the image of the shadowy person whom I'd seen out of the window sprinting away through the snow-covered park, I imagined Seiko must be around thirty years old, an ambitious officer who was a graduate of the police academy, who moonlighted doing private investigation jobs in order to supplement his income, someone who considered students of architecture "effete." Well then, what was his assessment of me?
7. I was an abject victim of entrapment. Seiko had reached this conclusion so handily that he had even felt somewhat sorry for me. And yet he had been unable to deduce that the source of the strain between the young woman and the young man had been Janan's desire to do something with the book. But then, it must have been on Janan's insistence that they decided to draft someone into whose hands they would put the book. They had looked over the students in the halls of the Technical University like headhunters for a private firm sifting through the talent pool for the right candidate to fill a vacant position. It was not at all clear why I was the one they had chosen. But soon Seiko had accurately determined that they had indeed been watching me, following me, and talking about me. Then, the scene of my falling into the trap had gone even more easily than their singling me out. How easy? Well, Janan had walked close to me several times in the hallway, carrying the book in her hand. She had once given me a sweet smile. Then it was with great relish that she had indeed set me up: She had become aware of me watching her in line at the canteen, and pretending that she had to put down what she had in her hand so that she could rifle through her bag for her wallet, she had placed the book on the table before me; and after ten seconds or so, her delicate hand had spirited it away. Then assured that I, the poor fish, had taken the bait, the two of them had placed the book free of charge at the sidewalk stall which they had already determined was on my route, so that I would see the book on my way home and recognizing it bemusedly—"Ah, there's that book!"—I would buy it. Which is exactly what happened. Saddened by the situation on my account, Seiko accurately made this observation about me: "a dreamy kid with nothing special to recommend him."
Not only did I not mind it too much, since he had pretty much the same assessment of Mehmet, I even found enough consolation in it to work up the courage to ask myself this question: Why had I not ever confessed to myself that I had bought and read the book as a means of getting to the beautiful girl?
What was truly unbearable, however, was the fact that while I was gazing at Janan with open admiration, staring at her without even being aware that I was staring, while the book lighted on my table like a timid magic bird—that is, while I was living the most entrancing moment of my life—not only was Mehmet watching the two of us, in the distance there was Seiko, watching all three of us.
"The coincidence that I loved and accepted with joy, thinking it was life itself, turns out to be mere fiction constructed by someone else," said the hoodwinked hero, deciding to leave the room for the purpose of seeing Doctor Fine's arsenal. But he still had to figure out a few more things and do some more research, that is, he needed to put in another hour's work.
I worked as hard as I could and came up with an inventory of all the young Mehmets who were seen reading the book, which had been made by Doctor Fine's punctilious watches and the heartsick dealers all over Anatolia. Seeing that Serkisof had not disclosed our Mehmet's surname, I ended up with a fairly long list which I did not yet know how to evaluate.
It was quite late, but I was certain Doctor Fine was waiting up for me. I walked toward the room where the games of bezique were played against the background ticking of all the clocks. Janan and Doctor Fine's daughters had retired to their rooms, and the bezique cronies had long gone home. Doctor Fine had retreated into the farthest corner of the room, where he was reading sunk deep in an overstuffed chair as if to shield himself from the light of the kerosene lamps.
When he became aware of my presence, he slipped a letter opener inlaid with mother-of-pearl into the book he had been reading, closed it, and rose to his feet, saying he was ready and had been waiting up for me. I might want to rest a bit first, in case my eyes were too fatigued from all that reading. But he was certain that I was pleased with all that I had read and gleaned. Wasn't life just rife with sly sonsobitches and mind-boggling happenstances? And yet he was resolved that it was his duty to bring order to all this chaos.
"The dossiers and the indexes have been prepared by Rosabelle with the care of a girl working at an embroidery frame," he said. "As for Rosebud, it is as much a pleasure for her to direct the correspondence as it is to be a dutiful daughter, writing the letters to my obedient watches in line with my general wishes and responses. Every afternoon we take tea listening to Rosamund's beautiful voice read us the letters we receive. Sometimes we work in this room, sometimes we move into the archive room where you have been studying. On warm spring days and in the summer, we sit for hours around the table under the mulberry tree. For a man who likes solitude as I do, those are hours spent in true happiness."
My mind kept searching for appropriate words to praise all this love and devotion, all this care and refinement, and all this peace and order. Having seen the cover of the book he put down when he saw me, I knew he had been reading a volume of Zagor. Did he have any knowledge that Uncle Rıfkı, whose death he had ordered, had at one time attempted a nationalistic version of this illustrated novel? But I was in no mind to fuss with the finer points of these coincidences.
"May I see the guns now, sir?"
His fond response was spoken with an affectionate tone that gave me confidence: I was welcome to call him Doctor, or else Father.
Doctor Fine showed me a Browning semiautomatic pistol which had been imported by the department of internal security from Belgium in 1956 on a contract bid, explaining that until recently these had been issued only to top echelon police. Then he told me about the time the German-make Parabellum pistol, which could be converted into a rifle by virtue of the wooden holster that doubled as a stock, had gone off by accident, and the 9-millimeter bullet had pierced through two massive Hungarian draft horses, then gone in one window of the house and out the other, and lodged in the trunk of the mulberry; he went on to say that it was, however, an awkward firearm to carry. If I wanted something practical and reliable, he recommended the Smith & Wesson with a safety grip. And then there was the shiny Colt revolver that would thrill any gun enthusiast, which did not have a safety, so even if one were to freeze up, all one had to remember was to pull the trigger; and yet one might possibly feel too much like an American cowboy carrying one of these babies. So our attention was directed to a series of the German-made Walthers, which was the one make that had been successfully absorbed into our national consciousness, and its patented domestic look-alike, the Kırıkkale model. These guns were special in my eyes too by virtue of their widespread use in the last forty years, having been tried hundreds of thousands of times by gun enthusiasts ranging from army officers to night watchmen, from bread bakers to policemen, on the bodies of many a rebel, thief, Casanova, politician, and starving citizen.
On Doctor Fine's assurance that there was nary a difference between the Walther and the Kırıkkale and after he had asserted several times that they were both part of our bodies as well as our souls, I settled on a Walther 9-millimeter with a hammer, a gun that could be easily concealed and did not need to be fired at close range to do the trick. And, of course, there was no need for me to say anything before Doctor Fine made me a present of the gun as well as a couple of clips, kissing me on the forehead, which was the fitting gesture that lightly alluded to our forefathers' obsession with guns. He said that he still had some more work to do, but I ought to go to bed now and get my rest.
Sleep was the last thing on my mind. Walking the seventeen steps from the gun cabinet to our room, seventeen different scenarios went through my head. I had stored all of them in one corner of my mind as I read, and had at the last moment settled on the synthesis that fit in with the final scene. I remember knocking three times on the door Janan had locked, reviewing once again the wonder wrought by my mind which had been intoxicated by so much reading, but I have no notion of what that synthesis was. As soon as I knocked on the door, a voice inside me said "Password!" perhaps because I thought Janan might have asked for the password, so I came back with: "Long live the Sultan!"
When Janan turned the lock and then opened the door, I was unnerved by the expression on her face which was half-cheerful, no, half-sad, no, totally mysterious, and I felt like some amateur actor who forgets the lines he had been memorizing for weeks the moment he steps into the lights. It was not all that difficult to calculate that someone who had his wits about him would trust his instincts in a situation like this rather than trying to come up with a bunch of derelict words that he barely remembers. Which is what I did. I tried to forget that I was a prey, at best, who had fallen into a trap.
I kissed Janan on the lips like some young husband back from a long trip. Here we were at last, after all the unforeseen dangers, at home in our room. I loved her so much I thought nothing else was important. If life presented a rough spot or two, I was the seasoned traveler who had the courage to take things in my stride. Her lips smelled of mulberries. The two of us, we were the two people who were meant to hold on to each other, turning our backs on the summons of a dogmatic and unattainable life and all those who tried to distress us with their self-sacrifices, all those esteemed and passionate fools who try projecting their obsessions on the world, all the people who have slipped off the course of their lives, lured by ideas that have been thought of some place far away. When two people have shared great dreams, when they've been comrades from morning to night for months on end, when they've covered such great distances together, what could possibly be the impediment to their forgetting the world in an embrace, O Angel? And most of all, what could stop them from becoming their authentic selves and finding that unique moment of truth?
The ghost of the third lover.
Please let me again kiss you on the lips, for the ghost who remains a mere name in all those intelligence reports shuns becoming an actual person. Whereas I am here and, look, I know time is slowly running out. Look how all those highways we traveled exist as themselves without being in the least aware of us once we have traveled over them, stretching out full of themselves, made of stones and asphalt and warmth on summer nights under the stars. Let us too, here, without further ado lie down together … Please, sweetheart, when my hands touch your beautiful shoulders, your slender and fragile arms, when I come so close to you, look how slowly and joyfully we approach that unique time so sought after by all the voyagers who travel on the bus. When I press my lips on that semitransparent skin between your ear and your hair, when the electricity of your hair gives fright to the birds that suddenly swoop past my forehead and face, raising the scent of autumn in the air, and when your breast stiffens like a stubborn bird taking wing in my palm, look, I see in your eyes how full and right is the unattainable time that reawakens between us: now we are neither here nor there, not in the land you have been dreaming about, not on some bus or in a dim hotel room somewhere, not even in some sort of future that can only exist within the pages of a book. Now we are here in this room, as if existing in a time that is open-ended, you with your sighs and I with my hurried kisses, we are holding on to each other, awaiting a miracle that might happen. A time for fullness! Embrace me, so that time will not flow away, come, embrace me, my soul, so that the miracle will not end. Please, don't resist, but remember: the nights in bus seats when our bodies would slowly lose themselves in each other, when our dreams and our hair tangled together; remember before you turn away your lips, remember seeing the inside of houses in the back streets of small towns we passed through, our heads pressed against the cold and dark windowpane; remember all the films we watched hand in hand: the bullets that poured like rain, blondes descending staircases, all the cool dudes you so adored. Remember all the kisses we watched quietly as if we were committing a sin, forgetting a crime, dreaming of a different land. Remember those lips drawing together while the eyes were averted from the camera; remember how we were able to sit completely still for a moment even as the bus tires revolved seven and a half times per minute. But she did not remember. I kissed her hopelessly for the last time. The bed had been rumpled. Was it possible that she felt on me the hard form of the Walther? Janan had stretched out on the bed, staring at the ceiling thoughtfully as if contemplating the stars. Even so, I couldn't help saying, "Janan, were we not happy on our bus trips? Let us go back to riding the buses."
Of course, it made no sense.
"What were you reading?" she asked me. "What have you found out today?"
"Many things about life," I said, using the language of dubbed films and the tone of soap operas. "Very useful things really. There are so many who have read the book, all rushing toward some place or other … Everything is confused and the light that the book inspires in people is as dazzling as death. Life is so astounding."
I had a feeling I could go on in this vein; if I could not create miracles through love, then I could at least do it by speaking the sort of words that fascinate children. Forgive my naïveté, Angel, and the trickery I resorted to out of my need, for this was the first time in seventy days that I had felt this close to Janan, lying beside her on the bed; as anyone who has done a bit of reading knows, imitating childlike wonderment is the immediate ruse attempted by people like me who have had the doors of true love slammed in their faces. On a night it rained like a deluge as we rode from Afyon to Kütahya on a bus that leaked in torrents through the ceiling and the windows, the film we saw was False Paradise; but Seiko had recently informed me—had he not?—that Janan had watched the same film in happier and calmer circumstances a year before that, her hand in the hand of her lover.
"So who's the angel?" she asked me now.
"Appears to be related to the book," I said. "We are not the only ones who know about it. There are others pursuing the angel."
"So who does the angel appear to?"
"Those who have faith in the book, those who read it with care."
"Then what?"
"Then you keep reading until you become transformed. One morning you wake up and people who see you say, my, my, this girl has turned into an angel in the light that emanates from the book. Then it means that the angel must have been a girl all along. It makes you wonder then how such an angel could lure someone into a trap. Is it possible for angels to pull nasty stunts?"
"Don't know."
"I don't either. I am also doing some thinking, and searching." That is what I said, Angel, perhaps because I was loath to step out of line into zones of danger and uncertainty, thinking that the only piece of heaven I was sure of was the bed where I was lying next to Janan. Let the unique moment have its reign. There was a faint smell of woodwork in the room, and also a cool scent that was reminiscent of the sort of soap and chewing gum we bought when we were children but no longer do because the packaging is so poor.
I, who had neither the ability to delve deep into the book nor to rise to Janan's level of seriousness, I felt that in the wee hours of the night I might be able to come up with the words that would mediate some points. So I told Janan that the most horrifying thing was time itself; without knowing it, we had embarked on this journey to escape time. That was the reason why we were in constant motion, looking for the moment when time stood still. Which was the unique moment of fulfillment. When we got close to it, we could sense the time of departure, our own eyes having witnessed, along with the dead and the dying, the miracle of this incredible zone. The seeds of the wisdom in the book also existed in their most childlike form in the comics we had thumbed through all morning, and it was high time we used our heads and got the point. There was nothing there, in that distant place. The beginning and the end of our journey was wherever we happened to be. He was right: the road and all the dark rooms were rife with killers carrying guns. Death seeped into life through the book, through books.
I held her, saying, Sweetheart, let's do stay here, in this beautiful room, cherishing it. Look, a table, a clock, a lamp, a window. When we rise in the morning, the mulberry tree will be there for us to admire. So what if he is there and we are here? Here's the windowsill, the table leg, the wick in the lamp: light and scent. The world is so simple! Do forget the book. He too wants us to forget it. To be is to be embracing you. But Janan was not having any of it.
"Where is Mehmet?"
She was looking at the ceiling with rapt attention, as if the answer to her question was inscribed there. She knit her brows. Her forehead seemed higher. Her lips twitched for a split second as if about to reveal a secret. Under the parchment-colored light in the room her skin had assumed a pink hue which I had never before seen. What with decent meals and a place to sleep in peaceful surroundings after all those nights traveling on some bus, at last Janan had some color in her face. I mentioned this to her, hoping that, like some girls who will marry out of a sudden longing for a happily settled married life, she would marry me.
"I am getting sick, that's why," she said. "I was chilled in the rain. I'm running a fever."
How beautiful she was! She was stretched out and staring at the ceiling, and I was lying next to her, admiring the color in her face, keeping my hand pressed as objectively as a doctor's on her noble forehead. My hand remained there as if to make sure she would not escape from me. I was reviewing my childhood memories, how she had completely transformed ordinary objects in the sphere of the pleasure of touch, like beds, rooms, smells. Other thoughts and calculations were also running through my head. When she turned her face slightly, her eyes questioning me, I pulled my hand away from her forehead and told her the truth.
"You do have a fever."
Suddenly a lot of possibilities that were not part of my plans appeared before me. I went down to the kitchen at one in the morning. Negotiating among hulking pots and phantoms in the half light, I came upon a saucepan in which I made tea with the dried linden flowers I found in a jar, imagining all the while how I was going to tell Janan that the best way to ward off a cold was to crawl under the blanket with someone. And later, as I rifled through the medicine bottles on the sideboard where Janan had directed me, looking for an aspirin, I was thinking that if I too were to get sick, then we wouldn't have to leave the room for days. A curtain moved and some slippers sounded on the floor. The shadow of Doctor Fine's wife appeared first and then her nervous self. "No, ma'am," I said, "it's nothing serious; she has just caught a cold."
She took me upstairs. She had me take down a heavy blanket from a storage space, and slipping a duvet cover over it, she said: "The poor sweetheart, she's an angel! Don't give her any trouble, you hear? You take care." Then she mentioned something else which would always stay in my mind: How beautiful was my wife's neck!
Back in the room I gazed at her neck for a long time. Had I not noticed it before? Yes, I had and I loved it. But now the length of her neck seemed so striking, I could think of nothing else for quite some time. I watched her drink her linden tea slowly and then take her aspirin, wrapping herself in the blanket like some good-natured child expecting to "get well."
There were long stretches of silence. Shielding my eyes with my hands, I looked out the window. The mulberry tree stirred ever so slightly. Dear One, our mulberry tree rustles even in the faintest breeze. Silence. Janan was trembling, and how quickly time was passing.
So it didn't take long for our room to acquire that special climate and character known as a "sick room." I paced up and down, apprehensive that the table, the glass, the side table were being gradually transformed into objects that were overly familiar, overly intimate. The hour struck three. Will you sit here next to me on the edge of the bed? she asked. I gripped her feet through the blanket. She smiled, telling me I was so sweet. She closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. No, she actually fell asleep, slept. Was she asleep? She was asleep.
I found myself pacing. Looking at the time, pouring water out of the pitcher, gazing at Janan, floundering. Taking an aspirin for the hell of it. Placing my hand on her forehead to gauge her temperature again and again whenever she opened her eyes.
Time which flowed as if under the compulsion of timepieces came to a stop at a certain point, the semitransparent membrane in which I was being enveloped was torn open, and Janan sat up in bed. All of a sudden we found ourselves hotly discussing bus attendants who were really auxiliary bus drivers; one of them had once said that someday he was going to commandeer the driver's seat and drive the bus to a yet unexplored land. And then there was the one who said, help yourselves to the chewing gum, provided for our valued passengers with the compliments of the bus company; and then unable to hold his tongue, he had added, but don't chew too much, brother, because the gum is laced with opium so that the passengers will sleep like babies, thinking their peaceful sleep is due to good shock absorbers, the skill of the driver who never passes on the right, and the superiority of our vehicles and our bus company. Then how about the one we came across on two different bus lines, Janan, do you remember what he said?—it was so good to laugh! Brother, he said, the first time I laid eyes on you both I just knew you had eloped together, now I see from your ring that you two got hitched, sister, congratulations.
Will you marry me? We had seen so many scenes come alive with the brilliance of these words: when the lovers are walking under the trees, arms around each other, or when they are under a lamppost, or in a car—in the back seat, naturally—or on the bridge that spans the Bosphorus, or in the rain produced under the influence of foreign films, or when the boy and the girl are suddenly left alone by the charming uncle or friends whose intentions are good, or when the rich guy pops the question to the seductive female as he goes splash into the swimming pool: Will you marry me? Since I had never seen a scene in a sick room where the girl with the beautiful neck gets asked the question, I didn't believe my words could awaken in Janan a feeling as magical as those in the movies. Besides, my mind was on a dauntless mosquito that was working the room.
I looked at the time and got anxious. I checked her temperature and became worried. Let me see your tongue, I said; she stuck it out; it was pink and came to a point. I leaned over her and took her tongue in my mouth. We remained like that for a while, Angel.
"Don't, dear heart," she said. "You are very sweet, but let's not."
She fell asleep. I lay down next to her, hanging on the edge of the bed, and began counting her breaths. Later, as the day was about to break, I was thinking a lot of things and then thinking again: I'll say to her, Janan, I'd do anything for you, Janan, don't you understand how much I love you … Stuff like that which always had the same gist. For a while I thought I'd make up some lie and drag her back to the buses, but I already knew approximately where I had to go; besides, after becoming acquainted with Doctor Fine's merciless watches and spending a night in this room with Janan, I was aware that I had begun to be afraid of death.
You know it all too well, Angel, the poor kid was lying next to his beloved, listening to her breathing until daybreak, gazing at Janan's regular but distinctive chin, her arms showing out of the nightgown Rosebud had loaned her, her hair spreading on the pillow, and the mulberry tree gradually becoming resplendent with daylight.
Then everything speeded up. There was clattering in the house, footsteps cautiously going by our door, the sound of a window being slammed in the wind that had started up again, the mooing of a cow, the growl of a car, a cough, and a knock on our door. A clean-shaven middle-aged person with a large medical bag, looking more like a doctor than anything else, entered the room followed by a whiff of toasted bread. His lips were gory red as if he had recently been sucking blood, and there was an ugly sore on the side of his mouth. I was gripped by a fantasy that he was going to strip Janan, who was burning with fever, and use those lips to kiss her neck and back. He was taking his stethoscope out of his hateful bag when I snatched my Walther from where I had concealed it and left the house without paying any attention to the worried mother of the house standing by the door.
Before anyone could see me I rushed out to the terrain with which Doctor Fine had acquainted me. In a deserted spot surrounded by poplars where I was sure that I would neither be observed nor the wind bear any tales, I took out my gun and fired rounds in rapid succession. That was how I used up some of the rounds that had been Doctor Fine's gift, doing a short target practice which was not only curtailed by its parsimony, it was so inept that it was pitiful. I had not managed to hit the trunk of the poplar I had aimed at, not even in one out of three shots at four paces. I remember being somewhat hesitant, helplessly trying to pull my thoughts together as I observed the hurried clouds that arrived from the north. The sorrows of young Walther …
Up ahead there was a rocky outcrop that was high enough to afford a partial overview of Doctor Fine's estate. I climbed up there, sat down, and instead of being lost in patrician thoughts contemplating the vastness and the wealth of the landscape, I wondered in what miserable place my own life would end. A long time went by but none of the angels, books, muses, and wise peasants who in times of dire distress come to the aid of prophets, film stars, saints, and political leaders put in an appearance on my behalf.
There was no help for it but to return to the mansion. The gory-lipped mad doctor had already drunk my Janan's blood with relish and was now sitting with the mother and drinking the tea made by the rosy daughters. When he saw me, his eyes gleamed at the prospect of giving me advice.
"Young man!" he began. My wife had caught a cold, she was suffering from the flu; more important, she was on the verge of a serious debilitation due to fatigue, neglect, and lack of sleep. What was I up to, getting her so dead tired? How was it that I treated her so roughly? The mother and the daughters eyed the newlywed young husband with disapprobation.
"I gave her some heavy-duty medicine," said the doctor. "She is not to stir out of bed for an entire week."
A whole week! I was thinking to myself that seven days were more than enough for me, when the quack, having had his tea and stuffed a couple of almond macaroons in his face, was finally ready to get the hell out. Janan was asleep in bed, so I removed a few of the paraphernalia I thought I might need, the notes I had taken in the archives, and the money. I kissed Janan on the neck. I left the room with the haste of a volunteer on his way to save his country. I told Rosebud and her mother that I had some urgent business that could not wait and a responsibility that I could not shirk. I entrusted my wife to them. They said they would look after her as if she were the bride of their own son. I indicated with special insistence that I would be back within five days, and without looking back, not even once, to see the land of witches, phantoms, and bandits I was leaving behind me, without even a glance at the grave of the young man from Kayseri who was interred there in lieu of Doctor Fine's son, I made my way to town and the bus terminal.
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