Free The New Life by Orhan Pamuk

bus, boarding it, and taking Janan in my arms. But sometimes I felt so hopeless and so weary that I wished I were the man I saw through the half-closed curtains who was sitting at a table and smoking when our angry bus went by past midnight through the narrow streets of some secluded town.
    But I still knew that I really wanted to be someplace else, in a time other than this, like that felicitous moment of being when one has not yet chosen between life and death, there among the dead who died in the heartrending eruption of chance … Before ascending to the seven spheres of heaven, trying to accustom my eyes to the obscure sight with pools of blood and shards of broken glass at the threshold of that realm from which there is no return, I might contemplate with pleasure whether to enter, or not. Should I turn back? Or proceed? What were mornings like in the nether world? What would it be like to abandon this journey altogether and lose oneself in that bottomless night? I would shiver thinking about the unique time in that realm where I might shed my being and perhaps unite with Janan, and I would feel in my legs and in my stitched forehead the urgency to achieve the unexpected happiness that would follow.
    Ah, you who ride the night buses! My abject brethren! I know you too are seeking the hour of zero gravity. Ah, to be neither here nor there! To become someone else and roam the peaceful garden that exists between the two worlds! How well I know that the soccer fan in the leather jacket is not waiting for the game to start but anticipating the hour of hazard when bleeding copiously he becomes a blood-red hero. And I also know that the elderly woman who keeps taking something out of her plastic bag and stuffing it in her mouth is not in reality dying to reunite with her sisters and nieces but to reach the threshold of the nether world. The surveyor who has one eye on the road and the other on his dreams is not reckoning the cadastration of the town hall but calculating the point in the crossroads where all towns become history. And I am sure that the pasty-faced high school kid dozing in his seat up front is not dreaming of kissing his sweetheart but of the forceful impact when he kisses the windshield with passion and vehemence. Is it not the same rapture that besets us, after all? Whenever the driver slams on the brakes or the bus whips around in the wind, we open our eyes instantly to stare into the dark road, trying to figure out if the zero hour is upon us. No, not yet!
    I spent eighty-nine nights in bus seats without once hearing the tolling of the blissful hour in my soul. There was one time when the bus came to a screeching halt and bumped into a poultry truck, but not even a single one of the bewildered chickens received a bloody nose let alone any of the drowsy passengers. Another night, the bus was skidding pleasurably on an ice-covered highway when I looked out of my frozen window and felt the radiance of coming face to face with God. I was about to discover the single element common to all existence, love, life, and time, but the prankish bus hung on the edge of the dark void, suspended.
    I had read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don’t know probability and statistics. The rear exit was where I descended on earth, where I returned to life; the rear exit is where I meet the hurly-burly life in bus terminals: Hello there, roasted-seed vendors, cassette-tape peddlers, bingo captains, elderly fellows with suitcases, elderly dames with plastic bags, hello! So as not to leave the matter to luck, I looked for the least safe bus, chose the route with the most curves, and canvassed the personnel coffee shops for the driver who was the most sleep-deprived, for bus lines with names like SAFEWAY, TRUE SAFEWAY, EXPRESS SAFEWAY, FLYING SAFEWAY, GREASED LIGHTNING . Bus attendants poured bottles of cologne on my hands, but none had the fragrance of the