Free The New Life by Orhan Pamuk Page A

face I was seeking; they brought around arrowroot biscuits on fake silver trays, but none tasted like those my mother served at tea. I ate domestic chocolates made without real cocoa, but my legs didn’t get cramps like they used to when I was a kid. Sometimes the attendant offered all manner of candy and caramels in baskets, but among brands like Golden, Mabel, Fruito, I never came across any of those Uncle Rıfkı liked, the ones called New Life Caramels. I counted the miles in my sleep and dreamed when I was awake. I scrunched into my seat, I shrank and shrank and turned into a wrinkle, I wedged my legs into the seat, I dreamed that I made love to my seatmate. When I awoke, I found his bald pate on my shoulder, his pitiful hand in my lap. Every night I initially played the part of the reserved neighbor to some hapless passenger, then quite the fellow conversationalist, but by morning we would be on such intimate terms that I was his brazen confidant. Cigarette? Where are you going? What’s your line of work? On one bus I was a junior traveling insurance salesman; on another, where it was freezingly cold, I claimed I was soon to marry my cousin who was the love of my life. Behaving like someone who watches UFOs, I divulged to a grandfatherly type that I was anticipating an angel; another time I said my boss and I would be happy to fix all your broken timepieces. Mine is a Movado, said the elderly man with the false teeth; it never misses. While the owner slept with his mouth open, I thought I heard the ticking of the watch that kept perfect time. What is time? An accident! What is life? Time! What is accident? A life, a new life! Submitting to this simple logic, which I was surprised no one had proposed before, I resolved to forego bus terminals, O Angel, and go straight to the scenes of accidents.
    I observed passengers who had been cruelly speared into the front seats when their bus had heedlessly and treacherously slammed into the back of a truck loaded with steel bars the tips of which projected out. I saw a driver who in an effort to miss a tabby cat had driven his clumsy bus into a ravine; his corpse was so jammed in, it couldn’t be pried out. I saw heads that had been ripped to pieces, bodies that were rent, hands sundered; I saw drivers who had tenderly taken the wheel into their guts, brains that had exploded like heads of cabbage, bloody ears that still wore earrings, eyeglasses both broken and intact, mirrors, florid bowels carefully laid out on newspapers, combs, squashed fruit, coins, broken teeth, baby bottles, shoes—all manner of matter and spirit that had been eagerly sacrificed to the moment of truth.
    One cold spring morning I was tipped off by the traffic police and caught up with a pair of buses that had butted heads in the silence of the steppe. Already half an hour had passed since the moment of ardent and blissful collision that had tumultuously exploded, but the magic that makes life meaningful and bearable still hung in the air. I was standing between vehicles that belonged to the police and to the gendarmerie, studying the black tires of one of the buses that had turned over, when I caught the pleasant whiff of new life and death. My legs trembling and the stitches on my forehead smarting, I pressed forward with determination as if I had an appointment, making my way among the bewildered survivors in the misty dusk.
    I climbed into the bus, the door handle of which was somewhat hard to reach, and I was going past all the upended seats, gratified to be stepping on eyeglasses, glassware, chains, and fruit that had succumbed to gravity and spilled on the ceiling, when it seemed that I remembered something. I used to be someone else once, and that someone used to desire to become me. I had dreamed of a life where time was blissfully concentrated and compressed and where colors flowed in my mind like waterfalls, hadn’t I? The book I had left behind on my table came to my mind,