Free The New Life by Orhan Pamuk Page B

and I imagined the book staring at the ceiling like the dead staring open-mouthed at the sky. I imagined my mother keeping the book on my table among all the things left over from my previous life which had been interrupted. I was imagining myself say, Look, Mom, what I am searching for among shards of glass, drops of blood, and the dead is the threshold of another kind of life, when I spied a wallet. Before expiring, a body had climbed over the seat and up toward the window, but it had come to rest at the point of equilibrium, and presented to full view the wallet in its back pocket.
    I took the wallet and slipped it in my own pocket, but this was not what I had recalled only a moment ago and yet pretended not to remember. What was on my mind was the other bus; where I stood looking through the shattered glass and the cute little curtains that wafted gently in the windows, I now read the Marlboro-red and lethal blue lettering on the other bus that said SAFEST SAFEWAY .
    I jumped out of one of the window frames in which the glass had been totally smashed and began to run, stepping on bloody shards of broken glass strewn between the bodies that the gendarmes had yet to carry away. I was not mistaken, the other bus was indeed the same SAFEST SAFEWAY that had safely carried me from a trifling city to an obscure town. I climbed into this old acquaintance and sat in the same seat where I had ridden six weeks ago, and I began to wait like a patient passenger whose trust in this world is optimistic. What was I waiting for? Perhaps for a wind, an appointed hour, or perhaps for a wayfarer. Twilight began to fade. I felt the presence of other living or dead souls who like me were ensconced in the seats, and I heard them calling out to some enigmatic spirits; they were gasping as if talking to beauties in their nightmares or else, in their dreams of paradise, they were having a spat with death. Then my attentive soul sensed something even more profound: I focused on the driver’s station where everything had vanished except for the radio, where, along with the sighs and cries, there was music playing that was enveloped in a sweetly exquisite aura.
    Silence fell for a brief moment, and I observed that the light was growing denser. In the mist I saw the blissful ghosts of the dead and the dying. You have gone as far as you may, thou wayfarer! But I think you can go farther! You are pleasantly swaying in anticipation, not knowing whether there is another door and another secret garden where life and death, meaning and motion, time and chance, light and happiness come together. Suddenly that same impatient desire rose once more from deeper depths and besieged my entire body, the desire to be both here and there. It seemed as if I heard several words, I shivered, and it was then, my beauty, that you came through the door, my Janan, clad in that same white dress you were wearing in the corridor at Taşkışla Hall where I saw you last. Your face was drenched in blood.
    I did not ask you, “What are you doing here?” And you, Janan, neither did you ask me what I was doing here. We knew.
    I took you by the hand and seated you next to me, in seat No. 38. And with the checkered handkerchief I’d got in Şirinyer I tenderly wiped the blood off your face and your forehead. Then, my sweetheart, I held your hand, and for a while we sat thus silently. It was getting lighter; the ambulances arrived, and on the dead driver’s radio they were playing and singing our song.

5
    We caught the first bus out of town soon after Janan had had four stitches on her forehead in Rumi’s moribund Konya, where we walked along the low garden walls, somber buildings, and treeless avenues, conscious of the mechanical rise and fall of our feet on the pavement. I sort of remember the next three towns: one was the capital of chimney stacks, the other the capital of lentil soup, and the last, the capital city of bad taste. But after that, as