THE NEXT DAY I FELL IN LOVE. LOVE WAS EVERY BIT AS devastating as the light that surged from the book into my face, proving to me how substantially my life had already gone off the track.
As soon as I woke up in the morning, I reviewed all that had happened to me on the previous day and knew at once that the new realm which had opened before me was not just a momentary reverie but as real as my own torso and my limbs. Finding others who were in the same predicament as myself was of the utmost necessity to save myself from the feeling of unbearable loneliness that beset me in the new world into which I was projected.
It had snowed in the night, and snow had accumulated on the windowsills, the sidewalks, and the rooftops. In the chilly white light from outside, the open book on the table appeared sparer and more innocent than it was, which gave it a more ominous character.
Even so, I succeeded in having breakfast with my mother as usual, savoring the smell of toast, thumbing through the morning edition of Milliyet, glancing at Jelal Salik's column. As if nothing were out of the ordinary, I had some of the cheese and smiled into my mother's good-natured face. The clatter of cups, spoons, and the teakettle, the noise of the citrus truck in the street were telling me to trust in the normal flow of life, but I wasn't deceived. When I stepped outside, I was so sure the world had been utterly transformed that I was not embarrassed to be wearing my dead father's worn and cumbersome overcoat.
I walked to the station and got on the train; I got off the train and boarded the ferry; at Karak?y I leapt out on the landing; I elbowed my way up the stairs, got on the bus and arrived at Taksim Square; on my way to the university, I stopped briefly and watched some gypsies hawking flowers on the sidewalk. How could I trust life to continue as in the past? Or forget I had ever read the book? For a moment the prospect before me seemed so terrifying that I felt like running away.
At the lecture session on stress mechanics, I solemnly copied down the schemata, the figures and formulas on the blackboard. When the bald-headed professor was not writing something on the board, I folded my arms on my chest and listened to his mellow voice. Was I really listening? Or just pretending to listen like anybody else, playing the part of a student in the department of civil engineering at the Technical University? I couldn't say. But a while later, when I sensed that the familiar old world was intolerably hopeless, my heart began to beat fast, my head began to swim as if a drug were coursing through my veins, and I was thrilled with the power that surged from the book, spreading gradually from its locus in my neck throughout my entire body. The new world had already annulled all existence and transformed the present into the past. Things I saw, things I touched were all pathetically old.
Two days before, when I first laid eyes on the book, it was in the hands of a girl from architecture. She was getting something at the canteen in the lower level and needed to find her wallet, but because she was carrying something else in her other hand, she was unable to rummage through her bag. The object in her hand was a book and, in an effort to free her hand, she was forced to put the book down just for a moment on the table where I was sitting; and I had, just for a moment, stared at the book placed on my table. That was all there was to the coincidence that had changed my life. On my way home that afternoon, when I saw another copy of it among the old tomes, pamphlets, volumes of poetry and divination, love stories and political thrillers being sold in a sidewalk stall, I had bought the book.
The moment the noon bell buzzed, most of the other students hurried up the stairs to get in the cafeteria line, but I just sat there at my desk. Then I wandered through the halls, went down to the canteen, passed through courtyards, strolled down colonnaded galleries, went into empty classrooms; I looked through windows to see snow-laden trees in the park across the way, and had some water in the bathroom. I walked and walked, up and down all over Ta?k??la Hall. The girl was nowhere to be seen, but I was not worried.
After the noon hour, the hallways got even more crowded. I walked the corridors all through the school of architecture, I went into the drafting rooms, I watched coin games being played on the tables; I sat in a corner and, putting together a newspaper that had fallen apart, I read it. I took to the corridors once more, went up and down staircases, listened to conversations about soccer, politics, and what was on TV last night. I joined a group making light of some movie star's decision to have a child, I offered around my lighter and cigarettes; someone was telling a joke, I listened to it and, what's more, while I did all this, I provided good-natured replies to whoever stopped and asked me if I had seen so-and-so. The times I didn't manage to find a couple of friends to josh around with, or windows to look out of, or a destination to walk to, I walked briskly with great determination in some direction or other, as if I had something very important on my mind and was in an awful hurry. But since I had no particular goal, should I find myself at the library entrance, or up the staircase, or run into someone who asked for a cigarette, I changed direction, blended into the throng, or stopped to light up. I was just about to look at a newly posted announcement on a bulletin board when my heart began to pound, then my heart took off and left me helpless. There she was, the girl in whose hand I had seen the book; moving away from me in the crowd, but walking away ever so slowly as in a dream, she seemed, for some reason, to beckon me to her. I lost my head, I was no longer myself, I just knew it, I let myself follow her.
She was wearing a dress that was pale but not white, it was the lightest of shades to which I could assign no color. I caught up with her before she reached the staircase, and when I caught a glimpse of her up close, the radiance of her face was quite as powerful as the light that the book emanated, but ever so gentle. I was in this world, breathing at the threshold of the new life. The longer I beheld her radiance, the more I understood my heart would no longer heed me.
I told her I had read the book. I told her I'd read the book after seeing it in her hand. I had my own world before reading the book, I said, but after reading the book, I now had another world. We had to talk, I said, for I was left entirely on my own.
"I have a class now," she said.
My heart missed a couple of beats. Perhaps the girl had guessed my bewilderment; she thought it over for a moment.
"All right," she said, making up her mind. "Let's find a free classroom and talk."
We found a classroom on the second floor that was not in use. My legs trembled as I walked in. I couldn't figure out how to tell her I was aware of the world that the book promised me, considering that the book had spoken to me in whispers, opening up as if yielding a secret. The girl said her name was Janan, and I told her mine.
"Why are you so drawn to the book?" she asked.
I had a notion to say, Angel, because you have read it. But how did I come up with this angel business anyway? My mind was in confusion. My mind is always getting confused, Angel, but could it be that someone will help me?
"My whole life was changed after reading the book," I said. "The room, the house, the world where I live ceased to be mine, making me feel I have no domicile. I first saw the book in your hand; so you too must have read it. Tell me about the world you traveled to and back. Tell me what I must do to set foot in that world. Give me an explanation as to why we are still here. Tell me how the new world can be as familiar as my home and yet my home as strange as the new world."
Who knows how much longer I would have gone on in this vein, chapter and verse, but my eyes seemed to be momentarily dazzled. The snowy light of the winter afternoon was so consistent and clear outside that the windows of the little chalk-laden classroom seemed to be made of ice. I looked at her, afraid to look in her face.
"What would you be willing to do to reach the world in the book?" she asked.
Her face was pale, her hair light brown, her gaze gentle; if she was of this world, she seemed to have been drawn from memory; if she was from the future, then she was the harbinger of dread and sorrow. I gazed at her without being aware of gazing, as if I were fearful that if I looked at her too intently the situation would become real.
"I would do anything," I said.
She gazed at me sweetly, a hint of a smile on her lips. How must you act when a phenomenally beautiful and charming girl gazes at you like that? How to hold the matches, light a cigarette, look out the window, talk to her, confront her, take a breath? They never teach these things in the classroom. People like me writhe in pain fecklessly, trying to conceal the pounding of their hearts.
"What do you mean by anything?" she asked me.
"Everything," I said and fell silent, listening to my heartbeats.
I don't know why but I suddenly had an image of long journeys that seemed endless, the deluges of myth and legend, labyrinthine streets that vanish, sad trees, muddy rivers, gardens, countries. If I were to embrace her one day, I must venture forth to these places.
"Would you be willing to face death, for example?"
"I would."
"Even if you knew that some people would kill you for reading the book?"
I tried to smile, listening to the engineering student inside me say: It's only a book, after all! But Janan was watching me with rapt attention. I thought with misgiving that I'd never get anywhere near her, nor the world in the book, if I were careless and said something wrong.
"I don't think anyone's going to kill me or anything," I said, acting the part of some character I couldn't name. "But even if that were the case, I would truly not be afraid of death."
Her honey-colored eyes flashed for a split second in the chalky light that filtered into the room. "Do you think that world really exists? Or is it a mere fantasy dreamed up and written in a book?"
"That world has to exist!" I said. "You are so beautiful that I know you come from there."
She took a couple of swift steps toward me. She held my head between her hands, reached up, and kissed me on the lips. Her tongue lingered briefly on my mouth. She stepped back, allowing me to hold her lithe body at arm's length.
"You are so brave!" she said.
I picked up some kind of a fragrance, the smell of cologne. I stepped toward her as if intoxicated. A couple of boisterous students went past the classroom door.
"Wait a minute and listen to me, please," she said. "You must tell Mehmet everything you've told me. He did go to the world in the book and managed to come back. He came back from there, he knows, you understand? Yet he doesn't believe others can also get there. He's lived through terrible things and lost his faith. Will you talk to him?"
"Who's this Mehmet?"
"Be in front of Room 201 in ten minutes, before class starts," she said and went out the door suddenly; she vanished.
The room felt totally empty, as if I weren't there either. I stood there astounded. No one had ever kissed me like that before, no one had ever looked at me like that. And now I was left alone. I was afraid, thinking I would never see her again, nor ever again be able to plant my feet squarely on the ground. I wanted to run after her, but my heart was beating so fast that I was afraid to breathe. The bright white light had dazed not only my eyes but also my mind. It's all because of the book, I said to myself and instantly knew that I loved the book and wanted to exist in its universe—so much that I thought for a moment tears would stream down my eyes. It was the book's existence that kept me going, and I somehow knew the girl would surely embrace me once more. But right now I felt the whole world had pulled up and left me.
I heard a racket below, and looking down, I saw a bunch of construction engineering students noisily throwing snowballs at each other near the edge of the park. I watched them without really registering what I was seeing. There was nothing left of the child in me. I had slipped away.
It has happened to all of us: one day, one ordinary day when we imagine we're making our routine rounds in the world with ticket stubs and tobacco shreds in our pockets, our heads full of news items, traffic noise, troublesome monologues, we suddenly realize we are already someplace else, that we are not actually where our feet have taken us. I had long slipped away; I had melted into a color paler than pale where I stood behind the windowpane made of ice. If you are to come down to earth, or any kind of reality, you must then hold a girl, that girl, hold on to her and win her love. How quickly had my racing heart learned all this claptrap! I was in love. I yielded myself to the immeasurable measure of my heart. I looked at my watch. Eight minutes to go.
I walked like a ghost through the high-ceilinged hallways, oddly aware of my body, my life, my face, my story. Would I encounter her in the crowd? If I did chance upon her, what would I say? How was my face? I cannot remember. I went into the washroom next to the staircase, put my mouth on the water spout, and drank. I looked in the mirror to see my mouth that had so recently been kissed. Mom, I am in love. I am slipping away, Mom. Mom, I am afraid, but I will do anything for her. I will ask Janan, who is this Mehmet anyway? Why is he scared? Who are these people who want to kill those who've read the book? I fear nothing. If one has understood the book and believed in it, as I myself have, one would naturally have no fear.
Back among the crowd, I again found myself walking briskly as if I had important business. I went up to the second floor and walked along the tall windows that look down on the fountain courtyard, walked and walked, leaving myself behind, thinking of Janan with every step. I went by classmates congregated for our next class. Guess what! Only a little while ago a very attractive girl kissed me, and how! My legs were taking me swiftly to my destiny, a destiny that contained dark woods, hotel rooms, mauve and azure phantoms, life, peace, and death.
When I reached Room 201 three minutes before class, I picked Mehmet out of the crowd in the hall even before I saw Janan standing near him. He was pale, tall and thin as myself, pensive, preoccupied, wan. I had a vague memory of having seen him before in Janan's company. He knows more than I do, I speculated; he has done more living; he's even a couple of years older than me. How he knew who I was, I cannot say, but he took me aside, behind the lockers.
"I hear you've read the book," he said. "What's in it for you?"
"A new life."
"Do you buy it?"
"I do."
His complexion looked so wan it made me dread the things he must have gone through.
"Look, listen to me," he said. "I too went for it. I thought I could find that world. I was always on some bus to some place or other, going from town to town, thinking I would find that land, those people, the very streets. Believe me, at the end there is nothing but death. They kill without mercy. They could be watching us even now."
"Don't scare him now," Janan said.
There was a silence. Mehmet looked at me for a moment as if he had known me for years. I felt I had let him down.
"I am not scared," I said, looking at Janan. "I am capable of pursuing it to the very end," I added with the air of a strong type in the movies.
Janan's incredible body was just a few steps from me, between the two of us, but closer to him.
"There is nothing to pursue to the end," said Mehmet. "Just a book. Someone sat down and wrote it. A dream. There is nothing else for you to do, aside from reading and rereading it."
"Tell him what you told me," Janan said to me.
"That world exists," I said. I wished to take hold of Janan by her long graceful arm and draw her to myself. I paused. "I will find that world."
"World shmorld!" Mehmet said. "It doesn't exist. Think of it as tomfoolery perpetrated on children by an old sap. The old man thought he'd write a book to entertain adults the same way he did children. It's doubtful he even knew what it meant. It's entertaining reading, but if you believe it, your life is lost."
"There's a whole world in there," I said, as strong but stupid men do in the movies. "And I know I will find a way to reach it."
"In that case, happy trails …" He turned away, gave Janan an I-told-you-so look, and he was about to leave when he stopped and asked, "What makes you so sure of the existence of that life?"
"Because I have the impression the book is telling the story of my life."
He smiled amiably and walked away.
"Don't leave," I said to Janan. "Is he your lover?"
"He actually liked you," she said. "Not for himself, but for me. He fears for people like you."
"Is he your lover? Don't leave without telling me everything."
"He needs me," she said.
I had heard those words so many times in the movies that I supplied the fervent response with spontaneity and conviction: "I will die if you leave me."
She smiled and joined the students crowding into Room 201. For a moment I had an impulse to follow her and sit in. Looking in the classroom's wide windows from the hallway, I saw them both at a desk they had found to sit at together among the other students all dressed alike in khakis, faded clothes, and blue jeans. They were waiting for class without talking when Janan pushed her light brown hair gently behind her ears, making another piece of my heart dissolve. Contrary to how love is portrayed in the movies, I felt more miserable than just miserable following my feet wherever they took me.
What did she think of me? What color are the walls in her home? What did she and her father talk about? Was their bathroom sparkling clean? Did she have siblings? What did she have for breakfast? Were they lovers? In that case, why did she kiss me?
The tiny classroom where she kissed me was free. I retreated in there like a defeated army which was nonetheless staunchly expecting new battles. My footsteps echoing in the empty classroom, my miserable, reprehensible hands opening a pack of cigarettes, the smell of chalk, the white light made of ice—I pressed my forehead against the windowpane. Was this the new life I beheld myself in at the threshold of this morning? I was exhausted by all that had taken place in my mind, but still, the rational student of engineering in me was busy in one corner doing his calculations: I was in no condition to go to my own class, so I'd wait for theirs to end in two hours. Two hours!
My forehead was pressed against the cold windowpane, I don't know for how long, but I was full of self-pity; I liked wallowing in self-pity; I thought tears were about to well in my eyes when snowflakes began drifting on light gusts of wind. Beyond the steep street that leads to Dolmabah?e, I could see the plane and chestnut trees. How still they were! Trees did not know they were trees, I reflected. Blackbirds took wing out of the snowy branches. I watched them with admiration.
I watched the snowflakes, which fell in gentle flurries, lingering indecisively at some point in pursuit of their fellow flakes, unable to make up their minds, when a light wind bore down and whisked them away. And at times a single flake swayed in the air for a moment and stood still, then acting as if it had changed its mind, it turned around and began to rise slowly up toward the sky. I observed many a snowflake revert to the sky before it could land in the mud, the park, on the pavement or the trees. Did anyone know this? Had anyone noticed?
Had anyone ever noticed that the acute point of the triangle which was formed at the intersection and which seemed to be part of the park pointed to the Tower of Leander? Had anyone noticed the pine trees which, under the influence of the east wind all these years, had leaned over the sidewalk in perfect symmetry, forming an octagon over the minibus stop? Watching the man with a pink plastic bag in his hand stand on the sidewalk, I wondered if anyone had realized that half the population of Istanbul goes around carrying plastic bags. Utterly unaware of your identity, I wondered if anyone had seen your footprints, Angel, in the tracks left by starving dogs and ragpickers in the snow and ash that cover dead city parks? Was this how I was to witness the new world, revealed to me like a secret in the book I bought at the sidewalk stall two days ago?
It was my heart and not my eyes that first became aware of Janan's shape in the graying light and the deepening snow on the same sidewalk. She was wearing a purple coat; my heart must have impressed the coat upon itself without my knowledge. Beside her was Mehmet, wearing a gray jacket and walking in the snow like an evil spirit that leaves no tracks. I had an impulse to run after them.
They stopped to talk at the same spot where the bookstall had been two days ago. Janan's hurt and withdrawn stance, accompanied by their wide gestures, indicated that, more than talking, they were having an argument, like a pair of old lovers all too accustomed to fights.
Then they started to walk again only to stop once more. I was at a great distance, but still I could coolly infer from their body language, and the looks they got from the sidewalk traffic, that they were arguing even more violently now.
This didn't last very long either. Janan turned around and began walking back to the building where I was, while Mehmet followed her with his eyes before continuing on his way toward Taksim. My heart kept missing a beat.
That is when I saw the man who stood at the Sar?yer minibus stop cross the street, carrying the pink plastic bag. Focused as my eyes were on the grace of the purple-clad figure, they were in no state to notice someone crossing the street, but there was something like a false note in the man's behavior. A few steps from the curb, the man pulled something—a gun—out of the pink bag. He aimed it at Mehmet, who also saw the gun.
I first witnessed Mehmet take the hit and shudder, then I registered the report; after that, I heard the second gunshot, expecting to hear yet a third. Mehmet stumbled and fell. The man dropped his plastic bag and made for the park.
Janan was still approaching, her steps wounded and dainty like a little bird's. She hadn't heard the gunshots. A truck full of snow-covered oranges rattled rambunctiously into the intersection. It was as if the world had gone back into motion.
I noticed some commotion at the minibus stop. Mehmet was getting up. In the distance the man was running without his plastic bag down the hill toward In?nü Stadium, skipping and hopping across the snow in the park like a clown bent on entertaining the kids, with a couple of playful dogs on his trail.
I should have run downstairs to meet Janan halfway and tell her what had happened, but I was riveted to the sight of Mehmet wobbling and looking around in a daze. For how long? For a while, a long while, until Janan turned the Ta?k??la corner and disappeared from my angle of vision.
I ran down the stairs and hurtled past a group of plainclothes police, students, and janitors standing around. When I reached the main entrance, there was no sign of Janan anywhere. I quickly went upstairs but didn't see her there either. Then I ran to the intersection and still didn't see anything or anybody related to the scene I had just witnessed. Neither Mehmet nor the plastic bag that the man with the gun had disposed of were anywhere.
The snow on the spot where Mehmet fell had melted into mud. A two-year-old kid wearing a beanie went by with his stylish and attractive mother.
"Mom, where did the rabbit go?" the kid said. "Where, Mom?"
I ran in a frenzy across the street toward the Sar?yer minibus stop. The world was once more wearing the silence of snow and the indifference of trees. Two minibus drivers who looked exactly alike were much astonished by my queries. They had no idea what I was talking about. What's more, the tough-looking fellow who brought them their tea had not heard any gunshots either; besides, he had no intention of being astonished by anything. The attendant at the minibus stop held on to his whistle, staring at me as if I were the criminal who had pulled the trigger. Blackbirds congregated in the pine tree over my head. I stuck my head in the minibus at the last moment before it left and anxiously asked my questions.
"A young man and woman hailed a taxi over there and took off," an elderly woman said, "just a little while ago."
Her finger pointed to Taksim Square. I knew what I was doing was not sensible but I still ran in that direction. I thought I was all alone in the world among all the vendors, vehicles, and stores around the square. I was about to make my way to Beyo?lu when, remembering the Emergency Care Hospital, I tore off down S?raselviler Avenue and went through the emergency entrance into the smell of ether and iodine as if I were a trauma case myself.
I saw gentlemen lying in pools of blood, their trousers ripped, their cuffs rolled up. I saw the blue faces of victims of poison and gastroenteritis whose stomachs had been pumped, and who were now stretched out on gurneys and left in the snow behind the potted cyclamens for a breath of fresh air. I showed the way to the tubby but nice elderly man who was searching door to door for the doctor on duty, all the while holding tight to the clothesline he had made into a tourniquet for his arm to avoid bleeding to death. I saw the pair of old cronies who, after knifing each other with the same knife, were now politely giving their statements and apologizing to the arresting officer for failing to remember to bring along the offending knife. I waited my turn and was informed by the nurses first, and later by the police, that no, no student had showed up that day who was suffering from a gunshot wound, accompanied by a girl with light brown hair.
Then I stopped at Beyo?lu Municipal Hospital too, where I had the impression that I was seeing the same cronies who had knifed each other, the same suicidal girls who had resorted to drinking iodine, the same apprentices who had had their arms caught in the machinery or their fingers under the needle, the same passengers who had been crushed between the bus and the bus stop, or between the ferry and the ferry platform. I examined the police reports carefully; I made an off-the-record statement for the benef?t of a policeman who became suspicious of my suspicions; and upstairs on the obstetrics floor, I was afraid I was going to burst into tears smelling the cologne a delighted new father doused liberally into our hands.
It was getting dark when I returned to the scene of the incident. I wove in between the minibuses and made my way into the minipark where blackbirds darted angrily over my head at first and then kept watch skulking in the branches. I might have been in the thick of city life, but I heard a deafening silence in my ears as if I were a murderer who had knifed someone and was keeping out of sight. In the distance I saw the dim yellow light in the little classroom where Janan kissed me and surmised a class must now be in progress there. The same trees whose distress had baffled me that very morning had now turned into clumsy and pitiless stacks of bark. I walked on the snow in my shoes, tracking the footprints of the man with the missing plastic bag, who four hours ago had hopped and skipped his way through the snow like a carefree clown. To make certain that the tracks were indeed there, I kept on his trail all the way down to the highway, then turned back, and as I backtracked I noticed that my footprints and the footprints of the man with the missing plastic bag had been inextricably intertwined. Presently, two dark dogs appeared from the bushes looking like just such a guilty party as I was, only to take fright and flee. I stopped for a moment and stared at the sky, which was as dark as the dogs.
My mother and I ate our supper watching TV. The news broadcast, the faces flashing on the screen, accounts of murders, accidents, fires, and assassinations seemed as distant to me as the stormy waves on a tiny section of an ocean visible in between mountains. Even so, the desire to be "there," to be part of that leaden ocean in the distance kept stirring inside me. Pictures kept flickering on the black-and-white TV for which the antenna was not properly set, but no mention was made of a student who had been shot.
I shut myself in my room after supper. The book stood open just as I had left it on the table, just so … I was afraid of it. There was brute force in the book's summons for me to return and wholeheartedly abandon myself to it. Thinking I would not be able to resist the call, I took to the streets once more and walked in the snow and mire all the way, again, to the sea. The darkness of the water gave me heart.
I sat down at the table thus heartened and, as if submitting my body to a sacred task, I held my face to the light that surged from the book. The light was not so powerful at first, but as I turned the pages it reached into me so deeply that I felt my entire being dissolve. An unbearable urge to live and run, aching with impatience and excitement in the pit of my stomach, I read until daybreak.
