The New Life by Orhan Pamuk

was the person who rose from the table past the witching hour when the only noises heard in the district are the dogs howling across great distances, and took a final look at the book he had been poring over for many nights and the pages he had filled under its influence. I was the person who removed his savings from his sock drawer and, without turning off the lights in his room, stood at his mother’s bedroom door listening fondly to the sound of her breathing. It was I, Angel, who long past the midnight hour slipped out of his own house like a timorous stranger and blended into the darkness in the streets. I was the one on the sidewalk, his eyes fixed on his own lighted windows as if he were contemplating with tears and pathos someone else’s fragile and depleted life. It was me who was running to his new life eagerly, listening to the reverberations of his own footsteps in the silence of the night.
    The only light in the neighborhood still burning was the ghastly glow in the windows of Uncle Railman Rıfkı’s house. I was up on the garden wall in an instant and looking in between the partially closed curtains to see under the feeble light his wife, Aunt Ratibe, sitting up and smoking. In one of Uncle Rıfkı’s stories for children, there’s an intrepid hero who, like myself, takes to the disconsolate streets of his own childhood in search of the Land of Gold, hearkening to the call of obscure venues, the clamor of faraway countries, and the roaring sound in trees that remained invisible. Wearing on my back the overcoat my dead father who retired from the State Railroads left me, I walked into the heart of darkness.
    The night concealed me, it kept me and showed me the way. I proceeded into the inner organs of the city that vibrated steadily, its concrete highways rigid as the arteries of a paralyzed patient, its neon boulevards reverberating with the whine of rowdy trucks carrying meat, milk, and canned food. I consecrated the garbage pails that belched the swill in their maws out on the wet sidewalks that reflected the lights; I asked the gruesome trees that never stand still for directions; I blinked seeing fellow citizens in dimly lit stores who still sat up at cash registers going over their accounts; I steered clear of the police on duty in front of precinct stations; I smiled forlornly at drunks, vagrants, unbelievers, and outcasts who had no tidings of a glowing new life; I exchanged dark glances with Checker Cab drivers who sneaked up on me like sleepless sinners in the stillness of blinking red lights; I was not deceived by the beautiful women smiling down on me from soap billboards, nor did I put my trust in the good-looking men in the cigarette advertisements, nor even in the statues of Atatürk, or the early editions of tomorrow’s papers being scrambled up by drunks and insomniacs, or the lottery man drinking tea at an all-night café, nor his friend who waved and called out to me, “Take a load off, young man.” The innermost stench of the rotting city led me to the bus terminal that reeked of the sea and hamburgers, latrines and exhaust, gasoline and filth.
    Trying to avoid becoming intoxicated by the plastic lettering on top of bus line offices that promised me new venues, new hearts, new lives, and hundreds of colorful cities and towns, I took myself into a small restaurant. There, I turned away from the semolina cakes, the puddings and salads being displayed in the ample refrigerated case, wondering in whose stomachs and how many hundreds of miles away they would finally be digested. Right now they were just standing there in neat rows like the plastic letters in the names of towns and bus companies. And then I forgot for whom I had begun to wait. Perhaps I was waiting for you, Angel, to pull me away, tenderly and graciously cautioning me, putting me gently on the right track. But there was no one in the restaurant aside from a mother holding a child and a