The New Life by Orhan Pamuk Page B

movie, that I remember being overwhelmed by an astonishingly powerful feeling of incompleteness, of apprehension and expectation. I was nervously tapping my cigarette ash into the ashtray, the lid of which I would very soon close with a sharp and decisive blow of my forehead. The angry impatience rising inside me against the indecisiveness of the lovers who still had not managed to kiss turned into a deeper and more significant feeling of edginess. I had a sense of something profound and authentic approaching, there it comes, now!—like the magical silence that falls over everyone including the audience the moment before the king is crowned. In that silence preceding the coronation the only sound heard is the flutter of the wings of a pair of doves flying across the royal scene. Then I heard the old man next to me moan, and I turned toward him. His bald head was peacefully bouncing on the dark, frozen window on which it rested, the same head that contained the raging pains he had described to me a hundred miles and a couple of miserable towns back which were carbon copies of each other. I conjectured that maybe the doctor at the hospital he was going to see when he got there in the morning had advised that he press his head against icy-cold panes as a remedy for his brain tumor; but turning my eyes back to the dark highway, I was gripped by a panic that I had not felt in days. What was this deep and irresistible anticipation? Why now this impatient urgency that overwhelmed me?
    I was jolted by the crashing sound of a distinct force that wrenched my inner organs. I was heaved out of my seat and was about to tumble over into the one in front when I was rammed into components of steel, tin, aluminum, and glass, angrily striking objects and being hit, hurt, crumpled. At that very instant, I fell back once more into the same bus seat as someone who was altogether different.
    Yet neither was the bus any longer the same bus. I could see through a blue fog from where I still sat in confusion that the driver’s station plus the seats immediately behind it had disintegrated into smithereens and disappeared.
    It must have been this that I had been looking for; it was what I wanted. How aware I was of what I discovered in my heart! Peace, sleep, death, time! I was both here and there, in peace and waging a bloody war, insomniac as a restless ghost and also interminably somnolent, present in an eternal night and also in time that flowed away inexorably. Consequently, I went into slow motion, just as in the movies, and rose from my seat, skirted the corpse of the young bus attendant who had migrated into the land of the dead, still holding a bottle in his hand. I went out the rear exit and stepped into the dark garden of the night.
    One end of this arid and limitless garden was the asphalt highway that now lay covered with shards of glass, the other end a realm from which there was no return. I proceeded fearlessly into the velvet night, convinced that this was the halcyon land which had for weeks wafted balmy as paradise in my imagination. It was as if I were sleepwalking, but I was awake, walking but with my feet not touching the ground. Perhaps I had no feet, but perhaps I no longer remember since I was there all by myself. I was there by myself and I was myself alone, my numbed body and my consciousness. I was brimming with my own being.
    I sat down somewhere next to a rock in the paradisical darkness and stretched out on the ground. Stars here and there above me and an actual rock beside me. I touched it with longing, feeling the unbelievable pleasure of a touch that was real. Once upon a time, there was a real world where a touch was a touch, smells were smells, and sounds were sounds. Can it be, O star, that the other time has given this present time a glimpse of itself? I could see my own life in the dark. I read a book and found you. If this be death, then I am born again. I am here, in this world, a brand-new being with no