The New Life (15 page)

On the wall next to the barometer there apparently was an old photograph in a large frame, the portrait of a young person, which Janan mentioned when we went back to our room. But I had not registered it. Like some dispassionate person whose life slips away from him, like someone who sleeps through movies and gives books careless readings, I asked her whose picture it was that she saw in the frame.

“Mehmet's,” Janan said. We were standing in the light of the kerosene lamps we had been handed to bring up to the room. “You still don't get it? Doctor Fine is Mehmet's father.”

I remember hearing clanging noises in my mind that sounded like an unfortunate public telephone in which the token will not fall. Then everything fell into place and I felt more angry than surprised, realizing the incontrovertible truth which was like a storm subsiding at the break of dawn. It happens to most of us at some time or other. When we have sat and watched a movie for a whole hour thinking we know what is going on before we realize that we were the only fool in the theater who has completely missed the point, we become enraged.

“So what was his other name?”

“Nahit,” she said, nodding knowingly like a person who has faith in astrology. “It means the evening star, apparently, the planet Venus.”

I was about to say that if I had a name like that and a father to match, I too would want to take on a different identity, when I realized tears were streaming from Janan's eyes.

I don't even want to remember the rest of the night. My role was to console Janan, who was weeping for Nahit alias Mehmet, and perhaps this was not too much to ask, but I was reduced to having to remind Janan that we already knew that Mehmet-Nahit had not actually died in a traffic accident; he had only made it appear as if he had. We were sure to find Mehmet walking in the wondrous streets somewhere in the heart of the steppe, and he would have transformed the wisdom he gleaned from the book into his own existence in the wondrous realm where new life is possible.

Even though this conviction was actually stronger in Janan than in me, anxiety created violent storms in my dolorous beauty's soul; so I was forced to explain to her at length why I thought we were on the right track. Look how we had managed to sneak away from the dealers' convention without getting into any trouble! And look how we had managed to follow an internal logic that only appeared coincidental, ending up in this mansion where the object of our quest had spent his childhood, in this very room that was full of his traces. The reader who senses the sarcasm in my tone perhaps perceives that the scales had fallen off my eyes, that the enchantment that invaded my whole being and illuminated my soul—how shall I put it?—had changed direction. While Janan was grief-stricken merely because Mehmet-Nahit was assumed to be dead, I was despondent because I now understood that our bus trips would never again be the same.

After a breakfast of bread, honey, ricotta cheese, and tea with the three sisters, we saw the museum of sorts on the second floor that Doctor Fine had dedicated to the memory of his fourth child, and only son, who was burned to death in a bus accident. “My father wishes for you to see this,” Rosamund said, putting a very large key surprisingly easily into a small keyhole.

The door opened into a magical silence. The smell of old magazines and newspapers. Low light filtered through the curtains. Nahit's bed and coverlet embroidered with flowers. Photographs of Mehmet's childhood, adolescence, and his Nahit period hanging on the walls inside frames.

My heart had speeded up under a strange compulsion and it was beating wildly. Rosamund whispered to point out Nahit's primary and secondary school report cards, his honor roll certificates. In hushed tones, all A's. Little Nahit's still muddy soccer shoes, his short pants with suspenders. A Japanese make kaleidoscope ordered from an Ankara store called Jonquil. In the dimly lit room, finding correspondences to my own childhood gave me shivers, and I was feeling as scared as Janan had said she was, when Rosamund pulled aside the curtains and whispered that during his years in medical school her darling brother used to stay up all night reading and smoking whenever he was home, and then in the morning he would open this window to gaze at the mulberry tree.

There was a silence. Then Janan asked what books Mehmet-Nahit had been reading during that period. The eldest sister had a brief attack of uncertainty and indecision. “My father didn't think it was appropriate to keep those on the premises,” she said, and then she smiled as if consoling herself. “But these can be looked at,” she said, “the stuff he read in his childhood.”

She was pointing to the bookcase next to the bed, which was full of children's magazines and comic books. I didn't want to come any closer to the bookcase because I wished to avoid over-identifying with the child who had once read these publications, besides I was afraid Janan might become emotional and burst into tears in this unnerving museum; yet my resistance was broken when my hand reached out of its own volition to touch the picture on the cover of one of the magazines neatly stacked in the case, the colors on their spines looking quite familiar although somewhat faded.

The picture on the cover showed a twelve-year-old kid who was clinging with one hand to the thick trunk of a tree, on which the leaves had been drawn painstakingly but due to the bad printing job the green had bled outside the lines, while with the other hand he had grabbed the hand of a blond kid who was the same age as himself, saving him at the last minute before he fell into a bottomless ravine. Both of the child heroes wore expressions of terror. In the background was a wild American landscape rendered in grays and blues, with a vulture circling in anticipation of a disaster and spilled blood.

I sounded out the syllables of the title the way I used to when I was a child:
NEBÎ IN NEBRASKA
. I flipped through the comic book, which was one of Uncle Rıfkı's earlier efforts, remembering the adventures that took place within the pages.

Young Nebî is appointed by the Sultan to represent Muslim children at the Chicago World's Fair. There, a kid called Tom who happens to be an American Indian tells Nebî about his problem, so they go to Nebraska together to solve it. White men who have their eyes on the lands where Tom's forefathers have for centuries hunted buffalo are encouraging Tom's Indian tribe to become addicted to alcohol, handing guns as well as bottles of whiskey to tribal youths with a penchant for bad behavior. The conspiracy Nebî and Tom bring to light is absolutely merciless: getting peaceful Indians drunk enough so they will revolt, then getting the federal army to squash the rebels and drive them off the land. The rich hotel and bar owner who tries to push Tom into the sheer ravine falls into it himself and dies, so the children save the tribe from falling into the trap.

Janan was looking through
MARY AND ALI
because the title sounded familiar to her; it was about the adventures of a boy from Istanbul who had also gone to America. He arrives at Boston harbor on the steamship he has embarked on in Galata in search of adventure; at the docks he meets Mary, who is weeping with great big sobs and looking at the Atlantic Ocean because her stepmother has turned her out of her own home; the two kids set out on the road west in search of her absent father. They pass through St. Louis, which looks like the illustrations in Tom Mix comics; they make their way through the white forests of Iowa where Uncle Rıfkı has placed in dark corners the shadows of wolves; and they arrive at a sun-drenched paradise, having left behind them all the errant cowboys, bandits that attack railway cars, and Indians who circle wagon trains. In the green and bright valley, Mary understands that true happiness is not finding her father but comprehending the Sufi virtues of Peace, Resignation, and Patience which she has learned from Ali; and heeding a sense of duty, she returns to be with her brother back in Boston. As for Ali, he thinks to himself, “When you come to think of it, injustice and wickedness exist everywhere in the world”; and looking back at America from the deck of the clipper he has boarded feeling homesick for Istanbul, he says, “What is important is to live in such a way that the goodness inside you is kept intact.”

Instead of growing despondent as I imagined she might, Janan had cheered up considerably turning the ink-smelling pages that reminded me of the dark and cold winter nights of my childhood. I told her I too had read the same comics as a child. Assuming she had not perceived the sarcasm in my words, I added that it was one more thing Mehmet alias Nahit and I had in common. I suppose I was behaving like some obsessive lover who thinks because his love is not requited his beloved must be insensitive. But I did not feel at all like telling her that the illustrator and writer who created these comics was someone I used to call Uncle Rıfkı. I did tell her of one instance when the author had felt like telling us readers why he was compelled to create these comic-book characters.

“Dear Children,” Uncle Rıfkı had put in a brief note at the beginning of one of his comic books, “wherever I see you after school, be it in train compartments or in the street in my modest neighborhood, I always see you reading about Tom Mix or Billy the Kid's adventures in cowboy magazines. I too love those brave and honest cowboys and Texas rangers. So I thought that if I told you the story of a Turkish kid among American cowboys, you might like it. Besides, this way you will be exposed not only to heroes who are Christians, but through the adventures of your plucky Turkish compatriots you will also come to cherish the ethics and the national values that our forefathers have bequeathed to us. If it is exciting to you that a kid from a poor neighborhood in Istanbul can draw a gun as fast as Billy the Kid or be as honest as Tom Mix, just you wait until you read our next adventure.”

Patiently, carefully, and as quietly as Mary and Ali had contemplated the wonders they met in the Wild Wild West, Janan and I studied for a long time the heroes Uncle Rıfkı had drawn in a world that was black and white, the dusky mountains, the terrifying woods, the cities teeming with odd inventions and habits. In law offices, in harbors full of schooners, in distant train stations, and among gold rushers, we met swashbucklers who sent greetings to the Sultan and the Turks, Negroes who had been freed from slavery and had embraced Islam, Indian chiefs who consulted shamans who were Central Asian Turks on their methods of making yurts, as well as farmers and their children who were so pure and good-hearted they were like angels. After reading some pages of a gory adventure where gunslingers mow each other down like flies, where good and evil bollix up the heroes by trading places time after time, or where the ethics of the Orient are compared to the rationalism of the Occident, one of the good and brave heroes gets shot in the back by a craven bullet, and just as he dies at daybreak he has an intimation that he is at the threshold of encountering an angel. But Uncle Rıfkı had not rendered the angel on the page.

I put together the issues in which a string of adventures related how Pertev from Istanbul and Peter from Boston become fast friends and turn America upside down, and I showed my favorite scenes to Janan: young Pertev with Peter's help foils a crooked gambler who robs a town blind by virtue of a system of mirrors he has rigged up; then he runs the gambler out of town with the aid of townsmen who swear off poker and gambling. When crude oil comes gushing out right in the middle of a church, and the townspeople, who are divided among themselves, are ready to come to blows and fall into the trap of either oil billionaires or exploiters of piety, Peter saves the day by giving an Atatürk-style speech on secularization, enlightened by ideas of Westernization which he has learned from Pertev. Not only that, young Pertev provides the initial electric idea that leads to the discovery of the light bulb by Edison, whom he meets when young Edison made his living selling newspapers in railway cars, by telling Edison that angels are created of light, that angels have a kind of mysterious electricity.

But then, of all his works,
Heroes of the Railroad
was the one that most strongly reflected Uncle Rıfkı's own enthusiasms and yearnings. In this story we see Pertev and Peter supporting the initiative to build a railroad from East to West across America. The railroad that would connect the country coast to coast was a matter of life and death for America, just like it was for Turkey in the thirties, but there were a great many enemies of the endeavor, such as the Wells Fargo Company or the minions of Mobil Oil, clergymen who refused to let the railway through their land holdings, or international rivals like Russia, sabotaging the railway men's enlightened efforts by inciting the Indians, or instigating workers' strikes, and encouraging young men to slash railway car seats with razors and knives, just as it was done on Istanbul commuter trains.

“Should the railroad proposition fail,” Peter was saying anxiously in one of the balloons, “the development of our country will be curtailed, and what people call accident will be a matter of fate. We must fight to the end, Pertev!”

How I used to love those big exclamation marks that followed boldface ejaculations that filled up the balloons! “Look out!” Pertev would shout out to Peter, warning him to dodge the knife before some treacherous villain stabbed him in the back. “Behind you!” Peter would shout out to Pertev, who, without even bothering to look back, would swing his fist, which would connect with the chin of some enemy of the railways. Sometimes Uncle Rıfkı would mediate directly, inserting among the pictures small boxes into which he wrote in letters as spindly as his own legs words like
SUDDENLY
or
NOW WHAT
and
ALL OF A SUDDEN
, punctuating them with huge exclamation marks, at which point, as borne out by my own experience, Mehmet alias Nahit would be drawn into the story.

Janan and I had been watching for sentences that took exclamation points when we read this one: “The things written in the book are now left behind me!” It was spoken by a character who had dedicated himself to the war against illiteracy and said to Pertev and Peter when they visited him in his hut where, disappointed with his failed life, he had secluded himself.