Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Nothing else had ever been like the sleeplessness of Ankara. Sleep evaded and evaded you, and by the time it came it wasn’t a blessing but a curse. Now, the more you slept, the more you were eating into the next day, destroying what was left of it with depressingness, sealing the doom of the next night.

She said that children were people, whose dignity and privacy were worthy of respect. She was the only person I had ever met or heard of who thought or said anything like that.

I always knew that this way in which I was disappointing people and making a spectacle of myself was a favor bestowed upon me by my mother, who was sparing me a bad experience that she had not been spared, and I felt guilty toward everyone: toward my mother for not appreciating how she always defended and protected me, toward the old people whose hands I didn’t kiss, and toward my cousins who did have to kiss the old people’s hands.

But why was I still thinking about that, now that I was long past the age where anyone could expect me to kiss their hand? Maybe my father was right and I tended to “dwell” on imagined slights and bad feelings from the past.

And yet … what was value, if it wasn’t conferred by some people? A daunting thought: How would I eventually root out from my mind all the beliefs that I hated?

The longer I lived, the more evident it became that going out and getting drunk were the things people cared the most about. They thought you were putting on an act if you said you were more interested in anything else. Even Let’s Go, which was written by people who supposedly cared about human achievement, was always implying that museums were somewhere you went to seem high-minded, and that the thing that was actually important and desirable was knowing which were the right bars and clubs.

The Eastern Question, too, was something I had heard of: like “the Woman Question,” it turned up in nineteenth-century novels. The Eastern Question was essentially, “How do we divide up all the Ottomans’ stuff?” It wasn’t so different from the Woman Question, which was about whether women could have jobs and money.

He could tell you were a good person, too. Good people always find each other.” Was that true? It was too bad there wasn’t a club you could join, the way there were for different religions, ethnicities, and nationalities, all of which comprised both assholes and non-assholes. How evenly they seemed to be distributed. What was it based on?

It seemed to me that Mesut’s life was more real than mine, though how could anyone’s life be any more real than anyone else’s?

and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of “important” itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.

Later, he dropped me off at the pension. I walked through the moonlit garden, went up the stone staircase, took a shower, and wrote copy until I fell asleep, with the feeling of leading “a full life.”

It didn’t automatically make sense, as I had expected, given its universal and canonical status. It was, rather, its own super-specific thing, like the taste of some particular kind of wine. The moments, isolated at first, when I started to feel like I understood it—like I understood why it was desirable, how to appreciate it, and how to draw it out—reminded me of the first time I managed to follow a Shakespeare play, and understood not only what all those people were talking about, but why their mode of speech was considered admirable. How all the things that went unspoken in a real conversation—because they were secret, or because nobody had realized them, or put them into words—had been translated into a measured multi-syllabic torrent that unfurled so ceaselessly from the actors.

Why did I feel a wave of elation? It was like my brain knew to strive toward freedom, but my body had another plan. Or was the elation the part that was real, while the rest of it—the idea that you couldn’t get married before you finished college, that you had to marry someone who had been to college and spoke English—was somehow fake?

“So what do you think about love?” I asked Mesut in a casual tone. “Love is to get caught on something,” he said readily. “It’s to be unable to forget.”

How present and alive he was, how strong and substantial. Yet this was itself a form of limitation. An inextricable aspect of his strength and solidity was that he existed, not everywhere, but in a particular place. Unlike my feelings, which were dimensionless and followed me wherever I went, he was person-sized and staying here.

Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility. This seemed to prove the material reality of thoughts and feelings.

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me—nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

I eventually gave up trying to explain anything to anyone. It did no good. Everyone was too afraid. The Turkish people were afraid of missing some “opportunity” represented by the tourists, of being taken advantage of and left with nothing. The tourists were afraid of missing some “authentic” experience, of being exploited for their money and left with nothing. What the tourists really wanted was never to pay for anything, because they were good people. I had noticed this in myself: how I always hoped to be given things for free, as a reward for not being a total asshole.

Whenever anything made me feel badly, my standard procedure was to recount it to myself as a story in which everyone was at least a little bit right, and some people were kind or humorous, and their kindness and humor redeemed everything, and recognizing it redeemed me. Then I felt humane and objective.

And yet, nearly everything the guy himself said was insane. We drank wine, smoked cigarettes, and had screaming arguments in the street. It felt somehow important and universal to be arguing in such a way with a man.

On the one hand, I wasn’t bored, and we were having sex every day. It was a relief to feel that I wasn’t leading a sterile, life-denying existence, only learning the things that were in books, ignorant of the real world. My complexion looked better than it had at school. But after three days, it was too much; I realized I would rather be sterile and have dull skin and live in peace.

“no one knew who was lover and who the beloved.”

It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation—maybe even more so than in America. People heard my accent, and saw what I was wearing, and doing, and it didn’t make sense, or fit with my ID card.

And I had never heard anyone describe so accurately the difference between last year and this year: Last year, I admired wines. This, I’m wandering inside the red world.

Why had I assumed that the problem was with my Turkish—that the problem was with me? That was something girls did. On the other hand … wasn’t the problem with me, by definition? After all, I was the one having the problem.

Why did I insist on blocking myself against the marrow of life? Wasn’t this—this, being outside, here, negotiating with a handsome, possibly disabled mugger—wasn’t this, the cigarette butts and melon guts in the gutter, the faint smell of horses, the sickening pulse of bass from the clubs—wasn’t this what life was?

On the bus, a porter was handing out tiny cakes. It was wonderful to be eating a prepackaged cake full of candied fruit—an experience it would never have occurred to me to seek out—while watching the glittering Mediterranean being shunted away behind the thick windows, replaced by the mountains and the steppe. Dusk began to fall, and I turned on my seat light and took out my new book: The Portrait of a Lady, chosen somewhat perfunctorily from the one shelf of English-language books—all discount paperback “classics”—at the bookstore in Antalya.

The work of art she was creating was her own character: how she acted, how she was, how other people saw her. From this perspective, the aesthetic wasn’t really the opposite of the ethical. The way Isabel wanted to be, and act, and seem, was generous and brave. Her main goal was to avoid meanness, jealousy, and cruelty—not because God said they weren’t permitted, but because who even wanted to be like that?

In Isabel’s case, the death she postponed wasn’t her own, but Ralph’s, and she was living the stories, rather than narrating them. But as she lived them, they were narrated. They became the book you were reading right now.

Isabel’s values made sense to me. She wasn’t interested in ruining destitute women, or electroplating a tortoise. She wanted to fathom the human condition. She valued reading, travel, and relationships with radically different people: the kinds of people who didn’t necessarily get the point of each other.

Isabel said that was “the supreme good fortune”: to be in a better position for appreciating other people than they were for appreciating you.

Was that what a novel was: a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?

That was exciting again—especially since he went on to say that, if you did do that subtle and monstrous thing, you would definitely find what you had been looking for. It would be there, in some circumstance of your real life. (So Isabel had come from his real life?) But it became clear that he was speaking only theoretically: in practical terms he thought that that kind of reconstruction or excavation was impossible, or somehow not worth trying, or not worth thinking about.

But I was more fortunate. I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

I loved Henry James again, when he wrote about trying to dramatize Isabel’s life, even when there seemed to be no drama. He described a scene where the only “action” was that Isabel sat in a chair by a burned-out fire.

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

That was what Russia had done: taken a fork in the road to a different future. For all my life there had been another world, and no one had come out, and no one had gone in—until one day the borders turned out to be fictitious, the insurmountable barrier became nothing but a pack of cards, so that now you could walk right through the looking glass, into the world of backward N’s and R’s.

In the past, I had been in one country or another because of other people: my parents, Svetlana, Ivan, Sean. But I was in Russia because I had looked at the literatures of the world and made a choice. Nobody had especially wanted me to come—indeed, the customs officer who stamped my passport had left a distinct impression of wishing me to be elsewhere—yet here I was.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.