Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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The news that Mevlut’s father had fallen out with Uncle Hasan in Istanbul over the past winter quickly reached the village…Last December, during the coldest days of the month, Uncle Hasan and his two sons, Korkut and Süleyman, had left the house they lived in with Mevlut’s father in Kültepe and moved into a new one they had all built together on Duttepe, the hill opposite Kültepe, leaving Mevlut’s father behind. Uncle Hasan’s wife, Safiye, who was both Mevlut’s maternal aunt and his paternal uncle’s wife, had quickly followed, coming from the village into this new home in Istanbul to look after her husband and sons. These developments meant that Mevlut could now join his father in the autumn so that Mustafa Efendi would not be left alone in Istanbul.

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Süleyman.My father and Uncle Mustafa are brothers, but our surnames are different. When Atatürk decreed that everyone should take a surname, the census officer from Beyşehir came to our village on the back of a donkey, toting his reams of records, to write down the surnames everyone had chosen for themselves. On the last day of the whole operation, it was our grandfather’s turn. He was a very devout and pious man who had never gone anywhere farther than Beyşehir. He took his time thinking and finally went for “Aktaş.” His two sons were arguing in their father’s presence as usual. “Put me down as Karataş,” demanded Uncle Mustafa, who was a little boy at the time, but neither my grandfather nor the census officer paid him any heed. Still, my uncle Mustafa is very stubborn and prickly, and many years later, before Mevlut was enrolled in middle school, he went down to the judge to have his surname changed, and from then on they became Karataş, “Blackstone,” while we remained Aktaş, “Whitestone.” My cousin Mevlut Karataş is really looking forward to starting school in Istanbul this autumn. But of the kids from around our village who have been sent to Istanbul on this pretext, not a single one has graduated from high school yet. There are almost a hundred villages and towns around where we come from, and so far only one boy has ever made it to college. That bespectacled mousy creature eventually went off to America, and no one has ever heard from him again. Many years later, someone saw his picture in the newspapers, but because he had changed his name, no one was even sure whether this was our bespectacled rodent or not. If you ask me, that bastard must have converted to Christianity by now.

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One evening toward the end of that summer, Mevlut’s father brought out a rusty saw Mevlut remembered from his childhood. He led his son to the old oak tree. Slowly and deliberately, they sawed off a branch that was about as thick as an arm. It was a long and slightly curved branch. Using a bread knife and then a pocketknife, Mevlut’s father trimmed the twigs off one by one.

“This will be the pole you use when you work as a street vendor!” he said. He took some matches from the kitchen and asked Mevlut to light a fire. He charred and blackened the knots on the rod, turning it slowly over the fire until it had dried up. “It’s not enough to do it once. You have to leave it out in the sunshine all through the summer and dry it over the fire again. Eventually, it will become as hard as stone and as smooth as silk. Go on, have a look and see if it sits well on your shoulders.”

Mevlut placed the stick across his shoulders. He felt its toughness and warmth with a shiver.

At the end of summer, they went to Istanbul, taking a small sack of homemade soup powder, some dried red chilies, bags of bulgur and flatbread, and baskets of walnuts. His father would give the bulgur and walnuts as gifts to the doormen in some of the more prestigious buildings so that they would treat him well and let him take the elevator. They also took a broken flashlight that was to be fixed in Istanbul, a kettle that his father particularly liked and would bring back with him to the village, some straw mats for the dirt floor at home, and other paraphernalia. Plastic bags and baskets bursting with their belongings kept popping out of the corners into which they’d stuffed them during their one-and-a-half-day train ride. Mevlut immersed himself in the world he could see beyond the carriage window, even as he thought of the mother and the sisters he was already missing, and had to jump up every so often to chase after the hard-boiled eggs that kept falling out of their bags and rolling into the middle of the carriage.

The world beyond the train window contained more people, wheat fields, poplars, oxen, bridges, donkeys, houses, mosques, tractors, signs, letters, stars, and transmission towers than Mevlut had seen in the first twelve years of his life. The transmission towers looked as if they were coming straight at him, which sometimes made his head spin until he fell asleep with his head on his father’s shoulder, and woke up to find that the yellow fields and the sunny abundance of wheat had been replaced by purplish rocks all around, so that later, in his dreams, he would see Istanbul as a city built out of these purple rocks.

Then his eyes would fall upon a green river and green trees, and he would feel his soul changing color. If this world could speak, what would it say? Sometimes, it seemed to Mevlut that the train wasn’t moving at all but that an entire universe was filing past the window. Each time they passed a station, he would get excited and shout the name out to his father—“Hamam…İhsaniye…Döğer…”—and when the thick blue cigarette smoke in the compartment made his eyes water, he went outside to the toilet, stumbling like a drunk before he could force the door open with some difficulty, and watched the railroad tracks and the gravel go by under the toilet hole. The clacking of the train’s wheels could scarcely be heard through the hole. On the way back to his seat, Mevlut would first walk through to the very end of the train, looking into each compartment to observe the traveling multitudes, the women sleeping, the children crying, the people playing cards, eating spiced sausages that made entire compartments smell of garlic, and performing their daily prayers.

“What are you up to, why are you always going to the toilet?” his father asked. “Is the water running?”

“It isn’t.”

Children selling snacks would board the train at some stations, and while eating the wrap his mother had dutifully packed for him, Mevlut would examine the raisins, roasted chickpeas, biscuits, bread, cheese, almonds, and chewing gum these children sold before the train pulled into the next town. Sometimes shepherds would spot the train from afar and run down after it with their dogs, and as the train sped past, these boys would yell for “newspaprrrrsss” with which to roll cigarettes filled with smuggled tobacco, and hearing this Mevlut would feel a strange sense of superiority. When the Istanbul train stopped in the middle of the grasslands, Mevlut would remember just how quiet a place the world really was. In that quiet time, during those waits that felt like they might never end, Mevlut would look out the window to see women picking tomatoes from a small garden of a village house, hens walking along the train tracks, two donkeys scratching each other next to an electric water pump, and, just a bit farther, a bearded man dozing on the heath.

“When are we going to move?” he asked during one of these interminable stops.

“Be patient, son, Istanbul isn’t going anywhere.”