Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Vediha complains about all sorts of nonsense, including how I always come home late, when I come home at all, how I take off on work trips for ten days at a time, and the cross-eyed woman with dyed-blond hair who worked in our office in Şişli.

It’s true that sometimes I do disappear for ten days, or two weeks, though it has nothing to do with the construction business. Last time, it was Azerbaijan. Tarık and some other nationalist friends from our old Pan-Turkic movement were complaining, “The government has given us this sacred task, but we don’t have any money.” Word came from Ankara that they had to find sponsors for their coup among private businesses. How could I say no to these patriots who came to ask for my help? Russian communism is all washed up, but the Azeri president Aliyev is a member of the KGB and the Soviet Politburo. So while he’s supposedly a Turk, all he wants is for the Turks to follow Russia’s lead. We held secret meetings with some warlords in Baku. Abulfaz Elchibey was Azerbaijan’s first democratically elected president. He had won most of the votes of the glorious Azeri people (they’re all Turks, really, with some Russians and Persians thrown in), but he’d been deposed in a KGB-style coup and gone back to his village in a huff. He was sick of the traitors who’d handed victory over to the enemy in the war against Armenia; he was tired of the incompetents who surrounded him, and of the Russian spies who’d brought him down. He refused to meet us because he figured we were Russian agents, too, so Tarık and I passed the time in the bars and hotels of Baku. Before we got the chance to visit Elchibey’s village to pay our respects to this great man and tell him “We’ve got America on our side, Azerbaijan’s future lies with the West,” we had news that the plans for our Turkish-style coup had fallen through. Someone in Ankara had panicked and told Aliyev that we’d come to overthrow his government. We also found out that Elchibey was under house arrest and couldn’t even go out into his own back garden to feed the chickens, let alone join us to launch a coup. So we headed straight to the airport and back to Istanbul.

Here is what this adventure taught me: It’s true that the whole world is against the Turks, but the biggest enemies of the Turks are Turks themselves. Also, Baku girls hated the Russians, but they’d still learned all their loose ways from them — even though, at the end of the day, they still preferred Azeri men. If that’s how it is, miss, then I’m not sticking my neck out for you. Anyway, my willingness to join the cause had already strengthened my position with the government and the party. Meanwhile, Süleyman was taking my preoccupation as a chance to do whatever he wanted.

—

Aunt Safiye.Vediha and I couldn’t find him a suitable girl, so Süleyman picked one himself. He never comes home anymore. We’re very embarrassed and worried that something untoward will happen.

—

Rayiha.On cold winter evenings when the shop was busy, Ferhat would come by to help, and I would take the girls home with Samiha. They loved their aunt’s free-flowing gossip, her vast knowledge of all the film stars who appeared on TV, the details of who had eloped with whom, her advice about clothes, how she would tell them, “Do your hair this way” or “Clip it up like that,” and how she might see someone on-screen and exclaim, “Oh, I used to work in that man’s house; his wife would cry all the time.” When we got back home, they would practice trying to talk just like her, until one day I had enough and almost said, Don’t turn into your aunt — but I stopped myself, because I didn’t want to be jealous. What I really wanted to know, but couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone, was “When they are alone in the shop, do Samiha and Mevlut actually look at each other, or do they pretend their eyes have met by accident in the mirror?” Whenever I felt the poison of envy seeping into my heart, I took out my bundle of letters from Mevlut.

Yesterday, as I walked out of the boza shop, Mevlut gave me the sweetest smile, and a sneaking suspicion that he may have meant it for my sister began to eat away at my soul, so as soon as I got home I opened one of the letters: “There are no other eyes I would rather gaze upon, no face I would sooner smile at, nowhere else I would ever turn!” he’d written. There were other things, too: “Your eyes have captured me like a magnet draws metal, I am your prisoner, Rayiha, you are the only thing I see” and “Just one glance from you has made me your willing slave.”

Sometimes Mevlut would ask one of us, “Clear those dirty glasses,” the way a restaurant manager barks at his busboys. When he asked me, I got angry at him for giving me the dirty job instead of Samiha; but when he asked Samiha, I got annoyed that she was the one he’d thought of first.

Mevlut could tell that I was jealous. He tried to avoid being alone in the shop with Samiha or showing too much interest in her. If he’s being so careful, he must be hiding something! I thought, and got jealous anyway. Samiha went to a toy store one day and brought my girls a water gun, as if she were buying a gift for a pair of boys. When Mevlut came home in the evening, he joined in their game. The next day, when the girls went to school and Mevlut went to the shop, I looked around for the gun to throw it in the trash (they’d squirted it at me plenty, too), but I couldn’t find it — Fatma, I guessed, must have put it in her bag and taken it to school. That night, while she slept, I took it out and hid it away somewhere. Another time, Samiha came by with a singing doll that could blink, too. Obviously Fatma, who was almost twelve, would have no interest in playing with a doll, but I didn’t say anything. The girls mostly ignored it. Someone must have stashed it away somewhere.

The most painful thing, though, was that I kept wondering, Is Samiha alone with Mevlut in the shop right now? I knew it was wrong, but I just couldn’t get this thought out of my head, because Süleyman, who knew all the Beyoğlu gossip, had told Vediha how Ferhat was coming home really late at night and drowning his sorrows all over town, the way men do in films when they’ve had their heart broken.

—

Ferhat.The old elevator car, a gilded, mirrored cage, came to a halt. I still remember that day from a time that now seems as ancient as dreams, but love always feels like only yesterday. After I’ve cut people’s power off, I find it more satisfying to rap on the door instead of ringing the bell, like some hit man from an American movie.

A maid answered and said Madam’s daughter was in bed with a fever (this is everyone’s favorite lie), but the lady would be with me in a minute. I sat on the chair the maid offered me and looked out at the Bosphorus. I was just thinking that the elated sense of purpose I felt in my soul must have had something to do with the swirling, mournful view before me, but then the real reason came into the room like a ray of light, wearing black jeans and a white blouse.

“Good afternoon, officer. Ercan, our doorman, told me you wished to meet.”

“We are not government officers anymore,” I said.

“Are you not from the electricity board?”

“It’s all been privatized now, ma’am…”

“I see…”

“We wouldn’t have wanted it to be this way…,” I said, struggling to get the words out. “I had to cut your power off. There were some unpaid bills.”

“Thank you. Please do not worry. It’s not your fault. You just follow your orders, whether you work for the government or for a private company.”

I didn’t manage any answer to the harsh truth of these poisonous words. I was falling rapidly in love and couldn’t think of anything except how fast I was falling. I gathered all my remaining strength. “Unfortunately I’ve had to seal the meter downstairs,” I lied. “Had I known your daughter was ill, I would have never cut you off.”