Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Never mind, officer, what’s done is done,” she said. She wore the strict, somber expression of those lady judges in Turkish melodramas. “Don’t worry, you were just doing your job.”

We were both quiet for a moment. She hadn’t said any of the things I had been expecting to hear as I made my way up on the elevator, so now I couldn’t remember any of the answers I’d prepared. I looked at my watch. “The ten-day national holiday will officially begin in twenty minutes.”

“Mr. Officer,” she said firmly, “I’m afraid I have never been able to bring myself to bribe anyone in my life, nor have I ever been able to tolerate those who do. I live to be an example to my daughter.”

“Be that as it may, ma’am,” I said, “it is important for people like you to understand that those officers you are so quick to look down on in fact treasure their pride more than you can imagine.”

I walked back to the door seething, because I knew that the woman I loved was never going to say “Stop.”

She took two steps toward me. It felt as if anything could happen between us, though I already knew, even then, that this love was hopeless.

But despair is what keeps love alive.

“Look at all these people, Mr. Officer,” she said, gesturing toward the city. “You know better than I do that these ten million souls are gathered here in Istanbul to earn their daily bread, chasing after their profits, collecting their bills and interest. But there is only one thing that can keep a person going among these monstrous multitudes, and that is love.”

She turned around and walked away before I had a chance to respond. In these old buildings, street vendors and meter inspectors aren’t allowed to use the ancient elevators to go down. So I took the stairs as I thought things through.

I went down to the airless basement, all the way to the end of the corridor. My hands stretched out to seal the meter, which I had already disconnected. But my nimble fingers did the opposite, and the next minute, the wires I had cut were spliced together again, and number 11’s meter whirred back to life.

“It was good that you gave them their power back,” said the doorman Ercan.

“Why?”

“Madam is with Sami from Sürmene, who has a lot of influence in Beyoğlu. He’s got eyes and ears everywhere…He would have given you trouble. These Black Sea people are a mafia.”

“There’s no sick daughter, is there?”

“What daughter? They’re not even married…This Sürmene man’s got a wife back in the village, grown children, too. His sons know about Madam, but they don’t say anything.”

—

Rayiha.One evening after dinner, I was watching TV with the girls at their aunt Samiha’s when Ferhat arrived and beamed at the sight of the four of us together. “Your daughters are getting bigger every day! Look at you, Fatma, you’re a young lady now,” he said. “Oh dear, it’s late, we should go home,” I told the girls, but he said “Don’t leave, Rayiha, stay a little longer. Mevlut is capable of sitting in that shop forever, waiting for some drunk to show up for a glass of boza.”

I didn’t like his making fun of Mevlut in front of the girls. “You’re right, Ferhat,” I said. “But it seems one person’s livelihood is another man’s joke. Come on, girls, let’s go.”

We got back late, and Mevlut was angry. “You will not take a single step on İstiklal Avenue, the girls aren’t allowed,” he said. “And you’re not to leave the house at all after dark.”

“Did you know the girls get meatballs, lamb cutlets, and roast chicken at their aunt’s?” I blurted out. Normally I would never have said such a thing, fearing Mevlut’s rage, but God must have put the words in my mouth.

Mevlut got offended and wouldn’t speak to me for three days. So I stopped taking the girls to Aunt Samiha’s, and we just sat at home in the evenings. Whenever I felt the prick of jealousy, I picked up my needlework, and instead of stitching birds cut out from magazines, I decorated fabrics with things from Mevlut’s letters: ruthless eyes that could capture you with a single glance, and looks that cut across your path like bandits. I had eyes dangling down from a tree like enormous fruits and jealous birds weaving in and out around them. I sprinkled the branches with hooded black eyes that looked like daffodils, embroidering an entire blanket with a tree whose hundreds of blossoming eyes peeped out from behind the leaves, like amulets guarding against bad luck. I cleared a path through the darkness in my heart. I made eyes that were like suns, with dark rays that leaped from each lash like arrows, tracing their jagged way through folds of cloth and the winding branches of a fig tree. But nothing could quench my anger!

“Mevlut won’t let us come over anymore, Samiha…Why don’t you come to us when he’s at the shop,” I said one day.

That’s how my sister began to visit us in the evenings with bags of meatballs and crispy minced-meat flatbreads. I soon began to wonder whether Samiha just came to see my daughters, or whether she was there for Mevlut, too.

—

Ferhat.Back on the street, I realized I had lost my confidence up in number 11. In the space of just twenty minutes, I had fallen in love and been duped. I should have just shut the power off and left. The doorman had called her Madam, though I knew from the electric bill that her name was Selvihan.

I began to daydream that my Selvihan was being held hostage by this mafia don, and I was going to rescue her. To fall in love with a woman, a guy like Süleyman needs to see her half naked in that corner of the Sunday paper aimed at sex-starved men and then pay to sleep with her a few times until he forms an attachment. For Mevlut, it’s important that he not know the girl at all, but that he catch just enough of a glimpse to fuel his fantasies. But for a guy like me, to fall in love with a woman, I need to feel as if I’ve squared off against her at the chessboard of life. My opening moves, I admit, were a bit amateurish. But I had a gambit in mind to capture this Selvihan. I knew a guy in our accounting and records department, an experienced, gregarious fellow who loved rakı, and with his help I began to comb through the most recent receipts and bank transfers for that account.

I remember spending many nights looking at my Samiha, beautiful as a rose in bloom, and thinking, Why would a man with a wife like that lose his head over some thug’s mistress locked up in some room with a view? Some evenings, over a glass of rakı, I would remind Samiha that, after all we’d been through, we had finally made it to the heart of the city, just as we’d always wanted.

“We even have money now,” I’d say. “We can do whatever we want. So what shall we do?”

“Let’s run away,” Samiha would say. “Let’s go somewhere no one can find us, somewhere no one even knows us.”

Hearing these words, I realized just how happy Samiha had been those first few months we’d spent all alone together in the Ghaazi Quarter. I’d kept in touch with some of my old friends, both from the Maoists and the pro-Soviet faction, and they were all just as sick and tired as we were of city life. If after years of suffering they’d managed to make a bit of money, they would say, “We’ll save up some more and then we’re leaving Istanbul and going away down south.” Like me, they fantasized about olive trees and vineyards and a farmhouse in a garden down in some Mediterranean town they’d never even been to. Samiha and I both imagined that if we were living on a farm in the south, she would finally get pregnant and we would have a baby.

In the mornings, I’d say, “We’ve been so patient, we’re making some money now, let’s grit our teeth just a while longer and salt away a little more. Then we’ll have enough to buy a big field in the south.”