Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“I get bored at home in the evenings,” Samiha would say. “Take me to the movies one night.”

One evening I got tired of talking to Mevlut in the shop, so I downed some rakı and went over to the apartment in Gümüşsuyu. I rang the doorman’s bell first, like a policeman who’s come to make an arrest.

“What’s the matter, boss? I thought it was the boza seller. Everything okay?” said Doorman Ercan when he saw me looking at the meters. “Oh, but those people in number eleven are gone now.”

He was right: number 11’s meter was still. For a moment, I felt as if the world had stopped turning.

I went to see the rakı -loving accountant at the Taksim offices: he introduced me to two ancient bookkeepers who looked after the archives and the old handwritten records of the agency that had been distributing electricity to Istanbul’s neighborhoods for over eighty years. The two wise old clerks — one of them was seventy, and the other sixty-five — had taken their retirement bonuses and left, only to return to their office of forty years, now under contract with the pri vate company and eager to teach a new generation of inspectors all the wondrously ingenious tricks that Istanbul residents had devised over eighty years to cheat the electric company and its men. Seeing that I was a young go-getter, they were especially eager to show me the ropes. They could still recall the details of every ploy, the lay of all the neighborhoods, even the women who answered the doors, and all their rumored romances. But for my purposes it wasn’t enough to look in the archives alone; I’d need to check the latest records, too. It would be only a matter of time before I knocked on a door somewhere in Istanbul and found Selvihan behind it. Everyone in this city has a heart, and an electric meter.

—

Rayiha.I’m pregnant again, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. At my age, and with two girls in the house already, it’s too embarrassing.

Maybe You Would Be Happier If I Would Just Die and You Could Marry Samiha

MEVLUT WOULD NEVER forget the story Ferhat told him one night when they still had the Brothers-in-Law Boza Shop:

“During the worst days of the military dictatorship that followed the 1980 coup, with the people of Diyarbakır — a town with a large Kurdish population — cowed by the screams coming from the prison’s torture chambers, a man who looked like a government inspector came down to the city from Ankara. In the taxi from the airport to his hotel, the mysterious visitor asked the Kurdish driver what life in Diyarbakır was like. The driver told him that all the Kurds were very happy with the new military government, that they only had eyes for the Turkish flag and nothing else, and that city folk were very pleased now that the Kurdish separatist terrorists had all been thrown in jail. ‘I’m a lawyer,’ said the visitor from Ankara. ‘I’m here to defend those who’ve been tortured in prison and had dogs let loose on them for speaking Kurdish.’ On hearing this, the driver changed tack completely. He gave a detailed account of the tortures being inflicted on Kurds in prison, of people being thrown into the sewers alive and getting beaten to death. The lawyer from Ankara couldn’t help but interrupt. ‘But you were telling me the opposite just now,’ he said. ‘You’re right, Mr. Lawyer,’ said the driver from Diyarbakır. ‘What I told you earlier were my public views. What I’m telling you now are my private views.’ ”

Every time he thought about this story, Mevlut laughed as if hearing it for the first time, and he would have loved to talk more about it with his friend sometime when they were both in the shop looking after customers, but Ferhat was always busy or his mind was elsewhere. It could be that Ferhat had cut back his appearances at the shop because he found Mevlut’s moralistic musings irritating. Sometimes Mevlut would let slip some crack about rakı or womanizing or the responsibilities of married men, and Ferhat would snap back: “Did you read that in the Righteous Path ?” Mevlut had tried to tell him that he’d only bought that paper once because of the nice piece they’d run about the shop, but Ferhat always brushed him off. He had also mocked the picture of “The Other Realm,” with its cypress trees, gravestones, and that divine light, which Mevlut had hung on the wall. Why was his friend so enamored of the kinds of things old men liked to think about, cemeteries and ancient relics?

As the Islamist parties gained more votes and followers, Mevlut saw Ferhat and many other leftists and Alevis becoming uneasy, and perhaps even starting to feel afraid. He himself had more or less seriously come to the conclusion that the first thing they would do in power would be to ban alcohol, and that would make everyone realize the importance of boza. Still, if anyone at the teahouse brought up the subject, he stayed out of it and, if pressed, offered only this prediction — which was enough to rile the anxious pro-Atatürk secularists.

Mevlut had also begun to think that another reason that Ferhat was making himself scarce must have to do with those letters Mevlut had written in the army. “If someone had written letters to my wife for three years, I wouldn’t want to see him every day either,” he told himself. On evenings when it became clear that Ferhat wouldn’t be showing up at all, Mevlut would remind himself that his friend was barely even at home anymore. (Left by herself, Samiha had started coming over to spend time with Rayiha and the girls.) On one such evening, Mevlut got so angry and restless that he decided to close up shop early and go home. When he got home, he found out Samiha had just left. She must have started wearing some sort of perfume, or perhaps the scent drifting up to Mevlut’s nose came from the new toys she’d bought for the girls.

When she saw him coming home so early, Rayiha didn’t seem as delighted as Mevlut had hoped. Instead, she flared up with jealousy. Twice she asked her husband what he was doing back so soon. Mevlut himself wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, but he found Rayiha’s suspicion unreasonable. At Brothers-in-Law, he had always taken such pains to avoid upsetting any of them (Samiha included): he tried to avoid being left alone with Samiha, and when there was work to be done, he always spoke to Rayiha with gentle familiarity, assuming with Samiha a more distant, formal manner, as he would have done with some employee at the Binbom Café. These precautions, however, had not sufficed, and Mevlut felt himself being dragged into a vicious circle: If he acted like there was no cause to be jealous, it would look like he was hiding something, getting up to no good right under Rayiha’s nose, which would only inflame her suspicion. If, however, he seemed too understanding about Rayiha’s feelings, it would be like admitting to a crime he hadn’t committed. Fortunately, when he got home that evening, the girls hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so Rayiha held back, and the tension blew over before their argument could escalate.

—

Rayiha.One afternoon, while working with our neighbor Reyhan on a bridal trousseau, I sheepishly told her a little bit about my feelings. She took my side, saying any wife whose husband spent time with a woman as beautiful as Samiha was bound to feel jealous. Of course this just made my jealousy worse. According to Reyhan, I should not keep my feelings bottled up inside until I burst but rather I should talk to Mevlut and remind him to be a little more considerate. I thought I’d bring it up with Mevlut after the girls left for school. But we ended up fighting. “So what?” said Mevlut. “I can’t come back to my own house at whatever time I please?”