Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

To be honest, I take most things Reyhan tells me with a grain of salt, and I would certainly never count my dear little sister as one of those beautiful but childless women whose very existence is a threat to the natural order. The way Reyhan saw it, when Samiha played with the girls, she wasn’t just nursing the pangs of her childlessness; she was also indulging in the pain and pleasures of JEALOUSY. “A woman who is barren is a woman to be feared, Rayiha, for behind her silence lies a towering rage,” she said. “When she buys your daughters meatballs from the diner, she’s not as innocent as you think.” In my anger, I threw some of the things Reyhan had said back at Mevlut. “You shouldn’t talk about your sister like that,” he said.

So Samiha’s got my foolish Mevlut wrapped around her finger and ready to rush to her defense, has she? Well then: “She is BARREN!” I screamed, even louder than before. “If you’re going to take her side, I’ll be as nasty as I want.” Mevlut waved me off as if to say, You are despicable, and he curled his lip as if he were looking at some sort of bug.

He wrote all those letters to her only to marry me in the end, the freak! No, that I didn’t dare say out loud. I don’t know how, but as I was shouting at him I picked up a packet of Filiz tea and threw it at his head. “MAYBE YOU WOULD BE HAPPIER IF I WOULD JUST DIE AND YOU COULD MARRY SAMIHA,” I screamed. I would never leave my daughters to a stepmother, though. I can see just as well as you can that Samiha is trying to charm my daughters with her gifts, her stories, her beauty, and her money, but if I dared to mention it, everybody — and especially all of you reading this — would say the same thing: “What on earth do you mean, Rayiha? Can’t the girls have a little fun with their aunt?”

Mevlut tried to regain the upper hand: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, KNOW YOUR PLACE!”

“I know my place and I know it well, and that’s why I’m not coming to the shop anymore,” I said. “It stinks in there.”

“What?”

“The Brothers-in-Law Boza Shop…IT STINKS. It makes my stomach turn.”

“Boza makes you sick?”

“I’ve had enough of your boza…”

Mevlut’s expression became so menacing that I got scared and cried out: “I’M PREGNANT.” I hadn’t planned on telling him; I was planning to go and have it scraped out of me the way Vediha does, but it was too late, I’d said it now, so I just went on.

“I have your baby in my belly, Mevlut; at this age and with Fatma and Fevziye around, it’s mortifying. You should have been more care ful,” I said, blaming him. I already wished I hadn’t told him, but at the same time I was pleased to see him mollified.

Oh yes, Mr. Mevlut, you sit in that shop fantasizing about your sister-in-law, with that smug, self-satisfied grin, but now everyone’s going to know what you’ve been up to with your wife after the girls go to school. They’re all going to say, “Mevlut doesn’t waste a chance, does he!” Never mind barren Samiha, who will be even more jealous now.

Sitting next to me on the edge of the bed, Mevlut put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close. “I wonder if it’s a boy or a girl,” he said. “Of course you shouldn’t come to the shop in this state,” he said, sweet and caring. “I won’t go either. It’s only making us fight. Selling boza on the street at night is better, and there’s more money in it, Rayiha.”

We went back and forth for a while: “You go, no really, you go, I won’t go, you don’t go, of course you should go,” we said, and also “that’s not what I meant, it’s nobody’s fault,” and things like that.

“Samiha’s the one who’s in the wrong,” said Mevlut. “She shouldn’t come to the shop anymore. She’s changed, and so has Ferhat, they’re not like us anymore, just look at that perfume she wears…”

“What perfume?”

“Whatever it was, the whole house smelled of it when I came home last night,” he said, laughing.

“So that’s why you came home early yesterday, to catch a whiff of her!” I said, and started crying again.

—

Vediha.Poor Rayiha is pregnant again. She came to Duttepe one morning and said, “Oh, Vediha, it’s so embarrassing with the girls around, you have to help me, take me to the hospital.”

“Your daughters are old enough to be married, Rayiha. You’re almost thirty, Mevlut is nearly forty. What’s going on with you two, sweetheart? Haven’t you figured out by now when to do it and when not to?”

Rayiha gave me lots of intimate details she’d never bothered to mention before, and eventually she brought up Samiha, finding some excuse to criticize her. That’s how I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t Mevlut’s carelessness that had gotten her pregnant but Rayiha’s own trick — not that I would ever say such a thing to her.

“My dear Rayiha, children are a family’s delight, a woman’s consolation, and life’s greatest joy, so what’s the problem, just pop this one out, too,” I said. “I get so cross with Bozkurt and Turan sometimes; they’re so disrespectful. We both know how they’ve always tormented your girls. I’ve worn myself out giving them so many smacks over the years, but they are my reason for living; they keep me going. I would die if anything happened to them, God forbid. They’ve got beards to shave and pimples to squeeze now; they’re so grown up they won’t let their mother even touch them anymore, not even for a little kiss…If I could make another two, I’d have the little ones to sit on my lap now, I’d kiss them and hug them and I’d be happier, I wouldn’t mind so much when Korkut is awful. Now I wish I hadn’t had all those abortions…There’s plenty of women who’ve gone mad with regret over an abortion, but never in the history of the world has a woman ever regretted having a child. Do you regret giving birth to Fatma, Rayiha? Do you regret having Fevziye?”

Rayiha started crying. She said Mevlut wasn’t earning enough, he had failed as a manager, and now they were terrified that the boza shop was going to fail, too; if not for the needlework she did for those linen shops in Beyoğlu, they would be struggling to make it to the end of the month. She’d made her mind up, she wouldn’t have another child and expect God to feed it. The four of them barely had room to breathe in their one-room apartment as it was; there certainly wasn’t any space for another.

“My darling Rayiha,” I said, “your sister will always lend you a hand in times of trouble. But a child is a sacred thing; this is a big responsibility. Go home and think it over. I’ll call Samiha, and we’ll talk about it together next week.”

“Don’t call Samiha, I can’t stand her anyway. I don’t want her to know I’m carrying a baby. She’s barren; she’d get jealous. I’ve made my decision. I don’t need to think about it.”

I explained to Rayiha that three years after the coup in 1980, our dictator General Kenan Evren had done a good deed by allowing unmarried women less than ten weeks into a pregnancy to go to a hospital and get an abortion. This had mostly benefited those brave city girls who had sex before marriage. For married women to be able to take advantage of this new regulation, they had to get their husbands to sign a form confirming they agreed to the termination of the pregnancy. The men of Duttepe often refused to sign, saying they might as well keep the baby, it was a sin to do otherwise, and at least they’d have someone else to look after them in their old age, and so after many drawn-out arguments with their husbands, their wives would end up with a fourth or fifth child. Some caused themselves to miscarry using primitive methods they learned from one another. “Don’t you even think of doing anything like that if Mevlut doesn’t sign, Rayiha, you’ll regret it,” I told my sister.