Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

As I also told Rayiha, there are men like Korkut who have no qualms at all about signing those forms. They find it more convenient than taking the necessary precautions, so they go ahead and knock up their wives, thinking, She can get an abortion anyway! After Evren’s law was introduced, Korkut got me pregnant three times. I had three abortions at the Etfal Hospital, though of course as soon as we started making a little more money, I wished I could take them back. But I did at least become familiar with the procedure.

“The first thing we do, Rayiha, is go to the councilman and get a certificate that confirms you’re married to Mevlut, then we’ll go to the hospital and get two doctors to sign the form that says you’re pregnant, and finally we’ll pick up a blank permission form for Mevlut to sign. Okay?”

—

Mevlut and Rayiha’s quarrel rumbled on, heated as ever, but now it wasn’t over jealousy but the more delicate question of whether Rayiha should keep the baby. They couldn’t bring it up at the shop, or when the girls were around, so their only chance was in the morning after the girls left for school. Their exchanges on this subject amounted not so much to discussions as a series of gestured misunderstandings: a long face, a scowl, a sniff of annoyance, a hateful glance, and a frown carried more weight than a sentence, so they each paid more attention to the other’s face than to the other’s words. Mevlut was very upset when he realized soon enough that in her growing restlessness and hostility, Rayiha was interpreting his indecision as a stalling tactic.

His indecision notwithstanding, he was thrilled at the prospect of a boy and had already started daydreaming about that possibility. He would call him Mevlidhan. He thought of how Babur had conquered India thanks to his three lionhearted boys and how Genghis Khan’s four loyal sons had made him the world’s most fearsome emperor. He kept telling Rayiha that his own father’s failures on first arriving in Istanbul had all been for want of a son beside him, and how, by the time Mevlut had come from the village to help, it had been too late. But every time Rayiha heard the words “too late,” all she could think of was the ten-week limit for having a legal abortion.

Those morning hours after the girls left for school, once the time of their joyous lovemaking, now were given over to endless bickering and recrimination. Only Rayiha’s tears could make Mevlut feel bad enough to relent for a moment and comfort her, to tell her “Everything is going to be fine,” at which point a confused Rayiha would say that perhaps it was indeed better for her to keep the baby, only to regret her words immediately.

Mevlut himself wondered — with increasing resentment — whether Rayiha’s determination to end her pregnancy was her answer to (and punishment for) his poverty and all his life’s failures. He almost felt that if he could only persuade her to keep the baby, it would show the world that they had everything they needed in life after all. It would even be clear that they were happier than Korkut and Vediha, who only had two children, and certainly poor Samiha and Ferhat, who had none at all. Happy people had lots of kids. Rich and unhappy people envied the poor for their children — just like these Europeans, who kept saying that Turkey should look into family planning.

One morning, Mevlut succumbed to Rayiha’s insistence and her tears and went to the local councilman for the certificate proving they were married. The councilman, who was also a real-estate broker, wasn’t in his office. Reluctant to return to Rayiha empty-handed, Mevlut wandered the streets of Tarlabaşı for a while: out of old habit from his days of unemployment, his eyes roamed around looking for a street vendor’s cart that was for sale, an acquaintance who might be looking for someone to work in his shop, or some furniture he could buy on the cheap. Over the past ten years, Tarlabaşı had filled with empty street vendors’ carts, some of which were left chained up on a corner even during the day. Mevlut thought of how, ever since he’d stopped selling boza at night, he had felt a tightness in his chest, and he’d lost some of the old urge to feel the chemistry of the streets on his skin.

He sat down for a cup of tea and talked about religion and the new mayor for a bit with the Kurdish scrap-metal dealer who’d married him and Rayiha in a religious ceremony thirteen years ago and had also given them all that guidance about sexual contact during Ramadan. There were even more bars with sidewalk tables out on the streets of Beyoğlu now. He asked the scrap-metal dealer about abortions. “It says in the Koran that it’s a big sin,” said the dealer, embarking on a detailed explanation, but Mevlut didn’t take him too seriously. If it really was such a horrible sin, why would so many people be having abortions all the time?

But there was something else the dealer had spoken of that stayed with Mevlut: how the souls of babies taken from their mothers’ wombs before birth climbed trees in heaven, hopping from branch to branch like orphaned birds, skipping restlessly like tiny white sparrows. He never mentioned this conversation to Rayiha, fearing she wouldn’t believe that the councilman hadn’t been in his office.

When he went back four days later, the councilman told him that his wife’s identity card had expired and that if Rayiha expected to obtain any sort of service from the government (Mevlut hadn’t specified what sort of service she was seeking), she would have to get a new identity card, just like everyone else. This kind of thing always scared Mevlut. His late father’s biggest lesson had been to steer clear of government records and their keepers. Mevlut had never paid the state any taxes. In return, they had taken his white rice cart and destroyed it.

Having convinced herself that her husband would eventually sign the permission form she needed for an abortion, Rayiha felt bad about having abandoned him at the shop, and so at the beginning of April, she started returning to Brothers-in-Law. One afternoon there, she threw up and tried to hide it from Mevlut, without success. Mevlut cleaned up his wife’s vomit before any customers could notice. In these final days of her life, Rayiha never came back there again.

It had been decided that in the afternoon, when they were done with school, Fatma and Fevziye would stop by Brothers-in-Law to wash glasses and help tidy up. Rayiha struggled to explain to them why she herself couldn’t go to help their father. But the fewer the people who knew about the baby — her daughters included — the simpler it would be to get rid of it.

Mevlut directed his daughters like cooks and nurses supporting frontline troops. Fatma would come in one day, and Fevziye the next. Mevlut made them wash the glasses and clean up, but he was too protective a father to let them serve customers and take payment, or even talk to anyone at all. They could confide in him, and they would have their usual long conversations about what they did in school, impersonators and comedians they liked on TV, their favorite scenes in some movie, or the latest episode of a show.

Fatma was smart, quiet, and sensible. She knew how much food and clothes cost and what every shop sold; she was aware of what people came to Brothers-in-Law, what condition the street was in, the doorman who sold illicit things through the beggar on the corner, her mother alone at home, and even what lay ahead for her father’s business. She was full of a protective love for him, which Mevlut could feel deeply. As he often proudly told Rayiha, if his store were ever a success one day (and if Fatma were a boy), Mevlut would comfortably leave it in her twelve-year-old hands.