Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

—

Süleyman.Korkut told me to keep an eye on poor Mevlut, so I never left his side. He would have almost fallen in again while shoveling earth into the grave if I hadn’t grabbed him from behind. At one point he ran out of strength and he couldn’t stand anymore. I helped him to another gravestone. He didn’t move until Rayiha’s coffin was buried and everyone had left.

—

If it had been up to him, Mevlut would never have left the spot where Süleyman had found him in the cemetery. He sensed that Rayiha needed his help. There had been too many people, and he’d forgotten some of the prayers he was meant to say, but he was sure that as soon as everyone was gone, the words would come rolling off his tongue, and he’d be able to give Rayiha what she needed. Mevlut knew that reciting prayers during the burial of the deceased and their soul’s ascent from the graveyard was meant to comfort them. The sight of all those different gravestones, the cypresses in the background, all the other trees and weeds, and the way the light shone down from the sky reminded Mevlut of the picture he’d found in the Righteous Path and cut out and framed with Rayiha for the wall of Brothers-in-Law. The similarity made him feel as if he’d already lived through this moment. He’d experienced this illusion before when out selling boza at night, and he’d always welcomed it as a pleasant trick his mind played on him.

Mevlut’s mind responded to Rayiha’s death in three distinct ways, all of which could feel like delusions in one moment, and reality the next:

The most persistent response was to refuse to believe that Rayiha had passed away. Even though his wife had died in his arms, Mevlut’s mind would often indulge in fantasies wherein no such thing had ever happened: Rayiha was in the other room, she’d just said something, in fact, though Mevlut hadn’t heard; she was going to walk in now; life would go on as usual.

The second response was anger at everyone and everything. He was angry at the taxi driver who’d been too slow getting Rayiha to hospital and the government clerks who had taken such a long time to issue her a new identity card, he was angry at the neighborhood councilman, the doctors, those who had abandoned him, the people who made everything so expensive, the terrorists, and the politicians. Most of all, he was angry at Rayiha: for leaving him all alone; for not giving birth to Mevlidhan; for refusing to be a mother.

His mind’s third response was to help Rayiha on her journey to the hereafter. He wanted to be of some use to her in the afterlife at least. Rayiha was so lonely now, down in that tomb. Her torment would be eased if Mevlut brought the girls to the cemetery to say a few prayers. Mevlut would start praying by Rayiha’s grave, and he would get all the words mixed up (he didn’t know what most of them meant anyway) or skip some altogether, but he would console himself with the thought that what really mattered was the intention behind the prayer.

In the first few months, Mevlut and his two daughters would follow their visits to Rayiha’s grave with a trip to Duttepe to see the Aktaş family. Aunt Safiye and Vediha would bring out food for the orphaned girls and give them some of the chocolates and cookies that they always made sure to have on hand on those days, and all four of them would sit and watch movies on TV.

On two of these visits to Duttepe, they saw Samiha there, too. Now that she was no longer scared of Süleyman, Mevlut understood why she would come back to the house she’d escaped all those years ago to be with Ferhat: Samiha endured the strain for the sake of seeing her nieces, so that she could console them and find her own consolation in their presence.

They were in Duttepe again one day when Vediha told Mevlut that if he was planning to take the girls to the village in Beyşehir that summer, she might come along, too. The old school in Cennetpınar, she explained, had been converted into a guesthouse, and Korkut regularly sent donations to the village development association. It was the first Mevlut had ever heard of this organization, though it was to grow increasingly influential as time went by. He thought that at least if he went to the village he wouldn’t spend too much money.

On the bus to Beyşehir with Fatma and Fevziye, Mevlut considered the possibility that he might never come back to Istanbul. But within three days he’d understood that the thought of staying in the village forever had been a meaningless fantasy stemming from his pain over losing Rayiha. The village was a dead end, and they could no longer be anything more than guests there. He did want to go back to the city. His life, his fury, his happiness, Rayiha — everything revolved around Istanbul.

Their grandmother and their aunts’ affection distracted his girls from their grief for a while, but they quickly exhausted any amusements country life had to offer. The village was still very poor. Any boys their age soon made Fatma and Fevziye uncomfortable with their attentions and their pranks. At night, the girls would sleep in the same room as their grandmother; they would talk to her and listen to her stories about village legends, historic disagreements, and ongoing feuds and rivalries between this person and that; it was fun, but sometimes it would scare them, too, and then they would remember that they had lost their mother. During that visit to the village, Mevlut realized that deep down he had always resented his mother for not having come to Istanbul and having left him and his father alone in the city. Had his mother and his sisters joined them there, perhaps Rayiha would have never come to the point where she saw no other option but to try to get rid of the baby by herself.

But it was soothing to hear his mother say “My poor Mevlut” and to be kissed and cuddled as if he were still a child. These tender moments would always make him feel like going to hide in a corner somewhere, but then he would find one last excuse to go back to his mother. His mother’s affection seemed to be laced with an anguish over not only Rayiha’s death but also Mevlut’s difficulties in Istanbul and his continuing dependence on his cousins for support. Unlike his father, Mevlut had never in twenty-five years been able to send any money back to his mother; that made him feel ashamed.

Throughout that summer, Mevlut found more pleasure in the companionship of his crooked-necked father-in-law — whom he went to see three times a week, walking over to Gümüşdere village with his daughters — than he did in spending time with his mother and sisters. Whenever they visited at lunchtime, Abdurrahman Efendi would slip Mevlut some rakı in one of those shatterproof glasses, making sure Fatma and Fevziye didn’t notice, and when his granddaughters were out dawdling in one of the many gardens nearby, he would tell his son-in-law allusive, allegorical tales. They had both seen their wives die young before they could give birth to a new child (a boy). They were both going to devote the rest of their lives to their daughters. They both knew that for each of them looking at any one of his daughters was always going to be a painful reminder of her mother.

During their last days in the countryside, Mevlut took his daughters to their mother’s village more frequently. When they walked along the tree-lined road over the barren hills, all three of them liked to stop every now and then to take in the view below, the outlines of little towns in the distance and the mosques with their slender minarets. They would look for long, silent minutes at smudges of green in the rocky soil, bright yellow fields lit up by the sun piercing through the clouds, the narrow line of the lake in the distance, and graveyards planted with cypress trees. Somewhere far away, there would be dogs barking. On the bus back to Istanbul, Mevlut realized that the landscapes of the village would always remind him of Rayiha.