Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Süleyman Gets into a Tight Spot

Ferhat.I spent the summer of 1995 out on the streets and in the records office of Seven Hills Electric looking for traces of Selvihan, my electric lover. I’ve lost count of how many cigarettes and cups of tea I had sitting with those two dogged bookkeepers in that room with endless shelves of cardboard binders bound with metal rings and secured with padlocks, and all those faded envelopes and folders heaving with eighty-year-old bundles of grimy paper. Seven Hills Electric may have changed names a few times, but its dusty archives provided a full history of the production and distribution of electric power in Istanbul, starting in 1914 with the Silahtar power station. Those two elderly clerks believed that only by studying this history and learning all of the tricks people had come up with over the years to cheat the government, and only by truly understanding the ins and outs of how they used and paid for their electricity, could an inspector ever hope to get them to pay their bills.

Halfway through the summer, we realized that Seven Hills Electric’s new owners, who hailed from the Anatolian heartland, might not agree. They were trying to sell the archives for scrap to dealers who bought paper by the kilo — or, failing that, to have the whole lot incinerated. “They’ll have to burn us with it!” said the older of the two clerks in response to these rumors, while the other railed that if there was anything worse than capitalism, it was these new-money hicks from Anatolia. They soon resolved that they might do better getting me to appeal to our new owners from Kayseri and make them understand that the archives were a crucial and irreplaceable tool for the collection of bills; maybe that would save this vast treasure trove of human ingenuity from destruction.

We started from the oldest records, whole folders of thick, fragrant white paper predating the foundation of the Republic and the abandonment of Arabic script for the Latin alphabet in 1928, and bearing handwritten notes in Ottoman Turkish and French. We moved on to the records for the 1930s, showing which new neighborhoods had been connected to the grid and where consumption was highest, and here my pair of historians informed me that in those days Istanbul still had a very large non-Muslim population. They leafed through the yellowing sheets of one-hundred-, five-hundred-, and nine-hundred-page logbooks in which previous clerks had taken detailed notes on the far-flung households they had visited and the ingenious stratagems for thievery they had discovered, this by way of explaining to me how a new system introduced in the 1950s had given each inspector a specific set of neighborhoods to oversee, just as local Ottoman governors used to do, and how this had allowed them to maintain a surveillance of people’s lives, like policemen.

These frayed and torn logs followed a color code: white for households, purple for shops, and red for factories. Purple and red were usually the worst offenders, but if “the young inspector Mr. Ferhat” took a closer look at the “elucidations” sections on each sheet and kept up with those old government inspectors’ heroic efforts to record what they saw, he would notice that, after the 1970s, the city’s poorer neighborhoods — Zeytinburnu, Taşlıtarla, and Duttepe and its environs — had all become fertile breeding grounds for electricity theft. The electricity board’s employees had filled these “elucidation” boxes — which became the “comments” section in later versions of the logbooks — with their insights on their customers, the meters they inspected, and the various schemes of power theft they discovered, all spelled out in a variety of now-indecipherable hands, using purple pens and ballpoints that only worked if you wet the tip with your tongue. My intuition told me that all of this knowledge was bringing me closer to Selvihan.

Notes like “New fridge” or “Noted second electric stove” helped meter inspectors to estimate how many kilowatt-hours a household should have consumed in a particular period. The two clerks believed that based on these records, you could clearly deduce the date on which any given home acquired a fridge, an iron, a washing machine, an electric stove, or any other household appliance. Other remarks—“Gone back to the village,” “Away at a wedding for two months,” “Gone to their summerhouse,” “Two people staying over from their hometown”—offered an account of movements to and from the city as they might affect energy consumption. But whenever I found any meter readings for a nightclub, a kebab restaurant, or Turkish classical-music bar owned by Sami from Sürmene, I would focus on those and ignore all the other elucidations. So the two elderly clerks would call my attention to even-more-intriguing notes: “Fix bill to nail over doorknob.” “Follow wall next to neighborhood water fountain — meter behind fig tree.” “Tall bespectacled man is mad. Avoid.” “Beware of dog in garden. His name is Count. Will not attack if called by name.” “Lights on top floor of nightclub have second set of wires running from outside the building.”

Whoever had written that last comment was, in my guides’ opinion, a hero, a brave soul truly dedicated to his job. If they discovered a nightclub or a secret gambling den (I’d heard that Sami from Sürmene was involved in that racket, too) artfully stealing power, most inspectors would avoid taking official note of it; that way, when they were offered money to look the other way, they wouldn’t have to kick back to their superiors. Whenever I came across this kind of tip-off, I would head out for a surprise inspection of the café, restaurant, or nightclub that corresponded to that particular meter, fantasizing all the while of how close I was to taking down Sami from Sürmene and rescuing my beloved Selvihan from his clutches.

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Mahinur Meryem.I was almost forty years old when I became pregnant with Süleyman’s child. At that age, a woman on her own has to think about her future and how she will live for the rest of her life. We’d been together for ten years. I may have been naïve enough to believe all Süleyman’s lies and excuses, but I guess my body knew what was necessary better than I did.

As I expected, Süleyman didn’t take the news well. At first he accused me of making it up to force him to marry me. But as we got drunk and screamed at each other in that apartment in Cihangir, he began to realize that I really was carrying his baby, and he got scared. He got very drunk and wrecked the place, which was very upsetting, but I could also see that he was pleased. After that, we argued every time he visited, though I kept trying to appease him. His threats and his drinking only got worse, though. He even threatened to stop supporting my singing career.

“Forget the music, Süleyman, I would die for this baby,” I would tell him sometimes.

Those words would soften him, and he would become gentle again. But even when he didn’t, we would still have violent sex after every fight.

“How can you make love to a woman that way and then just leave?” I would say.

Süleyman would look down in embarrassment. But sometimes, on his way out, he would say that if I kept hectoring him, I would never see him again.

“Then this is our farewell, Süleyman,” I would say, closing the door with tears in my eyes. He started coming by every day of the week after that, and meanwhile the baby kept growing in my womb. That didn’t stop him from trying to slap me a couple of times.

“Go on, Süleyman, hit me,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be able to get rid of me the way you people got rid of Rayiha.”

Sometimes he looked so helpless that I would feel sorry for him. He would sit there — QUIETLY and POLITELY — agonizing about his life like a merchant whose fleet has just sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea and knocking back rakı like it was water, and I would tell him how happy we were going to be, how looking into his soul I saw a diamond in the rough, and how rare it was to find the kind of closeness and understanding we shared.