Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Oooh, look, we’re moving again!”

“It’s not us, it’s just the train next to us,” said his father, laughing.

In the village school that Mevlut had attended for five years, a map of Turkey, with a flag on it and a portrait of Atatürk, used to hang right behind where the teacher stood, and throughout the journey, Mevlut tried to keep track of where they might be on that map. He fell asleep before the train entered Izmit and didn’t wake up again until they arrived in Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa station.

The many bundles, bags, and baskets they were carrying were so heavy that it took them a full hour to make their way down the stairs of Haydarpaşa train station and catch a ferry to Karaköy. That was the first time Mevlut saw the sea, in the evening twilight. The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep. There was a sweet smell of seaweed in the cool breeze. The European side of the city was sparkling with lights. It wasn’t his first sight of the sea but of these lights that Mevlut would never forget for the rest of his life. Once they got to the other side, the local buses wouldn’t let them on with all their luggage, so they walked for four hours all the way home to the edge of Zincirlikuyu.

The Hills at the End of the City

HOME WAS a gecekondu, a slum house. This was the word Mevlut’s father used to refer to this place whenever he got angry about its crudeness and poverty, but on those rare occasions when he wasn’t angry, he preferred to use the word “home,” with a tenderness akin to what Mevlut felt toward the house. This tenderness fostered the illusion that the place might hold traces of the eternal home that would one day be theirs in this world, but it was difficult to truly believe this. The gecekondu consisted of a single fairly large room. There was also a toilet next to it, which was a hole in the ground. At night, the sound of dogs fighting and howling in distant neighborhoods could be heard through the small unglazed window in the toilet.

When they arrived that first night, a man and a woman were already in the house, and Mevlut thought for a moment that they’d walked into the wrong building. Eventually it became clear that they were the lodgers Mevlut’s father had taken in for the summer. Mevlut’s father started arguing with them, but then he gave up and made a bed in another dark corner of the room, where father and son ended up sleeping side by side.

When Mevlut woke up toward noon the next day, there was no one home. He thought of how his father, his uncle, and eventually his cousins, too, had all lived in this house together only recently. Thinking back on the stories Korkut and Süleyman had told him over the summer, Mevlut tried to picture them in this room, but the place felt eerily abandoned. There was an old table, four chairs, two beds (one with bedsprings and one without), two cupboards, two windows, and a stove. After six winters working in this city, this was the extent of his father’s possessions. After arguing with his father last year, Mevlut’s uncle and cousins had moved out to a different house, taking their beds, their furniture, and the rest of their belongings. Mevlut couldn’t find a single thing that had been theirs. Looking inside a cupboard, he was pleased to see one or two things his father had brought over from the village, the woolen socks his mother had knit for him, his long johns, and a pair of scissors — now rusty — that Mevlut had once seen his sisters using back home.

The house had a dirt floor. Mevlut saw that, before leaving for the day, his father had laid out one of the straw mats they had carried from the village. His uncle and cousins must have taken the old one with them when they left last year.

The rough old table on which his father had left a fresh loaf of bread that morning was of hardwood and plywood both. Mevlut would put empty matchboxes and wooden shims under its one short leg to keep it steady, but every now and then the table would wobble, spilling soup or tea over them and making his father angry. He got angry about lots of things. Many times during the years they would spend together in this house after 1969 his father vowed to “fix the table,” but he never did.

Even when they were in a rush, sitting down and having dinner with his father in the evening made Mevlut happy, especially during his first few years in Istanbul. But because they soon had to go out to sell boza — either his father on his own or with Mevlut by his side — these dinners were nowhere near as fun as the lively, joyful meals they used to have back in the village, sitting on the floor, with his sisters and his mother. In his father’s gestures, Mevlut could always sense an eagerness to get to work as soon as possible. No sooner had he swallowed his last morsel than Mustafa Efendi would light up a cigarette, and before even half finishing it, he would say, “Let’s go.”

When he got back from school and before setting out again to sell boza, Mevlut liked to make soup, either on the stove or, if it wasn’t lit, on their little butane cooktop. Into a pot of boiling water, he would throw a spoonful of margarine and whatever was left in the fridge, such as carrots, celery, and potatoes, as well as a handful of the chilies and bulgur they’d brought from the village, and then he would stand back and listen to the pot bubbling away as he watched the infernal tumult inside. The little bits of potato and carrot whirled around madly like creatures burning in the fires of hell — you could almost hear them wailing in agony from inside the pot — and then there would be sudden unexpected surges, as in volcanic craters, and the carrots and celery would rise up close to Mevlut’s nose. He loved watching the potatoes turn yellow as they cooked and the carrots give their color off to the soup, and listening to the changing sounds the soup made as it bubbled away. He likened the ceaseless motion in the pot to the orbits of the planets, which he had learned about in geography class at his new school, the Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, and this made him think that he, too, was spinning around in this universe, just like these little particles in the soup. The hot steam from the pot smelled good, and it was nice to warm himself over it.

“The soup is delicious, my boy!” his father said every time. “I wonder if we should make you a cook’s apprentice?” On evenings when he didn’t go out to sell boza with his father but stayed at home to do his homework, as soon as his father had gone Mevlut would clear the table, take out his geography textbook, and start to memorize all of the city and country names, getting lost in sleepy daydreams as he looked at pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Buddhist temples in China. On days when he went to school in the morning and helped his father carry around the heavy yogurt trays in the afternoon, he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep as soon as they’d had their dinner. His father would wake him before going out again.

“Put your pajamas on and get under the blanket before you go to sleep, son. Otherwise you’ll freeze when the stove goes off.”

“Wait for me, Dad, I’m coming, too,” Mevlut would say without really waking up, as if talking in his sleep.

When he was left alone in the house at night, and set his mind to his geography homework, try as he might Mevlut could never ignore altogether the noise of the wind howling through the window, the relentless scurrying about of mice and of imps, the sounds outside of footsteps and of wailing dogs. These city dogs were more restless, more desperate, than the dogs back in the village. There were frequent power cuts so Mevlut couldn’t even do his homework, and in the darkness the flames and the crackling from the stove seemed bigger and louder, and he became convinced that there was an eye watching him closely from the shadows in a corner of the room. If he took his eyes off his geography book, the owner of the eye would realize that Mevlut had seen it and would certainly pounce on him, so there were times when Mevlut couldn’t even bring himself to get up and go to bed, and slept with his head resting on his books.