Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“You’ve been bullied by your brother long enough, but if you could get away from him, Süleyman, you’d be a new man. We have nothing to fear from anyone.”

This whole thing would get us talking about whether I would ever start wearing a headscarf. “I’ll think about it,” I’d say. “But there are some things I can do, and some things I just can’t.”

“Me too,” Süleyman would say dejectedly. “So you tell me what you feel you can do.”

“Sometimes women agree to have a religious wedding on top of the civil ceremony, just to spare their well-meaning husbands any headaches…I can do that. But first your family has to come to the house in Üsküdar and formally ask my parents for my hand.”

—

In the autumn of 1995, Mevlut returned to Istanbul and his job at the advertising agency parking lot. The Groom — who understood entirely that Mevlut had to return to his village after the death of his wife — gave him back all his duties, which had been assigned to the doorman in his absence. Mevlut saw that in the three months he’d been away, Kemal from Zonguldak’s gang had expanded its territory, shifting its borders with the help of two flowerpots and a few loose curbstones. More worrying, they had adopted an aggressive new tone toward Mevlut. But he didn’t mind. After Rayiha’s death, he was constantly angry at everyone and everything, but for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to feel that way about this young man from Zonguldak with his new navy blazer.

At night, he still went out to sell boza, and he devoted the rest of his energy to his daughters. But his attentions never got beyond a few very basic questions: “Have you done your homework?” “Are you hungry?” “Are you okay?” He was aware that they spent even more time at their aunt Samiha’s now and that they didn’t really want to talk to him about their visits. So when the doorbell rang one morning after Fatma and Fevziye had left for school, and he opened the door to find Ferhat behind it, he thought for a moment that his friend must want to talk about his girls.

“You can’t live in this neighborhood anymore unless you’ve got a gun,” said Ferhat. “Drugs, prostitutes, transvestites, all kinds of gangs…We’ve got to find you and the girls a new place somewhere…”

“We’re happy here; this is Rayiha’s home.”

Ferhat said there was something very important he wanted to talk about and took Mevlut to one of the new cafés on Taksim Square. They watched the crowds pouring into Beyoğlu and talked for a long time. Eventually, Mevlut understood that his friend was offering him a job as a sort of electricity inspector’s apprentice.

“But do you have any private doubts about this?”

“In this case, what I’m saying and what I feel privately are identical,” said Ferhat. “This job will make you happy, it’ll make the girls happy, and it’ll even make Rayiha happy, worried as she must be about you all, up there in heaven. You’re going to be making good money.”

In fact, the salary Mevlut would draw from Seven Hills Electric wasn’t very high, but working as Ferhat’s so-called assistant, chasing after past-due bills, would still pay more than looking after the Groom’s parking lot. But he sensed that to arrive at this “good money” would involve taking a cut from what he was able to collect from customers.

“These new owners from Kayseri know full well that their employees will take advantage where they can,” said Ferhat. “Just bring your middle-school diploma, proof of address, your identity card, and six passport photos, and we can get you started within three days. We’ll do a few rounds together to start, and I’ll teach you everything you need to know. You’re an honest, fair-minded man, Mevlut, and that’s why we really want you to join us.”

“May God acknowledge your good deeds,” said Mevlut, and as he paced around the parking lot later, he thought of how Ferhat hadn’t even noticed the sarcasm in those words. Three days later, he phoned the number Ferhat had given him.

“For the first time in your life, you’ve made the right decision,” said Ferhat.

In two days, they met at the bus stop in Kurtuluş. Mevlut had worn his best blazer and a pair of unstained trousers. Ferhat had brought a bag that had once belonged to one of the two elderly bookkeepers. “You’ll need one of these inspector’s bags,” he said. “They scare people.”

They went into a street on the outer edges of Kurtuluş. Mevlut still came to this neighborhood to sell boza sometimes. At night, neon lamps and the light from TV sets gave this street a more modern air, but in its unassuming daytime guise, it looked just as it had twenty-five years ago when he was in middle school. They spent the whole morning in that neighborhood, inspecting almost two hundred fifty electric meters from the same logbook.

The first thing they would do upon entering a building was check the meters downstairs near the doorman’s quarters. “Number seven’s got a load of unpaid bills; they’ve had two warnings in the past five months and still haven’t paid, but look: their meter is spinning away,” Ferhat would say, in the tone of one trying to instill learning. He’d take the logbook from his bag, squinting every now and then as he leafed through it. “Number six filed a complaint about two supposed overcharges from around this time last year. Looks like we never cut their power off. And yet their meter’s completely still. Huh. Let’s have a look.”

They’d climb up to the third floor, through the smell of mold, onions, and frying oil, and ring the doorbell of number 7. Before anyone could answer, Ferhat would call out “Electric company!” like an unforgiving inquisitor. An electricity inspector at the door would throw the household into a panic, and there was something about Ferhat’s manner that could break into a family’s private world even as he silently rebuked them for it. Mevlut had learned these nuances in his own way, during all the years he’d spent delivering yogurt door to door. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t just his honesty that had led Ferhat to seek his help but also his experience navigating the intimate world of private households — in particular, his ability to talk to women without making them feel harassed.

The door to a home with an unpaid bill might open, but it could also stay shut. In that case, Mevlut would do as Ferhat showed him, checking to see whether he could hear any sounds coming from inside. If the approaching footsteps they’d heard just after they rang the bell suddenly stopped after they called out “Electric company!” it meant, of course, that there was someone inside unwilling to settle their debt. Usually, though, the door would open, and they would be faced with a housewife, a mother, a middle-aged auntie trying to tie up her headscarf, a woman with a child in her arms, a ghostly old grandpa, an angry idler, a woman in pink dishwashing gloves, or a very old lady who could barely see.

“Electric company!” Ferhat would again say officiously through the open door. “You have unpaid bills!”

Some would reply immediately: “Come back tomorrow, inspector, I don’t have any change” or “We don’t have any money today!” Others would say, “What do you mean, son, we pay our bills at the bank every month.” Others still would insist, “We paid it only yesterday” or “We send our doorman to the bank with the money every month.”

“I don’t know about that, but it says on here that you have overdue charges,” Ferhat would say. “It’s all automated now; the computer does everything. We’re required to cut your power off if you refuse to pay.”