Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

—

Samiha.“This cannot go on,” I told Ferhat the other morning. “You stay out until dawn, and the only time I get to see you, you’re asleep. Keep it up, and I’m going to leave you.”

“You can’t! I would die! You’re my reason for doing it, my reason for living,” he said. “We’ve been through hell, me and you, but we’ve almost made it, finally. I just have this one last big job. Let me get it done, and then I’ll buy you not one but two whole farms down south.”

As usual, I believed him more or less, but only up to a point; the rest of the way, I just pretended to. It’s been two years since Rayiha died; how quickly the time has gone by. Now I’m a year older than she was then, and still I don’t have a child, or a real husband. When I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I told Vediha everything.

“First of all, Samiha, Ferhat is a good husband!” she said. “Most men are bad-tempered, pigheaded boors. Ferhat isn’t like that. Most men are stingy, especially when it comes to their wives. But all over this lovely place of yours I can see money’s been spent. Most men beat their wives, too. You’ve never mentioned anything like that. I know he loves you. You’d be insane to leave him. Ferhat is a good person, deep down. You can’t just leave a house and a husband like that. Where would you go anyway? Come on now, let’s go to the movies.”

My sister may know everything, but she sure can’t see why a person would need to stand up for herself.

When I brought it up with Ferhat again and told him I really was going to leave this time, he just scoffed: “I might be about to take down Sami from Sürmene and his empire, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”

The most upsetting thing, though, was when I found out that apparently Mevlut had been giving his daughters a hard time about their visits: “Why are you always going over to your aunt’s?” I won’t tell you which one of the girls gave her father away. But I found out that he doesn’t like the idea of their coming here and learning how to put makeup on, wear lipstick, and dress themselves.

“He should be ashamed of himself!” said Vediha. “He’s still brooding about those stupid letters. You should tell Ferhat. Isn’t he Mevlut’s boss now?”

I didn’t tell Ferhat a thing. Once I’d made my decision, I went over every detail in my head, again and again. And then I began to wait.

—

Ferhat.There are two ways to bring down a big nightclub, an expensive restaurant, or a small hotel: (1) You worm your way in and find out where all the illegal cables are, under the pretext of showing the owners even newer and smarter ways to connect to the mains. Then you make a deal with their enemies and arrange for a raid. (2) You find the expert electrician who’d rigged their illegal hookups in the first place and try to get it out of him: which walls are hiding which cables, whether this and that circuit is real or a red herring, et cetera. The second way is definitely more dangerous, because the expert in question (usually a former government clerk) might figure he can do better for himself by going straight to the owners he did the job for and telling them all about the little rat who’s so interested in their wiring. Where there’s a lot of money to be made, there’s also a lot of blood to be spilled. You couldn’t make any bricks or tiles without electricity, could you?

My two elderly clerks in the records office of Seven Hills Electric warned me about the dangers I might face. They also told me that the meter readings for the Sunshine Club, as well as most of the homes, cafés, and offices in the area, were all handled by an older inspector, a guy so strict that he’d come to be known as the Admiral. This man had flourished with all the new fines he could slap on people, and his work had caught my two clerks’ eye. From the inspectors’ office, we obtained the Admiral’s most recent meter readings for the Sunshine Club. Using these records and all the old ones in the archives, the old clerks got busy working out the various methods by which the Sunshine Club had stolen most of its power during forty years in business. Where had they hidden the cables? How had they bypassed the meter? Could we trust the notes we’d found? I hung on their every word.

“It wouldn’t take much to bring this place crashing down. Allah help us!” said one of the clerks, excitedly. They were both so energized they forgot I was even there. Nightclub wars were the worst kind of trouble: back in the day, when rival establishments and their gangs declared war on each other, they would kidnap each other’s singers and belly dancers and hold them hostage, shooting them in the kneecaps eventually. Another common ploy was for a gang to go into a rival nightclub as ordinary customers, politely request a song, and start a brawl when it wasn’t played. With contacts in the press, you could arrange for everyone to hear about these fights, which sometimes ended in murder, and soon enough customers would stop coming to that nightclub, leading its owners to send their own guys over to the other place to do the same to them, and on and on with more gunfire and more bloodshed. I loved those old clerks’ stories.

After studying the situation for another week, I met with the owners of the Moonlight Club again. I said I could provide them with all the necessary schematics.

“Excellent. Don’t give them to anyone else,” said Mr. Mustache. “We’ve got a plan. Where do you live? I’ll send our guys over to explain everything. You never know, it’s always safer to talk at home.”

When he said “home,” my first thought was Samiha. I wanted to run back that evening and tell her how close we were to the end of our long road. I was going to burst in and say, “We’re bringing down the Sunshine Club.” Samiha was going to be so happy: not only would we finally be rich, but we’d be sticking it to those exploitative fat cats. But when I did eventually make it home, it was already quite late, and I fell asleep on the living room couch. When I woke up in the morning, I saw that Samiha was gone.

—

The Holy Guide hadn’t taught Mevlut any magic words to chase the dogs away. Was there any truth to his pronouncement that they took against those who didn’t belong to this land? If that was really the reason that dogs barked at people, they should never have barked at Mevlut, who even in the newest and most remote neighborhoods never once felt himself a stranger as he wandered among the city’s concrete buildings, grocery stores, and laundry lines, its posters for cram schools and banks, and its bus stops, speaking to old men who always wanted to pay their bills some other day and kids with snot running from their noses. In fact, the dogs had toned down their growling somewhat since Mevlut’s latest visit to the Holy Guide in February 1997. He felt there were two reasons for this welcome development.

First: the street dogs had begun to lose their grip on these outlying areas. These places didn’t have any ancient cemeteries like the one in the picture Mevlut had cut out from the Righteous Path, and so during the day the strays had nowhere to shelter as a pack while they waited for nightfall. On top of this, the municipal authorities had equipped these neighborhoods with huge and heavy-wheeled dumpsters resembling mining trolleys. The dogs weren’t strong enough to tip over these little fortresses to scavenge for food.

The other reason Mevlut was now less afraid of dogs had to do with his greater magnanimity toward the poor souls who lived in these deprived neighborhoods and couldn’t pay their bills. He didn’t strut around these places like some high-handed bureaucratic zealot determined to eradicate every last illicit connection. If he turned up at a house outside the city and found a few pathetic cables hooked up to a high-voltage main nearby, he would give a range of meaningful looks (perhaps even asking some pointed questions) making clear to whoever was home — be it a retired old man, a middle-aged Kurdish lady who’d fled the war, some unemployed and irascible father, or an angry mother — that he knew exactly what they were up to. But when they proceeded to deny it, affecting all the sincerity they could, he would, in turn, affect to believe every word. They would thus feel they’d out smarted the inspector and start denying every other little misdeed Mevlut had spotted: there was no circuit bypassing the meter; nothing had been wedged under the rotor disk either; this was certainly not the sort of household where people tampered with the display dials to make the reading lower. But when confronted with these further denials, Mevlut would make it very clear that he didn’t believe any of it. And so it was that he was able to infiltrate the city’s roughest and most isolated parts, identify the most blatant instances of electricity theft, and come out with a decent amount of money to hand to Ferhat at the end of the day — all without angering the majority of the locals or the dogs, ever alert to the presence of a hostile intruder. “Mevlut, you’ve somehow managed to bridge the gulf between what people think in private and what they say in public,” said Ferhat one day when Mevlut told him he’d started getting along with the stray dogs again. “You’ve got this whole nation figured out. I’ve got a favor to ask of you now, but it has to do with my private life, not my public life.”