Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Sometimes when he was out selling boza in distant neighborhoods, Mevlut thought how Ferhat probably agreed with all those who thought that there must be something “not quite right” with Mevlut that he should still be bothering with boza. Maybe Samiha thought that, too. But in the end she’d left Ferhat. No woman had ever left Mevlut.

He got home one night in November to find a police car parked outside, and his mind went straight to Ferhat. It didn’t occur to him that the police might have come for him. When he walked into the building and saw the officer standing on the stairs, the door to his apartment thrown open, and the fear on Fatma’s and Fevziye’s faces, his immediate reaction was to think that it wasn’t him the police were after, that this must all have to do with some scheme of Ferhat’s.

“We just need to take your father’s statement tonight,” said the officer, trying to comfort the girls, who were crying as they watched their father go.

But Mevlut knew that in any police case, whether it involved drugs, politics, or just an ordinary murder, such reassurances were always misleading. Sometimes, people who were taken away for questioning didn’t come home for years. The police station was only five minutes away; they would never have sent a car if all they’d wanted to do was take him there for a statement.

As the police car drove through the night, Mevlut told himself over and over again that he was innocent. Ferhat may have done something wrong, though. Mevlut had cooperated with him. Maybe that meant he was guilty — at least in his intentions. A feeling of contrition surged through him like a wave of nausea.

Once they got to the police station, it became clear that they weren’t going to take his statement right away. He’d anticipated this, but he still couldn’t help feeling disappointed. They threw Mevlut in a spacious cell. There was some light from an old lamp in the corridor, but the back of the cell was dark. Mevlut guessed that there were two other people in there. The first man was asleep. The second was drunk and seemed to be quietly complaining about something. Like the first man, Mevlut curled up on the cold floor in a corner of the cell and rested his ear against his shoulder so he wouldn’t have to hear the second man’s voice.

The thought of Fatma’s and Fevziye’s scared and tearful expressions as he’d left the house dampened his spirits. The best thing to do now was to wallow in his misery until he fell asleep, just as he used to do as a child. What would Rayiha say if she could see her husband right now? She’d say, “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from Ferhat?” He thought about the way she used to push her hair back like a little girl, her flashes of anger, and the mischievous smile she would give him every time she found a clever way to make things simpler in the kitchen. How they used to laugh, sometimes! Had Rayiha been alive now, Mevlut would have been less apprehensive about what was going to happen. They were definitely going to beat him up when they questioned him in the morning; they might even whip his feet or give him electric shocks. Ferhat had told him so many stories about how evil the police were. Now he was at their mercy. It’ll be all right! he told himself, trying to calm down. He’d been scared of getting beaten during military service, too, but it had all been fine in the end. He didn’t sleep all night. When he heard the morning call to prayer, he understood what a privilege it was to be free to go out into the street and the flow of city life.

When they took him to the interrogation room, he felt sick with exhaustion and worry. What should he do if they hit him or whipped his feet to try to extract information? Mevlut’s left-wing friends had told him countless stories of brave men who’d died while heroically enduring all sorts of tortures; he would have liked to emulate them, but what was the secret he was supposed to hide? Ferhat must have been using Mevlut’s name in some dirty business. Getting involved in the electricity racket had been a huge mistake.

“Do you think you’re at home?” said a man in plain clothes. “You don’t sit down until I say so.”

“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

“We’ll decide whether you’ve done anything wrong, but first let’s see if you know how to tell the truth.”

“I will tell the truth,” said Mevlut, with courage and conviction. They seemed impressed with his words.

They asked him what he’d been doing two nights ago. He said he’d gone out to sell boza, just as he did every night, and told them which streets and neighborhoods he’d been to and which apartments he’d entered at what time.

At one point, the questioning had slowed down. Mevlut looked through the open door and saw Süleyman walk past, led along by a policeman. What was he doing here? Before he could sort his thoughts out, the police told him that Ferhat had been murdered in his home two nights ago. They watched Mevlut’s face closely to see how he reacted. They asked about Ferhat’s work as an electricity inspector. Mevlut didn’t say anything that might get either Ferhat or Süleyman in trouble. His friend was dead.

“There was some bad blood between this Süleyman Aktaş and Fer hat Yılmaz, right?” they kept saying. Mevlut explained how all that was history; Süleyman was happily married now, he’d had a child, and he would have never done anything like that. They reminded him that Ferhat’s wife had left him and taken refuge in Süleyman’s house. Mevlut said it wasn’t Süleyman’s doing, and he never went to that house anymore anyway. He’d heard about all this from Vediha. Mevlut never stopped defending both his friends’ innocence. Who could have killed Ferhat? Did Mevlut suspect anyone? He didn’t. Did Mevlut bear any ill will toward Ferhat? Had they ever had any disagreements over money or women? He didn’t, and they hadn’t. Would he have expected Ferhat to be murdered? He wouldn’t.

Sometimes the police forgot he was there and started talking about other things, catching up with a colleague who’d opened the door, or teasing each other about the football results. Mevlut took all this to mean that he probably wasn’t in too much trouble.

At one point he thought he heard someone say: “Three men running after the same girl!” They all laughed at that, as if none of it had anything to do with Mevlut. Could Süleyman have told the police about the letters? Mevlut began to lose hope.

When they sent him back to the cell after the interrogation, the guilt he’d been feeling turned into panic: they were going to beat him up until he told them all about the letters and how Süleyman had tricked him. For a moment, he felt so ashamed that he wanted to die. But soon he realized he was probably exaggerating. Yes, it was certainly true that all three of them had fallen in love with Samiha. Mevlut also knew that if he told the police, Those letters were actually meant for Rayiha, they would probably just laugh at him and move on.

In the afternoon, while he was busy rehearsing all these explanations, they let him go. Outside, he began to grieve over Ferhat. It felt like a major part of his life and memories had been wiped out. But the urge to go home and hug his daughters was so strong that by the time he got on the bus to Taksim, he was euphoric.

The girls weren’t home, and in its empty state, the house depressed him. Fatma and Fevziye had left without doing the dishes: he felt a rising melancholy, and he was oddly even a little afraid at the sight of the same boza utensils he’d been using for thirty years, Rayiha’s basil plant on the windowsill, and the big cockroaches that had gathered enough courage in just two days to start scuttling about like they owned the place. It was as if the room had turned into someplace else overnight, and everything inside it had very slightly changed shape.