Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Why didn’t you turn off the stove and get into bed, son?” his father would say when he came back in the middle of the night feeling tired and irritable.

The streets were freezing cold, so his father didn’t mind that the house was warm, but at the same time he didn’t like to see so much wood used up in the stove. As he was reluctant to admit to this, he would say, at most, “Turn off the stove if you’re going to sleep.”

His father either got their firewood from Uncle Hasan’s little shop or else chopped it himself with a neighbor’s ax. Before winter arrived, Mevlut’s father taught him how to light the stove using dry twigs and bits of newspaper, and where to find these sticks and scraps in the nearby hills.

In the first months after they’d arrived in the city, on returning from his yogurt rounds, Mevlut’s father would take him farther up Kültepe, the hill on which they lived. Their house was at the edge of the city, on the lower part of a balding, muddy hill dotted with mulberry trees, and with a fig tree here and there. At the bottom, the hill was bound by traces of a narrow little creek, which wended its way around and through the other hills, from Ortaköy to the Bosphorus. The women of the families who had migrated here in the midfifties from impoverished villages around Ordu, Gümüşhane, Kastamonu, and Erzincan used to grow corn and wash their laundry all along the creek, just as they had done back home, and in summer their children would swim in its shallow waters. Back then, the creek was known by its old Ottoman name Buzludere, “Icy Creek,” but the waste generated over fifteen years by more than eighty thousand Anatolian migrant settlers on the surrounding hills, and by a multitude of factories, small and large, soon caused the river to be known as Bokludere, “Dung Creek.” By the time Mevlut arrived in Istanbul, neither name was used anymore, as the river had long been forgotten, absorbed by the growing city and mostly buried under layers of concrete from its source to its mouth.

At the top of Kültepe, “Ash Hill,” Mevlut’s father showed him the remains of an old waste-incineration plant whose ashes had given the hill its name. From here, you could see the slums that were rapidly taking over the surrounding hills (Duttepe, Kuştepe, Esentepe, Gültepe, Harmantepe, Seyrantepe, Oktepe, et cetera), the city’s biggest cemetery (Zincirlikuyu), factories of all shapes and sizes, garages, workshops, depots, medicine and lightbulb manufacturers, and, in the distance, the ghostly silhouette of the city with its tall buildings and its minarets. The city itself and its neighborhoods — where Mevlut and his father sold yogurt in the mornings and boza in the evenings, and where Mevlut went to school — were only mysterious smudges on the horizon.

Farther out still, you could see the blue hills on the Asian side of the city. The Bosphorus was nestled between these hills, and although invisible from Kültepe, whenever Mevlut climbed up the hill during his first months in the city, he always thought he could glimpse its blue waters between the mountains. Atop each hill that sloped down to the sea was one of those enormous transmission towers carrying a key power line into the city. The wind made strange noises when it blew against these gigantic steel constructions, and on humid days, the buzz of the cables scared Mevlut and his friends. On the barbed wire surrounding the tower was a picture of a skull warning DANGER OF DEATH, the sign pockmarked with bullet holes.

When he first used to come up here to gather sticks and paper, Mevlut would look out at the view below and assume that the danger came not from the electricity but from the city itself. People said that it was forbidden and bad luck to get too close to the enormous towers, but most of the neighborhood got its electricity from illicit cables expertly hooked into this main line.

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Mustafa Efendi.So that he would understand the hardship we’ve endured, I told my son how all the hills around here, except for ours and Duttepe, still lacked power. I told him that when his uncle and I first came here six years ago, there was no electricity anywhere, no water supply or any sewage drains either. I showed him those places on the other hills where Ottoman sultans used to hunt and where soldiers took their target practice, the greenhouses where the Albanians grew strawberries and flowers, the dairy farm run by those who lived in Kâğıthane, and the white graveyard, where the bodies of soldiers who died in the typhus epidemic during the Balkan War of 1912 were covered with lime; I told him just so he wouldn’t be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy. I didn’t want to crush his spirit entirely, though, so I also showed him the Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, where we would soon have him enrolled, the dirt field laid out for the Duttepe football team, the Derya Cinema with its feeble projector, which had just opened this summer among the mulberry trees, and the site of the Duttepe Mosque, which had been under construction for four years now, sponsored by the baker and contractor Hadji Hamit Vural and his men, all from Rize, with their matching oversize chins to prove it. On the slopes to the right of the mosque, I pointed out the house his uncle Hasan had finished building last year on the plot we had marked out together four years ago with a wall of whitewashed stones. “When your uncle and I arrived here six years ago, all of these hills were empty!” I said. I explained that for the poor souls who’d come here from far away the priority was to find a job and settle down in the city, and in order to get to the city ahead of everyone else in the mornings, they all tried to build their homes as close as possible to the roads at the foot of the hills, so that you could almost see the neighborhoods growing from the bottom of each hill toward the top.

Oh, My Boy, Istanbul Is a Little Scary, Isn’t It?

LYING IN BED at night during his first months in Istanbul, Mevlut would listen closely to the sounds of the city drifting in from afar. He would wake up with a start on some quiet nights to the faint sound of dogs barking in the distance, and when he realized that his father wasn’t back yet, he would bury his head under the blanket and try to go back to sleep. When it seemed that Mevlut’s nighttime fear of dogs was getting out of hand, his father took him to a holy man in a wooden house in Kasımpaşa who said a few prayers and breathed a blessing over Mevlut. Mevlut would remember it all many years later.

He discovered in a dream one night that the vice principal of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, the so-called Skeleton, looked just like the skull on the DANGER OF DEATH sign on the electric transmission tower. (Mevlut and his father had met Skeleton when they had gone to present Mevlut’s primary-school certificate from the village so that they could enroll him.) Mevlut didn’t dare look up from his math homework lest he should come face-to-face with the demon that he believed was always watching him from the darkness outside the window. That was why sometimes, when he wanted to go to sleep, he couldn’t even work up the courage to get up and go to bed.

Mevlut got to know Kültepe, Duttepe, and the neighborhoods of the surrounding hills through Süleyman, who had become very famil iar with the whole area in the year he’d already spent there. Mevlut saw many gecekondu homes, some of whose foundations had only just been laid, some with the walls only half built, and others awaiting the finishing touches. Most of them were occupied by men only. The majority of those who had come to Kültepe and Duttepe from Konya, Kastamonu, and Gümüşhane these past five years had either left their wives and children behind, as Mevlut’s father had done, or were single men with no prospects for marriage, no gainful employment, or any property whatsoever back in their village. They left their doors open sometimes, and Mevlut would see as many as six or seven single men in one room, all sleeping like logs, and in those moments he could really feel the sullen presence of the dogs that lurked about. The dogs must have been able to detect the thick smell of stale breath, sweat, and sleeping bodies. Unmarried men were aggressive, unfriendly, and always scowling, so Mevlut was mostly afraid of them.