Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Every now and then in those early weeks of 1999, Mevlut said to his daughter, “I can come and pick you up after cram school.” The classes Fatma was taking in Şişli to prepare for the college entrance exams sometimes ended at around the same time Mevlut was done with his day’s work at the clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy; but Fatma never wanted her father to come. It wasn’t that she came home late; Mevlut knew her class timetable well. Fatma and Fevziye cooked his dinner every evening with the same pots and pans their mother had used for years.

That year, Fatma and Fevziye insisted that their father get a telephone installed in the house. The prices had gone down; everyone was having a phone line hooked up nowadays, and once you sent in your application, you usually got connected within three months. Mevlut kept putting it off, worried about the extra expense and the idea of his daughters spending their days glued to the phone. He was especially wary at the prospect of Samiha calling them every day and telling them what to do. When his daughters told him they were “going to Duttepe,” Mevlut knew that often they just went to Şişli instead and spent the day at the cinema, in cake shops, and browsing shopping malls with their aunt Samiha. Their aunt Vediha would come along, too, sometimes, without telling Korkut.

Mevlut did not attempt to sell ice cream during the summer of 1999. A traditional ice-cream vendor with a three-wheeled cart could hardly move around Şişli and the city center anymore, let alone make decent sales. Nowadays those were only to be had in the older neighborhoods, where children played football in the street on summer afternoons, but Mevlut’s growing responsibilities at the migrants’ association always kept him busy during those hours.

One evening in June, after Fatma had successfully completed her second year of high school, Süleyman came by the clubhouse on his own. He took Mevlut to a new place in Osmanbey and asked him to do something that made our hero deeply uncomfortable.

—

Süleyman.Bozkurt was nineteen by the time he finally managed to finish high school. That was only because Korkut forked out the cash to get him enrolled in one of those private schools at which you can basically buy your child a diploma. He hasn’t done well enough on the college entrance exams this year (or last year) to earn a place at a decent university, and now he’s really losing his way. Apparently he crashed his car twice and even spent a night in jail following a drunken brawl. So his father decided to send him off to do his military service at the age of twenty. The boy rebelled and became so depressed that he stopped eating properly. Bozkurt told his mother that he is in love with Fatma. But he didn’t actually ask them to arrange a match or anything like that. When Fatma and Fevziye came to Duttepe this spring, they got into another argument with Bozkurt and Turan. The girls got offended, and they haven’t been back to Duttepe since. (Mevlut has no idea.) Not seeing Fatma anymore was making Bozkurt heartsick. So Korkut said, “Let’s get them engaged before we send him off to the army, otherwise he’s going to get swallowed up by Istanbul.” Korkut mentioned these plans only to Vediha; we didn’t tell Samiha a thing. His father and I spoke to Bozkurt. “I’ll marry her,” he said, looking away. Now it’s fallen to me to make the two sides meet.

“Fatma’s still in school,” said Mevlut. “Do we even know whether she likes him? Will she even listen to what I say?”

“I’ve only been beaten up by the police once in my life, Mevlut,” I said. “And that was your fault.” I didn’t add anything more to that.

—

Mevlut felt it was significant that Süleyman hadn’t brought up all the help the Aktaş family had given him over the years. Instead he’d focused on how the police had beaten him up after Ferhat’s murder. In the time they’d both spent in jail, for some reason the police had only beaten Süleyman and left Mevlut safe and sound. He still smiled every time he thought about it. All of Korkut’s influence had not been enough to protect Süleyman from that beating.

How much did he really owe the Aktaş family? There were also all those old land and property disputes to consider. He waited a long time before raising the subject with Fatma. But he did keep thinking about it, amazed that his daughter was already old enough to get married, and that Korkut and Süleyman had thought it appropriate to make this proposal. His father and his uncle had married two sisters; the next generation’s cousins had done the same and married two sisters, too. If the third generation all started marrying each other now, their children were bound to be born cross-eyed, stammering idiots.

The bigger question, though, was the prospect of imminent loneliness. During those summer evenings, Mevlut would watch TV with his daughters for hours and then go out for long walks after they went to sleep. The shadows leaves cast in the light of the streetlamps, the interminable walls, the neon lights in shopwindows, and the words in billboard advertisements would all speak to him.

He was watching TV with Fatma one evening while Fevziye was at the grocery store when their conversation somehow made its way to the house in Duttepe. “Why have you stopped visiting your aunts?” asked Mevlut.

“We see them both often enough,” said Fatma. “But we don’t go to Duttepe much anymore. Only when Bozkurt and Turan aren’t around. I can’t stand them.”

“What did they say to you?”

“Oh, childish things…Brainless Bozkurt!”

“I heard he’s very upset about your argument. He’s stopped eating, and he says—”

“Dad, he’s nuts,” said Fatma, judiciously interrupting her father so that he would drop the subject.

Mevlut saw the anger in his daughter’s eyes. “Then you shouldn’t bother going to Duttepe at all,” he said, gladly taking his daughter’s side.

They never mentioned it again. Mevlut didn’t know how to deliver the news of this formal rejection without hurting anyone’s feelings, so he didn’t call Süleyman. But one sweltering evening in the middle of August, Süleyman came by the clubhouse while Mevlut was busy serving some factory-made ice cream he’d just bought from the grocery store to a threesome from the village of İmrenler who were trying to organize a Bosphorus cruise.

“Fatma isn’t interested, she says no,” Mevlut told Süleyman as soon as they were alone. “Anyway, she wants to continue her studies; I can’t pull her out of school, can I? She’s doing a lot better than Bozkurt ever did,” he added, seized by the urge to rub it in a little.

“I told you he’s going to do his military service, didn’t I…,” said Süleyman. “Well, never mind…Though you could have said something. If I hadn’t come by and asked, you wouldn’t even have bothered to give us an answer.”

“I thought I’d wait in case Fatma changed her mind.”

Mevlut could see that Süleyman wasn’t angry about the rejection; in fact, it seemed to make sense to him. But Süleyman was worried about what Korkut would say. Mevlut worried about it, too, for a time, but he didn’t want Fatma to get married until she had graduated from college. Now, father and daughter had at least another five or six blissful years of companionship ahead of them. Whenever he had a conversation with Fatma, Mevlut always felt reassured in the knowledge that he was talking to someone he could trust to be intelligent, just as he had always trusted Rayiha.

He woke up sometime after midnight five days later to find the bed, the room, and the whole world shaking. The ground was making terrifying noises, and he could hear glasses and ashtrays shattering to pieces, the jangle of the neighbor’s windows breaking, and the sound of screaming all around. His daughters leaped into his bed and huddled up with their father. The earthquake lasted much longer than Mevlut had expected. When it stopped, the power was out, and Fevziye was crying.