Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Take some clothes and let’s go outside,” said Mevlut.

The whole world had woken up and gone out into the gloomy streets. All of Tarlabaşı seemed to be talking at once out there in the dark. The drunks were complaining, many people were crying, and some particularly angry people were shouting their displeasure. Mevlut and his girls had managed to put on some clothes, but other families had rushed out of their homes in nothing but their underwear and nightshirts, some wearing slippers, others barefoot. These people kept trying to go back inside for proper clothes, to fetch some money, and lock the door, only to run back out screaming as another aftershock hit.

The huge, raucous crowd amassing on the pavements and in the streets showed Mevlut and his daughters just how many people could squeeze into one of those small apartments in Tarlabaşı’s two- and three-story blocks. Intoxicated by the shock, they walked around the neighborhood for an hour among grandfathers in pajamas, old ladies in long skirts, and children in briefs, bathing shorts, and slippers. They realized toward dawn that the aftershocks, which were already growing weaker and less frequent, were not going to destroy their building, so they went home and back to sleep. A week later, TV channels and tabloids were telling about another earthquake that was about to raze the entire city to the ground, and many people chose to spend the night in Taksim Square, out on the streets, and in the parks. Mevlut and his daughters went out to gape at these frightened thrill-seekers, but when it got late, they went home and slept peacefully through the night.

—

Süleyman.When the earthquake hit, we were at home in our new seventh-floor apartment in Şişli. Everything shook for a long time. The kitchen cupboard came right off the wall. I grabbed Melahat and the kids and took the stairs with only matches to guide us in the dark, and we walked through a sea of people for an hour all the way to our house in Duttepe, carrying the children in our arms.

—

Korkut.The house stretched and swayed like a spring. In the darkness after the quake, Bozkurt went back inside to pick up everyone’s bedding and mattresses. We were just settling down in the garden, making our beds wherever we could when…Süleyman arrived with his wife and kids. “Your building in Şişli is brand-new and made of concrete; it must be a lot more solid than our thirty-year-old hovel. Why did you come here?” I asked. “I don’t know,” said Süleyman. In the morning, we saw that our house was all twisted up, with the third and fourth floors curving down toward the street like one of those old wooden houses with bay windows.

—

Vediha.I was serving dinner two nights later when the table started shaking and the kids yelled, “Earthquake!” I managed to fling myself out of the house and into the garden, almost taking a spill down the stairs in the process. But then I realized that there hadn’t been another earthquake; it was just Bozkurt and Turan shaking the table to play a trick on me. They were watching me from the window and laughing. I had to laugh, too. I went back upstairs. “Now listen to me, you try that again and I’ll give you a good slap, just like your father does, I don’t care how old you are,” I said. Three days later, when Bozkurt played the same prank, I fell for it again; but then I gave him the smack I’d promised. Now he won’t speak to his mother anymore. My son is suffering from unrequited love, and soon he’s going to go off to do his military service; I worry about him.

—

Samiha.When Süleyman turned up on the night of the earthquake with his wife and kids in tow, I realized just how much I hated him. I went upstairs to my room on the now-crooked third floor and didn’t come down again until he and his unruly brood had gone back home. They spent two nights in the garden making a constant racket before finally returning to Şişli. They came back again a few times in September—“There’s going to be another earthquake tonight!”—to sleep in the garden, and on those days I didn’t even bother to come down.

The latest thing Süleyman had done to make me furious was letting Korkut talk him into asking for Fatma’s hand for Bozkurt. They didn’t tell me anything, figuring I’d try to stop them. Stupidity is no excuse for evil. I realized they must have done something foolish when I noticed that Fatma and Fevziye only came to Duttepe when Bozkurt wasn’t there. Vediha told me everything eventually. Of course I was proud of Fatma for saying no. I would drop the girls off at cram school every Saturday and Sunday and then take them out to the movies with Vediha in the evening.

That winter, I did everything I could to ensure Fatma did well on her university entrance exams. Vediha couldn’t help but resent Fatma for having rejected her son just as he was about to leave to join the army; the more she tried to mask her feelings, the more obvious they became. So I started meeting with the girls in pudding shops, bakeries, and the McDonald’s. I would take them to shopping malls: we would walk around and look in all the shops without buying anything, just staring at the windows in silence and walking under the bright lights feeling that something new was about to happen in our lives, and when we got tired, we would say, “Let’s do one more floor and then go downstairs for some kebab.”

Fatma and Fevziye spent New Year’s Eve 2000 watching TV and waiting for their father to come back from selling boza. Mevlut came home at eleven; he watched TV with them; they ate roast chicken and potatoes. They usually never spoke to me about their father, but Fatma did tell me about that night.

Fatma took her university entrance exams at the beginning of June. I waited for her outside the door. Everyone’s mothers, fathers, and brothers sat on a long, low wall across from the columns that flanked the entrance to this old building. I gazed toward Dolmabahçe Palace and smoked a cigarette. When she came out of the exam, Fatma looked just as tired as everyone else, but she seemed more optimistic, too.

—

Mevlut felt proud when his daughter graduated from high school without needing to take a single makeup exam and then was accepted into college to study hospitality management. Some fathers would put their children’s high-school graduation pictures up on the clubhouse bulletin board. Mevlut fantasized about doing the same. But of course no father would ever display the graduation photos of an all-girls’ school. Still, news of Mevlut’s daughter’s academic success soon spread among the former yogurt sellers and the Beyşehir people involved with the migrants’ association. Süleyman dropped in especially to congratulate Mevlut; he spoke about how a man’s greatest asset in this city was a child with an education.

On her first day of classes, toward the end of September, Mevlut took his daughter all the way to the front door of the university. This was the first public hotel management school in Istanbul: they concentrated as much on the management and economics of the hospitality industry as they did on the practicalities of serving guests. The school, a division of Istanbul University, was in Laleli, in a converted inn. Mevlut daydreamed about selling boza in these beautiful old neighborhoods. Once, on his way back from the Holy Guide’s place, he walked for an hour all the way from Çarşamba to his daughter’s school. Those parts of the city were still quiet at night.

In January 2001, four months after starting classes, Fatma told her father about a boy she was seeing. He was in the same program, but he was two years older. His intentions were serious. He was from Izmir. (Mevlut felt his heart stop for a moment.) They both wanted the same thing in life: to get a university degree and start working in the tourism industry.