Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut couldn’t believe how quickly his daughter had reached this stage of her life. Then again, Fatma would still get married later than any other girl in the family. “You’re too late now, at your age your mother and your aunts already had two children each!” said Mevlut, suffering even as he teased her.

“That’s why I’m going to get married straightaway,” said Fatma. In her quick rejoinder, Mevlut saw all her determination to get out of the house as soon as possible.

In February, they came from Izmir to Istanbul to ask for Fatma’s hand. Mevlut found a night when the clubhouse was free and booked it for the engagement party, borrowing some extra chairs from the coffeehouse across the road. Apart from Korkut and his sons, all their acquaintances from Duttepe came to the party. Mevlut knew that none of these people, including Samiha, would go to the actual wedding, which was to take place in Izmir at the beginning of the summer. The engagement party was the first time he saw Samiha within the con fines of the clubhouse: unlike all the other women there, her headscarf and overcoat weren’t faded or tan colored; they were new, dark blue, and tied loose. Mevlut wondered whether perhaps she wanted not to wear a headscarf anymore. Fatma didn’t always wear hers, and she had to take it off every time she went to the university. Mevlut couldn’t tell if his daughter was pleased about this or not. It was mostly between Fatma and her university friends.

None of the people who’d come from Izmir wore headscarves. In the days leading up to the engagement, Mevlut saw just how much his daughter longed to become part of this family. At home, Fatma would hug him and kiss him and weep over how she was about to leave the house in which she’d spent her childhood, but a few minutes later, Mevlut would catch her deep in daydreams about all the little pleasures of her new life with her husband. That was how Mevlut discovered that his daughter and his future son-in-law had applied to transfer to the hospitality management faculty of the university in Izmir. Two months later, they found out that their application had been accepted. Thus, in the space of just three months, it was decided that after they got married at the beginning of summer, Fatma and Burhan (for that was the unappealing name of Mevlut’s future son-in-law, who was stiff as a poker and always wore a perfectly blank expression) would move into an apartment in Izmir belonging to the groom’s family and become residents of that city.

Of Fatma’s family in Istanbul, only Mevlut and Fevziye went down to Izmir for the wedding. Mevlut liked Izmir; it was like a smaller, warmer version of Istanbul, with palm trees. All the poorer neighborhoods were right in the middle of the bay. At the wedding, he watched Fatma hold her husband close while they danced — just as in the movies — and felt embarrassed, but also somewhat moved. On the bus back to Istanbul, Mevlut and Fevziye didn’t say a word to each other. The feeling of his younger daughter’s head resting on his shoulder as she fell asleep during the overnight journey and the scent of her hair made Mevlut happy. In just six months, his elder daughter, the girl he’d cherished for all these years, and dreamed of keeping close to him for the rest of his life, had gone far beyond her father’s reach.

Let Them Both Kiss My Hand

ON SEPTEMBER 11, Mevlut and Fevziye spent the day watching TV footage of the planes crashing into those skyscrapers in America, and the buildings collapsing in a cloud of fire and smoke, like something out of the movies. Except for a quiet comment from Mevlut—“The Americans will want their revenge now!”—they never mentioned these events again.

They had become good friends after Fatma got married and left. Fevziye loved talking, telling jokes, and imitating other people, and she liked to make her father laugh by inventing ridiculous stories. She’d inherited her mother’s talent for spotting the amusingly absurd side to everything. She could parrot the sound of their neighbor whistling through his front teeth as he spoke, or a door creaking open, or her father huffing and puffing as he clambered up the stairs, and when she slept at night, she curled up in an S shape, just as her mother used to do.

When he got home from the clubhouse one evening five days after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Mevlut found the TV switched off, no food on the dining table, and no Fevziye either. At first, it didn’t occur to him that his daughter might have run away, so he just fumed at the thought that his seventeen-year-old was still out after dark, doing nothing useful. Fevziye had failed both mathematics and English in her penultimate year of high school; all summer, Mevlut hadn’t once seen her sit down and study. As he looked out the window at the dark street, waiting for his daughter to come home, his anger slowly turned into worry.

He’d noticed with a pang that Fevziye’s handbag and many of her clothes and other possessions weren’t in their usual places. He was debating with himself whether to go over to Duttepe to inquire with the Aktaş family when the doorbell rang, giving him a brief flash of hope that it might be Fevziye.

But it was Süleyman. He told Mevlut straightaway that Fevziye had run away with someone, that the boy was “suitable” and from a good family, and that his father owned three taxis, which he rented out. The boy’s father had called in the afternoon, and Süleyman had gone to see them. Perhaps they would have called Mevlut first if he’d had a telephone at home. In any case, Fevziye was fine.

“If she was fine, then why did she run away?” said Mevlut. “To embarrass her father and disgrace herself?”

“Why did you run away with Rayiha?” said Süleyman. “Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would have said yes if you’d just asked for her.”

On hearing these words, Mevlut began to suspect that Fevziye’s escape might have been a form of emulation. After all, his daughter had done exactly what her mother and father had done. “Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would have never let me marry his daughter,” he said, thinking back proudly to the night he ran away with Rayiha. “I will not accept this taxi driver who’s run away with my girl. Fevziye had promised me she’d finish high school and go to college.”

“She missed both of her makeup exams,” said Süleyman. “She has failed the year. She was probably too scared to tell you. But Vediha knows all about how you’ve always told the poor girl you’d never forgive her if she doesn’t finish high school, and how you’ve been pushing her to go to college like her sister.”

When he realized that what he’d thought were private matters between him and his daughter had clearly been discussed not just in the Aktaş family, but among complete strangers, too — a taxi driver and his family — and that he’d gained a reputation for being an irascible and dictatorial father, Mevlut became indignant.

“Fevziye is no daughter of mine,” he sniffed, but he regretted the words immediately. Süleyman hadn’t even left yet, and already Mevlut started to be overcome by the same sense of helplessness any father whose daughter has eloped is bound to feel: If he didn’t forgive his daughter straightaway and pretend to like and approve of the groom (a driver? he could never have imagined it!), the news that his daughter had run off to live with a man she wasn’t married to would quickly spread, and Mevlut’s honor would be stained. But if he was too quick to forgive the irresponsible bastard who’d taken his daughter, then everyone would say that Mevlut himself had been in on it or that he’d taken a significant sum of money to allow his daughter to get married to the man. He knew that unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life lonely and cantankerous — much as his own father had done — he had no choice but to take the second option without delay.