Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Süleyman, I can’t live without my daughters. I will forgive Fevziye. But first let her come here with this man she means to marry. Let them both kiss my hand and show their respect. I may have run away with Rayiha, too, but at least afterward I went all the way to the village to Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman’s doorstep to pay my respects.”

“I’m sure your taxi driver son-in-law will have as much respect for you as you did for Crooked Neck,” Süleyman said with a smirk.

Mevlut didn’t realize that Süleyman was making fun of him. He was confused, afraid of loneliness, and in need of being comforted. “There used to be such a thing as respect, once upon a time!” he heard himself saying, and Süleyman laughed at this, too.

Mevlut’s second son-in-law was called Erhan. He looked completely ordinary (short with a narrow forehead), and Mevlut couldn’t understand what his beautiful flower of a daughter — the same girl he’d cherished for so many years, and for whom he’d always had such high hopes — could possibly have seen in him. He must be very sly and very clever, thought Mevlut, feeling disappointed with his daughter for failing to see through all that.

He did, however, like the way Erhan bowed all the way down to the floor and kissed his hand apologetically.

“Fevziye must finish high school, she must not drop out of school,” said Mevlut. “Otherwise I will never forgive you.”

“That’s what we also think,” said Erhan. But as they talked, it became clear that it would be impossible for Fevziye to keep going to school and hide the fact that she was married.

Mevlut knew, though, that the real cause of his anxiety wasn’t the thought of his daughter not finishing high school or going to college but that he would soon be completely alone in the house and more generally in the world. His soul’s real anguish wasn’t his having failed to give his daughter a proper education but the sense that he was being abandoned.

In a private moment, Mevlut began to remonstrate with his daughter. “Why did you run away? Would I have said no if they’d come here and asked for your hand like civilized people?”

Mevlut could tell from the way Fevziye averted her eyes that she was thinking, Yes, of course you would have said no!

“We were so happy here, father and daughter,” said Mevlut. “Now I’ve got no one left.”

Fevziye hugged him; Mevlut struggled to hold back tears. Now, there would be no one waiting for him when he came home in the evenings from selling boza. When he had the dream of running through a dark cypress forest with dogs chasing him, and woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night, the sound of his daughters breathing in their sleep would no longer be there to comfort him.

His fear of loneliness led Mevlut to drive a hard bargain. In a moment of shared enthusiasm, he made his future son-in-law swear upon his honor that Fevziye would graduate from not only high school but college, too. Fevziye spent that night at home with Mevlut. He was glad that she had come to her senses before the whole matter could get out of hand, though he still couldn’t help but mention every now and then that she’d broken his heart by running away.

“You ran away with Mom, too!” said Fevziye.

“Your mother would have never done what you did,” said Mevlut.

“Yes, she would have,” said Fevziye.

His daughter’s willful, decisive response pleased Mevlut, but he also saw it as further proof that she’d been trying to do as her mother had done. On religious holidays, or whenever Fatma and her dither ing fool of a husband came to see them from Izmir, they would all go to Rayiha’s grave. If the visit ended up feeling more melancholy than usual, Mevlut would spend the whole way back home giving them an extended and embellished account of how he had run away with Rayiha, how they’d worked everything out down to the tiniest detail, how they had first met and exchanged glances at a wedding, and how he would never forget the way their mother had looked at him that night.

The next day, Erhan the taxi driver and his father — himself a retired driver — came by to return Fevziye’s suitcase. As soon as Mevlut saw the groom’s father, Mr. Sadullah, who was ten years older than him, he knew that he was going to like this man a lot more than he liked his son. Mr. Sadullah was a widower, too; he’d lost his wife to a heart attack three years ago. (The better to describe those events, Mr. Sadullah had sat at the only table inside Mevlut’s one-room house and reenacted the way she’d dropped her spoon halfway through a bowl of soup and died with her head resting on the table.)

Mr. Sadullah was from Düzce; his father had come to Istanbul during the Second World War and worked as an apprentice to an Armenian shoemaker on Gedikpaşa Hill, who would later make him his business partner. When the place was looted during the anti-Christian uprisings of September sixth and seventh, 1955, the Armenian owner left Istanbul, handing the shop over to Mr. Sadullah’s father, who had continued to run it on his own. But his “free-spirited” and “indolent” son stood his ground against his father’s insistence and his beatings, and instead of learning how to make shoes, he became “the best driver in Istanbul.” Mr. Sadullah would give Mevlut a knowing wink as he explained how being a driver back then, when all the cabs and shared taxis were American models, was probably the most glamorous job in the world, and from this Mevlut understood that the short, clever young man with a head shaped like an upturned bowl, the one who’d run away with his daughter, had inherited all his taste for a good time from his father.

Mevlut went to their three-story stone-built house in Kadırga to discuss the details of the wedding ceremony; he developed a close friendship with Mr. Sadullah, which would only grow stronger after the wedding, and in his forties he finally learned how to enjoy the kinds of conversations that friends normally had over dinner and a glass of rakı —even though he didn’t drink much himself.

Mr. Sadullah had three taxis, which he rented out to six drivers working twelve-hour shifts every day. Even more than the makes and models of his cars (two Turkish Murats, one a ’96 and the other ’98, and a 1958 Dodge, which Mr. Sadullah himself drove from time to time just for fun, keeping it in mint condition), he liked to talk about the ever-increasing cost of obtaining a prized taxi license in Istanbul. His son Erhan looked after one of the taxis himself and kept tabs on the other taxis, too, for his father, checking their odometers and taximeters. Mr. Sadullah would smile as he explained how his son didn’t really keep a close enough eye on the drivers, who were either dishonest (skimming from what they made in a day), unlucky (getting into accidents all the time), disrespectful (coming late for their shift and being rude), or downright foolish. But seeing it wasn’t worth his arguing with these people over a few pennies more, Mr. Sadullah left all that unpleasantness to his son. Mevlut inspected the attic room where Erhan and Fevziye would live after they got married, checking everything from the new cupboards to the trousseau and the double bed (“Erhan never came up here that time your daughter spent the night,” Mr. Sadullah had reassured him), and confirmed that he was satisfied.

Mevlut loved it when Mr. Sadullah showed him around all the places that had formed the backdrop of his life, reminiscing and telling old anecdotes in that charming way of his that only got sweeter when you let him go on uninterrupted. Mevlut soon learned where to find the Vale School (an Ottoman-era building that was much older than the Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School) in Cankurtaran, where the boarders beat and bullied the day students like Mr. Sadullah, the shoe shop that his father had brought to ruin in ten years (in its place there was now a café like the Binbom), and the adorable teahouse across from the park. He almost couldn’t believe it when he found out that there had been no park there three hundred years ago, just water in which hundreds of Ottoman galleons had moored, waiting for war. (There were pictures of these vessels on the walls inside the teahouse.) Mevlut began to feel that had he spent his own childhood and youth surrounded by these broken old fountains, derelict bathhouses, and dusty, filthy, ghost- and spider-ridden religious retreats built by bearded and beturbaned Ottoman leaders — that is, if his father hadn’t come from Cennetpınar to Kültepe but had gone straight to one of these neighborhoods across the Golden Horn instead, settling in old Istanbul like so many other lucky people who’d migrated to the city from the Anatolian countryside — he would have ended up a completely different person, and so would his daughters. He even felt a kind of remorse, as if going to live in Kültepe had been his own decision. But he didn’t know a single person who’d come to Istanbul from Cennetpınar in the 1960s and ’70s and settled in one of these neighborhoods. As he began to notice how much wealthier Istanbul was growing, he thought that he might be able to sell more boza if he tried coming to some of the backstreets in these historic quarters of the city.