Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Soon, Mr. Sadullah invited Mevlut to come over for dinner again. Mevlut didn’t have much time to spare between his work at the clubhouse and his evening boza rounds, and so to accommodate their burgeoning friendship, Mr. Sadullah offered to come by the clubhouse in his Dodge to pick Mevlut up and load his shoulder pole and jugs into the trunk, so that once they were done with dinner, he could drop him off wherever he wanted to sell his boza that night. The fathers-in-law grew even closer after this dinner, during which they discussed all the intricacies of the upcoming wedding celebrations.

The groom’s side would of course pay for the wedding, so when he found out that the party wasn’t going to take place in a wedding hall but in the basement floor of a hotel in Aksaray, Mevlut had no objections. He was, however, upset to hear that there would be alcohol served. He didn’t want there to be anything about this wedding that could make the people of Duttepe, and especially the Aktaş family, uncomfortable.

Mr. Sadullah set his mind at ease: guests would bring their own bottles of rakı and store them in the kitchen; those who wanted a drink would have to ask the waiters personally, and the requested glasses of iced rakı would be prepared upstairs and brought down without any fuss. Of course their own guests — his son’s taxi-driver friends, the neighborhood locals, the Kadırga football team and its board of directors — wouldn’t mind if there was no rakı served with the meal; but if there was, they would certainly drink some, and be happier for it. Most of them supported the secular Republican People’s Party anyway.

“So do I,” said Mevlut in a spirit of solidarity, but without much conviction.

The hotel in Aksaray was a new building. While excavating the foundation, the contractor had found the remains of a small Byzantine church, and since such a discovery would normally have put a stop to the building works, he’d had to pay out some hefty bribes across the municipality to make sure no one noticed the ruins, and to compensate himself for the cost, he’d dug an extra basement floor. On the night of the wedding, Mevlut counted twenty-two tables in the room, which soon filled to capacity and became submerged in layers of thick blue smoke from countless cigarettes. There were six tables for men only. That part of the wedding hall was full of the groom’s friends from the neighborhood and other taxi drivers. Most of these young drivers were unmarried. But even those who had wives had quite early on left them behind with the children in the part of the hall reserved for families and gone to join their friends at the bachelors’ tables, which they thought would be more fun. Mevlut could tell how much those tables must already be drinking just by the sheer number of waiters needed to ferry trays for rakı and ice back and forth between the kitchen and that end of the hall. But guests were openly drinking even at the mixed tables, where a few, like one particularly irascible old man, lost their patience with the sluggish waiters and decided to take matters into their own hands, going to the kitchen upstairs to pour their own drinks.

Mevlut and Fevziye had considered every single permutation of Aktaş family attendance. Bozkurt was away doing his military service and wouldn’t be there to make a drunken scene. Korkut, whose son had been rejected by the bride, might find an excuse not to come or bolt, saying, “There was too much drinking, it made me uncomfortable,” and so ruin the party for everyone else. But Fevziye, who kept up with all the Aktaş family news through her aunt Samiha, said that the outlook in Duttepe was not quite so negative. In fact the real danger wasn’t from Bozkurt or Korkut but Samiha herself, who was furious at Korkut and Süleyman.

Thank God Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman had come up from the village, as had Fatma and her stiff-as-a-poker husband from Izmir. Fevziye had arranged for them all to share a taxi with Samiha. Mevlut spent the early part of the celebration worrying about why that taxi was taking so long, when all the other guests from Duttepe had already arrived and brought their gifts. All but one of the five big tables set aside for the bride’s family were already full (their neighbor Reyhan and her husband were both looking very smart). Mevlut went upstairs to the kitchen to have a glass of rakı where no one would see him and lingered around the hotel entrance, waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival.

When he returned to the wedding hall, he saw that the fifth table was now completely full. When had they come in? He sat back down next to Mr. Sadullah at the groom’s table and continued to stare at the Aktaş family. Süleyman had brought both his sons, aged three and five; Melahat was very elegantly dressed; in his suit and tie, Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman looked so neat and courteous he might have been mistaken for a retired government officer. Every time his eyes caught the red stain in the middle of the table, Mevlut shivered and looked away.

—

Samiha.My darling Fevziye, in her beautiful wedding gown, sat next to her husband in the middle of the room, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, feeling her joy and excitement in my own heart. How wonderful it is to be young and happy. I was also very pleased to hear from my dear Fatma, seated beside me, that she was happy with her own husband in Izmir, that his family was supporting them, that they were both doing very well at the hotel school, that they’d spent the summer holidays apprenticing at a hotel on Kuşadası, and that their English was improving; it was great to see them both smiling all the time. When my darling Rayiha passed away, I cried for days, not just because I’d lost my beloved sister but also because these two sweet little girls had been orphaned at such a young age. I began to keep an eye on what they ate, what they wore, who their friends were in the neighborhood, and everything else, just as if they’d been my own daughters; I became a mother to these unlucky girls, though from a distance. Cowardly Mevlut didn’t want me in his house because he was scared there might be gossip and that Ferhat would misunderstand; that hurt my feelings and dampened my enthusiasm, but I never gave up. When I turned away from Fevziye to Fatma again, she said, “You look so regal in that purple dress, Auntie!” and I thought I might start to cry. I stood up and walked in the exact opposite direction from Mevlut’s table, went upstairs to the kitchen door, and after telling one of the waiters “My father’s still waiting for his drink,” I was immediately given a glass of rakı on the rocks. I retreated to the window and quickly gulped it down before hurrying back to my place at the table, between my father and Fatma.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi.Vediha came over to our table, told her father-in-law Hasan the grocer — who hadn’t said a word all night—“You must be getting bored, Father,” and took him by the arm over to his sons’ table. Let me be clear: the thing that hurts me most is that even when her actual father is right there, my darling Vediha calls this dull and distant man her “dear father” just because she’s married to his spiteful son. I went to sit at the table of the man who was in charge of the festivities and posed a riddle to everyone: “Do you know what Mr. Sadullah, Mr. Mevlut, and I all have in common?” They began to say that it was probably yogurt or our youth or our love of rakı …until I said, “Each of our wives died young and left us all alone in this world,” and burst into tears.

—

Samiha.Vediha and Süleyman stood on either side of my father and walked him back to our table, but all Mevlut did was sit and watch. Couldn’t he even bring himself to take his late wife’s father by the arm and maybe whisper a few words of comfort in his ear? But if he were to come anywhere near my table, people might gossip; they might remember that he’d actually written those letters to me and start talking about it again…I bet that’s what he’s afraid of. Oh, Mevlut, you coward. He keeps looking at me, but then pretending he didn’t. But I look right back at him, just the way I did at Korkut’s wedding twenty-three years ago, just, as he wrote in his letters, as if I wanted to take him prisoner with my ensorcelled eyes. I looked at him so I could cut across his path like a bandit and steal his heart away, so that he would be struck by the force of my gaze. I looked at him so that he could see his reflection in the mirror of my heart.