Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“My darling Samiha, you’re wasting your time staring over there,” said my father, by then completely drunk. “A man who writes letters to one girl but then marries her sister is no good for anyone.”

“I’m not looking that way,” I said, though I stubbornly kept looking anyway and saw that, every now and then, Mevlut looked at me, too, right until the very end of the evening.

You Two Are Made for Each Other

LEFT ALONE in the house where he’d spent years living elbow to elbow with his wife and daughters, Mevlut began to feel depleted, almost as if he’d fallen ill, so that even getting out of bed in the mornings seemed like a chore. In the past, even on his darkest days, he’d always been able to count on his indomitable optimism — which some thought of as “innocence”—and on his knack for finding the easiest and least distressing way through any situation. He therefore saw his current malaise as a sign of a bigger problem, and even though he was only forty-five, he began to feel afraid of death.

When he was in the clubhouse or the neighborhood coffeehouse in the morning, chatting to one or two people he knew, he was able to keep his fear of loneliness at bay. (Ever since he’d been left on his own, he had grown even kinder and more tolerant toward anyone he met.) But when he walked in the street at night, he was scared.

Now that Rayiha had died and his daughters were both married, the streets of Istanbul seemed longer than ever before, like bottomless black wells. He might find himself in some remote neighborhood late at night, ringing his bell and crying “Boza” as he made his way, when the sudden realization that he had never before been on this street or in this neighborhood induced a strange and terrifying memory or that feeling that he used to have as a child or a young man whenever he went somewhere he wasn’t meant to go (and when the dogs barked): the feeling that he would be caught and punished, which he took to mean that he was, in truth, a bad person. Some nights, the city seemed transformed into a more mysterious, menacing place, and Mevlut couldn’t make out whether he felt this way because there was no one waiting for him at home or because these new streets had become imbued with signs and symbols he didn’t recognize: his fears were exacerbated by the silence of the new concrete walls, the insistent presence of a multitude of strange and ever-changing posters, and the way a street could suddenly twist on and on just as he thought it might be ending, almost as if to mock him. When he walked down a quiet street where no curtain twitched and no window opened, he would sometimes feel — though he knew, rationally, that it wasn’t true — as if he’d been there before, in a time as old as fables, and as he reveled in the sensation of meeting the present moment as if it were a memory, he would shout “Boo-zaa” and feel that he was really calling out to his own past. Sometimes his fear of dogs would return, reignited by his own imagination or by the barking of an actual dog standing beside the wall of a mosque, and suddenly it would hit him that he was completely alone in the world. (It was comforting, in these moments, to think of Samiha and her purple dress.) Or he might see on an empty street one night a pair of tall, thin men walk past, oblivious to his presence, and get the feeling that the words he’d just heard them say (about locks and keys and responsibilities) were clues to some message meant for him — only to find that the two short, fat men in black suits walking down a narrow street of a completely different neighborhood two nights later were saying exactly the same words.

It was as if the city’s old, mossy walls, its ancient fountains covered in beautiful script, and its wooden homes, twisting and rotting to the point of leaning on one another for support, had all been burned down and wrecked into nothingness, and the new streets, concrete houses, neon-lit shops, and apartment blocks taking their place had been built to seem even older, more intimidating and incomprehensible, than any place before. The city was no longer an enormous, familiar home but a faithless space in which anyone who got the chance added more concrete, more streets, courtyards, walls, pavements, and shops.

With the city growing inexorably out of his reach, and no one to come home to at the other end of each dark road, Mevlut began to feel the need for God more than ever before. He started performing midday prayers before he went to work at the clubhouse — not just on Fridays but whenever he felt the need to do so — either at the Şişli Mosque or at the Duttepe Mosque if he took a longer route or at any other mosque he happened to come across. He delighted in the silence that reigned in these places, the way the city’s constant humming filtered softly inside like the light that fell in embroidered patterns along the bottom edge of the dome, and the chance to spend half an hour in communion with old men who’d cut their ties with the world or men like him who simply had nobody left; it all made him feel as if he’d found a cure for his loneliness. At night, these emotions led him to places where he would never have set foot back when he was still a happy man, like deserted mosque courtyards or cemeteries tucked away deep in the heart of a neighborhood, where he could sit on the edge of a gravestone and smoke a cigarette. He would read dedications to people who had come and gone long ago and look reverently at ancient tombstones covered in Arabic script and surmounted with turbans carved in stone. He’d started whispering the name of God to himself more often, and occasionally he would ask him for deliverance from a lifetime of loneliness.

Sometimes he thought of the other men he knew who’d also lost their wives and found themselves alone at the age of forty-five but then got married again with the help of family and friends. At the migrants’ association, Mevlut had met Vahap, a man from the village of İmrenler who ran a plumbing supply shop in Şişli. When his wife and only son died in a bus accident on their way to a wedding in the village, Vahap’s relatives immediately arranged for him to marry someone else from there. When his wife died giving birth to their first child, Hamdi from Gümüşdere himself almost died of sadness, but his uncle and the rest of his family found him a new wife, a gregarious, carefree woman who’d slowly brought him back to life.

But no one offered to help Mevlut in this way nor even spoke in passing of any suitable women they might know who’d been widowed at a young age (it was also important that the woman in question not already have children of her own). The reason was that Mevlut’s entire family already thought that the right match for Mevlut was Samiha. “Like you, she’s alone, too,” Korkut had told him once. Or, perhaps, it was Mevlut himself — as he sometimes noticed — who wanted to believe that this was what everyone thought. He, too, accepted that Samiha was probably the right one for him and often got lost daydreaming about Fevziye’s wedding, when Samiha in that purple dress had stared at him from the other side of the room, though for a while he’d forbidden himself from even thinking about the possibility of marrying again: Mevlut felt that wishing he could be closer to Samiha, or just trying to catch her eye as he had done at his daughter’s wedding — let alone marrying her — would be enormously disrespectful to Rayiha’s memory. Sometimes he sensed that other people thought the same, and maybe that was why they always found it so difficult and awkward to talk to him about Samiha.

For a time, he thought that the best thing he could do was to get Samiha out of his head (I don’t think about her that often anyway, he told himself) and muse about some other woman instead. Korkut and the other founders and directors of the migrants’ association had banned rummikub and card games from the clubhouse in the hope of sparing theirs the same fate as most other migrants’ associations, which always eventually turned into ordinary coffeehouses, places where women didn’t feel comfortable coming in with their husbands. One way to attract more women and families was to organize dumpling nights. The women would get together at one another’s houses to prepare the dumplings and come to the event with their husbands, brothers, and children. On some of these evenings, Mevlut would be especially busy in the tea stall. A widow from Erenler came to one of these dumpling nights with her sister and her sister’s husband; she was tall, with good posture, and seemed healthy. Mevlut had looked her over a few times from the tea stall. Another one who’d caught his eye was the daughter of a family from İmrenler, a girl in her thirties who’d left her husband in Germany and returned to Istanbul: her thick black hair seemed set to burst out from underneath her headscarf. While taking her cup of tea, she’d looked straight at Mevlut with her coal-black eyes. Had she learned in Germany how to stare like that? All these women seemed so much more comfortable and direct in the way they took in Mevlut’s handsome, boyish face than Samiha had been all those years ago at Korkut’s wedding or more recently at Fevziye’s: one merry widow, a cheerful, chubby lady from Gümüşdere, had chatted playfully with him all through one of those dumpling nights and also while he’d served her tea at a picnic. Mevlut had admired her self-reliance and the way she’d just stood on the side smiling while the other guests danced at the end of the picnic.