Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

More than half the people who’d populated Mevlut’s childhood years had moved to neighborhoods far from Duttepe and rarely came by the clubhouse, but if they could find someone to give them a ride, they did sometimes show up for football matches and picnics. (That kid his age Mevlut used to see roaming the streets with his junk dealer father and their horse cart was, it turned out, from the village of Höyük and had remained very poor; Mevlut still didn’t know his name.) Some had aged prematurely over the years, put on weight, got bloated and hunched over, lost their hair, and seen their physiognomies so transformed (the faces ever more pear shaped, with shrinking eyes, and noses and ears that seemed only to grow), that either Mevlut didn’t recognize them, or they felt obliged to come up to him and humbly introduce themselves. He knew that most of these people weren’t any richer than he was, but he could also sense that they were happier because their wives were still alive. If only he could get married again, he might even end up happier than they were.

On his next visit to Kadırga, Mevlut took one look at his daughter’s face and knew immediately that she had news for him. Fevziye had met her aunt. Samiha hadn’t known about Süleyman’s visit to Mevlut three weeks ago. So when Fevziye passed on her father’s apology, her aunt had no idea what she was talking about. As soon as she understood, she became annoyed at both Mevlut and Fevziye. Samiha would never have asked Süleyman for help; nor had this matter ever even crossed her mind before.

Mevlut saw the concern and anxiety on the face of his daughter the messenger. “We made a mistake,” he said, sighing.

“Yes,” she said.

They didn’t speak of it again for a long time. As he was trying to figure out what he should do next, Mevlut also began to admit to himself that “home” was another problem he had to deal with. As well as feeling lonely in the house in Tarlabaşı, he had begun to feel like a stranger in the neighborhood. He could see now that the same streets on which he’d lived for the last twenty-four years were inexorably turning into foreign territory, and he knew the future did not lie in Tarlabaşı.

Back in the 1980s, when Tarlabaşı Avenue was being built, Mevlut had heard the neighborhood — with its crooked, narrow streets, and its crumbling, hundred-year-old brick buildings — described as a place of historic significance and of potentially enormous value, but he’d never believed any of it. At the time, there had only been a handful of left-wing architects and students saying these things in protest against the construction of the new six-lane avenue. But politicians and contractors soon began to follow suit: Tarlabaşı was a precious jewel that had to be preserved. It was rumored hotels, shopping malls, and skyscrapers were to be built in the area.

Mevlut had never truly felt that this was the right neighborhood for him, but over the past few years life on these streets had changed so much that the feeling had only intensified. After his daughters’ weddings, he had been cut off from the neighborhood’s female universe. The old carpenters, blacksmiths, repairmen, and shopkeepers trained by the Armenians and the Greeks had all left, as had those hardworking families ready to do any job to survive, and now the Assyrians were also gone, replaced by drug dealers, immigrants moving into abandoned apartments, homeless people, gangsters, and pimps. Every time he went to some other part of the city and people asked him how he could still be living in Tarlabaşı, Mevlut would claim that “all those people are in the upper quarters, on the Beyoğlu side.” One night a well-dressed young man had stopped Mevlut and frantically asked him, “Do you have any sugar, uncle?” Everyone knew that “sugar” was code for “drugs.” By now, even in the dead of night, Mevlut needed no more than a quick glance to spot the pushers who sometimes came all the way down to his street to evade the police raids, and the dealers who hid their product under the hubcaps of parked cars so as not to be caught with it, just as he could always recognize the brawny, bewigged transvestites who worked in the brothels near Beyoğlu.

In Tarlabaşı and Beyoğlu, this kind of hugely profitable vice had always been in the hands of organized crime, but now there were upstart gangs from Mardin and Diyarbakır gunning each other down in the streets for control of the market. Mevlut suspected that Ferhat had been the victim of some such struggle. He had once seen Cezmi from Cizre, the most renowned of these gangsters and thugs, passing through the neighborhood in a kind of victory procession, surrounded by private henchmen and noisy, awestruck children.

All these new people who hung their underwear and shirts out to dry between each other’s buildings, turning the whole neighborhood into one big Laundromat, made Mevlut feel that he no longer belonged here. There never used to be so many street stalls in Tarlabaşı, and he didn’t like these new street vendors either. He also suspected that these gangsterish types — his so-called landlords (who changed every five or six years) — might suddenly pull out and leave the house to real-estate brokers, property speculators, developers eager to build hotels, or to some other gang, as had happened elsewhere over the past two years. Either that, or he would soon find himself unable to keep up with the constant rent increases. After having been largely ignored for so many years, the whole neighborhood had suddenly become a magnet for all the misery and destructive appetite that the city could muster. There was an Iranian family who had settled into a second-floor apartment two buildings down from his; they had rented the place as somewhere to stay while they waited for the consulate to give them the visas they needed to emigrate permanently to America. When everyone had panicked and run out into the streets on the night of the earthquake three years ago, Mevlut had been astonished to discover that there were almost twenty people living in the Iranians’ tiny apartment. By now, he was getting used to the idea of Tarlabaşı as just a temporary stop on so many longer journeys.

Where would he go from here? He gave this a lot of thought, by means of either logical consideration or more impressionistic daydreaming. If he were to rent a place in Mr. Sadullah’s neighborhood of Kadırga, he’d be closer to Fevziye and wouldn’t feel so alone all the time. Would Samiha want to live in a place like that? Anyway, it wasn’t as if anyone had asked him to come. Besides, the rents there were too high, and it was too far from his job at the clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy. He started to think about a place closer to work. The ideal solution was, of course, the house in Kültepe where he’d spent his childhood with his father. For the first time, he thought of asking Süleyman to help him evict the current tenant so he could move back in himself. Every now and then he pictured himself and Samiha living there.

It was around this time that something happened that so delighted Mevlut he felt encouraged to go looking for Samiha again.

Mevlut had never played much football as a child in the village, never having really enjoyed the game or been very good at it. When he kicked the ball, it rarely went where he intended it to go, and no one ever picked him for their team. During his early years in Istanbul, he’d never had the time, the will, or the spare shoes he would have needed in order to join those who played on the streets and in empty lots, and he would only watch the matches on TV because everyone else did. So when he went to watch the finals of the migrants’ association tournament — which Korkut thought crucial in uniting all the villages — it was only because he knew that everyone else would be there, too.