Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

There were stands for spectators on opposite sides of the wire-fenced playing field. He couldn’t have felt more pleased if he’d just made it to a wedding all his friends were going to, but still he picked a corner where no one else was sitting from which to watch the game.

It was between the villages of Gümüşdere and Çiftekavaklar. Çiftekavaklar’s youthful team was taking it very seriously, and even though some of the players were wearing trousers, at least they’d all pulled on matching shirts. Most of the Gümüşdere team, on the other hand, were grown men in the same clothes they usually wore to be comfortable at home. Mevlut recognized a hunchbacked, potbellied retired yogurt seller from his father’s generation (every time he kicked the ball, half the crowd in the stands would laugh and clap) and his son, who seemed determined to show off his skills; Mevlut had seen them before when they’d crossed paths selling yogurt in Duttepe and at all the weddings they’d attended (Korkut’s, Süleyman’s, and those of many other friends and their children and grandchildren). Like Mevlut, thirty-five years ago the man’s son had also come to Istanbul to sell yogurt and further his studies (he’d managed to graduate from high school); now he had two small vans that he used to distribute olives and cheese to grocery stores, as well as two sons and two daughters to applaud their father from the stands and a wife with dyed blond hair under her headscarf who kept getting up in the middle of the match to give her husband a tissue with which to wipe the sweat off his brow (and also, as Mevlut saw once the match was over, a late-model Murat, which could fit all six of them).

It didn’t take Mevlut long to understand why these artificial-grass fields that lit up the night with their floodlights had mushroomed all over the city, appearing in every empty lot, car park, or unclaimed parcel of land: some of the cheer may have been a little forced, but there was no doubt that these neighborhood matchups were hugely entertaining. The crowd loved to pretend they were at an actual football match like the ones on TV. Just as on TV, whenever a player committed a foul, they would shout at the referee to “send him off!” or give the other team a penalty. The crowd would roar in approval and hug one another at every goal, while the team that had just scored engaged in prolonged celebratory theatrics, just as they had seen real teams doing. All through the game, the crowd chanted slogans and intoned the names of their favorites.

Mevlut, too, had been engrossed in the match when suddenly he was astonished to hear his own name being called: the whole crowd had seen him — their clubhouse manager and tea brewer — and started clapping and chanting, “Mevlut…Mevlut…Mevlut…” He stood up to acknowledge them with a few awkward gestures, giving a slight bow as he’d seen real footballers do on TV. “Yeaaah!” they screamed. Their cries of “Mevlut!” went on for a while. The applause had been deafening. He sat back down in shock, almost on the verge of tears.

I Wrote the Letters to You

SEEING HOW POPULAR he was at the migrants’ association’s football match had put Mevlut in a cheerful and optimistic mood. The next time he went to see Fevziye, he pressed his daughter and showed her a new determination.

“I should go to Duttepe and talk to your aunt myself. I should apologize to her for having hurt her over Süleyman’s nonsense. But I can’t do that at my uncle’s house. Does this aunt Samiha of yours ever go out?”

Fevziye told him that her aunt Samiha sometimes went down to the shops in Duttepe around midday.

“Are we doing the right thing?” said Mevlut. “Should I really go and speak to her? Do you want me to?”

“Yes, go, it would be a good thing.”

“It wouldn’t be disrespectful to your mother’s memory, would it?”

“Dad, you won’t survive on your own,” said Fevziye.

Mevlut started going to Duttepe and performing his midday prayers at the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque. There were very few young people there, unless it was a Friday. The mosque would usually fill up with men of his father’s generation — retired street vendors, master builders, repairmen — well before the start of prayers, and afterward they would all stroll down together to the covered passage under the mosque, headed for the coffeehouse. Some of them had beards and walking sticks and wore green skullcaps. Mevlut knew deep down that the only reason he had started coming here to pray was for the chance of running into Samiha at the shops afterward, so his mind would focus on these old men’s whispers, the silence inside the mosque, and the threadbare state of its carpets, and he would end up unable to inject any sincerity into his prayer. What did it mean when a believer who trusted as much as Mevlut did to the power and grace of God, and felt such a strong need to take comfort in Him, couldn’t even pray sincerely in a mosque? If a person couldn’t be true to himself in the presence of God, despite a purity of heart and intentions, what should he do? He thought of asking these questions of the Holy Guide; he even fantasized about what answers he might receive.

“God knows who you truly are,” the Holy Guide would say while everyone listened. “Since you know that He knows, you wish to be the same, inside and out.”

After prayers, he would leave the mosque and loiter in the square where Duttepe’s first coffeehouses, junk shop, grocery store, and bus stop had popped up thirty years ago. The area was no different now from anywhere else in Istanbul. There was concrete everywhere, and billboards, banks, and kebab shops. By now, Mevlut had been to Duttepe three times already and still hadn’t managed to run into Samiha. He was beginning to worry about how to break it to Fevziye when one day he saw Samiha standing in front of the Vurals’ bakery.

He stopped and turned around, heading straight back into the passage under the mosque. He was wrong. This woman wasn’t for him.

Mevlut went to the coffeehouse at the end of the passage, where everyone was watching TV; he left just as quickly as he’d come. If he went upstairs, through the back door and across the mosque courtyard, he should be able to get to the clubhouse without Samiha’s seeing him.

A heavy sense of regret spread rapidly through his soul. Would he have to spend the rest of his life alone? In any case, he didn’t want to go back. He went up the stairs to head out.

When he stepped into the courtyard of the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque, he came face-to-face with Samiha. For a moment, they just looked at each other, standing two feet apart as they’d done at Korkut’s wedding. These were most definitely the same eyes Mevlut had seen back then, the same dark eyes for which he’d written those letters, the reason that he’d studied all those handbooks and dictionaries. He felt close to the idea of Samiha, but as a real human being, she seemed a stranger.

“Mevlut, how come you won’t even visit us when you’re here, or at least let us know you’re around?” said Samiha boldly.

“I’ll come next time,” said Mevlut. “But there’s something else. Come to the Villa Pudding Shop tomorrow at noon.”

“Why?”

“We shouldn’t talk here, in front of everyone…people will gossip. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

They bade each other an awkward farewell from a respectable distance, but both their faces betrayed their satisfaction at having been able to arrange a meeting. As long as Mevlut didn’t say anything he didn’t mean to, or do anything to embarrass himself, the meeting at the pudding shop should go well. Mevlut had seen many married couples chatting over a shared meal at the Villa. Everyone would think they were husband and wife, too. There was nothing to worry about.