Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“So what,” said Mevlut to these concerns. “Let them think whatever they want. We’ll just mind our own business.”

—

Mevlut called Süleyman to tell him the news, but he’d already found out from Vediha anyway. The aging tenant from Rize who was living in Mevlut’s house refused to leave immediately. Süleyman spoke to a lawyer who told them that if they tried going through the courts, it could take years to evict a tenant without a lease living in a house with no title deed to show. So the Vurals’ eldest son sent one of his guys — one renowned for his ruthless thuggish ways — to speak with the tenant from Rize, and he was able to obtain the tenant’s written agreement to vacate the premises within three months. On hearing that the wedding would take place three months later than planned, Mevlut showed both impatience and relief. Everything was moving so fast. He worried that it might all end in embarrassment and sometimes imagined that anyone learning that he would marry Samiha could only say “poor Rayiha” and look down on Mevlut. Of course such gossips wouldn’t be satisfied merely condemning Mevlut; they were also bound to bring up that old story, nearly forgotten in the wake of Rayiha’s death: “The man wrote to the younger sister, but got married to the older one instead.”

When Samiha mentioned marriage straightaway, speaking to him in reasoned, decisive tones, Mevlut understood that they would not be going out to cafés, the cinema, or even for lunch at an appropriate restaurant before they married. It was only when he found himself feeling disappointed that he realized how, in some part of his mind, he had been harboring such fantasies. At the same time, all the negotiations over the wedding, the precautions they were obliged to take to avoid the notice of the gossips, and all his uncertainty over what gestures were expected of him, how much he should spend, and what lies he could get away with were so exhausting that Mevlut began to think that arranged marriages were truly a blessed convenience.

He only got to see Samiha once every two weeks when she came over to Mr. Sadullah’s house in the afternoon. They wouldn’t speak much. Despite Fevziye’s efforts to bring her father and her aunt closer, Mevlut could see that he would never get to become friends with Samiha until they were married.

In September 2002, the tenant vacated the house in Kültepe, and Mevlut rejoiced at the pretext this gave him to improve his friendship with Samiha. Samiha took the narrow, winding road from Duttepe to Kültepe, and from there, they went to see Mevlut’s childhood home together.

The one-room gecekondu house, which he had so lovingly described to her in their meeting at the Villa Pudding Shop, was virtually a ruin. It still had an earthen floor, just as it had had thirty years ago. The toilet beside the room was still but a hole in the ground. Through a small window in the toilet you could hear the roar of trucks along the ring road at night. There was an electric stove next to the old woodstove. Mevlut couldn’t locate the illegal wiring, but he knew from experience that in a neighborhood like Kültepe, no one would buy an electric stove unless they could steal the electricity needed for it. The wobbly table with the short leg where he’d sat and studied as a child scared of demons was still there, as was the wooden bedstead. Mevlut even found the pots in which he’d made soup thirty years ago, and the coffeepot they’d always used. Just like him and his father, the tenants hadn’t bought a single thing for the house in years.

Yet the world around the house had changed completely. Once half empty, the hill was now covered in three- and four-story concrete buildings. The dirt roads — some of which had been new in 1969—were now all covered in asphalt. Some former gecekondu homes had been converted into multistory office buildings for lawyers and accountants or architects’ studios. Every rooftop was now covered with satellite dishes and billboards, transforming the view Mevlut used to see whenever he lifted his head from his middle-school homework to look out the window, though the poplars and the minarets of Hadji Hamit’s mosque were exactly the same.

Mevlut used the last of his savings to pave the floor of his gecekondu house (he, too, had started using this term), refurbish the roof and toilet, and have the walls painted. Süleyman sent a van from his construction company a couple of times to help, but Mevlut never mentioned that to Samiha. He was desperate to get along with everyone and didn’t want anyone to disapprove of his wedding.

He thought it suspicious that his daughter in Izmir had kept quiet all summer and hadn’t even come to Istanbul once, but he kept trying to put it out of his mind. When they started discussing the wedding arrangements, however, Fevziye couldn’t hide the truth from her father anymore: Fatma was against her father’s marrying her aunt after her mother’s death. She wouldn’t be coming to Istanbul for the wedding. She didn’t even want to speak to her father and her aunt Samiha on the phone.

As the summer grew hotter, Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman arrived in Istanbul, and Mevlut went to see him in Duttepe, where he was lodged on the third floor, which had itself gone crooked in the earthquake. Mevlut wanted to ask his permission to marry Samiha and to kiss his hand, just as he had done when he’d gone to their village to ask him for Rayiha’s hand twenty years ago. Perhaps Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman and Samiha, father and daughter, might go to Izmir to persuade Fatma to come to the wedding…But Fatma refused even to consider receiving such a visit, and that made Mevlut feel like writing her off. After all, she had turned her back on the family.

Finally, though, Mevlut couldn’t sustain any resentment against his daughter, because some part of him agreed with her. He could see that Samiha felt guilty, too. After all she had done to make sure Fatma got to go to college, and after all the care she’d lavished on her niece when Fatma’s mother died, Samiha felt as wounded as Mevlut did. And yet, when Mevlut said, “Let’s have the wedding far away from everyone,” Samiha proposed the very opposite.

“Let’s do it near Duttepe, let them all come and see for themselves…Let them gossip their hearts out…,” said Samiha. “That way, they’ll get bored of talking about it sooner.”

Mevlut admired Samiha’s reasoning, and her brave decision to wear a white gown at the age of thirty-six. They decided to have the wedding at the clubhouse, as it was close to Duttepe and wouldn’t cost them anything. The association’s offices weren’t very big, so all the guests came in, had their lemonades (and the glasses of rakı Mevlut arranged to have served on the sly), and gave their gifts, without lingering for long in the hot, humid, and overcrowded clubhouse.

Samiha had used her own money to rent the white gown, which she’d found with Vediha in a shop in Şişli. All through the wedding, Mevlut kept thinking that she looked stunning: surely any man who came face-to-face with such a beauty would write her love letters for three years.

Süleyman knew by now that he made Samiha uncomfortable: neither he nor the rest of the Aktaş family made their presence felt much at the wedding. He was drunk by the time he decided to leave, and he pulled Mevlut aside.

“Don’t forget I arranged both your marriages, my friend,” he said. “But I can’t figure out whether it was a good thing to do.”

“It was a great thing to do,” said Mevlut.

After the wedding, the bride and groom, Fevziye and her husband, and Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman piled into Mr. Sadullah’s Dodge and went to a restaurant in Büyükdere that served alcohol. Neither Mevlut, nor Samiha, who loved being in her wedding gown, drank anything. When they got home, they got into bed and made love with all the lights off. Mevlut had always known that sex with Samiha was never going to be awkward or difficult. They were both happier than they could have ever imagined.