Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Another contentious issue was the expense of temporary accommodation: when they demolished old gecekondu homes, contractors were obliged to pay relocation costs for the displaced until their new homes were finished. Some had supposedly signed contracts specifying temporary arrangements for two years, only to end up on the street when the contractors didn’t finish on time. Amid such rumors all over Istanbul, many local landowners decided that it was probably safer to come to an agreement with the contractors only after everyone else had already done so. Others kept procrastinating — single-handedly delaying major projects — simply out of a sense there would be more to gain by being the last to sign.

Korkut referred to them as “obstructors,” and he loathed them. To him they were dirty profiteers hindering other people’s lives and livelihoods for the sake of a better deal or more apartments than they had a right to. Mevlut had heard tales of so-called obstructors getting six — perhaps even seven — apartments in sixteen- or seventeen-story buildings while everyone else was allotted two or three. These sharp negotiators usually planned to sell off all their expensive new units as soon as they got them and move to a different city or neighborhood, as they knew it wasn’t just the government and its contractors who would be furious with them for the delays but also their own friends and neighbors desperate to move into their new homes as soon as possible. Mevlut knew that in Oktepe, Zeytinburnu, and Fikirtepe these obstructors and their neighbors had come to blows, sometimes ending in stabbings. It was also rumored that contractors were secretly instigating this kind of discord. Mevlut came to know all about this business when, during their last negotiation meeting, Korkut had said, “You’re no better than those obstructors, Mevlut!”

The Vural Holdings offices on Main Street were empty that day. Mevlut had attended many meetings here, whether organized by homeowners or the contractors. He’d sat there with Samiha looking at flashy models with oddly shaped balconies and tried to picture the small, northerly apartment that was his due. The office had photographs of other high-rises the Vurals had built in Istanbul, and some with Hadji Hamit holding a shovel forty years ago, working on some of his very first projects. It was around midday now, and even the curbsides, where prospective buyers from the city’s better neighborhoods usually parked their cars on weekends, were empty. After wasting some time window-shopping in the arcade under the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque, Mevlut began to climb Duttepe’s twisting, narrow roads so he wouldn’t be late for the meeting at Uncle Hasan’s grocery store.

Just beyond the first few houses at the foot of the hill was a flat stretch of road where there once stood a row of malodorous wooden dormitories for Hadji Hamit’s workers. As a child, Mevlut had looked in their open doors and glimpsed the sleeping forms of tired young workers entombed in their bunks within the dark and musty rooms. Over the past three years, the vacancy rate had risen as renters fled, expecting the whole neighborhood to be demolished soon anyway, and the now-derelict structures dotting the whole of Duttepe made the area look run-down and ugly. Mevlut looked at the darkening sky ahead and fretted. As he climbed the hill, he felt as if he were walking straight into the heavens.

Why hadn’t he been able to refuse when Samiha had insisted on sixty-two percent? He didn’t know how he could get the Aktaş family to agree to that. In their last round of negotiations, which took place at the clubhouse, Korkut had balked at fifty-five percent, and in frustra tion they’d agreed to adjourn and try one more time. But Mevlut hadn’t heard from Korkut and Süleyman for weeks. It all made him very anxious, but he also liked it that Korkut considered him an obstructor; it might mean he was poised to get more than anyone else in the end. Since the clubhouse meeting, however, Duttepe and Kültepe had been designated seismic hazard zones, and Mevlut — like many others in Kültepe — had begun to suspect a trick orchestrated by the Vurals. After the 1999 earthquake it had been established by law that any building found to be structurally unsound could be demolished with the consent of at least two-thirds of its owners. Now both the government and the developers were using this measure to circumvent small-property owners who stood in the way of bigger and taller apartment buildings. With the seismic hazard law invoked in Kültepe, the lot of an obstructor was even harder, and Mevlut couldn’t fathom how he was going to ask for the sixty-two percent Samiha had insisted on as he walked out the door.

It had been seven years since the wedding, and he was happy. They had become good friends. But theirs was not a friendship that revolved around all that was bright and wonderful in the world; instead, it was founded on companionable hard work, their shared struggle to overcome difficulties, and on coming to terms with the banality of everyday life. Once he got to know Samiha a bit better, Mevlut found a stubborn, decisive woman who was determined to live a good life, and he liked this side of her. But she didn’t always know where to channel this inner strength, and maybe that was why she kept trying to direct Mevlut much more than he could happily bear — often going as far as to tell him what to do outright.

Mevlut would have been quite happy to settle with the Vurals for fifty-five percent: this would have given him three apartments on the lower floors of the twelve-story building, with no Bosphorus view. Since his mother and sisters in the village formally counted as his father’s heirs, too, his share would have effectively come to something slightly less than one whole apartment. They would use the rents from Ferhat’s apartments in Çukurcuma to make up the difference over five years (though if they managed to get sixty-two percent, this could be accomplished in three years). Either way, in the end, they would own the apartment outright between them. He had spent months going over the figures with Samiha at home. Now, after forty years in Istanbul, with a place to call his own (or half his own) never so close, Mevlut didn’t want to see his hopes dashed, and so as he walked into his uncle Hasan’s grocery, with its colorful assortment of vitreous boxes, newspapers, and sundry bottles, he felt almost afraid.

His eyes took some time to adjust to the semidarkness inside the shop.

“Mevlut, you try talking to my father,” said Süleyman. “He’s driving us mad; maybe he’ll listen to you.”

Uncle Hasan was sitting at the cash desk as he’d been doing for thirty-five years. He was truly old now, but he still sat up straight. Mevlut was struck by how much his uncle resembled his father; as a child, he’d never been able to see that. He hugged his uncle and kissed his cheeks, which were covered in moles and a thin beard.

The thing Süleyman was teasing his father about as Korkut laughed was Uncle Hasan’s insistence on continuing to pack his customers’ purchases in those little baskets he made out of old newspapers (he called them pint baskets). In the 1950s and 1960s, all Istanbul grocers used to do it, but now only Uncle Hasan still spent his spare time folding up discarded newspapers brought from home or found elsewhere, and whenever his sons protested, he would only say, “It’s not hurting anyone.” Mevlut did as he always did when visiting the shop: he sat down in the chair across from his uncle and started folding newspapers, too.

Süleyman told his father that the neighborhood was changing, and customers wouldn’t want to come to a minimart with only dirty old newspapers in which to take home their groceries.

“Then let them stop coming,” said Uncle Hasan. “This isn’t a minimart anyway, it’s a grocery store. ” He turned to Mevlut and winked.