Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Uncle Hasan still kept accounts for some of his customers who paid at the end of the month. His eyesight wasn’t very good, though, so he told them to write down for themselves what they’d bought. He asked Mevlut to check whether the customer who’d just walked out had written down the correct amount. When he realized that his sons weren’t going to come back to smooth things over, he tried to comfort Mevlut: “Your father and I, we were such close brothers, such good friends,” he said. “We fenced off the land in Kültepe and Duttepe together, we built our houses together with our own hands. We told the neighborhood councilman to put both our names down on the papers so that we would never grow apart. In those days, your father and I would sell yogurt together, we’d eat together, we’d go to Friday prayers together, we’d sit in the park smoking cigarettes together…Have you got the councilman’s document, my boy?”

Mevlut placed the wrinkled, spongy forty-year-old piece of paper on the counter.

“We ended up growing apart anyway. Why? Because he didn’t bring your mother and your sisters over to Istanbul from the village. You both worked your hearts out, you and your father, God rest his soul. You deserve those apartments more than anyone else does. Your sisters didn’t come to Istanbul to work. The right thing would be for you to have all three of the apartments the contractor is giving you. I have a few spares of those old forms. The councilman was my friend, and I have his seal, too. I’ve been keeping it safe for thirty-five years. I say let’s tear this old thing up. Let’s make a new one ourselves. We’ll put your name on it, and stamp it all off. That way you and Samiha will get a whole apartment outright.”

Mevlut realized that this meant increasing his own share at the expense of his mother and sisters in the village, so he said, “No.”

“Don’t be so quick to decide. You’re the one who’s been breaking his back here in Istanbul. You have a right to the city’s rent.”

The phone in his pocket rang, and Mevlut went outside in the rain. “I saw you called, what’s the matter?” said Samiha. “It’s not going well,” said Mevlut. “Don’t let them bully you,” said Samiha.

Mevlut hung up, feeling exasperated, and went back into the shop. “I’m leaving, Uncle Hasan!” he said.

“Up to you, son,” said Uncle Hasan as he folded newspapers. “Whatever happens, the Lord’s purpose shall always prevail.”

Mevlut would have much preferred it if his uncle had said, Stay a while longer, the boys will cool off eventually. He grew irritated at the old man, and at Samiha for having driven him to this. He was also angry at Korkut and Süleyman and at the Vurals, too, but most of all he was annoyed with himself. If he’d told Uncle Hasan yes just now, he’d have finally been able to get the home he deserved. As it was, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

As he walked in the rain along the winding asphalt road (formerly a muddy dirt road), past the Food Stop Mart (which used to be a junk dealer’s), and down the steps (which weren’t there before) to the big road back to Kültepe, Mevlut thought of Rayiha, as he did so many times each day. He’d started dreaming about her more often, too. These were painful, difficult dreams. There would always be overflowing rivers, fires, and darkness between them. All of these shadowy things would then turn into a kind of wild jungle, just like the ugly apartment blocks he could see now, rising to his right. Mevlut would realize that there were dogs roaming among the trees in this jungle, but Rayiha’s grave was there, too, and as he pushed through his fear of dogs and toward her, he would suddenly realize with a jolt of pleasure that his beloved was, in fact, behind him, watching him, and he would wake up happy but also strangely distressed.

Had Rayiha been the one waiting for him at home, she would have found the right words to soothe his worries. But when Samiha put her mind to something, that was all she ever saw, and this only made Mevlut more anxious. By now he felt like himself only when he was out at night selling boza.

The gardens of some empty homes were planted with signs that said PROPERTY OF VURAL HOLDINGS. The slopes along the main road that climbed up to Kültepe had been empty when Mevlut had first moved to Istanbul. His father used to send Mevlut here to collect scrap paper, wood, and dried twigs for the stove. Nowadays the road was flanked on either side by hideous gecekondu homes, six or seven stories high. They had once been two or three floors at most. But over the years, the owners had added so many illegal floors (burdening the already weak foundations) it would no longer have been economical to knock them all down and replace them with new high-rises. The owners had nothing to gain from the new law permitting twelve-story construction, and the contractors didn’t even try to negotiate with them. Korkut had once told Mevlut that these horrible buildings, with each additional floor different from the one below, gave a bad impression of Duttepe and Kültepe, lowering the value of the new apartments to be built and ruining the image of the neighborhood; the only hope was for the next big earthquake to destroy them all.

Ever since the quake in 1999, Mevlut — like all residents of Istanbul — would sometimes catch himself thinking about “the big one,” the one the experts said was imminent and would destroy the whole city. In those moments, he would realize that this city where he’d spent forty years of his life, where he’d passed through thousands and thousands of doors, getting to know the insides of people’s homes, was no less an ephemeral thing than the life he’d lived there and the memories he’d made. The new tall buildings that were replacing his generation’s gecekondu homes would also disappear one day, along with all the people who lived inside them. He would sometimes have a vision of the day when all the people and all the buildings were to vanish, and he would feel then as if it wasn’t really worth doing anything at all, that he might as well give up any expectations he may have had of life.

Throughout the happy years of his marriage to Rayiha, though, he’d always thought that Istanbul would never change, that all his hard work out on the streets would gain him a place of his own someday, and that he would learn to adapt to the city. All this had happened, to an extent. But ten million other people had joined him in Istanbul over the past forty years, latching on as he had to anything they could find, and the city had emerged transformed. Istanbul’s population had been only three million when Mevlut had first arrived; now, they said there were thirteen million people living there.

Raindrops were dripping down the back of his neck. Mevlut, who was fifty-two years old, looked for a place to shelter and let his heart rate slow down. He didn’t have any specific worries about his heart, but he was smoking too much lately. Over on the right he saw a clearing that had often been used for weddings and circumcision parties and for the Derya Cinema’s summer screenings; now they’d turned it into a football field with artificial turf surrounded by a wire fence. Mevlut had organized football tournaments there for the migrants’ association. Under the dripping eaves of their office building, he lit a cigarette and watched the rain falling onto the plastic grass.

His life was still passing by in a crescendo of anxieties. Mevlut had reached the age at which he would have liked to put his feet up, but he didn’t feel secure enough to do so. The deficiency and inadequacy he’d felt in his heart when he’d first moved to the city had intensified after Rayiha’s death, and especially over the past five years. What would Samiha say? All he wanted was a house where he could spend the rest of his days in comfort, a place where he knew no one would ever be able to kick him out. Samiha should try to console him about his failure to get that, but Mevlut knew that as soon as he got home and broke the news to her, he would probably end up consoling her instead. He decided to tell her only the good news from the negotiation. That, at least, should be how he introduced the subject.