Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Kültepe’s inadequate sewage system couldn’t absorb all the water coursing down the neighborhood’s steep slopes. Mevlut realized that Main Street must be flooded when he heard the sounds of cars honking in the resulting traffic jam.

By the time he got home, he was soaking wet. The way Samiha was looking at him made him nervous, so he went a little overboard: “Everything’s fine,” he said. “They’re going to give us one thousand two hundred fifty liras every month so we can live wherever we want.”

“I know it’s all fallen through, Mevlut. Why are you lying to me?” said Samiha.

Vediha had called Samiha on her mobile phone and told her that Korkut was both deeply wounded and furious, that it was all over now, that they were cutting all ties with Mevlut.

“What did you say? Did you tell her how you made me swear on my way out that I wouldn’t take any lower than sixty-two percent?”

“Are you regretting it now?” said Samiha, raising a single, contemptuous eyebrow. “Do you think Süleyman and Korkut would have been nicer to you if you’d just given in to them?”

“I’ve been giving in to them all my life,” said Mevlut. Samiha’s silence spurred him on. “If I stand up to them now, I might lose the apartment. Do you want that kind of responsibility? Call your sister back, smooth things over, tell her they scared me, and I’m sorry for what I said.”

“I will not do that.”

“Then I’ll call Vediha myself,” said Mevlut, but he didn’t take his phone out of his pocket. He felt as if he were on his own. He knew he couldn’t make any major decisions that day without Samiha’s support. He changed out of his wet clothes, looking out at the view just as he used to do as a child when he did his homework. Right next to the old orange building of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, in the courtyard where Mevlut had always loved running around and where they’d had gym class, there was a new building so big that he could hardly recognize his old school anymore.

Samiha picked up her ringing phone and said, “We’re here,” before hanging up. She looked at Mevlut. “Vediha’s on her way. She said you’re not to go anywhere and just wait here.”

Samiha was sure that Vediha was coming to say, Mevlut made a mistake, he should ask for a little less; she urged her husband not to back down.

“Vediha is a good person. She wouldn’t suggest anything that is unfair to us,” said Mevlut.

“I wouldn’t trust her so much,” said Samiha. “She’ll defend Süleyman over you. Hasn’t she always?”

Was this a barbed reference to the letters? If so, it was the first time in their seven years together that Mevlut had heard Samiha make a bitter remark on the matter. They listened to the rain in silence.

There was a thunderous knock at the door. It was Vediha, who walked in complaining that she was “completely soaked,” though she was carrying an enormous purple umbrella and, actually, only her feet were wet. Samiha went to get her sister fresh socks and a pair of slippers, and Vediha placed a piece of paper on the table.

“Mevlut, just sign and let’s get this over with. You’ve asked for more than you are owed, you don’t know what I had to do to calm everyone down…”

Mevlut had seen others with the same boilerplate contract, and he wasn’t sure where to look: when he saw that it said sixty-two percent, he was delighted, but he held his emotions in check. “I won’t sign it if it’s not my right,” he said.

“Oh, Mevlut, haven’t you learned, rights don’t matter in the city, only profits,” said Vediha, smiling. “Give it ten years and what you’ve earned will become yours by rights. Now sign. You’re getting everything you asked for, so don’t complain.”

“No signing until we’ve read it,” said Samiha, but when she saw Mevlut pointing at the sixty-two percent, she, too, was relieved. “What happened?” she asked her sister.

Mevlut picked up the pen and signed the contract. Vediha used her mobile phone to tell Korkut. Once that was done, she gave Samiha the box of stuffed pastries she’d brought, and as they drank the tea Samiha had prepared and waited for the rain to stop, she told them the whole story, savoring every moment of her account: Korkut and Süleyman had been furious with Mevlut. In spite of Vediha’s pleading, it did look like the dispute might end up in court, with Mevlut losing everything, but then the elderly Hadji Hamit Vural caught wind of what was happening, and he called Korkut up.

“Hadji Hamit’s dream is to build a much taller building, a big tower in Duttepe near our old house,” said Vediha. “So he told Korkut, ‘Give your cousin whatever he wants.’ He won’t enter into any agreements for that tower until he’s done with these twelve-story blocks.”

“Let’s hope there’s no catch,” said Samiha.

Later, Samiha showed the contract to a lawyer, who confirmed that there were no tricks. They moved into an apartment near Mevlut’s clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy. But Mevlut’s mind was still on the home they’d left behind in Kültepe. He went to check on his empty house a few times and to see whether any tramps or burglars had broken in, but there was nothing there to steal. He’d sold everything of any value, from the doorknobs to the kitchen sink.

Toward the end of that summer, Vural Holdings’ earthmovers began to demolish houses in Kültepe, and every day Mevlut went down to watch. On the first day of the demolitions, there was a progovernment rally attended by journalists and solemnly addressed by the mayor. But in the hot summer days that followed, none of the people who saw their homes disappear in a cloud of dust applauded as they had done at that inaugural ceremony (not even the people who’d gotten the best deals from Vural Holdings). Mevlut saw people cry, laugh, look away, or start fights as their houses were knocked down. When the time came for his own one-room house, Mevlut felt his heart breaking. He observed his whole childhood, the food he’d eaten, the homework he’d done, the way things had smelled, the sound of his father grunting in his sleep, hundreds of thousands of memories all smashed to pieces in a single swipe of the bulldozer shovel.

I Can Only Meditate When I’m Walking

THEY NOW ALL LIVED spread out across the twelve floors and sixty-eight apartments of a single building in Kültepe. Mevlut and Samiha’s first-floor apartment was the only one on the northern façade, the side without a view. Uncle Hasan and Aunt Safiye were on the ground floor; Korkut and Vediha on the ninth; while Süleyman and Melahat were on the top floor. They would run into one another sometimes, either at the entrance, where the chain-smoking doorman stood and told off the children playing football in the street, or in the elevator, where, after exchanging a few jokes and pleasantries, they would act as if it were completely normal for them to be living all together in a twelve-story building. In truth, though, they all felt uneasy with the situation.

While he was generally happy, Süleyman felt his situation to be the most abject of all. His real desire had been for an apartment with city views on an upper floor of the thirty-story skyscraper that Hadji Hamit Vural had lovingly built in Duttepe during the last years of his life — not one here in Block D. Ninety-year-old Hadji Hamit had been accommodating—“Of course, your brother and father should come and live in my tower, too!”—but after his sudden death two years ago (which drew the minister for Public Works and Housing to his funeral), Vural Holdings’ board of directors had decided there was no room for Korkut and Süleyman in the building. The brothers would spend the whole of 2010 analyzing what had gone wrong, finally arriving at two explanations: The first had to do with an end-of-year staff meeting where Korkut, bemoaning the company’s enormous outlay for bribes to government officials in exchange for construction permits, had imprudently asked, “Can we really not get them for less?” Hadji Hamit’s sons, it was suspected, had taken offense at his implication—“You’re not bribing any ministers, you’re just pocketing the money yourselves”—though Korkut had meant nothing of the kind. The second explanation put the whole matter down to Korkut’s hand in the failed coup attempt in Baku, an episode that had since been rehashed exhaustively, earning him the reputation of one who organized military coups. Such a reputation would have been appreciated by previous nationalist and conservative governments, but it wasn’t very popular with the current Islamist regime.