Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

In 1965, the year they moved into the unregistered house they had built in Kültepe, the two brothers claimed two empty lots, one in Kültepe itself and the other in Duttepe, with the help of Uncle Hasan’s eldest son Korkut, who had just joined them from the village. The 1965 elections were approaching, and there was a sense of leniency in the air, with rumors that the Justice Party would declare an amnesty on unregistered property after the elections, and with this in mind they set out to build a new house on the land in Duttepe.

In those days, no one in either Duttepe or Kültepe formally held title to their land. The enterprising individual who built a house on an empty lot would plant a few poplars and willow trees and lay the first few bricks of a wall to mark out his property, after which he would go to the neighborhood councilman and pay him something to draw up a document certifying that said individual had built the house in question and planted those trees himself. Just like the genuine title deeds issued by the State Land Registry, these documents included a crude plan of the house, which the councilman himself would draw with a pencil and ruler. He would jot down some additional notations in his childish scrawl — the adjacent plots belonging to this or that person, a nearby fountain, the location of the wall (which in fact might have consisted of no more than a rock or two here and there), and the poplar trees — and if you gave him some extra money, he would add a couple of words to widen the imaginary boundaries of the plot, before finally affixing his seal underneath it all.

In reality, the land belonged to the national Treasury or to the forestry department, so the documents provided by the councilman did not guarantee ownership at all. A house built on unregistered land could be knocked down by the authorities at any moment. Sleeping for the first time in the homes they’d built with their own hands, people would often have nightmares about this potential disaster. But the value of the councilman’s document would prove itself when the government decided, as it tended to do every decade or so in election years, to issue title deeds for homes built overnight — for these deeds would be handed out in conformity with the documents drawn up by the local councilman. Furthermore, anyone who was able to procure a document from the councilman certifying ownership of a plot of land could then sell that plot to someone else. During periods when the flow of unemployed and homeless immigrants to the city was particularly heavy, the price of these documents would rise, with the increasingly valuable plots quickly split up and parceled out, and the political influence of the councilman, needless to say, also climbing in proportion to the influx of migrants.

Through all this feverish activity, the authorities could still send the gendarmes to a hastily built home and knock it down whenever they felt like it or found it politically expedient to do so. The key was to finish building the house and start living in it as soon as possible. If a house had occupants, it could not be demolished without a warrant, and this could take a long time to obtain. As soon as they had the chance, anyone who claimed a plot of land on a hill would, provided they had any sense, recruit their friends and family to help them put up four walls overnight and then move in immediately so that the demolition crews couldn’t touch them the next day. Mevlut liked to hear the stories of mothers and their children who had their first night’s sleep in Istanbul with the stars as their blankets and the sky as their ceiling, in homes with no real roof yet, and with even the walls and the windows not yet finished. Legend has it that the term gecekondu —“placed overnight”—was coined by a mason from Erzincan who in one night built about a dozen homes ready for people to move into; when he died at a ripe old age, thousands paid their respects at his grave in Duttepe cemetery.

The construction project undertaken by Mevlut’s father and uncle had also been inspired by the preelectoral mood of permissiveness, but it was abandoned when that same mood caused a sharp increase in the price of construction materials and scrap metal. Rumors of a coming amnesty on unregistered property had sparked a frenzy of unlicensed building on state-owned land and forests. Even those who’d never before thought about building an illegal home went off to a hill somewhere at the edge of the city and, with the help of the local councilman, bought some land from whatever organization controlled the area (gangs, really, some of which carried sticks, others armed with pistols, and others still with political affiliations) and built homes in the most isolated and absurdly remote locations. As for buildings in the city center, many had floors added on to them around this time without permits. The wide expanses of empty land on which Istanbul was spread quickly turned into one vast construction site. The newspapers of the homeowning bourgeoisie decried the unplanned urban sprawl, while the rest of the city basked in the joy of home building. The small factories that produced the substandard hollow bricks used to build the gecekondu homes, and the shops that sold other construction materials, were all working overtime, and you could see horse carts, vans, and minibuses carrying bricks, cement, sand, timber, metal, and glass around the dusty neighborhood roads and up the hill paths at all hours of the day, gleefully ringing their bells and blowing their horns. “I hammered away for days to build your uncle Hasan’s house,” Mevlut’s father would say to him whenever there was a religious holiday and father and son went to Duttepe to visit their relatives. “I just want to be sure you remember that. Not that I would want you to make enemies of your uncle and your cousins.”

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Süleyman.That’s not true: Mevlut knows that the real reason why construction on the Kültepe house had to stop was that Uncle Mustafa kept sending all the money he made in Istanbul back to the village. As for what happened last year, my brother and I really wanted to work with Uncle Mustafa on the house, but my father understandably had had enough of my uncle’s mood swings, of his constantly picking fights and treating his own nephews so badly.

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Mevlut would become very upset whenever his father told him that his cousins Korkut and Süleyman “would stab him in the back one day.” He couldn’t even enjoy going to see the Aktaş family for holidays and other special occasions, like the day the Duttepe football team made its debut or when the Vural family invited everyone to celebrate the construction of the mosque. He’d always relished those visits because he knew his aunt Safiye would feed him pastries, that he would get to see Süleyman and catch a glimpse of Korkut, and of course he’d enjoy the comforts of a clean and tidy home. At the same time he dreaded those barbed exchanges between his father and his uncle Hasan, which always filled him with a sense of impending doom.

The first few times they went to visit the Aktaş family, Mevlut’s father would take a good long look at the windows of the three-room house, and declare “this bit should have been painted green, the wall on that side needs replastering,” to remind Mevlut of the injustice they’d suffered and to ensure that everyone knew of the claim that Mustafa Efendi and his son Mevlut had on this house.

Later, Mevlut would overhear his father telling Uncle Hasan: “As soon as you get hold of some money, you’ll sink it all into some swamp or something!” “What, like this one?” his uncle Hasan would reply. “They’re already offering me one and a half times the initial value, but I won’t sell.” Instead of gently fizzling out, these arguments would typically escalate. Before Mevlut even got a chance to eat his stewed fruit and orange after dinner, his father would rise from the table and take hold of his hand, saying: “Come on, son, we’re leaving!” Once they were out in the dark night, he would add: “Didn’t I say that we shouldn’t have come at all? That’s it, we’re never coming again.”