Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

In fact, as they would later find out, the reason for the exclusion was their own father’s having told Vural Holdings, “I won’t sign away my land unless we all get to live under the same roof.” Convincing Uncle Hasan and Aunt Safiye to leave their forty-year-old four-story house for an apartment had been a challenge for Korkut and Süleyman, and they’d succeeded only by pointing out how extensively the earthquake had bent and twisted the upper floors of the old house.

On the morning of the Feast of the Sacrifice in 2012, Mevlut could find neither Süleyman nor Korkut nor their sons in the throng gathered to pray in the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque. Back when they’d lived on separate hills and in different neighborhoods, the cousins had always made sure to find one another so that after praying they could elbow their way through the crowd and over the carpets together to kiss Hadji Hamit Vural’s hand.

They all had mobile phones now, yet nobody had called Mevlut, and so even amid that ocean of men spilling out of the mosque courtyard and into the street and the square outside, he felt completely alone. He spotted some faces of Duttepe and Kültepe folk he recognized from his middle- and high-school years, as well as some of the shopkeepers and car owners who were his neighbors in Block D, but while he managed to catch their eye in greeting, the crowd was so pushy, rude, and impatient that he felt as if he’d come to pray in someone else’s neighborhood. Did any of the young men gathered here know that Hadji Hamit Vural — whom the preacher had mentioned but four or five names down from Atatürk himself as one of those men “whose tireless work had made this beautiful nation and given us the chance to live as we do”—had come to Rayiha and Mevlut’s wedding many years ago and presented the groom with a wristwatch?

When Mevlut came back from the mosque, Samiha wasn’t home. She must have gone upstairs to see Vediha, in number 9. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman had come to Kültepe for the holidays and had been staying up there for the past week. There were plenty of spare rooms in that apartment (all on the side without a view), and so far Korkut and his father-in-law had managed to avoid each other, while Vediha and Samiha spent most of their days watching TV with their father. Süleyman must have put his family in the car early that morning and gone to pay his own father-in-law in Üskudar a holiday visit. That was what Mevlut had assumed when he hadn’t seen Süleyman’s Ford Mondeo.

Mevlut’s first-floor apartment looked out onto the twelve-story building’s parking area, which gave him plenty of insight into the lives of the building’s retired couples, raucous young strivers, married couples whose jobs he couldn’t figure out, the university-educated grandchildren of old yogurt sellers, and kids of all ages endlessly playing football among the parked cars. Süleyman’s sons, sixteen-year-old Hasan and fourteen-year-old Kâzım, were the rowdiest of them all. If the ball sailed out of the confines of the lot and down the hill, these lazy young things wouldn’t even run after it but rather cry out “Ball! Ball! Ball!” in the hope that someone coming up the hill might pick it up; this would infuriate Mevlut, who’d walked his whole life just to make a living.

Nevertheless, in the eight months he’d already spent in this apartment, Mevlut hadn’t once opened the window to scold the kids playing football for making too much noise. Six days a week, he would leave the house at ten thirty in the morning and go to the migrants’ association in Mecidiyeköy. He would sell boza most evenings from mid-October through mid-April in neighborhoods like Şişli, Nişantaşı, and Gümüşsuyu, working the city’s well-heeled old four- and five- story buildings. He had severed all ties with his former neighborhood of Tarlabaşı: it was now part of an urban redevelopment zone created to encourage the construction of new boutique hotels, big shopping malls, and tourist attractions; most of its century-old Greek homes had been vacated.

While his morning tea was brewing, Mevlut watched a sheep being sacrificed in the parking lot (though he couldn’t see Süleyman’s rams) and leafed through the Holy Guide’s posthumous book Conversations. He’d first found out about this volume — the back cover had a lovely photograph of the Holy Guide as a young man — six months ago from an edition of the Righteous Path he’d spotted in a grocer’s window, and thereafter he made sure not to miss a single one of the twenty coupons he would need to get it. Mevlut believed he was partly responsible for the chapter entitled “The Intentions of Our Heart and Our Words.” He opened the book to those pages sometimes and studied them intently.

In the past, once the holiday prayers were over, Mevlut, his father, his uncle, and his cousins would always walk back to Duttepe together, laughing and conversing along the way, and have the breakfast of stuffed pastries and tea Aunt Safiye would have prepared for the assembled family. Now that they all lived in separate apartments, there no longer was anyplace they could all casually gather as they had done in the room beside the kitchen in the old house. Aunt Safiye had tried to keep the spirit of those days alive by inviting the whole family over for lunch, but Süleyman was going to see Melahat’s family, and his kids — who, once their holiday pocket money was secured, usually tired of their grandparents — weren’t there either.

When Korkut failed to show up as well that holiday morning, Aunt Safiye launched into a long rant about the greedy contractors and politicians she believed to be at the root of all these evils and who had led her darling boys astray. “I must have told them a thousand times, ‘Wait until we’re dead before you knock the house down, and then you can build all the towers you want,’ but they wouldn’t listen. They kept saying, ‘This place will come down in the next earthquake, Ma, you’re going to be so comfortable in the new apartments with all the conveniences,’ so by the end I just gave up. You don’t want to feel like you’re clipping their wings. I never fell for any of it, though. ‘You’ll have trees and gardens in your backyard,’ they swore, ‘you’ll be able to stick your arm out the window and pick plums and mulberries right off the branches.’ Well, we’ve got no plums and no mulberries; no chicks or hens; no soil and no garden. We can’t live without our leaves and bugs and grass, my child. That’s why your uncle Hasan has fallen ill. We don’t even get cats and dogs here, with all the construction work. Even on holidays like today, the only people who knock on our door are kids asking for pocket money, and that’s it, no one else, not even for dinner. My beloved house on the other hill, my home for forty years, has been demolished, and in its place they’ve put that huge tower, and it’s all I can do not to cry when I look at it, my darling Mevlut. I made your chicken. Here, have some more potatoes, I know how much you like them.”

Samiha leaped at the chance to tell them all the stories she’d heard of people who’d become utterly miserable ever since moving into the tall ugly buildings that had replaced their old gecekondu homes. It was no doubt hugely satisfying to bad-mouth Korkut and Süleyman right to their mother’s face for the way they’d thrown themselves at the Vurals and their government-backed high-rise projects. She talked about all the families who’d left behind their gardens and the homes they’d built and lived in for forty years (just like the Aktaşes), all the difficulties they were obliged to endure after having agreed to move into the new high-rises, either for the money or because they’d been pushed into it — for lack of a valid title deed or on account of their neighborhood’s having been declared a seismic hazard zone. She talked about the housewives who got depressed and ended up in the hospital; the people left out on the street because the construction was running behind schedule; those who couldn’t pay off their debts to the contractor; those who’d drawn a less-than-appealing flat in the lottery and now regretted ever consenting to the deal in the first place; and all the folk who missed their trees and their gardens. She railed against the way the old liquor factory, football stadium, and municipal administration buildings (formerly horse stables) had all been heartlessly demolished and all the mulberry trees cut down. But she didn’t mention how she used to meet Ferhat in secret under those same mulberry trees thirty years ago.