Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“But, Samiha, poor people don’t want to live in dirty, freezing hovels anymore, with nothing but a stove to keep them warm; they all want somewhere clean, modern, and comfortable to call home!” said Vediha, defending her husband and Süleyman. Mevlut wasn’t surprised: the two sisters met up at least twice a day for idle chats in one apartment or the other, and Vediha often said how happy she was to be living in Block D. Now that she’d moved into a separate apartment with her husband, she was finally free of having to cook for the entire family every day and refill their cups of tea, no longer responsible for patching their clothes, mending their seams, and making sure they took their pills — no longer forced to be “everyone’s maid,” as she’d sometimes resentfully put it. (Mevlut’s theory was that being relieved of these chores was why Vediha had gained so much weight in recent years.) She did get lonely from time to time, with both her sons married now and Korkut still coming home late, but she had no complaints about living in the high-rise. When she wasn’t busy chewing the fat with Samiha, she went to Şişli to see her grandchildren. After much effort, extensive research, and several fruitless attempts, she’d managed to get Bozkurt married to the daughter of a plumber who’d come to Istanbul from Gümüşdere. This daughter-in-law, a middle-school graduate, was affable and charmingly loquacious, and whenever she had errands to run, she would leave the two daughters she’d borne in quick succession with their grandmother. Turan’s firstborn was a year old by then, and occasionally they would all get together at his house in Şişli. When Vediha went to Şişli to see her grandchildren, Samiha would join her, too, sometimes.

Mevlut came to feel aggrieved at Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman’s rapport with his two daughters. Was he jealous of their friendship and closeness? Or was it the way Samiha would laugh when she relayed to her husband some biting remark that Crooked Neck had let slip when he was drunk? (“It’s a huge mystery to me how not one, but two of my daughters could find no one they liked more than Mevlut in all of Istanbul,” he’d said one time.) Or was it that his eternal father-in-law, now in his eighties, had started drinking rakı at noon every day and was slowly getting Vediha into the same habit, having already corrupted Samiha?

Apart from the usual stuffed pastries, Aunt Safiye had also made french fries for her grandchildren, who hadn’t turned up, so Vediha was eating them all herself. Mevlut was almost certain that Abdurrahman Efendi had had his midday drink upstairs at number 9 a while ago before coming downstairs for lunch, and he was beginning to wonder whether Vediha might have had a few herself. When he left for the clubhouse to wish everyone a good holiday, he pictured Samiha having another drink with her father upstairs afterward. As he exchanged holiday greetings with his fellow Beyşehir migrants and shooed the kids who came knocking on the door asking for holiday money (“This is an office!”), Mevlut thought of Samiha at home sipping her rakı while she waited for him.

Ever since their second year of marriage, Mevlut and Samiha had been playing a little game. It was their way of facing the question that had informed their whole life: to whom did he write the letters? In their early days together they discussed the matter so thoroughly as to come to a sort of understanding: after their first meeting at the Villa Pudding Shop, Mevlut had conceded that he had written the letters to Samiha. His private and public views on the subject conformed easily enough. He had seen Samiha at Korkut’s wedding and been captivated by her eyes. But someone had tricked him, and he’d wound up marrying Rayiha instead, but he’d never regretted it, for he’d been immensely happy with Rayiha. Mevlut was never willing to spurn the joyful years he’d spent with his first wife or insult her memory, and Samiha understood his position.

What they couldn’t agree on, however, emerged whenever Samiha had a glass of rakı, opened one of his letters, and asked him what he’d meant when he’d likened her eyes to “bandits cutting across his path” or some such phrase. Samiha believed that this kind of question did not violate the spirit of their entente, since Mevlut had admittedly been referring to her and should therefore be able to explain his meaning. That much Mevlut accepted, but he refused all the same to enter into the frame of mind he’d been in back then.

Samiha would say, “You don’t have to get into that mood again, but at least tell me how you felt when you were writing those things to me.”

Mevlut would sip on his rakı and try to explain to his wife, as truthfully as he could, the way he’d felt as a twenty-three-year-old writing that letter, but after a point he would find himself unable to continue. One day, Samiha lost her patience with Mevlut’s reticence and said, “You can’t even bring yourself to tell me today how you used to feel back then.”

“That’s because I’m not the person I was when I wrote those letters,” Mevlut responded.

After a silence it quickly became clear that what had made Mevlut into a different person was not merely the passage of time and the streaks of gray in his hair, but also the love he’d felt for Rayiha. Samiha realized that she would not be able to force Mevlut into romantic declarations; and sensing his wife’s resignation Mevlut began to feel guilty about it. Such had been the beginnings of the game they still played today, these humorous exchanges that had now become a convivial ritual of sorts. At a propitious moment, either one of them — not just Samiha — would read out a few sentences from one of those faded, thirty-year-old letters, and Mevlut would explain why and how he’d written what he had.

The essence of the situation was that Mevlut would never get too sentimental when he offered these explanations, that he could talk about the young man who’d written those letters like some other person altogether. In this way, they were able to explore the subject to the satisfaction of Samiha’s pride — he had indeed been in love with her as a young man — without slighting the memory of Rayiha. He would read these excerpts from the letters in a spirit of good humor and of earnest inquiry, for they were, after all, mementos from his life’s most intense and exhilarating years, and they helped him discover new aspects of the past he shared with Samiha.

When he came back home from the clubhouse at dusk that day, he found Samiha sipping tea at the dinner table. She had one of Mevlut’s letters in front of her. He realized that she must have decided she’d had too much rakı and switched to tea instead, and that made him glad.

Why had Mevlut compared Samiha’s eyes to a daffodil in one of the letters he’d sent from the army base in Kars? This was around the time that Turgut Pasha had taken him under his wing; Mevlut confessed that he’d gotten some help and advice from a high-school literature teacher who was also doing his military service. Daffodils had tradi tionally been used to represent the eye in Ottoman literature: women used to cover up even more back then, and since men could only ever see their eyes, both court and folk literature fixated on them. Mevlut got carried away telling his wife all that he’d learned from the teacher, adding as well some intricate new thoughts of his own. When you were lured in by a pair of eyes and a face as beautiful as that, you stopped being you; in fact, you no longer even knew what you were doing. “I wasn’t myself back then,” Mevlut allowed.

“But none of that’s in the letter,” said Samiha.

Caught up in the glow of these youthful memories, Mevlut recalled the importance of that letter in particular. For a moment, he wasn’t just remembering the passionate young man who’d written love letters but also envisioning the beautiful girl he’d meant them for. When he’d been composing his missives, Samiha’s face had only ever appeared to him in vague outline. As he thought back to the past, though, he could see the figure of a young woman, almost a child, whose gentle features appeared to him now with exceptional clarity. This girl, whose image was enough to quicken Mevlut’s heart, wasn’t Samiha, but Rayiha.