Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

They watched the news on TV (the president had come to the Sü leymaniye Mosque in Istanbul for the holiday prayers) and didn’t talk to one another at all while they ate. Uncle Hasan may have been downstairs, but still the rakı bottle hadn’t been put out on the dinner table. So Korkut and Süleyman went to the kitchen every now and then to top up their glasses.

Mevlut felt like some rakı, too. He wasn’t like those people who prayed more and drank more as they got older; he still didn’t drink too much. But the things Samiha had said earlier when they’d been sitting downstairs in the dark had broken his heart, and he knew that he’d feel better after a drink.

Ever thoughtful, Melahat followed him into the kitchen. “The rakı ’s in the fridge,” she said. Samiha came in behind them, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’d like some, too…,” she said with a laugh.

“Don’t use that glass, here, take this, and would you like some more ice?” said Melahat, and as always, Mevlut found himself admiring her courtesy and solicitude. Right in the middle of the open fridge, Mevlut saw a green plastic bowl full of bright red hunks of meat.

“Süleyman, bless him, had two rams slaughtered,” said Melahat. “We’ve been distributing the meat to the poor, but there is still so much left. It won’t fit in our fridge. We’ve put a bowl into Vediha’s fridge and one in my mother-in-law’s, and still there’s another big one out on the balcony. Would you mind if we put it in your fridge for a while?”

Süleyman had bought the two rams three weeks ago and tied them up in a corner of the parking lot close to Mevlut’s window, and although initially he’d taken care of them and fed them hay, he’d soon forgotten all about them, just as Mevlut had. Sometimes a stray ball kicked by one of the children would hit one of the animals, and the brainless tethered rams would butt their heads and kick up a cloud of dust as the kids laughed. Once, before both animals had ended up in plastic washbasins to be distributed among the poor and the four refrigerators, Mevlut had gone to the parking lot and looked one of the rams straight in the eyes, remembering with sorrow the twenty thousand sheep at the bottom of the Bosphorus.

“Of course you can put it in our fridge,” said Samiha. The rakı had mellowed her, but Mevlut could tell from her face that she didn’t like this idea at all.

“Fresh meat smells awful,” said Melahat. “Süleyman was going to give it away at the office, but…do you have any idea who might need it in the neighborhood?”

Mevlut gave the matter some serious thought: over on the opposite end of Kültepe and on the other hills all around, a new class of strange people had moved into the old gecekondu homes left empty when the exciting prospect of new high-rises had caused their various owners to sue one another or the state over the stipulations in the paperwork issued by the neighborhood councilman. But the newest destitute multitudes mostly lived in the farthest reaches of Istanbul, farther out than the second ring road around the city, where even Mevlut had never set foot. These people came to the city center wheeling enormous sacks along and scavenging in bins. The city had grown so big and sprawling that it was impossible to drive to and from these neighborhoods in a day, let alone walk. What amazed Mevlut even more were the strange new buildings that had begun to rise from these quarters like phantoms, so tall that you could see them from the opposite shore of the Bosphorus. Mevlut loved to watch these buildings from afar.

At first, he didn’t get a chance to take in the view from the dining room as much as he would have liked, because he had to listen to the story Süleyman was telling: two months ago, the apartments in the block that had belonged to Mevlut’s sisters and mother had been sold, and his sisters’ respective husbands, both men in their sixties who’d rarely left the village, had come to Istanbul for the occasion and stayed for five days on the ground floor with Aunt Safiye, who was both their wives’ maternal aunt and their paternal uncle’s wife. Süleyman had taken them around the city in his Ford, and now he was full of stories mocking their fascination with Istanbul’s skyscrapers, bridges, historic mosques, and shopping malls. The highlight of these stories was how these elderly uncles — seeking, like everyone else, to avoid paying taxes — had taken their payment for the apartments in bagfuls of dollars, rather than going through the bank, and had never let those bags out of their sight for the duration of the trip. Süleyman got up from the dinner table and did an imitation of the two old men hunched over their heavy bags of cash as they boarded the bus that would take them home. He said, “Oh, Mevlut, what would we do without you?” and when everyone turned to him and smiled, Mevlut’s mood turned sour.

There was something in their smiles that suggested they found Mevlut as naïve and childish as the two elderly uncles. It wasn’t that they still thought he belonged in the village; what amused them was that he’d been honest enough to refuse the opportunity to forge some paperwork and end up owning all of those apartments himself. His sisters’ husbands were diligent (they’d even brought Mevlut the title deed for his share of the small village plot he’d inherited from his father); they would not let anyone cheat them too easily. Mevlut thought dejectedly that if only he had followed Uncle Hasan’s suggestion three years ago and redrawn the councilman’s document, he would have owned his apartment outright and could have stopped working in his fifties.

Mevlut remained pensive for a time. He tried to convince himself not to mind too much about how Samiha had hurt him: compared with everyone else’s fat, blowsy old wives, his was still beautiful, bright, and full of life. They were all going to go to Kadırga tomorrow to see his grandchildren, too. He had even reconciled with Fatma. His life was better than anyone else’s. He should be happy. He was, wasn’t he? When Melahat brought in the pistachio baklava, he suddenly rose to his feet. “I want to have a look at this view, too,” he said, turning his chair to face the other way.

“Well, if you can see anything beyond the tower,” said Korkut.

“Oh no, we put you in the wrong seat,” said Süleyman.

Mevlut picked his chair up and went to sit out on the balcony. He felt dizzy for a moment, both from the height and the sheer expanse of the landscape before him. The tower Korkut had mentioned was the thirty-story one Hadji Hamit Vural had built during the last five years of his life, working on it day and night as he had done on the Duttepe Mosque and sparing no expense to make it as tall as he possibly could. Sadly, it was never to become one of Istanbul’s tallest buildings, as he would have wished. But like most of the city’s skyscrapers, it said TOWER in English on the front in enormous letters, despite having no British or American residents to show for it.

This was the third time Mevlut had gone out on this balcony to take in the view. On his previous two visits, he hadn’t noticed just how much HADJI HAMIT VURAL TOWER I blocked Süleyman’s view. Vural Holdings had made sure to sell all the apartments in Kültepe’s new twelve-story buildings first and only then to build Hadji Hamit’s tower in Duttepe, which ruined the Kültepe apartments’ views.

Mevlut realized that he was looking at the city from the same angle now as he had that time his father had taken him up the hill when he’d first arrived in Kültepe. From this spot forty years ago you would have seen factories everywhere and all the other hills fast filling up with poor neighborhoods, starting from the bottom and working their way to the top. All that Mevlut could see now was an ocean of apartment blocks of varying heights. The surrounding hills, once clearly marked out by their own transmission towers, had now been submerged, lost beneath thousands of buildings, just as the old creeks that used to run through the city had been forgotten, along with their names, as soon as they’d been asphalted over and covered in roads. Mevlut couldn’t summon more than a vague sense of each hill—“That must be Oktepe over there, and those, I guess, are the minarets of the mosque in Harmantepe”—and even that only with much thought and close attention.