Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

What faced him now was a vast wall of windows. The city — powerful, untamed, frighteningly real — still felt unbreachable, even to him. The hundreds of thousands of windows lined up along this wall were like so many eyes watching him. They started out dark in the morning and changed color throughout the day; at night, they shone with a glow that seemed to turn the night overhanging the city into a sort of daytime. As a child, he had always liked looking at the city lights from afar. There was something magical about them. But he had never seen Istanbul from so far up. It was dreadful and dazzling at once. Istanbul could still make him flinch, but even now at fifty-five years of age, he still felt the urge to leap right into this forest of staring buildings.

If you looked long enough at the landscape of the city, however, you would soon start to notice movement at the foot of each building, the signs of activity across the various hills. The pharmaceutical and light bulb factories and other industrial works that had existed forty years ago had been razed, replaced by this assortment of frightening towers. Beyond the concrete curtain formed by all the tall new buildings, you could still make out traces of old Istanbul, just as you would have when Mevlut first came to this spot. Here and there, high gleaming towers had already cropped up, even in those neighborhoods. But what really struck him was the sea of skyscrapers and tall buildings rising even farther beyond those limits. Some were so far away that Mevlut couldn’t be sure whether they were on the Asian side of the city or on this one.

Each of these buildings shone as brightly as the Süleymaniye Mosque, and at night, their radiance formed a halo over the city, honey gold or mustard yellow. On nights when the clouds gathered low, they would reflect the city’s lemon-colored light, like strange lamps illuminating it from overhead. Amid this tangle of lights, it was difficult to distinguish the Bosphorus unless some ship’s spotlights, like the navigation lights of faraway planes, briefly flickered in the distance. Mevlut sensed that the light and darkness inside his mind looked like the nighttime landscape of the city. Maybe this was why he’d been going out into the streets to sell boza in the evening for the past forty years, no matter how little he earned from it.

So this is how Mevlut came to understand the truth that a part of him had known all along: walking around the city at night made him feel as if he were wandering around inside his own head. That was why whenever he spoke to the walls, advertisements, shadows, and strange and mysterious shapes he couldn’t see in the night, he always felt as if he were talking to himself.

“What is it, what are you staring at?” said Süleyman, coming out onto the balcony. “Are you looking for something?”

“I’m just looking.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? But I hear you’re going to leave us and go to Çukurcuma.”

When he went back inside, he saw that Samiha had taken her father by the arm and was walking him toward the door. Over the past few years, senility had crept up his crooked neck, and he didn’t talk much anymore, instead sitting quietly with his daughters like a well-behaved child as soon as he’d had a couple of drinks. Mevlut was surprised he was still able to take the bus from the village and come to Istanbul on his own.

“My father isn’t feeling too well, we should go now,” said Samiha.

“I’m coming,” said Mevlut.

His wife and father-in-law had already walked out.

“So, Mevlut, I hear you’re abandoning us,” said Korkut.

“Everyone wants boza on a cold holiday evening,” said Mevlut.

“I don’t mean tonight. I mean that you’re going to leave this place and move to Çukurcuma.” When Mevlut didn’t respond, Korkut said, “You don’t really have it in you to go away and leave us.”

“Oh, I do,” said Mevlut.

In the elevator, with music playing constantly in the background, his father-in-law’s weary, quiet demeanor saddened Mevlut, but mostly he was upset with Samiha. Downstairs in their apartment, he picked up his boza gear without saying a word to her and headed out into the streets full of joy and fervor.

Half an hour later, he’d reached the backstreets of Feriköy, feeling optimistic that the streets were going to tell him wonderful things that night. Samiha had broken his heart by reminding him that there had been a time when she hadn’t loved him. In moments like this, when he felt distressed, and all of his life’s failures and inadequacies seemed to surge inside him like a wave of regret, Mevlut’s mind would automatically turn to Rayiha.

“Boo-zaa,” he cried toward the empty streets.

Whenever he dreamed of her lately, the problem he had to solve was always the same: Rayiha was waiting for him in a palatial old wooden mansion, but no matter how many turns he took and how many doors he opened, he couldn’t seem to find the door to the house where she was staying, and he just kept going around in circles. He would realize that the street he had just passed had changed again, and if he wanted to find the door he was looking for, he would have to walk along the new street, too, and so he would resume his long, measureless journey. On some nights, when he found himself selling boza in some far-off street, he couldn’t quite make out whether this was a scene from that dream or whether he was in fact on that street at that moment.

“Boo-zaa.”

As a child and a teenager, Mevlut had already understood that the cryptic things he noticed while walking on the street were figments of his own mind. Back then, he had knowingly dreamed all these things up himself. But in later years, he began to feel that there was another power placing these thoughts and dreams inside his mind. In the past few years, Mevlut had stopped seeing any difference at all between his fantasies and the things he saw on the street at night: it seemed as if they were all cut from the same cloth. It was a pleasant sensation, intensified by the glass of rakı he’d just had over at Süleyman’s.

The idea that Rayiha was waiting for him in a wooden mansion somewhere along these streets could be a figment of his imagination, but equally it could be true. The eye that had been watching him from above even as he walked along Istanbul’s farthest streets for the past forty years might actually be there, or it might simply have been a momentary fantasy that Mevlut had ended up believing forever. It might just be his imagination that the distant skyscrapers he’d seen from Süleyman’s balcony looked like the gravestones in the picture from the Righteous Path —just as he had been given to feel that time had started running faster ever since a man and his son had robbed him of his wristwatch eighteen years ago…

Mevlut knew that every time he called out “Boo-zaa,” his emotions really did spread to the people inside the homes he passed, but at the same time he also realized that this was no more than a charming fantasy. It could be true that there was another realm hidden within this one and that he might be able to walk and ponder his way into it if he allowed his secret other self to emerge. For the moment, he refused to choose between the two realms. His public views were correct, and so were his private ones; the intentions of the heart and the intentions of words were equally important…This meant that all the words that had leaped out at him from advertisements, posters, newspapers displayed in grocery stores, and messages painted on walls may have been telling Mevlut the truth all along. The city had been sending him these symbols and signs for forty years. He felt the urge to respond to the things it had been telling him, just as he used to do as a child. It was his turn to talk now. What would he like to say to the city?