Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Let me show you something,” his father would say as they groped their way around a dark, dank stairwell in a block of apartments. “Ah, there it is! Go on, open it.” In the semidarkness, Mevlut would find a little compartment beside the door to an apartment and open it carefully, as if lifting the lid off Aladdin’s magic lamp. In the shadows inside there would be a bowl with a sheet of paper ripped from a school notebook. “Read what it says!” Mevlut would hold the note under the pale light of the stairwell lamp, handling it delicately, like some sort of treasure map, and he would read out in a whisper: “Half a kilo, with cream.”

Seeing how his son looked up to him as a man of wisdom who could speak the special language of the city, and how the boy couldn’t wait to learn the secrets of the city himself, was enough to put a proud spring in Mevlut’s father’s step. “You’ll learn it all soon enough…You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven’t…You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven’t walked at all. Are you tired, son, shall we sit down for a bit?”

“Yes, let’s sit down.”

They hadn’t been in the city even two months before it got cold enough to start selling boza in the evenings, and Mevlut began to feel the strain. After going to school in the mornings and walking fifteen kilometers in four hours to sell yogurt with his father in the afternoons, he would fall asleep as soon as they got home. Sometimes, when they stopped to rest in diners and teahouses, he would put his head down on the table for a quick nap, but his father would tell him to wake up, as this was the kind of thing you would expect to see in one of those disreputable twenty-four-hour coffeehouses, and it might not go down so well with the manager.

Mevlut’s father would wake him in the evenings, too, before he left to sell boza. (“Dad, I have a history test tomorrow, I have to study,” Mevlut might say.) Once or twice when he couldn’t get up in the morning, Mevlut told his father, “There’s no school today,” and his father was happy that they could go out together to sell yogurt that day and make a little more money. Some evenings, his father couldn’t bear to wake him, and he would pick up the jugs of boza himself and walk out pulling the door softly shut in his wake. Later, when Mevlut woke up all alone in the house, he would hear the familiar strange noises coming from outside, and he would feel remorseful, not just because he was afraid, but also because he missed his father’s companionship and the feeling of his hand inside his father’s. With all these thoughts weighing on his mind, he couldn’t even study, which only made him feel guiltier.

A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor

PERCHING ON a low, flat expanse at one end of the road linking Duttepe and the hills behind it to Istanbul, Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was situated in such a way that mothers hanging laundry up in their gardens, old ladies rolling out dough with their rolling pins, and unemployed men sitting in teahouses playing rummikub and card games in the neighborhoods along Dung Creek and in the profusion of gecekondu homes on the surrounding hills could all see the school’s orange building, its bust of Atatürk, and its students doing endless gym exercises (in their trousers, long-sleeved shirts, and rubber-soled shoes) in the big school yard, like so many colorful flecks in the distance, under the supervision of Blind Kerim, teacher of religion as well as gym. Every forty-five minutes, hundreds of students would pour out into the yard, released by a bell that wasn’t heard in the faraway hills, until another silent signal caused them all to disappear just as quickly. But every Monday morning, all twelve hundred students, both the middle school and the high school, would gather around the bust of Atatürk, their collective interpretation of the national anthem echoing mightily off the hills and heard in thousands of nearby homes.

The national anthem (“The Independence March”) was always preceded by an address from the principal, Mr. Fazıl, who would climb to the top of the stairs at the entrance of the school building to give a lecture on Atatürk, love of country, the nation, and the unforgettable military victories of the past (he was partial to engagements of bloody conquest, like the Battle of Mohács) and to encourage the students to follow Atatürk’s example. From the crowd, the school’s older, more rebellious elements called out derisive comments, which Mevlut initially struggled to understand, while other miscreants interrupted with strange if not downright rude heckles, so the vice principal, Skeleton, stood careful watch beside Mr. Fazıl, like a policeman. This strict surveillance meant that it would not be until a year and a half later, when he was fourteen and had begun to question the protocols of the school, that Mevlut finally got to know those serial dissenters, who farted impertinently even when surrounded by a large group and who were respected and admired by both the religious, right-wing students and the nationalist, left-wing students (the right-wing students being invariably religious, and the left-wing students invariably nationalist).

According to the principal, it was a depressing sign of the school’s and the nation’s prospects that twelve hundred students were unable to sing the national anthem together and in unison. The sight of them all singing to their own beat and, worse, of a number of “hopeless degenerates” who didn’t bother to sing at all drove Mr. Fazıl insane. Sometimes, by the time one side of the school yard had finished singing, the other side wouldn’t even be halfway through, so the principal, who yearned for them all to work together “like the fingers of a closed fist,” made the twelve hundred students sing the anthem over and over again, come rain or shine, until they got it right, while some of the boys, stubborn and determined to make mischief, flubbed the rhythm on purpose, causing fits of laughter and fights between the patriotic kids suffering the cold and the sneering, cynical defeatists.

Mevlut watched these fights from a distance, laughing at the boys’ insolent jokes while biting the insides of his plump cheeks to avoid detection by Skeleton. But then, slowly, the national flag would be raised, with its star and crescent moon, and Mevlut’s eyes would fill with guilty tears as he sang the anthem with genuine emotion. For the rest of his life, the sight of a Turkish flag being raised — even in movies — was enough to leave him misty eyed.

As the principal demanded, Mevlut wanted very much “to think of nothing else but his country, like Atatürk.” But in order to do this, he’d have to get through three years of middle school and three years of high school. No one from Mevlut’s family or from his entire village had ever performed such a feat, so this idea became ingrained in Mevlut’s mind from the very first days of school, assuming the same mythical contours as the flag, the country, and Atatürk — beautiful to imagine but difficult to reach. Most of the boys who came to the school from the new poor neighborhoods also helped their fathers in their work as street vendors or worked with local shopkeepers or were perhaps waiting in line to start an apprenticeship with a baker, an auto mechanic, a welder — knowing all along that they would drop out of school as soon as they got a little older.

Principal Fazıl was chiefly concerned with maintaining discipline, which required a proper harmony and order between, on the one hand, the children of respectable families, who in class always sat in the front rows, and, on the other hand, the throngs of poorer boys. He had developed his own brand of thinking on this subject and shared it every Monday during the flag-raising ceremony, distilled as a slogan: “A good education removes the barriers between rich and poor!” Mevlut wasn’t quite sure whether Principal Fazıl meant to say to his poorer students, “If you study hard and finish school, you, too, will be rich,” or whether he meant, “If you study hard and finish school, no one will notice how poor you are.”