Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

In order to show the rest of the country what Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School had to offer, the principal wanted the school’s team to make a good showing at Istanbul Radio’s Quiz Competition for Secondary Schools. So he fielded a team of middle-class children from the better neighborhoods (the lazy and the resentful called them nerds) and spent most of his time having them memorize the birth and death dates of Ottoman sultans. At the flag-raising ceremonies, with the whole student body there, the principal bad-mouthed those who’d dropped out to work as repairmen and welders’ apprentices, cursing them as weak and worthless traitors to the cause of enlightenment and science; he also told off those like Mevlut, who went to school in the morning and sold yogurt in the afternoon; and he tried to lead those who’d become more concerned with getting ahead than with school back onto the right path, shouting: “Turkey will not be saved by cooked rice peddlers, hawkers, and kebab vendors, but by science!” Einstein, too, had grown up poor, and he’d even failed physics once, but he had never thought of giving up school to make a living — to his own benefit and that of his nation.

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Skeleton.In truth, our Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was originally founded to serve the neighborhoods on the hills in and around Mecidiyeköy, to make sure that the children of civil servants, lawyers, and doctors, who lived there in modern and European-looking cooperative housing, received a proper state education. Sadly, over the past ten years the school has been overrun by hordes of Anatolian children, who live in the new neighborhoods that have sprung up illegally on the once-empty hills, making it almost impossible to run this lovely school properly. Even though many skip class to work as street vendors, or take a job and drop out, and a significant number of boys are expelled for stealing, battery, or threatening teachers, our classrooms remain overcrowded. There can be, I regret to say, as many as fifty-five students taking lessons in one of our modern classrooms built with thirty students in mind, three students may have to squeeze onto desks designed for two, and during recess, the boys cannot run or walk or play without crashing into one another like bumper cars. Every time the bell rings or a fight breaks out or there is any kind of sudden rush, there follows a stampede in which some students get crushed and the weaker ones faint, and there is nothing we can do but take them to the staff room, where we try to revive them with cologne. With all the overcrowding, it is of course more effective to have students learn by rote rather than try to explain things to them. Rote learning doesn’t just develop children’s memory, it teaches them to respect their elders. This is also the reasoning behind the education ministry’s textbooks. There are five regions in Turkey. A cow’s stomach has four parts. There were five reasons that the Ottoman State entered a period of decline.

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For one and a half school years, between sixth and seventh grade, Mevlut worried constantly about where to sit in the classroom. The inner turmoil he endured while grappling with this question was as intense as the ancient philosophers’ worries over how to live a moral life. Within a month of starting school, Mevlut already knew that if he wanted to become “a scientist Atatürk would be proud of,” as the principal liked to say, he would have to befriend the boys from good families and nice neighborhoods, whose notebooks, neckties, and homework were always in good order. Out of the two-thirds of the student body who, like Mevlut, lived in a poor neighborhood, he had yet to meet anyone who did well in school. Once or twice in the school yard, he’d bumped into boys from other classes who took school seriously because they, too, had heard it said, “This one’s really clever, he should be sent to school,” but in the apocalyptically overcrowded school, he had never managed to communicate with these lost and lonely souls who, like the quiz team, were belittled by the rest as nerds. This was partly because the nerds themselves regarded Mevlut with some suspicion, as he, too, was from a poor neighborhood. He rightly suspected that their rosy worldview was fatally flawed: deep down, he felt that these “clever” boys, who thought they would become rich one day if only they could learn the sixth-grade geography textbook by heart, were, in fact, fools, and the last thing he wanted was to be anything like them.

Mevlut felt better when he got to make friends with and sit next to some of the wealthier boys, who took the front-row seat in class and always kept up with their homework. In order to be allowed to sit near the front, Mevlut had to maintain constant eye contact with the teachers; when they began a sentence and left it hanging — the logic being that the students might learn something by completing the thought — Mevlut tried to be the first to finish the sentence. When the teacher asked a question, even when he didn’t know the answer Mevlut always raised his hand with the optimistic manner of someone who did.

But these children among whom Mevlut strove to fit in, who lived in proper apartment blocks in the nicer neighborhoods, could also be strange and break your heart at any time. In his first year of middle school, Mevlut earned the privilege of sitting in the front row next to “the Groom,” but one day when they were outside in the snowy school yard the Groom was nearly trampled by swarms of boys playing football (with a ball made out of crumpled old newspapers bound in string, proper footballs being forbidden on school grounds), hurtling about, shouting, fighting, pushing and shoving in the dirt, and gambling (the wager being collectible footballer stickers, tiny pencils, or cigarettes split in three). In a fit of pique, the Groom turned to Mevlut and said, “This school has been taken over by peasants! My dad is going to transfer me.”

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The Groom.They gave me this nickname during the first month of school because I take a lot of care over my tie and blazer, and some mornings I splash on some of my father’s aftershave (he’s a women’s doctor) before coming to class. The smell of aftershave is like a breath of fresh air in a classroom that stinks of dirt, stale breath, and sweat, and on days when I don’t wear it, people ask me, “Hey, Groom, no wedding today?” Contrary to what some people think, I’m no pushover. Once some clown was trying to mock me, leaning into my neck pretending he wanted to smell my aftershave, as if I were some sort of queer, so I gave him an uppercut that sent him flying, and that won the respect of all the back-row bullies. The only reason I’m here is because my father’s too cheap to pay for private school.

This is the sort of thing Mevlut and I were discussing in class one day when the biology teacher, Massive Melahat, said: “Ten nineteen, Mevlut Karataş, you’re talking too much, go to the back!”

“We weren’t talking, ma’am!” I said — not because I’m the brave white hat Mevlut thinks I am, but because I knew I was safe; Melahat wouldn’t dare send someone like me, a boy from a good family, all the way to the back rows.

—

Mevlut wasn’t too worried. He’d been sent to the back before, but his good behavior, his innocent, boyish face, and his readiness to raise his hand meant that he would always manage to creep back to the front. Teachers looking for ways to lower the noise level would sometimes move everyone around. On these occasions, the sweet-faced Mevlut would look into the teacher’s eyes with such fervent enthusiasm and deference that he would manage to get himself moved right to the front — but only until some misfortune forced him back.