Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Another time, the brave Groom tried again to protest the busty biology teacher Melahat’s decision to send Mevlut to the back rows yet again. “Please, ma’am, why not let him sit at the front; he loves your lessons.”

“Don’t you see he’s as tall as a tree?” was the cruel Melahat’s response. “Those at the back can’t see the board because of him.”

Mevlut was in fact older than most of the other boys in his class, because his father had needlessly kept him behind in the village for a whole year. Having to return to the back rows was always mortifying, and he soon came to imagine that there must be some sort of mysterious link between the size of his body and his newly acquired habit of masturbation. The back rows would greet Mevlut’s return to their ranks with applause and chants of “Mevlut, coming home!”

The back rows were the domain of the delinquents, the lazy, the stupid, the ones conditioned into hopelessness, the bulky thugs, the older boys, and those about to be kicked out of school anyway. Many who had been pushed to the back ended up finding a job and dropping out, but you would also find boys who aged there year after year as their search for employment proved fruitless. Some chose to sit there from the very beginning, knowing they were guilty from the outset or too stupid, too old, or too big for the front rows. But others, Mevlut among them, refused to accept that the back rows were their ugly fate and only grasped the painful truth after many empty efforts and much heartbreak, like some poor people who only realize at the end of their lives that they will never be rich. Most teachers, such as Ramses the history teacher (who really did look like a mummy), knew firsthand the futility of trying to teach anything to the back rows. Still others, like the young and timid English teacher Miss Nazlı—looking into her eyes from a front-row seat was pure bliss, and Mevlut fell slowly and unwittingly in love — were so afraid of antagonizing the back rows or of quarreling with any of the students there that they barely even glanced in that direction.

Not a single teacher, not even the principal, who was sometimes able to scare all twelve hundred boys into submission, would willingly challenge the back rows. For such tensions could escalate into out-and-out feuds, with not just the back rows but the entire class turning on the teacher. A particularly delicate matter likely to provoke everyone was when teachers mocked the students from the poor neighborhoods, their accents, their looks, their ignorance, and the pimples that blossomed daily on their faces like bright red hydrangeas. There were boys who would not stop making jokes, and whose stories were a lot more interesting than anything the teachers could come up with, and the teachers would try to silence and subdue them with the humiliating thwack of a ruler. There was a period when the young chemistry teacher, Show-Off Fevzi, whom everyone hated, was pelted with rice-grain bullets blown through empty ballpoint-pen tubes every time he turned toward the board to write down the formula for some lead oxide. His crime was to have mocked the accent and clothes of a student from the east (no one called them Kurds in those days), whom he had wanted to intimidate.

The back-row louts were always interrupting, purely for the pleasure of bullying a teacher they thought too meek, or perhaps simply because they felt like it:

“We’ve had enough of your rambling, ma’am, we’re really bored! Will you tell us about your trip to Europe?”

“Sir, did you really take a train on your own all the way to Spain?”

Like those people who will sit at open-air summer cinemas and talk throughout the show, the back rows provided a noisy running commentary on the goings-on at any given moment; they told their jokes and anecdotes, laughing so hard at their own wit that a teacher asking a question and the student in the front row trying to answer it often couldn’t hear each other. Whenever he was exiled to the back, Mevlut could barely keep up with the lesson. But his idea of perfect happiness was to be within earshot of the jokes from the back and able to listen to Miss Nazlı at the same time.

There’s No School Tomorrow

Mustafa Efendi. The next autumn, Mevlut was already in seventh grade, and still he was embarrassed about having to shout “Yogurt seller!” on the streets, but at least he was now used to carrying the yogurt trays and boza jugs on a stick across his shoulders. In the afternoons, I would send him off on his own to carry empty trays from, say, a restaurant in the back alleys of Beyoğlu to the warehouse in Sirkeci, and then back to Beyoğlu again with fresh trays or a jug of raw boza from the Vefa shop to drop off at Rasim’s place, which stank of fried oil and onions, before returning to Kültepe. “Any more of this and we’ll finally have the first professor to come out of our village, by God!” I’d say if he happened to be up, sitting there all alone doing his schoolwork when I got back home. If he’d worked hard, he’d say “Dad, will you sit down with me for a minute?” and then, with his eyes turned toward the ceiling, he would begin to recite the facts he’d learned by heart. When he got stuck, he would turn his eyes back down to look at my face. “You won’t find the answers here, son, I don’t even know how to read,” I’d say. In his second year of middle school, he wasn’t tired of school yet, nor of working as a street vendor. Some evenings he’d say, “I’ll come out with you to sell boza, there’s no school tomorrow!” and I wouldn’t object. Other times he’d tell me, “I’ve got homework, I’ll go straight home after school.”

—

Like most students at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School, Mevlut kept his after-school life a closely guarded secret; even the other boys who worked as street vendors didn’t know what he did after the last class. Sometimes he’d spot another student out on the street selling yogurt with his father, but he would always pretend not to have seen him, and when they met in class the next day, he would act as if nothing had happened. He would, however, keep a close watch on how the boy did in school, whether it showed that he worked as a street vendor, and he would wonder what the other boy would grow up to be, how his life would turn out. There was a kid from Höyük who did his rounds on a horse cart, pulling the horse along by its harness and collecting old newspapers, empty bottles, and scrap metal with his father. Mevlut first noticed him when they crossed paths in Tarlabaşı toward the end of the year. Later, he realized that this boy, who used to sit in class staring out the window with a dreamy expression, had disappeared four months into seventh grade, never to come back to school, though not once had anybody even mentioned him or the fact of his absence. In that moment, Mevlut also understood that his mind would soon forget all about this boy’s existence, just as it had that of all his other friends who had found a job or an apprenticeship and dropped out.

The young English teacher Miss Nazlı had a fair complexion, big green eyes, and an apron with printed green leaves. Mevlut realized that she came from another world, and he wanted to become class president just so he could be closer to her. Class presidents could employ kicks, slaps, and threats in order to subdue any delinquent who refused to listen and whom the teachers were too scared to punish themselves with a swipe of the ruler. This help was essential for teachers like Miss Nazlı, who would otherwise be defenseless against the clamor and indiscipline of the classroom, and many a volunteer from the back rows leaped at the chance to offer his services to female teachers by patrolling the other rows for disobedient scamps, ready to dole out a slap on the neck or a twist of the ear. To ensure that Miss Nazlı took note of their gallantry, these volunteers would preface any blow to the miscreant with a loud cry of “Oi! Pay attention to the lesson!” Or: “Stop being disrespectful to the teacher!” If Mevlut sensed that Miss Nazlı appreciated this assistance, even though she barely ever looked at the back rows, he would be gripped by a jealous fury. If only one day she should choose him as class president, Mevlut would not resort to brute force to silence the mob; the lazy good-for-nothings and the troublemakers would listen to him because he was from the poor neighborhoods. Unfortunately, owing to extracurricular political developments, Mevlut never got to realize his political dreams.