Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

In March 1971, there was a military coup, and the long-standing prime minister Demirel stepped down, fearing for his life. Revolutionary groups were robbing banks and kidnapping foreign diplomats for ransom; the government kept declaring martial law and imposing curfews; the military police were searching people’s homes. Every wall in the city was plastered with photos of the most wanted; booksellers were banned from the streets. All of this was bad news for street vendors. Mevlut’s father railed against “those who have caused this anarchy.” Yet even after thousands had been locked up and tortured, things still didn’t go back to normal for street sellers and anyone working on the black market.

The army whitewashed all of Istanbul’s pavements, anything that seemed dirty or untidy (the whole city pretty much qualified), the trunks of huge plane trees, and walls dating back to the Ottoman era, turning the whole place into an army cantonment. Shared taxis were banned from stopping where they pleased to let passengers board or alight, and street vendors were barred from big squares and avenues, those nice parks where the water fountains actually worked, and from the ferries and trains. With journalists in tow, the police targeted famous gangsters, raiding their semisecret gambling dens and brothels and disrupting their trade in cigarettes and liquor smuggled in from Europe.

After the coup, Skeleton relieved any left-wing teachers of administrative roles and, in so doing, eliminated any chance of Miss Nazlı’s choosing Mevlut as class president. At times she wouldn’t even turn up for class, and it was rumored that her husband was wanted by the police. Everyone was affected by the radio and TV proclamations concerning order, discipline, and cleanliness. The school painted over the political slogans, the obscenities, and the assortment of illustrated filthy stories about the teachers (including a caricature of Skeleton and Massive Melahat copulating) that had previously adorned walls, toilet stalls, and assorted nooks around the campus. The hotheads who stood up to the teachers, the rabble-rousers who kept shouting political slogans, miring every lesson in propaganda and ideology, were ultimately subdued. To ensure that everyone now sang the national anthem in unison during the flag-raising ceremony, the principal and Skeleton placed one of those loudspeakers found in mosque minarets on either side of the bust of Atatürk, though the effect was only to add a new metallic voice to the tone-deaf choir. Besides, the loudspeakers were so loud that many of those who’d actually been trying to sing the anthem simply gave up. Ramses the history teacher now spent more time than ever on blood-soaked military triumphs, teaching that the color of the Turkish flag represented the color of blood and that the blood of the Turkish people was no ordinary blood.

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Mohini.My real name is Ali Yalnız. “Mohini” is the fine name of the elephant that the Indian prime minister Pandit Nehru gave as a gift to Turkish children in the year 1950. To earn the nickname “Mohini” in Istanbul’s high schools, it wasn’t enough just to look and act like an elephant, big and heavy, older looking than you were, and ambling along unsteadily as I did. You also had to be poor and sensitive. As the prophet Abraham also said, elephants are very sensitive animals. For our school, the most horrifying political consequence of the 1971 military coup was that, after waging a heroic resistance against Skeleton and the other teachers, we were all forced to cut our long hair short. Many tears were shed over this catastrophe, not just by the rock- and pop-fan sons of doctors and civil servants, but also by kids who came from poor neighborhoods but had nice hair. The principal and Skeleton had been threatening some kind of action for ages during the Monday flag-raising ceremony, saying it was inappropriate for boys to wear their hair like women, just to imitate some degenerate European pop stars. But it wasn’t until soldiers came into the school after the coup that those tyrants got their wish. They say that the army captain who arrived by jeep that day had come to coordinate our relief efforts for the victims of the earthquake in eastern Turkey. But the opportunistic Skeleton took the chance to call in Duttepe’s best barber as well. Regrettably, I also panicked at the sight of the soldiers and allowed my hair to be cut. Afterward, I looked even uglier and hated myself even more for bowing to authority so passively, shuffling obediently into the barber’s chair.

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Skeleton had sensed Mevlut’s presidential ambitions, and after the coup, he entrusted this model student with the task of assisting Mohini during the long recess. Mevlut was pleased, as this was an opportunity to be out in the empty corridors during class and to stand out from the crowd. Every day just before the long recess at 11:10, he and Mohini left the classroom and made their way through dark, dank corridors and stairwells, down to the basement. There, Mohini’s first stop was the high-school boys’ toilet next to the coal cellar (where Mevlut wouldn’t even dream of following), a foul, stinking pit, with a thick blue fog of cigarette smoke hanging over it, where he would go begging the older boys for cigarette stubs, and if he was lucky enough to get one, he would smoke it on the spot while Mevlut waited patiently at the door; “This is my sedative right here,” Mohini would say with a knowing look. Then they would go wait in line in the school kitchen for Mohini to be given a jug, which he would carry on his back all the way upstairs, though it was almost as big as he was, and finally place it gently over the classroom stove.

This big ugly jug held the smelly and scalding hot milk prepared down in the stinking kitchens from powdered milk that UNICEF distributed for free to schools in developing countries. Concentrating on his task like a good housewife, Mohini poured the milk into plastic cups of all sizes, which the students brought in from home, while the teacher on recess duty took out a blue box holding another UNICEF beneficence, the dreaded fish-oil capsules. He presented one of these carefully to each student, as some precious gemstone, before patrolling the rows to make sure that they were actually swallowing both malodorous kindnesses. Most of the boys threw the pills out the window toward the corner of the school yard where all the trash accumulated, which was also the designated gambling spot, or they would crush them on the floor for the simple pleasure of stinking up the classroom. Others loaded them into their hollowed ballpoint tubes and shot them at the blackboard. Wave after wave of fish-oil bombardment had left the blackboards of Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School with a slippery sheen and an unpleasant aroma that made visitors queasy. When one of these projectiles hit the portrait of Atatürk in classroom 9C upstairs, an alarmed Skeleton called in inspectors from the municipal police as well as the board of education to investigate, though the easygoing president of the board, who’d seen plenty over the years, ably defused the situation by explaining to the officers enforcing martial law that no insult to the founder of the Republic or any government dignitaries had been intended by anyone. At the time, any attempts to politicize the powdered-milk and fish-oil rituals would fail, but years later there would be many histories and memoirs written on the subject, with the Islamists, the nationalists, and the leftists united in claiming that the state, under pressure from Western powers, had conspired to force-feed them those reeking, poisonous pellets throughout their childhood.