Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

The summer of 1973 saw the opening of a second summer cinema in Duttepe. The movies were projected onto the side of an old two-story gecekondu building. Mevlut would go there occasionally, with his box of Kısmet, and run into Süleyman or Ferhat, all of them looking for a way to sneak in without paying. But when the Derya had first opened, Mevlut used to go regularly, even buying a ticket. He would make a healthy profit while watching Türkân Şoray on the big screen, but he soon grew indifferent to the place. Those in the neighborhood all knew him and couldn’t feign much awe at his pronouncements on fate and fortune.

In November, once the Duttepe Mosque, with its machine-loomed carpets, had opened its doors to the public, the old men of the neighborhood began accusing Mevlut of encouraging gambling, so he took his box elsewhere. The God-fearing elders and pensioners of Duttepe had given up their little makeshift prayer rooms in favor of the new mosque, to which they flocked five times a day. Friday prayers were conducted for a devout and enthusiastic crowd worthy of Judgment Day.

The formal inauguration of the mosque took place on the morning of the Feast of the Sacrifice in 1974. Having bathed, laid out his clean clothes, and ironed his white school shirt the night before, Mevlut woke up early with his father. The mosque and the raised arcades outside were already full half an hour before the scheduled time, with thousands of men swarming in from the surrounding hills. Mevlut and his father had trouble squeezing through, but Mustafa Efendi was determined to witness this historic moment from a front-row seat. They managed to elbow their way to the front, saying, “Sorry, brother, we’ve got a message to pass on.”

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Mustafa Efendi.We were praying in the front, with Hadji Hamit Vural, the man who built the mosque, sitting just two rows ahead of us. That man and the lackeys he brings in from his village act like they own this neighborhood, but I thanked God for him that morning, and I thought to myself, God bless you. The murmur that rose from those gathered, their joyful whispering, it all cheered me up in an instant. Sharing in one another’s fervor as we prayed together, feeling the presence of that quiet but earnest army of believers that had emerged through the darkness to come here, I felt as good as if I’d spent weeks reading the Koran. “God is greaaat,” I said reverently, and then again “Gooood is great” to a different melody. “Dear God,” the imam said in his affecting sermon, “please look after this nation, this congregation, and all of those who are busy at work, day and night, come rain or shine.” He said, “Dear God, please watch over those who come here from the distant villages of our dear Anatolia and work as street vendors to earn their daily bread,” and also “Help them succeed and forgive their sins.” My eyes were tearing up as the preacher continued—“Dear God, bless our government with authority, our army with strength, and our policemen with patience”—and I said “Amen!” along with everyone else. After the sermon, while all the men in the congregation were wishing one another a happy holiday, I threw ten liras into the collection box. I grabbed Mevlut’s arm and took him over to kiss Hadji Hamit Vural’s hand. His uncle Hasan, Süleyman, and Korkut were already in the queue waiting to do the same. Mevlut greeted his cousins first and then paid his respects to his uncle Hasan, who gave him fifty liras. There was a whole host of Hadji Hamit Vural’s men hanging about and so many people waiting to see him that half an hour passed before our turn came. We ended up keeping Safiye Yenge waiting, back home in Duttepe, where she was busy making us filled pastries. It was a rather nice holiday lunch, after all. But I couldn’t stop myself from saying, if only once: “I’m not the only one who has a right to this house, Mevlut does, too.” Hasan pretended not to hear. The kids had finished their food by then, and they ran out to the garden, expecting their father and uncle to hunker down for one of their usual property disputes, but we managed to get through at least that holiday without any arguments.

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Hadji Hamit Vural.The mosque made everyone happy in the end. All the wretched and lost souls of Duttepe and Kültepe stood in line on that holy day to kiss my hand (though it would have been good to see the Alevis, too). I gave each of them a crisp new one-hundred-lira note from the bundles we’d picked up at the bank just for the Feast of the Sacrifice. With tears in my eyes, I thanked Almighty God for blessing me with such a day. My late father used to wander the mountains near the city of Rize in the 1930s, going from village to village on the back of a donkey selling all sorts of bits and bobs he would buy from the city. I was just about to take over from him when the Second World War broke out and I was drafted into the army. They took us to the Dardanelles. We never went to war, but we spent four years guarding the strait and the military outposts. The quartermaster, a man from Samsun, said to me, “Hamit, it would be a waste to send you back to your village, you’re too bright. Come to Istanbul, I’ll find you a job.” May he rest in peace. It was thanks to him that I got to be a grocer’s apprentice in Feriköy after the war, back when these apprenticeships didn’t yet exist and home deliveries were unheard of. I would buy a basketful of bread from the baker and take it around on the back of a donkey, until eventually I realized that I could do this job myself and opened a grocery store in Kasımpaşa next to the Piyale Paşa Primary School, after which I went and built up some empty lots and sold them off at a profit. I opened a little bakery in Kağıthane. There was plenty of labor in the city back then, though not much experience. You can’t really trust any old villager.

I began bringing men over from our own village, starting with my relatives. There were some huts in Duttepe back then, and that’s where I put up those young men — all of them very well behaved and always respectful — and before long we were taking over more empty land, and business was booming, thank God. But all of these unmarried men, how were they going to remember to say their daily prayers and be thankful to God, so that they would feel at peace and do their jobs properly? On my first pilgrimage to Mecca, I prayed to God and to our Blessed Prophet and racked my brains for a solution. I thought I might as well do it myself and started putting some money aside from the bakery and the construction projects to buy steel and cement. We went to the mayor and asked for some land; we went to our wealthy neighbors and asked for donations. Some were generous, God bless their souls, but others said, What, in Duttepe? People actually live there? And so I made a promise to myself that I would build a mosque at the top of Duttepe, so tall that it would be visible from the mayor’s residence in Nişantaşı and from any apartment block in Taksim, so they could see for themselves all of the people who did indeed live in the hills of Duttepe (Mulberry), Kültepe (Ash), Gültepe (Rose), Harmantepe (Harvest).

After the foundations were laid and covered up, I stood there at the door every Friday at prayers, collecting donations. The poor would say, “Let the rich pay for it!” The rich would say, “He buys the cement from his own shop,” and give nothing. So I gave everything out of my own pocket. Whenever we had two or three idle builders on one of our construction sites, or some leftover steel, I sent them all to the mosque. The ill-wishers said, “Hadji Hamit, your dome is too big and too ambitious; when the wooden supports come off God will bring the whole thing down on your head, and then you’ll understand how proud you’ve been.” I stood right under the dome when the supports came off. It did not fall. I gave thanks to God. I climbed to the top of the dome and cried. My head spun. It was like being an ant on top of a great ball: all you can see at first from the top of the dome is a circle around you, but then you discover a whole universe at your feet. From up there, when you can’t see where the dome ends, the line between death and the universe blurs, and it frightens you. Still, there were dissenters who would go down to the city and come back saying, “We couldn’t see your dome, where is it?” So I poured all my energy into the minarets. Three years went by, and they said, “Do you think you’re some sort of sultan, building two minarets with three balconies?” Every time I walked up the narrow staircase with the master builder, we would go a little higher, and up at the top I would get dizzy and black out. They said to me, “Duttepe is no more than a village; who ever heard of a village mosque with two minarets with three balconies each?”