Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

So I said, If Duttepe is a village, then let the Hadji Hamit Vural Duttepe Mosque be the greatest village mosque in Turkey. They didn’t even know what to say. Another year went by, and now they all came knocking on my door, eating my salt, and telling me how well the mosque had turned out, and all the while begging for votes in the elections: “Duttepe isn’t a village, Duttepe is part of Istanbul, we’ve upgraded you to a municipality now, so you’d better let us have your votes,” they said, “Hadji Hamit, tell your men to vote for us.” Yes, it’s true that these were my men. But that’s why they will never trust you, they will vote for whomever I tell them to vote for…

What Makes the City a City

ONE EARLY EVENING in March 1974, Mevlut had just stashed his yogurt paraphernalia in a cupboard under the stairs at a friend’s and was on his way from Pangaltı to Şişli, when, outside the Site Cinema, he saw an attractive woman who looked vaguely familiar, and without really thinking about it, he began to follow her. Mevlut knew there were some — his classmates and other boys of Mevlut’s age in Duttepe, for instance — who got a kick out of following women on the street. He never took these stalkers’ stories seriously, either because they were coarse and he disapproved or because they seemed completely improbable (“This chick kept turning around like she wanted me to follow her”). He did, however, keep a close eye on his own feelings when he followed the woman that day. He was enjoying it, and worried that he might do it again.

She went into an apartment block in the backstreets of Osmanbey. Mevlut recalled delivering yogurt to this building, and perhaps this was how he’d seen her face before, but he had no regular customers in there. He made no effort to find out on what floor or in which apartment the woman lived. Still, he would pass by the spot where he’d first noticed her whenever he had the chance. He saw her again in the distance around noon on a day when he was carrying a relatively light load, and he ended up following her with the pole across his back all the way to Elmadağ, where she walked into the office of British Airways.

That was where the woman worked. Mevlut decided to call her Neriman. Neriman was a brave and righteous woman who had sacrificed her life to defend her honor and chastity in a TV film.

Clearly, Neriman wasn’t English. Her job was to find customers for the English airline in Turkey. Sometimes she could be found at a table on the ground floor, selling tickets to those who walked in. Mevlut liked that she took her job seriously. But some days she wasn’t there at all. When Mevlut couldn’t see her in the office, he felt sad, and he didn’t like waiting for her either. Sometimes he felt there was a special sin, a secret he shared with Neriman. He had already discovered that his guilt only seemed to strengthen her pull on him.

Neriman was quite tall. Mevlut could pick out her chestnut hair even when it was nothing but a tiny blur in the distant crowd. Neriman didn’t walk particularly fast, but she was as lively and determined as a high-school girl. Mevlut guessed she must be about ten years older than he was. Even when she walked way ahead of him, Mevlut could still guess what went on in Neriman’s mind. She’s going to turn right now, he would think to himself, and that’s what Neriman would do, turning into a side street to get to her house in Osmanbey. Mevlut felt strangely empowered knowing where she lived, where she worked, that she had bought a lighter from a corner shop (which meant she was a smoker), that she didn’t wear those black shoes every day, and that she slowed down every time she walked past Ace Cinema to look at the movie posters and stills.

Three months after their first meeting, Mevlut began to wish that Neriman would find out that he was following her and all the things he knew about her. During those three months, Mevlut had followed Neriman on the streets only seven times. It wasn’t a huge number, but of course Neriman wouldn’t be happy if she found out; perhaps she would even think he was some sort of pervert. Mevlut could accept that such a reaction would not be unwarranted. If someone in the village were to follow his sisters as he followed Neriman, he would want to beat the bastard up.

But Istanbul was not a village. In the city, that guy you thought was stalking that woman he didn’t know could turn out to be someone like Mevlut, who carried important thoughts in his head and was destined to make it big someday. In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.

As Neriman walked among the crowd, there were two reasons that Mevlut sometimes liked to slow his pace and let the distance between them grow:

1. Being able to spot the chestnut dot that was Neriman in a crowd and always knowing how to predict her movements, no matter how far she was, gave Mevlut the impression that they shared a very special spiritual intimacy.

2. All the buildings, stores, shopwindows, people, advertisements, and movie posters that came between them seemed like pieces of the life he shared with Neriman. As the number of steps between them multiplied, it was as if they also had more memories to share.

In his head, he would picture her being harassed on the street or dropping her handkerchief or a pickpocket trying to grab her dark blue bag. He would rush to the scene immediately to save her or at least present her with the handkerchief she’d dropped. All the bystanders would say what a gallant young man he was, while Neriman would thank him and catch on to his interest in her.

Once, a young man selling American cigarettes on the street (most of these youths were from Adana) went a little too far in trying to get Neriman’s attention. She turned around and said something. (Mevlut imagined it might be “Leave me alone!”) But the pushy young man would not give up. Mevlut sped up. Suddenly Neriman turned back, gave the youth some money, and quickly grabbed a pack of red Marlboros and put it in her pocket.

Mevlut thought he could say something like “You better watch it next time” when he walked past the man, acting like he was Neriman’s protector. But it wasn’t worth the trouble with these brutes. He wasn’t sure he liked seeing Neriman buying contraband cigarettes on the street anyway.

At the start of summer, when he was finally done with the first year of high school, Mevlut was following Neriman when he witnessed an incident that would weigh on his mind for months. Two men standing on the pavement in Osmanbey called out to her. Neriman went on her way, pretending she hadn’t heard them, and they began to follow her. Mevlut was just about to catch up with them when…Neriman turned and looked at the men, smiled in recognition, and started to chat with them animatedly, waving her arms about with the joy of running into long-lost friends. When the two men left Neriman and walked past Mevlut, talking and chuckling, he tried to eavesdrop on their conversation but couldn’t hear them say anything bad about Neriman. All he heard was something like “It’s harder in the second period,” but he wasn’t sure he’d heard properly, nor whether they were even talking about Neriman. Who were these two men? As they crossed paths, he felt the urge to tell them, “Gentlemen, I know that lady better than you do.”

Sometimes he would be cross with Neriman because they hadn’t met in so long, and he would start looking for another Neriman among the women on the street. He found a few likely candidates here and there when he was out walking without his yogurt vendor’s shoulder pole and followed them all the way home. One time he jumped on a bus at the Ömer Hayyam stop and went all the way to Laleli on the other side of the Golden Horn. He liked that these new women took him away to other neighborhoods, and he enjoyed finding out about their lives and daydreaming about them, but he could never seem to get attached to any of them. His fantasies weren’t so different from the things he’d heard from his classmates and other wasters who went around stalking women. Mevlut hadn’t jerked off to Neriman even once. His affection and respect for her were founded on the purity of his feelings for her.