Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

He didn’t go to school much that year. Unless they were twisted enough to want to make enemies of their students, teachers would not want to fail a student twice for the same year, because that would get the kid kicked out of school. Trusting in this principle, Mevlut arranged for his name to be left out during roll calls and otherwise ignored school entirely. He passed the year and decided to sell Kısmet with Ferhat over the summer. Mevlut was even happier once his father went to the village and he had the house to himself, and meanwhile he was making lots of money with Ferhat.

One morning, Süleyman came knocking on the door, and this time Mevlut answered straightaway. “There’s a war on,” said his cousin. “We’re conquering Cyprus.” Mevlut followed him to his uncle’s house in Duttepe. Everyone was hunched around the television watching military marches, and every time the TV showed a tank or an airplane, Korkut would jump in to say what model it was, C-160 or M47. Then they showed the same picture of Prime Minister Ecevit over and over again, saying “May God bless this endeavor, for our nation, for all Cypriots, and for humanity.” Korkut used to call Ecevit a Communist, but all was forgiven now. Whenever President Makarios of Cyprus or one of the Greek generals came up on the screen, they would swear at him and dissolve into giggles. They walked down to the Duttepe bus stop and went into the coffeehouses. Everywhere you looked people were happy and excited, watching the same images of fighter planes, tanks, and flags, Atatürk and the army generals. Regular announcements on TV kept urging anyone who had dodged their compulsory military service to report to the draft office immediately, and Korkut never failed to say, “I was going to go anyway.”

The country was, as ever, already under martial law, but now there were also new blackout regulations for Istanbul. Uncle Hasan was worried about blackout patrols and possible fines, so Mevlut and Süleyman helped him dim the lights in his shop. They cut up some cheap, thick dark blue paper into pieces roughly the size of a glass of water, which they then carefully slipped over the naked bulbs like little hats. Can you see it from outside? Pull the curtain; the Greek planes might not see this, but the patrols will, they snickered. That night, Mevlut felt like a real Turk from Central Asia, like the ones in the history books.

But as soon as he got back to Kültepe, his mood changed. Greece is a lot smaller than Turkey, and it would never attack us, and even if it did, it wouldn’t bomb Kültepe, he reasoned as he started now to think about his place in the universe. He hadn’t lit any lamps at home. Just as when he had first moved to Istanbul, he couldn’t see the masses living on the other hills, but he could sense their presence in the darkness. The same hills that had been half empty five years ago had filled up with houses now, and even on the empty hills farther out you could see the first transmission towers and mosque minarets. All those places and all of Istanbul were dark now, and Mevlut could see the stars in the summer sky. He lay down on the dirt and watched them for a long time, thinking of Neriman. Had she also blacked out the lamps in her home as he had? Mevlut felt that his feet would be taking him to Neriman’s streets again, more than they ever had before.

God Save the Turks

MEVLUT COULD SEE that tensions between Duttepe and Kültepe were on the rise, and he was aware of a number of disputes escalating into all-out blood feuds, but he never anticipated the fierce war that would erupt between the two hills like something out of the movies. After all, at first sight there wasn’t much setting the two hills apart, nothing that could conceivably lead to such deep-seated enmity and bloody battle:

· On both hills, the first gecekondu homes had been built in the mid-fifties, out of hollow bricks, mud, and tin. These homes had been occupied by migrant settlers from the poor villages of Anatolia.

· Half of the male population on both hills slept in the same blue-striped pajamas (though with some minor variation in the width of the stripes) while the other half wore no pajamas at all and slept in a shirt, sweater vest, or pullover and under that an old undershirt, sleeveless or long sleeved depending on the season.

· Ninety-seven percent of the women on both hills covered their heads when they went out on the streets, just as their mothers used to do. They had all been born to village life, but now that they were in the city, they discovered that the “street” here was something else entirely, and so even in the summer they wore a loose-fitting coat of faded dark blue or brown whenever they went out.

· Most people on both hills thought of their house not as their home for life but rather as a refuge in which to rest their weary heads until they got rich and returned to the village or as a place to stay while they waited for their chance to move into an apartment in the city.

· With astonishing consistency, the people of Kültepe and Duttepe all saw the same figures in their dreams at regular intervals:

Boys:the female primary-school teacher

Girls:Atatürk

Men:the Holy Prophet Muhammad

Women:a tall, anonymous Western film star

Old men:an angel drinking milk

Old women:a young postman bringing good news

· Afterward, they would revel in the thought of having been entrusted with an important message, seeing themselves as extraordinary individuals, though they rarely shared the contents of these dreams with anyone else.

· Electricity came in 1966, tap water in 1970, and asphalt roads in 1973 to both Kültepe and Duttepe within days of each other, so that neither had cause to resent the other for having been favored.

· By the mid-1970s, every other house in Kültepe and Duttepe had a black-and-white television set with a grainy picture (father-and-son teams would constantly be at work on their homemade TV aerials to improve it), and during important broadcasts, such as football matches, the Eurovision song contest, and Turkish movies, families with no television went to their neighbors’, and on both hills it was for the women to serve tea to the assembled audience.

· Both hills got their bread from Hadji Hamit Vural’s bakery.

· The five most commonly eaten foods on both hills were, in order: (1) underweight bread, (2) tomatoes (in summer and autumn), (3) potatoes, (4) onions, and (5) oranges.

Yet there were those who argued that these data were as deceptive as Hadji Hamit’s underweight bread, because the future of a society was not determined by the traits its members shared but rested entirely on their differences. Some fundamental differences had cropped up between Duttepe and Kültepe over the course of twenty years:

· The top of Duttepe was now dominated by Hadji Hamit Vural’s mosque. On hot summer days when the light filtered through its fine high windows, the mosque would be nice and cool inside; you would feel grateful to God for having created such a place and wrestle all your rebellious thoughts into submission. As for Kültepe, it was still topped by the giant, rusty transmission tower, with its sign picturing a skull, which Mevlut had seen on his first day in Istanbul.

· Ninety-nine percent of the people of Duttepe and Kültepe fasted, in theory, during the month of Ramadan. But in Kültepe, those who did so in practice were no more than seventy percent, because Kültepe was home to a high proportion of Alevis — Alawites — who had come in the 1960s from in and around Bingöl, Dersim, Sivas, and Erzincan. The Alevis of Kültepe did not use the mosque in Duttepe.