Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

· There were many more Kurds in Kültepe than in Duttepe, but even the Kurds themselves didn’t like this term being bandied about too freely, so the knowledge of their presence remained, for the time being, strictly within the bounds of people’s private thoughts, lying dormant in a corner of their minds like a secret language spoken only at home.

· One of the back tables at the Motherland Coffeehouse in Duttepe had been taken over by young nationalists, the “Idealists” who called themselves Grey Wolves after an ancient Turkic myth. Their ideals involved liberating the Turks of Central Asia (in Samarkand, Tashkent, Bukhara, Xinjiang) from the hegemony of the Russian and Chinese Communist governments. They were ready to do anything, even to kill, for this cause.

· One of the back tables at the Homeland Coffeehouse in Kültepe had been taken over by young men who called themselves leftist-socialists. Their vision involved creating a free society modeled on Russia or China. They were ready to do anything, even to die, for this cause.

After scraping through sophomore year on his second try, Mevlut stopped going to class entirely. He didn’t even show up for exams. His father was aware of the situation, and Mevlut no longer even bothered claiming there was an exam tomorrow and pretending to study.

One night, he felt like a cigarette. He left the house on a whim to go over to Ferhat’s place. A young man was standing with Ferhat in the back garden, pouring something into a bucket and stirring. “Caustic soda,” explained Ferhat. “If you add flour to it, it’ll turn into glue. We’re going to put some posters up. Come along, if you want.” He turned to the other young man. “Ali, meet Mevlut. Mevlut’s a good guy, he’s one of us.”

Mevlut shook hands with the tall Ali, who offered him a cigarette; it was a Bafra. Mevlut decided to join them. He thought to himself that he was embarking on this dangerous mission because he was a truly valiant young man.

Slowly, they made their way through the alleys, under cover of darkness. Whenever he saw an appropriate spot, Ferhat would stop, put down his bucket, and with the brush spread the sticky, corrosive liquid evenly over the chosen surface or wall. While he was at it, Ali would unroll one of the posters he was carrying under his arm, plastering it over the wet surface in a quick and practiced motion. As Ali ran his hands over the poster to ensure that it stuck, Ferhat would use the brush for a quick sweep over the poster, taking special care over the corners.

Mevlut was the lookout. They all held their breath when a family on its way back from watching TV at the neighbors’ almost walked right into them, the mother and father laughing at their son’s saying, “I don’t want to go to bed yet!”

This poster work was not so different from going out to sell things on the street at night. First you mixed certain liquids and powders at home like a wizard, and then you headed out into the darkness. But while, as a street vendor, you went out of your way to be heard, calling out or ringing your bell, when you were putting posters up you had to keep as quiet as the night itself.

They went a roundabout way in order to avoid the coffeehouses, the shopping street, and Hadji Hamit’s bakery down below. Once they got to Duttepe, Ferhat lowered his voice to a whisper, and Mevlut felt like a guerrilla fighter sneaking into enemy territory. Now Ferhat was lookout while Mevlut carried the bucket and brushed glue over the walls. It started to rain, the streets emptied out, and Mevlut caught an eerie scent of death.

The sound of distant gunfire came echoing through the nearby hills. They stopped where they were, exchanging glances. For the first time that night, Mevlut read the writing on their posters, giving it his full attention: HÜSEYIN ALKAN’S KILLERS WILL BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE. There was a sort of decorative border underneath, made out of hammer-and-sickle signs and red flags. Mevlut wasn’t sure who Hüseyin Alkan was, but he knew he must have been an Alevi like Ferhat and Ali, just as he knew that Alevis preferred to be called leftists, and he felt a sort of guilt mixed with a sense of superiority about not being one of them himself.

As the rain got heavier, the streets grew quieter and the dogs stopped barking. They sheltered under the overhang of a building while Ferhat whispered an explanation: Hüseyin Alkan had been on his way back from the coffeehouse two weeks ago when he was shot dead by the Grey Wolves of Duttepe. They got to the street where his uncle Hasan lived. There was the house he’d been to hundreds of times since he’d come to Istanbul, and where he’d spent many happy hours in the company of Süleyman, Korkut, and Aunt Safiye; seeing it now through the eyes of an angry, poster-wielding left-wing militant, he saw his father’s point. His uncle and his cousins, the entire Aktaş family, had built this house with Mevlut’s father and then wrenched it away from him without a second thought.

There was no one around. Mevlut slathered glue over the most prominent spot at the back of the house. Ali put two posters up. The dog in the garden recognized Mevlut’s scent, so he only wagged his tail. They stuck posters onto the back and side walls of the house, too.

“That’s enough, they’ll see us,” muttered Ferhat. Mevlut’s fury had scared him. The liberating thrill of the forbidden had gone to Mevlut’s head. The caustic soda was burning the tips of his fingers and the back of his hands, and he was getting wet in the rain, but none of that bothered him. They went all the way up to the top of the hill, putting up posters on all the empty streets along the way.

The wall of the Hadji Hamit Vural Mosque that gave onto the square said POST NO BILLS in massive letters. But the warning was covered over with advertisements for soap and laundry powders, posters of ultranationalist associations and the Grey Wolves that said GOD SAVE THE TURKS, and signs announcing Koran classes. Mevlut spread glue over all this with great gusto, and soon they had covered the whole wall with their own posters. There was no one around, so they even did the walls of the mosque courtyard from the inside.

They heard a noise. It was just a door slamming in the breeze, but at first they mistook it for gunfire and started running. Mevlut could feel the liquid in the bucket dousing him, but he ran anyway. They got out of Duttepe, but they were so embarrassed for being scared that they kept working away on the other hills until they ran out of posters. By the end of the night, their hands burned and in places were even bleeding from the caustic soda.

—

Süleyman.As my brother always says: an Alevi who dares to put Communist posters up on a mosque must be ready to meet his maker. Alevis are a harmless, quiet, hardworking lot at heart, but some scoundrels in Kültepe are trying to sow the seeds of discord between us with the backing of the Communists. These Marxist-Leninists first targeted the bachelors that the Vurals brought in from villages near their hometown of Rize, trying to recruit them to the cause of communism and trade unions. Obviously the bachelors from Rize hadn’t come to Istanbul for such nonsense but to make a living; they had no intention of ending up in some labor camp in Siberia or Manchuria. They are a sensible bunch, and they rejected the advances of these godless Alevi Communists. Meanwhile, the Vurals reported the Communist Alevis to the police. That’s how all these plainclothes policemen and government agents ended up in our coffeehouses, smoking cigarettes (like all government workers, their brand is Yeni Harman) and watching TV all day. Of course, what lies beneath all this is some old land in Duttepe that the heretical Alevi Kurds claimed years ago and that the Vurals later seized and started building on. That old land in Duttepe, and the land in Kültepe that has houses all over it now, the whole lot of it belongs to them, they say! Is that so? If you don’t have a title deed, my friend, the neighborhood councilman’s word is law. Incidentally, the councilman — Rıza from Rize — is on our side. In any case, if you truly believed you were in the right, your conscience would be clear, and if your conscience were clear, you wouldn’t be sneaking around our streets in the middle of the night putting up Communist propaganda and promoting godlessness on the walls of a mosque, would you?