Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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Korkut.When I came from the village to join my father here twelve years ago, Duttepe was half empty, and the other hills were even emptier. The people who ended up taking advantage of all that land weren’t just folk like us who had no roof over their heads and no other place in Istanbul to call home, but even people who had proper jobs and lives down in the city. New factories and workshops were cropping up daily, like the drug-manufacturing plant on the main road and the lightbulb factory, and they all needed free, empty lots to build dormitories for their cheap labor, so whenever anyone turned up and took over some of the vacant public land, no one objected. The news quickly spread that there was land here for the taking, and quite a few office clerks, teachers, and even shop owners who were based in the city center were shrewd enough to come to our hills and grab some land, thinking they might make a profit off it someday. But how are you going to take ownership of the land if you don’t have a title deed to prove it’s yours? The safest way is to build a house on it, preferably when the authorities are looking the other way, and move in overnight, but if that’s not possible, then you have to at least be prepared to pick up a gun and stand guard over your plot. Or you find an armed guard for your land. In that case you must also treat that guard as a friend, share your meals with him and keep him company, so that he will put his heart into looking after your land, and when the time comes for the government to start handing out title deeds, no one else can come along and use your man to tell the government “Actually, sir, this land is mine and I have witnesses to prove it.” Our esteemed Hadji Hamit Vural of Rize really knew what he was doing. Those young men he brought over from his village, he gave them jobs on his construction sites and in his bakeries, he fed them (though technically, I suppose they were baking their own bread), and he deployed them like soldiers to stand guard over his construction sites and his land. But it takes more than just a bunch of Rızas from the Rize countryside to make an army. To make sure they learned the ropes properly, we gave our friends from the village free membership in our club and in the Altaylı Karate and Taekwondo School, so that they would understand what it means to be a Turk, where Central Asia, the cradle of the Turkic races, is located, who Bruce Lee is, and the significance of the blue belt. We picked appropriate, clean family films and held educational screenings in our clubhouse in Mecidiyeköy, all to keep these boys who broke their backs every day in bakeries and on construction sites out of the clutches of Beyoğlu’s nightclub whores and also of the pro-Moscow leftist organizations. There were boys who really believed in our cause, tearing up whenever they looked at the map that showed all the Turks in Central Asia that had yet to be freed, and I made sure to recruit these first-rate fellows for the club. As a result of our efforts, the political influence and the patriotic militia of the Grey Wolves in Mecidiyeköy grew bigger and stronger and naturally spread to the other hills. By the time the Communists realized they’d lost their hold over our hill, it was too late. The first to notice was the father of that sneak Ferhat, whom Mevlut loves to hang out with. That greedy miser didn’t waste a minute building his house here and moving the entire family over from Karaköy, just so that he could stake a better claim on the land. Then he started bringing his Kurdish-Alevi comrades over from their village near Bingöl so that they could help him keep an eye on all the other land he’d taken over in Kültepe. This Hüseyin Alkan who got killed was also from that village, but I have no idea who killed him. Whenever one of these Communist troublemakers gets killed, his friends all march together at his funeral, shouting political slogans and putting up posters, and once the funeral is over, they like to go on a little glass-breaking rampage. (Secretly, they all love a good funeral, because it lets them indulge their destructive impulses.) But once they realize that it could be their turn next, they come to their senses and either just slink off quietly or renounce communism altogether. That is how you freely spread your beliefs.

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Ferhat.Hüseyin, who gave his life for our cause, was a really nice person. It was my dad who brought him over from the village and put him in one of the houses we built in Kültepe. I’m sure it must have been one of Vural’s thugs who shot him in the back of the neck that night. It didn’t help that the police closed their investigation by blaming us. I have a feeling the Grey Wolves are going to attack Kültepe soon, backed by the Vurals, and try to get rid of us once and for all, but I can’t tell Mevlut (he’s thick enough to pass it along to the Vural camp). I can’t even mention it to our guys. Half the Alevi youth is pro-Moscow, and the other half are Maoists, and they beat each other up so often over their differences, there’s really no point warning them of the danger of losing Kültepe. The sad truth is that I don’t really believe in the struggle I’m supposed to believe in. I’m hoping to take the leap and set up my own business soon. I also really want to go to college. But like most Alevis, I’m left-wing and secular and hate the Grey Wolves and the counterinsurgents out to kill us. Even though I know we are never going to win, I still go to the funerals; I raise my fist and shout slogans along with everyone else. My dad sees the danger in all this and sometimes he says, “I wonder if we should sell the house and move out of Kültepe,” but he can’t bring himself to do it because he’s the one who brought everyone here in the first place.

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Korkut.I could tell by the number of posters stuck to our house that this wasn’t just the work of a political organization; it had to be someone who knows us personally. When Uncle Mustafa came by two days later and mentioned that Mevlut was never home, especially at night, and that he barely went to school anymore, that’s when I really got suspicious. Uncle Mustafa was checking to see whether Süleyman would let anything slip, about him and Mevlut getting in trouble together. But I just knew it was that bastard Ferhat who was corrupting Mevlut. I told Süleyman to trick Mevlut into coming over for roast chicken two days later.

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Aunt Safiye.Both my sons want to be friends with Mevlut, especially Süleyman, but they can’t stop themselves from winding him up. Mevlut’s father hasn’t managed to save enough money to sort out their house back in the village, and they don’t have enough to improve the one-room shack in Kültepe either. Sometimes I think I should go over to Kültepe for a day and bring a woman’s touch to that pigsty they’ve been living in all these years, but then I fear I just couldn’t bear it. Because of his father’s insistence on leaving the rest of the family behind in the village, Mevlut has been like an orphan in Istanbul all his life since primary school. At first, when they’d just moved here, he used to come to me whenever he missed his mum. I would sit him on my lap, stroke his hair, kiss his cheeks, and tell him how clever he was. Korkut and Süleyman were jealous, but I didn’t care. He still has that innocent look about him, and I’ve got the same urge to sit him on my knees again and cuddle him a bit, I can tell he still needs it, even though he’s so grown up now, his face is covered in pimples, and he’s shy with Korkut and Süleyman. I’ve stopped asking him about school — it only takes one look at him to understand the confusion inside his head. As soon as he came in that evening, I took him to the kitchen and kissed him on the cheeks before Korkut and Süleyman saw us. “You’ve grown so tall, but stand up straight, don’t be ashamed of your height,” I said. “That’s not it, Auntie, it’s the stick I use to carry the yogurt, it’s bending my back, but I’m going to give it up soon,” he said…The way he wolfed that chicken down at dinner, I fell to pieces. Korkut talked about how the Communists would try to sweet-talk kindhearted innocents over to their side, but Mevlut kept quiet. “Stop trying to scare the poor orphan, you rascals,” I told Korkut and Süleyman in the kitchen.