Orhan Pamuk: A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut and Rayiha watched as Süleyman drove away until they could no longer see the van’s red taillights. They walked into the old train station building without holding hands.

Inside the brightly lit train station, gleaming under fluorescent lights, Mevlut looked once again at the face of the girl he had run away with, a closer look this time, enough to confirm what he had glimpsed but not quite believed while shutting the back door of the van; he looked away.

This was not the girl he had seen at the wedding of his uncle’s elder son Korkut in Istanbul. This was her older sister. They had shown him the pretty sister at the wedding, and then given him the ugly

sister instead. Mevlut realized he’d been tricked. He was ashamed and couldn’t even look at the girl whose name may well not have been

Rayiha.

Who had played this trick on him, and how? Walking toward the ticket counter at the train station, he heard the distant echoes of his own footsteps as if they belonged to someone else. For the rest of his life, old train stations would always remind Mevlut of these moments.

In a daze, he bought two tickets for Istanbul.

The man at the counter had said, “It’ll be here soon,” but there was no sign of the train. They sat on the corner of a bench in a tiny waiting room crowded with baskets, parcels, suitcases, and tired passengers and did not say a single word to each other.

Mevlut recalled that Rayiha did have an older sister — or, rather, the pretty girl he thought of as Rayiha, because the real Rayiha had to be this girl. That’s how Süleyman had referred to her earlier. Mevlut had sent love letters addressed to Rayiha but with someone else, a different face, in mind. He didn’t even know the name of the pretty sister he had always pictured. He had no clear understanding of how he had been tricked, no memory of how he’d arrived at this moment, and so the strangeness in his mind became a part of the trap he had fallen into.

As they sat on the bench, he looked only at Rayiha’s hand. This was the hand he had lovingly held such a short while ago; it was this hand, as he had written in his love letters, that he had yearned to hold, this well-formed, pretty hand. It rested quietly on her lap, and every now and then it carefully smoothed the creases on her skirt and on the cloth wrapped around her possessions.

Mevlut got up and went to the station café. As he walked back toward Rayiha with two stale buns, he observed her covered head and her face once more from afar. This definitely wasn’t the beautiful girl he had seen at Korkut’s wedding, a wedding he had attended even though his father had told him not to. Once more, Mevlut was sure he had never even seen this girl, the real Rayiha, before. How had they come to this moment? Did Rayiha realize that his letters had actually been intended for her sister?

“Would you like a bun?”

Rayiha held out her delicate hand and took it. In her face, Mevlut saw gratitude — not the excitement of runaway lovers.

With Mevlut sitting next to her, Rayiha labored over her bun as if committing a crime. He ate the other stale bun, not with any relish but only because he wasn’t sure what else to do.

They sat without talking. Mevlut felt like a boy waiting for the end of the school day, finding that time just would not pass. His mind kept working unbidden, trying to figure out what mistake he had made to find himself here.

His thoughts returned repeatedly to the wedding where he’d first seen the pretty sister to whom he had written all those letters; his late father, Mustafa Efendi, telling him not to go to that wedding; and how he had snuck away from the village and gone to Istanbul anyway. Could that one act really have caused all of this? Like the headlights of the van that had brought them here, his thoughts roamed over a half-lit landscape, the gloomy memories and shadows of his twenty-five years, trying to shed some light on the present situation.

The train did not arrive. Mevlut got up and went to the café again, but now it was closed. Two horse-drawn cabs were waiting to take passengers to town. One of the coachmen was smoking a cigarette in the boundless silence that reigned. Mevlut walked up to an ancient plane tree next to the station building.

In the pale light from the station he could make out the sign under the tree.

THE FOUNDER OF OUR REPUBLIC

MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK

DRANK COFFEE UNDER THE SHADE

OF THIS ANCIENT PLANE TREE

WHEN HE CAME TO AKŞEHIR IN THE YEAR 1922.

Mevlut remembered Akşehir from his history lessons. He had learned about the important role this village had played in Turkish history, but at that moment he couldn’t remember any of it, and he blamed himself. He just hadn’t worked hard enough in school to be the kind of student that his teachers would have wanted. Maybe that was his biggest flaw. But, he thought with some optimism, he was only twenty-five and had plenty of time to improve himself.

On his way back to their bench, he looked at Rayiha one more time. No, he couldn’t remember seeing her at all at the wedding four years ago.

The rusty Istanbul train groaned its way into the station four hours late, and they managed to find an empty carriage. There was no one in their compartment, but still Mevlut sat next to Rayiha rather than across from her. Every time they went over a switch or a worn stretch of railroad, the train shook, and Mevlut’s upper arm brushed against Rayiha’s. Even this seemed strange to Mevlut.

He went to the toilet and listened to the click-clacking sound coming through the hole in the floor, just the way he used to do as a child. When he returned to his seat, the girl had fallen asleep. How could she sleep so peacefully on the night she had run away from home? “Rayiha, Rayiha!” he whispered in her ear. The girl woke up as naturally as only someone whose name was really Rayiha could have done and smiled at him sweetly. Mevlut sat next to her without a word.

They did not speak as they looked out the carriage window, like a couple who had been married for years and had nothing left to say to each other. Every now and then they saw the streetlamps of a little hamlet or the taillights of a car on an isolated road and the green and red lights of railroad signals, but mostly the world outside was pitch black, and they could see nothing but their own reflections in the windowpane.

Two hours later, at dawn, Mevlut saw that there were tears in Rayiha’s eyes. The compartment was still empty, and the train was making its noisy way down a purple-hued landscape with cliffs at every corner.

“Do you want to go back home?” Mevlut asked her. “Have you changed your mind?”

She cried even harder. Mevlut put his arm around her shoulders awkwardly, but then, because it was so uncomfortable, he pulled his arm back. Rayiha cried for a long time. Mevlut felt guilt and remorse.

“You don’t love me,” she said at length.

“Why do you say that?”

“Your letters were so loving, but you tricked me. Was it really you who wrote them?”

“I wrote them all myself,” said Mevlut.

Rayiha kept crying.

An hour later, when the train stopped at Afyonkarahisar station, Mevlut jumped off the carriage and bought some bread, two triangles of cream cheese, and a pack of biscuits. A boy was selling tea from a tray. They bought some to have with their breakfast while the train made its way alongside the river Aksu. Mevlut was happy to watch Rayiha as she looked out of the carriage window at the towns they passed, the poplars, the tractors, the horse carts, the kids playing football, and the rivers flowing under steel bridges. Everything was interesting; the whole world was new.

Between Alayurt and Uluköy stations, Rayiha fell asleep with her head on Mevlut’s shoulder. Mevlut couldn’t deny that this made him happy, nor that it made him feel a sense of responsibility. Two gendarmes and an old man came to sit in their compartment. Mevlut saw transmission towers, trucks on the asphalt roads, and new concrete bridges and read them as signs that the country was growing and developing. He did not like the political slogans he saw scrawled on factory walls and around poor neighborhoods.