Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Stay out of this, Mom, we’ve got our reasons,” said Korkut.

“Nonsense, you just like taunting him…Who could possibly sus pect my darling Mevlut? I am sure he has nothing to do with these evil people.”

“Mevlut is going to come out with us tonight to write on the walls and prove he’s not working with the Maoists,” said Korkut as he returned to the table. “Isn’t that so, Mevlut?”

—

There were three of them again, and again one of them was carrying a large bucket, but this time it was full of black paint rather than glue. Whenever they found a suitable place, Korkut would write on the wall with his brush. Mevlut would hold the paint bucket for him while trying to guess what Korkut was writing. GOD SAVE THE TURKS, one slogan he already knew, was his favorite. He’d seen it all over the city. He liked it because it seemed a harmless plea, and it was a reminder of what he’d learned in history class: that he was part of one big Turkish family spanning the whole world. Some of the other slogans, though, were rather sinister. When Korkut wrote DUTTEPE IS WHERE COMMUNISTS COME TO DIE, Mevlut sensed that it referred to Ferhat and his friends and hoped that these sentiments would not get beyond mere posturing.

A stray remark from Süleyman (“My brother’s got the shooting iron”) on lookout duty alerted Mevlut to the fact that they were carrying a gun. If there was enough room on the wall, sometimes Korkut would write GODLESS before COMMUNIST. He usually failed to anticipate how many words and letters he needed, and some letters would end up small and crooked, which finally was what bothered Mevlut the most. (When the letters listing a street vendor’s wares on his cart or his sesame roll trolley were all squished up, Mevlut could tell the man had no future.) Eventually Mevlut could no longer refrain from pointing out to Korkut that he’d made the letter C too big. “You try it, then!” said Korkut, forcing the brush on him. Deep into the night, Mevlut covered up ads for circumcision services, walls that said DON’T BE A LITTER LOUT, and the Maoist posters he’d put up four nights before, with the slogan GOD SAVE THE TURKS!

They walked through the dark, thick forest of gecekondu homes, walls, gardens, shops, and suspicious dogs. Every time he stopped to write GOD SAVE THE TURKS, Mevlut could feel the depth of the surrounding darkness in which these words were a beacon, a signature appended onto the boundless night, transforming the neighborhood. That night, he discovered many things about Duttepe and Kültepe that he had previously overlooked while loafing around with Ferhat and Süleyman in the evenings: every inch of the neighborhood fountains was covered in political slogans and posters; the people who hung around smoking outside coffeehouses were actually armed watchmen; at night, everyone — families, passersby — fled the streets and took refuge in their own private world; in this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor.

We Don’t Take Sides

ONE NIGHT toward the end of April, a round of gunfire from a passing taxi hit the people playing cards and watching television in the Homeland Coffeehouse at the entrance to Kültepe. Five hundred meters away, in their house on the other side of the hill, Mevlut and his father were having lentil soup in what was, for them, an uncharacteristically friendly atmosphere. They exchanged a look while they waited for the machine gun’s report to die down. When Mevlut got too close to the window, his father yelled, “Come back here!” Presently, they heard the metallic clatter of the machine gun again, now farther away, and so they went back to their soup.

“See?” said his father with a meaningful expression, as if this were proof of what he’d been saying all along.

The attack had targeted two coffeehouses, both frequented by leftists and Alevis. Two people had been killed in the coffeehouse at Kültepe and another in Oktepe, and almost twenty had been injured. The next day, Marxist groups calling themselves armed vanguards and the Alevi relatives of the victims rose up in protest. Mevlut joined Ferhat among the crowds, shouting out a slogan every now and then and marching through the neighborhood, though not in the front row. He didn’t clench his fist quite as forcefully as others in the crowd, nor did he know enough of the words to keep up with their chants, but he was certainly angry…There were no plainclothes policemen around, nor any of Hadji Hamit Vural’s men. As a result, it took just two days for all the streets and walls in Kültepe and Duttepe to be covered in Marxist and Maoist slogans. Amid the excitement of the protests, new posters were printed in the city, and fresh slogans were coined for the resistance movement.

On the third day, when the victims’ funeral was meant to take place, an army of mustachioed policemen wielding black batons arrived in a fleet of blue buses. There were also growing numbers of photojournalists who were assailed by children gesticulating wildly for their pictures to be taken, too. When the funeral procession reached Duttepe, the angry young men broke off from the rest of the crowd and, as expected, began to march.

Mevlut didn’t join them this time. His uncle Hasan’s house gave onto the mosque courtyard, and he could see his uncle, Korkut, Süleyman, and some of Vural’s men smoking and looking out the windows at the crowds down below. Mevlut wasn’t cowed by their presence, nor was he worried that they might punish or shun him. All the same, he felt awkward clenching his fist and shouting slogans when he knew they were watching. There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.

A scuffle broke out when the police outside the mosque tried to block the advance of the marching funeral crowds. Some youths within the crowd threw stones, one shattering the window of a shop displaying posters of the Grey Wolves. The Fatih Real Estate Agency, run by Hadji Hamit’s family, and the small contractors’ offices next door were soon also damaged. Apart from desks, televisions, and typewriters, there wasn’t much of value in these places, where the Grey Wolves controlling Duttepe liked to come and pass the time watching TV and smoking cigarettes. But as a result of the attacks, the war of the Grey Wolves against the Marxists, or the right-wing idealists against the left-wing materialists, or Konya against Bingöl, was brought vividly to the whole neighborhood’s attention.

These rough and vicious early battles went on for more than three days, with Mevlut and other curious observers watching from a distance. He saw helmeted men drawing their batons and charging the crowd, shouting “Allah! Allah!” like Janissaries. He watched from a sheltered spot as tanklike armored vehicles shot water at the demonstrators. In the midst of all this, he would still go down to the city to drop some yogurt off with his loyal regulars in Feriköy and Şişli, and in the evenings he would go out selling boza. On one of these nights, he hid his student ID from the police, who had set up a security cordon between Duttepe and Kültepe, and deducing from the way he looked that he was only a poor street vendor, they let him through without trouble.

Filled with anger and a sense of solidarity, he went back to class. In just three days, the atmosphere at the school had become heavily politicized. Leftist students would raise their hands and brashly interrupt classes to give political lectures. Mevlut enjoyed the sense of freedom but did not himself say a single word.