Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Why? We’re not Alevis!”

“They might have put one by mistake,” said Mevlut, thinking that perhaps he should have been more careful showing his face around the neighborhood in the company of Ferhat and the other leftists. But he hid this worry from his father.

In a quiet moment, when the street was calmer and the shouts had died down, they opened the door to check. There was no mark. Mevlut wanted to inspect the walls, too, just to make sure. “Get back inside!” his father shouted. The white slum house in which Mevlut and his father had spent years together now looked like an orange ghost in the night. Father and son shut the door tight, but they didn’t sleep until dawn, when the sounds of gunfire ceased.

—

Korkut.To be honest, I didn’t believe that the Alevis had put a bomb in the mosque either, but lies spread fast. The patient, quiet, devout people of Duttepe had seen “with their own eyes” the Communist propaganda that had appeared on mosques and even in the farthest neighborhoods, and their anger was a force to be reckoned with. You can’t just come here from downtown in Karaköy, or maybe even from outside of Istanbul, from Sivas or Bingöl, and think you can take this land away from the people who actually live in Duttepe! Last night we saw who really owns these houses, who actually lives in them. It’s hard to stop a young nationalist whose faith has been insulted. Many homes were damaged.

—

Ferhat.The police did nothing, and if they did, it was only to join in the raids. Groups with scarves wrapped around their faces started to break into homes, vandalize property, and loot Alevi shops. Three houses, four shops, and the grocery store run by a family from Dersim were all burned to the ground. They retreated when our people started shooting at them from the roofs. But we think they’ll be back after sunrise.

—

“Come on, let’s go down to the city,” said Mevlut’s father in the morning.

“I’m staying,” said Mevlut.

“But, son, these people will never stop fighting, they’ll never tire of hacking away at each other — politics is just an excuse…Let’s just sell our yogurt and our boza. Please don’t get involved. Stay away from the Alevis, the leftists, the Kurds, and that Ferhat. We don’t want to get kicked out, too, while they’re busy rooting them out.”

Mevlut gave him his word that he would not set foot outside. He said he would sit and look after the house, but once his father had gone, he found it impossible to stay at home. He filled his pockets with pumpkin seeds, grabbed a small kitchen knife, and rushed off to the higher neighborhoods like a curious child running to the movies.

The streets were busy, and he saw men armed with sticks. He also saw girls chewing gum as they walked back from the grocery store with armfuls of bread and women scrubbing their laundry in the garden, as if nothing had happened. Those God-fearing citizens who hailed from Konya, Giresun, and Tokat did not support the Alevis, but neither did they wish to fight them.

“Don’t walk through there, mister,” said a little boy to a distracted Mevlut.

“They can shoot all the way here from Duttepe,” said the boy’s friend.

Looking as if he was trying to avoid some invisible rainfall, Mevlut worked out where the bullets were likely to hit and crossed to the other side of the street in a single move. The kids followed his movements closely, but they also laughed at him.

“Why aren’t you in school?” said Mevlut.

“School’s closed!” they shouted gleefully.

At the doorway of a house that had burned down, he saw a woman crying; she was bringing out a woven basket and a wet mattress, just like the kind Mevlut and his father had at home. A tall, thin young man and another who was decidedly chubbier stopped Mevlut as he was making his way up a steep slope, but they let him pass when an onlooker confirmed that Mevlut was from Kültepe.

The upper sections of the slope of Kültepe that faced Duttepe had been transformed into a military outpost. Slabs of concrete, steel doors, tin cans filled up with earth, rocks, tiles, and hollow bricks had been used to build crenellated fortifications that sometimes ran right up to people’s homes, only to emerge and fork out from the other side. The walls of Kültepe’s oldest houses were not bulletproof. Yet Mevlut had seen people shooting at the other hill even from these buildings.

Bullets were expensive, and people didn’t shoot too frequently. There would often be long spells of silence, and Mevlut and many others would use these unofficial cease-fires to move around the hill. Toward midday, he found Ferhat near the peak, standing on the roof of a new concrete building right next to the transmission tower that carried electricity into the city.

“The police will be here soon,” said Ferhat. “We don’t stand a chance. The fascists and the police have more weapons, and they have more people. And the press is on their side.”

This was Ferhat’s private view. In front of everyone else, he would say, “We will never let these sons of bitches in!” and would act as if he was about to start shooting any moment, even though he didn’t have a gun.

“Tomorrow the newspapers won’t talk about the massacre of Alevis in Kültepe,” said Ferhat. “They’ll write that the political uprisings were quashed and that the Communists set themselves on fire and committed suicide out of spite.”

“If it’s not going to end well, then why are we even fighting?” said Mevlut.

“Should we just hold our hands up and surrender?”

Mevlut was confused. He saw that Kültepe and the slopes of Duttepe were bursting with houses, streets, and walls and that, in the eight years he’d been in Istanbul, extra floors had been added to many rickety houses, some homes that had originally been built out of mud had been razed to the ground and rebuilt using hollow bricks or even concrete, houses and shops had been painted over, gardens had flourished and trees grown tall, and the slopes of both hills had been covered with ads for cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and soap. Some of these were even illuminated at night.

“The leftists and the rightists should each send their leader to the square down near the Vural bakery to fight it out honorably,” said Mevlut, only half in jest. “Whoever wins the battle can win the war.”

There was something reminiscent of old fairy tales in the fortifications that arose on both hills like castle bastions and in the way the warriors on each side were standing guard.

“Which side would you support in a fight like that, Mevlut?”

“I’d support the socialists,” said Mevlut. “I’m against capitalism.”

“But aren’t we supposed to set up shop in the future and become capitalists ourselves?” said Ferhat with a smile.

“I like how the Communists look out for the poor,” said Mevlut. “But why don’t they believe in God?”

When the yellow helicopter that had been hovering over Kültepe and Duttepe since ten o’clock in the morning returned, the people on both sides of the face-off between the hills went quiet. Everyone positioned at the top of the two hills could see the headphones on the soldier inside the helicopter’s clear cockpit. To see that a helicopter had been sent filled Ferhat and Mevlut with pride, just as it did everyone else on both hills. Kültepe was bedecked with red-and-yellow flags bearing the hammer and sickle, banners made out of cloth were suspended between buildings, and groups of youths hiding behind scarves over their mouths shouted slogans at the helicopter flying above.