Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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Hadji Hamit Vural.“Young man, I hear you’re lovesick and in a lot of pain, is it true?” I asked, and he turned his eyes away in shame: he was embarrassed not about being head over heels but about his friends discovering his hopeless romance and his being unable to sort it out by himself. I turned to his fat little brother. “God willing, we shall find a solution to your brother’s heartache,” I said. “But he has made a mistake that you must avoid. Tell me, what’s your name? All right, then, Süleyman, my son, if you’re going to love a girl as deeply as your brother here…you’ve got to make sure to start loving her after you’re married. If you’re in a rush, then maybe wait until you’re engaged, or perhaps until you’ve got an informal agreement…At least wait until the bride price has been decided. But if you fall in love before all that, like your brother, and you sit down to discuss the price with the girl’s father, then those cunning, crafty fathers will ask you for the moon. There are two kinds of love in our land. The first kind is when you fall in love with someone because you don’t know them at all. In fact, most couples would never fall in love if they got to know each other even a little bit before getting married. This is why our Blessed Prophet Muhammad did not think it was appropriate for there to be any contact between the boy and the girl before marriage. There is also the kind that happens when two people get married and fall in love after that, when they have a whole life to share between them, and that can only happen when you marry someone you don’t know.”

—

Süleyman.I said, “Sir, I would never fall in love with a girl I didn’t know.” “Did you say a girl you do know, or a girl you don’t know?” asked the radiant Mr. Hadji Hamit. “Leave the knowing to one side; the best kind of love is the love you feel for someone you haven’t even seen. Blind people know how to fall in love, you know.” Mr. Hamit laughed. Then his men laughed, too, though they didn’t really get it. Before we left, my brother and I kissed Mr. Hadji Hamit’s blessed hand with deference. My brother punched me hard on the shoulder when we were alone, saying, “We’ll see what kind of wife you find in this city.”

The Owner of Unregistered Land

NOT UNTIL much later, in May 1978, in a letter his elder sister had written to their father in Istanbul, did Mevlut discover that Korkut was about to marry a girl from the neighboring village of Gümüşdere. His sister had been writing her father for almost fifteen years, sometimes regularly, sometimes when the mood struck her. Mevlut would read the letters to his father in the same focused, serious voice he used to read out the newspaper. On finding out that the reason for Korkut’s visit was a girl from Gümüşdere, they both felt strangely jealous, and downright angry. Why hadn’t Korkut mentioned anything? Two days later, when father and son went over to visit the Aktaş family and learned all the details, it occurred to Mevlut that his life in Istanbul would be so much easier if only he, too, could count on a patron and protector as powerful as Hadji Hamit Vural.

—

Mustafa Efendi.Two weeks after our visit to the Aktaş family, during which we found out that Korkut was getting married with Hadji Hamit Vural’s support, I was at my older brother Hasan’s grocery store, chatting about trivial matters, when he suddenly put on a serious face and announced that it had been decided: the new ring road would pass through Kültepe, and the cadastral surveyors would therefore no longer be coming to that side of the hill (and even if they did, they would have no choice but to set those plots aside for the road, no matter how much you tried to bribe them), meaning that no one would be able to have the land around there registered officially in his name, and the government would be paying no one a single penny of compensation for the land it expropriated to build its six-lane highway.

“I realized our plot in Kültepe was going to go for nothing,” he said, “so I sold it to Hadji Hamit Vural, who is collecting all the land on that side of the hill. He’s a generous man, God bless him, and he paid me handsomely!”

“What! You mean you sold my land without even asking me?”

“It’s not your land, Mustafa. It’s our land. I went to claim it, and you gave me a hand. The councilman did things properly and wrote both our names under the date and signature on the piece of paper he gave us, just as he did with everyone else. He gave the document to me, and you didn’t seem to mind him doing that. But that piece of paper was going to be worthless in another year. Forget about a house, no one’s going to start anything on that side of the hill, because they know it’ll just get demolished. You must have noticed that not a single wall has been going up.”

“How much did you sell it for?”

He was saying “Now, why don’t you calm down a little and stop using that tone with your older brother…” when a woman walked into the shop and asked for some rice. I stormed out angrily while he was busy with his plastic scoop, putting rice from a sack into a paper bag. I could have killed him! I have nothing in this world except for my slum house and half of that land! I didn’t tell anyone. Not even Mevlut. The next day, I went back to the shop. Hasan was folding old newspapers into paper bags. “How much did you sell it for?” Again, he didn’t say. I could no longer sleep at night. A week later, when the shop was empty, he suddenly told me how much the land had gone for. What? He said I would get half, of course. But it was such a pittance that all I could say was: I DO NOT ACCEPT THAT SUM. “Well, I don’t exactly have it anymore,” said my brother, “we’re arranging Korkut’s wedding, aren’t we!” “Excuse me? Are you saying you’re marrying off your son with the money from my land?” “I told you poor Korkut is smitten!” he said. “Don’t get so mad, it’ll be Mevlut’s turn soon, Crooked Neck’s daughter has two sisters. Let’s get one married off to Mevlut. What’s that poor boy going to do?” “Don’t you worry about Mevlut,” I said. “He’s going to finish high school first and then do his military service. Anyway, if there was a suitable girl, you’d take her for your Süleyman.”

—

It was from Süleyman that Mevlut found out that the unregistered land his father and his uncle had claimed in Kültepe thirteen years ago had been sold. According to Süleyman, there was no such thing as “the owner of unregistered land” anyway. No one had built a home there, or even planted a single tree, and it would be impossible to stop the government’s six-lane road with a piece of paper obtained from a neighborhood councilman years ago. When his father brought the topic up two weeks later, Mevlut acted as if it were news to him. He understood his father’s fury, and he resented the Aktaş family for having sold their shared property without even asking, and when he considered that, on top of this, they had been so much more successful in Istanbul than Mevlut and his father had, he felt increasingly angry, as if he’d suffered a personal injustice. But he also knew that he couldn’t afford to cut his ties with his uncle and cousins, that without them he would be left all alone in the city.

“Now listen here, if you ever go to your uncle’s place again without my permission, if you meet up with Korkut and Süleyman again, it’ll have to be over my dead body,” said his father. “Understood?”