Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Understood,” said Mevlut. “I swear I won’t.”

But as his oath kept him away from his aunt’s kitchen and stopped him from spending time with Süleyman, he regretted it almost immediately. Ferhat wasn’t around either, as he had left Kültepe with his family last year after high school. So after his father had gone back to the village, Mevlut spent part of the month of June wandering around teahouses and children’s playgrounds alone with his box of Kısmet. But the money he earned in a day was only slightly more than what he spent, and he found he couldn’t make even a quarter of what he used to pull in working with Ferhat.

At the beginning of July in 1978, Mevlut took a bus back to the village. At first, it was fun being with his mother and sisters as well as his father. But the whole village was busy preparing for Korkut’s wedding, and Mevlut found it unsettling. He walked around the hills with his aging dog, his old friend Kâmil. He remembered the smell of grass drying in the sun, the scent of acorns and cold streams weaving through the rocks. But he just couldn’t shake off the feeling of missing out on all the things happening in Istanbul and on the opportunity to get rich.

One afternoon he dug out the two banknotes he had hidden in a corner of the garden under the plane tree. He told his mother he was going back to Istanbul. “Your father won’t like it!” she said, but he ignored her. “There’s lots of work to do!” he said. He managed to take the minibus down to Beyşehir that day without running into his father. In town, he ate minced meat and eggplant at the cheap diner across from the Eşrefoğlu Mosque while he waited for the bus. At night, as the bus made its steady way toward Istanbul, he sensed that his life and his future were now entirely in his own hands, that he was a grown man standing on his own, and he was thrilled at the endless possibilities that lay ahead.

In Istanbul, he realized that his month away had already cost him some customers. It never used to be that way. Of course some families would always just draw their curtains shut and stay out of sight, while others would leave for the summer. (Some yogurt sellers followed their customers all the way to their summerhouses on the Princes’ Islands, in Erenköy, and in Suadiye.) Still, sales never used to suffer this much during the summer, because the cafés would buy yogurt to make ayran. But in that summer of 1978, Mevlut grasped the truth that selling yogurt on the streets was a dying craft. The number of yogurt vendors was obviously dwindling fast among both the hardworking, apron-clad men of his father’s generation and the eager young strivers of Mevlut’s, who were always looking for something else to do.

The increasing hardship of the yogurt seller’s life had turned his father into a man full of nothing but anger and hostility, but it did not affect Mevlut in the same way. Even on his lowest, loneliest days, he never lost the smile that his customers found so refreshing. The aunties and the doormen’s wives in the tall new apartment blocks with their NO STREET VENDORS signs, and the old shrews who usually took so much pleasure in pointing out “Street vendors are not allowed on the elevator,” always took pains to explain to Mevlut exactly how to open the elevator doors and what buttons he was supposed to press. There were many maids and doormen’s daughters who admired his boyish good looks from kitchens, stairwells, and apartment doors, though he had no idea how to go about even talking to them. To hide his ignorance even from himself, he became convinced that this was the way to “be respectful.” He had seen men his age in the movies who had no trouble at all talking to girls, and he would have liked to be more like them. But in truth, he wasn’t too fond of foreign films, in which you never quite knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. But whenever he touched himself, he still mostly fantasized about the foreign women from the movies and the Turkish magazines. He liked to indulge in these fantasies dispassionately as he lay in bed with the morning sun warming his half-naked body.

He liked being at home all by himself. It meant he was his own master, if only until his father came back. He tried moving the wobbly table with the short leg somewhere else, he stood on a chair and fixed that end of the curtain that drooped on its rail, he put the cutlery and the pots and pans he didn’t use back into the cupboard. He swept the floor and cleaned everything much more often than when his father was around. Still, he couldn’t ignore the thought that this one-room house was even smellier and messier than usual. Savoring his solitude and his own ripe smell, he felt himself captive to the same urge that had always drawn his father toward a moody loneliness, the very same feeling that roiled his own blood. He was now twenty-one years old.

He stopped by the coffeehouses in Kültepe and Duttepe. He felt like hanging out with the familiar faces from the neighborhood and the youths who loafed around watching TV, so he went a few times to the place where day laborers congregated in the mornings. At eight o’clock every morning, they would gather in an empty lot at the entrance to Mecidiyeköy, offering their labor. They were mostly unskilled workers who, having been put to work somewhere immediately upon arriving from the village, had then been let go to save their employers the insurance costs; now they would take any job they could get while they stayed with their relatives on one of the nearby hills. Young men living the shame of unemployment and foolish hotheads who couldn’t hold any job, they all came here in the morning to smoke their cigarettes as they waited for the foremen who came with their vans from all over the city. Among the young men who whiled away the hours in the coffeehouses, there were some who occasionally went out to the ends of the city for day jobs and boasted about the money they made, but it took Mevlut only half a day to make as much.

At the end of one of those days, when he felt particularly alone and demoralized, he left his trays, his stick, and all of his other equipment at a restaurant and went to look for Ferhat. It took Mevlut two hours, packed like a sardine in a red public-transport bus that reeked of sweat, to get to Gaziosmanpaşa on the outskirts of the city. Out of curiosity, he looked inside the fridges that served as window displays for convenience stores, and he saw that the yogurt companies had conquered these neighborhoods, too. In a grocery store in a backstreet, he saw a fridge with yogurt in a tray, ready to be sold by the kilo.

He got on a minibus, and by the time he reached the Ghaazi Quarter outside the city, it was already getting dark. He walked to the mosque at the other end of the neighborhood, on a road that consisted entirely of an almost-vertical slope. The forest behind the hill was supposed to be an unspoiled, verdant marker of Istanbul’s outer limits, but it seemed the city’s newest migrants had been nibbling away at bits of the woodland, undeterred by all the barbed-wire fencing. The neighborhood was covered in revolutionary slogans, hammer-and-sickle signs, and red-star stencils; the whole place seemed much poorer to Mevlut than Kültepe or Duttepe. In a daze, but with a vague fear always at the back of his mind, he wandered the streets, in and out of the most crowded coffeehouses, hoping to see the familiar face of one of the Alevis who had been forced out of Kültepe. He asked around for Ferhat but found nothing, nor did he see anyone he knew. The streets of the Ghaazi Quarter after dark, without even a lamppost to illuminate them, seemed to him more dismal than any distant Anatolian town.

He got back home and masturbated all night. He would do it once and then, after he’d ejaculated and wound down, the shame and guilt would set in, and he would swear: never again. Some time would pass before he would begin to worry about breaking his oath, and therefore committing a sin. It would seem to him only prudent to do it quickly once more, to get it out of his system at last, and then renounce the wicked habit until the end of his days. That’s how he would end up masturbating again two hours later.