Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Sometimes his mind went places he really wished it wouldn’t. He questioned the existence of God, he thought about the most obscene words he knew, and sometimes he visualized an explosion, like something from the movies, which would shatter the whole world into pieces. Was it really him thinking all these horrifying thoughts?

Ever since he’d stopped going to school, he’d been shaving only once a week. He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself. Then he didn’t shave at all for two weeks. He decided to start again when his stubbly face began to scare some of his loyal customers, who valued cleanliness as much as a layer of cream on their yogurt. Inside the house, it was no longer as dark as it used to be. (He couldn’t remember why it used to be that way.) But he still went outside with his shaving mirror as his father did. Once he had shaved off his beard, he finally accepted the truth he had been dimly aware of for some time. Wiping the foam from his face and his neck, he looked in the mirror: yes, he had a mustache now.

Mevlut didn’t like himself too much with a mustache. He didn’t think he looked “nice.” That baby-faced boy everyone thought was so cute had disappeared, replaced by one of the millions of men he saw out on the streets every day. All those customers who thought he was so charming, the old ladies who still asked whether he was in school, and the housemaids who gave him longing looks from under their headscarves, would they still like him now? His mustache took the shape of everyone else’s, even though he hadn’t touched it at all. It was heartbreaking to think that he was no longer the person his aunt used to cuddle on her lap; he realized that this was the start of something from which there could be no turning back, but at the same time he felt a greater strength in this new self.

Whenever he masturbated, there was something at the back of his mind that he had always forbidden himself to think about but that now, sadly, he could no longer keep back there: he was twenty-one years old and he had never slept with a woman. A pretty girl with a headscarf and good morals, the kind he would like for a wife, would never sleep with him before they got married; and he would never want to marry a woman willing to have sex with him before the wedding.

His priority wasn’t marriage anyway, but finding a kind woman he could hold and kiss, a woman he could have sex with. In his mind, he saw all these things as being separate from marriage, but apart from marriage, he found himself unable to obtain sexual contact. He could have tried to start something with one of the girls who showed some interest (they might go to the park or to the cinema, or have a soft drink somewhere), made her believe he intended to marry her (this would probably be the hard part), and then slept with her. But only a selfish brute would do that sort of thing, not Mevlut. Not to mention that he might end up getting shot by the tearful girl’s older brothers or her father. The only girls who would sleep with a boy casually and without their families finding out were those who didn’t wear headscarves, and Mevlut knew that no girl born and bred in the city would ever be interested in him (no matter how rakish he looked with a mustache). The last resort was to go to one of the brothels in Karaköy. Mevlut never did.

One night toward the end of summer, a day after he’d happened to walk past Uncle Hasan’s shop, Mevlut heard a knock at his door and was really pleased to see Süleyman standing outside. He embraced his cousin warmly and noticed that Süleyman had also grown a mustache.

—

Süleyman.Mevlut called me his brother and gave me such a big hug that I ended up with tears in my eyes. We laughed about how we’d both grown mustaches unbeknownst to each other.

“You’ve styled yours like the leftists!” I said.

“What?”

“Oh come on, you know what I’m talking about, it’s the leftists who cut the tips into triangles like that. Did you copy Ferhat?”

“I didn’t copy anyone. I just cut it the way I felt like, I wasn’t going for any particular shape…Anyway, that means you’ve cut yours like a Grey Wolf.”

We took the mirror from the shelf and examined each other’s facial hair.

“Mevlut, don’t come to the wedding in the village,” I said, “but there’s going to be a wedding reception for Korkut two weeks from now at the Şahika Wedding Hall in Mecidiyeköy, and you’re coming to that. Uncle Mustafa is being difficult, he’s tearing the family apart, but you don’t need to be like him. Look at how the Kurds and the Alevis always watch out for each other. They band together and build each other houses, nonstop. When one of them finds work somewhere, the first thing he does is bring over anyone from the clan still left in his village.”

“Isn’t that how the rest of us got here, though?” said Mevlut. “You lot are turning a profit, but no matter how hard we work, my father and I still can’t seem to save enough to enjoy any of the opportunities Istanbul has to offer. And now our land is gone.”

“We haven’t forgotten your share in the land, Mevlut. Hadji Hamit Vural is a just, generous man. Otherwise my brother Korkut would never have been able to find the money he needed to get married. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman Efendi has another two beautiful daughters. We’ll take the older one of the two for you; I hear she’s very pretty. Otherwise, who is going to find you a wife, look after you, and protect you? Being alone in this big city is unbearable.”

“I’ll find myself a girl to marry, I don’t need anyone’s help,” Mevlut said stubbornly.

Only God Could Have Ordained This Chance Encounter

AT THE END of August, Mevlut went to Korkut and Vediha’s wedding party. Even he wasn’t exactly sure why he’d changed his mind. The morning of the wedding, he wore a suit he had bought at a discount from a tailor his father knew. He also put on the faded blue tie his father wore on religious holidays and whenever he had to go to a government office. With some money he’d put aside, he bought twenty German marks from a jeweler in Şişli.

The Şahika Wedding Hall was on the sloping road from Duttepe to Mecidiyeköy. It was often used by municipal authorities and labor unions for circumcision parties or to host the wedding receptions of foremen as well as laborers, typically with the support of their employers. During those summers when they had worked together as street vendors, Mevlut and Ferhat had snuck inside two or three times toward the end of a party to cadge a free lemonade and a few biscuits; and yet this place, which he had so often passed, had not left much of an impression on Mevlut. When he walked downstairs into the hall, the place was so packed, the little orchestra was so loud, the subterranean atmosphere so hot and stuffy that, for a moment, Mevlut had trouble breathing.

—

Süleyman.Me, my brother, and all the rest of us were so happy when we saw that Mevlut had come. My brother, looking sharp in his off-white cream suit and a purple dress shirt, could not have been nicer to Mevlut, introducing him to everyone before bringing him over to our table, where all the young men were sitting. “Don’t be fooled by this baby face,” he said. “He’s the toughest guy in our family.”

“Well, my dear Mevlut, now that you’ve got a mustache, plain lemonade just won’t cut it,” I said. I showed him the bottle under the table and filled his glass up with vodka. “Have you ever had genuine Russian Communist vodka?” “I haven’t even tried Turkish vodka yet,” said Mevlut. “If this stuff is even stronger than rakı, it’ll go straight to my head.” “It won’t, it’ll just make you relax, and maybe you’ll even find the courage to look around and see if anyone catches your eye.” “I do look around!” said Mevlut. But he didn’t. When the first sip of vodka and lemonade touched his tongue, he recoiled as if he’d been burned, but then he pulled himself together. “Süleyman, I wanted to pin a twenty-mark note on Korkut, but I’m not sure it’s enough?” “Where on earth do you find these marks, if the police catch you they’ll lock you up,” I said, just to scare him. “Everyone does it, though. You’re a fool if you keep your savings in Turkish liras; with all this inflation it’ll be worth half as much by the end of the day,” he said. I turned to the rest of the table. “Mevlut here might look all innocent,” I said. “But he’s the craftiest, most tightfisted street vendor I’ve ever seen. For a scrooge like you to pin twenty marks on the groom…it’s a big deal…But enough with this yogurt business, Mevlut. Our fathers were yogurt sellers, too, but we’ve all got different jobs now.” “I plan to set up my own business one day, don’t you worry. Then you’re all going to wonder why you didn’t come up with it yourselves.” “Go on, then, tell us what you’re going to do.” “Mevlut, you should come and be my business partner!” said Hidayet the Boxer. (This was his nickname because he had a nose like a boxer’s and because, once he knew he would be kicked out of school anyway, he knocked out the chemistry teacher Show-Off Fevzi with a single punch, just like my brother.) “I haven’t got some grocery store or kebab joint like this bunch. I’ve got a real shop, it sells building materials,” said Hidayet. “It’s not even yours, it’s your brother-in-law’s,” I said. “We can all manage that much.” “Guys, the girls are looking this way.” “Where?” “The girls at the bride’s table.” “Hey, don’t all stare like that,” I said. “Those girls are my family now.” “We’re not,” said Hidayet the Boxer, still staring. “Those girls are too young anyway. We’re not child molesters.” “Careful, guys, Hadji Hamit is here.” “So what?” “Are we supposed to stand up and sing the national anthem?” “Hide the vodka, don’t even try to have it with your lemonade, he doesn’t miss a trick. He hates this sort of thing, and he’ll make us pay for it later.”