Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Okay, so tell me one of these things…”

“Her dark eyes…We were very close when we looked at each other.”

“I’ll put that in…What else…Do you know anything else about her?”

“I don’t know anything else about her because we’re not married yet…,” said Mevlut, smiling.

“If you saw her on the street tomorrow, would you recognize her?”

“Not from afar. But I would recognize her eyes immediately. Everyone knows how pretty she is anyway.”

“If everyone knows how pretty this girl is, then”—I was going to say, They won’t let you have her, but instead all I said was—“you’re in trouble.”

“I would do anything for her.”

“Yet here I am writing your letter for you.”

“Will you be nice and write this letter for me?”

“I’ll write it. But you know one letter’s not going to be enough.”

“Shall I bring pen and paper?”

“Wait, let’s talk first and figure out what we’re going to say.”

We had to cut our conversation short when the dishwasher kids from Mardin walked in.

Your Eyes Are Like Ensorcelled Arrows

IT TOOK THEM a long time to write that first letter. They started in February 1979, when the famous Milliyet columnist Celâl Salik was shot dead on the street in Nişantaşı, and Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran as the Shah of Iran fled his country. The dishwasher boys from Mardin had long predicted these events, and emboldened by their prescience, they joined Mevlut and Ferhat’s evening confabulations on the love letter.

It was only Mevlut’s inveterate optimism that allowed everyone to contribute so freely. He smiled and didn’t mind too much when they teased him about his feelings. Even when they purposely made useless suggestions—“You should send her a lollipop” or “Don’t say that you’re a waiter, tell her you work in the catering industry” or “Write about how your uncle took your land”—he took it in stride, smiling benevolently before returning to the solemn task at hand.

Following months of endless debate, they decided that these letters should be based not on Mevlut’s notions about women but rather on what he knew about Rayiha in particular. Since the only aspect of Rayiha known to Mevlut was her eyes, logic dictated that they should be the focus of the letters.

“I walk down the dark streets at night, and suddenly I see those eyes before me,” said Mevlut one evening. Ferhat thought this was a very good sentence, so he included it in their draft version, changing “those eyes” to “your eyes.” At first he had suggested that they shouldn’t write about walking down the streets at night, as this might give away the fact that Mevlut was a boza seller, but Mevlut had ignored him. After all, Rayiha was going to find that out eventually.

After much deliberation, Ferhat wrote down the second sentence: “Your eyes are like ensorcelled arrows that pierce my heart and take me captive.” “Ensorcelled” seemed too pretentious a word, but one of the boys from Mardin allowed that “people use it where we come from,” which thereby validated the choice. It had taken them two weeks to agree on these two sentences. Mevlut would recite them to himself while out in the evening selling boza, wondering impatiently what the third sentence should be.

“I am your prisoner, I can think of nothing else but you ever since your eyes worked their way into my heart.” Mevlut and Ferhat both agreed at once on the importance of this sentence, which would help Rayiha understand why the look they had shared had ensnared Mevlut.

On one of the evenings devoted to the third poetic sentence, Mahmut, the more confident and hopeful of the two dishwashers from Mardin, asked Mevlut: “Do you really think about this girl all day?” When Mevlut didn’t immediately respond, Mahmut explained apologetically: “After all, what can you think about a girl you’ve only seen for a second?”

“That’s the point, you dimwit!” said Ferhat, losing his temper a little in defending Mevlut. “He thinks about her eyes…”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, I fully support and respect my brother Mevlut’s feelings. But it seems to me — and please forgive me for saying it — that you can fall more deeply in love with a girl once you truly get to know her.”

“What do you mean?” said Ferhat.

“We know this guy from Mardin who works up in the Eczacıbaşı medicine factory. There’s this girl his age he sees every day on the packaging line. She wears the same blue apron as all the other girls in the department. Our friend from Mardin and this girl spend eight hours a day facing each other, and the job demands they do some talking, too. Our guy starts off with these strange feelings, his body feels funny, he ends up in the infirmary. At the beginning, he doesn’t even realize he’s fallen in love with this girl. I guess you could say he couldn’t accept it. Apparently there was nothing special about the girl, not her eyes nor any other part. But he fell madly in love with her just because he saw her and talked to her every day. Can you believe it?”

“What happened next?” asked Mevlut.

“They married the girl off to someone else. When our friend went back to Mardin, he killed himself.”

For a moment, Mevlut worried he might meet with the same fate. How much had Rayiha really intended to make eye contact with him? On nights when he didn’t drink any rakı, Mevlut had the honesty to admit that there had been an element of chance in their encounter. But in those moments when he felt most profoundly in love, he would claim that such an exalted emotion was only possible because God had willed it so. As for Ferhat, he was strongly of the opinion that Mevlut’s letter should imply that some part of Rayiha had wanted them to share that brief glance. So they ended up with the following sentence: “You must have meant your ruthless deeds, or else you would not have barred my path with your meaningful looks and like a bandit stolen my heart away.”

It was easy enough to refer to Rayiha in the main body of the letter, but they had some trouble figuring out how Mevlut should address her at the start. Ferhat came in one evening with a book called Examples of Beautiful Love Letters and How to Write Them. To make sure they took it seriously, he read a selection of possible forms of address out loud, but Mevlut always found reason to object. He couldn’t address Rayiha as “Ma’am.” Both “Dear Ma’am” and “Little Lady” sounded equally strange. (Still, the word “little” definitely worked.) As for things like “My beloved,” “My beauty,” “My heart’s companion,” “My angel,” or “My one and only,” Mevlut found them too forward. (The book was full of counsel against assuming too much familiarity in the early letters.) That night, Mevlut took the book from Ferhat and began to read it very closely. “Lingering Lady, “Demon Damsel,” and “Miss Mystery” were among some of the openers he liked, but he worried they might be misinterpreted. Weeks went by, and they had almost finished all nineteen sentences of their letter before they finally agreed that “Languid Eyes” would be a decent form of address.

When he saw how the book had inspired Mevlut, Ferhat went to look for others. He went to rummage the storerooms of the old bookshops on Babıali Street, the ones that regularly sent books to the countryside on popular topics ranging from folk poetry to the life stories of famous wrestlers, Islam and sex, what to do on your wedding night, the tale of Layla and Majnun, and the Islamic interpretation of dreams, and he emerged with six more guides to writing love letters. Mevlut examined the pictures of blue-eyed women, fair haired and light skinned with red lipstick and red nail polish, and flanked by men in ties, and he found these couples who graced the covers of these paperbacks reminiscent of American movies; he would cut the folded pages open carefully with a kitchen knife, breathing in their pleasant scent, and whenever he had some time alone before going out to sell yogurt in the mornings or after coming back from selling boza at night, he would pore over the sample letters and the authors’ advice to the lovelorn and smitten.