Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

The books were organized the same way: the letters were categorized according to various occasions that lovers might face, such as the first encounter, an exchange of glances, a chance meeting, a rendezvous, moments of happiness, longing, and arguments. As he rifled through to the end of each book in search of appropriate phrases and expressions he could use, Mevlut found that all love stories progressed through the same stages. He and Rayiha had only just begun. Some of the books also included typical responses from the girls. Mevlut pictured all sorts of people — suffering from lovesickness, playing hard to get, dealing with heartbreak — and as he discovered these lives unfolding like the pages of a novel, he considered his own situation compared with theirs.

He became interested in the subject of love stories that went badly and ended in a breakup. These books taught Mevlut that “when a romance did not end in marriage,” the two parties could ask each other for their love letters to be returned.

“If things end badly with Rayiha, God forbid, and she asks me to return her letters, then I will,” he resolved one night after his second glass of rakı . “But I would never ask her to return mine; Rayiha can keep them until the day the world ends.”

The Western couple on one cover looked like movie stars in the throes of a heated and highly emotional argument, with a bundle of letters bound with pink ribbon resting on a table in the foreground. Mevlut vowed to write Rayiha enough letters for such a bundle, two hundred at least. He realized that the paper he chose for his letters, the way they smelled, the envelope they came in, and of course any gifts he might send along with his missives would be key in winning her over. They talked about these things until the sun came up. They spent many sleepless nights throughout that melancholy autumn studying which perfume bought from which store would be best to spray on their letters, carrying out tests with some of the cheaper scents.

They had just about decided that the most meaningful gift that could accompany the letter was a nazar amulet, to protect against the evil eye, when an altogether different sort of letter arrived to trouble Mevlut. It came in a rough government-issue manila envelope and had passed through a number of hands before Süleyman finally brought it to Mevlut one evening, by which time many people already knew its contents. Now that he no longer had any ties with the Atatürk Secondary School, the authorities had gone looking for him in the village to register him for mandatory military service.

When the Beyoğlu police station had sent its plainclothes policeman to the restaurant to ask for Mevlut, he was busy with Ferhat in Sultanhamam and the Grand Bazaar looking for an eye bead and a handkerchief for Rayiha, and even though the restaurant workers were taken by surprise, they still had the wherewithal to say what people in Istanbul usually did in these circumstances: “Oh, him? He’s gone back to the village!”

“It’ll take about two months for them to send gendarmes to the village and find out you’re not there either,” said Kadri the Kurd. “Anyone your age who’s trying to dodge the draft is either an upper-class rich kid who can’t live without his creature comforts or someone who’s worked out some get-rich-quick scheme at the age of twenty and can’t give it up just when the dough’s started rolling in. How old are you, Mevlut?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well, you’re a big boy now. Go and do your military service. This restaurant’s sliding. It’s not like you two are making that much money here. Are you scared of the beatings? Don’t be, there might be a few smacks now and then, but the army is a just place. They won’t beat a sweet-faced boy too much if you do as they say.”

Mevlut decided he would do his military service right away. He went down to the Beyoğlu draft office in Dolmabahçe and was showing his letter to the officer there when another officer whose rank he wasn’t sure of told him off for standing at attention in the wrong spot. This scared Mevlut, but he didn’t panic. Back out on the street, he sensed that life would go back to normal as soon as he finished his military service.

His father, he thought, would welcome his decision to get it done without further delay. He went to Kültepe to see him. They kissed and made up. Emptied as it had been, home seemed even more desolate and miserable than he remembered. Still, in that moment, Mevlut became aware of just how attached he was to this room where he’d spent ten years of his life. He opened the kitchen cupboard; the heavy old pot on the shelf, the rusty candlestick, and the blunt cutlery pulled on his heartstrings. In the wet night, the dried-up caulk in the window frame looking out to Duttepe smelled like an ancient memory. But he was wary of spending the night here with his father.

“Do you still go over to your uncle’s place?” his father said.

“No, I never see them,” said Mevlut, aware that his father knew this wasn’t true. There was a time when he would never have been able to blurt out such an obvious lie about such a delicate matter but instead would have devised an answer that wouldn’t hurt his father’s feelings too much while also being technically true. At the door, he did as he would normally do only on religious holidays: he respectfully kissed his father’s hand.

“The army might make a man out of you yet!” said Mustafa Efendi as he was seeing off his son.

Why such a derisive, dispiriting remark right at the very end of their meeting? The combined effect of his father’s words and the smoke from lignite coal fires made Mevlut’s eyes water as he made his way down to the Kültepe bus stop.

Three weeks later, he went to the draft office in Beşiktaş and found out that he was to undergo his basic training in Burdur. He forgot for a moment where Burdur was and panicked.

“Don’t worry, there are four buses from Istanbul to Burdur every evening from the Harem bus terminal on the Asian side,” said the quieter of the two boys from Mardin that night, and he began to list all the companies that provided this service. “Gazanfer Bilge is the best of the lot,” he said, continuing, “Isn’t it nice? You’re off to join the army, but you’ve got your lover in your heart and her eyes on your mind. Military service is a breeze when you’ve got a girl to write letters to…How do I know? There’s this friend of ours from Mardin…”

Do You Think You’re at Home?

IN ALMOST TWO YEARS of military service, Mevlut learned so much about how to go undetected in provincial towns, among other men, and within large groups that he ended up believing the old saying that only the army could make “men” out of boys and started spouting his own version: “You’re not a real man until you’ve done your military service.” The military taught him the physicality and fragility of his own body and manhood.

Before he became a man, Mevlut never used to distinguish his body from his mind and soul, thinking of all three together as “me.” But in the army he would discover that he was not necessarily the sole master of his own body and that, in fact, it might be worth surrendering it to his commanders if to do so at least allowed him to save his soul and keep his thoughts and dreams to himself. During the infamous first physical that created exemptions for hapless fellows who didn’t even know that their health was poor (tubercular street vendors, nearsighted laborers, and half-deaf quilters) and for rich guys shrewd enough to bribe the doctors, one elderly physician, noticing Mevlut’s embarrassment, told him gently, “Go on, son, take your clothes off. This is the military, we’re all men here.”