Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Two days later, he was walking around with his shirt unbuttoned, lost in thought (how long had it been since Süleyman had delivered the letter? he wondered), when a lieutenant spotted him in this “undisciplined” state. He gave Mevlut two quick slaps with the palm of his hand, and then the back, calling him an idiot, too. “Do you think you’re at home or something? What’s your unit?” He went on his way without even waiting for Mevlut’s answer.

Mevlut would receive plenty more slaps and blows in his twenty months of military service, but this would always be the one that hurt the most — because the lieutenant was right. Yes, he had indeed been busy thinking about Rayiha, and in that moment he hadn’t given a thought to the tilt of his cap, his salute, or the way he walked.

That night, Mevlut got into bed before everyone else, pulling the covers over his head and musing bleakly about his life. He would have liked to be at the house in Tarlabaşı with Ferhat and the kids from Mardin right now, but ultimately that wasn’t really home. It was as if the lieutenant had meant exactly this when he’d said, “Do you think you’re at home?” The only place he could think of as home was the house in Kültepe, where he imagined his father would have fallen asleep in front of the television just then, but that place wasn’t even registered in their name yet.

In the mornings, he would open at random to a page from the letter-writing handbooks he kept hidden under the sweaters at the bottom of his cupboard and hide behind the closet skimming through them so he might have something to keep his mind busy for the rest of the day, during pointless drills and interminable hikes where he would use what he had learned to mentally compose future letters to Rayiha. He would memorize the words, like those political prisoners who sit in cells with no pen or paper and write poetry in their heads, and whenever he had a weekend pass, he would write it all down and post the results off to Duttepe. Happiness was sitting down at a forgotten desk in the intercity bus terminal writing letters to Rayiha, instead of going to the coffeehouses and the cinemas frequented by the other privates, and sometimes Mevlut felt like a poet.

At the end of the four-month boot camp, he had learned how to use a G3 infantry rifle, how to report to an officer (slightly better than everyone else), how to salute, how to stand at attention, how to obey orders (just as well as everyone else), how to scrape by, and how to lie and be two-faced (not as well as everyone else) when circumstances called for it.

There were some things he had trouble with, but he couldn’t decide whether to blame his own incompetence or his moral reservations. “Now listen here, I’m off, but I’ll be back in half an hour, and you will keep going during that time,” the commander would say. “Understood?”

“Yes, sir, understood!” the whole unit would shout.

But as soon as the commander disappeared around the corner of the yellow headquarters building, half the unit would stretch out on the floor and start smoking and prattling away. Of those still standing, half would now continue the drill, but only until they were sure the commander wasn’t suddenly coming back, while the other half (Mevlut among them) would only pretend to continue. There were a very few who kept faith with the drill and were pushed around and ridiculed by all the others, until they were forced to stop, so in the end no one actually carried on as ordered. Was all this really necessary?

In the third month of military service, Mevlut worked up the courage to put this philosophical and ethical question to the two shopkeepers over tea one evening.

“Mevlut, you really are an innocent, aren’t you?” said the one from Antalya.

“Either that or you’re pretending to be and tricking us all,” said the one from Ankara.

If I had a shop like they do, even a small one, I would have definitely finished high school and gone to college, and then I’d be doing my military service as an officer, thought Mevlut. He no longer had any respect for these shopkeepers, but he knew that if he broke with them now, he’d still be playing the “sweet-faced dumb kid who fetches the tea” for any new friends he might make. He would still be using his cap to pick up the kettle with the broken handle, as everyone else did.

In the lottery that decided where he would end up next, he drew the tank brigade stationed in Kars. Some guys were lucky enough to draw cities in the western part of the country, and even bases in Istanbul. These lots were rumored to be rigged. But Mevlut felt neither envy nor resentment, nor did he worry about having to spend sixteen months on the Russian border, in Turkey’s coldest and poorest city.

He got to Kars in a day, changing buses in Ankara, without even paying a visit to Istanbul first. In July 1980, Kars was an impoverished city of fifty thousand. As he made his way, suitcase in hand, from the bus station to the army barracks in the center of town, he noticed that the streets were covered in left-wing slogans, and he recognized some of the tags from those he had seen on the walls in Kültepe.

Mevlut found the army base calm and peaceful. The soldiers stationed in the city, with the exception of those attached to the secret services, did not get involved in the political fighting. Sometimes the gendarmes searched for leftist militants hiding out in farmers’ villages and on dairy farms that specialized in cheese, but those gendarmes were based elsewhere.

During musters one morning, less than a month after he’d arrived in the city, he told the commander that he worked as a waiter in civilian life. After that, he started working in the officers’ mess. This meant he no longer had to stand on guard duty in the cold or deal with senseless and arbitrary orders from the more irksome commanders. He now had plenty of time to sit at the little desk in the barracks or at one of the tables in the mess and write to Rayiha when no one was looking, filling up page after page while the radio played Anatolian folk songs and the singer Emel Sayın’s interpretation of the classic Nihavend-style song “That First Look That Fills the Heart Can Never Be Forgotten,” composed by Erol Sayan. Most of the privates who were assigned to work in headquarters or in the barracks, trying to look busy while they worked as “clerks,” “painters,” or “repairmen,” carried small transistor radios in hidden pockets. Mevlut wrote many love letters that year under the influence of his evolving musical tastes, drawing a range of expressions from Anatolian folk songs to describe Rayiha’s “coy glances,” “languid looks,” “doelike, ink-black, dreaming, teasing, piercing eyes,” and “enchanting gaze.”

The more he wrote, the more he felt as if he’d known Rayiha since way back when they were both children, that they had a shared spiritual history. He was creating an intimacy between them with every word and every sentence he wrote down, and he sensed that all the things he was imagining now would one day come true.

Toward the end of summer, he was arguing with a cook in the kitchens about an eggplant stew that had been served too cold and angered the major, when someone took his arm and pulled him to one side. For one alarming moment, Mevlut thought it was a giant.

“Oh my God! Mohini!”

They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks.

“They say people lose weight in the military, they end up skin and bones, but you’ve become fat.”

“I’m a waiter at the officers’ club,” said Mevlut. “The scraps are pretty good.”

“I’m at the club’s hairdresser.”

Mohini had come to Kars two weeks before. After he had failed high school, his father had sent him to be a hairdresser’s apprentice, and so it was decided that this was what he would do for a living. Dyeing the hair of the officers’ wives blond was easy, as far as army assignments went. Yet Mohini was full of complaints, as Mevlut learned when they spent their off-duty day together at the teahouse across from the Asia Hotel, watching football.