Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“You should be grateful that you have Vediha Yenge and the rest of us,” said Süleyman ten days later. “She’s gone all the way to the village for you. Now let’s see if you’ll get your way. Bring me another rakı, will you?”

Vediha took her two sons — three-year-old Bozkurt and two-year-old Turan — along with her to the village. Mevlut thought they would be back almost immediately, as the kids would quickly tire of a muddy village dwelling where the lights went out all the time and the water never ran, but he was wrong. Restless, he would go over to Duttepe twice a week, thinking Vediha Yenge must surely be back by now, but he would find no one but Aunt Safiye sitting alone in the gloomy house.

“Who would have thought it was that daughter-in-law of mine who was breathing life into this house,” said Aunt Safiye to Mevlut who was visiting late one night. “Ever since Vediha’s been gone, there’s been a few nights when Korkut hasn’t come home. Süleyman is out, too. I made lentil soup, shall I warm some up for you? We can watch television. Did you hear, Kastelli ran away, and all the bankers have gone bust. You haven’t given these bankers any of your money, have you?”

“I don’t have any money, Aunt Safiye.”

“Don’t worry…Don’t spend your life stressing about money, you’re bound to get your big break someday. Money doesn’t make happiness. Look at how much Korkut earns, and still he and Vediha are at each other’s throats every day…I feel sorry for Bozkurt and Turan, they’ve known nothing but arguments and fights all their life. Never mind…Hopefully this thing of yours will work out, God willing.”

“What thing?” said Mevlut, his heart speeding up as he turned away from the television, but Aunt Safiye said no more.

“I have some good news,” said Süleyman three days later. “Vediha Yenge is back from the village. Rayiha loves you very much, my dear Mevlut. It’s all thanks to your letters. She definitely doesn’t want the banker her father means for her to marry. The banker himself is officially bankrupt, but he bought gold and American dollars with his customers’ money and buried it all away somewhere. Once all this media attention dies down and the newspapers move on to the next story, he’s going to dig up the money from whatever garden he’s buried it in and live the good life with Rayiha while the greedy blockheads who gave him their cash have to deal with the courts. He’s promised the Crooked Neck a bundle. If her father gives his consent, he’s going to marry Rayiha in a civil ceremony and go to Germany until the storm blows over. Apparently that crook of a ruined banker — and former tea vendor — is hiding out learning German and wants Rayiha to learn enough herself to be able buy meat from the halal butcher in Germany.”

“That bastard,” said Mevlut. “If I don’t get to elope with Rayiha, I’ll kill him.”

“You won’t need to kill anyone. I’m going to take the van and we’re going to go to the village and take her away,” said Süleyman. “I’ll sort everything out for you.”

Mevlut hugged and kissed his cousin. That night, he was too exhilarated to sleep.

When they met again, Süleyman had planned everything: after Thursday’s evening prayers, Rayiha was going to take her belongings and come out to her back garden.

“Let’s get going,” said Mevlut.

“Sit back down, will you. It’s no more than a day’s drive by van.”

“It might rain, it’s flood season…And we have to make preparations in Beyşehir.”

“There’s no need for any preparations. As soon as it gets dark, you’ll find the girl in the Crooked Neck’s back garden as if you’d put her there yourself. I’ll drive you both to Akşehir and drop you off at the train station. You and Rayiha will take the train, and I’ll come back on my own so her father doesn’t suspect me.”

Just hearing Süleyman say “you and Rayiha” was enough to send Mevlut into raptures. He’d already taken a week off work, and extended his leave for another week, claiming “family matters.” When he asked for yet another week of unpaid leave, his boss grumbled. So Mevlut told him not to expect him back.

He could find another job in an ordinary restaurant like that anytime. He had also been thinking of entering the ice-cream business. He had met an ice-cream vendor who wanted to rent out his three-wheeled ice-cream cart and ice-cream churn from the month of Ramadan onward.

He tidied up the house a little and tried to put himself in Rayiha’s shoes to imagine what she would see when she walked through the door, what sorts of things she would notice. Should he buy a bedspread now or let her choose one? Every time he imagined Rayiha inside the house, he thought of how she would see him walking around in his underwear, and he both craved that intimacy and shied away from the thought.

—

Süleyman.I fooled them all — my brother, my mother, Vediha, and everyone else — telling them I was going to take the van and disappear for a couple of days. On the eve of our departure, our would-be groom was jumping for joy; I took him to one side to have a word.

“Now listen very carefully, my dear Mevlut, because I’m talking to you not as your best friend and your cousin right now but as a member of the girl’s family. Rayiha isn’t even eighteen yet. If her father loses it, if he decides ‘I can’t forgive someone who’s run away with my daughter’ and sends the gendarmes after you, you’re going to have to hide until she turns eighteen, and you won’t be able to marry her until then. Now I want you to give me your word of honor that, when the time comes, you are absolutely going to marry her.”

“You have my word,” said Mevlut. “I’m going to marry her in a religious ceremony, too.”

In the van the next morning, on our way to the village, Mevlut was in a great mood, joking around, looking at every passing factory and bridge, telling me “Faster, floor it!” and generally just babbling away. Then, he went quiet.

“What’s wrong, scared of running away with a girl all of a sudden? We’re just coming into Afyon. If we spend the night in the van, the police will get suspicious and they might take us to the police station, so I think we’d better go to that motel over there, all right? It’s on me.”

On the ground floor of the Nezahat Hotel, there was a restaurant that served alcohol. I was just draining my second drink as I sat there listening to Mevlut still going on about the tortures he saw in the military, when I finally snapped.

“Look, I’m Turkish and I won’t hear a word said against my army, got it?” I said. “Maybe all these tortures and beatings and locking up a hundred thousand people is a bit much, but I’m happy with the coup. I’m sure you’d agree that the whole country’s calmed right down, not just Istanbul, the streets are spotless, there’s no more arguing about left or right, no more assassinations, the traffic’s flowing smooth ever since the army put their foot down, the brothels have been shut down, and all the prostitutes, the Communists, the Marlboro sellers, the black-market traders, the mafia thugs, bootleggers, pimps, and street vendors have been swept away. Now don’t get all offended; there just isn’t any future for street vendors in this country, and you better accept it, my dear Mevlut. A man forks out a fortune on rent to open his nice fruit-and-vegetable shop in the best spot in the city, and along you come and sit on the pavement right on his doorstep to sell your potatoes and tomatoes from the village…Is that fair? The army’s just regulating things a little. If only he’d lived a little longer, Atatürk wouldn’t have stopped at the fez and the skullcap, he would have also banned street vendors all over the country, starting from Istanbul. I’m told they don’t have these things in Europe.”