Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

By evening time, I was soaked through with sweat. Mevlut showed me how to light the gas boiler with a match, how to regulate the butane supply, and which one was the hot water tap. We had to stand on a chair to insert a lit match into a black hole in the boiler and turn it on. Mevlut suggested I crack open the little frosted-glass window that opened onto the dark inner courtyard of the building.

“If you leave it open just so, you’ll let the dirty air out, and no one will see you…,” he whispered. “I’ll be gone for an hour.”

—

Rayiha was still in the same outfit she’d been wearing when they had run away from the village, and Mevlut had figured out that she wouldn’t be comfortable taking her clothes off and bathing if he was in the house. He sat in a coffeehouse just off İstiklal Avenue. On winter evenings, this place would be full of doormen, lottery-ticket sellers, drivers, and tired street vendors, but now it was empty. He looked at the cup of tea that had been placed in front of him and thought of Rayiha bathing. Where had he gotten the idea that she had fair skin? From looking at her neck! Why had he said “an hour” when he’d left? Time was moving very slowly. He looked at a lonely tea leaf at the bottom of his glass.

Not wanting to go back home before an hour had passed, he had a beer and took the long way back through the backstreets of Tarlabaşı: it pleased him to be a part of these streets where kids cursed at one another as they played football, mothers sat outside small three-story houses with big trays on their laps, picking stones out of rice, and everyone knew everyone else.

Mevlut haggled for watermelons with a man sitting under the shade of a black cloth gazebo in an empty clearing, tapping a number of watermelons with his fingers to try to guess how red they were inside. There was an ant walking on a watermelon. Whenever Mevlut turned the fruit over in his hands, the ant would end up upside down, but it would never fall; it would just run around until it was back on top of the watermelon. He had the vendor weigh the watermelon, taking care not to knock the patient ant off. He walked back into the house without a sound and put the watermelon in the kitchen.

—

Rayiha.Once I had bathed and put on some fresh, clean clothes, I lay down on the bed with my back to the door and fell asleep without covering my hair.

—

Mevlut went up to her quietly. For a long time, he looked at Rayiha lying on the bed, knowing that he would never forget this moment. Her body and feet looked delicate and pretty under her clothes. Her shoulders and her arms stirred gently every time she breathed. For a moment, Mevlut felt that she was only pretending to be asleep. He lay down quietly and cautiously on the other side of the double bed, without changing his clothes.

His heart was beating fast. If they started having sex now — and he wasn’t even sure how to go about doing that — he would be taking advantage of her trust.

Rayiha had put her trust in Mevlut, she had surrendered her life into his hands, and she had taken off her headscarf and shown him her long, beautiful hair before they were married — before they’d even had sex. As he looked at her long, flowing locks, Mevlut sensed that this trust and surrender would be enough to bind him to Rayiha and understood just how much he was going to love her. He wasn’t alone in the world. He watched Rayiha breathing in and out, and his happiness seemed boundless. She had even appreciated his letters.

They fell asleep in their clothes. Late at night, they embraced in the dark, but they did not make love. Mevlut could tell that it must be easier to engage in sexual activities at night. But he would have liked his first time with Rayiha to be in the light of day, when he could look into her eyes. Come morning, however, every time they did look into each other’s eyes from up close, they got embarrassed and found other things to keep them busy.

—

Rayiha.The next morning, I took Mevlut shopping again. I picked a plastic tablecloth that looked like waxcloth, a duvet cover with blue flowers, a plastic breadbasket that looked like it was made of wicker, and a plastic lemon press. Mevlut soon tired of my browsing the stores looking at slippers, teacups, jars, and saltshakers just for fun, without buying anything. We went back home. We sat on the edge of the bed.

“No one knows we’re here, right?” I said.

Mevlut’s boyish face gave me such a look in response that I said, “There’s food on the stove,” and ran off to the kitchen. In the afternoon, when the sun warmed up the small apartment, I felt tired and went to lie down on the bed.

—

When Mevlut went to lie down next to her, they hugged and kissed for the very first time. His desire intensified when he saw the look of childlike guilt on clever Rayiha’s face. But every time his desires announced themselves in fleshly form, they were both overcome with embarrassment. Mevlut put his hand inside Rayiha’s dress and touched her left breast for a moment, and his head spun.

She pushed him away. He got up, his pride bruised.

“Don’t worry, I’m not angry!” he said as he walked out the door with decision. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

In one of the streets behind the Ağa Mosque, there was a Kurdish scrap-metal dealer who had graduated from a religious institute in Ankara. He charged a small fee to perform quick religious wedding ceremonies for couples who’d already had their civil ceremonies but wanted to be on the safe side; men who had wives back in their villages but had fallen in love with someone else in Istanbul and had no one else to turn to; and conservative teenagers who kept their meetings a secret from their fathers and older brothers, let things get too far, and then couldn’t live with the guilt. The scrap dealer claimed he was a Hanafi because only Sunnis of the Hanafi school were allowed to marry young people without their parents’ permission.

Mevlut found this man among old radiators, stove lids, and rusty engine parts in the back room of his shop, dozing with his head under a copy of the Istanbul daily Akşam.

“Sir, I would like to get married according to the laws of our faith.”

“I understand, but what’s the rush?” said the learned man. “You’re too poor and too young to take a second wife.”

“I ran away with a girl!” said Mevlut.

“With her agreement, of course?”

“We’re in love.”

“The world’s full of philanderers who like to kidnap girls and rape them, claiming all the while that it’s love. These villains sometimes even manage to persuade the girls’ helpless families to let them marry their daughters…”

“It’s not like that at all,” said Mevlut. “We are getting married by mutual consent and hopefully with love.”

“Love is a disease,” said the scholar. “And marriage is the only cure, you’re right. But it is a cure you may regret, for it is like having to take awful quinine for the rest of your life even after your typhoid fever is cured.”

“I won’t regret it,” said Mevlut.

“Then what’s the rush? Haven’t you consummated yet?”

“Only after we’re properly married,” said Mevlut.

“Either she’s really ugly, or you’re a real innocent. What’s your name? You’re a good-looking lad, sit down and have some tea.”