Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Only Desperate Yogurt Sellers Bother with Boza

Abdurrahman Efendi.It’s tough when your daughter elopes: if you’re not up in arms the second you find out, firing bullets left and right, you’ll have the gossips whispering “Her father knew” behind your back. It was only four years ago that a lovely girl was kidnapped in broad daylight by three armed bandits while she was working the fields. Her father went to the judge and had him send the gendarmes after them, he tortured himself for days wondering what horrible things they must be doing to his daughter, but he still couldn’t avoid that slander: “Her father knew.” I asked Samiha over and over again to tell me who’d taken Rayiha, I even told her she had a slap coming if she wasn’t careful, but she didn’t believe me, of course — my daughters know I couldn’t even bear to twist their ears — and I didn’t get a thing out of her.

To head off any gossip in the village, I went down to the magistrate in Beyşehir. “But you didn’t even manage to keep hold of your daughter’s identity card,” he said. “It’s clear to me that the girl ran away because she wanted to. She’s under eighteen, though, so I can press charges. I can send the gendarmes after them. But then if your anger fades and you decide to forgive your son-in-law so they can be married properly, you’ll still have this court case to deal with. Go and think it over at the coffeehouse for a bit, and if you’re still determined to pursue the matter, I’ll be here.”

On my way to the coffeehouse, I stopped at the Broken Ladle for some lentil soup, and when I overheard the people at the next table talking about an imminent cockfighting match at the Animal Welfare Club, I followed them out of the diner. So I ended up going back to the village before I could decide what to do. A month later, just after Ramadan, there was some news from Vediha: Rayiha was in Istanbul, she was well, she was pregnant, and the man she had run away with was Mevlut, her husband Korkut’s cousin. Vediha had seen this fool Mevlut and knew that he was completely penniless. I said, “I will never forgive them,” but Vediha could already tell that I would.

—

Vediha.Rayiha came over to our place one afternoon sometime after the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, but she didn’t tell Mevlut. She said that she was very happy with him and that she was pregnant. She hugged me and cried. She told me how lonely she’d been feeling, how scared she was of everything, and how she wanted to live the way we used to do back in the village, with all her sisters and a family buzzing around her, among the trees and the chickens, in other words in a house with a garden like ours in Duttepe — not in some shabby, cramped apartment. What my dear Rayiha really wanted was for our father to stop thinking “There cannot be a wedding for a girl who runs away” and just forgive her, allowing her a civil ceremony and a wedding reception, too. Might I be able to coax everyone gently into agreement, placating Korkut and my father-in-law, Hasan, without hurting my father’s feelings, and sorting this all out before the baby in her belly grew too big? “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But first you must swear one more time that you will never tell Dad or anyone else that it was Süleyman and I who delivered Mevlut’s letters.” Rayiha, who is an optimist by nature, swore without any hesitation. “I’m sure everyone’s secretly glad I ran away and got married, because it’s Samiha’s turn now,” she said.

—

Korkut.I went down to Gümüşdere, and after a brief negotiation, I convinced my weeping crooked-necked father-in-law to “forgive” Rayiha. I was a bit irritated at first because he was acting as if I’d been involved in the elopement (later I interpreted this tone of his as a sign that Vediha and my brother, Süleyman, must have had a hand in the matter), but really, he was pleased that Rayiha was married — he was just annoyed to have let Mevlut snatch his daughter away for free. To smooth his ruffled feathers, I promised that I would help him repair the broken wall around his garden and that I would tell Mevlut and Rayiha to go to the village to kiss his hand and beg for forgiveness, and later, I sent him two thousand liras with Vediha.

—

Mevlut became anxious when he found out that Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would forgive them only on the condition that they went back to the village to pay their respects to him. Such a visit would inevitably entail coming face-to-face with the beautiful Samiha, who had been the intended recipient of all his letters, and he was sure he wouldn’t be able to hide his embarrassment when he saw her and his face turned crimson. Mevlut spent the fourteen-hour bus ride from Istanbul to Beyşehir wide awake, brooding over this prospect, while Rayiha slept like a baby beside him. The hardest part was having to hide his unease from Rayiha, who was so glad that everything had been resolved in the best way possible and overjoyed to be seeing her father and sister again. Mevlut feared that even allowing himself to think about it too much would lead Rayiha to sense the truth. In practice this meant that he thought about it even more, which, just as with his fear of dogs, only made things worse. Rayiha could sense that there was something eating away at her husband. They were having a cup of tea at the Mountain View way station, where their bus had stopped for a quick break in the middle of the night, when she finally asked him, “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“There’s a strangeness in my mind,” said Mevlut. “No matter what I do, I feel completely alone in this world.” “You will never feel that way again now that I’m with you,” said Rayiha with maternal feeling. As Rayiha snuggled up to him, Mevlut watched her dreamlike reflection in the window of the teahouse, and he knew that he would never forget this moment.

—

They spent two days in Cennetpınar, Mevlut’s village. His mother made up their best bed for Rayiha and brought out some candied walnut wrap, Mevlut’s favorite. She kept kissing her daughter-in-law, showing Mevlut Rayiha’s hands, her arms, even her ears, and saying, “Isn’t she just lovely?” Mevlut basked in the maternal affection he’d missed ever since moving to Istanbul at the age of twelve, but at the same time he felt a sense of resentment and superiority he couldn’t quite explain.

—

Rayiha.In the fifty days I’d been away from my village, my home, our garden, I’d missed them all so much, even the old village road and the trees and the chickens, that now I felt I had to go off on my own for a while. In the very room in which I’d switched the lights on and off to signal Mevlut the night we ran away, my husband now went like a naughty schoolboy up to my father asking his forgiveness. I will never forget how happy I was to see him kiss my dear father’s hand. Afterward, I walked in with a tray and served the coffee, smiling charmingly at everyone, as if they were guests come to look at a potential match for their son, and I was the girl who hadn’t managed to find a husband yet. Mevlut was so nervous that he downed his boiling coffee like lemonade, without even blowing on it first, and tears sprang from his eyes. They were talking about mundane things, until Mevlut got upset when he realized that I would be staying behind with my father and Samiha and not coming back to Istanbul until the wedding, just like a real bride.

—

Mevlut was annoyed that Rayiha hadn’t warned him about her plans to stay in the village for a while. He was walking back toward his village in a huff, having instinctively cut his visit short, and deep down, he was very pleased not to have seen Samiha in the house at all. Rayiha had mentioned her sister, but for whatever reason, Samiha hadn’t shown her face; he was glad for the temporary reprieve from that humiliation, knowing nonetheless that the matter hadn’t been resolved, only postponed until the wedding in Istanbul. Did the fact that Samiha hadn’t been home mean that she, too, had hidden away in embarrassment and that she wanted to forget all this?