Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

On the way back to Istanbul the next day, on a bus that swayed in the night like an old spaceship, Mevlut slept deeply. He woke up when it stopped at the Mountain View way station again, sat at the same table where he’d had a cup of tea with Rayiha on their way to the village, and realized now how much he loved her. To spend a single day on his own was enough to understand that in just fifty days his love for Rayiha had already transcended anything he’d seen in the movies or heard of in fairy tales.

—

Samiha.We’re all so pleased that Rayiha has found a husband who loves her and is as cute as a little boy. I’ve come to Istanbul for the wedding with my father and Rayiha. It’s our second visit, and of course we’re staying with Vediha again. My sisters and I had a great time with all the other women at the henna ceremony the day before the wedding, and we laughed to the point of tears: Rayiha did an impression of my father telling people off, while Vediha pretended to be Korkut losing his temper in traffic and swearing at everyone around him. I imitated the suitors who came calling for me at home but didn’t know what to do with themselves, let alone where to put the box of sweets and the bottle of cologne they’d bought from Affan’s Haberdashers across the street from the Eşrefoğlu Mosque in Beyşehir. I was on the spot now that it was my turn to get married, after Rayiha. I didn’t like my father standing guard over me, or all the curious eyes watching us whenever someone opened the door to the henna party. I didn’t mind seeing my suitors’ soulful glances from afar, as if they’ve already fallen hopelessly in love (or even the way some would stroke their mustaches while they stared), only to turn away pretending they hadn’t been looking at all. But there were also those who thought it would be simpler to impress my father and not bother with me, and that made me furious.

—

Rayiha.Sitting on a chair in that crowd of noisy women, I was wearing the pink dress Mevlut had bought me in Aksaray, which his sisters had decorated with flowers and lace; Vediha had placed a veil over my head, and a gauze you couldn’t quite see through hung over my face, but through a gap in the veil, I could watch all the other girls enjoying their songs and games. The henna paste was lit up and waved over my head on a tray bearing coins and candles, and all the girls and women tried to make me feel sad, saying “Poor little Rayiha, you’re leaving your childhood home to live with strangers, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re a grown woman now, poor dear,” but I just couldn’t make myself cry. Every time Vediha and Samiha parted my veil to check whether I was weeping yet, I thought I might burst out laughing, and they would have to turn around and announce, “No, she isn’t crying yet,” which only encouraged the women sitting in a circle around me to resort to all sorts of provocative insinuations—“This one’s certainly ready, isn’t she! She’s not looking back.” Worrying that the more envious among them might mention my swollen belly, I thought of my mother’s death and the day we buried her, trying my best to squeeze some tears out, but still I couldn’t cry.

—

Ferhat.“Forget it!” I said when Mevlut invited me to his wedding, which got him upset, though I must admit I wouldn’t mind seeing the Şahika Wedding Hall again. I’ve been to so many left-wing gatherings in that big basement room. Socialist political parties and left-wing clubs used to hold their annual conferences and general meetings there. They’d start off with folk songs and “The Internationale,” but by the end there’d be fistfights and chairs flying, not because of any nationalists trying to break the meetings up with sticks, but because the rival pro-Soviet and pro-China factions among us could never get their fill of beating each other bloody. When Kültepe’s leftists lost the turf wars of 1977, all these places were taken over by state-sponsored right-wing organizations, and we never really set foot there again.

—

Mevlut hadn’t even told Ferhat that the Şahika Wedding Hall was run by one of the Vurals, without whom this party wouldn’t be happening. Ferhat found an excuse to needle him anyway.

“You’re pretty good at keeping left and right happy, aren’t you,” he said. “You’d make a good shopkeeper now, with all this bowing and scraping.”

“I wouldn’t mind being a good shopkeeper,” said Mevlut, sitting with Ferhat and offering him some vodka and lemonade underneath the table, before moving on to straight vodka. “One day,” he said, hugging his friend, “you and I are going to open the best shop in Turkey.”

The moment Mevlut told the marriage officiant “I do,” he felt he could put his life in Rayiha’s hands and trust in her intelligence. During the reception, he gladly went along with whatever his wife was doing — as he would do throughout their married life — knowing that life would be easier that way and that the child within his soul (not to be confused with the one inside Rayiha’s womb) would always be happy. So it was that half an hour later, after having greeted everyone else, he went up to Hadji Hamit Vural, who had taken over a table like a politician surrounded by his bodyguards, to kiss the great man’s hand, and then the hands of the men he’d brought with him (all eight of them).

As he sat with Rayiha on two shiny red velvet chairs reserved for the bride and groom and set right in the middle of the wedding hall, Mevlut looked around at the tables for the men (which took up more than half the room) and saw many familiar faces: most were former yogurt sellers of his father’s generation, their hunched backs long broken under the weight of the loads they’d carried for years. Ever since the decline of the yogurt business, the poorest and least successful among them had started working various jobs by day while selling boza at night, as Mevlut did. Some had built illegal homes on the outskirts of the city (these dwellings occasionally collapsed and had to be rebuilt from scratch), and as the value of their land had risen, they’d been able to relax at last and retire, or even go back to the village. Some had a place there with a distant view of Lake Beyşehir as well as their house in one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods. Those men sat puffing on their Marlboros. But those who’d believed the newspaper ads promoting the Workers’ Bank’s deposit schemes, and the things they’d learned in primary school, had banked every cent of their earnings over the years, only to see their savings turn to dust in the latest surge of inflation. Those who’d tried to avoid this fate by giving their money to the new self-styled bankers had also lost everything. So now their sons worked as street vendors, too, just like Mevlut, who understood as well as anyone there how men who had withered away selling goods on the street for a quarter century could still have nothing to show for it, like his father, not even a village house with a garden. His mother was sitting with all the other street vendors’ wives, tired, aging ladies who’d stayed behind in the village; Mevlut couldn’t bear to look their way.

The drums and the woodwinds started playing, and Mevlut joined the other men on the dance floor. While he hopped and skipped about, his eyes followed Rayiha’s purple headscarf as she greeted each and every single young woman and middle-aged lady on the women’s side of the hall. That was when he spotted Mohini, who had made it back from military service just in time for the wedding. It wouldn’t be long before the guests started pinning jewelry on the bride and groom, when a burst of energy surged through the sweltering wedding hall and the crowd lost any semblance of order, drunk on their plain lemonade, the noise, and the stuffy air. “I can’t deal with all these fascists unless I’m looking over to where the Vurals are sitting, and drinking to their health,” said Ferhat, passing his friend a glass of vodka and lemonade under the table as discreetly as possible. Mevlut thought he’d lost Rayiha for a moment, but then found her again and rushed to her side. She was coming out of the toilets flanked by two girls in headscarves the same color as hers.