Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Mevlut, I can see how happy Rayiha is and I’m so glad for the both of you…,” said one of the girls. “I’m sorry I never got the chance to say congratulations in the village.”

“Didn’t you recognize her? That was my little sister, Samiha,” said Rayiha once they’d sat back down on their red velvet chairs. “She’s really the one with the beautiful eyes. She’s so happy here in Istanbul. There are so many suitors that my father and Vediha don’t know what to do with all the love letters she’s getting.”

—

Süleyman.At first I thought Mevlut had skillfully kept his emotions in check. But then I realized — no, he hadn’t even recognized Samiha, the beautiful girl he’d written all those letters to.

—

Mohini.Mevlut and Rayiha asked me to make a list of the presents they were given and to be a sort of emcee during the gift-giving ceremony. Every time I picked up the microphone and announced a new gift—“The venerable Mr. Vural, businessman and construction magnate from Rize, generous philanthropist and founder of the Duttepe Mosque, presents the groom with a Swiss wristwatch, made in China!”—there would be a ripple of applause, setting off lots of gossip and giggling, and the misers who thought they could get away with a small gift saw they were about to be humiliated in front of everyone and quickly whipped out a bigger banknote.

—

Süleyman.I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Ferhat in the crowd. Five years ago, this scumbag and his Moscow-funded gang would have been ready to ambush my brother and his friends on a street corner somewhere; if we’d known Mevlut was going to find some excuse to have him at the wedding—“He’s my friend, he’s mellowed now!”—you can bet we wouldn’t have taken the trouble to deliver his letters, sort out his marriage, and even arrange his wedding reception…

But Comrade Ferhat looks rather disheartened. He was once the kind of guy who thought he knew everything, he’d stare you down spinning his prayer beads around like a key chain and acting like some Communist thug right out of prison, but those days are gone. Since the coup two years ago most of his comrades have been rotting away in jail or else tortured to the point that they’ve come out maimed. The smart ones ran off to Europe to avoid the torture. But since our comrade Ferhat can’t speak any other language but Kurdish, he has toned down his politics and stayed put, figuring that he wouldn’t get very far with the human rights crowd over there anyway. It’s just like my brother says: a clever Communist will forget about ideology as soon as he’s married and focus on making money; but a stupid Communist, like Ferhat, unable to make a living because of his ridiculous ideas, will make it his business to find paupers like Mevlut to “advise.”

Then there are those types the rest of us guys naturally disapprove of: like the rich guy who falls for a pretty girl and visits her family’s mansion to ask for her hand, but when he goes in and sees that she has a prettier and even younger sister, he turns to her father right then and there and tells him that actually he doesn’t want the girl he came for but the little one playing hopscotch in the corner. That guy, we can all agree, is a true scumbag; but at least we can understand where he’s coming from. How do you even explain someone like Mevlut, who wrote a girl weepy love letters for years and then said nothing when he saw that he’d run away in the dead of night not with the pretty girl he’d fallen for but with her sister?

—

Rayiha’s pure, childlike joy magnified Mevlut’s happiness. She seemed genuinely delighted when people pinned banknotes on her, showing none of the feigned amazement Mevlut had seen on other brides. Mohini was trying to amuse the crowd with his gift-by-gift commentary, remarking on the amounts of cash or gold and jewelry being given by various guests (“Fifty American dollars from the youngest of all yogurt-selling grandpas!”), and as at every wedding, the guests were applauding in a spirit halfway between irony and politeness.

While everyone was busy looking elsewhere, Mevlut secretly studied Rayiha. Her hands, her arms, and her ears all seemed beautiful to him, but so did her nose, her mouth, and her face. Rayiha’s only flaw right now was that she looked exhausted, but she still showed a friendly warmth that really suited her. She hadn’t found anyone to look after her plastic bag stuffed full of gifts, envelopes, and packages, so she’d leaned it against her chair. Her delicate little hand was resting on her lap. Mevlut remembered how he’d held it when they were running away together, and the first time he’d had a good look at it, in the train station in Akşehir. The day they’d run away together already felt like the distant past. In the last three months, they’d had so much sex, grown so close, and talked and laughed so much that Mevlut was amazed to realize there was no one he knew better than he knew Rayiha, and the men showing off their dance moves to the young women in the hall seemed to him like children who knew nothing about life. Mevlut felt he’d known Rayiha for years and slowly began to believe that his letters had been meant for someone like her — perhaps even for Rayiha herself.

Food Tastes Better When It’s Got Some Dirt in It

WHEN THEY GOT HOME, Mevlut and Rayiha were not surprised to find that many of the envelopes people had made such a show of giving them were empty. Trusting neither the banks nor the bankers, Mevlut took most of the money they’d received and bought Rayiha some gold bangles. He also bought a secondhand black-and-white television in Dolapdere, so Rayiha wouldn’t get bored while she waited for him at home in the evenings. Sometimes they would hold hands as they watched TV together. Mevlut had started coming home early on Saturday evenings when Little House on the Prairie was on and on Sundays when it was time for Dallas, as there would be no one left out on the streets to buy his ice cream anyway.

When Hızır came back from the village at the start of October and took back his ice-cream cart, Mevlut was unemployed for a while. Ferhat had gone quiet after the wedding. Even if they happened to run into each other in a Tarlabaşı coffeehouse, they no longer had the conversations they had back in the day, when Ferhat used to tell him about a new business opportunity no one else had thought about, which would make the two of them “lots of money.” Mevlut went to the Beyoğlu restaurants where he’d worked in the past and spoke to the headwaiters and restaurant managers who spent their afternoons doing the books, or reading the newspaper and betting on football, but no one could offer him a job with the kind of salary he expected.

There were some new upscale restaurants opening in the city, but those places were looking for people with some form of “hospitality training” who spoke enough English to understand “yes” from “no”—not someone like Mevlut who’d come from the village ready to take any job that came his way and had learned as he went along. In November, he started working in a restaurant somewhere, but after a couple of weeks he’d already given his notice. Some self-important guy wearing a tie had complained that his spicy tomato salad wasn’t spicy enough, and Mevlut had snapped at him before remorsefully casting off his uniform. But it wasn’t a case of some sad and weary soul acting impulsively: these were the happiest days of his life. He was going to be a father soon, and he was planning to use all the wedding jewelry on a chickpea-rice business that would guarantee his son a future.