Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Vediha, Samiha, and I found out when we went to the Etfal Hospital in Şişli. I left the hospital fretting. “Who cares, for God’s sake!” Samiha said. “There are enough men roaming the streets of Istanbul already.”

Do Not Get Out of the Van

Samiha.My father and I came to Istanbul for the wedding and ended up staying. Every morning when I wake up in that room in Vediha’s place, I look at the shadows of the water pitcher and the bottle of cologne on the table, and I get lost in thought: I had so many suitors in the village that my father thought I’d find an even better match in Istanbul…But I have yet to meet anyone here other than Süleyman…I don’t know what he and Korkut have promised my father. I do know they’re the ones who paid for his dentures. He puts them in a glass before he goes to sleep; when I’m in bed waiting for him to wake up, I always feel like taking those false teeth and throwing them out the window. I help Vediha with the housework all morning and do some knitting for the winter, and we watch TV together when the programs start in the afternoon. My father plays with Bozkurt and Turan in the mornings, but they like to pull on his beard and his hair, and he ends up arguing with his grandchildren. Once, my father and I went down to the Bosphorus with Vediha and Süleyman; another time we went to the cinema in Beyoğlu and for some milk pudding afterward.

Süleyman came up to me this morning, spinning his car keys on his finger like a string of prayer beads; he said he needed to cross the Bosphorus around noon to pick up six bags of cement and some steel from Üsküdar, he was going to drive over the Bosphorus Bridge, and I could go with him if I wanted. I asked my sister Vediha. “It’s up to you,” she said. “But for God’s sake be careful!” What did she mean? When we went to the Palace Cinema that time, my father and Vediha had no objections to Süleyman sitting right next to me, so when I felt his hand creeping up like a cautious crab to touch the side of my leg halfway through the movie, I tried to figure out whether it was on purpose or just a coincidence, but I couldn’t decide…Süleyman was being perfectly polite and considerate as we crossed the Bosphorus Bridge under the midday sun on this bright, freezing cold winter’s day. He said, “Samiha, would you like me to switch to the right lane so you can have a better view?” and took the Ford van so close to the edge of the bridge that for a moment, I felt we might fall onto the Russian ship with the red chimney passing by down below.

We crossed the Bosphorus Bridge and drove along this horrible, potholed road on the outskirts of Üsküdar, and that was the end of all the prettiness and the wonderful tourist spots: there were cement factories surrounded by barbed wire; workshops with smashed windows; derelict houses worse than anything we have back in the village; and thousands of rusty metal barrels, so many that I wondered whether they’d rained down from the sky.

We stopped in a flat stretch covered with ramshackle houses. If you ask me, it looked a lot like Duttepe (poor, in other words), only newer and uglier. “This is a branch of Aktaş Construction, we set it up with the Vurals,” said Süleyman as he got out of the car, and just as he was about to walk into an ugly building, he turned around and warned me menacingly: “Do not get out of the van!” Naturally, this made me really want to get out of the van. But there wasn’t a single woman around, so I stayed where I was, waiting in the front passenger seat.

By the time we got through the traffic on the way back, there wasn’t time for lunch, and Süleyman couldn’t drop me home either. When we got to the start of Duttepe, he spotted some friends of his and abruptly stopped the car. “Well, we’re in the neighborhood now, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting up the hill,” he said. “Here, take this and buy my mother some bread on the way!”

I bought the bread and slowly made my way up to the Aktaş house, which was shaping up to be a real house made of concrete, and I started to think about how people say that the trouble with two strangers get ting married isn’t necessarily that the woman has to marry someone she doesn’t know but that she has to learn to love someone she doesn’t know…But I think it must be easier for a girl to marry someone she doesn’t know, because the more you get to know men, the harder it is to love them.

—

Rayiha.The unnamed baby girl in my belly had grown so big that I was having trouble sitting down. Mevlut was reading names out of his book one evening—“Hamdullah is one who gives thanks to Allah; Uybedullah is Allah’s servant; Seyfullah is the sword, the soldier of Allah”—when I decided to interrupt him: “Darling, isn’t there anything in that book about girls’ names?” He said, “Oh, look, there is, who would have thought?” like a man who finds out one day that his favorite diner has a “family room” on the second floor reserved for women. That man might peep through a crack in the door for a quick, bashful look at the women’s section, and in a similar way, Mevlut took a halfhearted glance at the back pages before returning to the boys’ names. Luckily, Vediha went and got me two more books from a nice shop in Şişli that sold toys as well. One of the two books had mostly nationalistic names from Central Asia, like Kurtcebe, Alparslan, or Atabeg, while the girls’ names lived in separate pages from the boys’, just as men and women lived separately in Ottoman palaces. In the Handbook of Modern Baby Names, however, the boys and girls sat in mixed groups, as they do in private high schools or at the wedding receptions of rich and Westernized families, but Mevlut laughed at the girls’ names — Simge, Suzan, Mine, Irem — and only took the boys’ names seriously: Tolga, Hakan, Kılıç.

In spite of all this, I wouldn’t want you to think that Mevlut regarded the birth of our daughter Fatma in April as some sort of tragedy, or that he was mean to me because I hadn’t been able to give him a son. It was, in fact, the very opposite. Mevlut was so happy to be a father that he kept telling everyone he’d wanted a girl all along, and he really believed it. There was a photographer called Şakir on our street who would take photos of people getting drunk on rakı and wine in the bars of Beyoğlu, which he developed in the darkroom in his old-fashioned studio; Mevlut brought him over to our house one day to take a picture of him holding the baby in his arms, looking like a giant as he grinned from ear to ear. Mevlut stuck the photo on his cart and gave out some free rice, telling his customers, “I’ve had a baby girl.” As soon as he came home in the evenings, he would sit Fatma on his lap, bring her left hand right up to his eyes, examine her perfectly formed hands up close like a watchmaker in his shop, and say, “Look, she’s got fingernails, too,” and then he would compare his fingers and mine with the baby’s and kiss us both with tears in his eyes, full of wonder at this miracle of God.

—

Mevlut was very happy, but there was also a strangeness in his soul of which Rayiha knew nothing. “God bless your beautiful baby!” his customers would say when they saw the photos on his cart (where they got soggy from the steam rising from the rice), and sometimes he wouldn’t tell them that the baby was a girl. It took him a long time to admit to himself that the true cause of his unhappiness was that he was jealous of the baby. At first he thought he was getting annoyed about being woken up several times in the middle of the night when Rayiha had to breast-feed Fatma. There was also the problem of the mosquitoes that kept getting under the baby’s mosquito net and sucking her blood, a subject of quarrels all summer. Eventually, though, Mevlut noticed that a strange feeling seized him whenever he saw Rayiha cooing to the baby and offering it one of her enormous breasts: it troubled him to see Rayiha looking at the child with the kind of love and adoration he felt should be for him alone. He couldn’t tell her, though, and began to resent her, too. Rayiha and the baby had become one, and Mevlut had been made to feel insignificant.