Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Ferhat, will you take me out with you? Are we going to go and see things together?” I asked him.

“Whatever you want, my darling,” he said. “But we’ve got to get home first.”

“You couldn’t have made a better decision, miss, trust me,” said his friend, the taxi driver who was helping us. “The guns didn’t scare you, did they?”

“She doesn’t get scared!” said Ferhat.

We passed Gaziosmanpaşa, formerly known as Taşlıtarla—“Stony Field.” As we drove uphill on a dusty dirt road, the world seemed to grow older with every house, chimney, and tree that passed. I saw single-story houses that hadn’t even been finished but already looked old; pitifully empty lots; walls built out of hollow bricks, scrap metal, and bits of wood; and dogs that barked at anyone. The roads were unpaved, the gardens were big, the houses few and far between; this place was like a village, yet everything, down to the last door and window, had once been in one of those old Istanbul homes before someone ripped it out and brought it here. People here were always in a hurry, as if this neighborhood were just a temporary place to stay until they could move into the actual Istanbul home they were going to buy one day. I saw women like me wearing skirts over faded blue trousers; old ladies in baggy trousers and headscarves wound tight around their faces; I saw straight, loose trousers that looked like stovepipes, long skirts, and women in overcoats.

The house Ferhat was renting, a single room with two windows, stood halfway up the slope. From the window at the back, you could see a plot of land far away that Ferhat had marked out with stones he had limewashed, so that on summer nights when the moon was big, we could see his plot from our bed, glowing in the dark like a ghost. “The land is calling to us,” Ferhat would whisper, and then he’d start telling me about the house we would build there as soon as we’d saved enough. He would ask me how many rooms the house should have and whether the kitchen should face uphill or downhill, and I’d tell him what I thought.

The first night after I’d run away, we got into bed with our clothes still on and did not make love. If I share these intimate details with you, dear readers, it is because I hope that my story might serve as an example to you all. I liked it when Ferhat stroked my hair while I cried in the night. For a week, we slept that way, with our clothes still on and without ever making love. One night I saw a seagull outside the window, and because we were so far from the sea, I thought this had to be a sign of God’s forgiveness. Ferhat realized that I was ready to give myself to him now; I could tell from the look in his eyes that he knew.

He had never tried to force me into doing anything I didn’t want to do, which made me love and respect him even more. Nevertheless, I told him, “We better have a civil wedding as soon as I turn eighteen, or I’ll kill you.”

“With a gun or with poison?”

“That’s my business,” I said.

He kissed me the way they do in the movies. I had never kissed a man on the lips, so I got confused and forgot what I was saying.

“How much longer until you turn eighteen?”

I proudly produced my identity card from my suitcase and worked out that there were seven months and twelve days to go.

“If you’re seventeen and still haven’t got a husband, you might as well call yourself a spinster,” said Ferhat. “Even if we were to make love now, God would feel sorry for you and wouldn’t count it as a sin.”

“I don’t know about that…but if God forgives us, it’ll be because we have to hide out here, with no one to rely on except each other.”

“Not true,” said Ferhat. “I have a family; I have relatives and friends all over this hill. We’re not alone.” At that word—“alone”—I burst into tears. Ferhat stroked my hair to comfort me, just as my father used to do when I was little. I don’t know why, but that made me cry even harder.

We made love feeling deeply self-conscious, though I would never have wanted it to happen that way. I was a little lost at first, but I got used to my new life fairly quickly. I wondered what my sisters and my father might be saying about me. Ferhat would leave just before noon, taking a dusty old minibus like the ones we used to have back in the village, all the way to the fully licensed New Bounty Restaurant in Gaziosmanpaşa, where he worked as a waiter. In the mornings he watched university lectures on TV, and I, too, would watch the professor as Ferhat followed the lesson.

“I can’t concentrate if you sit right next to me while I’m watching,” Ferhat would say. But when I didn’t sit next to him, he would start to wonder where I’d gone to in our tiny house — was I outside feeding bread crumbs to the chickens? — and he still couldn’t concentrate.

I won’t tell you how we made love or what I did to make sure I didn’t get pregnant until we were married, but whenever I was in the city, I would go to Rayiha and Mevlut’s house in Tarlabaşı without informing Ferhat, and I would tell my sister everything. Mevlut was out selling rice from his cart, so he was never home. Vediha came along, too, sometimes. We would play with the children while Rayiha prepared the boza and the chicken, and we’d watch TV as Vediha offered pearls of wisdom to her little sisters.

“Do not trust men,” she would say at the beginning of every lesson. I noticed she’d started smoking. “Samiha, you can’t get pregnant until you and Ferhat have had a civil wedding. If he won’t marry you once you’ve turned eighteen, don’t waste another second on that bastard. You always have your room waiting for you in Duttepe. Rayiha, not a word to Mevlut or Süleyman that the three of us meet up in here. Have a cigarette, dear. It’ll calm your nerves. Süleyman’s still furious. We can’t find him a suitable girl, he doesn’t like any of them, he’s still stuck on you, and — God help us — he’s still charging around saying he’ll murder Ferhat.”

“Vediha, Samiha, I’m going out for half an hour or so. Look after the babies for a bit, will you?” Rayiha would say. “I haven’t left the house in three days.”

When I first went to live there, the Ghaazi Quarter looked like a different place every time I saw it. I met a young woman who wore jeans like me and who’d also run away with someone to avoid a marriage she didn’t want; she wore her headscarf loose, too. There was a Kurdish woman who loved to talk about how she had come from Malatya and how the police and the gendarmes were after her, and when we’d walk back home together from the fountain carrying our jerricans full of water, she would tell me about the pain in her kidneys, the scorpions in her woodshed, and how even in her dreams she was always walking uphill.

The Ghaazi Quarter was just one steep hillside populated by people of every conceivable city, country, trade (though most were unem ployed), race, tribe, and tongue. There was a forest behind the hill, and below the forest was a dam with a green reservoir that supplied water to the whole city. If you made sure to get along with the Alevis, the Kurds, and later with the fanatics of the Tariqi sect and their sheikh, too, your home was unlikely to get demolished, and word of this spread fast so that now all sorts of people lived on this hill. But no one ever said where they were really from. I took Ferhat’s advice and gave a different answer every time anyone asked.

Ferhat went to Gaziosmanpaşa every day, avoiding Istanbul for fear of running into Süleyman (of course, he had no idea about my trips to the city, so please don’t mention them); he told me he was saving, though he didn’t even have a bank account. After he left, I would keep myself busy sweeping the dirt floor (it took a month before I realized that the more I swept the floor, the higher the ceiling got), shifting the tiles and the tin sheets on the roof, which would leak even when it wasn’t raining, and trying to block out the wind, which even on calm, cloudless days with no trace of a breeze outside would still find its way through the chipped bricks and uneven stones, upsetting the nervous lizards on our walls. Some nights, instead of the wind blowing we would hear the howling of wolves, and the roof wouldn’t leak water but slush and rusty nails. On winter evenings, the seagulls would come to perch and warm their orange feet and backsides on the stovepipe coming out of the window, and when their squawking drowned out the voices of American gangsters and policemen on TV, I would get scared to be home alone and think wistfully of my father, who had returned to the village.