Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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Abdurrahman Efendi.My darling daughter, my beautiful Samiha. I can sense that you’ve been talking about me all the way from this table in the village coffeehouse where I am dozing in front of the television, I know you’re all right and have no complaints about that bastard who ran off with you, and I wish you every happiness, my dear. Forget about money. Marry whoever you want to marry, my child, even an Alevi is fine, just as long as you bring your husband to the village so you can both kiss my hand. I wonder where you are…I wonder if my feelings and my words are reaching you in return…

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Ferhat.As soon as I realized that Samiha was scared of being home alone while I worked late at the New Bounty Restaurant, I told her she could go watch TV in the evenings with our neighbors from the town of Sivas. Haydar was an Alevi who worked as a doorman in a new apartment block in Gaziosmanpaşa, where his wife, Zeliha, scrubbed the stairs five days a week and also helped out a baker’s wife on an upper-floor apartment with the cooking and the dishes. Samiha noticed how Haydar and Zeliha always left the house together in the morning and took the bus home together every evening, keeping each other company all day. We were walking up the slope to our house one night, an icy wind from the Black Sea rattling our bones, when Samiha told me that there were other tenants in that building where Haydar’s wife worked looking for maids to come in for the day.

Once we got home, I put my foot down. “I’d rather go hungry than have you working as a maid!” I said.

I was holding a rusty old wheel rim, which I added to the pile of old doors, scrap metal, wire, tin drums, bricks, and smooth rocks I was collecting for the house I would build one day on the plot I had marked out with phosphorescent stones.

—

People in the Ghaazi Quarter had started to help one another build houses out of the doors, chimneys, and hollow bricks they’d amassed when the leftists, Alevis, and Kurds took over the neighborhood six years earlier. Before then, the quarter had been ruled by Nazmi the Laz from the eastern Black Sea coast. In 1972, Nazmi the Laz and two of his men (who also hailed from Rize) opened a shop at the foot of this hill, which was empty back then except for nettles and shrubs. He sold overpriced tiles, hollow bricks, cement, and other construction materials to poor migrants from Eastern Anatolia who came here hoping to build an unlicensed home on an empty patch of public land. He was like a friend to his customers, offering them advice and tea (later, he would open a teahouse next door), and his shop soon became a meeting point for those flocking to Istanbul from every corner of the Anatolian peninsula — especially from Sivas, Kars, and Tokat — migrants yearning for four walls and a ceiling.

Nazmi the Laz would take his famous horse-drawn cart with rubber tires and do the rounds of Istanbul’s demolition crews, collecting wooden doors, newel posts, window frames, cracked bits of marble and paving, metal railings, and old roof tiles, which he displayed all around his shops and his teahouse. He would demand exorbitant prices for these rusty, rotten furnishings, just as he did for the cement and the bricks he sold in his shop. But if you were willing to pay and to hire Nazmi’s horse cart to deliver the materials to your construction site, you could count on Nazmi and his men to keep an eye on the land you’d seized and the house you were building on it.

Those not prepared to pay Nazmi, or who thought it was shrewder to go elsewhere for the building materials—“I know where I can get it all a lot cheaper,” they’d say — were likely to see their ramshackle homes damaged overnight without a witness in sight, if not completely demolished, with the blessing of the Gaziosmanpaşa police. Once the demolition crews and the police were gone, Nazmi the Laz would pay a condolence call on those penny-wise fools weeping over the rubble of their ruined homes: he would say how he was friends with the captain at the Gaziosmanpaşa police station, they played cards together in the coffeehouse every evening, and had he only known this was going to happen, he could have done something.

In fact, Nazmi the Laz had connections in the nationalist party then in power. From around 1978 onward, when those who’d built on government land using the materials bought from Nazmi started to fight over one another’s land, Nazmi the Laz set up his so-called office to keep a record of all these transactions, just like an official land registry. He also issued documents resembling proper title deeds to anyone who paid him for the right to claim a plot of empty land. To make these documents look as legitimate as he could, he followed the practice of the state’s official deeds by affixing a photograph of the owner (he’d recently installed a small coin-operated photo booth for his clients’ convenience) as well as including the name of the previous owner (he was always proud to name himself), and noting the precise location and dimensions of the plot, before finally sealing the whole thing with a red stamp he’d ordered from a stationery shop in Gaziosmanpaşa.

“When the government’s giving out land here one day, they’re going to look at my records and the title deeds I’ve been handing out,” Nazmi would boast. Sometimes he would address the unemployed men playing rummikub in his teahouse with a little speech on how happy he was to serve his countrymen — who’d left the poorest villages of Sivas and come all the way to Istanbul without a single thing to call their own — by turning them into landowners overnight, and to those who asked, “When are we going to get electricity here, Nazmi?” he would say that they were working on it, hinting that in the event the Ghaazi Quarter was declared a municipality, he would stand for local elections under the banner of the ruling party.

One day, a tall, pale man with a dreamy look in his eyes appeared on the empty hills behind the neighborhood, on land that Nazmi had yet to parcel out. His name was Ali. He never came down to Nazmi the Laz’s shop and teahouse; he kept to himself, avoiding neighborhood gossip, living alone on that isolated plot at the farthest edge of the city, where he settled down with his cheap bricks, pots and pans, gas lamps, and mattresses. Nazmi the Laz sent two of his truculent mustachioed henchmen to remind Ali that someone owned that land.

“This land belongs neither to Nazmi the Laz, nor to Hamdi the Turk, nor Kadir the Kurd, nor the state,” Ali told them. “Everything — the whole universe and this nation, too — belongs to Allah. We are nothing more than His mortal subjects passing through this temporary existence!”

One night, Nazmi the Laz’s men showed this reckless Ali just how right he was — with a bullet to his head. They buried him near the reservoir, keeping things neat and tidy so as not to give the city newspapers an excuse to write about their favorite topic: how the people who lived in the poor neighborhoods were polluting the beautiful green waters of the reservoir that served as Istanbul’s water supply. But the neighborhood dogs, who spent their winters warring with the wolves that came down looking for food, soon found the body. Instead of seizing Nazmi the Laz’s mustachioed men, the police arrested and tortured a family from Sivas who lived in the house closest to the lake. They ignored the many anonymous tips that Nazmi the Laz was behind it all and pressed on, applying their usual expert torture methods to the people from the lake, first whipping their feet and then setting up simple circuits to administer electric shocks.