Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

When a Kurd from Bingöl died of a heart attack under questioning, the whole neighborhood rose up in protest and raided Nazmi the Laz’s teahouse. Nazmi was away, enjoying a wedding at his village near Rize. Taken by surprise, his armed men panicked and ran away, doing no more than firing a few futile shots in the air. Leftist, Marxist, and Maoist youths from various neighborhoods and universities around the city heard what was happening in the Ghaazi Quarter and came to lead this “spontaneous uprising of the people.”

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Ferhat.Within two days, Nazmi the Laz’s offices were taken over and university students seized the land registry, and soon the news spread all over Turkey, especially among the Kurds and the Alevis, that anyone who came to the Ghaazi Quarter and announced that they were “poor and left wing” (or “godless,” according to the nationalist papers) would be given some land. That’s how, six years ago, I got my plot, which is still marked out with phosphorescent rocks. I didn’t settle there at the time, because, like everyone else, I believed that Nazmi the Laz would surely return one day to get his revenge and get his land back with the help of the state. Besides, Beyoğlu, where Mevlut and I were working as waiters, was so far from the Ghaazi Quarter that it took half the day just getting there and back by bus.

We are still living in fear of Süleyman’s rage. Nobody wanted to get involved to help us make peace with the Aktaş family (I resented Mevlut, Rayiha, and Vediha for this). So Samiha and I ended up having a quiet, simple wedding in the Ghaazi Quarter. No one pinned any gold or hundred-dollar bills on us the way they did on Mevlut and Rayiha. I was sad not to have been able to invite Mevlut, to have had to get married without my best friend there, but at the same time it made me furious to see how close he was with the Aktaş bunch and how he was willing to mingle with fascists just because he imagined he could get something out of it.

My God, Where Is All This Filth Coming From?

Samiha.Ferhat is so worried about what people will say that he’s skipping the best parts of our story, supposedly because they’re “private.” We did have a very small wedding, but it was wonderful. We borrowed a white dress for me from the Pure Princess Bridal Shop on the second floor of the blue building in Gaziosmanpaşa. I didn’t put a foot wrong all evening and refused to let anything bring me down — not the ugly, envious biddies around me saying “Poor dear, what a waste for such a pretty girl!” or those who kept their mouths shut but looked at me as if to say, You’re so beautiful, why marry some penniless waiter? I could never be anyone’s slave, harem girl, or prisoner…Look at me and you’ll know what freedom looks like. That night, Ferhat got so drunk on all the rakı he’d been sneaking under the table that I ended up having to get him home. But I held my head up and proudly faced the crowd of jealous women and admiring men (including the unemployed ones who’d only come for the free lemonade and tea biscuits).

Two months later, Haydar and his wife, Zeliha, had talked me into working as a housemaid in Gaziosmanpaşa. Haydar would sometimes have a drink with Ferhat, and he and his wife had come to our wedding. So when they suggested that I start working, they meant well. Ferhat initially resisted the idea, not wanting to be the kind of man who sends the girl he’s just eloped with off to work as a maid only two months after marrying her. But one rainy morning, we all took the minibus to Gaziosmanpaşa together. Ferhat came along to meet the doorman at the Civan Apartment, the building where Zeliha and many of her relatives worked. We went down to the basement, where we sat — three women and three men — drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in the doorman’s quarters, which were smaller than the room we lived in, lacking even a window. Afterward, Zeliha took me to apartment number 5, where I was supposed to start work. As we walked up the stairs, I felt shy to be entering a stranger’s home and scared of being away from Ferhat. We’d been inseparable ever since we’d run off. At first, Ferhat would come with me every morning and spend afternoons smoking downstairs in the doorman’s place until I was done, and at four o’clock, when I emerged from apartment number 5 and found him downstairs in that stuffy basement, he would walk me right up to the minibus or else leave me with Zeliha to make sure I got on, before rushing off to make his shift at the Bounty Restaurant. But within three weeks, I had already started making my own way to work in the mornings, and by the time winter came around, I was coming back home alone in the evenings, too.

—

Ferhat.I’m just going to interrupt for one minute because I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression: I’m a hardworking man of honor who knows his responsibilities, and if it were up to me, I would never allow my wife to work. But Samiha kept saying how bored she was at home and how much she wanted to work. She cried a lot, too, though she won’t tell you that. Besides, Haydar and Zeliha are like family now, and the people at the Civan Apartment are like brothers and sisters to them. When Samiha told me, “I can get there by myself, you stay at home and keep up with your college courses on TV!” I decided to let her. But then I felt even worse every time I couldn’t understand the accounting lessons or couldn’t post my homework assignments to Ankara on time. There’s this mathematics professor on right now who’s got so many white hairs sprouting out of his enormous nose and ears that you can make them out on TV. I can barely follow what he’s doing with all those numbers he’s writing on the blackboard. The only reason I put up with this torture is because Samiha believes — more than I do — that everything will be different once I manage to earn a degree and find a job as a government clerk.

—

Samiha.My first “employer,” the lady in apartment number 5, was a troubled, short-tempered type. “You look nothing alike,” she said, eyeing us suspiciously. We’d agreed that I would gain her trust by saying I was a relative of Zeliha’s on her father’s side. Mrs. Nalan did believe that I meant well, but at first she couldn’t quite trust me to get rid of all the dust properly. Until four years ago, she’d done the cleaning herself, as she didn’t really have that much money to spare. But then her firstborn son died of cancer while still in middle school, and Mrs. Nalan had been waging a ruthless war on dust and germs ever since.

“Did you wipe under the fridge and inside the white lamp?” she would ask, even when she had just seen me doing exactly that. She worried that the dust would infect her second son with cancer, too, and as it came time for him to get home from school, I would become increasingly agitated, dusting with more determination and running back and forth to the window to shake out the duster, furious as a pilgrim stoning the devil. “Well done, Samiha, well done!” Mrs. Nalan would say to spur me on. She would stand there talking on the phone while pointing out some speck I’d missed. “My God, where is all this filth coming from!” she’d complain. She’d wag her finger at me, and I’d feel as guilty as if I’d brought it all with me from the poor neighborhood I lived in, but even so, I loved her.

Within two months, Mrs. Nalan trusted me to come in three times a week. By now she had started leaving me home alone, armed with soaps, buckets, and rags, while she went out to do her shopping or to play rummy with the same friends she was always on the phone with. Sometimes she’d sneak back in without warning, pretending to have forgotten something, and when she saw me still hard at work cleaning, she’d be pleased and say, “Well done, God bless you!” Sometimes, she would pick up the photo of her dead son that stood on top of the TV next to the china dog and cry as she wiped the silver frame over and over again, so I would set down my dusting cloth and try to console her.