Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Zeliha came to visit me one day just after Mrs. Nalan had gone out. “Have you gone crazy?” she said when she saw me working as hard as ever; she sat down to watch TV while I worked. From then on, Zeliha started coming over whenever the lady she worked for wasn’t home (sometimes Zeliha’s lady and Mrs. Nalan would leave together). While I dusted, she would talk about what was happening on TV and rummage through the fridge for a snack, telling me that the spinach wasn’t bad, but the yogurt had gone sour (it was the kind that you bought from the grocery store in a glass bowl). When she started looking through Mrs. Nalan’s drawers, commenting on her underwear, her bras, her handkerchiefs, as well as other things we weren’t even sure what to call, I couldn’t resist joining in for a laugh. Among the silk headscarves and foulards right at the back of one drawer, there was a triangular amulet charmed to bring wealth and good fortune. Tucked away in another corner, among old identity cards, tax returns, and photographs, we found a carved wooden box that smelled wonderful, though we had no idea what it was for. Hidden among the medicine bottles and cough syrups in the drawer on Mrs. Nalan’s husband’s side of the bed, Zeliha found a strange bottle with a liquid the color of tobacco. The bottle was pink, with a picture of an Arab lady with big lips on the label, and our favorite thing about it was the smell (perhaps it was some sort of medicine, or perhaps Zeliha was right that it was poison), but we were too scared to ever pour any of its contents out. A month later, while exploring the secrets of the house on my own (I liked finding pictures of Mrs. Nalan’s dead son and his old homework assignments), I noticed that the bottle had disappeared from its usual place.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Nalan said she needed to talk to me. She told me that Zeliha had been fired in deference to her husband’s wishes (though I wasn’t entirely sure whose husband she was referring to), and regrettably, although she was absolutely sure that I was innocent, this meant I couldn’t work there anymore either. I hadn’t fully grasped what was going on yet, but when I saw that she was crying, I started crying, too.

“Don’t cry, my dear, we’ve arranged something wonderful for you!” she said with the upbeat tone of a fortune-telling Gypsy saying, Your future looks very bright! A wealthy, distinguished family in Şişli was looking for a hardworking, honest, and trustworthy maid like me. Mrs. Nalan was going to send me there, and I was to go straightaway without making a fuss.

I didn’t mind, but Ferhat wasn’t happy with this new job because the house was so far away. I had to wake up even earlier now to catch the first minibus to Gaziosmanpaşa while it was still dark outside. In Gaziosmanpaşa, I had to wait another half hour for the bus to Taksim. This leg of the trip took well over an hour, and the bus was usually so full that everyone waiting to board would elbow one another out of the way to get on first and grab an empty seat. Looking out of the window of the bus, I’d watch the people going to work, the street vendors pushing their carts to their chosen neighborhoods, the boats on the Golden Horn, and — my favorites — all the children going to school. As we drove past I would try to make out the big newspaper headlines in shopwindows, the posters on the walls, and the enormous billboards. I would absentmindedly read the rhyming couplets of wisdom people had stuck on the back of their cars and their trucks, and I would start to feel as if the city were talking to me. It was nice to think that Ferhat had spent his childhood in Karaköy, right in the middle of the city, and when I got home I would ask him to tell me about those days. But he got back late in the evenings, and we saw less and less of each other.

In Taksim, where I had to change buses again, I would buy a sesame roll from one of the men in front of the post office and either eat it on the bus as I looked out the window or put it in my plastic handbag and have it later at the house where I worked, with a cup of tea. Sometimes the lady I worked for would tell me, “Have some breakfast if you haven’t eaten already.” So I would help myself to cheese and olives from the fridge. But sometimes she wouldn’t say anything at all. Around noon, I would start making grilled meatballs for her lunch, and she would tell me, “Throw in three more for you, Samiha.” She would take five meatballs on her plate but only eat four; I’d eat her leftover meatball in the kitchen, and so we’d end up having four each.

But Madam (that’s what I used to call her — I never used her name) would not sit at the table with me, and I wasn’t allowed to eat when she did. She wanted me near enough to hear her when she said, “Where’s the salt?” or “Clear this away now,” so I would stand in the doorway to the dining room watching her eat, but she wouldn’t talk to me. She kept asking me the same question and always forgot the answer: “Where are you from?” When I told her Beyşehir, she would say, “Where’s that? I’ve never been,” so eventually I started saying I was from Konya. “Ah, yes, Konya! I’m going to go one day and visit Rumi’s grave,” she’d reply. When I went to work in two other homes, one in Şişli and the other in Nişantaşı, I said I was from Konya again, and though the people there also immediately mentioned Rumi, they didn’t want me performing any daily prayer rituals. Anyway, Zeliha had already taught me to say no if ever anyone asked, “Do you pray?”

I’d started going to these other houses on Madam’s recommendation, and the families there didn’t like me using the same bathroom as they did. These were old houses with small servants’ bathrooms that I would sometimes have to share with a cat or a dog and where I’d also leave my handbag and my coat. Madam had a cat who stole food from the kitchen and never left her lap, and sometimes, when the cat and I were home alone, I’d give it a swipe and confess to Ferhat when I got home in the evening.

There was a period when Madam fell ill, and I had to spend a few nights in Şişli to look after her, because I knew that she would find someone else if I didn’t. I was given a small, clean room that shared a wall with the next building; there was no window, but the bedsheets smelled lovely, and I liked it there. I got used to it eventually. The road to and from Şişli could take four to five hours a day, so on some evenings I would stay over at Madam’s, serve her breakfast in the morning, and then go to work in a different house. But I was always dying to get back to Ferhat and the Ghaazi Quarter, and a single day away was enough to make me miss our home and all our things. Every now and then I liked to get off work early in the afternoon and wander around the city for a while before getting on the bus or before changing at Taksim, but I also worried that someone from Duttepe might see me on the street and tell Süleyman.

When the ladies I worked for went out during the day, they’d tell me, “Samiha, when you’re done, don’t waste your time on prayers and TV, go straight home.” I worked so hard sometimes that I could have wiped the whole city clean, but then my mind would wander and I’d slow down. Right at the back of the bottom drawer in the wardrobe with all of Sir’s shirts and vests, I found a foreign magazine with pictures of men and women in poses so dirty that even just having seen them I felt dirty, too. Inside Madam’s medicine cabinet, on the left-hand side, there was a strange box that smelled of almonds, and under the comb inside the box, there was a foreign banknote. I liked leafing through family albums, discovering old photographs of weddings, school days, and summer holidays tucked away in drawers, and seeing what the people I worked for used to be like when they were young.