Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Sometimes the manager of some law firm or architects’ firm would take his clerks out for lunch, women included, or a mother in a headscarf would treat her good-for-nothing sons to some meatballs and ayran, and we would sit them at the tables right by the door, reserved for families. Our manager, who had three portraits of Atatürk in civilian clothes up on the wall — one smiling and two looking stern — had a particular fixation with drawing more female customers to the Bounty Restaurant. His idea of success was for a woman to come in with a group of men and be able to have a pleasant evening — especially during the dinner shift, when rakı was served — without being subjected to innuendo and arguments all night, and to enjoy herself enough to come again, though in all the Bounty Restaurant’s checkered history, this had sadly never happened. The day after any night a woman had visited the restaurant, our furious and despairing boss would do his impression of the male customers from the night before, wide eyed and with their mouths hanging open, and tell us waiters that, next time a woman came in to eat, we shouldn’t panic and crowd around her but act instead as if it were perfectly normal for her to be there and shield her from the loud, foulmouthed men at the other tables and their sleazy looks. This last request was the hardest to fulfill.

Late at night, when it seemed the last drunk customers were never going to leave, the manager would tell me, “You can go now, you’ve got a long way home.” I’d spend the journey home thinking of Samiha, feeling guilty, and making up my mind that it wasn’t right for her to be working as a maid. I hated waking up in the mornings and realizing she’d already left for work, and I would curse my poverty and my ever having allowed her to work in the first place. In the afternoons, the dishwasher and the two busboys, who all shared an apartment, would laugh as they shelled beans and peeled potatoes while I sat at the table in the corner, trying to follow Learn Accounting on the public channel. Even when I could follow the lesson, the homework sheets that came in the post would stump me, and I would get up and walk out of the Bounty to wander around the streets of Taşlıtarla like a sleepwalker, feeling helpless and angry, and dream about hijacking a taxi at gunpoint like in the movies, going to find Samiha at the house where she worked in Şişli, and taking her away to our new home in some distant neighborhood. In my dreams, the house I was going to build on the land framed by the phosphorescent stones, using the money I’d saved up, already had twelve rooms and four doors. But at five o’clock in the evening, when every employee of the Bounty Restaurant, from the dishwasher to the headwaiter, gathered round a big pot in the middle of the long table at the back to eat their fill of meat and potato soup with fresh bread before donning their uniforms and beginning their shifts, I’d get bitter thinking how I was wasting away out here when I should have been running my own business in the city center.

On those evenings when Samiha was expected to come home, my kindly manager, seeing me itching to get out of the Bounty as early as possible, would say, “Take off that apron and go home, Mr. Bridegroom.” Samiha had been in the restaurant a few times, so the other waiters, the busboys, and the dishwashers had all seen how beautiful she was; they would laugh and jealously call me Mr. Bridegroom, and as I waited and waited for the bus to the Ghaazi Quarter (there was a new direct bus service to our neighborhood, but it wasn’t very regular), I would lament my failure to make the most of my good fortune, until, in my frustration, I began to fear that I was doing something wrong.

When it arrived, the bus to the Ghaazi Quarter was so slow and wasted so much time at each stop that I could barely keep my nervous legs still. At a stop near the end of the route, there would be a voice calling out from the darkness, trying desperately to catch the last bus to the end of the city—“Driver, driver, wait”—so the driver would light a cigarette, and the bus would wait, and in my impatience, I’d have to stand the rest of the way. When I finally got off at the last stop, I’d sprint up the hill to our house, forgetting how tired I was. The silence of the dark night, the pale light from the poor neighborhoods in the distance, and the stinking smoke of lignite fuel that rose from some of the chimneys around me soon became signs that I associated with Samiha waiting for me at home. It was Wednesday, so she had to be home. Maybe she’d already collapsed from exhaustion and gone to sleep, as she often did. She looked so pretty when she was sleepy. Or maybe she’d made me some chamomile tea, and she was watching TV while she waited for me. I’d think about her intelligence and her friendship and start running, believing that if I ran, then Samiha would definitely be home.

If she wasn’t home, I would quickly have some rakı to calm myself and ease the suffering, and then I would start blaming myself for everything. The next day, I’d get out of work even earlier, just as impatient as ever to be on my way home.

“I’m sorry,” Samiha would say when we saw each other. “Madam had guests last night…She really wanted me to stay over, and she gave me this!”

I’d take the money from her and put it away. “You’re not going to work anymore, you’re never leaving this house again,” I’d declare. “We’ll stay right here, together, until the day the world ends.”

The first few times this happened, Samiha said, “How will we eat?” Soon, though, she was laughing about it, telling me, “All right, I won’t go to work anymore.” But of course she still went to work every morning.

We Were Just Passing By

Süleyman.Yesterday evening I went to see Uncle Asım in Ümraniye. He is a friend of my father’s and a former yogurt seller. He’s a wise man, smart enough to have given up yogurt years ago and set up his own grocery store. Now he’s retired. Last night he showed me the poplars he planted in his garden and the enormous walnut tree that had been a tiny sapling when he’d first claimed this plot of land twenty years ago. The noise and the light that filtered into the garden from the tube factory next door made everything look strange and wonderful. We were both completely drunk on the rakı we’d been sipping all night. His wife was inside, already asleep.

“They’re offering me really good money for this land, but I know it’ll go higher, I’m already regretting the piece I did sell, it went too cheap,” said Uncle Asım. Fifteen years ago, he had a shop in Tophane and a rented apartment on Kazancı Hill. Three times last night, he told me how wise he had been to come here all the way from the city and claim some vacant land for himself on the off chance they’d eventually give him a title deed. Another thing he said three times was that his daughters are all married now, “thank God,” and their husbands are all good men — though not quite as good as I am. What he was really trying to say was “Son, why did you come knocking on my door tonight, all the way from across the Bosphorus in Duttepe, when I don’t even have a daughter left for you to marry?”

Like everything else, this reminded me of Samiha. It’s been two years since she ran away. I swear I’m going to find the scum who took her, that bastard Ferhat, and make him pay for this insult and the humiliation. Even now, there are times when I dream that Samiha’s coming back to me, but deep down I know it will never happen, so I stop indulging in the fantasy. If I’m free of these troubles now, I owe it to Melahat and Vediha. Vediha has really applied herself to finding me a wife.