Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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Vediha.As a family, we decided that the best way to help Süleyman get over Samiha was to get him married. One night, he was at home, and he was drunk. “Süleyman,” I said, “you and Samiha went out for a while, you really got to know each other, and in the end it didn’t work out. Maybe it would make more sense for you to marry a girl you don’t know at all, someone you’ve only ever met once…Love can come after marriage.” “I guess you’re right,” he said, cheering up. “So have you got a new girl for me, then?” But then he began to get picky. “I can’t marry some village yogurt seller’s daughter.” “Your brother Korkut and your cousin Mevlut both married a yogurt seller’s daughter. What’s so terrible about us?” “It’s not like that, I don’t see you three that way.” “How do you see us?” “Don’t get me wrong…” “I’m not, Süleyman. But why do you think we’d marry you off to a village girl?” I asked him in my sternest voice. The truth is, Süleyman needs a strong woman to reprimand him every now and then; he even likes it.

“And I don’t want one of those eighteen-year-old high-school graduates either. They find something wrong in everything I say, and all they ever do is argue…Besides, these are the same girls who’ll insist we have to go out together before we get married, go to the movies maybe, as if we’d met at university instead of being introduced by matchmakers, and even then they’re always worried about getting caught by their parents, always trying to tell me what to do…It’s an uphill battle.”

I told Süleyman, Don’t worry, Istanbul is teeming with girls who want a good-looking, successful, intelligent man like him.

“But where are they?” he asked me earnestly.

“They’re at home with their mothers, Süleyman; they don’t go out much. You just listen to my advice, and I promise you I’ll show you all the sweetest and the prettiest ones, and then when you’ve found the most beautiful of them all, the one your heart desires, we’ll go and ask for her hand in marriage.”

“Thank you, Vediha, but to be honest, I’ve never really gone for the straitlaced types, who stay at home with their mothers and always do as they’re told.”

“But if you’re looking for a different kind of girl, then how come you never tried to win Samiha over with a sweet word or two?”

“I just couldn’t get the hang of it!” he said. “She would make fun of me every time I tried.”

“Süleyman, I’ll comb every inch of Istanbul if I have to, but I’ll find you a girl. But if you like her, you’ve got to treat her right, understood?”

“All right, but what if she gets spoiled?”

—

Süleyman.I’d take Vediha in the van, and we would go out to meet eligible girls. People with experience in this sort of thing said we should take my mother along, too, as this would give our delegation an air of formality, but I didn’t want to do that. My mother’s clothes and her manner are still too close to village ways. Vediha would wear blue jeans under her usual dress, a long, dark blue overcoat I never saw her wear anywhere else, and a headscarf that matched that blue exactly; you might have mistaken her for a lady doctor or judge who happened to be wearing a headscarf. Vediha loved being out of the house so much that as soon as I stepped on the gas and we went flying down the streets of Istanbul, she would practically forget our mission, taking in every inch of the city and talking nonstop, until I had to laugh.

“This bus route is run by a private company, not by the municipality, and that’s why it keeps the doors open while it’s moving,” I’d tell her as I tried to pass the bus crawling ahead of us letting passengers jump on and off.

“Careful we don’t run them over, these people are crazy,” she’d say, laughing. As we got closer to our destination, I’d grow silent. “Don’t worry, Süleyman,” she’d say. “She’s a nice girl, I like her. But if you don’t, then we’ll just get up and leave. You can drive your sister around for a bit on your way back.”

Vediha was always making new friends, thanks to her warmth and kindness, and through these connections, she would identify the eligible girls, and then the two of us would go to see them at home. Most had either come to Istanbul after finishing primary school in the village (like me), or else they’d gone to a school in a poor city neighborhood that was even worse than the village. Some of them were determined to finish high school; others could barely read and write. Most were too young, but once they reached high-school age, they really didn’t want to be still living with their parents in some tiny, run-down, stove-heated house that was always freezing. It was always nice to hear Vediha telling me that all these girls were sick of their parents and looking for a chance to get away from home, but a part of me knew that this wasn’t really true of every girl we met.

—

Vediha.Oh, Süleyman…the truth — though I never told him this— is that good girls don’t know how to think for themselves, and girls who think for themselves aren’t any good. There were other things I never told him, too. If you’re looking for a girl like Samiha, a girl with character, you’re not going to find her at home with her mother, waiting for a man to marry her. You expect a girl who has her own mind and her own personality to bow down to your every wish? That’s not going to happen. You want her to be pure and innocent, but also eager to fulfill all your wild desires (let’s not forget that I married his brother)? That’s never going to happen either. What you don’t realize, poor Süleyman, is that you need a girl who doesn’t wear a headscarf — though I assume you wouldn’t want a girl like that. But this was a sensitive subject, and I never brought it up. But I kept trying, because the surest way to get permission to leave the house was to tell Korkut I was going out to find Süleyman a wife. Soon enough, Süleyman came to accept the gap between his expectations and reality.

When families want to get their sons and daughters married off, the first place they look is back in the village, among their own rela tives, or down the street and around the neighborhood. Only a girl who can’t find a husband nearby — usually because everyone knows there’s something wrong with her — will ever say she wants to marry a stranger from some other part of town. Some try to dress this up as the beauty of a free spirit. But whenever I heard about one of these freedom-loving girls, I would always try to figure out what she was hiding. Naturally, these girls and their families had their own cause for suspicion (after all, hadn’t we also come a long way from home to find a match?), and they would give us a very close look, trying to work out what we had to hide. Anyway, I warned Süleyman, if a girl has got nothing obviously wrong with her but still can’t find a husband, it means she’s probably setting her sights too high.

—

Süleyman.There was this high-school girl who lived on the second floor of a new building in the backstreets of Aksaray. Not only was she wearing her school uniform (with her headscarf) when she greeted us, but she also spent the entire time poring over a notebook and math textbook at the dining table. Meanwhile, another girl, a distant relation, took on the role of the polite young woman who entertains the candidate’s guests, even though she has her own homework to do.

In a house somewhere behind Bakırköy, we went to see Behice, who during our brief visit got up from her chair five times to go to the window and peek out through the lace curtains at the kids playing football in the street. “Behice likes to look out the window,” said her mother, as if to make excuses for this behavior but also imply, as so many mothers did, that this particular quirk was further proof of what an excellent wife her daughter was bound to be.