Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut had bought them an Arçelik gas stove, secondhand. It could turn the house into a sauna, but it used up too much gas. (Sometimes, to economize, Rayiha would warm their food up on it, too.) She bought the gas from a Kurd whose shop was three streets down in Dolapdere. As the conflict in eastern Turkey grew more violent, Mevlut watched the streets of Tarlabaşı fill up, one family at a time, with Kurdish migrants. These newcomers were tough people, nothing like easygoing Ferhat. Their villages had been evacuated and burned to the ground during the war. They were poor and never bought any boza, so Mevlut rarely went to their neighborhoods. He stopped going altogether when drug dealers and homeless, glue-sniffing young men began to frequent the area.

After Ferhat drove off in a taxi with Samiha in early 1984, Mevlut wouldn’t see him again for many years. This was very strange, considering how close they’d been in their childhood and youth, and every now and then Mevlut would offer Rayiha a mumbled explanation: “They live too far away.” Only rarely did he allow himself to think that the real reason for the distance between them was in all those letters Mevlut had written with Ferhat’s wife, Samiha, in mind.

It was also true that Istanbul’s relentless sprawl was driving them farther apart. The bus journey to and from the other’s house would have taken half a day. Mevlut missed Ferhat, even as the focus of his resentment toward him kept shifting. He wondered why Ferhat never got in touch. Whatever the reason, it was clearly an admission of guilt. When he found out how happy the newlyweds were in the Ghaazi Quarter and that Ferhat was working as a waiter in a restaurant in Gaziosmanpaşa, Mevlut felt a rush of jealousy.

Some nights, after two hours of selling boza, he pushed himself to go on for just a little bit longer by dreaming there in the empty streets about the happiness awaiting him at home. Just thinking of how their home and their bed smelled, the sounds Fatma and Fevziye made under the covers, the way his body and Rayiha’s touched as they slept, how their skin still burned at the contact, brought him close to tears of joy. All he ever wanted when he got home was to put on his pajamas and jump straight into the big, cozy bed. As they watched TV, he would tell Rayiha how much he’d made that night, how the streets had been, the things he’d seen in the houses where he’d made deliveries, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep before he’d given her a full account of his day and surrendered himself to her bright, loving eyes.

“They said there was too much sugar in it,” he’d whisper, eyes on the TV as he relayed any comments on that day’s batch. “Well, I didn’t have a choice, yesterday’s leftovers were really sour,” Rayiha would respond, defending, as always, the mixture she’d prepared. Or perhaps Mevlut might tell her how he’d spent all day worrying about a strange question someone had asked him when he’d gone all the way up to their kitchen to serve them. One night, an old lady had pointed to his apron and said, “Did you buy this yourself?” What had she meant? Was it the color of the apron? Or had she meant to imply that it was something a woman would usually wear?

At night, Mevlut watched the whole world transform into a mysterious realm of shadows, with the city’s own darkness cloaking the alleyways, and faraway streets rising like rugged cliffs through the gloom. The cars that chased each other on TV were just as strange as those dark backstreets in the night; who knew where those black mountains on the left side of the TV screen were, why that dog was running, why it was on TV, and why that woman was crying, all by herself?

—

Rayiha.Sometimes Mevlut would get out of bed in the middle of the night, light a cigarette, and smoke it as he watched the street outside through a gap in the curtains. I could see him in the light of the lamppost outside our house, and I would wonder what he was thinking and wish he’d come back to bed. Sometimes he’d get so lost in his own thoughts, I would get up myself, have a glass of water, and make sure the girls were tucked in properly. Only then would he come back, looking ashamed of himself somehow. “It’s nothing,” he’d tell me. “I’m just thinking.”

Mevlut loved summer evenings because he got to spend time with us. But let me tell you something he’ll never tell you: we made even less money in the summer than in winter. Mevlut would keep the windows open all day, oblivious to the flies that came into the house, the noise (“It’s quieter outside,” he’d say), and all the dust from the buildings they kept knocking down for the new road up the hill, and he would watch TV all day with an eye on the girls laughing and playing in the back garden, on the street, or up in a tree, listening from upstairs in case they started fighting and he had to break it up. Some evenings he would lose his temper for no reason, and if he was angry enough, he would walk out, slamming the door behind him (the girls got used to it eventually, but it always scared them a little); he’d go to the coffeehouse to play cards or sit down for a cigarette on the three narrow steps between the entrance to our building and the pavement. Sometimes I would follow him out and sit next to him, and the girls might come, too. Their friends would soon pop out from every corner, and while they played their games on the street and in the garden, I would sit there in the light of the streetlamp sifting the rice Mevlut would later sell down in Kabataş.

It was on these steps that I got to know Reyhan, the woman who lived across the street and two doors down. She stuck her head out of her bay window one day and said, “I think your streetlamp’s brighter than ours!” before picking up her embroidery and coming down to sit next to me. “I’m from Eastern Anatolia, but I’m not a Kurd,” she would say, as secretive about her hometown as she was about her age. She was at least fifteen years older than me, and she would admire my hands as I sifted the rice. “Look at those hands, smooth as a baby’s bottom! Look how quickly they move, like the wings of a dove,” she’d say. “You should take up needlework, trust me, you’d make more money than me and that angel you’ve got for a husband. I earn more than mine does on his policeman’s salary, and he really doesn’t like it…”

When she was fifteen, Reyhan’s father decided — without consulting anyone — to give her away to a felt merchant, so she had to go and live in Malatya with nothing but a small bundle of her possessions, never to see her parents or the rest of her family again. She was one of seven children in a desperately poor family, but she didn’t think this justified their selling her off the way they did, and sometimes she still argued with them as if they were right there in front of her. “There are parents who won’t let men so much as look at their daughters, never mind marrying them off to someone they don’t want,” she’d say, shaking her head but never taking her eyes off her needlework. She was also upset that her father had sold her to her first husband without the obligation of a civil wedding. She’d eloped with her second husband, though, and this time she’d insisted on a civil ceremony. “I wish I’d said no beatings, too.” She’d laugh. “Never forget how lucky you are to have Mevlut.”

Reyhan would feign disbelief that men like Mevlut — men who never hit their wives — existed, and she would argue that it must have had something to do with me. She always asked me to repeat the story of how I’d found my “angel husband”—how we’d seen and liked each other at a wedding, how Mevlut had used go-betweens to send me letters when he was away for military service. The policeman would hit her whenever he drank rakı, so on those evenings when the table was laid for a drinking session, she’d sit and wait for him to finish his first glass. Then, as soon as he started reminiscing about some interrogation he’d been involved in — which was usually the first sign of an imminent beating — she would get up, take her embroidery, and come over to see me. If I happened to be upstairs, I’d be alerted to her presence downstairs by the sound of her husband Necati’s cajoling: “Please come home, my darling Reyhan, I won’t have any more, I promise.” Sometimes I took the girls with me and joined her on the steps. “Let’s sit together for a while, he’ll fall asleep soon enough,” Reyhan would say. When Mevlut was out selling boza on winter evenings, she’d come and watch TV with me and the girls, telling them stories that made them laugh and nibbling on sunflower seeds all evening. She’d smile at Mevlut when he came home late at night and tell him, “God bless your domestic bliss!”