Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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There were moments when Mevlut could sense that these were the happiest years of his life, but he usually kept this knowledge hidden away at the back of his mind. If he allowed himself to think about how happy he was, he might lose it all. In this life, there were plenty of things to get angry and complain about anyway, each enough to overshadow any momentary happiness: he couldn’t abide the way Reyhan was always in their house until late, sticking her nose in their business. He couldn’t stand it when Fatma and Fevziye started arguing while they watched TV, screaming and shouting at each other and then bursting into tears. He’d get furious when people told him to make sure to come the next day with ten glasses of boza for their guests only to pretend they weren’t home the following night, refusing to let Mevlut inside the building and leaving him to ring their doorbell out in the cold. He’d get livid at the sight of a mother from Kütahya sobbing on TV over the death of her son, killed in Hakkâri when Kurdish militants ambushed his military convoy. He couldn’t bear the crybabies who stopped buying cooked rice or boza from street vendors because Chernobyl had exploded and the wind had supposedly brought cancer clouds right over the city. He couldn’t stand it when he took such care to reattach the arm on his daughters’ plastic doll, using copper electric wires he’d carefully stripped, only for the girls to rip it back out again immediately. When the wind buffeted the TV aerial, he could tolerate the white spots that appeared on the screen like snowflakes, but he couldn’t take it when the whole screen got covered in shadows and the image turned blurry. He’d get enraged when the power was cut all over the neighborhood right in the middle of a program on folk songs. When the plot to assassinate President Özal was on the news, and the footage (which Mevlut had seen at least twenty times) of the would-be killer’s body writhing on the floor under a barrage of police bullets was interrupted by an advertisement for Hayat yogurt, Mevlut would lose his temper and tell Rayiha, “These bastards and their chemical yogurt have ruined street vendors.”

But when Rayiha said, “Take the girls out tomorrow morning so I can give the house a good cleaning,” Mevlut would forget about everything that upset him. Walking in the streets with Fevziye in his arms and Fatma’s tiny hand inside his own calloused palm made him feel like the happiest man in the world. It filled him with joy to come home after a day spent selling rice and doze off to the sound of his girls talking, to wake up and play games with them (guessing whose hand was on his back or playing tag), or to be approached on the street by a new customer—“I’ll have a glass, boza seller”—knowing he had all these little pleasures to look forward to.

During these years of unquestioning gratitude for all of life’s blessings, Mevlut was only dimly aware of the gentle passage of time, the death of some pine trees, the way some old timber houses seemed to disappear overnight, the construction of six- or seven-story buildings on those empty plots where kids used to play football and street vendors and the unemployed used to take afternoon naps, and the growing size of the billboards and posters on the streets, just as he barely registered the passing of seasons and the way leaves dried up and fell off trees. It was just the way the end of the boza season or the football championships always caught him by surprise and how he only realized on the last Sunday evening of the 1987 season that Antalyaspor would be relegated. Or the way he noticed the number of overhead pedestrian crossings that had cropped up in the city after the military coup of 1980, and the metal barriers that had been erected along pavements in order to direct people to these crossings, only when he tried and failed one day to cross Halaskargazi Road at street level. Mevlut had heard people in the coffeehouse and on TV talking about the mayor’s plans for a big new road from Taksim to Tepebaşı, which would connect Taksim and Şişhane via a route that was to run through Tarlabaşı, five streets up from theirs, but he’d never thought it might be true. Most of the news that Rayiha brought him from the neighborhood’s old-timers and gossiping women Mevlut already knew from what he heard on the streets and in the coffeehouse, and through his exchanges with the elderly Greek ladies who lived in moldy, gloomy, ancient apartments around the Çiçek Arcade, the fish market, and the British consulate.

Though no one likes to think or talk about it anymore, Tarlabaşı used to be a neighborhood populated by Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Assyrians. There used to be a stream — now covered in concrete and forgotten — that flowed from Taksim down to the Golden Horn, taking on a different name in each of the neighborhoods it crossed (Dolap Creek, Bilecik Creek, Bishop’s Crossing, Kasımpaşa Creek), and on one shoulder of the valley through which it flowed were the neighborhoods of Kurtuluş and Feriköy, where sixty years ago, in the early 1920s, you could find only Greeks and Armenians. The first blow against the non-Muslim population of Beyoğlu after the birth of the Turkish republic was the 1942 property tax, through which the government, having become increasingly open to German influence during World War II, imposed levies on Tarlabaşı’s Christian community that most of them would never be able to pay, and sent the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and Jewish men who failed to do so to labor camps in Aşkale. Mevlut had heard countless stories of pharmacists, furniture makers, and Greek families who’d lived here for generations being sent to labor camps for their failure to pay the taxes and having to turn their shops over to their Turkish apprentices or hide out at home for months on end just to escape the authorities searching for people on the street. Most of the Greek population went over to Greece after the anti-Christian uprisings of the sixth and seventh of September 1955, during the war over Cyprus, when mobs armed with sticks and carrying flags looted and vandalized churches and shops, chased priests away, and raped women. Those who didn’t leave the country then had to do so overnight in 1964, by government decree.

These stories were usually traded in whispered tones by the neighborhood’s long-standing residents after a few drinks at the bar or by those who felt like complaining about the new settlers who’d come to live in the empty homes left behind by the departing Greeks. Mevlut heard people say, “The Greeks were better than these Kurds,” and Africans and impoverished migrants were also coming to Tarlabaşı now because the government was doing nothing to stop them; what on earth was next?

Yet when any of the Greek families who’d fled or been banished came back to Istanbul and Tarlabaşı to check on the old houses of which they were still the registered owners, they weren’t exactly well received. People were reluctant to tell them the truth—“Your homes have been settled by Anatolian paupers from Bitlis and Adana!”—so even the neighborhood’s most good-natured residents often shied away from meeting their old acquaintances. There were those who resented the visitors and treated them with open hostility, convinced that the Greek landlords had only come back to claim their rent; and also those who would meet with their old friends in the coffeehouse and embrace them with tears in their eyes as they remembered the good old days. But these emotional moments never lasted long. Mevlut had watched as some of the Greeks come to see their old homes were heckled and stoned by bands of children recruited by one of the many criminal gangs who operated in the area, working with the government and the police to take over the Greeks’ empty homes and rent them out to the poor migrants coming in from Eastern Anatolia. On witnessing this kind of scene, Mevlut’s first instinct, like everyone else’s, would be to intervene: “Stop that, kids, it’s not fair.” But he’d start to have second thoughts immediately; the kids would never listen to him anyway, and besides, his own landlord was among the people putting them up to it, so in the end he’d just walk away without saying anything, half ashamed and half furious, thinking, Well, the Greeks seized Cyprus, anyway, or pondering some other injustice he wasn’t entirely sure about.