Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

The program of demolitions was announced as an effort to clean up and modernize the city, an approach that appealed to everyone. Criminals, Kurds, Gypsies, and thieves currently squatting in the neighborhood’s vacant buildings would get kicked out; drug dens, smugglers’ warehouses, brothels, bachelor dormitories, and ruined buildings that served as hubs of illegal activities would be demolished, and in their place would be a new six-lane highway taking you from Tepebaşı to Taksim in five minutes.

There was some protest from the Greek landlords, whose lawyers took the government to court over the property seizures, and from the architects’ union and a handful of university students battling to save these historic buildings, but their voices went largely unheard. The mayor had the press on his side, and in one particular instance, when the court warrant for the demolition of one of these old buildings took too long to arrive, he sat at the steering wheel of a bulldozer draped with a Turkish flag and brought down the house himself, cheered on by bystanders. The dust generated by these demolitions would find its way even into Mevlut’s house five streets down, seeping in through the cracks in the closed windows. The bulldozers were always surrounded by curious crowds of the unemployed, shop clerks, passersby, and children, the street vendors plying them with ayran, sesame rolls, and corn on the cob.

Mevlut was keen to keep his rice cart away from the dust. Throughout these demolition years, he never took his rice anywhere too noisy or crowded. What really struck him was the demolition of the big sixty- and seventy-year-old blocks at the Taksim end of the coming six-lane boulevard. When he’d first come to Istanbul, a light-skinned, fair-haired, kindhearted woman on an enormous billboard six or seven stories high had offered him Tamek tomato ketchup and Lux soap from one of these buildings facing Taksim Square. Mevlut had always liked the way she smiled at him — with silent yet insistent affection — and he made it a point to look up at her every time he came to Taksim Square.

He was very sorry to learn that the famous sandwich shop Crystal Café, which used to be housed in the same building as the woman with the fair hair, had been demolished along with the building itself. No other place in Istanbul had ever sold as much ayran. Mevlut had tried its signature dish twice (once on the house) — a spicy hamburger dipped in tomato sauce — and he’d also had some of their ayran to go with it. The Crystal got the yogurt for their ayran from the enormous Concrete Brothers of Cennetpınar’s neighboring village of İmrenler. Concrete Abdullah and Concrete Nurullah didn’t furnish yogurt only to the Crystal Café; they also did regular business with a whole host of restaurants and cafés in Taksim, Osmanbey, and Beyoğlu, all of them buying in great quantity, and up until the mid-1970s, when the big yogurt companies started to distribute their product in glass bowls and wooden barrels, the brothers made a fortune, taking over territory in Kültepe, Duttepe, and the Asian side of the city, until they were swept away in the space of two years, along with all the other yogurt vendors. Mevlut realized how much he’d envied the rich and capable Concrete Brothers — so much cleverer than he was, they didn’t even need to sell boza in the evenings to make ends meet — when he realized he was interpreting the demolition of the Crystal Café as some sort of punishment of them.

Mevlut had been in Istanbul for twenty years. It was sad to see the old face of the city as he had come to know it disappear before his eyes, erased by new roads, demolitions, buildings, billboards, shops, tunnels, and flyovers, but it was also gratifying to feel that someone out there was working to improve the city for his benefit. He didn’t see it as a place that had existed before his arrival and to which he’d come as an outsider. Instead, he liked to imagine that Istanbul was being built while he lived in it and to dream of how much cleaner, more beautiful, and more modern it would be in the future. He was fond of the people who lived in its historic buildings with fifty-year-old elevators, central heating, and high ceilings, built while he was still back in the village or before he’d even been born, and he never forgot that these were the people who had always treated him more kindly than anyone else. But these buildings inevitably reminded him that he was still a stranger here. Their doormen were condescending even if they didn’t mean to be, which always left him scared of making a mistake. But he liked old things: the feeling of walking into one of those cemeteries he discovered while selling boza in distant neighborhoods, the sight of a mosque wall covered in moss, and the unintelligible Ottoman writing on a broken fountain with its brass taps long dried up.

Sometimes he thought of how he broke his back every day even now just to scrape by with a rice business that wasn’t really profitable, while all around him everyone who’d come from somewhere else was getting rich, buying property, and building his own home on his own land, but in those moments he told himself that it would be ungrateful to want more than the happiness God had already given him. And once in a great while, he noticed the storks flying overhead and realized that the seasons were passing, another winter was over, and he was slowly getting older.

Isn’t That What Happened?

Rayiha.I used to take Fatma and Fevziye to Duttepe (just one ticket between them) so they could spend time with their aunt Vediha and have a place where they could run around and pick mulberries, but I can’t do that anymore. The last time I went, two months ago, I got cornered by Süleyman, who started asking me about Mevlut. I told him he was fine. But then, in that typical wisecracking way of his, he brought up Ferhat and Samiha.

“We haven’t seen them since they ran away, Süleyman, really,” I said, telling him the same old lie.

“You know, I think I believe you,” said Süleyman. “I doubt Mevlut would want anything to do with Ferhat and Samiha anymore. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Surely you must know, Rayiha. All those letters Mevlut wrote when he was in the military were meant for Samiha.”

“What?”

“I read some of them before I passed them on to Vediha to give to you. Those eyes Mevlut wrote about were not your eyes, Rayiha.”

He said it all with a smirk, as if this were all in good fun. So I played along, smiling back. Thank God I then had the presence of mind to say, “If Mevlut meant the letters for Samiha, why did you bring them to me?”

—

Süleyman.I had no intention of upsetting poor Rayiha. But in the end, isn’t the truth what matters most? She didn’t say another word to me, she just said good-bye to Vediha, took her girls, and left. Occasionally, when it was time for them to go, I’d put them all in my van and drive them up to the Mecidiyeköy bus stop myself, just to make sure they got back on time and Mevlut didn’t get annoyed because no one was there when he got home in the evening. The girls love the van. But that day, Rayiha didn’t even bother to say good-bye to me. When Mevlut gets home, I doubt she’ll ask him “Did you write those letters to Samiha?” She’ll cry about it for sure. But once she’s thought it over, she’ll realize that everything I told her is true.

—

Rayiha.I sat with Fevziye on my lap and Fatma beside me on the bus ride from Mecidiyeköy to Taksim. My daughters can always tell when their mother is sad or upset, even when I don’t say anything. As we walked home, I said with a frown, “Don’t tell your father we went to see your aunt Vediha, okay?” It came to me that maybe the reason that Mevlut doesn’t want me going to Duttepe is to keep me as far as possible from Süleyman’s insinuations. As soon as I saw Mevlut’s sweet, boyish face that evening, I knew Süleyman was lying. But the next morning, while the girls were out playing in the garden, I remembered the way Mevlut had looked at me in Akşehir train station the night we eloped, and I became uneasy again…Süleyman had been the one driving the van that day.