Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

I took the letters out from where I kept them, and when I read through them again, I felt relieved: they sounded exactly the way Mevlut talks to me when we’re alone together. I felt guilty for having paid any mind to Süleyman’s lies. But then I remembered that Süleyman himself had brought me the letters, and that he’d used Vediha to convince me to run away with Mevlut, and I felt unsure. That was when I vowed never to go to Duttepe again.

—

Vediha.One afternoon, just after Mevlut would have left to sell his rice, I snuck out of the house and got on a bus to Tarlabaşı to see Rayiha. My little sister greeted me with tears of joy in her eyes. She was busy frying chicken with her hair pulled back like a chef’s, a huge fork in her hand and a cloud of smoke with the scent of cooking swirling around her as she yelled at the kids to stop making a mess. I gave the girls a hug and kiss before she sent them out to play in the garden. “They’ve both been sick, or else we would have been by,” she said. “Mevlut doesn’t even know about my visits.”

“But Rayiha, Korkut never lets me out of the house, and certainly nowhere near Beyoğlu. How are we ever going to see each other?”

“The girls are scared of your boys, now. Do you remember what Bozkurt and Turan did that time, when they tied poor Fatma to a tree and started shooting arrows at her? They split her eyebrow wide open.”

“Don’t you worry, Rayiha; I gave them quite a beating over it and made them swear they’ll never hurt the girls again. Anyway, Bozkurt and Turan aren’t back from school until after four. Tell me the truth, Rayiha, is that really why you haven’t been coming, or is it Mevlut who’s told you not to?”

“Actually, if you want to know, it’s not Mevlut’s fault. It’s Süleyman who’s to blame; he’s trying to cause trouble. He was saying that the letters Mevlut wrote me when he was in the army were really meant for Samiha.”

“Oh, Rayiha, you can’t let Süleyman get to you…”

Rayiha pulled out a bundle of letters from the bottom of her wicker sewing box and opened one of the yellowing envelopes at random. “ ‘My life, my soul, my one and only doe-eyed Miss Rayiha,’ ” she read, and she burst into tears.

—

Süleyman.I really can’t stand Mahinur when she starts mocking my family and saying we still belong in the village. As if she were a general’s daughter or a doctor’s wife or something, and not a government clerk’s nightclub-hostess daughter. Give her two glasses of rakı, and she’ll get going: “Were you some sort of shepherd, back home?” she’ll say, raising her eyebrows gravely as if it were a serious question.

“You’ve had too much to drink again,” I’ll tell her.

“Who, me? You drink plenty more than I do, and then you lose control. Hit me again and I’ll give you a taste of the fire iron.”

I went home. My mother and Vediha were watching Gorbachev and Bush kissing each other on TV. Korkut was out, and I was just thinking I might have another drink when Vediha ambushed me in the kitchen.

“Now listen to me, Süleyman,” she said. “If you cause Rayiha to stop coming to this house, I will never forgive you. She truly believes these lies and stupid jokes of yours, you’ve got the poor girl in tears.”

“Oh, fine, Vediha, I won’t say anything more to her. But why don’t we get our facts straight first, if we’re going to keep telling lies to spare people’s feelings.”

“Süleyman, let’s imagine for a minute that Mevlut really did see Samiha and fell in love with her, but then wrote his letters to Rayiha because he thought that was her name.”

“Well, that is exactly what happened…”

“No, what’s likelier is that you tricked him on purpose…”

“I just helped Mevlut get married.”

“Have it your way, but what good does it do to dredge it all up now? Apart from causing poor Rayiha a lot of pain?”

“Vediha, you’ve done your best to find me a wife. Now you have to face the truth.”

“None of the things you said actually happened,” said Vediha in a steely tone. “I will tell your brother, too. I’ll have no more of this. Understood?”

As you see, whenever she wants to intimidate me, Vediha refers to her husband as “your brother” instead of “Korkut.”

—

Rayiha.I can be making a warm compress to soothe Fatma’s earache, when I’ll drop what I’m doing and go pick out a letter from one of the bundles I keep in my sewing box and skim to find the part where Mevlut compares my eyes to “the melancholy mountains of Kars.” In the evening, while I’m listening to Reyhan’s chatter and to the girls wheezing and coughing in their sleep while I’m waiting for Mevlut to come home, I’ll get up as if in a dream and go back to where Mevlut wrote “I need no other gaze, no other sun in my life.” In the mornings, when I’m at the fish market with Fatma and Fevziye in Balıkpazarı, standing in that stench and watching Hamdi the poultry dealer plucking a chicken before he hacks it to pieces and smokes the skin, I’ll remember how Mevlut once called me his “darling who smells of roses and of heaven, true to her name,” and instantly feel better. When the south wind makes the city reek of sewage and seaweed, the sky looks the color of a rotten egg, and I feel a weight on my soul, I’ll go back to the letter in which he told me my eyes were “as dark as fathomless night and as clear as fresh spring water.”

—

Abdurrahman Efendi.There’s no pleasure in village life anymore, now that I’ve married my girls off, so I go to Istanbul whenever I get the chance. As the buses rattle along and I fall in and out of sleep, I always find myself wondering bitterly if I’m even wanted there at all. In Istanbul, I stay at Vediha’s and try my best to avoid grumpy Korkut and his grocer father, Hasan, who looks more like a ghost with every passing year. I’m a tired old man without a penny to my name, and I’ve never stayed in a hotel in my life. I think there’s something undignified about having to pay for a place to sleep at night.

It is not true that I took gifts and money from Süleyman and Korkut in exchange for letting Süleyman marry my daughter Samiha, nor does the fact that Samiha eloped mean that I must have been tricking them all along. Korkut did pay for my teeth, but I saw this generosity as a gift from Vediha’s husband, not as the bride price for my youngest daughter. Not to mention how insulting it is to suggest that a beauty like Samiha should be worth no more than a set of dentures.

Süleyman still won’t let it go, so I always try to stay away from him whenever I’m at the Aktaş home, but one night he caught me having a bite to eat in the kitchen. We hugged like father and son, which was unusual for us. His father had already gone to sleep, so we turned with great relish to the half a bottle of rakı Süleyman had hidden behind the potato basket. I’m not entirely sure what happened next, but just before the call to prayer at dawn, I heard Süleyman saying the same thing over and over again. “Father, you’re a straight-talking kind of man, so be honest with me now, isn’t that what happened?” he repeated. “Mevlut wrote those love letters for Samiha.”

“Süleyman, my son, it doesn’t really matter who was in love with whom when it all began. What matters is being happy after the wedding. That’s why when a girl and boy are engaged to be married, our Prophet says they shouldn’t be allowed to meet before the wedding and waste all the excitement of lovemaking beforehand, and it’s also why the Koran forbids women from going around with their heads uncovered…”