Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Very true,” said Süleyman. Though I don’t think he really agreed with me; he just didn’t dare argue against anything that had to do with the Holy Prophet or the Koran.

“In our realm,” I continued, “girls and boys who are engaged don’t get to know each other at all until they’re married, so it doesn’t matter who was meant to receive their love letters. The letter is just a token; what really counts is what is in your heart.”

“So what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter that Mevlut wrote letters meant for Samiha when his fate was to be with Rayiha?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Süleyman frowned. “God takes note of His creatures’ true intentions. The Lord favors a man who intends to fast during Ramadan over a man who fasts because he can’t find food to eat anyway. Because one of them means it, while the other one doesn’t.”

“Mevlut and Rayiha are good people in the eyes of Allah the Merciful. Don’t worry about them,” I said. “They will have God’s blessing. God loves happy people, who know how to make the best of the little they have. Would Mevlut and Rayiha be happy if He didn’t love them? And if they’re happy, then it’s not our place to say any more, is it, son?”

—

Süleyman.If Rayiha actually believed those letters were meant for her, why didn’t she tell Mevlut to ask her father for her hand? They could have been married immediately, without needing to elope. It’s not like she had other suitors. But it was always assumed that Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman would ask for a lot of money in exchange for his daughter’s hand…So Rayiha would have ended up a spinster, and her father wouldn’t have been able to move on to marrying off the next daughter, Samiha — the one who’s really pretty. It’s that simple. (Of course he ended up making no money from his youngest daughter either, but that’s beside the point.)

—

Abdurrahman Efendi.I left after a while and went to stay with my youngest daughter in the Ghaazi Quarter, all the way at the other end of the city. Süleyman still can’t get over what happened, so I told no one I was going to stay at Samiha and Ferhat’s, pretending instead that I was going back to the village. Vediha and I cried as we hugged each other good-bye, as if this time I might die when I went back to the village. I took my bag and boarded the bus from Mecidiyeköy to Taksim. Since we were not moving in the traffic at all, some of the passengers, fed up with being piled one on top of the other, yelled “Open the door, driver” every time we came to a standstill, but the driver refused: “We’re not at the stop yet.” I followed the ongoing argument without getting involved. We were also packed like sardines on the next bus I took, and by the time I got off at Gaziosmanpaşa, I felt I’d been completely flattened. I took a blue minibus from Gaziosmanpaşa and reached the Ghaazi Quarter at dusk.

This part of the city seemed colder and darker; the clouds here hung lower and looked more fearsome. I hurried up a hill; the whole neighborhood was really just one long slope. There was nobody around, and I could smell the forest and the lake at the edge of the city. A deep silence had descended from the mountains onto the ghostlike homes around me.

My darling daughter opened the door, and for some reason we both cried as we embraced. I knew straightaway that my Samiha was crying because she was lonely and unhappy. That evening, her husband, Ferhat, didn’t make it home until around midnight and fell straight into bed. They both work so hard that, by nighttime, they have neither the energy nor the heart to be together in this house in the middle of nowhere. Ferhat showed me his certificate from the University of Anatolia; he’d finally managed to get a college degree through a cor respondence course. Maybe they would be happy now. But by nightfall, I was too worried to sleep. This Ferhat can never make my beautiful, clever, darling, long-suffering Samiha happy. It’s not that they eloped, you see; what bothers me is that this man is making her work as a maid.

But Samiha refuses to admit that having to clean other people’s homes makes her unhappy. When her husband left for work in the morning (whatever it is that he does), Samiha acted as if she were perfectly happy with her life. She’d taken the day off to be with me. She fried two eggs for me. She took me to the window at the back and showed me her husband’s plot of land marked with phosphorescent stones. We went out into the little garden of their house on top of a hill, and all around us were more hills covered with poor neighborhoods of houses that looked like white boxes. The outline of the city itself was almost invisible in the distance, half hidden like a monstrous creature lying in a pool of mud, smothered in fog and factory fumes. “Dad, do you see those hills over there?” said Samiha, pointing at the poor neighborhoods all around us. She shivered. “When we first came here five years ago, all these hills were empty.” She started crying.

—

Rayiha.“You can tell your father that Grandpa Abdurrahman and Aunt Vediha came to see you, but you mustn’t tell him that Aunt Samiha was here, understood?” “Why?” asked Fatma in her usual inquisitive way. I frowned and shook my head a little as I usually do when I’m about to run out of patience and give them a slap, and after that they both kept quiet.

As soon as my father and Samiha arrived, one of the girls climbed onto Father’s chest, and the other went to sit on Samiha’s lap. Father stood Fatma on his knees and engaged her in a thumb-wrestling match and a game of rock-paper-scissors, giving her riddles to solve and showing her his little pocket mirror, the watch he carried on a chain, and his lighter that didn’t work. When Samiha hugged Fevziye so hard, showering her with kisses, I knew straightaway that only a big bustling home with three or four babies of her own could relieve the pain of the loneliness she carried inside. Every kiss came with an expression of wonder—“Look at that hand! And look at that mole!”—and every single time I couldn’t help but lean over and examine Fevziye’s hand or the mole on Fatma’s neck.

—

Vediha.“Why don’t you go take Aunt Samiha to see the talking tree in the back garden and the fairy courtyard of the Assyrian church,” I said, and off they went. I was just about to tell Rayiha that there was no reason to be afraid of Süleyman anymore, that Bozkurt and Turan had started behaving themselves, and that she should start bringing the girls over again, when my father said something that made us both really angry.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi.I don’t know why they’re so angry at me. I can’t think of anything more natural than a father worrying about his daughters’ happiness. When Samiha went out in the garden with the girls, I told Rayiha and Vediha about their little sister’s lonely misery in that crumbling one-room house out on the other side of the city with nothing but cold, grief, and ghosts for company, and how I’d had my fill of the place after five days and decided to go back to the village.

“Between you and me, what your sister needs is a real husband that can make her happy.”

—

Rayiha.I don’t know what came over me, but all of a sudden I was so furious that I said some things bound to break my poor father’s heart, surprising even myself as the words came out of my mouth. “Don’t you dare wreck the girl’s marriage, Father,” I said. WE ARE NOT FOR SALE, I said. Yet part of me knew that my father was right, and I could see that poor Samiha no longer had the strength to mask her misery. There was also something else my mind kept going back to. We’d spent our childhood and adolescence hearing things like “Samiha is the prettiest and the most enchanting of you all, she’s the most beautiful girl in the world,” and now here she was, penniless, childless, and full of sadness, while Mevlut and I were happy; was this God’s way of testing people’s devotion, or was it divine justice?