Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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Süleyman.Actually, the village dogs never barked at me. We’ve moved to Istanbul now, and I’m sad that Mevlut had to stay behind in the village, I miss him…But the dogs in the village treated me the same way they treated Mevlut. I just thought I should make that clear.

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Every now and then, Mevlut and his dog Kâmil climbed one of the hills, leaving the herd to graze down below. From his vantage point looking over the fields stretched out beneath him, Mevlut would yearn to live, to be happy, to be someone in the universe. There were times when he would dream of his father coming on a bus to take him away to Istanbul. The plains below, where the animals grazed, ended in a steep rock face at a bend in the stream. Sometimes you could spot the smoke from a fire at the opposite edge of the plain. Mevlut knew that the fire must have been lit by shepherd boys from the neighboring village of Gümüşdere, who, like him, hadn’t been able to go to Istanbul to continue their studies. From atop Mevlut and Kâmil’s hill you could see, when it was windy and the sky was clear, and especially in the mornings, the little houses of Gümüşdere and the sweet little white mosque with its slender minaret.

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Abdurrahman Efendi.I will take the liberty to quickly interrupt here, as I actually live in the abovementioned village of Gümüşdere. In the 1950s, most of us who lived in Cennetpınar, Gümüşdere, and the three neighboring villages were all very poor. During winter, we would become indebted to the grocer and could just barely make it through to spring. Come springtime, some of the men would go to Istanbul to work on construction sites. Some of us couldn’t even afford the bus ticket to Istanbul, so the Blind Grocer would buy it for us and write it down at the very top of his account book. Back in 1954, a tall, wide-shouldered giant from our village of Gümüşdere, a man named Yusuf, went to Istanbul to work as a builder. Then he became, by pure coincidence, a yogurt seller and made a lot of money selling yogurt street by street. He first brought over his brothers and his cousins to help him in Istanbul, where they all lived in bachelors’ apartments. Until then, the people of Gümüşdere hadn’t known the first thing about yogurt. But soon, most of us were going to Istanbul to pursue this opportunity. I first went there when I was twenty-two, after completing my compulsory military service. (Owing to various disciplinary mishaps, this took me four years; I kept getting caught trying to run away, I got beaten up a lot and spent a great deal of time in jail, but let it be known that no one loves our army and our honorable officers more than I do!) At the time, our soldiers hadn’t yet decided to hang the prime minister Adnan Menderes; he was still driving around Istanbul in his Cadillac, and whenever he came across any remaining historic homes and mansions, he had them demolished to make way for wide avenues. Business was good for street vendors plying their trade among the rubble, but I just couldn’t manage that whole yogurt-selling thing. Our people here tend to be tough and strong, big boned and with wide shoulders. But me, I’m a bit on the skinny side, as you will see for yourself should we ever meet one day, God willing. I got crushed under that wooden pole all day, with a thirty-kilo tray of yogurt tied at each end. To top it all, like most yogurt sellers I also went out in the evenings to try to make a little more money by selling boza. You can try all you want to cushion the weight of the pole, but a novice yogurt seller will inevitably get calluses on his neck and shoulders. At the beginning, I was pleased to see that I wasn’t getting any, because my skin is as smooth as velvet, but then I realized that the damned stick was doing much worse; it was damaging my spine, so off I went to the hospital. I spent about a month in hospital queues before the doctor told me I had to stop shouldering loads immediately. But obviously I had to earn a living, so instead of giving up the stick, I gave up the doctor. And that’s how my neck began to get crooked, and I came to be known among friends no longer as Little Miss Abdy but as Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman, which was rather heartbreaking. In Istanbul I avoided those who came from my village, but I used to see this Mevlut’s hot-tempered dad, Mustafa, and his uncle Hasan all the time, selling yogurt on the streets. That was also when I got hooked on rakı, which helped me forget about my neck. After a while I gave up on my dreams of buying a house, a little place in some slum, some real-estate property. I stopped trying to save more money and just tried to enjoy myself instead. I bought some land in Gümüşdere with the money I’d made in Istanbul, and I married the poorest orphan girl in the village. The lesson I learned during my time in the city is that in order to make it there, you need to have at least three sons that you can bring over from the village to slave away for you. I thought I’d have three strapping boys before going back to Istanbul, and this time I’d be able to build myself a home on the first empty hill I came across and go on to conquer the city from there. But I ended up with no sons and three daughters. So two years ago I came back to the village for good, and I love my girls very much. Let me introduce them to you now:

Vediha.I wanted my first strapping boy to be serious and hardworking and had decided to call him Vedii. Unfortunately, I had a daughter. So I called her Vediha, the female version of Vedii.

Rayiha.She loves to sit on her father’s lap and has a lovely smell, too, as her name suggests.

Samiha.She’s a clever little thing, always crying and complaining; she’s not even three yet and already thundering about the house.

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Mevlut would sit down in Cennetpınar in the evenings with his mother, Atiye, and his two older sisters, who both doted on him, to write to their father, Mustafa Efendi, in Istanbul, asking for shoes, batteries, plastic clothes pegs, and soap, among other things. Their father was illiterate, so he rarely replied, ignoring most of their requests or else claiming, “You could buy those things cheaper from the blind village grocer.” Mevlut’s mother could sometimes be heard complaining in response: “We didn’t ask you to bring these things because the Blind Grocer doesn’t have them, Mustafa, but because we haven’t got them at home!” The letters Mevlut wrote to his father ended up instilling in the boy a particular understanding of what it meant to ask for something in writing. There were three elements to consider when WRITING A LETTER TO ASK SOMETHING OF SOMEONE WHO IS FAR AWAY:

1. What you truly want, which you can never really know anyway

2. What you are prepared to say openly, which usually helps you gain a slightly better understanding of what you truly want

3. The letter itself, which though imbued with the essence of items 1 and 2 is really an enchanted text with a much-greater significance

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Mustafa Efendi.When I came back from Istanbul at the end of May, I brought the girls their flowery purple and green dress fabrics; for their mother, a pair of closed slippers and the Pe-Re-Ja — brand cologne Mevlut had written down in his letter; and for Mevlut, the toy he’d asked for. I was a bit hurt by his halfhearted thanks for the present. “He wanted a water pistol like the village headman’s son…,” said his mother while his sisters smirked. The next day, I went to the Blind Grocer with Mevlut, and we went through each item on our account. Every now and then I lost my temper: “What the hell is this Çamlıca gum?” I’d bellow, but Mevlut kept his eyes down, as he was the one who had been buying it. “No more gum for this one!” I told the Blind Grocer. “Mevlut should go to school in Istanbul next winter anyway!” said the Blind Grocer, that know-it-all. “He’s got a good head for num bers and sums. Maybe he’ll be the one to finally go to college from our village.”