Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut had mostly ignored the elections, worried by the rumor “Once you’re registered to vote, the tax office starts knocking on your door.” There wasn’t any party he hated anyway, and the only demand he ever had of any candidate was “They should treat street vendors right.” But two elections ago, the military government had declared a curfew and sent soldiers to every home in the country, taking people’s names and threatening to jail anyone who didn’t vote. So this time Rayiha took their identity cards and went to have them both registered.

During the local elections in March 1994, the ballot boxes for their neighborhood were kept at Piyale Paşa Primary School, which the girls attended, so Mevlut took Rayiha, Fatma, and Fevziye and went down to vote in high spirits. There was a ballot box in Fatma’s classroom, and a large crowd, too. But Fevziye’s classroom was empty. They walked in and sat together in one of the rows. They laughed at Fevziye’s impression of her teacher and admired a picture she’d drawn, named MY HOUSE, which the teacher had liked well enough to hang in the corner: Fevziye had added two chimneys and a Turkish flag to the red roof of the house in the picture and drawn an almond tree in the background with the lost rice cart. She’d omitted the chains that had been used to secure the cart.

The next day, the newspapers wrote that the Islamist party had won the elections in Istanbul, and Mevlut thought, If they’re religious, they’ll get rid of the tables of drunks eating on the pavements of Beyoğlu, and then we’ll have an easier time getting through, and people will buy more boza. It was two days later that he was attacked by dogs and then robbed, losing his money and his Swiss watch; that’s when he decided to give up on selling boza.

Doing the Nation Proud

NOW THAT our story has again reached the night of Wednesday, 30 March 1994, I would advise my readers to reacquaint themselves with part 2 of our novel. That night, Mevlut was attacked by stray dogs and robbed of the wristwatch Hadji Hamit Vural had given him as a wedding present twelve years before — two incidents that caused him great distress. The following morning, when he talked to Rayiha about it after Fatma and Fevziye had gone to school, he remained firm in his resolve to stop selling boza. There was no way he could walk the streets at night while he carried this fear of dogs in his heart.

He also wondered whether it was a coincidence that he’d been attacked by dogs and robbed the same night. If the dogs had attacked him after he’d been robbed, he might have reasoned: The robbers scared me, and the dogs attacked smelling my fear. But actually, the dogs had attacked him first, and he’d been robbed two hours later. As he tried to find a link between the two events, Mevlut kept thinking back to an article he’d read a long time ago in the middle-school library. The article, in an old issue of Mind and Matter, had been about the ability of dogs to read people’s minds. Realizing quickly that it would be very difficult to recall the specifics of the article, Mevlut put it out of his mind.

—

Rayiha.When Mevlut decided to stop selling boza because of the dogs, I went to see Vediha in Duttepe the first chance I got.

“They’re not too pleased with Mevlut after what happened at the Binbom Café; they won’t be helping him find another job anytime soon,” said Vediha.

“Mevlut isn’t too pleased with them either,” I said. “Anyway, it’s Ferhat’s help I’m thinking of. I heard he’s making good money at the electricity board. He could find something for Mevlut, too. But Mevlut will never go to him unless Ferhat offers.”

“Why’s that?”

“You know why…”

Vediha looked at me as if she understood.

“Please, Vediha, you’ll know just what to say to Samiha and Ferhat,” I said. “He and Mevlut used to be such good friends. If Ferhat’s so keen to show off his money, let him give his old friend a hand.”

“When we were little, you and Samiha used to gang up on me all the time,” said Vediha. “Now I’ve got to get you two talking again?”

“I don’t have any quarrel with Samiha,” I said. “The problem is the men are too proud.”

“They don’t call it pride, though, they say it’s honor,” said Vediha. “That’s when they get vicious.”

—

A week later, Rayiha told her husband that on Sunday they would be taking the girls over to Samiha and Ferhat’s place, where Samiha was going to make them some Beyşehir-style kebab.

“Beyşehir kebab is just a flatbread topped with walnuts as well as meat,” said Mevlut. “I haven’t had it in twenty years. Where’s this coming from?”

“You haven’t seen Ferhat in ten years, either!” said Rayiha.

Mevlut was still unemployed: ever since he’d been robbed, he’d been nursing a grudge against the world and feeling ever more vulnerable. In the mornings he wandered around the restaurants of Tarlabaşı and Beyoğlu in a bitter, halfhearted search for some job that might suit him. In the evenings, he stayed at home.

On that sunny Sunday morning they got on a bus in Taksim, the only other passengers a handful of people who were also going to see friends and relatives on the other side of the city. Rayiha relaxed when she heard Mevlut telling Fatma and Fevziye that his childhood friend, their uncle Ferhat, was a really funny man.

Thanks to the girls, the moment when Mevlut saw Samiha and Ferhat again — something he’d been dreading for ten years — passed without any awkwardness. The two old friends hugged each other, Ferhat picked Fevziye up, and they all headed out to see the plot he had marked with white stones more than fifteen years ago, as if they were there to inspect some land on which they planned to build a house.

The girls wouldn’t stop running around; they were thrilled with the forest at the edge of the city, the dreamy outline of Istanbul in the hazy distance, and the gardens full of dogs, clucking hens, and little chicks. Mevlut thought of how Fatma and Fevziye, born and bred in Tarlabaşı, had never in their lives been in a field that smelled of manure, a village hut, or even an orchard. It delighted him to notice their amazement at everything they came across — a tree, a well sweep, a watering hose, and even a weathered old donkey and the metal sheets and ironwork railings that the neighborhood people had pilfered from Istanbul’s historic ruins and used for the walls around their own gardens.

But Mevlut also knew that the real reason for his good mood was that he’d accomplished this friendly reunion without sacrificing his pride and come here without upsetting Rayiha. Now he regretted the silly grief of all those years over this business with the love letters. But he still made sure he was never alone with Samiha.

When Samiha came in with the Beyşehir kebab, Mevlut went to sit at the opposite end of the table. A deepening sense of inner contentment had temporarily eased his worries about work and money. Ferhat kept laughing and making jokes and topping up Mevlut’s rakı glass, and the more Mevlut drank, the more at ease he felt. But he remained vigilant and didn’t speak much for fear of saying something wrong.

When the rakı began to make his head swim, he started to worry and decided not to say another word. He listened to the conversation at the table but didn’t join in (the talk had turned to the TV quiz show the girls had switched on), and whenever he felt the urge to speak, he would talk silently to himself instead.