A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

Page 28


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  Süleyman. When I got home, Vediha cleaned the wound on my forehead with a cotton ball. I went out to the garden and fired two shots at the mulberry tree with the Kırıkkale. The strange silence began soon after that. I couldn’t stop thinking that Samiha would surely come back home as if nothing had happened. That evening, everyone was in the house. Someone had switched the TV off as if we’d had a death in the family, and I realized that what really pained me was the silence. My brother kept smoking. Crooked-Necked Abdurrahman was drunk; Vediha was crying. I went out into the garden at midnight, and as I looked down from Duttepe to the city lights spread out below, I swore to God that I would avenge what had happened. Samiha is standing at a window somewhere among the millions of lights down there. Knowing that she doesn’t love me hurts so much that I’d rather think she was taken against her will, which in turn makes me think of how I want to kill those bastards. Our ancestors used to torture criminals before they executed them—it’s in times like these that one truly understands the importance of tradition.

  —

  Abdurrahman Efendi. What is it like to be a father whose daughters keep running away? I’m a little embarrassed, but I’m also proud that my daughters don’t settle for the husbands someone else picks out for them but bravely go with the men they choose for themselves. Though, if they’d had a mother to confide in, they would have done the right thing, and no one would have run away…In a marriage, trust is more important than love, as we all know. I worry about what they’ll do to poor Vediha after I go back to the village. But my eldest is smarter than she looks, and perhaps she’ll find a way to avoid getting punished for this.

  —

  Süleyman. I fell in love with Samiha even more after she ran away. Before she eloped, I loved her because she was beautiful and clever and because everyone admired her. That was understandable. Now, I love her because she left me and ran away. This is even more understandable, but the pain is unbearable. I spend mornings at our shop, daydreaming about her coming back and thinking that if I were to rush home right now I would find her there and we would get married and have a huge wedding reception.

  —

  Korkut. I made a few insinuations about how hard it would be to run away with a girl unless you had someone helping you inside the house, but Vediha didn’t take the bait. All she did was cry and say, “This city is huge, how was I supposed to know?” One day it was just me and Abdurrahman Efendi in the house. “Some fathers take a man’s money and anything else they can get, and then when a better match shows up, they secretly sell their daughter to the richer man and then pretend the girl eloped. Please don’t get me wrong, Abdurrahman Efendi, you’re a respectable man, but how could Samiha not think about this when she ran away?” I asked. “I’ll be the first to make her pay for this,” he said. Later, he decided that he was offended by what I’d said and stopped coming home for dinner. That’s when I told Vediha: “I don’t know which of you helped her, but you will not leave this house until I find out where Samiha went and with whom.” “It’s fine, you never let me go outside the neighborhood anyway, so now I just won’t even bother leaving the house,” she said. “Can I at least go out in the garden?”

  —

  Süleyman. One night I put Abdurrahman Efendi in the van and drove down to the Bosphorus, telling him we needed to talk. We went to the Tarator Seafood Restaurant in Sarıyer and sat in a corner away from the fish tank. Our fried mussels hadn’t arrived yet, and we were already on our second glass of rakı, all on an empty stomach, when I said, “Abdurrahman Efendi, you’ve lived much longer than I have, and I’m sure you will know the answer to my question. What does a man live for?” Abdurrahman Efendi had sensed a while ago that our conversation tonight could potentially head into dangerous territory, so he spent a long time trying to find the most harmless answer he could think of. “For love, my son!” he said. “What else?” He thought again and said, “For friendship.” “And?” “For happiness. For God and country…” “A man lives for his honor, Father!” I interrupted.

  —

  Abdurrahman Efendi. What I didn’t say is that, actually, I live for my daughters. I tried to humor this angry young man because part of me felt he wasn’t entirely wrong, but more than that, I felt sorry for him. We had so much to drink that I began to see all my forgotten memories floating around like submarines inside the distant fish tank. Toward the end of the night, I gathered up the courage to say, “Süleyman, my son, I know how hurt and angry you are, and I completely understand. We’re hurt and angry, too, because Samiha’s actions have put us in a very difficult position. But there’s no reason to drag honor and wounded pride into this! Your dignity hasn’t been compromised in any way. You weren’t married or even engaged to Samiha. Yes, I wish we’d had the two of you tie the knot before you got to know each other. I’m absolutely sure you would have been happy that way. But it’s not right for you to turn this into a matter of honor now. Everyone knows that all these big proclamations about honor are really just excuses invented to let people kill each other with a clear conscience. Are you going to kill my daughter?”

  Süleyman bristled. “I’m sorry, Father, but shouldn’t I at least have the right to go after the bastard who ran away with Samiha and punish him for what he did? That bastard humiliated me, didn’t he?” “Don’t take things the wrong way.” “Do I or do I not have the right?” “Calm down, son.” “When you come from the village and toil away for years trying to build a life for yourself in this dump of a city, and then a swindler comes along and tricks and sucks you dry, it’s really very difficult to stay calm.” “Believe me, son, if it was up to me I would pick Samiha up by the scruff of her neck and bring her home myself. I’m sure she knows she’s made a mistake. For all we know, maybe while we’ve been busy drinking, she’s on her way back home with her bag in hand and her tail between her legs.” “Who’s to say my brother and I would take her back?” “You won’t take my daughter back if she returns?” “I have to think about my honor.” “But what if no one’s laid a finger on her…”

  We sat there drinking until the bar closed at midnight. I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point Süleyman got up and apologized, respectfully kissing my hand while I promised him that I wouldn’t tell anyone what we’d talked about. I even said, “I won’t tell Samiha.” Süleyman started crying. He said my frown and my gestures reminded him of Samiha. “Fathers resemble their daughters,” I said with pride.

  “I made a mistake, I kept showing off, I didn’t try to be friends with her,” said Süleyman. “But she has a sharp tongue on her. It’s hard talking to girls; no one ever taught us how to do it properly. I just talked to her as I would talk to a man, only without swearing. It didn’t work.”

  Süleyman went to wash his face before we headed home, and when he came back, he’d really sobered up. On the way home, the traffic police in İstinye pulled us over to search the car, and we had to give them a hefty bribe to let us go.

  7

  * * *

  A Second Daughter

  It Was as If His Life Were Happening to Someone Else

  MEVLUT REMAINED a stranger to these events until much later. He hadn’t lost any of his early enthusiasm for his work: he was as optimistic as “the entrepreneur who believes in the idea,” beloved hero of books like How to Be a Successful Businessman. He was convinced that he could still make more money, if only he installed some brighter lighting inside the glass case of his three-wheeled cart, made deals with the ayran, tea, and Coke vendors that kept popping up and disappearing all around him, and tried harder to have truly heartfelt and sincere conversations with his customers. Mevlut did everything he could think of to build a regular clientele in the Kabataş-Fındıklı area. He didn’t mind so much when the corporate clerks who had their lunch standing up at his cart ignored his efforts, but he was furious when the smaller businesses he worked with asked him for receipts. He used his network of doormen, janitors, security guards, and tea serv
ers who worked inside company buildings to try to build a rapport with accountants and managers. One night, Rayiha told him that she was pregnant again and that it was going to be another girl.

  “How do you know it’s a girl? Did the three of you go to the hospital again?”

  “Not all three of us, Samiha wasn’t there. She eloped with someone else so she wouldn’t have to marry Süleyman.”

  “What?”

  Rayiha told him what she knew.

  That night, Mevlut was roaming around Feriköy like a sleepwalker, crying “Bozaaa,” when his feet led him to a cemetery. The moon was out; the cypress trees and the gravestones alternated between a silver gleam and a thick blackness. Mevlut took a paved road through the middle of the cemetery, feeling as if he’d picked a path in a dream. But the person walking in the cemetery wasn’t him, and it was as if his life, too, were happening to someone else.

  The farther he walked, the farther downhill the cemetery went, unfurling like a carpet, and Mevlut found himself on an ever-steepening slope. Who was the man Samiha had run away with? Was she going to turn to him one day and tell him, “Mevlut wrote me love letters about my eyes for years, and then he married my sister”? Did Samiha even know about all that?

  —

  Rayiha. “Last time you went through all the boys’ names, and we ended up having a girl,” I told Mevlut as I gave him the handbook of Islamic names. “Maybe if you try reading all the girls’ names, we’ll have a boy this time. You can check whether any of the girls’ names have ‘Allah’ in them!” “A girl’s name can’t have ‘Allah’ in it!” said Mevlut. According to the Koran, the most that girls could hope for was to be named for one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives. “Maybe if we keep eating rice every day, we’ll turn Chinese,” I teased. Mevlut laughed with me, picked up the baby, and covered her face with kisses. He didn’t even notice that his prickly mustache was making Fatma cry until I told him so.

  —

  Abdurrahman Efendi. My daughters’ late mother was called Fevziye. I suggested the name for their second daughter. You’ll be surprised to hear that even though all three of her daughters are in Istanbul now, and two of them rebelled and ran away from home, Fevziye, may she rest in peace, did not have a very adventurous life: she got married to me, the first man who asked for her hand, at the age of fifteen and lived peacefully to the age of twenty-three, without ever setting foot outside Gümüşdere village. I am on my way back there now, having accepted the painful truth that I’ve failed yet again to make it in Istanbul, and as I sit on this bus, looking mournfully out the window, I keep thinking how I wish I’d been like Fevziye and never left the village at all.

  —

  Vediha. My husband barely talks to me, he never comes home, and he sneers at everything I say. Korkut’s and Süleyman’s silences and all their subtle insinuations wore my father down until the poor man packed his bags and went back to the village. I cried a lot, secretly. In the space of just a month, my father and Samiha’s room has emptied completely. I go in there sometimes to look at my father’s bed on one side and Samiha’s on the other, and I weep, completely mortified about what happened. Every time I look outside the window, I try to picture where Samiha went and whom she might be with. Good for you, Samiha, I’m glad you ran away.

  —

  Süleyman. It’s been fifty-one days since Samiha ran away; and still there is no news. The whole time, I’ve been drinking rakı nonstop. Never at the dinner table, though, as I don’t want my brother getting angry; I either drink quietly in my room, as if taking a dose of medicine, or out in Beyoğlu. Sometimes I drive around in the van just to get my mind off things.

  I go to the market on Thursdays when we need to stock up on nails, paint, or plaster for the shop, and once the van gets sucked into the bustle of shopkeepers and enters that sea of human activity, it can take hours to get out. Every now and then I drive into a random street somewhere on a hill behind Üsküdar, past houses built out of hollow bricks, concrete walls, a mosque, a factory, a square; I keep going and see a bank, a restaurant, a bus stop; but no sign of Samiha. Still, the feeling that she might be around here somewhere grows inside me, and as I sit at the steering wheel, I almost feel as if I’m racing around in my own dream.

  —

  Mevlut and Rayiha’s second daughter, Fevziye, was born in August 1984, comfortably and without generating any extra hospital bills. Mevlut was so happy that he wrote THE TWO GIRLS’ RICE on his cart. Apart from the chaos of two babies crying in unison through the night, chronic lack of sleep, and the meddlesome Vediha, who kept coming over to help out, Mevlut had nothing to complain about.

  “Let this rice project go, Mr. Bridegroom, join the family business and give Rayiha a better life,” Vediha said one day.

  “We’re doing very well,” said Mevlut. Rayiha looked at her sister as if to say, That’s not true, which irked Mevlut, and once Vediha had left, he started grumbling. “Who does she think she is, intruding on our private life like that?” he said, and briefly considered forbidding Rayiha from visiting her sister’s home in Duttepe, though he didn’t insist, as he knew it wouldn’t be right to demand such a thing.

  8

  * * *

  Capitalism and Tradition

  Mevlut’s Blissful Family Life

  TOWARD THE END of February 1985, as a long, cold, unpropitious workday drew to a close, Mevlut was gathering his plates and glasses to leave Kabataş and go home when Süleyman pulled up in his van. “Everyone’s already brought you gifts and good-luck charms for the new baby, except for me,” he said. “Come and sit in the car, let’s talk for a bit. How’s work? Aren’t you cold out there?”

  Climbing into the front seat, Mevlut was reminded of how often the doe-eyed Samiha had sat in this very same place before she’d run away and disappeared a year ago, how much time she had spent driving around Istanbul with Süleyman.

  “I’ve been selling cooked rice for two years and in all this time I’ve never sat in a customer’s car,” he said. “It’s too high up here, it’s making me dizzy, I should get down.”

  “Sit, sit, we have so much to talk about!” said Süleyman, grabbing Mevlut’s hand as it made for the door handle. He gave his childhood friend a lovelorn, disheartened look.

  Mevlut saw that his cousin’s eyes were telling him: “We’re even now!” He pitied Süleyman, and in that moment he grasped the truth he’d been trying to ignore for two years: Süleyman had laid the trap that had tricked Mevlut into thinking that the girl with glimmering eyes was called Rayiha, not Samiha. If Süleyman had managed to marry Samiha as planned, they would have gone on pretending that no such trap had been set, and everyone would have been happy…

  “You and your brother are doing great, Süleyman, but the rest of us just can’t seem to find our way to prosperity. I hear the Vurals have already sold more than half the new apartments they’re building even though the foundations aren’t even finished yet.”

  “Yes, we’re doing all right, thank God,” said Süleyman. “But we also want you to do well. My brother feels the same way.”

  “So what’s the job you’re offering? Will I end up running a teahouse in the Vurals’ offices?”

  “Would you like to do that?”

  “There’s a customer coming,” said Mevlut, getting out of the vehicle. There was no customer, but he turned his back on Süleyman’s van and busied himself with a portion anyway. He scooped some rice onto a plate, flattening the mound with the back of a spoon. He turned off the butane stove in the three-wheeled cart and was pleased to notice that Süleyman had followed him out of the van.

  “Look, if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine, but let me give the baby her gift,” said Süleyman. “At least I’ll get to see her.”

  “If you don’t know the way to my place, you’d better follow me,” said Mevlut, and he began to push his cart.

  “Why don’t we load the cart into the back of my van?” said Süleyman.

  “Don’t underestim
ate this cart, it’s like a restaurant on three wheels. The kitchen unit and the stove are very delicate, and they weigh a ton.”

  He was climbing Kazancı Hill (which typically took him twenty minutes) toward Taksim, panting behind his cart as he did on his journey home between four and five o’clock every day, when Süleyman caught up with him.

  “Mevlut, let’s tie it to the bumper, and I’ll slowly tow you along.”

  He seemed sincere and friendly enough, but Mevlut kept going as if he hadn’t heard. A few yards later, he pushed his restaurant on wheels to one side of the road and put the brakes on. “Go up to Taksim and wait for me at the Tarlabaşı bus stop.”

  Süleyman accelerated, disappearing over the hill, and Mevlut began to fret about what he would think when he saw the state of the house and realized how poor they were. In truth, he’d been enjoying Süleyman’s solicitude. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the notion that he might be able to use his cousin to get closer to the Vurals and perhaps provide a better life for Rayiha and the kids.

  He chained his cart to the tree in the back garden. “Where are you!” he called out to Rayiha, who was taking longer than usual to come down and help him. They met upstairs in the kitchen, his arms loaded with rice cart paraphernalia. “Süleyman’s gotten the baby a gift, he’s on his way now! For goodness’ sake tidy up a little and make this place look decent!” said Mevlut.

  “Why?” said Rayiha. “Let him see exactly how we live.”

  “We’re all right,” said Mevlut. He was smiling now, cheered by the sight of his daughters. “But we shouldn’t give him any reason to talk. It stinks in here, let’s get some fresh air in.”