A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  I told Süleyman, Don’t worry, Istanbul is teeming with girls who want a good-looking, successful, intelligent man like him.

  “But where are they?” he asked me earnestly.

  “They’re at home with their mothers, Süleyman; they don’t go out much. You just listen to my advice, and I promise you I’ll show you all the sweetest and the prettiest ones, and then when you’ve found the most beautiful of them all, the one your heart desires, we’ll go and ask for her hand in marriage.”

  “Thank you, Vediha, but to be honest, I’ve never really gone for the straitlaced types, who stay at home with their mothers and always do as they’re told.”

  “But if you’re looking for a different kind of girl, then how come you never tried to win Samiha over with a sweet word or two?”

  “I just couldn’t get the hang of it!” he said. “She would make fun of me every time I tried.”

  “Süleyman, I’ll comb every inch of Istanbul if I have to, but I’ll find you a girl. But if you like her, you’ve got to treat her right, understood?”

  “All right, but what if she gets spoiled?”

  —

  Süleyman. I’d take Vediha in the van, and we would go out to meet eligible girls. People with experience in this sort of thing said we should take my mother along, too, as this would give our delegation an air of formality, but I didn’t want to do that. My mother’s clothes and her manner are still too close to village ways. Vediha would wear blue jeans under her usual dress, a long, dark blue overcoat I never saw her wear anywhere else, and a headscarf that matched that blue exactly; you might have mistaken her for a lady doctor or judge who happened to be wearing a headscarf. Vediha loved being out of the house so much that as soon as I stepped on the gas and we went flying down the streets of Istanbul, she would practically forget our mission, taking in every inch of the city and talking nonstop, until I had to laugh.

  “This bus route is run by a private company, not by the municipality, and that’s why it keeps the doors open while it’s moving,” I’d tell her as I tried to pass the bus crawling ahead of us letting passengers jump on and off.

  “Careful we don’t run them over, these people are crazy,” she’d say, laughing. As we got closer to our destination, I’d grow silent. “Don’t worry, Süleyman,” she’d say. “She’s a nice girl, I like her. But if you don’t, then we’ll just get up and leave. You can drive your sister around for a bit on your way back.”

  Vediha was always making new friends, thanks to her warmth and kindness, and through these connections, she would identify the eligible girls, and then the two of us would go to see them at home. Most had either come to Istanbul after finishing primary school in the village (like me), or else they’d gone to a school in a poor city neighborhood that was even worse than the village. Some of them were determined to finish high school; others could barely read and write. Most were too young, but once they reached high-school age, they really didn’t want to be still living with their parents in some tiny, run-down, stove-heated house that was always freezing. It was always nice to hear Vediha telling me that all these girls were sick of their parents and looking for a chance to get away from home, but a part of me knew that this wasn’t really true of every girl we met.

  —

  Vediha. Oh, Süleyman…the truth—though I never told him this— is that good girls don’t know how to think for themselves, and girls who think for themselves aren’t any good. There were other things I never told him, too. If you’re looking for a girl like Samiha, a girl with character, you’re not going to find her at home with her mother, waiting for a man to marry her. You expect a girl who has her own mind and her own personality to bow down to your every wish? That’s not going to happen. You want her to be pure and innocent, but also eager to fulfill all your wild desires (let’s not forget that I married his brother)? That’s never going to happen either. What you don’t realize, poor Süleyman, is that you need a girl who doesn’t wear a headscarf—though I assume you wouldn’t want a girl like that. But this was a sensitive subject, and I never brought it up. But I kept trying, because the surest way to get permission to leave the house was to tell Korkut I was going out to find Süleyman a wife. Soon enough, Süleyman came to accept the gap between his expectations and reality.

  When families want to get their sons and daughters married off, the first place they look is back in the village, among their own rela tives, or down the street and around the neighborhood. Only a girl who can’t find a husband nearby—usually because everyone knows there’s something wrong with her—will ever say she wants to marry a stranger from some other part of town. Some try to dress this up as the beauty of a free spirit. But whenever I heard about one of these freedom-loving girls, I would always try to figure out what she was hiding. Naturally, these girls and their families had their own cause for suspicion (after all, hadn’t we also come a long way from home to find a match?), and they would give us a very close look, trying to work out what we had to hide. Anyway, I warned Süleyman, if a girl has got nothing obviously wrong with her but still can’t find a husband, it means she’s probably setting her sights too high.

  —

  Süleyman. There was this high-school girl who lived on the second floor of a new building in the backstreets of Aksaray. Not only was she wearing her school uniform (with her headscarf) when she greeted us, but she also spent the entire time poring over a notebook and math textbook at the dining table. Meanwhile, another girl, a distant relation, took on the role of the polite young woman who entertains the candidate’s guests, even though she has her own homework to do.

  In a house somewhere behind Bakırköy, we went to see Behice, who during our brief visit got up from her chair five times to go to the window and peek out through the lace curtains at the kids playing football in the street. “Behice likes to look out the window,” said her mother, as if to make excuses for this behavior but also imply, as so many mothers did, that this particular quirk was further proof of what an excellent wife her daughter was bound to be.

  In a house across from the Piyale Paşa Mosque in Kasımpaşa, two sisters—neither of them the girl we’d come to see—kept whispering and giggling between themselves, or biting their lips trying not to laugh even more. After we left the house, Vediha told me that our quarry—their frowning older sister—had in fact entered like a ghost while we were having our tea and almond biscuits, crossing the room so quietly that I didn’t even notice my potential wife come and go, let alone whether she was pretty or not. “A man mustn’t marry a girl he wouldn’t even notice,” Vediha wisely advised on our leisurely way home in the van. “I was wrong about her; she isn’t right for you.”

  —

  Vediha. Some women are born matchmakers, blessed with a God-given gift for making people happy. I’m not one of them. But when Samiha ran away after my father had already taken money from Korkut and Süleyman, I became a quick study, not only out of fear they might blame me for what happened but also because I felt so sorry for silly Süleyman. I also really loved getting out of the house and driving around in the van.

  I’d start by saying that my husband had a younger brother who’d already finished his military service. Growing very serious, I would then launch into a somewhat embellished tale of just how clever, good-looking, respectful, and hardworking Süleyman was.

  Süleyman asked me to make sure I told people that he came from a “religious” family. The girls’ fathers appreciated this, but I’m not sure it was much of a draw for the girls themselves. I would explain that having become wealthy since moving to the city, the family didn’t now want a village girl for their son. Sometimes I’d hint that they had enemies in the village, but this could scare some families off. Whenever I met someone new, I’d almost always mention that I was looking for a suitable girl and ask whether they knew any; but since Korkut’s patience with my being out of the house was limited, even for this purpose, I didn’t exactly have my pick of candidates. And half of those I
did find still acted as if there is something embarrassing about an arranged marriage, which is ridiculous considering this is the way everyone gets married eventually.

  People would always say they knew a girl who was exactly what I was looking for, but unfortunately she would never agree to an arranged marriage or even to a visit from a potential suitor. We soon realized that when visiting a prospect it was better not to reveal our purpose and just act as if we happened to be in the neighborhood—perhaps our mutual friend so-and-so had recommended we say hello if we were ever in the area. Or maybe we would say Süleyman needed to check on a site he was managing for his construction company…

  Sometimes the drop-in approach depended on coming along with someone else paying a call at a particular house. This was essentially a form of mutual assistance between matchmakers, not unlike the way property brokers sometimes help each other out. The invited guest would explain our presence with some excuse made up on the spot—but not before having given the entire household a rather exuberant and exaggerated account of who we were. These small, old-fashioned apartments would invariably be packed with a crowd of inquisitive mothers, aunties, sisters, friends, and grandmothers. The expected guest would introduce us as the famous Aktaş family of Konya, owners of a thriving construction business for which Süleyman oversaw many projects; we’d called on her unexpectedly, and she’d decided to bring us along with her. The only one who even remotely believed these lies was Süleyman himself.

  Still, no one ever asked, “If you really were just passing by, then why is Süleyman clean-shaven, wearing that syrupy cologne and sporting his best suit and tie?” For our part, we never asked, “If you really had no idea we were coming, why did you tidy up the house, bring out your best china, and reupholster all the sofas?” The lies were part of the ritual, and just because we were lying, it didn’t mean we weren’t sincere. We understood one another’s private motivations, while making sure to keep up public appearances. These empty words were just a prelude to the main act to come, anyway. In a few minutes, the girl and the boy were to meet. Would they like each other? More important, would this audience judge them to be a good match? As it all unfolded, everyone in the room would begin to remember when they had been the object of this kind of attention.

  It wasn’t too long before the girl herself appeared, in her best clothes and perhaps even wearing her nicest headscarf, feeling mortified and trying to act nonchalant as she found somewhere to sit at the edge of the crowded room. There were usually so many hopeful young women of roughly the same age in the room that the mother and aunts, veterans of the field, would have to find some casual way of signaling the arrival of the shy girl we had actually come to see.

  “Where were you, darling, were you doing your homework? We have guests, look.”

  In four or five years’ worth of these visits and their disappointments, two of the five high-school girls Süleyman was interested in had used school as an excuse to reject us (“I’m afraid our daughter would like to finish her education”), so that Süleyman no longer liked hearing about girls who were supposedly “doing their homework.”

  When mothers feigned surprise—“Oh, I see we have guests today!”—their daughters could sometimes come out with an embarrassing reply: “Yes, Mom, we know; you’ve been preparing all day!” I liked these spirited, honest girls, and so did Süleyman, but from the speed with which he was later able to put them out of his mind, I figured that he must have also been a little scared of the way they might treat him.

  When we had to deal with girls who flatly refused to meet suitors, we would hide our true purpose. One time, a rude and unpleasant young thing really believed that we had come by simply to bring a gift to her father (who was a waiter) and paid no attention to us at all. With another girl, we had to pretend to be friends of her mother’s doctor. One day in spring, we went to an old wooden house in Edirnekapı, near the city walls. The girl we had come to see was playing dodgeball on the street with her friends and had no idea her mother was hosting a potential husband who had come to look her over. Her aunt leaned out of the window to lure her in: “Come up, darling, I’ve brought you some sesame-seed cookies!” She came straightaway, full of enchanting beauty. But she ignored us. She wolfed down two cookies with her eyes on the TV, and just as she was about to leave the room and go back downstairs to resume her game, her mother said, “Wait, sit down with our guests for a while.”

  She sat down instinctively, but with one glance at me and at Süleyman’s tie, she lost her temper: “It’s matchmakers again! I told you I didn’t want any more men coming home, Mother!”

  “Don’t talk to your mother like that…”

  “Well, that’s what they’re here for, isn’t it? Who is this man?”

  “Have some respect…They saw you, they liked you, and they’ve come all the way across the city just to talk to you. You know how bad the traffic is. Now, sit down.”

  “What am I supposed to say to these people? Am I supposed to marry this fatty?”

  She stormed out.

  It was the spring of 1989, and this was to be the last of our house visits, which were already growing more infrequent. Now and again, Süleyman would still say, “Find me a wife, Vediha Yenge,” but by then we all knew about Mahinur Meryem, so I didn’t think he really meant it. He was still talking about how he would have his revenge on Samiha and Ferhat, so I wasn’t very happy with him anyway.

  —

  Mahinur Meryem. Some regulars at bars and nightclubs may have heard my name before, though they may not remember it. My father was a humble government clerk, an honest, hardworking, but hot-tempered man. I was a promising student at Taksim Secondary School for Girls when our team made the finals of Milliyet’s pop-song contest for high schools, and my name ended up in the newspapers. Celâl Salik wrote about me once in his column: “She has the silky voice of a star.” It is still the highest praise I’ve ever received in my singing career. I would like to thank the late Mr. Salik and those who are letting me use my stage name in this book.

  My real name is Melahat. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, my singing career never took off after that initial success in high school. My father never understood my dreams, he often beat me, and when he saw I wouldn’t make it to college, he tried to get me married off. So when I was nineteen, I ran away from home and got married to a man of my own choosing. My first husband was like me: he loved music, though his father was a janitor at the Şişli town hall. Sadly, it didn’t work out, and neither did my second marriage nor any of the relationships that came after that, all ruined by my passion for singing, by poverty, and by the inability of men to keep their promises. I could write a book about all the men I’ve known, and then I would also end up on trial for insulting Turkishness. I haven’t told Süleyman too much about it. I won’t waste your time with it now.

  Two years ago, I was singing in some horrible dump in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, stubbornly sticking to Turkish pop, but hardly anyone ever came, and I was always scheduled at the very end of the program. So I moved to another tiny bar, where the manager persuaded me that I could be very successful if I switched my repertoire to Turkish classical and folk songs, but again I wasn’t on until the very end of the night. It was at the Paris Pavilion that I first met Süleyman—another one of those pushy guys desperately trying to chat me up between numbers. The Paris was a haunt for lovesick men not coping well with their misery but who found some consolation in traditional Turkish music, the specialty of the house, despite the name. At first, I ignored him, of course. But soon enough, he’d softened me up with his lonely presence every night, the armfuls of flowers he sent me, his persistence, and his childlike innocence.

  Süleyman now pays my rent for a fourth-floor apartment in Sormagir Street in Cihangir. After a couple of glasses of rakı in the evenings, he’ll say, “Come on, let’s go, I’ll take you for a drive in the van.” He doesn’t realize that there’s nothing romantic about his ride, but I don’t mind. A year a
go, I stopped singing folk songs and performing in small nightclubs. If Süleyman is willing to help, I’d like to go back to singing pop. But it doesn’t even matter that much.

  I do love driving around in Süleyman’s van at night. I’ll have a couple of drinks, too, and when we’re tipsy, we get along really well and can talk about anything. As soon as he’s able to shake off his fear of his brother and get away from his family, Süleyman turns into a kind of lovable, charming guy.

  He’ll take me down a hill to the Bosphorus, swerving through narrow alleyways.

  “Stop it, Süleyman, they’ll pull us over!” I’ll say.

  “Don’t worry, they’re all our men,” he’ll say.

  Sometimes, I’ll tell him what he wants to hear: “Oh, please stop, Süleyman, we’re going to fall off and die!” There was a period when we would have this exact exchange every evening.

  “What are you scared of, Melahat, do you really think we’re going to fall off the road?”

  “Süleyman, they’re building a new bridge over the Bosphorus, can you believe it?”

  “What’s not to believe? When we first came from the village, these people thought we’d never be more than just a bunch of poor yogurt sellers,” he’d say, getting worked up. “Now those same guys are begging us to sell them our property and using their middlemen to try to get involved in projects. Shall I tell you why I’m so confident that there really is going to be a second bridge soon, exactly like the first?”

  “Tell me, Süleyman.”

  “Because now that Kültepe and Duttepe are all theirs, the Vurals have started buying up all the land around where the highway to the bridge is supposed to be. The government hasn’t even begun to seize land for the highway yet. But the land the Vurals bought in Ümraniye, Saray, and Çakmak is already worth ten times what they paid. We’re going to fly down this hill now. Don’t be scared, okay?”