A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  Sometimes the police forgot he was there and started talking about other things, catching up with a colleague who’d opened the door, or teasing each other about the football results. Mevlut took all this to mean that he probably wasn’t in too much trouble.

  At one point he thought he heard someone say: “Three men running after the same girl!” They all laughed at that, as if none of it had anything to do with Mevlut. Could Süleyman have told the police about the letters? Mevlut began to lose hope.

  When they sent him back to the cell after the interrogation, the guilt he’d been feeling turned into panic: they were going to beat him up until he told them all about the letters and how Süleyman had tricked him. For a moment, he felt so ashamed that he wanted to die. But soon he realized he was probably exaggerating. Yes, it was certainly true that all three of them had fallen in love with Samiha. Mevlut also knew that if he told the police, Those letters were actually meant for Rayiha, they would probably just laugh at him and move on.

  In the afternoon, while he was busy rehearsing all these explanations, they let him go. Outside, he began to grieve over Ferhat. It felt like a major part of his life and memories had been wiped out. But the urge to go home and hug his daughters was so strong that by the time he got on the bus to Taksim, he was euphoric.

  The girls weren’t home, and in its empty state, the house depressed him. Fatma and Fevziye had left without doing the dishes: he felt a rising melancholy, and he was oddly even a little afraid at the sight of the same boza utensils he’d been using for thirty years, Rayiha’s basil plant on the windowsill, and the big cockroaches that had gathered enough courage in just two days to start scuttling about like they owned the place. It was as if the room had turned into someplace else overnight, and everything inside it had very slightly changed shape.

  He hurried outside: he was sure that his daughters would be in Duttepe with their aunts. Everyone there would blame Mevlut now because of how close he’d been with Ferhat. What should he say when he offered Samiha his condolences? He thought about all these things as he looked out the window on the bus to Mecidiyeköy.

  The Aktaş family home in Duttepe was as crowded as it usually was after holiday prayers: Süleyman had been released at around the same time as Mevlut. There was a moment when Mevlut found himself sitting across from Süleyman’s wife, Melahat, but they both looked at the TV and didn’t say a word to each other. Mevlut mused that people were too harsh about this woman, who seemed innocuous after all. All he wanted to do was to take his girls and go back home to Tarlabaşı without anyone blaming him or telling him off for anything. Even these people’s relief at Süleyman’s release felt like a reproach. Thank God this house had four floors now and three TVs that were always on. Mevlut never left the ground floor; this meant he didn’t get to see a tearful Samiha and express his condolences. She’d been widowed, too, now. Perhaps she knew something like this would eventually happen to Ferhat and had been smart enough to leave him.

  Ferhat’s Alevi relatives, his colleagues from the electric company, and a few old friends from Beyoğlu all came to his funeral, but not Samiha. Once they’d left the cemetery, Mevlut and Mohini didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. An ashen sky hung over Istanbul. Neither of them particularly liked drinking. They ended up going to the movies, and afterward Mevlut went straight home to wait for his daughters.

  He didn’t talk to the girls about their uncle Ferhat’s funeral at all. Fatma and Fevziye acted as if they believed that their jokey uncle had been murdered because he’d done something wrong, and they didn’t ask any questions. What had Samiha been telling them, what sorts of things had she been teaching them? Every time he looked at his girls, Mevlut worried about their future and wanted them to think of Ferhat exactly as the Aktaş family thought of him. He knew Ferhat wouldn’t have appreciated this, and he felt bad. But Mevlut’s private views on the subject were irrelevant compared with the need to protect his daughters’ future. Now that Ferhat was dead, the only people he could count on in the struggle to survive in Istanbul were Korkut and Süleyman.

  From the very beginning, Mevlut told Korkut exactly what he’d told the police: he had no knowledge of Ferhat’s high-stakes electricity machinations. In any case, the job no longer suited Mevlut; he was going to resign immediately. He had some money saved up. When he went to the big Seven Hills Electric headquarters in Taksim to hand in his notice, he found he’d already been let go. After all the depredations that had come with privatization, the company’s new owners were particularly concerned with avoiding criticism and the appearance of any irregularities. Mevlut winced when he heard some inspectors he knew already talking about Ferhat as someone who had sullied the good name of all electric inspectors. If another inspector had been killed or beaten up trying to track down illicit circuits, these same men would have spoken of him as a hero who had done the profession proud.

  The cause and method of Ferhat’s murder remained uncertain for several months. At first, the police hinted there might be some kind of homosexual motive behind the murder. Even Korkut and Süleyman were enraged at this theory. The reasoning was that the killer hadn’t forced his way inside Ferhat’s apartment, so he was clearly someone Ferhat knew, and they’d apparently even had a glass of rakı together. They had taken Samiha’s statement and seemed to believe her account of having been estranged from her husband recently, and how she’d been living with her sister and her sister’s husband; she was never considered a suspect, and in fact the police took her back to the house to determine whether anything had been stolen. They arrested two burglars who habitually operated in Çukurcuma and Cihangir and roughed them up a little. The details of the investigation changed every day, and Mevlut could only keep up thanks to Korkut’s political connections.

  There were nine million people living in Istanbul now, and ordinary crimes of passion, drunkenness, or fury weren’t considered news anymore unless there was also a half-naked woman or a celebrity involved. Ferhat’s murder didn’t even make the papers. The newspaper moguls who’d been enjoying a share of the profits since the electricity business had been privatized would have prevented any negative publicity. Six months later, a monthly journal to which Ferhat’s old left-wing militant friends often contributed published a piece no one read on the electricity mafia, with a list of names including “Ferhat Yılmaz.” According to the author, Ferhat was a well-meaning inspector who’d been caught in the crossfire of criminal gangs fighting over the spoils of the electricity racket.

  Mevlut had never heard of this journal before, but two months after the issue with the piece on Ferhat was first published, Süleyman brought him a copy, watched him read the article, and never said a word about it again. He had just had a second baby boy; the construction business was doing well, and he was happy with the way his life was going.

  “You know how much we all love you, right?” said Süleyman. “Fatma and Fevziye tell us you haven’t been able to find the kind of job you deserve.”

  “I’m doing all right, thank God,” said Mevlut. “I don’t understand why the girls would complain.”

  Ferhat’s property was divided over the eight months that followed his death. With the help of a lawyer the Aktaş family had hired for her, Samiha took possession of two small places around Çukurcuma and Tophane that her husband had rushed to buy on the cheap with money he’d saved during his years as a meter inspector. The tiny, ill-proportioned, and shabby apartments were refurbished and repainted by the Vurals’ construction company and then rented out. Mevlut kept up with all the particulars of life in Duttepe through Fatma and Fevziye, who went to see their aunts every weekend, staying overnight on Saturdays, and told their father about everything, from the food they ate to the films they went to see, the games their aunts played, and the rows between Korkut and Vediha. After these visits, Fatma and Fevziye would come home to Tarlabaşı thrilled to show their father the new sweaters, jeans, bags, and other gifts they’d been given. Their aunt Samiha was also p
aying for the evening classes Fatma had already begun to take in preparation for her university entrance exams, and she was giving both her nieces some extra pocket money, too. Fatma wanted to study hospitality management. Her determination always moved Mevlut to tears.

  “You know how much Korkut cares about politics,” said Süleyman. “I’m convinced that one day he will be rewarded for all the good he’s done for this country. We’ve left the village behind, but now we’re creating an association to bring together all the people who’ve come to Istanbul from back home in Beyşehir and make sure we have their support. We’ve got some other wealthy people getting involved from Duttepe, Kültepe, Nohut, and Yören.”

  “I don’t understand politics,” said Mevlut.

  “Mevlut, we’re forty now, we can understand anything,” said Süleyman. “This isn’t about politics anyway. We’re just going to organize some events; we’ve already been hosting day trips and group meals. Now there’s going to be a clubhouse, too. You would just make tea all day, as if you were running a café, and chat with people from back home. We’ve raised some money to rent a place out in Mecidiyeköy. You’d be in charge of opening up in the mornings and closing up in the evenings. You’d make at least three times what some poor street vendor would make. Korkut will guarantee it. You can leave at six and still have time to sell your boza at night. See, we’ve thought about that, too.”

  “Give me a couple of days to think it over.”

  “No, you’ve got to decide right now,” said Süleyman, but he relented when he saw Mevlut’s pensive look.

  Mevlut would have much preferred a job closer to the streets, the crowds, and Beyoğlu. Joking with his customers, ringing their doorbells, walking up and down the endless sloping streets: these were the things he knew and loved, not being cooped up somewhere. But he was painfully aware of how much he still depended on Süleyman and Korkut for support. By now he had spent all the money he’d put away as a meter inspector. His time at the electric company had also cost him a few boza customers, since he hadn’t been able to do as much work in the evenings. Some nights it felt as if not a single curtain would be pulled open as he walked by, not a single customer beckoning him to come upstairs. At night, he could sense the weight of the concrete, the hardness, and the horrors of the city around him. The dogs weren’t menacing anymore. Those wheeled metal dumpsters had made it all the way into the city center by now, to all the places Mevlut loved—Beyoğlu, Şişli, Cihangir, as everywhere else—followed by a new category of poor people who foraged in them. These streets—after the twenty-nine years he’d spent ambling along them—had become part of Mevlut’s soul, but now they were changing again very fast. There were too many words and letters, too many people, too much noise. Mevlut could sense a growing interest in the past, but he didn’t expect this would do much for boza. There was also a new class of tougher, angrier hawkers. They were always trying to cheat people, always shouting, and constantly undercutting one another…These newcomers were as clumsy as they were rapacious. The older generation of street vendors had been swallowed up in the tumult of the city…

  So this was how Mevlut warmed to the idea of socializing with people from his hometown and decided to accept the job. He would even have time to sell boza at night. The clubhouse’s small offices were on the ground floor. There was a roasted-chestnut vendor stationed right outside the door. In his first few months on the job, Mevlut watched him from the window and learned all the tricks of that trade and also spotted the things the man was doing wrong. Sometimes Mevlut would find an excuse to go out and talk to him (“Is the doorman in?” or “Where can I find a glazier around here?”). Occasionally, he let the man leave his roasted-chestnut stall inside the building (a practice that would soon be forbidden), and they would head off to the mosque together for Friday prayers.

  11

  * * *

  What Our Heart Intends and What Our Words Intend

  Fatma Continues Her Studies

  MEVLUT SOON FOUND a pleasing balance between his rather undemanding job running the clubhouse and his boza rounds in the evenings. He often got to leave before six, handing the “venue” over to whoever was hosting that evening’s event. There were several other people who also had the keys to the building. Sometimes the entire local contingent of migrants from villages like Göçük or Nohut would book the place for the whole evening, and Mevlut would hurry home (coming back the next morning to find the offices and the kitchen in a state of grubby disarray). Once he’d had an early dinner with his daughters and checked whether Fatma—now in her second year of high school—was working hard enough to make it to college (yes, she definitely wasn’t pretending), he would go out to sell boza in a happy mood.

  Throughout the autumn of 1998, Mevlut paid frequent visits to the Holy Guide. A new, eager, and more assertive crowd had begun to assemble at his lodge. Mevlut didn’t like them much, and he could sense that the feeling was mutual and that they found his presence incongruous. Bearded believers, backstreet hicks who never wore neckties, devotees, and acolytes of various kinds thronged to the Holy Guide in growing numbers, so that Mevlut hardly ever got the chance to talk to him anymore. Plagued by a series of illnesses that left him suffering chronic exhaustion, the Holy Guide no longer gave callig raphy classes, which meant that those gossipy students who used to come had stopped showing up; at least they’d brought some vitality and good cheer to the place. Nowadays, the Holy Guide sat on his armchair by the window with people crowding around him awaiting their turn to speak, nodding gravely at some disclosure or other (about the Holy Guide’s health? the latest political developments? or something Mevlut didn’t know about?) in their eagerness to express heartfelt sorrow. Now, whenever Mevlut entered the Holy Guide’s retreat, he, too, would put on the same sorrowful look and start talking in whispers. His first visits to this place had been very different: “Look who’s here, the boza seller with the face of an angel,” they’d say back then; “It’s Manager Mevlut!” they’d tease him; and someone would always comment on how much emotion they’d heard in his voice as he’d walked by on the street. Today, people just drank the boza he gave them for free, without even realizing that Mevlut was a boza seller.

  One evening, he finally managed to catch the Holy Guide’s eye and was blessed with the chance to speak to him for a few minutes. By the time it was all over and he was walking out of the lodge, he realized that it hadn’t been the happiest of conversations. Yet he’d been so intensely aware of the envy and resentment that everyone else had felt at this exchange that he was elated. That night’s talk had been both the most meaningful of Mevlut’s “conversations” with the Holy Guide, and the most heartbreaking.

  Mevlut had just about written off this particular visit when the Holy Guide, who’d been talking quietly to those around him, turned formally toward the audience amassed inside the spacious room and asked, “Who is wearing a wristwatch with a leather strap, and who is wearing one with a plastic strap?” The Holy Guide liked to challenge his disciples with questions, riddles, and religious conundrums. As usual, they all took turns trying dutifully to answer his question, when he spotted Mevlut:

  “Ah, it’s our boza seller with the blessed name!” he said, praising Mevlut and summoning him to his side.

  As Mevlut bent down to kiss his hand—covered in brown spots that seemed to grow in size and number with every visit—the man beside the Holy Guide rose to yield his seat to Mevlut. When Mevlut sat down, the Holy Guide looked him straight in the eyes and, leaning in much closer than Mevlut had expected, used some archaic phrases to ask him how he was doing. The words he used were as beautiful as the calligraphy he’d put up on the walls.

  Mevlut immediately thought of Samiha and cursed the devil for playing tricks on his mind while everyone was looking. He had long been considering how to explain to the Holy Guide about the letters he’d written to Rayiha when he’d actually had Samiha in mind. Just how much thought he must have devoted to this problem became clear to him w
hen he found himself suddenly able to recall years’ worth of intricate reasoning. First he would invoke the notion of intent in Islam. He would then ask the Holy Guide to explain the subtle distinction between a person’s private and public intentions. Here was his chance to analyze the defining strangeness of his life through the eyes of this holiest of men; perhaps what he learned that night might finally free him from all the doubts that still weighed on his soul.

  But their conversation took a completely different turn. Before Mevlut could say anything at all, the Holy Guide asked another question.

  “Have you been performing your daily prayers?”

  This was a question he usually reserved for immodest attention seekers, people who talked too much, and newcomers. He’d never asked Mevlut before. Perhaps that was because he knew Mevlut was just a penniless boza seller.

  Mevlut already knew how the question was meant to be answered because he’d heard it answered before: the chosen guest was supposed to give a truthful account of how many times he’d prayed and given alms over the past few days, while admitting with regret that he still hadn’t done enough to fulfill his duties as a believer. The Holy Guide would then pardon any shortcomings and provide his supplicant with some words of comfort: “What matters is that you meant well.” But the devil must have been at it again, or perhaps Mevlut simply realized that the whole truth might not go down so well; in any event, he managed only a faltering response. He said that what mattered in the eyes of God was the heart’s intent, the very words Mevlut had often heard the Holy Guide himself say. But the moment they left his mouth, he knew that there was something unseemly about his repeating them like that.

  “It does not matter whether your heart intends to pray; the most important thing is to truly pray,” said the Holy Guide. His tone was gentle, but those who knew him recognized it straightaway as the Holy Guide’s manner of scolding.