A Strangeness in My Mind by Pamuk Orhan

Author:Pamuk, Orhan [Pamuk, Orhan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-20T07:00:00+00:00

12

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In Tarlabaşı

The Happiest Man in the World

AT NIGHT, Mevlut and Rayiha slept in the same bed as their two daughters, Fatma and Fevziye. The house was cold, but it was nice and warm under the bedcovers. Sometimes the little ones were already asleep when Mevlut went out to sell boza in the evenings. He would come back late at night to find them asleep in exactly the same position as when he’d left. Rayiha would be sitting under the covers on the edge of the bed, watching TV with the heating turned off.

The girls had their own little bed next to the window, but they were scared of being alone, and even in the same room they would start crying if they were put there. Mevlut, who had the utmost respect for their feelings on this matter, would tell Rayiha, “Isn’t it incredible? They’re so little, but they’re already scared of loneliness.” The girls quickly got used to the big bed; there, they could have slept through anything. But when they slept in their own bed, they would wake up at the tiniest sound and start crying, which in turn would wake Mevlut and Rayiha, and the girls wouldn’t settle down until they could move to the big bed. Eventually Mevlut and Rayiha saw that sleeping all together in the same bed was better for everyone.

Mevlut had bought them an Arçelik gas stove, secondhand. It could turn the house into a sauna, but it used up too much gas. (Sometimes, to economize, Rayiha would warm their food up on it, too.) She bought the gas from a Kurd whose shop was three streets down in Dolapdere. As the conflict in eastern Turkey grew more violent, Mevlut watched the streets of Tarlabaşı fill up, one family at a time, with Kurdish migrants. These newcomers were tough people, nothing like easygoing Ferhat. Their villages had been evacuated and burned to the ground during the war. They were poor and never bought any boza, so Mevlut rarely went to their neighborhoods. He stopped going altogether when drug dealers and homeless, glue-sniffing young men began to frequent the area.

After Ferhat drove off in a taxi with Samiha in early 1984, Mevlut wouldn’t see him again for many years. This was very strange, considering how close they’d been in their childhood and youth, and every now and then Mevlut would offer Rayiha a mumbled explanation: “They live too far away.” Only rarely did he allow himself to think that the real reason for the distance between them was in all those letters Mevlut had written with Ferhat’s wife, Samiha, in mind.

It was also true that Istanbul’s relentless sprawl was driving them farther apart. The bus journey to and from the other’s house would have taken half a day. Mevlut missed Ferhat, even as the focus of his resentment toward him kept shifting. He wondered why Ferhat never got in touch. Whatever the reason, it was clearly an admission of guilt. When he found

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