by Orhan Pamuk
“So how are you?”
“We’re fine, Grandmother!”
As if she’d suffered some defeat, her face turned furious. And I remembered being afraid of that face when I was little.
“Recep, put a pillow behind my back!”
“You have all the pillows behind you, Madam.”
“Should I get you another one, Grandmother?” said Nilgün.
“So, tell me, what are you up to?”
“Grandma, Nilgün’s started at university,” I said.
“I know how to talk, too, Faruk, don’t worry,” said Nilgün. “I’m studying sociology, Grandmother, I’ve just finished the first year.”
“And you?”
“I’ll finish high school next year,” said Metin.
“After that?”
“After that, I’ll go to America!” said Metin.
“What’s over there?” said Grandmother.
“Rich people and smart people!” said Nilgün.
“University!” said Metin.
“Don’t all talk at once!” said Grandmother. “How about you?”
I didn’t tell her that I went back and forth between home and my department carrying a huge heavy bag of books, that I sat around bored in an empty house at night before eating and then fell asleep in front of the television. I didn’t tell her that only yesterday morning on my way to the university I was already longing to have a drink, that I was afraid of losing my faith in what they call history, that I missed my wife.
“He’s been made an associate professor, Grandmother,” said Nilgün.
“Grandmother, you look really well,” I said out of desperation.
“What’s your wife doing?” said Grandmother.
“I told you the last time, Grandmother,” I said. “We got divorced.”
“I know, I know!” she said. “What’s she doing now?”
“She remarried.”
“You got their rooms ready, right?” said Grandmother.
“I did,” said Recep.
“Don’t you have anything else to say?”
“Grandmother, Istanbul has become very crowded,” said Nilgün.
“It’s crowded here, too,” said Recep.
“Go sit over there, Recep,” I said.
“Grandmother, this house has gotten really old and rickety,” said Metin.
“I’m not well,” said Grandmother.
“It’s really falling apart, Grandmother. Let’s get it knocked down, have an apartment built, you’ll be so much more comfortable—”
“Quiet!” said Nilgün. “She’s not listening to you. This isn’t the time for it.”
There was a silence. I felt as if I could hear the furniture expanding and creaking in the hot airless room. There was a dim, almost distilled light coming in the windows.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” said Grandmother.
“Grandmother, we saw Hasan on the road!” said Nilgün. “He’s grown up, he’s become enormous.”
Grandmother’s lips quivered strangely.
“What are they doing, Recep?” asked Nilgün.
“Nothing!” said Recep. “They live in the house on the hill. Hasan’s in high school …”
“What are you telling them?” shouted Grandmother. “Who are you talking about?”
“What’s Ismail doing?” asked Nilgün.
“Nothing,” said Recep. “He sells lottery tickets.”
“What’s he telling you?” Grandmother shouted again. “Talk to me, not him! You get out of here, Recep, go down to your kitchen!”
“He’s not a problem, Grandmother,” said Nilgün. “Let him stay.”
“He’s fooled you right off, hasn’t he?” said Grandmother. “What did you tell them? Have you made them feel sorry for you already?”
“I haven’t said anything, Madam,” said Recep as he left.
“Everything’s become very expensive, Grandmother,” Nilgün said.
There was another silence.
“Okay, Grandmother,” I said. “We’d better go settle into our rooms.”
“You just came,” said Grandmother. “Where are you off to?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “We’re here for a whole week.”
“So you have nothing nice to tell me,” said Grandmother, almost smiling with some strange air of triumph.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the cemetery,” I said.
Recep installed us one by one into our rooms and opened the shutters. For me he’d made up the one overlooking the well again. It smelled of mildew, linens, and childhood.
“I hung your towel here,” he said, showing me.
I lit up a cigarette, and we looked out the open window together.
“Recep, how is Cennethisar this summer?”
“Bad,” he said. “It’s not like it used to be. People have become bad, really nasty!” he said.
He turned and looked me in the face, expecting understanding. Between the trees the sea was visible in the distance, and we could hear the buzz coming from the beach. Metin joined us:
“Faruk, could you give me the car keys?”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting my bag out and then I’m leaving.”
“If you bring our bags upstairs, I’ll let you have the car until tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Don’t worry, Faruk Bey, I’ll take care of the bags,” said Recep.
“Aren’t you going to the archives now in search of the plague?” said Metin.
“What are you going to look for?” said Recep.
“The plague I’ll look for tomorrow,” I said.
“Are you going to start drinking right away?” said Metin.
“What’s my drinking to you?” I said, but I wasn’t mad.
“Right,” said Metin, as he took the car keys and left.
Without thinking about anything I walked out behind Metin and went down the steps to the opening of the narrow passage. Recep was behind me.
“Is the key for the laundry still here?” I said. I slid my hand along the top of the door frame and found the dusty key.
“Madam doesn’t know,” said Recep. “Don’t tell her.”
I had to push hard to force the door open. Something must have fallen behind it: a skull covered with dust stuck between the door and the trunk. I picked it up and blew on it, then trying to look cheerful I showed it to him.
“Do you remember this?”
“Sir?”
“I guess you never come in here.”
I left the dusty skull on a little table that was covered with papers.
I was playing with a glass pipe I had taken into my hand as a child would, before setting it down on one of the pans of a rusty pair of scales. Standing silent in the doorway, Recep looked fearfully at the things I was touching: hundreds of little vials, pieces of broken glass, trunks, pieces of bone thrown into a box, old newspapers, rusty scissors, tweezers, French books of anatomy and medicine, boxes full of paper, pictures of birds and airplanes tacked to a board, eyeglass lenses, a circle divided into seven colors, chains, the sewing machine whose pedal I used to push pretending to be a driver when I was little, screwdrivers, bugs and lizards pinned to boards, hundreds of empty bottles with MONOPOLIES ADMINISTRATION written on them, all kinds of powders in labeled pharmacy bottles, and even mushrooms, in a flowerpot …
“Are those mushrooms, Faruk Bey?” said Recep.
“Yes, take them if you can use them.”
He didn’t enter, probably because he was afraid; so I went over and gave them to him. Then I found the brass sign indicating in the old Ottoman letters and in Ottoman time that Dr. Selâhattin accepted visitors every day from two to six and in the afternoon from eight to twelve. For a moment I felt like taking it back to Istanbul, not just because I thought it was charming but as a memento of him. Immediately, however, I was overcome by a strange disgust and fear of the past, and so I tossed the sign back on the heap of dusty things. After locking the door, I went o
ver to the kitchen with Recep. On the staircase, Metin was carrying the bags upstairs, grumbling.
5
Metin Wastes No Time
After I’d brought Faruk and Nilgün’s suitcases upstairs, I stripped down, put my bathing suit on under my summer clothes, grabbed my wallet, for once full of money, went downstairs, and took off in the old broken-down Anadol, headed for Vedat’s. When I got there, there was no sign of life except for the maid working in the kitchen. So I went around to the back through the garden, and pushing a little on the window, I spotted old Vedat lying in his bed. I sprang like a cat into the room and smashed his head into the pillow.
“Hey, you stupid animal,” he shouted. “What’s the idea? You think this is a joke?”
Pleased with myself, I only smiled smugly as I sized up the room. Everything was the same as last year, even the gross picture of the naked woman on the wall.
“Come on,” I said. “Up and at ’em!”
“What are we going to do at this hour?”
“What does anybody do in the afternoon?”
“Nothing!”
“Isn’t anybody around?”
“Everybody’s around, and there are even a few new ones.”
“Where do you hang out?”
“At Ceylan’s. They just got here!”
“Okay. Come on. Let’s go over there.”
“Ceylan won’t be up yet.”
“Well, then, let’s go swimming someplace else,” I said. “I haven’t been even once so far this year, because I’ve been wasting all my time teaching English and math to the retarded sons of cloth manufacturers and iron merchants.”
“So you’re not interested in Ceylan?”
“Get up, let’s at least go to Turgay’s.”
“You know, they offered him a spot on the youth basketball team?”
“I don’t care, I gave up basketball.”
“Leaves you more time to brownnose your teachers, right?”
Looking at Vedat’s tanned, fit, relaxed body I thought: Yeah, I work hard at my classes, if I’m not first in class I get really frustrated, but I don’t care what you call it; my father doesn’t have a set of looms for me to take over in ten years, a thread factory, an iron depot and a foundry, or even a small contract in Libya, not even an import-export office, my poor dad; he resigned his post as a district administrator and he’s got nothing to show for it but a grave we visit once a year so Grandmother doesn’t cry in the house, we go so she can do her bawling there.
Vedat had no intention of stirring from the bed where he lay facedown, but at least he dragged his mouth over to the edge of the pillow to speak: he said that Mehmet had brought a nurse back with him from England, who was staying with his family now, although they slept in separate rooms and even though she was not a girl, as he called her, but actually a thirty-year-old woman, she got along well enough with the girls in our group.
“Turan, as you know, is doing his military duty.”
How was I supposed to know, I said to myself, I don’t spend the winters with Ankara and Istanbul society, I spend them going between the dorm and my aunt’s house and trying to make a little money teaching mathematics, English, and poker to dopey rich kids like you. But I didn’t say anything, and Vedat continued, saying that Turan’s father felt his son wasn’t amounting to much and so, instead of pulling some strings, he decided the life of a private would straighten Turan out, but when I asked whether he had straightened out, Vedat said very seriously that he didn’t know, only that Turan had come home on a fifteen-day leave and started going after Hülya, at which point I was getting lost in my own thoughts, until Vedat, changing the subject, said, Oh yeah, there’s a new guy around, and I figured out right away that he was okay with Vedat, because he said this Fikret was “totally cool” and “our kind of guy,” not really explaining why until a little later he started to tell me about how much horsepower the guy’s fiberglass boat had, at which point I got really fed up and just stopped listening. When he realized this we were quiet for a while.
“What’s your sister doing?” he finally said.
“She’s become a typical leftie, always saying ‘I can’t believe how blind I was,’ just like the rest of them.”
“That’s a shame, sorry to hear it. Selcuk’s sister’s like that too,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Even worse, it looks like she’s in love with one of them! What about your sister?”
He could see I was annoyed and realized I didn’t like the subject.
“How’s your brother doing?”
“All he does is drink and get fat. He’s a hopeless slob! But he and my sister get along just fine. I don’t care, they can do whatever they want, but since one of them is so ideological that she hates money, and the other is such a slob he wouldn’t even lift a finger to earn any, I’m the one who has to deal with practical matters. That weird, awful house is still sitting on that plot of land for nothing.”
“Aren’t your grandmother and that, you know, the guy who works there, aren’t they living in the house?”
“They are. But why can’t they live in an apartment of a building we could build there. Then I wouldn’t have to spend the whole winter telling rich retards about the length of the hypotenuse and its relation to the radius of a circle, know what I mean?”
“I see your point,” he said. Vedat seemed a little uncomfortable, and I was afraid that he would think I was some kind of enemy of the rich.
He got up from the bed he hadn’t budged from until now, naked except for a little bathing suit, a nice tan on his handsome, smooth body. He yawned in an easy way, no pains, no cares.
“Funda will want to come! But she’s still asleep.”
He went to wake up his sister. A little while later he came back and furiously lit a cigarette as though his life were completely full of problems and he couldn’t do without one.
“You still don’t smoke?”
“No.”
There was a silence. I thought about Funda sleepily scratching herself in her bed. We talked a little about stupid things, like whether the sea was hot or cold. Then Funda came in the door.
“Vedat, where are my sandals?”
Last year this Funda was a little girl, this year she had long, beautiful legs and a little bikini.
“Hello, Metin!”
“Hello.”
“How are things?… Vedat, I asked you, where are my sandals?”
The brother and sister immediately started to argue: One said he wasn’t the keeper of the other’s things, the other asked how her straw hat had turned up in his closet the other day, and so it continued, back and forth, until Funda left, slamming the door. When she came back a little later, it was as if nothing were wrong, but then they started up again over who would look for the car key in their mother’s room. Finally Vedat went.
“Well, Funda,” I said, tense just to be there, “what else is new?”
“What could be new! It’s totally boring!”
We pressed on, talking for a while: I asked what year she had just completed—freshman year: she was doing two years’ “prep,” no, not in the German or Austrian high school, in the Italian one. So then I murmured these words to her: “Equipment electrique, Brevete type, Ansaldo San Giorgio Genova …” Funda asked me if I’d read them on some present someone brought me from Italy. I didn’t tell her that they were from the incomprehensible metal plates found above the doors on all the trolleys in Istanbul and that everyone in the city who used the trolleys wound up memorizing them to keep from dying of boredom; I got a feeling somehow that she would look down on me if I told her I rode the trolley. Then we were silent. I thought a little about the horrible creature they called their mother who slept until noon, reeked of creams and perfumes, who talked about playing cards to pass the time, and who passed the time by playing cards. Then Vedat came back, swinging the car keys on his finger.
We took the car that had been baking in the sun two hundred meters to Ceylan’s. I wanted to say so
mething because I was afraid of seeming too excited.
“They changed this place a lot.”
We walked across the flagstones set a step apart in the lawn. A gardener was watering it in the heat. Finally I saw the girls, and trying to act natural, I said to Vedat and Funda, “Hey, do you ever play poker?”
“Huh?”
We came down the steps. The girls looked good lying there. Realizing they’d seen me, I thought with satisfaction: That money I won playing poker bought me the shirt from Ismet’s and these Levi’s I have over my bathing suit, and in my pants pocket I still have twelve thousand liras I earned in a month giving private lessons to idiots! Still trying to make conversation, I said:
“Do you play cards?”
“What cards?” Funda said to one of them, “Let me introduce you to Metin!”
But I already knew Zeynep.
“Hello, Zeynep, how’re things?”
“Good.”
“This is Fahrunnisa, but don’t call her that, or she’ll get mad. She goes by Fafa!”
Fafa was not a pretty girl anyway. We shook hands.
“And this is Ceylan!”
I shook Ceylan’s taut, light hand. I wanted to look somewhere else. I thought I might be in love, but it was a silly, childish thought. Looking at the sea I tried to believe that I wasn’t nervous but calm and, that way, to calm myself. The others forgot about me and started to talk among themselves.
“Waterskiing is hard, too.”
“If I could just get up on my feet.”
“Well, at least it’s not as dangerous as skiing on the snow.”
“Your bathing suit has to be snug.”
“It hurts your arms though.”
“When Fikret gets here we’ll give it a try.”
I was bored, I shuffled, I coughed.
“Would you sit down!” said Vedat.
I thought I was looking intriguingly serious.
“Sit!” said Ceylan.
She was pretty enough that I again thought that I could fall in love with her, then a little later, I thought I believed what I had thought.
