Silent House by Orhan Pamuk

together, but he never said anything about me playing with you. I said the Fatiha prayer for him and stayed there for a while, not doing anything except cooking in the sun and listening to the crickets, and I thought strange things, strange dark things, I shivered, my thoughts got all mixed up, as if I’d smoked a cigarette. Then I left the cemetery, and I was going back to where I left my mathematics open on the table. Because an hour ago when I was sitting at the table, just as I looked out the window, you were going up the hill in your white Anadol and I realized, because your grandmother was with you, where you must be going and then, while I was thinking about the cemetery and the dead, it became even more impossible for me to follow that stupid annoying math and so I said, Why not just go and check them out, I’ll relax after I see what they’re up to in the cemetery, then I’ll come back and work, I said, so I hopped out the window to keep my mother from getting upset over nothing, ran up here, and saw you and now it’s back to the math problem I left.
    The dusty road ended, and the asphalt began. Cars were going by, and once or twice I signaled, but people with cars no longer have consciences: they go downhill at top speed, without even seeing me. Then I came to Tahsin’s. He and his mother were picking fruit in the back while his father sat at the stand selling cherries, but it was as if he couldn’t see me, maybe because I wasn’t driving a luxury car at a hundred kilometers an hour and suddenly braking so I could jump out and buy five kilos of cherries at eighty liras a kilo, he didn’t even lift his head and look at me. Yes, I would say that I’m the only one left who can’t think about something besides money, but when I saw Halil’s garbage truck I was happy. They were going downhill, I put up my hand for them to stop, and I got on.
    “What’s your dad doing?” he said.
    “The lottery,” I said. “What else? He works the trains in the mornings.”
    “You?”
    “I’m still in school,” I said. “How fast can this thing go?”
    “Eighty!” he said. “What are you doing here anyway?”
    “I was feeling fed up,” I said. “I took a walk.”
    “If you’re already fed up at this age …,” they said, laughing, and braking in front of my house.
    “No,” I said. “I’m going all the way down.”
    “What’s there?”
    “I have a friend there, you don’t know them.”
    As we passed the house, I looked at my open window. I’ll be back, I thought, before my father gets home at noon. I got out of the truck as soon as we came into the neighborhood at the bottom of the hill. I walked quickly so that Halil’s guys wouldn’t think I was some kind of useless bum. I went all the way out to the breakwater and sat down a little and looked at the sea, since I was dripping sweat from the heat. A motorboat pulled up at high speed, dropped off a girl on the dock before zooming off again. Looking at that girl, I thought of you, Nilgün. I saw how you lifted up your hands in prayer just a little while ago: It was weird. Just like you were actually talking with Him. It says in the book, there are angels. Then I thought: There’s the devil, too. And other things. I thought about them as though I wanted to be scared, to shiver and feel guilty so I’d run home up the hill, do my math, but I’d be sitting down soon enough anyway, so why not wander around for a while?
    When I got to the beach and heard all that noise that just stuns you and saw that mass of flesh, I thought again about guilt, sin, and the devil. A quivering mass of flesh: once in a while a bright beach ball would waft slowly up, as though it wanted to escape all this guilt and sin, but then it would fall down and get lost in the mass of flesh again; the women wouldn’t let it go. I looked some more through the wire fence covered with ivy at the crowd and the women. It’s strange,sometimes I feel like doing something bad, then I