Free Silent House by Orhan Pamuk Page B

two were silent. I went in and finished washing up. When I went in again Metin Bey had returned from getting dressed, so I went back, took off my apron, checked my jacket and tie, combed my hair, and smiled at myself in the mirror the way I did after the barber combed my hair. I went outside.
    “We’re ready,” they said.
    Upstairs, Madam had finally gotten dressed, the same terrible black coat, of course, her skirts touching the floor, since Madam was getting a little shorter each year, and the tips of her weird pointy boots stuck out like the identical noses of two curious foxes. She was putting a scarf on her head. She looked embarrassed to see me, and we were silent for a minute.
    “Won’t you be too warm in this heat?” I said.
    “Is everybody ready?”
    “They are.”
    She was looking around the room for something and, seeing that the closet was closed, seemed to look for something else, before looking at the closet again.
    “Take me down, then.”
    She saw me pulling the door open but had to give it a tug with her own hand, too. At the top of the stairs she leaned on me rather than on her cane. We went down very slowly, and when the others had gathered outside, we all worked at getting Madam into the car.
    “Did you make sure the doors are closed?” she said.
    “Yes, Madam,” I said, but then I went back in and this time slammed them so she could be assured.

7

Grandmother Offers Her Prayers

    M y God, suddenly, so strange, when the car started to move, I got so excited, just as I did when as a girl I’d gotten into a horse-drawn carriage, but then I thought of you, all you poor souls in the cemetery, and I thought I would cry, but not yet, Fatma, because looking out the windows as the car passed through the gate into the streets, I saw Recep in the house, was he going to stay there all by himself, I began to wonder, but the car stopped and we waited a little till the dwarf got in on the other side and crawled into the back.
    “You shut the doors tight, didn’t you, Recep?”
    “Yes, Faruk Bey.”
    I sighed and leaned all the way back in my seat.
    “Grandmother, you heard, didn’t you, Recep shut the doors tight. So don’t let it be like last year, constantly saying that they were left open …”
    I started to think about them and, of course, I remembered they were talking about how you had hung a brass sign on the garden gate, Selâhattin, that said DOCTOR SELÂHATTIN , these are my hours and I won’t take money from the poor, Fatma, you said, I want tobe in touch with the people, of course we don’t have many patients yet, it’s not a big city, we’re all the way out on the shore after all, really nobody else except a few miserable villagers in those days, now when I lifted my head—My God, look at the apartment buildings, the shops, the crowds, these half-naked people on the beach, don’t look, Fatma, what’s all that noise, all of them falling on top of one another, look, the hell you dreamed of has come to earth, Selâhattin, you won, if this is what you wanted, of course, look at the crowd, maybe this was it.
    “Grandmother looks really interested in everything, doesn’t she?”
    No, I wasn’t looking at anything, but your shameless grandchildren, Selâhattin.
    “Should we go the long way around and give you a little tour, Grandmother?”
    They must think your innocent wife is like you, yes, well, what can the poor kids do, brought up as they were, because you made your son just like yourself, Selâhattin, Doğan didn’t have any interest in his children either, Mother, their aunts can take care of them now, I can’t do it; if the aunts take care of them, then this is how they turn out, believing their grandmother is keen to see all the ugliness on the way to the cemetery, well, I’m not even looking, I bend my head down and open my purse, I inhale the smell of old age that rises up, and in the alligator darkness my little dry hand fishes for my handkerchief and I dab my poor