Read Online Silent House by Orhan Pamuk - Free Book Online

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.
    “There’s a chaise longue over there,” said Ceylan, pointing with the tip of her nose.
    Walking over to the chaise longue I saw it: horrifying furniture inside the open door of the concrete house; in American films, rich unhappy couples sit on furniture like this, drinking whiskey and shouting at each other as they argue about their troubled marriages. The smell of furniture, wealth, and luxury wafting out of the house seemed almost to challenge me—What are you doing here?—but I gave it some thought and I relaxed: I’m smarter than all of them! I looked at the gardener still watering the lawn, I picked up the chaise, went back with it, and sat down beside them listening to the chitchat while trying to decide whether I was in love or not.
    Fafa was dishing some dirt about our classmates, and Ceylan, alsoin our class, kept saying, tell them about this, and, oh, tell them about that, so that by the time the stories had ended I’d been roasted by the sun, and to top it off, I still hadn’t made up my mind. Then, not wanting to seem like some kind of boor who didn’t enjoy a joke, I decided to tell them some similarly retarded stories of mine, so I described in detail how we stole the exam questions from the principal’s office, but I left out how much money we made selling them to some stupid rich kids, some of whom had to pay a second time to get the answers, too, because I figured they would take it the wrong way, my having to do little jobs like that because I didn’t have a rich father to give me an Omega wristwatch for my birthday or some other bogus occasion, it would seem crude to them, even though their fathers were up to pretty much the same kind of thing from morning till night. The terrible racket of a motorboat pulling up shattered the relaxed atmosphere. They all turned their heads and looked. I deduced it was Fikret. He came in at high speed as though he were going to crash into the quay, then suddenly stopped, raising a big spray of water before jumping ashore with some difficulty.
    “What’s up, guys?” he said, shooting me a glance.
    “Let me introduce you,” said Vedat. “Metin, Fikret!”
    “Guys, what do you want to drink?” said Ceylan.
    Everybody said Coca-Cola.
    Fikret didn’t even answer but just pursed his lips and waved away the offer, as if to suggest he had too much on his mind even to enjoy a Coke.
    I looked over but couldn’t figure out whether Ceylan felt sorry for him or not. But I understood something else: I’ve been wise to this game the Fikrets play for years. If you’re ugly and stupid and you want girls to look at you, you better at least come off really deep, and it doesn’t hurt to