Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

At almost eleven years of age, Fevziye was still a child: she hated cleaning, wiping, drying, or any other task that required effort; she always found ways to cut corners if forced to perform the duties she so readily shirked. Mevlut often felt he should tell her off, but when he tried to be stern with her, he found it so hard to keep a straight face that he knew it would be no use. Mevlut loved talking to her about the customers who came in.

Some would barely take a sip of their boza before declaring with a few unpleasant remarks that they didn’t like it and then demand a partial refund. Such a tiny incident might give Mevlut and Fevziye a subject of conversation for two or three days. They would listen closely to the conversation between the two men who were going to fix the bastard who’d sent them a bad check; the pair of friends who’d just placed a bet on some horse with the bookie down the street; or that group of three who’d just come into the shop to wait out the rain after coming out of the movies. Mevlut loved to pick up a customer’s forgotten or discarded newspaper and have one of his clever girls, whichever happened to be there, read aloud to their father from a page chosen at random, as if he (like their illiterate grandfather Mustafa, whom they’d never met) couldn’t have read it for himself, and he would smile with satisfaction as he listened and gazed out the window. Sometimes he would interrupt them—“See what I mean?”—drawing their attention to some little lesson about life, ethics, and responsibility, which the article illustrated.

Sometimes one of the girls would give her father an embarrassed account of whatever was troubling her at that particular moment (the geography teacher who had it in for her, or how she needed new shoes because the ones she had were coming apart, or how she didn’t want to wear that old overcoat anymore because the other girls were making fun of it), and when Mevlut realized that there was nothing he could do to solve the problem, he would say, “Don’t worry, this too shall pass,” and conclude with the following aphorism: “As long as you keep your heart pure, you will always get what you want in the end.” One night he overheard them laughing over his devotion to that particular gem, but he couldn’t get angry at being the butt of their jokes, such was his pleasure at yet another demonstration of their cleverness and wit.

Every evening, Mevlut was willing to leave the shop unattended for a few minutes to take his daughter by the hand — whichever one had come to help him that day — and leap with her over the immense crowds and across İstiklal Avenue to the Tarlabaşı side, tell her, “Now go straight home, no dawdling,” and watch as she disappeared from view, before he hurried back to Brothers-in-Law.

One evening it was Fatma he’d dropped off, and he returned to find Ferhat inside, smoking a cigarette. “The people who’ve been giving us this old Greek shop have joined our enemies,” said Ferhat. “Property values and rents around here are going up, my dear Mevlut. You could sell anything you like here — socks, kebabs, underwear, apples — and still make ten times what we’re making.”

“We don’t make anything anyway…”

“Exactly. I’m dropping the shop.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to close it.”

“What if I were to stay?” Mevlut asked timidly.

“You’ll get a visit from the gang who rents out all the Greek properties. They’ll charge you whatever they feel like…And if you don’t pay it, they’ll make you regret it…”

“Why didn’t they do that to you?”

“I took care of their electricity and kept all these old abandoned houses hooked to the grid so they’d be of some use. If you clear out right away, you won’t lose all this stuff. Take it all out, sell it off, do whatever you want with it.”

Mevlut closed up shop right away, bought a small bottle of rakı from the grocer’s, and went home to have dinner with Rayiha and the girls. It had been years since the four of them had last sat at the dinner table together: he cracked jokes and laughed along with them as they watched TV, and then, with the air of someone with some excellent news, he announced that he would again be selling boza on the street at night; that, after careful consideration, he and Ferhat had decided to close the shop; and that he was drinking rakı now because he was taking a holiday for the evening. Had Rayiha not said, “God help us all,” no one would have had the feeling of having heard some bad news. His wife’s words irked Mevlut.

“Don’t bring God into this while I’m having rakı . Everything will be fine.”

The next day, Fatma and Fevziye helped him carry all the kitchen utensils back home from the shop. Mevlut was outraged when a junk dealer in Çukurcuma offered him a pittance for the desk, the table, and the chairs, so he looked up a carpenter he knew, but it turned out that whatever wood could be salvaged from the battered old furniture was worth even less than what the junk dealer had offered. He took the smaller of the two mirrors home. As for the heavy one with the silver frame that Ferhat had bought, he got Fatma and Fevziye each to take one end and carry it over to their aunt’s house. He took the framed clipping from the Righteous Path and the picture of the graveyard with the tombstones, the cypress trees, and the radiant light, and hung them side by side on the wall behind their television. Looking at the picture of “The Other Realm” comforted Mevlut.

Guilt and Astonishment

AFTER HIS FAILURE at the Binbom Café, Mevlut knew he couldn’t ask the Aktaş family to find him another job. Though angry with Ferhat, he would have been prepared to set hard feelings aside and let Ferhat ease his conscience by helping his friend — but Rayiha wouldn’t hear of it: she blamed Ferhat for closing the shop and kept saying that he was a bad person.

In the evenings, Mevlut sold boza, and in the mornings he would canvass his acquaintances in the city, looking for something. When headwaiters and restaurant managers he’d known for years offered him positions as a line manager or cashier, he acted as if he would give their proposals due consideration, but in truth he was after a job that would let him work less and earn more (like Ferhat), leaving him enough time and energy to sell boza in the evening.

One day in mid-April he heard from Mohini, who had been trying to help his friend ever since the closing of Brothers-in-Law. Mohini told Mevlut that the Groom, their old middle-school classmate, would be expecting to see him at the Pangaltı offices of his advertising agency.

When Mevlut arrived, wearing his best suit, the Groom greeted him with a formal handshake, and the two old friends didn’t even exchange a hug. Nevertheless, the Groom presented him to his pretty, smiling secretary (They must be lovers, thought Mevlut) as “a very worthy and special person, and exceptionally bright,” and “a great friend.” The secretary giggled at the idea of her wealthy bourgeois employer being friends of any kind with this man, who was evidently poor and wholly inept. So it was not altogether surprising when it was proposed that he run the tea stall under the stairs on the fourth floor; but Mevlut instinctively wanted to be nowhere near the Groom, let alone serve his besuited underlings tea all day, so he declined immediately. He quickly agreed, however, to the alternative assignment of looking after the company parking area in the back courtyard, which the Groom pointed out from the window.

You entered the courtyard parking area by way of the street that ran behind the building; Mevlut’s job was to bar unauthorized vehicles and to guard the place against those gangs commonly referred to as the “parking mafia.”