Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

In the past fifteen years, these gangs of five or six friends hailing from the same village, a mix of mafia thugs and ordinary delinquents with connections in the police force, had spread all over the city like prickly burrs. Spotting some road, street corner, or empty lot, any place in the center of Istanbul where parking wasn’t forbidden, they would stake a claim of ownership — with knives and guns if need be — demanding payment from anyone who wanted to park there and punishing those who balked by smashing their quarter lights, puncturing their tires, or taking a key to the paint of the new car they’d imported from Europe at great expense. During the six weeks Mevlut spent as a parking lot guard, he witnessed a huge number of arguments, swearing matches, and fistfights involving people who refused to pay up: some thought the fee was outrageously high; others said, “Who the hell are you, where did you come from, why should I pay you for the right to park in front of the house I’ve been living in for forty years?” Some looked for other excuses: “If I pay, will you give me a receipt?” By dint of levelheaded diplomacy and shrewd evasion, Mevlut was able to stay out of these disputes while enforcing from the very beginning a clear border between the advertising agency’s space and the street where the gang ran its racket.

In spite of their violent inclinations, their brazen, menacing ways, and their well-publicized inclination to damage people’s cars, Istanbul’s legions of car-park gangs provided the city’s heedless rich with an invaluable service. Whenever traffic was at a complete standstill, wherever it seemed impossible to find a spot, drivers could stop on a pavement or even in the middle of the road and entrust their car to these gangs’ “valets,” who would park and look after it as long as needed, cleaning the windows and even washing the whole car for an additional fee. When some of the younger, more audacious gang members slipped by Mevlut to park some car in the area he was supposed to guard, he would look away, as the Groom had made clear that he didn’t want “any trouble.” This made the job easier. Mevlut would stop street traffic with the assurance of a cop when the Groom or one of his employees arrived in the morning and again when they left in the evening; he would offer encouraging parking counsel—“Just a little to the left now” or “You’ve got loads of room”—hold the car door open for VIPs (with the Groom, this was always done in a spirit of camaraderie), and provide updates for those who asked him whether so-and-so had arrived or left already. The Groom’s intercession had procured Mevlut a chair, which was placed where the pavement merged into the courtyard, a point some people called the courtyard gate, though there was no gate there at all. Mevlut would spend most of his time sitting on this wooden chair to watch the traffic on the backstreet, the two doormen who stood talking to each other from outside their respective buildings, the beggar who every now and then came off the main road where he paraded his mangled leg, the industrious apprentice to that grocer from Samsun, the ordinary passersby, the windows on the surrounding buildings, and the stray cats and dogs. He would also chat with the local parking gang’s most junior member (whom colleagues sneeringly called “the valet”).

The extraordinary thing about Kemal, the valet from Zonguldak, was that even though he wasn’t particularly clever and talked too much, Mevlut found every single thing he said interesting. The key to his appeal was his free-flowing candor about the most intimate aspects of his everyday life — including his sexual proclivities, the eggs and sausages he’d had for dinner yesterday, the way his mother did the laundry or fought with his father back in the village, and how he’d felt watching a love scene on TV the night before. These personal anecdotes often came with a side helping of unsolicited opinions on poli tics, business, and local goings-on: half the men who worked in that advertising agency were faggots, and half the women were dykes; the whole of Pangaltı used to belong to the Armenians, and one day, they were going to use the Americans to demand it all back; the mayor of Istanbul was secretly a stockholder in the company that built those “caterpillar” buses they imported from Hungary.

Mevlut always sensed a hint of menace in the valet’s bravado: that rich bastard who’d parked his Mercedes on their turf without even bothering to give the poor soul there to guard it some small change for his troubles, hadn’t he considered that he might just come back to find his car gone, and no one doing anything about it? Or those cheapskates who refused to pay the parking fee (which was less than a pack of Marlboros anyway) and threatened to call the police on his gang — didn’t they understand that half the fee went to the police anyway? The same know-it-all jerks ready to lay into a humble valet had no inkling that in the three hours since they’d dropped it off, their new BMW had had its battery, pricey gearbox, and air-conditioning system replaced with junk. And that was nothing: a gang from the Black Sea town of Ünye, working with a shady garage down in Dolapdere, had once managed in half a day to replace the entire engine on a 1995 Mercedes with one from some old wreck, doing such a flawless job that the returning owner left the valet an especially large tip for having cleaned the car for him. But there was nothing for Mevlut to worry about; the gang had no designs on any cars under his care. In turn, Mevlut always let young Kemal park a few cars in the company lot, provided there were spots to spare, though he did keep the Groom upstairs apprised of all these arrangements.

Sometimes, the courtyard, the parking lot, the pavements, and the empty street would be suffused with a vast stillness and silence (as far as such a thing was possible in Istanbul), and Mevlut would realize that apart from being close to Rayiha and his daughters, his favorite thing in the world was watching people go by on the street, inventing stories inspired by the things he saw (just as he did when he watched television), and then talking to someone about it all. The Groom didn’t pay him much, but at least he was near where there was life and not stuck in an office, so he couldn’t complain. He could even go home shortly after six, once the office was closed and all the cars were gone. Then at night, when the parking lot became the gang’s turf until the next morning, Mevlut had time to go out and sell boza.

One month after starting at the parking lot, Mevlut was watching a door-to-door shoeshine polishing the shoes people were sending downstairs when he suddenly remembered that the ten first weeks of Rayiha’s pregnancy, during which she had the right to have an abortion, had already passed. Mevlut believed wholeheartedly that their inability to come to a decision on this matter had as much to do with his wife’s mixed feelings as with his own reluctance. Even in a government hospital, an abortion was always a dangerous thing. But a baby would bring joy to the house and strengthen the bonds of their family. Rayiha still hadn’t told Fatma and Fevziye that she was pregnant. When she did, she would know she had done the right thing from the pleasure of seeing her grown-up daughters welcome the new baby so tenderly.

He got lost in contemplation of his wife waiting for him back home. Thinking of how fond he was of her, how much he loved her, he nearly cried. It was only two o’clock; the girls wouldn’t be back from school yet. Mevlut felt as free as he used to feel in his high-school days; he asked young Kemal from Zonguldak to look after the lot, and he practically ran back home to Tarlabaşı. He longed to be at home alone with Rayiha as in those beautiful, blissful early years of their marriage, when they never used to argue. But there was also something weighing on his conscience, as if he’d forgotten something very important. Maybe that was why he was in such a hurry.