Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Working as a boza vendor, he’d become used to accepting little gifts on top of what he was owed — a pair of woolen socks, perhaps, or even some extra cash from people who told him “Keep the change!” and this had never troubled his conscience or wounded his pride. In a similar way, a tip for not cutting off someone’s power seemed a just reward for a service he was offering, and he had no qualms at all about pocketing the money. He knew these neighborhoods and their people well. (No one recognized Mevlut, though; they could never make the connection between the boza vendor who walked down the street once a week or once every other week in the winter and the inspector who came officially knocking on their door. Perhaps it was that the good people who bought boza at night were completely different from the bad people who stole electricity.) It seemed that the street dogs were always growling at Mevlut in these neighborhoods close to the city center. He began to keep his evening boza rounds brief.

He couldn’t have gone to Kültepe or Duttepe to collect money where everyone knew him, but he did take his logbooks and head over to those other hills that had followed the same course from destitution to development: Kuştepe, Harmantepe, Gültepe, and Oktepe. They could hardly be termed “poor neighborhoods” anymore. The single-story hollow-brick buildings that had once covered these hills had all been knocked down in the past twenty-five years, and now these places were all considered part of the city itself, like Zeytinburnu, Gaziosmanpaşa, and Ümraniye. Each neighborhood had its own center — usually the bus stop where one had caught the first regular service to the city some twenty-five years ago, and which would now be flanked by a mosque, a new statue of Atatürk, and a muddy little park. This would also be the spot where the neighborhood’s main street began, a long road that seemed to stretch all the way to the end of the world, with five- and six-story concrete blocks on either side. The buildings brought an assortment of kebab shops, grocery stores, and banks, all on street level. Here, too, there were families, mothers, children, grandfathers, and grocers who’d set their sights on free electricity (though in fact Mevlut couldn’t find that many), and their manner was no different from what you might find in any ordinary neighborhood in the center of Istanbul: the same tricks, the same lies, the same basic innocence…They may have been more apprehensive of Mevlut in these places, but they also showed him a lot more warmth than anywhere else.

The ancient cemeteries that would pop up in the older parts of the city, filled with strange and mysterious crumbling gravestones topped with all sorts of emblems and sculpted turbans, didn’t exist in these new neighborhoods. The newer and more modern cemeteries, devoid of cypress trees or any other vegetation, were usually situated well out side the new quarters and surrounded by tall concrete walls, just like factories, military bases, and hospitals. In the absence of graveyards, the stray dogs who stalked Mevlut on his morning inspections would spend the night sleeping in the dirty little park across from the statue of Atatürk.

Mevlut always approached the city’s newest and poorest neighborhoods with the best of intentions, yet he found that the most belligerent dogs of all lived here. He spent many miserable hours in these areas, most of which had only recently been assigned their own meters and logbooks. Often he hadn’t even heard their names before, and getting there could involve a two-hour bus ride below the city center and away from the main highways. Once off the bus, Mevlut would exercise all of his “good intentions” to ignore the wires that people had hooked up — not even bothering to hide them — to the big cables that carried electricity between cities, and he would turn a blind eye to the clumsy circuits powering the kebab stall across from the bus stop. He could sense that each of these neighborhoods had its own leaders and chiefs, and that he was being watched. My job is just to look at the official meters, he wanted to say in his most determined, proper, and righteous tone. You have nothing to fear from me. But the dogs attacked him, and Mevlut got scared.

These new homes and gardens on the edge of the city had been built with newer and better materials than the poor neighborhoods of Mevlut’s childhood. Hollow bricks had been replaced by alternatives of higher quality, plastic had been used instead of scrap metal, and gutters and pipes had all been made out of PVC. The houses were constantly growing with the addition of new rooms, just as gecekondu homes always had done, and this meant that the electricity meter would get swallowed up inside a room somewhere, so that if you wanted to take a reading or cut the power, you had no choice but to knock on the door. That would be the cue for the local strays to begin circling the inspector. In some new neighborhoods, a power line might have been brought in and affixed to a pole, a chunk of concrete, a wall, or even a grand old plane tree in the little local square, and sometimes this was where you found people’s meters, not inside their homes. These electri cal hubs, which weren’t so different from those Ottoman-era fountains that used to supply a neighborhood with water, would also be under the constant supervision of small packs of two or three stray dogs.

Mevlut was standing on the porch of a house with a garden one day when he was attacked by a black dog. He checked the notes of his predecessor in the logbook and called out the dog’s name, but Blackie paid him no heed. He barked at Mevlut and forced him to retreat. A month later, Mevlut only managed to get away from a raging guard dog because the dog’s chain wasn’t long enough. Whenever he came under attack like this, he always thought of Rayiha. These things were happening only because she wasn’t there anymore.

Mevlut was in the same neighborhood again one day, looking for a spot in the park to sit down with his bag on his lap while he waited for the bus, when— woof woof woof —a dog approached him. A second and third dog came up behind the first. They were the color of mud. Mevlut saw a black dog in the distance, as indistinct as a distant memory. They all started barking at the same time. Would he be able to ward them off with his inspector’s briefcase? He had never been so afraid of dogs in his life.

One Tuesday evening, he went to the Holy Guide’s lodge in Çarşamba. He left some boza in the kitchen. The Holy Guide was much livelier than usual and free of the usual crowd of hangers-on. When he realized that he had the Guide’s attention, Mevlut quickly explained how he’d first begun to fear dogs twenty-seven years ago. In 1969, around the time Mevlut had first begun to work as a street vendor, his father had taken him to see a holy man in a wooden house in the backstreets of Kasımpaşa in order to address this fear. That holy man had had a white beard and an enormous belly, and, compared with the Guide, he was old-fashioned and unsophisticated. He had given Mevlut some rock candy and told him that dogs were deaf, dumb, and blind creatures. Then he’d opened his palms up as if to pray, instructing Mevlut to do the same, and in his small stove-heated room, he had made Mevlut repeat the following words nine times: “SUMMOON, BUKMOON, OOMYOON FE HOOM LAH YARJOON.”

The next time he was attacked by strays, Mevlut had to put his fear to one side and repeat that verse three times. That was the first thing that people had to do when they became afraid of dogs, demons, and the devil: they had to banish the thought from their minds. “Don’t be scared, just pretend you haven’t seen them,” his father would say when he saw Mevlut getting agitated by the shadowy dogs on the dark streets where they sold boza together at night. “Say the verse quick, son!” he would whisper. But even when he concentrated as hard as he could, Mevlut would never remember the verse. His father would lose his temper and tell him off.