Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

When he finished recounting these episodes from his past, Mevlut cautiously asked the Holy Guide: Can a person really banish a fear or a thought from his mind by the force of his own will alone? By now, Mevlut’s experience was that trying to forget about something only made him think about it more. (In his youth, for example, the more he’d tried to get Neriman off his mind, the more he’d wanted to stalk her — but of course he didn’t mention this to the Holy Guide.) Wanting to forget something, having THE INTENTION TO FORGET something, was clearly not an efficient way of forgetting at all. In fact what you intended to forget tended to stick even more firmly in your mind. These were the questions he’d never had the chance to ask the holy man in Kasımpaşa, and now, twenty-seven years later, he was pleased to find that he had the courage to put them to the Holy Guide of the spiritual retreat in Çarşamba, who was a much more modern holy man anyway.

“The ability to forget depends on the PURITY of the believer’s HEART, the SINCERITY of his INTENTIONS, and the STRENGTH of his WILL,” said the Holy Guide. He’d liked Mevlut’s question and had graced it with a weighty response worthy of the “conversations.”

Feeling encouraged, Mevlut guiltily told the story of how as a little boy, on a snowy, moonlit night when the streets shone pure and white like a cinema screen, he’d watched a pack of dogs move in a flash to trap a cat under a car. He and his late father had walked past in silence, acting as if they hadn’t seen anything, pretending not to hear the cat’s dying wails either. In the time that had since gone by, the city had grown perhaps tenfold. Even though he’d forgotten all the prayers and verses he was supposed to say, Mevlut hadn’t been scared of dogs at all for twenty-five years. But in the last two years, he’d begun to fear them again. The dogs could tell, and that was why they barked at him and tried to corner him. What should he do?

“IT IS NOT ABOUT PRAYERS OR VERSES, BUT ABOUT YOUR HEART’S INTENT,” said the Holy Guide. “Boza seller, have you been doing anything recently that may have disturbed people’s lives?”

“I have not,” said Mevlut. He didn’t mention that he’d become embroiled in the electricity business.

“Perhaps you have and you don’t realize it,” said the Holy Guide. “Dogs can sense when a person doesn’t belong among us. This is their God-given gift. That is why people who want to copy the Europeans are always afraid of dogs. Mahmud II butchered the Janissaries, the backbone of the Ottoman Empire, and thus allowed the West to trample upon us; he also slaughtered the street dogs of Istanbul and exiled all those he couldn’t kill to Hayırsızada, the Wretched Island. The people of Istanbul organized a petition to bring the dogs back. During the armistice following World War I, when the city was under foreign occupation, the street dogs were massacred once more for the comfort of the English and the French. But again, the good people of Istanbul asked for their dogs to be returned. With this wealth of experience in their blood, all our dogs now have a very keen sense of who is their friend and who is their foe.”

Is It Right?

Ferhat.Don’t worry about Mevlut: another six months passed, and by the winter of 1997, he’d already gotten the hang of being a meter inspector. He was earning decent money, too. How much? Even he didn’t know. But every evening, he gave me a full account of what he’d collected that day, just the way he used to do with his father when they were selling yogurt together. He sold his boza at night, and generally stayed out of trouble.

The one who went looking for it was me, actually. As far as I could tell, Selvihan was still seeing Sami from Sürmene, putting any hope of being with her further and further out of reach and making me more and more desperate. I would often spend all night looking for her in the archives and around the city, but at least I always came home in the end — even if it was almost dawn.

I was at the Moonlight Club with some friends one night when one of the owners came and joined our table. These live music clubs swallow vast amounts of electricity, so the managers usually try to get in good with their local inspector. Whenever we go to these places, we can always expect nice discounts and plates of appetizers and fruit and panfried prawns on the house. Tables of assorted scroungers, bureaucrats, and gangsters are a common sight in any self-respecting nightclub, and, usually, all that’s expected of these “guests” is that they sit quietly, without sending flowers to any of the girls or requesting any songs. That night, however, our table became the center of attention, because the owner’s right-hand man, a certain Mr. Mustache (so named for the thin line of hair over his upper lip), kept inviting the singers to sit at our table and encouraging us to ask for whatever we wanted to hear.

Afterward, this Mr. Mustache asked if we could meet in a coffeehouse in Taksim one morning; I assumed it was to do with the usual stuff, making sure I neglected to notice some illegal wiring at the Moonlight and maybe one or two other things they were doing without a permit. Instead, he had a much bigger and more serious agenda: he wanted to “bring down” the Sunshine Club.

There was now a whole new breed of gangsters who specialized in “bringing down” bars, nightclubs, and even high-end restaurants. They exploited the havoc that privatization had brought upon the eighty-year-old game of electricity theft. With their help, a nightclub owner might conspire with electric company inspectors to plunge a rival club into darkness and have it hit with huge bills, thanks to penalties rising at twice the rate of inflation. If it all worked according to plan, the rival club would have to shut down for a couple of weeks, and if it couldn’t settle its account, it would go bankrupt and disappear altogether. In the last six months, I’d heard of a number of bars and clubs in Beyoğlu, two hotels in Aksaray and Taksim (electricity theft is very common in small hotels, too), and a big kebab shop on İstiklal Avenue being brought down this way.

But bigger businesses all had contacts in the police and the district attorney’s office, and they could count on the protection of mafia gangs, too. Even if some principled and meticulous inspector came along and exposed all their unmetered connections and back charges, cut their power, and put a seal on their meter, these big fish wouldn’t care; they’d just reconnect the lines with their own hands and pick up where they’d left off. They might even take the trouble to arrange for the brave inspector to get beaten to a pulp in the dead of night. To bring down one of these big guys, a rival business would have to have the public prosecutor, the mafia, and maybe even the police on its side, so that once the plan went into action, it could be sure that the damage would be permanent. That day, Mr. Mustache revealed that bringing down the Sunshine Club was part of a larger scheme on the part of those Cizre Kurds who were backing the Moonlight: they were out to get Sami from Sürmene.

I asked them why they had picked me for this major operation.

“Our guys tell us that you’ve already got your eye on Sami from Sürmene,” said Mr. Mustache. “They’ve seen you sniffing around at the Sunshine Club…”

“Cezmi from Cizre’s got eyes all over the place, hasn’t he?” I said. “But this is dangerous. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Don’t worry. Politicians aren’t the only ones who’ve become civilized these days, Beyoğlu gangs are, too. They’re not shooting each other in the street over little disagreements anymore.”