Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Give me a couple of days to think it over.”

“No, you’ve got to decide right now,” said Süleyman, but he relented when he saw Mevlut’s pensive look.

Mevlut would have much preferred a job closer to the streets, the crowds, and Beyoğlu. Joking with his customers, ringing their doorbells, walking up and down the endless sloping streets: these were the things he knew and loved, not being cooped up somewhere. But he was painfully aware of how much he still depended on Süleyman and Korkut for support. By now he had spent all the money he’d put away as a meter inspector. His time at the electric company had also cost him a few boza customers, since he hadn’t been able to do as much work in the evenings. Some nights it felt as if not a single curtain would be pulled open as he walked by, not a single customer beckoning him to come upstairs. At night, he could sense the weight of the concrete, the hardness, and the horrors of the city around him. The dogs weren’t menacing anymore. Those wheeled metal dumpsters had made it all the way into the city center by now, to all the places Mevlut loved — Beyoğlu, Şişli, Cihangir, as everywhere else — followed by a new category of poor people who foraged in them. These streets — after the twenty-nine years he’d spent ambling along them — had become part of Mevlut’s soul, but now they were changing again very fast. There were too many words and letters, too many people, too much noise. Mevlut could sense a growing interest in the past, but he didn’t expect this would do much for boza. There was also a new class of tougher, angrier hawkers. They were always trying to cheat people, always shouting, and constantly undercutting one another…These newcomers were as clumsy as they were rapacious. The older generation of street vendors had been swallowed up in the tumult of the city…

So this was how Mevlut warmed to the idea of socializing with people from his hometown and decided to accept the job. He would even have time to sell boza at night. The clubhouse’s small offices were on the ground floor. There was a roasted-chestnut vendor stationed right outside the door. In his first few months on the job, Mevlut watched him from the window and learned all the tricks of that trade and also spotted the things the man was doing wrong. Sometimes Mevlut would find an excuse to go out and talk to him (“Is the doorman in?” or “Where can I find a glazier around here?”). Occasionally, he let the man leave his roasted-chestnut stall inside the building (a practice that would soon be forbidden), and they would head off to the mosque together for Friday prayers.

Fatma Continues Her Studies

MEVLUT SOON FOUND a pleasing balance between his rather undemanding job running the clubhouse and his boza rounds in the evenings. He often got to leave before six, handing the “venue” over to whoever was hosting that evening’s event. There were several other people who also had the keys to the building. Sometimes the entire local contingent of migrants from villages like Göçük or Nohut would book the place for the whole evening, and Mevlut would hurry home (coming back the next morning to find the offices and the kitchen in a state of grubby disarray). Once he’d had an early dinner with his daughters and checked whether Fatma — now in her second year of high school — was working hard enough to make it to college (yes, she definitely wasn’t pretending), he would go out to sell boza in a happy mood.

Throughout the autumn of 1998, Mevlut paid frequent visits to the Holy Guide. A new, eager, and more assertive crowd had begun to assemble at his lodge. Mevlut didn’t like them much, and he could sense that the feeling was mutual and that they found his presence incongruous. Bearded believers, backstreet hicks who never wore neckties, devotees, and acolytes of various kinds thronged to the Holy Guide in growing numbers, so that Mevlut hardly ever got the chance to talk to him anymore. Plagued by a series of illnesses that left him suffering chronic exhaustion, the Holy Guide no longer gave callig raphy classes, which meant that those gossipy students who used to come had stopped showing up; at least they’d brought some vitality and good cheer to the place. Nowadays, the Holy Guide sat on his armchair by the window with people crowding around him awaiting their turn to speak, nodding gravely at some disclosure or other (about the Holy Guide’s health? the latest political developments? or something Mevlut didn’t know about?) in their eagerness to express heartfelt sorrow. Now, whenever Mevlut entered the Holy Guide’s retreat, he, too, would put on the same sorrowful look and start talking in whispers. His first visits to this place had been very different: “Look who’s here, the boza seller with the face of an angel,” they’d say back then; “It’s Manager Mevlut!” they’d tease him; and someone would always comment on how much emotion they’d heard in his voice as he’d walked by on the street. Today, people just drank the boza he gave them for free, without even realizing that Mevlut was a boza seller.

One evening, he finally managed to catch the Holy Guide’s eye and was blessed with the chance to speak to him for a few minutes. By the time it was all over and he was walking out of the lodge, he realized that it hadn’t been the happiest of conversations. Yet he’d been so intensely aware of the envy and resentment that everyone else had felt at this exchange that he was elated. That night’s talk had been both the most meaningful of Mevlut’s “conversations” with the Holy Guide, and the most heartbreaking.

Mevlut had just about written off this particular visit when the Holy Guide, who’d been talking quietly to those around him, turned formally toward the audience amassed inside the spacious room and asked, “Who is wearing a wristwatch with a leather strap, and who is wearing one with a plastic strap?” The Holy Guide liked to challenge his disciples with questions, riddles, and religious conundrums. As usual, they all took turns trying dutifully to answer his question, when he spotted Mevlut:

“Ah, it’s our boza seller with the blessed name!” he said, praising Mevlut and summoning him to his side.

As Mevlut bent down to kiss his hand — covered in brown spots that seemed to grow in size and number with every visit — the man beside the Holy Guide rose to yield his seat to Mevlut. When Mevlut sat down, the Holy Guide looked him straight in the eyes and, leaning in much closer than Mevlut had expected, used some archaic phrases to ask him how he was doing. The words he used were as beautiful as the calligraphy he’d put up on the walls.

Mevlut immediately thought of Samiha and cursed the devil for playing tricks on his mind while everyone was looking. He had long been considering how to explain to the Holy Guide about the letters he’d written to Rayiha when he’d actually had Samiha in mind. Just how much thought he must have devoted to this problem became clear to him when he found himself suddenly able to recall years’ worth of intricate reasoning. First he would invoke the notion of intent in Islam. He would then ask the Holy Guide to explain the subtle distinction between a person’s private and public intentions. Here was his chance to analyze the defining strangeness of his life through the eyes of this holiest of men; perhaps what he learned that night might finally free him from all the doubts that still weighed on his soul.

But their conversation took a completely different turn. Before Mevlut could say anything at all, the Holy Guide asked another question.

“Have you been performing your daily prayers?”

This was a question he usually reserved for immodest attention seekers, people who talked too much, and newcomers. He’d never asked Mevlut before. Perhaps that was because he knew Mevlut was just a penniless boza seller.