Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

On the way back from Uncle Hasan’s in Duttepe to their own place in Kültepe, Mevlut would see the city lights sparkling from afar, the velvety night, and the neon lamps of Istanbul. Sometimes, as he walked with his little hand in his father’s bigger one, a single star in the starry dark blue sky would catch Mevlut’s eye, and even as his father kept grumbling and muttering to himself, Mevlut imagined that they were walking toward it. Sometimes, you couldn’t see the city at all, but the pale orange-hued lights from the tens of thousands of tiny homes in the surrounding hills made the now-familiar landscape more resplendent than it really was. And sometimes, the lights from the nearby hills would disappear in the mist, and from within the thickening fog, Mevlut would hear the sound of dogs barking.

It’s Not Your Job to Act Superior

I’M SHAVING in honor of your first day of work, my boy,” his father said one morning just as Mevlut was waking up. “Lesson one: if you’re selling yogurt, and especially if you’re selling boza, you need to look neat. Some customers will look at your hands and your fingernails. Some of them will look at your shoes, trousers, and shirt. If you’re going inside a house, take your shoes off immediately, and make sure your socks don’t have holes in them and your feet don’t smell. But you’re a good lad, you’ve got a kind heart, and you always smell all nice and clean, don’t you?”

By clumsily imitating his father, Mevlut soon worked out how to hang yogurt trays on opposite ends of his pole so that the two sides balanced, how to slide slats between the trays to keep them separate, and how to cover each stack with a wooden lid.

The yogurt did not seem so heavy at first, because his father had taken some of his load, but as they advanced on the dirt road linking Kültepe to the city, Mevlut realized that a yogurt seller was essentially a porter. They would walk for half an hour along the dusty way full of trucks, horse carts, and buses. When they reached the paved road, he would concentrate on reading billboards, the headlines on newspapers displayed in grocery stores, and signs affixed to utility poles advertising circumcision services and cram schools. As they advanced farther into the city, they would see old wooden mansions that hadn’t yet burned down, military barracks dating back to the Ottoman era, dented shared taxis decorated with checkered livery, minivans blowing their musical horns and raising a cloud of dust in their wake, columns of soldiers marching by, kids playing football on the cobblestones, mothers pushing baby carriages, shopwindows teeming with shoes and boots in all colors, and policemen angrily blowing their whistles as they directed the traffic with their oversize white gloves.

Some cars, like the 1956 Dodge with its enormous and perfectly circular headlights, looked like old men staring with their eyes wide open; the radiator grille on the 1957 Plymouth suggested a man with his thick upper lip topped by a handlebar mustache; other cars (the 1961 Opel Rekord, for instance) looked like spiteful women whose mouths had turned to stone in the middle of an evil cackle, so that now you could see their countless tiny teeth. Mevlut likened the long-nosed trucks to big wolf dogs, and the Skoda-model public-transport buses, which huffed and puffed as they went, to bears walking on all fours.

There were enormous billboards that took up one whole side of a six- or seven-story building with images of beautiful women using Tamek tomato ketchup or Lux soap; the women, like those in European movies or in Mevlut’s schoolbooks, did not wear headscarves, and they would smile down at him until his father turned away from the square and into a shaded lane on the right, calling, “Yogurt sellerrr.” In the narrow street, Mevlut felt as if everyone was watching them. His father would call out again without ever slowing his pace, swinging his bell along the way (and though he never turned to look at his son, Mevlut could tell from his father’s determined expression that he was nonetheless thinking of him), and soon a window would open somewhere on an upper story. “Over here, yogurt seller, come on upstairs,” a man or a middle-aged lady in a headscarf would call out. Father and son would go inside and make their way up the stairs, through the vapors of frying oil, until they reached the door.

Mevlut became attuned to the lives in the thousands of kitchens he would see during his career as a street vendor, of the countless housewives, middle-aged women, children, little old ladies, grandpas, pensioners, housekeepers, the adopted and the orphaned that he would meet:

“Welcome, Mustafa Efendi, half a kilo right here, please.” “Ah, Mustafa Efendi! We’ve missed you! What have you been up to in that village all summer?” “Your yogurt better not be sour, yogurt seller. Go on then, put some in here. Your scales are honest, aren’t they?” “Who’s this beautiful boy, Mustafa Efendi, is it your son? God bless him!” “Oh dear, yogurt seller, I think they must have called you upstairs by mistake, we’ve got some yogurt from the shop already, there’s a huge bowl of it in the fridge.” “No one’s home, please make a note and we’ll pay you next time.” “No cream, Mustafa Efendi, the kids don’t like it.” “Mustafa, once my youngest daughter is all grown up, shall we marry her off to your boy here?” “What’s the holdup, yogurt seller? It’s taken you all day to climb two flights of stairs.” “Are you going to put it in the bowl, yogurt seller, or shall I give you this plate?” “It was cheaper the other day, yogurt seller…” “The building manager says street vendors aren’t allowed on the elevator, yogurt seller. Got it?” “Where do you get your yogurt from?” “Mustafa Efendi, make sure you pull the door shut behind you as you leave the building, our doorman’s run off.” “Mustafa Efendi, you will not drag this boy around on the streets with you like a porter, you will send him to school, okay? Otherwise I’m not buying your yogurt anymore.” “Yogurt seller, please drop off half a kilo every two days. Just send the boy upstairs.” “Don’t be scared, son, the dog doesn’t bite. All he wants is to have a sniff, see, he likes you.” “Have a seat, Mustafa, the wife and kids are out, no one’s home, there’s some rice with tomato sauce, I’ll heat it up for you if you’d like?” “Yogurt seller, we could barely hear you over the radio, shout a little louder next time when you go past, okay?” “These shoes don’t fit my boy anymore. Try them on, son.” “Mustafa Efendi, don’t let this boy grow up like an orphan. Bring his mother over from the village to look after you both.”

—

Mustafa Efendi.“God bless you, ma’am,” I’d say on my way out of the house, bowing all the way to the floor. “May God bless all that you touch, sister,” I would say so that Mevlut would learn that if you want to survive in this jungle, you have to make certain compromises, so that he would understand that if you want to be rich, you must be prepared to grovel. “Thank you, sir,” I would say with an elaborate show of obeisance. “Mevlut will wear these gloves all through winter. May God bless you. Go on, son, kiss the man’s hand…” But Mevlut wouldn’t kiss it; he would just stare straight ahead. Once we were back out in the street, I’d tell him “Look, son, you mustn’t be proud, you mustn’t turn your nose up at a bowl of soup or a pair of socks. This is our reward for the service we provide. We bring the world’s best yogurt all the way to their doorstep. And they give us something in return. That’s all it is.” A month would pass, and this time he might start sulking because a nice lady tried to give him a woolen skullcap, until, fearing my reaction, he would make as if to kiss her hand, only to be unable at the last moment to make himself do it. “Now listen here, it’s not your job to act superior,” I’d say. “When I tell you to kiss the customer’s hand, you have to kiss the customer’s hand. This one’s not just any old customer, she’s a kindly old lady. Not everyone is as nice as she is. There’s scum in this city who will buy yogurt on credit, then move houses without warning and just disappear without paying up. If you act all haughty when a good person tries to show you some kindness, you will never be rich. You should see how your uncle sucks up to Hadji Hamit Vural. Don’t let rich people make you feel ashamed. The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul first and started making money before we did.”