Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

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Every weekday between five past eight in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon, Mevlut was at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School. When the last bell rang, he’d run off to join his father on the yogurt rounds, emerging through the crowd of street vendors amassed outside the school gates and the boys who’d been unable to settle their scores inside the classrooms and were now taking their blazers off for a fistfight. Mevlut would drop off his schoolbag full of books and notebooks at Fidan Restaurant, where his father was waiting for him, and the two would head out to sell yogurt side by side until dusk.

There were other places like Fidan dotting the city where his father made regular deliveries two or three times a week. Occasionally he would fall out with the proprietors, who were always trying to push his prices down, causing him to drop one restaurant and pick up another instead. Delivering to these places was a lot of hard work for not much profit, but his father couldn’t give them up entirely because he depended on their kitchens, their massive fridges, and their terraces or back gardens as storage spaces for his trays of yogurt and jugs of boza. These were alcohol-free restaurants that catered to local shopkeepers, serving home-cooked food, döner kebabs, and fruit stews, the owners and headwaiters all on good terms with Mevlut’s father. Sometimes, they would show father and son to a table at the back, give them a helping of meat and vegetable stew or rice with chickpeas, a bit of bread, and some yogurt, and sit down with them to chat. Mevlut was fascinated by these conversations: a man who sold raffle tickets and Marlboros, a retired policeman who knew everything that went on in Beyoğlu, and the apprentice at the photography studio next door might also join them at the table, and they would talk about the rising prices, sports betting, how the police were cracking down on those who sold cigarettes and foreign liquor on the black market, the latest political intrigues in Ankara, and the inspections being carried out by the municipal police on the streets of Istanbul. Listening to the stories of these mustachioed chain-smokers, Mevlut felt as if he were entering the secret world of the city. He heard how a carpenters’ neighborhood on the back edge of Tarlabaşı was gradually being settled by a branch of a Kurdish clan from Ağrı; how the authorities wanted to clear out the bookstalls that had taken over Taksim Square because of their links with left-wing organizations; how the gang that controlled the car-parking racket on the lower streets had entered into a full-blown turf war, complete with clubs and chains, against the gang of Black Sea coast immigrants that operated in Tarlabaşı.

Whenever they came across street fights, car crashes, pickpockets, or incidents of sexual harassment, people shouted, threats were made, curses were flung and knives pulled, and Mevlut’s father left the scene as fast as possible.

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Mustafa Efendi.Watch out or they’ll call you in as a witness, I’d tell Mevlut. Once you’re in their books, you’re done for. Even worse: if you give them your address, they’ll send you a court summons. If you don’t show up, the police will come knocking at your door. They won’t just ask you why you didn’t appear in court, they’ll ask you what you do, how much tax you pay, where you’re registered, how much you make, and are you left wing or right wing.

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Mevlut did not always understand why his father would suddenly turn into a side street and sink into a long silence only moments after having shouted “Yogurt seller” with all his might; why he pretended not to hear a customer who stood at a window calling out “Yogurt seller, yogurt seller, hey, I’m talking to you”; why he greeted and embraced the Erzurum lot so warmly but then called them bastards behind their backs; or why he might give a customer two kilos of yogurt for half the usual price. There were times, too, when with many customers still left to visit, many more homes waiting for them to pass by, his father would walk into a coffeehouse, leaving his pole and his precious cargo of yogurt outside the door, and slump into a chair with a cup of tea, just sitting there without moving a muscle. This, Mevlut could understand.

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Mustafa Efendi.The yogurt seller spends his day walking. Neither the city buses nor those run by private companies will pick up a passenger carrying yogurt trays, and the yogurt seller can’t afford a taxi either. So you walk thirty kilometers every day carrying thirty, maybe forty kilos on your back. Our job is mostly heavy lifting.

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Two or three times a week, Mevlut’s father would walk from Duttepe to Eminönü. This took two hours. A truckload of yogurt from a Thracian dairy farm was delivered to an empty lot near Sirkeci train station in Eminönü. The unloading of the truck, the pushing and shoving among the yogurt sellers and restaurant managers waiting to pick up their supply, the sorting out of payments and returns of the empty aluminum trays to the warehouse among the buckets of olives and cheese (Mevlut loved the smell of this place), the settling of accounts — it would all be over in a flurry, just like the recurring commotions on Galata Bridge, the whistling of ferries and trains and the grunting of buses. As this organized chaos unfolded, Mevlut’s father asked him to keep track of their transactions. It was such a simple job that Mevlut suspected his illiterate father of bringing him along only to introduce him to the business and make sure the people there knew who he was.

As soon as they were done stocking up, his father would shoulder just under sixty kilos of yogurt with determination, walking nonstop for forty minutes before, dripping with sweat, he would drop off a portion of his cargo at a restaurant at the back of Beyoğlu and the rest at a different one in Pangaltı, then return to Sirkeci to collect the second load, dropping it off either at one of those two places or at a third, these spots serving as bases from which he would “distribute” his yogurt to various neighborhoods, to streets and homes that he knew like the back of his hand. In early October, once the temperature dropped, Mustafa Efendi would start going through the same steps twice a week with the boza. To his pole he would tie the jugs of raw boza filled at the Vefa Boza Shop, dropping them off at one of the restaurants where he had friendly relations, and later taking them home to be sweetened with sugar and flavored with spices, ready for him to sell out on the streets from seven o’clock every evening. To save time, sometimes Mevlut and his father would mix the sugar and spices into the raw boza in the kitchens and back gardens of these restaurants. Mevlut was in awe of the way his father was always able to keep track of where exactly he had left the empty, half-empty, and full yogurt trays and boza jugs and how he could always work out which route would allow them to make the most sales while walking the shortest distance.

Mustafa Efendi was on first-name terms with many of his customers; he could remember their yogurt preferences (with cream or without) and how they liked their boza (sour or fresh). When, one day, they got caught in the rain and took shelter in a musty teahouse along the way, Mevlut was amazed that his father knew both the owner and the owner’s son; just as he was when they were walking down the street one day, lost in thought, and they crossed paths with a junk dealer on a horse cart who embraced his father like a long-lost friend; or when his father showed himself so hand in glove with the local constable only later to call him “a piece of shit.” Considering all the streets, buildings, and apartments they saw — so many doors, doorbells, garden gates, staircases, and elevators — how could his father possibly remember how everything worked, how to open and close things, which buttons to push, how each gate bolted shut? Mustafa Efendi was always giving his son tips: “This is the Jewish cemetery. You walk by quietly.” “Someone from Gümüşdere village works as a janitor in this bank; he’s a good man, just something to bear in mind.” “Don’t cross here, try farther up where the metal guardrails stop; the traffic’s less dangerous, and you won’t have to wait as long!”