Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

In literature class, Mevlut loved reading Yahya Kemal’s verses about the Ottoman raiders rejoicing on their way to conquering the Balkans, sword in hand. When the teacher didn’t show up, they passed the hour by singing songs, and even the back rows’ most mischievous elements would temporarily assume a guise of cherubic innocence, and as he watched the rain falling outside (the thought of his father, out there selling yogurt, briefly crossing his mind), Mevlut felt as if he could have sat there singing in that cozy classroom forever and that, though he was far from his mother and his sisters, city life had much to recommend it over village life.

Within a few weeks of the military coup, the reign of martial law, curfews, and house searches had led to thousands of arrests, until eventually, as usual, the restrictions were relaxed, the street vendors felt comfortable coming out again, and so the roasted chickpeas, sesame rolls, gum-paste sweets, and cotton candy reappeared with their respective sellers by the gates of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School on the same spots they’d occupied before. On one of those hot days of spring, Mevlut, normally a stickler for the rules, felt momentarily envious of a boy roughly his age who was among those breaking the ban on hawking. The boy, whose face looked familiar, was carrying a cardboard box that said KISMET. Inside the box, Mevlut could see a large plastic football and some other toy prizes that looked rather interesting: miniature plastic soldiers, chewing gum, combs, collectible football stickers, handheld mirrors, and marbles.

“Don’t you know we’re not allowed to buy anything from street vendors?” he said, trying to look stern. “What’s that you’re selling?”

“God loves some people more. Those people end up rich. He loves some people a little less, and those people stay poor. You take a pin and scratch off one of these colored circles, and underneath you’ll find your gift and your fortune.”

“Did you make this yourself?” asked Mevlut. “Where do you get the prizes from?”

“They sell the whole game as a set, including the prizes, for thirty-two liras. There are one hundred holes, so if you go around letting people scratch them for sixty cents apiece, by the end you’ll have made sixty liras. There’s a lot of business to be done in the parks on the weekends. Want to have a go right now and find out if you’re going to be rich, or if you’re going to wind up as that poor wretch everyone looks down on? Go on, scratch one and have a look…I won’t charge you.”

“I’m not going to be poor, you’ll see.”

With a flourish, the boy produced a pin, which Mevlut took without hesitation. There were still many holes left to scratch on the box. He picked one carefully and scratched away.

“Tough luck! It’s empty,” said the boy.

“Let me see that,” said Mevlut, losing his temper. Under the colored aluminum foil he’d scratched away, he could see nothing — not a single word nor any gift. “Now what?”

“If it comes up empty, we give people one of these,” said the boy, handing Mevlut a piece of a wafer bar the size of a matchbox. “Maybe you’ve got no luck, but you know what they say: lucky at cards, unlucky at love. The key is to win when you lose. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Mevlut. “What’s your name and your registration number?”

“Three seventy-five, Ferhat Yılmaz. Are you going to report me to Skeleton?”

Mevlut waved his hand as if to say “obviously not,” and Ferhat made an “obviously not” face of his own, and they both knew straightaway that they would be the best of friends.

The first thing about Ferhat that struck Mevlut was that, though they were the same age, Ferhat was already well versed in the language and chemistry of the streets, the location of all the shops in town, and everyone’s secrets. Ferhat said that the cooperative running the school was crawling with crooks, that the history teacher Ramses was an idiot, and that most of the others were a bunch of jerks whose only thought was getting through the day in one piece so that they could collect their salaries at the end of the month.

One chilly day, Skeleton took the small army he had carefully assembled out of the school’s janitors and cleaners, the kitchen staff who prepared the powdered milk, and the guardian of the coal cellar and led an attack on the street vendors who camped outside the school walls. Mevlut and the others watched from the foot of the wall as the battle unfolded. Everyone was rooting for the street vendors, but power was on the side of the government and the school. A roasted-chickpea-and-sunflower-seed seller exchanged blows with Abdülvahap, who looked after the coal cellar. Skeleton threatened to call the police and the military command center. The whole scene etched itself into Mevlut’s memory as a demonstration of the state and the school administration’s general attitude toward street vendors.

The news that Miss Nazlı had left the school proved devastating for Mevlut. He felt empty and lost as he realized just how much time he spent thinking about her. He skipped school for three days and later explained his absence by saying his father was very sick. More and more, he enjoyed Ferhat’s jokes, his ready wit, and his optimism. They skipped school together and took to the streets selling Kısmet in Beşiktaş and Maçka Park. Ferhat taught him plenty of jokes and bits of wisdom involving one’s “intentions” and “kismet”—fate — insights that he later repeated to any yogurt and boza customers who had a soft spot for him. He began to tell his evening boza customers: “If you don’t make your intentions clear, you will never find your kismet here.”

Another of Ferhat’s achievements was his exchange of letters with some teenage girls in Europe. The girls were real. Ferhat even had photos in his pocket to prove it. He got their addresses from the section “Young People Looking for Pen Pals” in Milliyet newspaper’s youth magazine Hey, which the Groom would bring into class. Hey, which claimed to be Turkey’s first youth magazine, published the addresses of European girls only — never Turkish ones, as this would have offended conservative families. Ferhat had someone else write his letters for him, without ever revealing who this person was, and he never told the girls that he was a street vendor. Mevlut always wondered what he would put in a letter to a European girl, but he never worked it out. In class, the boys pored over the photos Ferhat had received from the European girls and either fell in love or tried to prove that the girls weren’t real, while some particularly jealous types ruined the photos by scribbling all over them.

One day, Mevlut read a magazine in the school library that would have a profound influence on his future career as a street vendor. The library at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was a place where students were made to sit still and behave when a teacher failed to show up for class. Whenever unsupervised kids were brought in, the librarian, Aysel, gave them copies of old magazines donated by the retired doctors and lawyers who lived in the upper neighborhoods nearby.

On Mevlut’s last visit to the library, Aysel went through her customary routine of handing out twenty- to thirty-year-old, discolored back issues of magazines like The Great Atatürk, Archaeology and Art, Mind and Matter, Our Beautiful Turkey, Medical World, and Knowledge Trove . Once she had made sure that there was one magazine for every two students to look at, she launched into her brief and famous speech about reading, to which Mevlut turned his full attention.

ONE MUST NEVER TALK WHEN READING was the famous and endlessly mocked first line and refrain of her speech. “You must read inside your head, without making a sound. Otherwise you will learn nothing from the writing on the page. When you get to the bottom of the page you are reading, do not turn the page straightaway, but wait until you are sure that your classmate has also finished reading the page. Once you have done that, you may turn the page, but without moistening your fingertips or creasing the paper. Do not write on the pages. Do not scribble, do not add any mustaches, glasses, or beards to the illustrations. A magazine is not just for looking at the pictures; you must read the text, too. Read the writing on every page first before you look at the pictures. When you have finished your magazine, raise your hand quietly, and I will come and give you a new one. But you will not have time to read a whole magazine anyway.” Librarian Aysel went quiet for a second and looked around to see whether her words had had any effect on Mevlut’s class, and then, like an Ottoman general ordering his impatient troops to attack and pillage, she pronounced her immortal last line: