Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Back when he used to stick to his father’s side, keeping accounts and adding weights to their scale, they’d had a customer called Tahir — Uncle Tahir to his friends — who hailed from the town of Torul. Now that he was working alone, Mevlut secretly relished the challenge of haggling with Uncle Tahir over the price of a kilo; it made him feel a lot more important than he ever did sitting in chemistry class staring blankly at the chalkboard. Two strong and capable young men from the village of İmrenler, nicknamed the Concrete Brothers, had begun to monopolize the diners and cafés in the Beyoğlu-Taksim area. To make sure he didn’t lose some long-standing customers from the streets of Feriköy and Harbiye, which he’d taken over from his father, Mevlut lowered his prices and made new friends. There was the boy from Erzincan whom Mevlut had gone to school with, who also lived in Duttepe and had just started working in a grilled-meatball restaurant that used up vast quantities of the yogurt drink ayran; meanwhile, Ferhat knew the Alevi Kurds from Maraş who owned the convenience store next door to that restaurant. In all this, Mevlut had begun to feel as if he’d grown up in the city.

At school, he had graduated to the basement toilet favored by the smokers and had begun to carry Bafra cigarettes to gain the acceptance of the regulars. They knew he earned his own money and had just started smoking, so he was expected to be the one always to have a pack at hand to distribute among the scroungers. Now that he was in high school, Mevlut realized that in middle school he had made too much of this same pack of braggarts who kept failing every year even though they had nothing to do but go to school, who worked no outside jobs, and passed the day trading gossip. The world out on the streets was in fact much bigger and more real than the world inside the school.

Anything he made working on the street was still passed straight on to his father, at least in theory. He did, actually, spend some on cigarettes, movies, sports gambling, and lottery tickets. He had no qualms hiding these expenses from his father, though he did feel guilty about the Elyazar Cinema.

The building that housed the Elyazar Cinema, in one of the small lanes between Galatasaray and Tünel, was built for an Armenian theater company (and used to be called the Odeon) in 1909, in the climate of freedom that reigned after the deposition of Abdul Hamid II; after the foundation of the Republic, it became a cinema (the Majestic) favored by the Greek community and Istanbul’s upper middle class; later, it took the name Elyazar, and for the past two years, like all of the cinemas in Beyoğlu, it had been screening adult films. In the dark (amid a strange confluence of human breath and eucalyptus), Mevlut would pick a seat off to one side, out of the way of the unemployed from the lower neighborhoods, the desolate old men and the hopeless loners, and there, hiding even from himself, shrinking and squirming in his seat, he would try to figure out the plot of the movie — not that it mattered.

Inserting sex clips into Turkish movies would be embarrassing for the half-famous film actors who lived in the area, so the Elyazar Cinema did not show any of those early Turkish blue films, in which the male actors (some of them very well known) appeared in their underpants. Most of the films shown were imports. Mevlut didn’t like how, in Italian films, the lustful female lead, her voice dubbed into Turkish, was made to seem so absurdly naïve and foolish. In German films, it made Mevlut uncomfortable to hear the protagonists cracking jokes throughout those “sex scenes” he’d waited for so eagerly, as if sex were something to be taken lightly. In French films, he would be amazed, if not furious, to see women jumping into bed with someone with practically no excuse. These women’s lines, and those of the men who tried to seduce them all, were always dubbed by the same handful of Turkish voice actors, so that sometimes it seemed to Mevlut that he was watching the same film over and over again. The scenes that the audience had come to see were never at the beginning. Thus, at the age of fifteen, Mevlut learned that sex was a kind of miracle that always kept you waiting.

The crowd that stood smoking and milling about in the lobby would hurry inside before the sex scenes began. “It’s starting!” the ushers would announce to these eager voyeurs just as the crucial scene approached. Mevlut couldn’t believe how comfortable with it they all seemed to be. As soon as he got his ticket, he would make his way through the crowd with his eyes fixed firmly on his shoes (“Have my laces come undone?”), never looking up.

When the erotic scenes began, the whole cinema would fall silent. Mevlut would feel his heart racing; slightly dizzy and sweating pro fusely, he would struggle to control himself. The “indecent” scenes were in fact cut from other films and spliced into these features at random, so Mevlut knew that the incredible things he was witnessing in that moment had nothing to do with the plot he had been trying to figure out just before. But his mind would still make connections between the sex scenes and the rest of the film, and if he allowed himself to believe for a second that the naked women whose lewd acts had just left him openmouthed were the same women in the house or at the office during the rest of the film, everything was somehow even more arousing, and as the front of his pants bulged, Mevlut would hunch over in growing shame. In all those times during high school when he went to the Elyazar Cinema on his own, he never put his hand in his pocket to play with himself, unlike some of the other patrons. It was said that there were elderly queers who came to this kind of place for the sole purpose of waiting for someone to undo his pants and jerk off to the film, whereupon they would pounce on his private parts. Mevlut himself had been accosted by these perverts—“So tell me, son, how old are you?” “Still a kid, aren’t you?”—but he’d played dumb, pretending he couldn’t hear. For the price of a single ticket you could spend the whole day in the Elyazar Cinema, watching the same two films over and over, and so sometimes Mevlut found it hard to leave.

—

Ferhat.In springtime, when the amusement parks and garden cafés opened, and the teahouses, children’s parks, bridges, and pavements on the Bosphorus began to fill up, Mevlut started to come with me to sell Kısmet on weekends. We really went at it for a couple of years and made a lot of money. We would go up to Mahmutpaşa together to buy the sets, and on the way back down the hill we’d already be making sales to kids out shopping with their parents; we would go on to the Spice Bazaar, Eminönü Square, and by the time we got over the bridge into Karaköy, we would be pleasantly surprised to find that half our colored circles had been scratched off by those trying their luck.

Mevlut could spot customers from afar before they even rose from their seats at the teahouse, and he approached everyone, young or old, with the same winning optimism and a surprising new pitch every time. “You know why you should try your luck? Because your socks and our gift comb are the same color,” he would say to some dopey kid who didn’t even know what color his socks were. “See, it said MIRROR under the twenty-seventh circle in Ferhat’s box, but my twenty-seventh circle hasn’t been scratched yet,” he would point out to a shrewd boy with spectacles who knew the game a bit and was hesitant to play. Some spring days, we would do such brisk business on the piers, the ferries, and in the parks that we’d run out of circles and head back to Kültepe. We went to the Bosphorus Bridge when it was opened in 1973, before it was closed to pedestrians following a bunch of suicides, and made good money over three sunny afternoons, but then it was “No vendors allowed,” and we couldn’t go back. “This is not a harmless game, this is gambling!” bearded old men would say as they turned us away from mosque courtyards; the same cinemas that were happy to let us see their sex films now told us “You’re too young to come in here”; and many times we were turned away from bars and nightclubs with the old “No vendors allowed.”