Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own. His guilt would flare up like a gentle ache in a corner of his soul whenever he went to the cinema and got caught up daydreaming. He would blame himself for wasting time, for missing the subtitles, for focusing only on the beautiful women in the film or on odd details that weren’t that important to the plot. Whenever he got an erection at the cinema, sometimes for good reason and sometimes for no reason at all, he would hunch over in his seat and work out that if he got home two hours before his father did in the evening, he would have plenty of time to masturbate without any worry of getting caught.

Sometimes, instead of going to the cinema, he would visit the barbershop in Tarlabaşı where Mohini worked as an apprentice, or drop by a coffeehouse favored by Alevis and left-wing chauffeurs to have a chat with the cashier boy he knew through Ferhat, watch people playing rummikub while keeping an eye on the television. He knew that he was just killing time, doing nothing at all, and heading down the wrong path anyway because of having dropped out of high school, but the truth was so painful that he preferred the comfort of other thoughts: he would start a business with Ferhat, they would be street vendors but different from all the others (he imagined stacking yogurt trays on a wheeled vehicle with a bell that chimed with every movement), or they could open a small tobacco store in the empty shop he’d just passed or maybe even a convenience store in place of that struggling shop that sold dress shirts and did dry cleaning…One day, he was going to make so much money that everyone would be amazed.

Even so, he could see for himself that it was getting harder to make a living by selling yogurt door to door, and families were growing accustomed to serving yogurt on their dinner tables in the same glass container the grocer sold it in.

“Mevlut, my boy, you know the only reason we still buy farm yogurt is so we can see your face every now and then,” said a kindly old lady. No one asked when he would finish high school anymore.

—

Mustafa Efendi.If they’d stopped at the glass bowls that came out in the 1960s, we would have found a way to deal with it. Those first bowls were thick and heavy and looked like clay pots, the deposit costs were high, and if they cracked or you chipped a corner somewhere, the store would refuse to refund the deposit for the empty container. Housewives would put these empty pots to good use: as cat-food bowls, ashtrays, storage jars for used cooking oil, bath bowls, and soap dishes. Having used the pots for all sorts of kitchen and household needs, people might suddenly think that they should return them to the shop and get their deposit back, and that’s how any one family’s makeshift bin or slimy dog bowl would get a quick rinse from a hose in some workshop in Kağıthane before landing on some other Istanbul family’s lovely, radiant dinner table, touted as the cleanest, healthiest new type of yogurt bowl. Sometimes, instead of using a clean plate as usual, customers would put one of these empty bowls on my scale pans so I could weigh my yogurt into it, and then I just couldn’t resist saying something. “Ma’am, you have to believe me when I say I’m telling you all this for your own good,” I’d begin. “But you should know that the hospitals in Çapa use these bowls to store urine, and on Heybeliada they use them as spittoons in the TB sanatorium…”

Eventually they brought out a lighter, cheaper version of these glass bowls. With this kind, there was no deposit for the grocer to refund, and they said, Just give them a rinse and use them as tumblers, and they even make nice gifts for housewives. They buried the cost in the price of the yogurt, of course. Still, thanks to my strong shoulders and to original Silivri yogurt, we were somehow keeping up, but only until the big dairy companies designed a fancy sticker with a picture of a cow on it and stuck it on their glass bowls, spelling out their brand name in great big letters, and advertising on the TV. Then they sent their Ford minivans, each sporting a picture of the same cow, down the narrow, winding streets to supply the grocery stores, and that destroyed our livelihoods. Thank goodness we still have boza to sell in the evenings and keep us going. If only Mevlut would stop messing around and start working a little harder, and hand over all the money he makes to his father, we’d have something to send back to the village for the winter.

My Daughter Is Not for Sale

Korkut.Six months after the war and all the fires last year, most of the Alevis in the neighborhood were gone. Some of them moved to other hills farther away, like Oktepe, while others went to live in the Ghaazi Quarter at the far outskirts of the city. I wish them all the best. Let’s hope they don’t start troubling our police and our gendarmes over there, too. If you find yourself on the path of a six-lane motorway built to modern international standards, speeding toward your unregistered chicken coop of a house at eighty kilometers an hour, you can claim all you want that “Revolution is the only solution!” but you’d only be fooling yourself.

Once that whole tangle of leftists was gone, the value of the deeds issued by the councilman increased overnight. Armed gangs and profiteers cropped up trying to claim new land. The same people who wouldn’t give old Hamit Vural a penny when he said, Let’s buy new carpets for the mosque, who said behind his back that he should pay for them himself, since he drove the Bingöl and Elazığ Alevis out and took their land, were themselves quick to snatch up land and title deeds according to the new development plans. Mr. Hamit also embarked on some new construction projects in Kültepe. He opened a new bread factory in Harmantepe and spared no expense building a dormitory with televisions, a prayer room, and a karate school for the bachelors he brought over from the village. When I got back from military service, I started working as an assistant on the construction site for this dormitory, and I managed the on-site supply store. On Saturdays, Mr. Hadji Hamit would share a meal of ayran, meat, rice, and salad with all these unmarried, patriotic young men in the dormitory cafeteria. I would like to thank him here for having so generously helped me to get married.

—

Abdurrahman Efendi.I am struggling to find a suitable match for my eldest daughter, Vediha, who is already sixteen. Normally it is best for the women to sort these things out among themselves while they’re washing their laundry or out at the public baths or the market, or while visiting each other, but my orphan girls have no mother and no aunts to speak of, so it’s all been left up to your humble servant. When people found out that I took a bus all the way to Istanbul just for this purpose, they said all I was after was a rich husband for my beautiful darling Vediha and that I would take her whole bride price and spend it on rakı . The reason that they would envy a cripple like me and talk behind my back is simple: despite my crooked neck, I’m still a jolly fellow who takes joy in his daughters, lives life to the fullest, and can also enjoy an occasional drink. It’s just a jealous lie that I used to get drunk and beat my late wife, or that I only went to Istanbul so I could forget my crooked neck and throw some money at the girls in Beyoğlu. In Istanbul, I dropped by the coffeehouses where the yogurt sellers are usually found early in the day and saw some old friends who are still working, still selling yogurt in the morning and boza in the evening. Not that you can just come straight out and say, “I’m looking for a husband for my daughter!” You have to start with some small talk and let friendship do the rest, and if you end up in a bar at night, one bottle will lead to the next, and before you know it, everyone’s talking more freely. I may have boasted drunkenly about my darling Vediha during one of these conversations, passing around a photo we took at the Billur Photography Studio in Akşehir.