Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut fell asleep, surprised that he was about to fall asleep.

They woke up together when the train stopped at Eskişehir and panicked for a moment, thinking the gendarmes had caught them, but then they relaxed and smiled at each other.

Rayiha had a very genuine smile. It was hard to believe that she might be hiding anything or to suspect her of scheming in some way. She had an open, decent face, full of light. Mevlut knew deep down that she must have colluded with those who had tricked him, but when he looked at her face, he couldn’t help but think that she had to be innocent in all of this.

As the train moved closer to Istanbul, they talked about the huge factories they passed along the way and the flames that poured out of the tall chimneys of the Izmit oil refinery, and they wondered what corner of the world the big freight ships they spotted might be headed for. Like her sisters, Rayiha had gone to elementary school, and she could name the distant countries across the sea without too much trouble. Mevlut felt proud of her.

Rayiha had already been to Istanbul once for her elder sister’s wedding. But still she humbly asked, “Is this Istanbul now?”

“Kartal counts as Istanbul, I suppose,” said Mevlut, with the confidence of familiarity. “But there’s still a ways to go.” He pointed out the Princes’ Islands ahead of them and vowed to take her there one day.

Not once during Rayiha’s brief life would they ever do this.

IN MARCH 1994, twelve years after Mevlut and Rayiha eloped to Istanbul, Mevlut was selling boza on a very dark night when he came face-to-face with a basket lowered down quickly but quietly from above.

“Boza seller, boza seller, boza for two, please!” a child’s voice called.

The basket had fallen through the night to Mevlut like an angel. He was amazed to see it, because in Istanbul the custom of buying goods from street vendors by means of a basket tied to a rope and dropped down from an upper-story window had all but disappeared. It took him back to his middle-school days, twenty-five years ago, when he used to help his father sell yogurt and boza. Into the enameled pot in the basket, Mevlut poured more boza than the children upstairs had asked for — not just enough for two glasses, but almost a kilo’s worth. He felt good, as if he’d been touched by an angel. In the past few years, his thoughts and daydreams had frequently turned to spiritual questions.

Before we go any further, and to make sure that our story is properly understood, perhaps I should explain for foreign readers who’ve never heard of it before, and for future generations of Turkish readers who will, I fear, forget all about it within the next twenty to thirty years, that boza is a traditional Asian beverage made of fermented wheat, with a thick consistency, a pleasant aroma, a dark yellowish color, and a low alcohol content. This story is already full of strange things, and I wouldn’t want people to think it entirely peculiar.

Boza is quick to spoil and turn sour in the heat, so in the old days, when the Ottomans ruled, it was sold mainly in shops and during the winter. By the time the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, the boza shops in Istanbul had long closed down, pushed out by German breweries. But the street vendors who sold this traditional drink never left. After the 1950s, boza selling became the preserve of those like Mevlut, who walked the poor and neglected cobblestone streets on winter evenings crying “Bozaaa,” reminding us of centuries past, and the good old days that have come and gone.

Sensing some impatience from the children up on the fifth floor, Mevlut pocketed the paper money they’d left in the basket and set the change in coins next to the pot. He gave the basket a gentle pull, just as he used to do as a child when he and his father would sell their wares on the street, and off it went.

The wicker basket made a quick ascent, giving the children some trouble as it swayed from side to side in the cold wind, bumping against the windowsills and the gutters on the floors below the children’s window. When it got to the fifth floor, it hovered for a moment, like a happy seagull gliding on the perfect current. Then, like a mysterious and forbidden thing, it disappeared into the night, and Mevlut went on his way.

“Booo-zaaaaa,” he called out into the half-lit street. “Goooood boozaaaaa.”

Using a basket to buy things off the street was a custom from the days when buildings in Istanbul had no elevators or automatic doorbells and were rarely more than five or six stories high. Back in 1969, when Mevlut first started working with his father, housewives who preferred to stay indoors would use the basket for purchasing not just boza but their daily yogurt, too, and even various items from the grocer’s boy. As they did not have telephones in their homes, they would tie a little bell to the bottom of the basket to alert the grocer or a passing vendor that they needed something. The vendor would, in turn, ring the bell and rock the basket to signal that the yogurt or the boza had been safely placed inside. Mevlut had always enjoyed watching these baskets make their way back up: some of them would sway in the breeze, bumping into windows, branches, electrical and telephone cables, and the laundry lines stretched between buildings, and the bell would respond to each collision with a pleasant chime. Regular customers would put their account ledger in the basket, too, so that Mevlut could add the day’s yogurt to their tab before sending the basket back up. Mevlut’s father could not read or write, and before his son joined him from the village, he used to enter purchases into these ledgers with tally marks (one stroke was one kilo, half a stroke a half a kilo, and so on). He would swell with pride at the sight of his boy writing down numbers as well as more detailed notes, like “Yogurt with cream; Monday — Friday,” for some clients.

But Istanbul had changed so much over the past twenty-five years that these memories now seemed like fairy tales to Mevlut. Most of the streets had been paved with cobblestones when he first arrived in the city, but now they were asphalt. The three-story buildings, surrounded by their own gardens, which had made up most of the city, had been razed to the ground and replaced with taller apartment blocks in which those who lived on the upper floors couldn’t possibly hear the call of a vendor passing in the street below. In place of radios, there were now television sets that were left on all evening, drowning out the boza seller’s voice. The quiet, browbeaten folk in gray and drab clothes who used to populate the streets had been replaced by rowdy, energetic, and more assertive crowds. Mevlut had experienced these changes in daily increments, not as a sudden shock, and so, unlike some others, he did not bemoan the transformation. Rather, he tried to keep pace with these momentous changes and always chose neighborhoods where he knew he was guaranteed a friendly reception.

A place like Beyoğlu, for example! The most populous neighborhood and the one closest to his house. Fifteen years ago, toward the end of the 1970s, when the area’s ramshackle cabaret bars and nightclubs and half-hidden brothels were still in business, Mevlut was able to make sales in the backstreets until as late as midnight. The women who sang and worked as hostesses in stove-heated basement nightclubs; their devoted fans; the middle-aged mustachioed men who came from rural Anatolia to shop in Istanbul and, at the end of a long day, liked to buy drinks for the hostesses; Istanbul’s newest miserable arrivals and the Arab and Pakistani tourists who were thrilled to be sitting at a table in a nightclub with a few women; the waiters, the bouncers, and the doormen — they all bought boza from Mevlut even at the midnight hour. But in the last decade or so, the demon of change had cast its spell over the neighborhood as it had over the whole city, and the fabric of that past had been torn asunder, causing those denizens to leave and the clubs playing Ottoman and European-style Turkish and continental music to shut down, giving way to noisy new establishments serving Adana and shish kebabs cooked over an open grill and washed down with rakı . The young crowds who liked to go dancing had no interest in boza, so Mevlut no longer went anywhere near İstiklal Avenue.