Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut remained motionless where he lay on the bed. If he got up, he thought, he might get into another fight with his father. If that happened and he ended up on the receiving end of more slaps and punches, it would be impossible for him not to leave the house.

From the bed, Mevlut could hear his father pacing in the single room that constituted their house, pouring himself some water and a glass of rakı, and lighting a cigarette. Throughout the nine years he had spent here, and especially while still in middle school, as he drifted in and out of sleep Mevlut had always found it reassuring and comforting to hear the little sounds of his father’s presence, his muttering to himself, inhaling and exhaling, the persistent cough he suffered when selling boza in wintertime, even the way he snored at night. He no longer felt the same way about his father.

Mevlut fell asleep in his clothes. When he was younger, he’d always liked drifting off to sleep on the bed in his clothes whenever his father beat him and made him cry, and in later years, too, whenever he came home exhausted after a day spent working, and still had his homework to do.

When he woke up in the morning, his father wasn’t home. Mevlut put his socks, shirts, shaving kit, pajamas, sweater vest, and slippers into the little suitcase he carried whenever he went back to the village. He was surprised to see that it was still half empty after he’d put in all of the things he wanted to take. He wrapped up the bundles of German marks on the table in some newspaper, putting them inside a plas tic bag that said LIFE, and placed them in the suitcase. As he walked out of the house, he felt neither fear nor guilt in his heart — only freedom.

He went straight to the Ghaazi Quarter to see Ferhat. This time, unlike his first visit to the neighborhood a year ago, he had only to ask a couple of people before quickly finding Ferhat’s place.

—

Ferhat.Mevlut never managed to finish high school, but I did, thank God. I didn’t do very well in the university placement exams, though. After we moved here, I briefly looked after the parking garage of a candy factory where some of my relatives worked in the accounts department, but there was a hooligan from Ordu there who bullied me. At some point I also got involved in a political organization with some of my friends from the neighborhood. It wasn’t really my thing. I felt guilty knowing that but still staying with them, out of respect and fear. It’s a good thing Mevlut came along with some money. We could both tell that the Ghaazi Quarter was no good for us, just like Kültepe. We thought that if we managed to get a foothold in the city center before we had to go off on military service, maybe somewhere near Karaköy and Taksim, there would be more work for us to do and more money to earn, and instead of wasting so much time on roads and buses, we would be among the throngs on the city pavements, where there is business to be done.

—

Karlıova Restaurant was a small, old Greek tavern off Nevizade Street, at the Tarlabaşı end of Beyoğlu. The original owner left the city in 1964 when Prime Minister Ismet Pasha kicked the Greeks out of Istanbul overnight, and the restaurant was taken over by a waiter from Bingöl named Kadri Karlıovalı, who served stews during the day to the tailors, jewelers, and shopkeepers of Beyoğlu and rakı and meze by night to middle-class drinkers out to enjoy themselves or on their way to the cinema; now, after fifteen years, he was on the brink of bankruptcy. The restaurant wasn’t just in trouble because the sex films had taken over the cinemas and the political terror had taken over the streets, so that the middle-class crowds were scared away from Beyoğlu. The irascible, penny-pinching Karlıovalı had accused a very young dishwasher of stealing and threatened to fire both the boy and a middle-aged waiter who had spoken up in his defense, leading four other already disgruntled employees to pick up and leave in solidarity. The owner used to buy yogurt from Mevlut’s father, and Ferhat’s family knew him as well, so the two friends decided to help this weary old man to sort things out at the restaurant before they went to do their military service. They had sensed an opportunity.

They moved into an old apartment the owner had set aside to board his dishwashers and busboys (who were all still children) and for the young waiters; now, with all the staff having gone, the place was almost completely empty. The apartment was in a three-story Greek building in Tarlabaşı built eighty years ago as a single-family house. But after the events of the sixth and seventh of September 1955, when nearby Greek Orthodox churches were burned down and Jewish, Greek, and Armenian shops were looted, the social fabric of the neighborhood had begun to fray, and the building, following the same trend, was split into several apartments separated by drywall. The landlord, who held official title to the building, now lived in Athens and couldn’t come to Istanbul too easily, so the rents were collected by a man from Sürmene, whom Mevlut never saw.

Two other dishwashers, aged fourteen and sixteen, both from the southeastern town of Mardin and both with primary-school diplomas, shared a bunk bed in one room of the apartment. Mevlut and Ferhat got rid of the other bunk beds, and each picked one of the other rooms, which they decorated according to their tastes with whatever they could find lying around. This was the first time in his life that Mevlut had ever lived apart from his family, or even had a room of his own. He bought a rickety old coffee table from a junk shop in Çukurcuma and took a chair from the restaurant, with the owner’s permission. After the restaurant closed at around midnight, they would set up a rakı table with the dishwasher boys (cheese, Coca-Cola, roasted chickpeas, ice, and plenty of cigarettes) and spend a good two or three hours merrily drinking. The boys told them that the argument at the restaurant hadn’t really been started by a dishwasher stealing something but by the discovery of the relationship between the owner and that dishwasher boy, over which the waiters who slept on the bunk beds in the apartment had risen up in furious protest. They asked the dishwasher boys to repeat the story several times, and pretty soon, they began to nurture a secret resentment against their elderly boss from Bingöl.

The two boys from Mardin had their hearts set on selling stuffed mussels. All the stuffed-mussel vendors in Istanbul and Turkey were from Mardin. The boys kept going on about how Mardin had cornered the stuffed-mussel business even though it was an inland city, and clearly this must mean people from Mardin were all exceptionally cunning and clever.

“Oh, come on, kid, all the sesame roll vendors are from Tokat, but I’ve never heard anyone say this was proof that people from Tokat are so brilliant!” Ferhat would say whenever he got fed up with the boys’ exuberant devotion to Mardin. “But you can’t compare stuffed mussels with sesame rolls,” the boys would reply. “All bakers are from Rize, and they’re always boasting about it, too,” Mevlut would say, just to give another example. These two boys, who were six or seven years younger than Mevlut, had come to Istanbul straight after primary school, and they had a rowdy liveliness that captivated Mevlut no less than their dubious stories and gossip about the restaurant owner and the older waiters; Mevlut often found himself swallowing anything they told him about the streets, Istanbul, and Turkey:

The journalist Celâl Salik was so harsh in his criticisms of the government because of the conflict between America and Russia and because the owner of his newspaper Milliyet was a Jew…The fat man next to the Ağa Mosque who sold soap bubbles to kids, and was known to all of Istanbul by the way he said “flying balloon,” was of course a plainclothes policeman, but his main purpose was to act as a cover for two more undercovers at the other end of the street, one disguised as a shoeshine and the other as a pan-fried liver vendor…Whenever customers at the Sultan’s Pudding Place next to the Palace Cinema left any chicken-topped rice or chicken soup on their plates, the waiters wouldn’t throw away the leftovers but rather just collect them in metal bowls, rinse them in hot water, and then serve them back to customers as fresh soup, rice toppings, or shredded-chicken blancmange…The Sürmene gang, who managed the houses officially registered to Greek families who’d run away to Athens, tended to rent most of them out to brothel keepers, who had very good relations with the Beyoğlu police station anyway…The CIA was going to fly Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran on a private jet to clamp down on the popular unrest that had just begun over there…There was going to be a military coup soon and General Tayyar Pasha would be declared president of the Republic.