Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“What a load of nonsense,” said Ferhat one night.

“No, no, one of our people from Mardin was at the brothel at number sixty-six Sıraselviler Street when the general came in, and that’s how I heard.”

“Our Tayyar Pasha is a big shot now, he’s the commander of the Istanbul detachment, why should he even need to go to a brothel? The pimps would be happy to bring the most perfect example of the kind of woman he wants right to his doorstep.”

“Maybe the pasha is scared of his wife, because our friend from Mardin saw him with his very own eyes at number sixty-six…You don’t believe us, you turn your nose up at people from Mardin, but if you were to go there one day, breathe its air, drink its water, and let us look after you, you would never want to leave again.”

Ferhat would lose his patience sometimes and say, “If Mardin is such a wonderful place, why did you come all the way to Istanbul?” at which the dishwasher boys would laugh as if he’d made a joke.

“We’re from a village near Mardin, actually. We didn’t even pass through the city on our way here,” one of them earnestly confessed. “No one except people from Mardin will help us out, here in Istanbul…so I suppose this is our way of saying thanks.”

Sometimes Ferhat would start berating these sweet dishwasher boys: “You’re Kurds, but still you have no class consciousness to speak of,” he would scold them. “Now go to your room and sleep,” he’d say, and off they would go.

—

Ferhat.If you’ve been following this story closely, you will have understood by now that it is difficult to get mad at Mevlut, but I did. His father came to the restaurant one day when he wasn’t there, and when I asked what had happened, Mustafa Efendi told me that Mevlut had gone to Korkut’s wedding. When I found out he’d been mingling with those Vurals, who have the blood of so many of our young men on their hands, I didn’t think I could get over it. I didn’t want to argue with him in front of all the waiters and the customers, so I dashed home before he arrived. When he got home and I saw the innocent look on his face, half my anger evaporated. “I hear you pinned some money on Korkut at his wedding,” I said.

“Oh, I see, my father must have come by the restaurant,” said Mevlut, looking up from the boza he was mixing for the evening. “Did the old man look troubled? Why do you suppose he wanted you to know that I went to that wedding?”

“He’s all alone now. He wants you to come back home.”

“He wants me to fight with you and end up alone and friendless in Istanbul, just like him. Should I go?”

“Don’t go.”

“Whenever there’s politics involved, everything somehow ends up being my fault,” said Mevlut. “I can’t get my head around it right now. I’ve fallen for someone. I think about her all the time.”

“Who?”

After a brief silence, Mevlut said: “I’ll tell you in the evening.”

—

But Mevlut had to work all day before he could meet up with Ferhat again at the apartment and talk over a glass of rakı in the evening. On a typical winter’s day in 1979, Mevlut would first go to Tepebaşı to pick up the raw boza that the Vefa Boza Shop’s vans had been delivering direct to the vendors’ neighborhoods for the past two years; then he’d head back home to add sugar and prepare the mixture he would sell in the evening, all the while thinking about the letter he was going to write to Rayiha; and then from noon until three he would be at the Karlıova Restaurant, waiting tables. From three to six o’clock, he delivered yogurt with cream to his best customers and to three restaurants like the Karlıova before going home to nap for a bit while thinking about Rayiha and his letter, and then heading back to the Karlıova Restaurant at seven.

After a three-hour shift at the Karlıova Restaurant, having worked right up until the time when all the drunks, the hotheads, and the generally disagreeable would start picking fights, Mevlut would take off his waiter’s apron and go out into the cold and dark streets to sell boza. He didn’t mind the extra work at the end of the day because he knew that his boza-loving customers were expecting him.

While the demand for yogurt sellers’ services was mostly declining, there was a growing interest in buying boza from nighttime street vendors. The frequent skirmishes between nationalist and Communist militants had something to do with it. Families now too scared to go outside, even on a Saturday, preferred an evening spent gazing out the window at the boza seller on the pavement, waiting for him to arrive, listening to the feeling in his voice, and drinking his boza as they remembered the good old days. Selling yogurt was tough now, but longtime street vendors from Beyşehir were still making good money thanks to boza. Mevlut had heard from the Vefa Boza Shop itself that boza sellers had begun to appear in neighborhoods like Balat, Kasımpaşa, and Gaziosmanpaşa, where they had rarely ventured before. At night, the city was left to poster-plastering armed gangs, stray dogs, foragers rummaging through trash cans, and of course to boza sellers; after a day in the ceaseless din of the restaurant and in the hubbub of Beyoğlu, walking down a dark and silent sloping street in the back of Feriköy felt to Mevlut like a homecoming, a return to a familiar universe. Sometimes the bare branches on a tree would twitch when there was no wind, and the political slogans covering every inch of a dried-up marble fountain, of which not even the tap remained intact, would seem to him at once familiar and as eerie as the hoot of an owl in the cemetery behind the little mosque. “Bozaaa,” Mevlut would cry out toward the eternal past. Sometimes, when he happened to look into a little house through a pair of open curtains, he would dream about living in just such a place with Rayiha someday and picture all the happiness that lay ahead.

—

Ferhat.“This girl — did you say her name was Rayiha? — if she’s really only fourteen as you say, then she’s too young,” I said.

“But we’re not getting married right away,” said Mevlut. “First I’m going to do my military service…By the time I’m back, she’ll be old enough.”

“Why should a girl you don’t even know, and a pretty one, too, wait until you’re back from the army?”

“I’ve thought about that, and I have two answers,” said Mevlut. “First, I don’t believe it was just luck that made us look into each other’s eyes at the wedding. She must have wanted it, too. Why else would she pick the moment I was standing there to walk from her table to her father’s? Even if it was really just a coincidence, I’m sure Rayiha must also think that the way our eyes met had a special significance.”

“How did you look into each other’s eyes?”

“You know how you meet someone’s gaze and you know you’re going to spend the rest of your life with them…”

“You should write that down,” I said. “How did she look at you?”

“She didn’t lower her eyes in shame the way girls usually do when they see a boy…She looked straight and proud into my eyes.”

“How did you look at her? Show me.”

Mevlut pretended I was Rayiha and gave me such a fervent, heartfelt look that I was moved.

“Ferhat, you’d write a better letter than I ever could. Even the European girls used to be impressed with your letters.”

“Fine, but first you have to tell me what you see in this girl. What is it about her that you love?”

“Don’t call Rayiha ‘this girl.’ I love everything about her.”