Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Every night for twenty-five years, around eight thirty, when the evening news broadcast was drawing to a close, Mevlut got ready to leave his rented home in Tarlabaşı. He wore the brown sweater his wife had knit, his woolen skullcap, and the blue apron that made such an impression on customers, picked up the jug containing the boza sweetened and flavored with special spices by his wife or his daughters, made an experienced guess as to how much it weighed (sometimes, on cold nights, he would say that they hadn’t prepared enough), put on his dark coat, and said good-bye to those at home. When his daughters were little, he used to tell them not to wait up for him, but these days he just told them “I won’t be long” while their eyes remained firmly fixed on the TV.

The first thing he would do when he stepped outside into the cold was to shoulder the thick oak-wood yoke he’d been using for twenty-five years to carry his load, a plastic jug full of boza tied at each end; like a soldier about to step onto the battlefield he would check his ammunition one last time, his belt pouches and the inner pockets of his jacket full of little bags of roasted chickpeas and cinnamon (prepared at home either by his wife, his increasingly irritable and impatient daughters, or by Mevlut himself), and finally he would set out on his night’s endless walk.

“Gooood booozaaaa…”

He would quickly reach the upper neighborhoods and then, once he got to Taksim, he would head toward whatever location he’d picked for that day, making steady sales with only a half-hour cigarette break.

It had been nine thirty when the basket fell to Mevlut like an angel that night, and he’d been in Pangaltı. By ten thirty, he was in the backstreets of Gümüşsuyu, on a dark lane leading up to the little mosque, when he saw a pack of street dogs he’d first noticed some weeks ago. Stray dogs never bothered street vendors, so until recently Mevlut hadn’t been afraid of them. But now he felt his heart quicken with a strange impulse, and he began to worry. He knew that street dogs attacked at the smell of fear. He tried to think about something else.

He tried to think of his girls laughing as they watched TV; the cypress trees in the cemetery; the home to which he’d soon return and where he’d be chatting with his wife; his Holy Guide who said that you should keep your heart pure; the angel he’d seen in a dream the other night. But this wasn’t enough to banish his fear of the dogs.

“Woof! Woof!” barked one approaching him.

There was a second behind the first. It was difficult to see them in the darkness; they were a muddy-brown color. In the distance, Mevlut saw a black one.

The three dogs and a fourth one he couldn’t see all started barking at the same time. Mevlut was gripped by a kind of fear he’d experienced only once or twice as a street vendor, and then only as a child. He couldn’t remember any of the verses and prayers that were meant to repel dogs. He did not move a muscle. But the dogs continued to bark.

Mevlut looked around for an open door through which to escape, a doorstep on which to take refuge. Should he use the stick across his back as a weapon?

A window opened. “Shoo!” someone yelled. “Leave the boza seller alone! Shoo, shoo!”

The dogs were startled into silence, and then they walked away.

Mevlut felt much gratitude toward this figure at the third-floor window.

“You can’t show them your fear, boza seller,” said the man. “They’re mean bastards, these dogs, they can tell when someone’s afraid. Got it?”

“Thanks,” said Mevlut, ready to continue on his way.

“Well, come on up and let us buy some of this boza, then.” Mevlut wasn’t too happy with the man’s patronizing manner, but he went to the door anyway.

It opened with a bzzzz from the buzzer. Inside the building, there was a smell of butane, frying oil, and paint. Mevlut took his time climbing the stairs to the third floor. Once he got to the apartment, they invited him inside just like kindly people used to do in the old days, rather than keeping him waiting at the door:

“Come on in, boza seller, you must be cold.”

There were several rows of shoes lined up outside the door. As he bent down to untie his laces, he remembered his old friend Ferhat. “There are three types of buildings in Istanbul,” he used to say: (1) those full of devout families where people say their daily prayers and leave their shoes outside, (2) rich and Westernized homes where you can go in with your shoes on, (3) new high-rise blocks where you can find a mix of both sorts.

This particular building was situated in a wealthy neighborhood. People here did not take their shoes off and leave them at the door before going in. But for some reason Mevlut felt as if he were in one of those new, big apartment blocks mixing the traditionally religious with others more Westernized. In any case, on those rare occasions nowadays when he was invited into living rooms or kitchens, he was always respectful enough to remove his shoes at the door, regardless of whether he was at an ordinary home or a wealthier family’s apartment. “Don’t worry about your shoes, boza seller!” they would sometimes call to him from inside, but he would ignore them.

There was a strong smell of rakı in this apartment. He could hear the cheerful chatter of people already drunk before dinner was even over. A mixed group of six or seven men and women sat at a table that took up almost the entire length of a sitting room, drinking and laughing at the television, which was, as in all homes, turned up too high.

The table went quiet once they realized Mevlut was in the kitchen.

There was a man in the kitchen who was completely drunk. “Go on, give us a little boza, boza seller,” he said. This wasn’t the man Mev lut had seen at the window. “Did you bring any roasted chickpeas and cinnamon?”

“I did!”

Mevlut knew better than to ask this lot how many kilos they wanted.

“How many of you are there?”

“How many of you are there?” the drunken man called to the living room in a mocking tone. There was much laughter and argument in response, and the group at the table took some time to count.

“Boza seller, I don’t want any if it’s sour,” Mevlut heard a woman say from the dinner table.

“My boza is sweet,” Mevlut answered.

“Then don’t give me any,” said a male voice. “Good boza is sour boza.”

They started arguing among themselves.

“Come here, boza seller,” another drunken voice called out.

Mevlut went from the kitchen to the living room, feeling poor and out of place. For a moment, everything was still and silent. Everyone at the dining table was smiling at him, giving him curious looks. It was probably the novelty of seeing a living relic of the past that had now fallen out of fashion. In the past few years, Mevlut had grown used to getting this sort of look.

“Boza seller, should proper boza be sweet or sour?” said a man with a mustache.

The three women all had dyed-blond hair. Mevlut noticed that the man who had opened the window earlier and rescued Mevlut from the dogs was sitting at one end of the table across from two of the women. “Boza can be both sweet and sour,” said Mevlut. This was an answer he’d memorized over twenty-five years.

“Boza seller, can you make a living from this?”

“I do, thank God.”

“So there’s good money in this work, eh? How long have you been doing it?”

“I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. Earlier I also used to sell yogurt in the mornings.”

“If you’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and if it’s good money, then you must be rich by now, right?”

“I cannot say that I am,” said Mevlut.