Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

There was a sign on the little white ice-cream cart that said

HIZIR’S ICE CREAM

Strawberry, Sour Cherry, Lemon, Chocolate, Cream

in red letters. Sometimes Mevlut would run out of a flavor toward the end of the evening, around the time he really began to miss Rayiha. “I don’t have any sour cherry,” he would tell a customer, who might try to get clever with him: “Then why did you write ‘sour cherry’ on your cart?” Mevlut’s initial urge would be to answer back, “I didn’t write it myself, did I?” but then he would think of Rayiha, and, feeling happy, he wouldn’t respond at all. He left behind the old bell he had inherited from his father and went out with a jollier and noisier one Hızır had given him, swinging it about until it swayed like a handkerchief fluttering on a clothesline in a storm, and he cried “Ice creeeam” in the melody Hızır himself had taught him. But the kids who would come running after him at the sound of the bell would shout, “Ice-cream man, ice-cream man, you’re not Hızır!”

“Hızır’s gone to a wedding in the village, I’m his little brother,” Mevlut would tell these children who emerged from the darkness like little imps, popping out from street corners, house windows, tree trunks, and mosque courtyards where they played hide-and-seek.

Mevlut was reluctant to leave the cart unattended, and it was difficult for him to enter homes and kitchens, so most families who wanted ice cream would send someone down to the street to fetch it. Big families would send servants carrying huge trays inlaid with silver or mother-of-pearl or use a rope to dangle a basket carrying as many as a dozen narrow-waisted little teacups and a piece of paper with detailed instructions on the flavors desired, and Mevlut soon discovered that filling these orders by the light of a streetlamp was as delicate and difficult a task as a pharmacist’s job. Sometimes there would be new customers rounding the corner before he’d finished, and even the children, who buzzed around him like flies on a plate of jam and never stopped talking, would grow impatient and agitated. Sometimes, when there wasn’t a soul on the street or around his ice-cream cart — during special nighttime Ramadan prayers, for example — a large family would send down a servant with a tray, and everyone in the house, starting with the children, their uncles watching football on TV, their happy guests, gossipy aunts, spoiled little girls, and finally the shy and irritable little boys, would shout down from the fifth floor for all the world to hear exactly how much sour cherry and how much cream they wanted and which flavor should go inside the cone and which one on top, with an impertinence that surprised even Mevlut. Sometimes people would insist he come upstairs, and he would stand by a crowded family dinner table or by the doors of a rich family’s chaotic kitchen, witnessing little children doing joyful cartwheels on the carpet. Some families, hearing the sound of the bell, would conclude that it must be Hızır down there, and the uncles and aunties would lean out the first-floor window, saying, “Hızır Efendi, how are you, you’re looking good!” even as they stared straight into Mevlut’s face; and far from correcting them, he would answer “Thank you, I have just returned from a wedding in the village…Ramadan has been particularly bountiful this year” in a manner designed to please, though always followed by a twinge of guilt.

What he felt most guilty about during Ramadan was his failing to resist temptation with Rayiha during fasting hours. Like her, he was smart enough to know that these were the happiest days of his life, and this happiness was too great for regret to dampen it, so he understood that his guilt sprang from a deeper source: the heart of someone who had been admitted to paradise by accident, without really deserving it.

At around ten thirty, before he was even halfway through the route Hızır had drawn, he would start to miss Rayiha enormously. What was she doing at home right now? Two weeks after the start of Ramadan, in whatever bit of the afternoon remained after making ice cream and having sex, they went to the movies a couple of times in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, to one of those cinemas that showed three comedy films starring people like Kemal Sunal and Fatma Girik, all for the price of a large ice-cream cone. Maybe if Mevlut were to buy her a secondhand television, Rayiha wouldn’t get bored waiting for him at home.

His last stop every night was a stairway that looked out on the tens of thousands of lit windows in Istanbul. This was the spot where Mevlut would one day get mugged by the father-and-son duo described at the start of our book, and as he stood here watching the oil tankers crossing the Bosphorus in the dark, and the lit-up Ramadan decorations hanging between minarets, Mevlut would think how lucky he was to have a home in Istanbul and a sweet girl like Rayiha waiting for him to return. He would pick out the brightest looking from among the kids that swooped around him like hungry seagulls tailing a fishing boat and tell him, “Go on, show me how much money you’ve got in your pockets.” This child and a few more like him would each get a cone piled high with ice cream, even though their small change was hardly enough to pay for it, and so, having used up the remaining ice cream in his tub, Mevlut would head home. He would ignore kids who had no money at all and pleaded, “Uncle Hızır, at least give us an empty cone!” or those who mimicked him for a laugh. He knew that the moment he gave a kid free ice cream, he wouldn’t be able to sell him or any of the other kids anything the next day.

—

Rayiha.I would know Mevlut was back by the sound of him pulling the cart into the back garden, and while he was busy chaining the front wheel to the almond tree, I would pick up the tubs (“Not a drop left, well done!” I’d say every time), the rags that needed washing, and the ice-cream scoops, taking them all upstairs. As soon as he stepped into the house, Mevlut would remove his apron and fling it to the floor. Some people handle the money they earn with the same veneration they would show a piece of paper with our Prophet’s name on it, holding it aloft like the source of life itself, so it was nice to see Mevlut casting off the apron with its pockets stuffed full of money in his eagerness to return to our bliss. I would kiss him.

On summer mornings, he would go out looking for strawberries, sour cherries, melons, and other ingredients for the ice cream, trying the Albanian fruit seller or else going to Balıkpazarı, and as I put on my shoes and my headscarf, Mevlut would say “Come along!” as if taking me along were his idea. After Ramadan, Mevlut started selling ice cream in the afternoons too.

Whenever I noticed Mevlut growing weary or bored in my presence, I would stand back a little as he caught up with his friends in barbershops, carpenter’s workshops, and garages. Sometimes he would say, “Wait over here for a minute, will you,” and go into a store, leaving me behind. I could keep myself entertained just by looking through an open door at workers in a factory that made plastic bowls. Mevlut would relax as we moved farther away from home. He would tell me about the awful backstreet cinemas we saw on the way, and another restaurant where he used to work with Ferhat, but he would feel uneasy whenever he spotted a familiar face among the crowds in Taksim and Galatasaray. Was it because he was the villain who’d seduced a woman, and I was the stupid girl who’d fallen for his tricks? “Let’s go home now,” he’d say, fuming from five steps ahead, and I would run to catch up with him, wondering how he could suddenly be so furious about something so small. (I spent my whole life trying to figure out why Mevlut would lose his temper all of a sudden.) He would soften as soon as we started to sort the fruit, and while we washed and juiced it, he’d plant kisses on my neck and my cheek, telling me he knew where the sweetest cherries and strawberries really were, which made me blush and laugh. The room was never dark no matter how tight we shut the curtains, but we would still pretend that it was and that we couldn’t see each other as we MADE LOVE.