Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

A waiter introduced Mevlut to a street vendor from Muş who’d sold rice with chickpeas for years but had recently suffered a stroke. The indisposed street vendor wanted to sell his cart and “his” spot behind the Kabataş pier for car ferries. Mevlut knew from experience that most street vendors hoping to sell their businesses tended to exaggerate their claims to certain spots. Whenever one of them managed to bribe and cajole the neighborhood constable into letting him park his cart somewhere for a few days, he’d forget that the corner wasn’t truly his property but belonged to the nation. Even so, after years spent walking the streets with a stick across his back, Mevlut had high hopes and began to entertain dreams of having his own place in Istanbul, like a real shop owner. He knew he was overpaying a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to haggle too much with the elderly half-paralyzed street vendor from Muş. Mevlut and Rayiha went to see the man and his stammering son in a poor neighborhood behind Ortaköy, in the rented apartment that they shared with cockroaches, mice, and a pressure cooker, and after two visits, they’d learned the trade. Mevlut went back again one day to collect the cart and push it all the way home. He bought a sack each of rice and chickpeas from a wholesaler in Sirkeci and stacked them between the kitchen and the television.

—

Rayiha.Just before going to bed, I would give the chickpeas a good soak and set the alarm for three in the morning, so I could get up and see that they’d softened properly before putting them in a pot on low heat. After I took the pot off the stove, Mevlut and I would embrace and go back to sleep with the comforting gurgle of the pot cooling in the background. In the morning, I would fry the rice a little in oil, just the way the man from Muş had taught us, and then leave it to simmer in water for a while. While Mevlut was out buying groceries, I would boil and then panfry the chicken. I’d set some of it aside, removing the bones and skin with my fingers, adding as much thyme and pepper as I liked, perhaps one or two cloves of garlic if I felt so inclined, and I would split the rest of the chicken into four pieces, placing them beside the rice.

—

Mevlut would come back home from his morning shopping with carrier nets full of fruit or tomatoes, breathe in the delicious smell of Rayiha’s cooking, and stroke his wife’s arm, her back, and her growing belly. Rayiha’s chicken satisfied all of Mevlut’s customers — the clerks who wore a shirt and tie or a skirt to their desk jobs at the banks and offices in Fındıklı, the rowdy students from the neighborhood’s schools and universities, the builders who worked at the construction sites nearby, and the drivers and passengers killing time as they waited for the ferry. He soon had his regulars — the big, friendly security guard at the local branch of Akbank, who was built like a barrel and always wore sunglasses; Mr. Nedim, who sold ferry tickets in a white uniform from his booth on the pier; the men and women who worked for the insurance company close by, who always seemed to be mocking Mevlut with their smiles — and Mevlut always found some topic of conversation with any customer, perhaps the penalty Fenerbahçe had been denied in their last match or the blind girl who knew all the answers yesterday on the TV quiz show. He won the municipal police over with his charm and lots of free plates piled high with chicken.

As an experienced street vendor who knew that chatting people up was part of the job, Mevlut never discussed politics. Just as in the days when he sold yogurt and boza, it wasn’t really the money that he cared about; what made him happy was seeing a customer come back again a few days later (which was rare) just because he’d enjoyed the rice and chicken, and be kind enough to tell him so (which was even rarer).

Most of Mevlut’s customers made it plain that the main attraction of his food was that it was cheap and close at hand, and some of them even said so outright. Occasionally, though, customers were kind enough to tell him, “Congratulations, rice vendor, your food’s delicious,” and this made Mevlut so happy that he would temporarily forget the harsh truth he kept trying to hide from himself as much as from Rayiha: he wasn’t clearing much at all from this rice business. If the street vendor from Muş had spent eight years in the same spot only to die in sickness and destitution, perhaps it hadn’t been his own fault after all.

—

Rayiha.Most days, Mevlut would bring back half the chickpeas, chicken thighs, and rice I’d cooked in the morning. These leftover drumsticks, small chicken halves, and bits of skin would have lost their shine by then, the fat around them would be discolored, but I would add them all to the pot again for the next day’s batch. I’d also put any leftover rice to simmer some more. It tasted even better after it had been cooked over a gentle flame for a second time. Mevlut wouldn’t say we were using leftovers; instead, he would call it seasoning, the way jail-block bosses and rich inmates would take the awful food served in prison and have it cooked again using their secret stash of good olive oil, spices, and pepper. He’d heard about this from a wealthy Kurd from Cizre who’d been in jail and now ran a parking lot. Mevlut would watch me cooking in the kitchen and take great pleasure in reminding me that food always tastes better when it’s got some dirt in it— a truth commonly acknowledged by anyone in Istanbul who makes a habit of consuming street food. I didn’t like this, and I would tell him there’s nothing “dirty” about food that’s been cooked again because it didn’t get eaten the first time around. But then he told me that those bits of skin that had been in and out of the pan a few times, and the chickpeas that had been boiled so many times that they’d softened into mush, were usually his customers’ favorites, and rather than go for the fresher, cleaner chunks of meat, they would pick out giblets that had been cooked a few times over, smothering them in mustard and ketchup before wolfing them down.

—

In October, Mevlut started selling boza again in the evenings. He’d walk for kilometers every night with all kinds of beautiful images and strange thoughts crossing his mind. During these walks, he discovered that the shadows of the trees in some neighborhoods moved even when there was no breeze at all, stray dogs got braver and cockier where streetlamps were broken or switched off, and the flyers for circumcision ceremonies and cram schools pasted on utility poles and in doorways were all written in rhyming couplets. Hearing the things the city told him at night and reading the language of the streets filled Mevlut with pride. But when he went back to his rice cart in the morning and stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets, the power of his imagination waned, he sensed that the world was hollow and meaningless, and he felt the urge to return to Rayiha as quickly as possible, afraid of the overwhelming loneliness growing inside him. What if she went into early labor while she was at home alone? Yet he would tell himself, Just a little longer, and start walking in restless circles around the big wheels and glass box of his rice cart or just shift his weight from his right foot to his left, glancing at his Swiss watch as he waited.

—

Rayiha.“He gave you that watch because it was in his interest to do so,” I would say whenever I noticed Mevlut looking at Hadji Hamit’s gift. “He did it so you’d feel like you owe him, not just you but your uncle and your cousins, too.” When Mevlut came back in the afternoon, I’d make him some herbal tea with leaves I picked from the tree in the courtyard of the Armenian church. He would check on the boza I’d already prepared for the evening, switch on the TV to the only program they were showing, a high-school geometry lesson, as he drank his sugary herbal tea, and then sleep through his own coughing fits until it was time for dinner. He spent seven years selling cooked rice, and during that time, I was always the one who prepared the chickpeas and the rice, who bought, boiled, and fried the chicken; I also added the sugar to the boza so it was ready for his evening rounds; and I spent my days washing all the dirty tools, spoons, jugs, and plates that needed washing. When I was pregnant, I also listened closely to the baby in my womb, taking care not to throw up in the rice from the stink of panfried chicken, and treasured the little corner with a cot and pillows for the baby. Mevlut had found a book called Islamic Names for Your Child in a junk shop. He would flip through the pages before dinner and read out some names for my consideration during the TV commercials — Nurullah, Abdullah, Sadullah, Fazlallah — and because I didn’t want to break his heart, I kept putting off telling him that our baby was a girl.