Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Why?”

“All the relatives that came with me from the village are rich now, but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be for me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m honest,” said Mevlut. “I can’t lie or sell spoiled food or cheat anyone just to buy a house or give my daughter a proper wedding…”

“Are you a religious man?”

Mevlut knew by now that this question carried political connotations in the wealthier households. The Islamist party, which was supported mainly by the poor, had won the municipal elections three days ago. Mevlut, too, had voted for its candidate — who had unexpectedly been elected mayor of Istanbul — because he was religious and had gone to the Piyale Paşa school in Kasımpaşa, which Mevlut’s daughters were now attending.

“I’m a salesman,” Mevlut replied cunningly. “How could a salesman possibly be religious?”

“Why shouldn’t he be?”

“I’m always working. If you’re out on the streets all the time, there’s no way you can pray five times a day…”

“And what do you do in the mornings?”

“I’ve done all sorts of things…I’ve sold rice with chickpeas, I’ve worked as a waiter, I’ve sold ice cream, I’ve been a manager…I can do anything.”

“A manager of what?”

“The Binbom Café. It was in Beyoğlu, but it shut down. Did you know it?”

“And now what do you do in the mornings?” said the man from the window.

“These days I’m free.”

“Do you have a wife, a family?” asked a blond lady with a sweet face.

“I do. We have two beautiful girls. They’re like angels, thank God.”

“You’ll send them to school, right? Will you make them cover their heads when they get older?”

“Does your wife wear a headscarf?”

“We’re just poor village people from the countryside,” said Mevlut. “We’re attached to our traditions.”

“Is that why you sell boza?”

“Most of my people came to Istanbul to sell yogurt and boza, but actually it’s not something we really knew in my village.”

“So you first discovered boza in the city?”

“Yes.”

“And where did you learn to call out like a proper boza seller?”

“You have a lovely voice, like a muezzin.”

“It’s the emotion in the seller’s voice that really sells the boza,” said Mevlut.

“But boza seller, don’t you get scared at night on the streets, or at least bored?”

“The Almighty God will always look after the poor boza seller. I always think nice things when I’m out.”

“Even when you’re in a dark and empty street, even when you walk past cemeteries and prowling dogs, when you see demons and fairies?”

Mevlut did not reply.

“What’s your name?”

“Mevlut Karataş.”

“Go on then, Mr. Mevlut, show us how you say ‘bozaaaa.’ ”

This wasn’t the first table of drunk people Mevlut had faced. When he’d first started working as a street vendor, plenty of drunk people would ask him whether there was electricity in his village (there hadn’t been when he’d first come to Istanbul, but now, in 1994, there was) and whether he’d ever been to school, followed by questions like “How did you feel when you first got on an elevator?” “When was the first time you went to the cinema?” In those early years, Mevlut would come up with amusing answers to endear himself to the customers who let him into their living rooms; he had no qualms about making himself seem more innocently ignorant and less streetwise than he was, and his friendly regulars did not need to ask twice to hear his rendition of the “Boozaaaa” call he usually reserved for the streets.

But those were the old days. Nowadays, Mevlut felt a resentment he couldn’t explain. Had it not been for his gratitude to the man who had rescued him from the dogs, he would have ended the conversation there, given them their boza, and left.

“So how many people would like boza?” he asked.

“Oh, haven’t you given them boza in the kitchen yet? And here we were thinking you’d sorted that out already!”

“Where do you get this boza from?”

“I make it myself.”

“No, really? I thought all the boza sellers just bought it ready-made.”

“There’s a factory now in Eskişehir; it’s been there for five years,” said Mevlut. “But I buy the raw boza from the oldest and the best place, the Vefa Boza Shop. Then I mix it up with my own ingredients and turn it into something you can drink.”

“So you add sugar to it at home?”

“By nature, boza is both sweet and sour.”

“Oh, come on now! Boza is meant to be sour. It’s the fermentation process that makes it sour, it’s the alcohol, just like with wine.”

“There’s alcohol in boza?” asked one of the women, with eyebrows raised.

“Darling, you don’t know anything, do you?” said one of the men. “Boza was the drink of choice under the Ottomans, when alcohol and wine were banned. When Murad the Fourth went around in disguise at night, he didn’t have just the taverns and coffee shops shut down but the boza shops, too.”

“Why did he ban the coffee shops?”

This sparked one of those drunken discussions Mevlut had witnessed many times in bars and at the tables of seasoned drinkers. And for a moment, they forgot about him.

“Boza seller, you tell us, is there alcohol in boza?”

“There is no alcohol in boza,” said Mevlut, knowing full well that this was not true. His father, too, used to lie about it.

“Come on now, boza seller…There is some alcohol in boza, though maybe not much. I suppose that’s how all those religious types got away with getting drunk during the Ottoman era. ‘Of course there’s no alcohol in boza,’ they would say, and then happily down ten glasses and get absolutely sloshed. But after the Republic was founded and Atatürk made rakı and wine legal, there was no point to boza anymore; that was the end of it right there, seventy years ago.”

“Maybe boza will make a comeback if some of the religious bans are reinstated…,” said a drunk man with a thin nose, shooting a challenging glance at Mevlut. “What do you think about the election results?”

“No,” said Mevlut, without batting an eye. “There is no alcohol in boza. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be selling it.”

“See, the man’s not like you, he cares about his beliefs,” said one of the other men.

“You speak for yourself. I’m religious, but I also like my rakı, ” said the one with the thin nose. “Boza seller, are you saying there’s no alcohol in boza because you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid of anyone but God,” said Mevlut.

“Oooh, there’s your answer, eh?”

“But don’t you worry about street dogs and robbers at night?”

“No one would harm a poor boza seller,” said Mevlut, smiling. This, too, was another of his practiced responses. “Bandits and robbers don’t bother boza sellers. I’ve been doing this job for twenty-five years. I’ve never been mugged. Everyone respects a boza seller.”

“Why?”

“Because boza has been around for a long time, passed down to us from our ancestors. There can’t be more than forty boza sellers out on the streets of Istanbul tonight. There are very few people like you who will actually buy boza. Most are happy just to listen to the boza seller’s call and remember the past. And that affection makes the boza seller happy, it’s what keeps us going.”

“Are you religious?”

“Yes, I am a God-fearing man,” said Mevlut, knowing that these words would scare them a bit.

“And do you love Atatürk, too?”

“His Excellency Field Marshal Mustafa Kemal Pasha passed through Akşehir, near where I come from, in the year 1922,” Mevlut informed them. “Then he set up the Republic in Ankara, and then he went to Istanbul, where he stayed at the Park Hotel in Taksim…One day he was standing at the window of his room when he noticed that the usual joy and bustle seemed to be missing from the city. He asked his assistant about it, who told him, Your Excellency, we’ve banned street vendors from entering the city, because they don’t have those in Europe and we thought you’d get angry. But it was precisely this which made Atatürk angry. Street vendors are the songbirds of the streets, they are the life and soul of Istanbul, he said. Under no circumstances must they ever be banned. From that day on, street vendors were free to roam the streets of Istanbul.”