Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Every home I worked in would have a pile of dusty old newspapers, empty bottles, and unopened boxes stashed away and forgotten in a corner somewhere, and I would always be told not to touch this pile — almost as if there were something sacred about it. Every house had a corner that I was meant to stay away from, and when no one was home, I would indulge my curiosity and have a look, taking care not to touch any of the fresh banknotes, gold coins, strange-smelling soaps, and decorative boxes they would leave out on purpose just to test me. Madam’s son had a collection of plastic toy soldiers that he would deploy in line formation on his bed or on the carpet. As he had one line fight another, I enjoyed watching him get so lost in his game that he forgot everything else, and sometimes when I was alone in the house I would sit down and play with the soldiers myself. Many families bought newspapers just to collect the coupons that came with them, and once a week I’d be tasked with cutting them all out. Once a month, when it was time to collect the enameled teapots, illustrated cookbooks, floral pillowcases, lemon squeezers, and musical pens that you could get if you had enough coupons, they would send me to stand in line for half a day at the nearest newsstand. There was one electric kitchen appliance that Madam — who spent the whole day gossiping on the phone — kept stored away with her winter woolens in a wardrobe that smelled of mothballs, and although, just like the gifts she got with the coupons, she never used it, not even for guests, she still kept this machine carefully stored away because it was, after all, a European import. Sometimes I would look through the receipts, newspaper clippings, and flyers that I might find tucked inside envelopes right at the bottom of a cupboard, or at the girls’ dresses and underwear and the writing in their notebooks, and it was as if I were about to find something I’d been seeking for a long time. Sometimes I felt as if those letters and those scribbles were meant for me and that I was in those photographs, too. Or I would feel it was my fault that Madam’s son had taken his mother’s red lipstick and hidden it in his room, and I became at once deeply attached to and yet somehow resentful of these people who were laying their private world open for me to see.

Sometimes, halfway through the day, I would already begin to miss Ferhat, our home, and the phosphorescent outline of our land we could see from the bed. Two years after I’d started working as a maid, as my overnight stays became more frequent, I began to resent Ferhat for failing to pull me away, once and for all, from these other families’ lives that were fast becoming my own, from their cruel sons and spoiled daughters, from the grocers’ boys and the doormen’s sons who chased after me because I was pretty, and from the tiny servants’ room where, if the heating was on, I would wake up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat.

—

Ferhat.A year after I went to work at the Bounty Restaurant, they started putting me in charge of the cash register. This was partly because of those university courses Samiha was always encouraging me to take — even if they were only correspondence courses and on TV. But in the evenings, when the restaurant was noisy and full, and a pleasant smell of rakı and soup hung in the air, the manager’s brother would sit at the desk and handle everything himself…The owner, whose main restaurant was in Aksaray (ours was a sister branch), had one rule that was repeated to the cooks and dishwashers, and to us waiters and busboys, on a monthly basis: every single plate of french fries, tomato salad, grilled meatballs, and chicken-topped rice, every small beer and shot of rakı, every bowl of lentil soup, kidney-bean stew, and leek with lamb, had to be noted down by the cashier before it was served.

With its four big windows (the lace curtains always drawn) on Atatürk Street, and its crowd of eager regulars (teetotaling local shop keepers having their stews at lunchtime and, in the evening, groups of men sipping rakı in moderation), the Bounty Restaurant was a veritable institution, so busy it wasn’t easy sometimes to follow the manager’s commandment. Even at lunchtime, when I got to sit at the cashier’s desk, I couldn’t always keep up with where the waiters were taking their plates of chicken-and-vegetable stew, celery roots in olive oil, fava-bean spread, and oven-baked mackerel. The waiters would queue up at my table to have each portion noted down (while impatient customers shouted, “That’s mine and it’s getting cold!”), until, sometimes, there was no choice but to set the rule aside for a few minutes, letting the waiters deliver their orders first and report them to me later, when things had calmed down a little: “Ferhat, stuffed peppers and fried pastry rolls for table seventeen, two chicken blancmanges for sixteen.” But the queuing problem remained, since the waiters would now try to shout over one another instead of waiting their turns: “A salad for number six, two yogurts for number two.” Some would call out the order as they hurried past with piles of dishes, and the cashier wouldn’t always have time to write it all down, or else he would forget, or, like me, he’d make something up on the spot or just give up entirely, the way I did when I just couldn’t follow a class I was watching on TV. The waiters didn’t mind at all if some portions went unrecorded; they knew that when customers thought they’d gotten something for free, they’d leave a better tip. As for the manager, his rule had less to do with money than with having some basis to answer drunken customers shouting, “We only ordered one plate of panfried mussels, I tell you!” and arguing over the bill.

I may not have manned the register during the dinner shift, but while I was serving, I got to know all the little tricks of a dishonest waiter. One of the simplest was one that I used myself from time to time: you find an appreciative customer, and you serve him a larger portion of his order (six meatballs instead of four, for example); but you tell him you’re only charging him for the smaller portion, and he is so delighted he adds the difference to your tip. In theory, all tips were supposed to be pooled and then split equally among the staff (though the manager himself would first take a cut), but in practice every waiter would hide part of what he received in some trouser pocket or in his white apron. No one ever said anything about it: getting caught would mean getting fired, and in any case, everyone did it, so no waiter would ever question what was in another waiter’s apron.

My evening station was near the entrance, and in addition to my tables, another duty of mine was to assist the manager. I wasn’t really the headwaiter, but I did help him to supervise. “Go and check on the stews for table four, they’re complaining,” he would say, and even though it was Hadi from Gümüşhane’s table, I’d go into the kitchen myself to look for the cook hiding in the cloud of smoke that rose from the meat and fat on the grill, and then I would go to table number 4 and tell them with a smile and a little joke that their stews were on their way, asking perhaps whether they might like them with garlic or would prefer them plain or otherwise trying to find out what football team they were for and talk about the match-fixing scandals, the corrupt referees, and the penalty we should have had on Sunday.

Whenever that idiot Hadi managed to upset a table, I’d go to the kitchen and grab a plate of fries or a huge pot of sizzling prawns, which were probably meant for some other table, and present it on the house to the table complaining that its order was taking forever or got screwed up. If there was a mixed-grill platter to spare, I might bring it to a table of drunks—“Here is the meat, finally,” I’d announce — never mind they’d never ordered it; they were having such a good time discussing politics, football, or the cost of living that they wouldn’t notice or care. In the later hours, I would appease quarrelsome diners, subdue tables that broke into song annoying everyone, resolve any disagreements over whether the window should be open or closed, remind the busboys to empty people’s ashtrays (“Go check on number ten, kid, get going…”), and flush out the waiters and dishwashers smoking in the kitchen, outside, or in the back storeroom, sending them to their stations with just a look.