Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“From the very beginning?” said Ferhat, without taking his eyes off the television.

“Yes, from the very beginning.”

“Mevlut didn’t write those first letters to Rayiha,” he said, now looking at me. “I wrote them.”

“What?”

“What would Mevlut know about love letters…He came to me before taking off for military service, he told me he was in love, so I wrote some letters for him.”

“Did you write them for me?”

“No. Mevlut asked me to write to Rayiha,” said Ferhat. “He told me all about how much he loved her.”

I’ll Go and Pick It Up First Thing Tomorrow Morning

IN THE WINTER of 1989, seven years into his life as a cooked-rice vendor, Mevlut began to clearly observe that the younger generations were growing increasingly suspicious of his presence. “If you don’t like my rice, you can have your money back,” he’d tell them. But so far none of these young workers had ever asked for a refund. His poorer, angrier, more loutish customers, and the loners who didn’t care what anyone thought, would often leave half their order uneaten and sometimes demand that Mevlut only charge them half the price, which request Mevlut would oblige. Then in a single, surreptitious move that he himself scarcely wanted to admit, he would put the uneaten portions of rice and chicken right back into their respective compartments in his cart and tip anything not fit to save into a box for the stray cats or to get rid of on the way home. He never told his wife about those customers who left half-eaten portions. Rayiha had been diligently cooking rice and chicken the same way for more than six years, so it couldn’t have been her fault. When he tried to understand why the new generation was nowhere near as taken with his rice as those he’d served in earlier days, he came up with several possibilities.

Among the younger generations there was now a regrettable misconception, fueled by newspapers and TV, that street food was “dirty.” Milk, yogurt, tomato paste, beef sausage, and canned vegetable companies kept bombarding people with advertisements about how “hygienic” their products were and how everything they sold was machine processed and “untouched by human hands,” to the point that sometimes Mevlut would find himself shouting back at the screen, “Oh, come on!”—scaring Fatma and Fevziye, who thought perhaps the TV was actually alive. Before they bought his rice, some customers would check the cleanliness of his plates, cups, and cutlery. Mevlut knew that these same people, so condescending and suspicious with him, would have no problem whatsoever eating from a big plate shared among friends and relatives. They didn’t care about cleanliness when they were with people they felt close to. This could only mean they didn’t trust Mevlut or consider him their equal.

In the past two years, he had also noticed that filling your stomach with a quick plate of rice for lunch carried the risk of making you “look poor.” Rice with chicken and chickpeas wasn’t even that filling, unless you had it as a snack between meals, as you might sesame rolls or biscuits. There was also nothing particularly strange or exotic about it, unlike, say, stuffed mussels, which contained raisins and cinnamon and had once been a pricey dish served only in certain bars and restaurants until the migrant community from Mardin turned them into a cheap street snack everyone could afford. (Mevlut had never tried them, though he’d always wondered what they tasted like.) Gone were the days when offices would place bulk orders with street vendors. The golden years of Ottoman-style street food — panfried liver, lamb’s head, and grilled meatballs — were all but forgotten, thanks to this new breed of office worker so fond of disposable plastic cutlery. Back then, you could start off with a street stall outside any big office building and end up with a proper grilled-meatball restaurant on the same corner, serving the same long-standing lunchtime clientele.

Every year, when it started getting colder and the boza season approached, Mevlut had gone to a wholesaler down in Sirkeci and bought a huge sack of dry chickpeas to last him until the next winter. That year, however, he didn’t have enough money saved up to buy his usual sack of chickpeas. His income from the rice had stayed the same, but it was no longer enough to cover the rising costs of food and clothing for his daughters. He was spending more and more money on needless things, the treats with Western-sounding names that irri tated him whenever he heard them on TV — TipiTip chewing gum, Golden chocolate bars, Super ice cream — as well as on an assortment of flower-shaped sweets, teddy bears that came with newspaper coupons, multicolored hair clips, toy watches, and pocket mirrors, which suffused him with pleasure at every purchase but left him feeling guilty, too, and somehow inadequate. If it hadn’t been for the boza he sold on winter evenings, the rent from his late father’s house in Kültepe, and the money Rayiha earned embroidering bedsheets for a handful of bridal trousseau shops Reyhan had told her about, Mevlut would have had trouble covering the rent on their own home and the gas he funneled into their stove on cold winter days.

The crowds in Kabataş always thinned out after lunch. Mevlut began to look for a new spot to park his cart from two to five in the afternoon. Far from reducing the distance that separated their house from İstiklal Avenue and Beyoğlu, the new Tarlabaşı Boulevard seemed to have pushed them even farther out and down the social ladder. The part of Tarlabaşı that had ended up on the other side of this road quickly filled up with nightclubs, bars, and other places where you could hear classical Turkish music while being served alcohol, so that soon all the families and the poor living there had to move out, as property prices rose, and the whole area became an extension of Istanbul’s biggest entertainment district. But none of this wealth had reached the streets on Mevlut’s side of the big road. Instead, the metal railings and concrete barriers running along the middle of the road and all along the sidewalks to prevent pedestrians from crossing over at street level had the effect of pushing Mevlut’s neighborhood farther toward Kasımpaşa and the deprived working-class quarters that rose among the ruins of the old shipyard.

There was no way Mevlut could push his cart over the concrete barriers and metal railings that ran the length of the six-lane road, nor could he use the overhead pedestrian crossings; and so the shortcut he had always taken to get home, cutting through the crowds on İstiklal Avenue on his way from Kabataş, was no longer available, leaving him no choice but to go the long way around through Talimhane. There were plans to limit İstiklal to foot traffic (leading to endless roadwork that had littered the whole street with potholes), except for a single tramline described in the newspapers as “nostalgic” (a word Mevlut didn’t like); as a result big foreign brands had opened shops lining the avenue, all of which made it harder for street vendors to come here. Beyoğlu’s police patrolled in their blue uniforms and dark glasses, swooping down on those selling sesame rolls, cassettes, stuffed mussels, meatballs, and almonds, the vendors who repaired lighters, sold grilled sausages, and made sandwiches all along the main avenue and on the side streets, too. One of them, who sold Albanian-style panfried liver and made no secret of his contacts at the Beyoğlu police station, had told Mevlut that any street vendors who could survive around İstiklal were either undercover agents or informants who reported to the police daily.

The crowds of Beyoğlu, flowing inexorably through the streets like the tributaries of a colossal river, had once again changed course and speed, as they so often did, with people starting to congregate at different corners and crossroads. Street vendors would rush to these new meeting hubs immediately, and even though the police chased them away, they’d be replaced in time by sandwich and kebab stalls, eventually to be succeeded by actual kebab restaurants and cigarette and newspaper stands, until finally neighborhood grocers would start selling kebab wraps and ice cream in front of their shops, and fruit-and-vegetable sellers would stay open all night with a constant stream of Turkish pop songs playing somewhere in the background. All these changes, small and large, brought to light a number of interesting new spots where Mevlut thought he might try to park his cart for a while.