Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

He found a little gap on a street in Talimhane, between a stack of timber meant for a construction site and an old abandoned Greek house. For a time, this became the place where he would await afternoon customers. The offices of the electricity board were across the road, and the people queuing up there to pay their bills, reactivate their power, and apply for a meter soon discovered the cooked-rice seller nearby. Mevlut was just starting to think that he might sell more rice if he spent lunchtimes here instead of in Kabataş when the guard at the construction site — who’d been eating for free in exchange for looking the other way — told Mevlut to get lost because his bosses didn’t like having him around.

Two hundred meters down the road, he found another small gap right next to the ruins of the Gloria Theatre. This hundred-year-old wooden building, owned by an Armenian charity trust, had gone up in flames on a cold winter night in 1987. Mevlut reflected how it was only two years ago that he was out selling boza in Taksim when he’d seen the fire in the distance and stood watching it, along with the rest of the city. There had been widespread rumors of arson, as the grand old theater, known for its Western-music recitals, had staged a play that made fun of Islamists, but the allegations had never been proven. Mevlut had never heard the word “Islamist” before. A play that mocked Islamic sensibilities was, of course, not to be tolerated, but at the time he had felt that burning down an entire building was probably an overreaction. Now, as he stood there, freezing in the cold and waiting for customers that did not come, he thought about the soul of the night watchman, who’d been burned alive with the rest of the building; the oft-expressed superstition that anyone who’d ever enjoyed an evening in that theater was cursed to die young; and the fact that a long time ago this area and the whole of Taksim Square had been an Armenian cemetery. In light of all this, it seemed reasonable that no one should ever come to his hidden haven for a plate of chicken and rice. He held out for five days before deciding to look elsewhere for a place to park his white cart.

He sought a little corner for his restaurant on wheels in Talimhane, behind Elmadağ, in the alleyways that wound down in Dolapdere and around Harbiye. He still had regular nighttime boza customers in all these neighborhoods, but the daytime was a different world. Sometimes Mevlut would entrust his rice cart to the barbershop next to the burned-down theater so he could wander among the local car-parts dealers, grocery stores, cheap diners, estate agents, upholsterers, and electricians. In Kabataş, if he needed the toilet or felt like stretching his legs, he would usually leave his cart with a friend who sold stuffed mussels or with some other acquaintance, but he would always hurry back in case a customer showed up. Here, though, leaving his cart was like running away from it, a feeling straight out of a dream. Sometimes, he felt the guilty urge to abandon the cart entirely.

One day he saw Neriman walking ahead of him in Harbiye, and he was amazed to feel his heart speed up. It was a surprising emotion, like running into your younger self on the street. When the woman stopped to look in a shopwindow, Mevlut saw that it wasn’t Neriman at all. He realized that the thought of her must have been lurking somewhere in the back of his mind these past few days as he was going by Harbiye’s travel agencies, and suddenly, visions from fifteen years ago, when he yet had dreams of finishing high school, started coming to him through the fog of memory: of the streets of Istanbul, which had been so much emptier back then; of the joys of masturbating at home alone; of the overwhelming isolation that had endowed everything with meaning; the leaves that fell off chestnut and plane trees in autumn, littering the streets; the kindness people used to show a sweet little boy selling yogurt…It had all come with a burden of loneliness and sorrow that he’d carried in his heart and in his gut, but he had no memory of those feelings now, and so he remembered his life fifteen years ago as a perfectly happy time. He felt a curious sense of regret, as if he’d lived his life for nothing. Yet he was so content with Rayiha.

When he returned to the burned-down theater, his cart had disappeared. Mevlut couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a cloudy day in winter, with dusk falling earlier than usual. He went into the barbershop where the lights had already been switched on for the evening.

“The police took your cart,” said the barber. “I told them you were on your way back, but they wouldn’t listen.”

In all his years as a street vendor, it was the first time this had ever happened to Mevlut.

—

Ferhat.Mevlut lost his rice cart to the municipal police over on our side of town just around the time I started working as an inspector for the electricity board, which was based in Taksim in a building shaped like a matchbox, much like the Hilton Hotel. But we never ran into each other. Had I known that he was parking nearby, would I have gone to look for him? I don’t know. But this claim that Mevlut had written his love letters to my wife rather than his own made me realize that it was time to clarify my thoughts on the matter, both private and public.

I’ve always known that at Korkut’s wedding Mevlut got only a fleet ing look at Abdurrahman Efendi’s other daughters — so what’s it to me if he meant his letters for one or the other? I had no idea that he’d been dreaming of Samiha all along when he wound up eloping with Rayiha. He was too embarrassed ever to tell me. So, privately, I’m not bothered by any of it. But as a matter of appearances, what views we must take in public, it’s become tough for us to be friends now: Mevlut used to write love letters to the girl who ended up being my wife…and I courted and married the girl Mevlut loved and could never have. Regardless of what we may feel in private, in this country it’s difficult for two men in this “public” situation to refrain from immediately beating each other up when meeting by chance on the street, let alone to shake hands and be the friends they were before.

—

The day the local police confiscated his rice cart, Mevlut came home at the usual time. At first, Rayiha didn’t even notice that the cart wasn’t tied to the almond tree in the back garden. But by the look on her husband’s face, she knew that there had been some sort of calamity.

“It’s nothing,” said Mevlut. “I’ll go and pick it up first thing tomorrow morning.”

He told his daughters — who never quite understood what the adults said but still caught on to all that remained unsaid — that a screw had come off one of the wheels, and he’d left the cart with a friend who did repairs in the neighborhood next to theirs. He gave them each a piece of chewing gum with a picture on the wrapper. At dinnertime, they ate their fill of the fresh rice Rayiha had cooked and the chicken she’d fried for Mevlut to sell the next day.

“Let’s save the rest for your customers the day after tomorrow, then,” said Rayiha, gently returning the uneaten chicken to the pot, which she put in the fridge.

That night, as Mevlut was pouring out a few glasses of boza in the kitchen of one of his oldest customers, she told him, “Mevlut Efendi, we’ve been having rakı all evening, so we hadn’t really planned on buying boza. But there was so much emotion, so much melancholy, in your voice that we couldn’t help ourselves.”

“It’s the boza seller’s voice that sells his boza,” said Mevlut, repeating a line he’d told his customers thousands of times before.