Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“How is everything with you? Which one of your daughters was meant to start school soon?”

“I’m very well, thank God. My eldest will start primary school in autumn, God willing.”

“Well done. You’re not letting them get married until they’ve finished high school, right?” said the old woman as she shut the door after him.

“I’m sending both my daughters to college,” said Mevlut as the door was closing on him.

Neither this pleasant exchange, nor any conversation with his other regulars, all of whom happened to be especially kind to him that night, managed to get Mevlut’s mind off the agony of losing his cart. He wondered where it might be, whether it would be mistreated if it fell into the wrong hands, how it would fare in the rain, even whether the butane stove might be stolen. He couldn’t bear to think of it without him there to look after it.

The next day, a few other street vendors whose carts and stalls had been likewise confiscated were waiting inside the imposing if somewhat decrepit Ottoman-era wooden building of Beyoğlu’s municipal offices. A junk dealer Mevlut had met a few times in Tarlabaşı was surprised to hear of a rice cart having been towed away. It was rare for vendors of cooked rice, meatballs, corn on the cob, or roasted chestnuts, who sold their goods from the more advanced, glass-paned rigs with built-in butane or coal stoves, to suffer a police seizure, since these vendors wouldn’t have been occupying their spots in the first place without having furnished gifts and free food to the health inspectors, as Mevlut did.

Neither Mevlut nor any other street vendor managed to get his cart back that day. An elderly man who sold pizza topped with minced meat said, “They’ll have destroyed them all by now,” a possibility Mevlut couldn’t even bear to think about.

The municipality’s health and hygiene regulations did not deter street vendors, and any fines on the books had long been rendered negligible by inflation, so the local authorities would make an example of recidivist vendors by destroying their carts and taking their goods on grounds of public health. This could lead to arguments, fisticuffs, and even knife fights, and sometimes a street vendor would plant himself outside the town hall to stage a hunger strike or set himself on fire, though this was rather rare. A street vendor could usually hope to get his confiscated stall back only right before a scheduled election, when every vote counted, or else if he happened to have a contact inside the administration. After that first day at the municipal building, the seasoned minced-meat-pizza vendor told Mevlut he was going out to buy himself a new cart the next day.

Mevlut resented this man for having decided not to seek out a contact in the bureaucracy and for being realistic enough to accept that he would never get his property back. Anyway, Mevlut didn’t have the money to buy a new three-wheeler and fit it with a stove. Even if he could raise the cash, he didn’t believe he could make a living selling rice anymore. Yet he couldn’t help but muse that if only he could get his cart back, he’d be able to return to his old life, and like those sad women who can’t accept that their husbands have died in the war, he simply couldn’t fathom that his white cart might really have been destroyed. There was an image in his mind, like a faded photograph, of the cart waiting for him in some municipal storeroom, on a concrete floor cordoned off by barbed wire.

The next day, he went back to Beyoğlu city hall. When one of the clerks asked him, “Where was your cart taken from?” Mevlut found out that the burned-down theater was officially in the municipal jurisdiction of Şişli, not Beyoğlu, and this filled his heart with hope. The Vurals and Korkut would help him find a contact at the Şişli Municipality. That night, in his dreams, he saw his white cart with its three wheels.

I Am the Victim of a Grave Injustice

Rayiha.Two weeks passed without any news about the cart. Mevlut was out long past midnight selling boza, woke up late, and ran around the house in his pajamas until noon, playing hide-and-seek and rock-paper-scissors with Fatma and Fevziye. Even at six and five the two of them could tell that something bad had happened, since there was no chickpea rice or chicken cooking in the house, and the white three-wheeled cart they loved so much was no longer tied to the almond tree every evening but had disappeared entirely. They put all their energy into playing with their father, maybe trying to suppress their worries over the fact that he was home and not working, and when their shouting got too loud, I’d yell at Mevlut:

“Take them out to get some fresh air in Kasımpaşa Park.”

“Will you give Vediha a call,” Mevlut would mumble. “Maybe there’s some news.”

Finally one night Korkut called: “Tell Mevlut to go to Şişli city hall. There’s a guy from Rize who works on the second floor, he’s one of Vural’s guys, he’ll help Mevlut out.”

—

That night, Mevlut was too joyous to sleep. He got up early in the morning, shaved, put on his best suit, and walked all the way to Şişli. As soon as he was reunited with his white cart, he was going to give it a fresh coat of paint, add some new decorations, and never leave it unattended again.

The man from Rize who worked on the second floor of the municipal building was an important and busy person, constantly scolding the people queuing up to see him. He kept Mevlut waiting in a corner for half an hour before summoning him with a flick of his finger. He led the way down a dark stairway, through corridors that smelled of cheap floor cleanser, stuffy rooms full of clerks reading newspapers, and a canteen that gave the whole basement an aroma of cheap oil and dishwasher liquid, and finally they emerged into a courtyard.

It was a dark courtyard surrounded by dark buildings, with a number of carts piled up in a corner; Mevlut’s heart leaped at the sight. As he walked toward them, he saw in a different corner two government officers hacking another cart to bits with an ax while a third man sorted the wheels, the wood from the frames, the stoves, and the glass panels into separate piles.

“So, have you picked one yet?” said the man from Rize, coming over to stand next to him.

“My cart isn’t here,” said Mevlut.

“Didn’t you say they took your cart a month ago? We usually strip them the day after we take them. Yours would have been destroyed, too, I’m afraid. These are the ones the health inspectors impounded yesterday. Of course if they went out every day, there’d be a riot. But if we never did any roundups at all, we’d have half the country selling potatoes and tomatoes in Taksim Square tomorrow. That would be the end of Beyoğlu and any hope of nice clean streets…We don’t usually let people claim their carts; they’d just wind up back on the square the next day. You should pick one out of this bunch before it’s too late…”

Mevlut looked at the carts like a shopper examining the merchandise. He spotted one with a glass cabinet like his own cart had and a solid wooden frame with thick, sturdy wheels. It was missing its butane stove, which had probably been stolen. But this cart was neater and newer than his. He began to feel guilty.

“I want my own cart.”

“Look, my friend, you were selling things on the street where you weren’t supposed to. Your cart’s been confiscated and destroyed. That is unfortunate, but you know the right people, so you can have a new cart for free. Take it and sell bread out of it, don’t let your children go hungry.”