Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Look,” I said, “your tenant is some poor soul from Rize, one of the Vurals’ men, one of us, basically; he’d leave the house in a minute if we told him to, no questions asked. He’s afraid of Mr. Hamit. And it’s not like his rent is low, he pays on time every month, cash in hand, and Vediha hands it on to you, no taxes, no excuses. What more do you want?”

“I’m sorry, Süleyman, but I don’t really trust anyone from Rize these days, so he can go.”

“What a ruthless landlord you are, the man’s married, he’s just had a kid, are we supposed to throw him out on the street?”

“Nobody took pity on me when I came to Istanbul, did they?” said Mevlut. “You know what I mean. All right, fine, don’t throw anyone out on the street just yet.”

“We took pity on you, we cared for you,” I said carefully.

—

The monthly rent Vediha channeled to Mevlut had been just enough to cover a week’s worth of his family’s expenses. But after the phone call with Süleyman, the rent Vediha brought for the month of March, plus the rent paid in advance for April and May, was higher than usual. Mevlut didn’t dwell too much on how easy it had been to raise the rent or on what part the Aktaş family, Süleyman and Korkut, might have played in accomplishing this. He used the money to buy a secondhand ice-cream cart, an ice bucket, metal vats, and a mixing machine, having decided to spend the summer of 1989 selling ice cream.

When Mevlut went to pick up the cart from a neighborhood down the hill, Fatma and Fevziye came along; as they pushed the cart back home, they were euphoric. When their neighbor Reyhan, misinterpreting the cause of all this merriment, leaned out of her window to cheer the return of Mevlut’s rice cart, no one had the heart to correct her. While Mevlut and the girls repaired the cart and gave it a fresh coat of paint in the back garden, the evening news showed crowds of protesters filling up Tiananmen Square in Beijing. At the beginning of June, Mevlut was awed by the bravery of the street vendor who had stood all alone before the tanks. What had he been selling before he stepped in the way of those tanks with a plastic bag in each hand? Probably rice like me, thought Mevlut. On TV he had seen how the Chinese cooked their rice, and it wasn’t with chickpeas and chicken as Rayiha did; they boiled it for a very long time. Mevlut was impressed with the protesters, though he felt it was important not to go too far protesting against the state, especially in poorer countries, where, if not for the state, there would be no one looking after poor people or street vendors. They were doing all right in China; the only problem was that Communists were, unfortunately, godless.

In the seven years that had passed since the summer Mevlut ran away with Rayiha, the major milk, chocolate, and sugar brands in the country had embarked on a fierce competition to place deep freezers in all the grocery stores, pastry shops, and sandwich and cigarette stalls in Istanbul. Starting in May every year, these shops would plant their freezers outside on the pavement so that people stopped buying ice cream from street vendors. Claiming that Mevlut was obstructing the way, the municipal police could seize and destroy his cart if he spent more than five minutes in the same spot, but they never said a word about the huge freezers from these big companies, which made it so difficult for people trying to walk by. On TV, there was a constant stream of commercials for these strange new ice-cream brands. In the narrow back alleys where Mevlut pushed his cart, children would come up to him and ask, “Do you have any Flinta, ice-cream man? Do you have a Rocket?”

If he was in a good mood, Mevlut would tell them, “This ice cream will fly farther than any of your Rockets.” That joke might even be good for a few more sales. But most evenings, he’d get home early and in a bad mood, and when Rayiha came downstairs to help him with the cart as she used to do seven years ago, he would snap at her: “Why are the girls still out so late playing by themselves?” Rayiha would go looking for them, and he would just leave the ice-cream cart behind and head upstairs to stare forlornly at the TV before going to bed. In one of these moments of dejection, he saw the giant waves of an ocean of his own dark thoughts roiling on the TV screen. He worried that unless he found a real job in the autumn, he would be unable to afford schoolbooks and clothes for the girls, food for the family, and gas for the stove.

Let Them Know What You’re Worth

TOWARD THE END of August, Rayiha told her husband that a former restaurant owner from Trabzon, a man close to the Vurals, was looking to hire someone like Mevlut. Mevlut was mortified to realize that his financial woes had once again been the subject of conversation at the Aktaş dinner table.

—

Rayiha.“They’re looking for someone who is honest and knows how food service and restaurants work, and that’s not easy to find in Istanbul these days,” I told Mevlut. “When you’re negotiating your salary, make sure you let them know what you’re worth. You owe it to your daughters,” I added, because Fatma would be starting primary school around the same time Mevlut was meant to start his new job. We both went to the ceremony they held on Fatma’s first day at Piyale Paşa Primary School. They made us stand in line all along the wall surrounding the playground. The principal explained that the school building used to be the private residence of a pasha who conquered some Mediterranean islands belonging to the French and the Italians around four hundred fifty years ago. The pasha attacked an enemy warship all by himself, and when he disappeared, everyone assumed he’d been taken prisoner, but in fact he’d managed to take the ship single-handedly. As for the children, they weren’t listening to the principal; they were either talking among themselves or clinging to their parents for fear of what was to come. As she walked into the school hand in hand with the other children, Fatma got scared and burst into tears. We waved to her until she disappeared into the building. It was a cool, cloudy day. On our way home up the hill, I saw tears and clouds of gloom in Mevlut’s eyes. He didn’t come home but went straight to the café where he was to be a “manager.” That same afternoon was the only time I would need to go to Kasımpaşa to fetch Fatma from school. She couldn’t stop talking about the teacher’s mustache and the window in her classroom. After that day, she made her way to school and back with the other neighborhood girls.

—

Rayiha called Mevlut a “manager” with equal amounts of affection and ridicule, though it wasn’t Mevlut who’d come up with the title but the owner of the café himself, Boss Tahsin from Trabzon. Just as he referred to his little café’s three workers as “employees” (“worker” wasn’t a nice word), he asked that they refrain from calling him “boss” and use “captain” instead, as would befit a true man of the Black Sea. All this achieved, however, was that his employees felt moved to call him “boss” even more often.

Mevlut soon realized that he’d been offered this job because Boss Tahsin didn’t trust his employees. He would have dinner at home with his family and then come down every evening to take over the cash register from his manager. He’d handle all payments himself for the next two hours, and then he’d close the café for the day. The twenty-four-hour diners on İstiklal Avenue were always crowded and lively, but anyone who came all the way down to the Binbom Café’s backstreets at night was either lost, drunk, or looking for cigarettes and alcohol.