Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

It was Mevlut’s job to open the café at ten in the morning and man the till until around eight in the evening, as well as making sure that the café ran smoothly. The Binbom Café’s customers mostly worked in the surrounding backstreets — in photography studios, advertising agencies, cheap restaurants, and nightclubs featuring Turkish classical music — or just happened to be passing by. Despite being a tiny, nar row place far from the main street, the café didn’t do too badly. But the suspicious boss was convinced that his employees were cheating him.

It didn’t take Mevlut long to figure out that Boss Tahsin’s anxiety about his workers’ honesty was more than just the usual prejudice of a rich man who thinks that the poor folk he employs must all be out to get him. They were in fact up to a trick Mevlut had seen before and that the boss warned him to look out for: they used the quantities they were given of cheese, minced meat, pickles, beef sausages, and tomato paste to make more sandwiches than municipal guidelines allowed and the owner had instructed, and what they received for the extra sandwiches they pocketed. Captain Tahsin, however, had developed a countermeasure, which he proudly explained to Mevlut: every day, a man from Rize who owned the Tayfun Bakery and supplied all of Binbom’s sandwich bread and hamburger buns would call the Captain to tell him exactly how many loaves he’d delivered that day, which prevented the café staff from using bits of cheese and minced meat salvaged from other portions to make extra sandwiches and burgers. But the workers could as easily work their trick with things like orange, pomegranate, or apple juice, and since there was no helpful baker to count the glasses used, it was up to Manager Mevlut to keep a watchful eye.

Mevlut’s main responsibility, though, was to make sure that every single customer was issued a receipt from the cash register, that great innovation that had sprung up all over the city five years ago. The Captain believed that no matter how much they tried to scrimp on cheese, no matter how much sugary water they secretly used to top up half a glass of orange juice, there was no way his employees could cheat him if every customer received a receipt. To ensure this discipline, every now and then the Captain would send an anonymous friend of his down to the café. The undercover operative would have a bite to eat and ask for a discount on his order in exchange for forgoing a receipt, just as the rest of Istanbul seemed to be doing. If the manager at the till agreed, it meant he was pocketing the money himself, and he would be fired immediately — just like Mevlut’s predecessor.

Mevlut didn’t see the café’s employees as opportunists waiting for a chance to cheat their boss from Trabzon but rather as the earnest crew of this boat they were all sailing. He always worked with a smile and took genuine pleasure in praising his colleagues’ work—“Ah, you’ve toasted this sandwich to perfection” or “God, this kebab wrap looks nice and crispy!” In the evenings, Mevlut would report dutifully to his superior officer, brimming with pride in the place’s smooth operation, especially on good days.

Once he’d surrendered the bridge to his captain, he’d run back home to sip a bowl of Rayiha’s lentil or wheat soup, watching TV out of the corner of his eye as he did at the café all day. Since café workers were allowed as many sandwiches and kebab wraps as they liked for their own consumption, Mevlut was never hungry when he came home, nor did he expect much for dinner, and while he sipped his soup he loved to look at Fatma’s school textbooks and especially at the letters, numbers, and sentences she’d written in her tiny, beautiful hand all over the white pages of her notebook (the same notebooks that in his day were of cheap yellow paper). He still went out again toward the end of the evening news and stayed out selling boza until as late as eleven thirty.

Now that he was managing the café and had another source of income, Mevlut didn’t feel the pressing need to sell one more glass or to look for new customers on remote streets in the old neighborhoods across the Golden Horn, where the dogs bared their teeth and growled. One summer evening, he took his ice-cream cart and visited the Holy Guide and his students, who gave him a tray of tulip-shaped teacups to fill up with ice cream on the street, and after that day he knocked on their door whenever he felt the need to confide in someone, using boza as an excuse when winter came and the weather got cold. To make it clear that he wasn’t there for business but for the depth of their conversation, he insisted that the ice cream or the boza served on every third visit would be on him, describing this on one occasion as “an offering to the school.” The Holy Guide’s lectures were termed “conversations.”

It was almost a year after his first visit before Mevlut deduced that the apartment where the Holy Guide gave his students private instruction in the art of Ottoman calligraphy was also a secret lodge of his sect. One reason that it took Mevlut so long to catch on was that the visitors to the apartment that served as a spiritual center were all so quiet and secretive by nature — but, equally, a part of Mevlut just didn’t care to know what was going on. He was so pleased to be there and know that every Thursday evening the Holy Guide would take the time to talk to him and listen to his problems — even if it was just five minutes — that he tried to avoid thinking anything that might spoil his happiness. Someone had once invited Mevlut to the Tuesday Discussions, regularly attended by twenty to thirty people and at which the Holy Guide was said to speak with anyone who came knocking at his door, but Mevlut never went.

Sometimes he worried that by going to the lodge and getting involved with the sect, he might be doing something illegal, but he would tell himself, If these are bad people doing bad things against the state, they wouldn’t have a huge picture of Atatürk on the wall, would they? Soon, however, he realized that the Atatürk picture was only there for show — just like the poster of Atatürk wearing a hat that hung right at the entrance to the Communist hideout he and Ferhat used to frequent in high school — so that if the police ever raided the house, the pious students could say, “There must be some mistake, we all love Atatürk!” The only difference between the Communists and the political Islamists was that the Communists criticized Atatürk constantly (Mevlut disapproved of their foul language) even though they truly believed in him; these Islamists, on the other hand, had no use at all for Atatürk but never said a word against him. Mevlut preferred the latter approach, and so when some of the Holy Guide’s more insolent and outspoken college men claimed that “Atatürk destroyed our glorious five-hundred-year-old tradition of calligraphy when he tried to imitate the West with his alphabet revolution,” he pretended not to hear them.

Mevlut likewise disapproved of those conservative college guys who would use every fawning trick in the book to get the Holy Guide to notice them, only to start gossiping idly and discussing TV shows when he left the room. Mevlut saw no trace of a TV anywhere inside the Holy Guide’s apartment, and this worried him because it seemed to him proof that what was going on here was something dangerous, of which the government would not have approved. Those who attended the Holy Guide’s lessons could well find themselves in trouble come the next military coup when the army started rounding up all the Communists, Kurds, and Islamists. On the other hand the Holy Guide had never told Mevlut anything that could be construed as political propaganda or indoctrination.

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Rayiha.With Mevlut running the café and Fatma going to primary school, I had a lot more time for my needlework. We didn’t have to worry about making ends meet anymore, so I worked because I felt like it, and because I liked earning my own money, too. Sometimes they gave us a picture or a page from a magazine showing us what design to embroider on which part of the curtain…But sometimes all they said was “You decide.” Whenever we had to decide, I could end up staring at the fabric for ages, asking myself, What shall I do, what shall I stitch on this? But I was just as likely to overflow with ideas for patterns, symbols, flowers, six-sided clouds, and deer bounding through fields, which I would apply to everything in sight — curtains, pillowcases, duvet covers, tablecloths, and napkins.