Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

“Take a break, Rayiha, you’re getting lost in the work again,” Reyhan would say.

—

Two or three afternoons a week, Rayiha would take Fatma and Fevziye by the hand and bring them to the café. The girls didn’t see much of their father outside his one hour at home every evening with his bowl of soup. Mevlut would still be asleep when Fatma went to school in the morning, and both girls were usually in bed by the time he came home at midnight. Fatma and Fevziye would have loved to go to the café more often, but their father had forbidden them from coming on their own, and he insisted that they never let go of their mother’s hand while on the way. Technically, Rayiha wasn’t allowed in Beyoğlu either, and especially not on İstiklal Avenue: when they ran to cross the road, she and the girls would feel as if they were fleeing Beyoğlu’s crowds of men as much as dodging the traffic itself.

—

Rayiha.While I’ve got the chance, I’d like to be clear that it’s not true I never fed Mevlut anything but soup for dinner in the five years he spent running the café. I also made him scrambled eggs with parsley and green peppers, french fries, pastry rolls, and kidney-bean stew with plenty of sweet peppers and carrots. As you know, Mevlut loves a roast chicken with potatoes. Now that he wasn’t selling rice anymore, once a month I’d buy him and the girls chicken from Hamdi the poultry dealer; he still gave me a discount.

—

Although no one ever spoke about it at home, the real reason that Rayiha brought the girls to the Binbom Café was so they could eat their fill of kebab wraps and cheese-and-sausage sandwiches and drink ayran and orange juice to their hearts’ content.

In the beginning, Rayiha had always felt the need to explain these visits somehow: “We were just passing by and thought we’d say hello!” “Good idea,” one of the café workers might say. After the first few visits, the girls started to get their favorite things prepared and served up to them without even having to ask. Rayiha wouldn’t eat anything, and if a kind, smiling café worker took the initiative to make her a kebab or a grilled-cheese sandwich, she always refused it, claiming she’d already eaten. Mevlut was proud of his wife’s principled stance, and he never told her “It’s okay, have a bite” as his coworkers expected him to.

Later, when Mevlut found out that the Binbom Café’s employees were cheating Captain Tahsin, his daughters’ free kebab sandwiches started to weigh on his conscience.

You Stay Out of It

AT THE START of 1990, Mevlut discovered the complex yet perfectly logical scheme by which the workers of the Binbom Café were circumventing the rules imposed by their boss from Trabzon to prevent them from cheating him. Every day, the café workers would draw from a common fund of their own money to buy bread and buns from a different bakery and stuff them meticulously with fillings bought from other shops, effectively preparing and selling their own food unbeknownst to the boss. Their hamburgers and kebab sandwiches were concealed like drugs in secret parcels delivered to nearby offices every day at lunchtime. Visiting every one of these offices himself with a little ledger in which he also wrote down comments people made on the food, a café worker named Vahit would collect the proceeds from these sales, bypassing Mevlut’s cash register. It had taken Mevlut a long time to discover this covert well-oiled machine, and another long winter was to pass before the café employees realized that he had found them out but wasn’t reporting them to the boss.

Mevlut was inclined to blame any wrongdoing at the café on the boss’s youngest employee, the Weasel (whose real name no one ever used). The Weasel had just come back from military service, and his job was to manage the café’s basement kitchen and storeroom, a filthy, fearsome cave measuring two by two and a half meters, where he prepared hamburger buns, tomato sauce, ayran, and french fries, among other things, and also perfunctorily washed — or, actually, rinsed — the café’s glasses and aluminum plates, these efforts interrupted by occasional forays upstairs during the rush times to help out with anything from toasting sandwiches to serving ayran. Mevlut had first spotted the other bakery’s bread down in the Weasel’s rat- and roach-infested kitchen.

Mevlut wasn’t fond of Vahit; he didn’t like the way he stared indecently at any decent-looking woman he saw. Yet, somewhat to Mevlut’s dismay, working together started to draw them closer over time. If there were no customers, they would while away the hours watching TV together, and at any emotional moment in whatever happened to be on-screen (there were five or six such moments a day), they would always glance toward each other with matching looks — and that, too, drew them closer. Eventually, Mevlut began to feel as if he’d known Vahit all his life. But when Mevlut realized Vahit’s role in the café employees’ illicit scheme, the intimacy of their shared reactions to the feelings emitting from the TV made Mevlut uneasy. Surely, he thought, genuine compassion was beyond a swindler like Vahit. As the manager, Mevlut even wondered whether this guilty employee had been using their shared responses to the TV as a way of getting into Mevlut’s good books.

Around the time he first noticed the signs of fraudulent activity at the café, Mevlut also began to feel as if the one eye (not both, strangely) with which he observed Vahit and the others had somehow detached itself from his body and had, of its own accord, begun to scrutinize Mevlut himself. When he felt trapped sometimes among the people whose lives revolved around this café, the eye would be watching him; he would feel fake. But then some Binbom customers ate their kebab sandwiches never looking away from their own reflections in the mirror.

When he was still selling cooked rice on the streets, Mevlut may have endured the cold standing on his feet, and he may have struggled to find customers for his ice cream, but at least in those days he had been free. He could let his mind wander, he could turn his back on the world whenever he wanted, and his body would move as his heart might will it. Now, he may as well have been chained to the shop. Dur ing the day, in those desperate moments when he took his eyes off the television and tried to daydream instead, he would console himself with the thought that he would see his daughters later and then go out to sell boza. He had customers he loved to see every evening, and there was the rest of the city, too. By now, he knew that every time he cried out “Boo-zaaa” with a particular sentiment, the people of Istanbul felt the very same emotion in their hearts, and that was why they asked him upstairs and bought his boza.

So it was that in the years he spent managing the Binbom Café, Mevlut became a more devoted and passionate boza seller than he’d ever been before. When he shouted “Boo-zaa” into half-lit streets, he wasn’t just calling out to a pair of closed curtains that concealed families going about their lives, or to some bare, unplastered wall, or to the demonic dogs whose invisible presence he could sense on darkened street corners; he was also reaching into the world inside his mind. Because every time he shouted “Boo-zaa,” he could feel the paintings in his mind emerging from his mouth like speech bubbles in a comic book before dissolving into the weary streets like clouds. Every word was an object, and every object was a picture. He sensed, now, that the streets on which he sold boza in the night and the universe in his mind were one and the same. Sometimes Mevlut thought he might be the only one to have ever discovered this remarkable truth, or perhaps it was a divine light that God had elected to bestow on him alone. When he came out of the café and went home in the evening feeling uneasy, and afterward walked into the night carrying his shoulder pole, he would discover the world within his soul reflected in the shadows of the city.