Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

He was calling out “Boo-zaa” one night after yet another day of not knowing what to do about the conspiracy at the Binbom Café, when a pleasant orange light spilled out of a window that had just opened up in the darkness. A big black shadow asked him to come upstairs.

It was an old Greek building in the backstreets of Feriköy. Mevlut remembered having delivered yogurt to this apartment with his father one afternoon soon after first arriving in Istanbul (like so many street vendors, he had the city’s apartment blocks and the plaques identifying them emblazoned in his mind). The building was called the Savanora. It still smelled of dust, moisture, and frying oil. He walked through a door on the second floor and into a wide, brightly lit room: the old apartment had been turned into a textile factory. He saw about a dozen girls each sitting at a sewing machine. Some were still children, but most were around Rayiha’s age, and everything about them — from the way they tied their headscarves loose, to the serious, faraway expressions on their faces as they worked — seemed frighteningly familiar to Mevlut. The man with the kind face was the one who had appeared at the window earlier, their boss. “Boza seller, these hardworking young ladies are like daughters to me. We need to fulfill an order from England; they’re soldiering on until the minibus comes to take them home in the morning,” he said. “Will you be kind and give them your best boza and your freshest roasted chickpeas? Where are you from, anyway?” Mevlut looked closely at the stucco reliefs on the walls, the big mirror with a gilded frame, and the chandelier made of fake crystals — all left behind by the Greek families who’d lived here once. For many years, whenever he would think back to this room, he would become convinced that his memory was playing tricks on him, that he hadn’t seen that chandelier or that mirror. It had to be, for in his recollections, the girls at the sewing machines would all look exactly like his daughters, Fatma and Fevziye.

Fatma and Fevziye would wear their matching black school uniforms, fix each other’s white collar — a blend of synthetic fibers and cotton, which always looked freshly starched — to the button on the back of their aprons, put their hair up, pick up the backpacks Mevlut had bought them at a discount from a shop in Sultanhamam (a place he knew from his high-school days selling Kısmet with Ferhat), and leave for school at seven forty-five every morning, just as their father, still in his pajamas, was getting out of bed.

Once the girls left for school, Mevlut and Rayiha would make love for as long as they liked. After their second daughter, Fevziye, had grown up a bit, they’d almost never had the chance to be alone in the room as they used to be in their first year of marriage. They only had the house to themselves when the girls were with Reyhan or another neighbor or when Vediha or Samiha came by early in the morning and took them out. On a summer day, the girls could sometimes disap pear for hours, at play with their friends in a neighbor’s garden. When the warm weather presented Mevlut and Rayiha this opportunity, they would always exchange a pointed look the moment they were alone. “Where are they?” Mevlut would ask; Rayiha would say, “They must be busy playing in the neighbor’s garden,” to which Mevlut would respond, “You never know, they might come back,” and that would be enough to keep them from reprising those blissful early days of their marriage.

For the past six or seven years, their embraces in their one-room house had occurred only after midnight, when the girls were in their bed in the other corner of the room, immersed in the deepest phase of their sleep. If Rayiha was up waiting for Mevlut returning late from his boza rounds, and if she received him sweetly instead of just looking at the television, Mevlut would take it as an invitation and switch all the lights off as soon as he was sure that the girls were sound asleep. Husband and wife would make cautious love under the covers, trying their best to keep it brief — for by then Mevlut was always exhausted. Sometimes they would fall asleep for a few hours only to wake up, pajamas and nightgown intertwined, and make love in hushed haste, though with deep and genuine feeling. Still, all these obstacles meant that they were enjoying their conjugal right less frequently than ever before, which they accepted as a natural feature of married life.

But now they had more time, and working at the café Mevlut wasn’t as tired as he used to be. Soon enough, the enthusiasm of those early days of their marriage returned, and now they felt easier together, too, for they had come to know and trust each other, and they weren’t so shy anymore. Being at home alone brought them closer, and they began once more to experience that mutual reliance that can only exist between husband and wife, and to remember how lucky they were to have found each other.

Their happiness also helped Rayiha to stop dwelling on the doubts Süleyman had cast on the intended recipient of Mevlut’s letters, though she still couldn’t forget them entirely. She continued to have moments of uncertainty, but on those occasions she’d read a couple of letters from her bundle and take comfort from Mevlut’s beautiful words.

Mevlut was expected at the Binbom Café at ten in the morning, so once the girls left for school, husband and wife could indulge in their conjugal happiness for no more than an hour and a half, including the time they spent sipping their tea and coffee at their one and only table. (Mevlut’s breakfast would always be a toasted cheese-and-tomato sandwich at Binbom.) It was during these hours of blissful companionship that Mevlut began telling Rayiha about the treachery taking place at the Binbom Café.

—

Rayiha.“You stay out of it,” I told him. “Keep an eye on everything but pretend you’ve seen nothing.” “But the boss put me there to find out what was going on,” said Mevlut — and he was right. “The boss is Vural’s man…Won’t they think I’m a fool who can’t smell a rat even when it’s dangling under his nose?” “Mevlut, you know they’re all in it together. If you tell the boss, they’ll gang up on you and tell him you were the one cheating him all along. Then you’ll be the one who loses his job. It would only make you look bad with the Vurals.” I saw how Mevlut would panic every time I said this, and it made me sad.

Twenty Thousand Sheep

ON THE NIGHT of 14 November 1991, a Lebanese merchant vessel sailing south and a ship from the Philippines carrying corn toward the Black Sea collided before the ancient fortress that stands on the narrowest stretch of the Bosphorus. The Lebanese ship sank, and five of her crew drowned. While watching TV with the others at the Binbom Café the next morning, Mevlut heard that the Lebanese ship had been carrying twenty thousand sheep.

The people of Istanbul found out about the accident when the sheep began to wash up against the piers along the Bosphorus and on the shores of Rumelihisarı, Kandilli, Bebek, Vaniköy, and Arnavutköy. Some of the poor creatures made it there alive, climbing out onto the city streets through the boathouses of old wooden mansions that hadn’t burned down yet, the jetties of modern restaurants that had replaced what used to be fishermen’s coffeehouses, and the gardens of homes where people had docked their boats for winter. The sheep were enraged and exhausted. Their cream-white pelts were clotted with mud and stained petrol green, their tired, spindly legs, which they could barely move, soaked in a rust-hued liquid resembling boza, and their eyes full of an ancient regret. Mevlut had been transfixed by those sheep eyes staring out from every inch of the café’s TV screen, and he’d felt all the force of that regret in his own soul.