Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Some of the sheep were rescued by people who, having heard about the accident, sailed out straightaway in the dead of night to help, and while a few of these animals found new homes in this way, most had died before morning. The roads, private docks, parks, and teahouses lining the Bosphorus filled up with the carcasses of drowned sheep, which made Mevlut and the rest of Istanbul want to run down and help.

Mevlut heard stories of how some sheep, having managed to get out into the city streets, inexplicably attacked people only to drop dead without warning, or walked into mosque courtyards, sacred tombs, and cemeteries, or how they were, in fact, harbingers of the apocalypse that was to come in the year 2000 and proof that the prophecies of the late columnist Celâl Salik, who’d been gunned down for his views, had been right all along. Thereafter, whenever Mevlut looked at the TV at the Binbom Café, he thought of the fate of those sheep, which he saw as signs of something deeper — just as those fishermen who kept finding dead sheep entangled in their nets every day, bloated like enormous balloons, came to see them as omens of misfortune.

What made everything worse, and turned the whole matter into the stuff of the city’s nightmares, were the reports that most of the twenty thousand sheep remained trapped inside the hull, still alive and waiting to be saved. Mevlut followed the interviews of divers who’d been sent down to the wreckage, but he just couldn’t picture what it must be like for the sheep sitting in darkness in the bowels of that ship. Was it actually dark in there, and did it smell bad, or was it like the world of dreams? The plight of the sheep reminded him of Jonah in the belly of the whale. What sins had the sheep committed to have ended up in that dark place? Was it more like heaven or hell in there? The Almighty God had sent Abraham a sheep to spare him from sacrificing his own son. Why had He sent twenty thousand sheep to Istanbul?

Beef and lamb were rare indulgences in Mevlut’s house. He stopped eating kebab sandwiches for a time. But he kept this new aversion to meat a secret from the world; it would never evolve into a serious moral stance, and it was forgotten entirely the day that the employees at the Binbom Café decided to share some crispy kebab leftovers.

Mevlut could feel how quickly time was passing; he felt himself aging every day spent trying to keep up with the treachery at the Bin bom Café, until, slowly, he knew he was turning into a different person. Finally, in the winter of 1993, after three years as manager, Mevlut realized that it was too late to alert the boss to his employees’ tricks. He’d tried once or twice to explain his moral quandary to the Holy Guide, but he’d never received a response that managed to ease his anxieties.

It only bewildered him all the more to see that, even when workers left the café for military service or a better job, or because they didn’t get along with anyone, the duplicity continued undaunted, burdening Mevlut’s conscience.

The person whom Mevlut should have denounced to the boss was the architect of the whole scheme, a man named Muharrem. Known as Chubby among the staff, he was the public face of the Binbom Café, a backstreet, poor man’s version of a cartoon hero created collectively by the men of the kebab and sandwich shops lining Taksim Square and İstiklal Avenue. He was in charge of roasting the döner kebab in the café window (meaning that he turned it on the spit once one side was cooked, made sure it didn’t burn, and when necessary cut it up for customers), and he wielded his long kebab knife the way a Maraş ice-cream vendor handled his spoon, twirling it with a flair designed to draw customers, especially tourists, off the street. Mevlut didn’t care for all this show. It wasn’t as if tourists ever came down this alley anyway.

Mevlut sometimes suspected that if Chubby Muharrem made all this effort for not much revenue at all, it was perhaps to hide from himself, as well as everyone else, his role as head crook. But having so rarely met anyone of genuine moral sentiment in all his days as a street vendor, he wondered whether in fact it might just be the opposite: Chubby Muharrem could have been perpetrating his expert surreptitious fraud without even considering it morally reprehensible. In the politically charged days after the bomb that killed the secular and leftist columnist Uğur Mumcu, Chubby discovered Mevlut was onto the scheme and explained that he viewed the whole arrangement as a way for the workers — underpaid and cruelly deprived of any benefits — to safeguard their own rights without bothering the boss. Mevlut was struck by the power of this leftist pronouncement, which engendered in him a new respect for Chubby. He may have been a criminal, but Mevlut could never betray him to the boss, the state, or the police.

In July, when Islamists attacked Alevis in Sivas and thirty-five people — including writers and poets — were burned alive inside the Madımak Hotel, Mevlut started missing his high-school friend again and longed to talk politics with him and to curse the villains of this world, as they used to do. Rayiha found out that Ferhat, who had been reading electric meters for the municipal government, had kept his job after the utility was privatized and was making plenty of money. Mevlut didn’t really want to believe that Ferhat could be doing so well, but sometimes, when the truth was unavoidable, he would console himself by remembering that the only way to make lots of money fast was to do wrong (just as they were doing at the Binbom Café), and he would judge Ferhat accordingly. Mevlut had seen so many youthful Communists turn into capitalists once they were married. They were usually even more obnoxious than committed Communists.

When autumn came, Vahit the ledger keeper began confiding to Mevlut the details of the employees’ scheme in tones somewhere between menacing and plaintive. He himself was innocent, he insisted. Mevlut must not betray him to the boss, but if he did, Vahit would have no choice but to do the same in return. Once he’d gotten that off his chest, Vahit looked at Mevlut as if to say “That’s life, huh!” just as he’d been doing recently during the most poignant scenes of all those TV reports on the destruction of Mostar Bridge in Bosnia. Vahit wanted to get married, which was another reason that he needed money. It wasn’t just the boss from Trabzon who was exploiting him, but Chubby and the others, too. His share of the profits from their fraud was small. In fact Chubby, “the real boss around here,” was much worse than the Captain. Unless Vahit started to get his due, he would go to the boss and tell him all about Chubby’s machinations.

All of this surprised Mevlut. In truth, Vahit was threatening to hit him where he was most vulnerable: his relationship with the Vurals. The extravagant praise the boss had heaped on his new manager, all to scare his other employees and make clear that Mevlut could not be bought, had backfired and might now be used against Mevlut. Some evenings, as the boss closed out the cash register, he would applaud Mevlut in front of everyone: Mevlut from Konya was an honest, ethical, and truly honorable man. He had all the innocence and sincerity of people from central Turkey. The boss spoke of heartland Turks as though he were the first to discover them in Istanbul. Once you managed to win these heartland Turks over, once they started believing in you, they would lay down their lives for you, if need be.

The Vurals cared deeply about their honor. Mevlut was one of their men, which meant that he would never cheat anybody and that he would have their backing when the time came to punish those who did cheat. From the way Vahit spoke, Mevlut got the impression that he believed the Black Sea Vurals to be the true owners of the Binbom Café, and the boss from Trabzon, like Mevlut himself, but another of their pawns. This didn’t surprise Mevlut: over his years in the streets of Istanbul, he’d met thousands of people, and he’d seen how they invariably believed that behind every drama and in every battle there was always someone else pulling the strings.