Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

One cold winter day in February, Mevlut slept through the morning after his daughters had left for school. When he got to work, twenty minutes later than usual, he found the Binbom Café shuttered. The locks had been changed, so he couldn’t even get inside. The shop that sold nuts and sunflower seeds two doors down told him that there had been a big fight at the café last night, obliging the Beyoğlu police to step in. The boss from Trabzon had brought some men in to beat up the workers, and they’d all ended up at the police station. After the police more or less forced both sides to make peace, the boss had come back with a locksmith he’d found God knows where, changed the locks, and put up a sign in the window that said CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.

That’s the official story, thought Mevlut. Meanwhile, in a part of his mind he kept thinking that he’d been fired for coming late to work that morning. Maybe the boss had discovered the workers’ scheme, or maybe he hadn’t. All he wanted to do was to go straight home to talk it all through with Rayiha, to share his distress at being unemployed again — if such was indeed the case — but he didn’t go home.

He spent the next few mornings wandering into coffeehouses he didn’t know and trying to figure out how to make ends meet. He was filled with a sense of guilt and impending doom, but there was a sort of joy there, too, which he quickly stopped trying to hide from him self. It was the same mix of freedom and fury he’d felt whenever he skipped school as a teenager. It had been a long time since he’d had the chance to walk the city aimlessly at noon, with no pressing business, and he went down to Kabataş, relishing the moment. Someone else had parked a cart for rice with chickpeas in the same spot he’d occupied for years. He saw the seller standing next to the big, ancient fountain, but he was reluctant to go any closer. He felt briefly as if he were watching his own life from a distance. Did this guy make much money? He was a slender man, just like Mevlut.

The park behind the fountain had finally been finished and opened to the public. Mevlut sat on a bench feeling the full weight of his predicament. His eyes roamed over the distant outline of Topkapı Palace in the mist, the enormous, gray ghosts of the city’s mosques, big ships with metallic hues gliding noiselessly past, and the seagulls with their incessant litany of scream and squabble. He felt a melancholy coming on, advancing with the irresistible determination of those huge ocean waves he’d seen on TV. Only Rayiha could console him. Mevlut knew he couldn’t live without her.

Twenty minutes later, he was at home in Tarlabaşı. Rayiha didn’t even ask, “Why are you back so early?” He pretended that he’d found some excuse to leave the café and come home to make love to her. (They’d done this before.) They forgot the world — including their daughters — for the next forty minutes.

Mevlut quickly found out that he didn’t need to bring the subject up at all, for Vediha had come by that morning and relayed all the news to Rayiha. She’d begun with a cutting “How can you still not have a telephone?” before recounting how one of the café’s workers had told the boss that he was being cheated by his employees. So Captain Tahsin had called in his friends from Trabzon to raid the shop and take back his property. An exchange of insults had led to a tussle between Chubby and the boss, landing them both in the police station, where they’d eventually shaken hands and called a truce. This informant had also claimed that Mevlut had been aware of these scoundrels’ tricks but that he’d taken money in exchange for his silence; the boss had believed this and complained to Hadji Hamit Vural about Mevlut.

Korkut and Süleyman told Hadji Hamit’s sons that Mevlut was an honest man who would never sink so low, and they refuted these slanders against the family’s honor. But the Aktaş family was also angry at Mevlut for causing this situation and jeopardizing their ties with the Vurals. Now Mevlut was getting angry at Rayiha for relaying all this bad news so sternly, without any hint of sympathy, almost as if she thought they had a point.

Rayiha noticed this immediately. “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way,” she said. “There are always plenty of people who want their curtains and their linens embroidered.”

What upset Mevlut most was that Fatma and Fevziye would no longer be able to have toasted cheese-and-sausage sandwiches and kebabs from the café in the afternoons. The staff had been so fond of them both, always so sweet to them. Chubby used to do funny impressions with his kebab knife to make them laugh. A week later, Mevlut heard through the grapevine that Chubby and Vahit were both very angry, calling him an opportunist who’d taken advantage of them by claiming a share of the spoils only to turn around and betray everyone to the boss. Mevlut didn’t respond to any of their accusations.

He caught himself longing once again to renew his friendship with Ferhat. Whenever Mevlut asked him something, Ferhat had always had an illuminating response, even if it hurt Mevlut’s feelings. Ferhat would have had the best advice on how to deal with the secret plots at the café. But Mevlut knew that this yearning amounted to an overly optimistic view about the nature of friendship. The streets had taught him that past the age of thirty a man was always a lone wolf. If he was lucky, he might have a female wolf like Rayiha beside him. Of course the only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves. The five years Mevlut had spent running the Binbom Café had kept him from the city, turning him into a man of sorrow.

After sending his daughters off to school in the morning, he would make love with Rayiha before going out to visit the local teahouses in search of a job. In the evenings he’d head out early to sell boza. He visited the congregation in Çarşamba twice. In five years, the Holy Guide had aged, now spending less time at the table than he did in his armchair beside the window. By the chair was the button by which he could buzz people into the building through the main entrance. A large side-view mirror from a truck had been screwed onto the wall of the three-story window so that the Holy Guide could see who was at the door without having to get up. On both of Mevlut’s visits, the Holy Guide had seen him in the mirror and let him in before he’d even had a chance to cry “Boo-zaa.” There were new students and new visitors now. They didn’t get the chance to talk much. On both visits, no one — not even the Holy Guide — noticed that Mevlut hadn’t charged for his boza, nor did he tell anyone that he no longer managed the café.

Why was it that on some nights he felt the urge to walk into a remote cemetery in some distant neighborhood and sit among the cypress trees in the moonlight? Why did a huge, black wave like the one on TV overtake him sometimes, so he found himself drowning in a swelling tide of sorrows? Even the packs of strays in Kurtuluş, Şişli, and Cihangir had started barking, growling, and baring their teeth at him, just like those other dogs in the neighborhoods across the Golden Horn. Why was Mevlut afraid of dogs again, to the degree that they noticed his fear and snarled at him? Perhaps the question was, why had all these dogs begun to growl at Mevlut, causing him to start fearing them in the first place?

It was election time again; the whole city was bedecked with political banners as swarms of cars blared folk songs and marches from loudspeakers, blocking traffic, and wearing everyone out. Back in Kültepe, people used to vote for whatever party promised new roads, electricity, water, and bus routes for the neighborhood. Hadji Hamit Vural was the one who negotiated for all these services, so he would decide what party this should be.