Orhan Pamuk - A Strangeness in My Mind

Yes, my letters were meant for Samiha, and of course I would have been struck by her eyes! he thought. He wasn’t looking in that direction now, but she really was exquisite, and her eyes were certainly beautiful enough to justify every single word he had written in his letters.

Still, it was a good thing Süleyman had tricked him into addressing them to Rayiha, even while thinking of Samiha all along. Mevlut knew he could have been happy only with Rayiha. God had made them for each other. He loved her so much; he would die without her. Beautiful girls like Samiha could be difficult and demanding and make you miserable in all sorts of irrational ways. Beautiful girls could only be happy if they married rich men. But a good girl like Rayiha would love her husband rich or poor. After working as a maid for all those years, Samiha was finally happy only now that Ferhat had begun to make a little money.

What would have happened if I’d put “Samiha” on my letters instead of “Rayiha”? thought Mevlut. Would Samiha ever have eloped with him?

Mevlut recognized — through a mixture of realism, jealousy, and inebriation — that she probably wouldn’t have.

“Don’t drink any more,” Rayiha whispered in his ear.

“I’m not,” he hissed. Samiha and Ferhat might get the wrong impression if they heard one of Rayiha’s unnecessary comments.

“Let him drink as much as he wants, Rayiha,” said Ferhat. “He’s finally decided to stop selling boza, he’s right to celebrate…”

“There are people out there who’ll mug a boza vendor on the street,” said Mevlut. “It’s not like I want to stop.” He suspected with some embarrassment that Rayiha must have explained everything already and that the point of this meal was to find him a job. “I wish I could sell boza for the rest of my life.”

“All right, Mevlut, let’s sell boza for the rest of our lives!” said Ferhat. “There’s a little shop on İmam Adnan Street. I was thinking we should make it a kebab place. But a boza shop is a better idea. The owner didn’t pay his debts, and now the shop’s ours for the taking.”

“Mevlut knows how to manage a café,” said Rayiha. “He’s got plenty of experience now.”

Mevlut didn’t like this pushy Rayiha who was so intent on setting up her husband with a job. But at that moment he lacked even the strength to sit there frowning at what other people were doing. He said nothing. He could sense that Rayiha, Samiha, and Ferhat had already decided everything. The truth was that he didn’t even mind. He would be managing a shop again. He could tell that it was better not to ask in his drunken state how on earth Ferhat had scraped together enough money to open a shop in Beyoğlu.

—

Ferhat.As soon as I got my college degree, an Alevi relative from Bingöl got me a job with the municipal electricity board. Then, when power distribution was privatized in 1991, the most hardworking and enterprising among us got their break. Some of the meter readers took the retirement package and left. Those who thought they could just keep going the way they had as government employees were quickly fired. But people who showed some initiative — people like me — were treated well.

The government had been working for years to bring electricity to every corner of Istanbul, from slums at the farthest outskirts, where only the poorest lived, to lawless dumps ruled by the worst kinds of thugs. The people of Istanbul had always found ways of tapping into power lines without paying. Having failed to make the cheats pay, the government handed the problem over to private companies. I worked at one of those companies. They had also passed a law adding a significant monthly interest charge to any unpaid bills, so that the same people who used to sneer at me when I came to read their meters and demand payment were now forced to pay up, whether they liked it or not.

The man from Samsun who’d been selling newspapers, cigarettes, and sandwiches from the shop on İmam Adnan Street was smart enough, but not a particularly skilled cheat. His shop was technically the property of an elderly Greek man who’d been sent off to Athens. The man from Samsun had taken over the abandoned shop without so much as a title deed or a contract, but he’d still managed to get a meter installed through a contact at city hall. Once that was done, he’d proceeded to hook a branch line into the main line, just upstream of the meter, and this source powered his sandwich toaster and two massive electric heaters that were powerful enough to let him turn the shop into a hammam. By the time I caught him, the overdue balance plus the interest (adjusted for inflation according to the new law) was so high that he would have had to sell his apartment in Kasımpaşa to pay it all off. So instead the shopkeeper from Samsun just disappeared, leaving everything behind.

—

The shop wasn’t half the size of the Binbom, with barely enough room inside for a single table for two. Rayiha would send the girls off to school in the morning and then, just as she had always done, she would add sugar to the boza mixture and wash the jugs at home, before heading out to buy a few things for the shop itself (a task she undertook with proprietary zeal). Mevlut would open it every morning at eleven, and since no one wanted boza so early in the day, he’d concentrate on making things neat and tidy, taking the glasses, jugs, and cinnamon shakers they’d bought and lining them up on the table that faced the street.

It was still cold when they decided to turn the place into a boza shop, and when they hastily opened five days later, there was plenty of interest. Buoyed by the initial success, Ferhat invested in the shop, refurbishing the fridge they were using as a window display, having the door and the exterior repainted (in creamy boza yellow, at Mevlut’s insistence), installing a light right over the door, and bringing a mirror in from home.

They also realized that the establishment needed a name. Mevlut felt it would be enough to put up a sign saying BOZA SHOP over the door. But a clever sign maker who had worked with some of the newest shops in Beyoğlu told them that this was not a name on which to build a thriving business. He inquired about their history and got them talking, and when he found out that they were married to sisters, he knew exactly what they should call the place:

THE BROTHERS-IN-LAW BOZA SHOP

In time, this was shortened simply to “Brothers-in-Law.” As they’d agreed during their long, rakı -soaked lunch in the Ghaazi Quarter, Ferhat would provide the overhead (a free shop in Beyoğlu, with no rent or electricity bills to pay) while Mevlut would put in the cost of daily operation (the boza he bought twice a week, sugar, roasted chickpeas, cinnamon) as well as his and Rayiha’s labor. The two childhood friends were to split the profits evenly.

—

Samiha.After all those years I’d worked as a maid, Ferhat didn’t want me toiling in Mevlut’s shop. “Why bother, you can’t sell boza out of a shop anyway,” he’d say, leaving me heartbroken. But he was himself intrigued by the shop when it first opened, and he would go over there most evenings to help Mevlut, getting home really late. I was curious, too, so I would go there myself without telling Ferhat. No one ever wanted to buy anything from two girls in headscarves, and pretty soon our shop became just like any one of Istanbul’s thousands of cafés, where the men stood at the front serving customers and handling the cash, and women in headscarves sat at the back looking after the kitchen and washing the dishes. The only difference was that we sold boza.