A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  “Booo-zaaaaa,” he called out into the half-lit street. “Goooood boozaaaaa.”

  Using a basket to buy things off the street was a custom from the days when buildings in Istanbul had no elevators or automatic doorbells and were rarely more than five or six stories high. Back in 1969, when Mevlut first started working with his father, housewives who preferred to stay indoors would use the basket for purchasing not just boza but their daily yogurt, too, and even various items from the grocer’s boy. As they did not have telephones in their homes, they would tie a little bell to the bottom of the basket to alert the grocer or a passing vendor that they needed something. The vendor would, in turn, ring the bell and rock the basket to signal that the yogurt or the boza had been safely placed inside. Mevlut had always enjoyed watching these baskets make their way back up: some of them would sway in the breeze, bumping into windows, branches, electrical and telephone cables, and the laundry lines stretched between buildings, and the bell would respond to each collision with a pleasant chime. Regular customers would put their account ledger in the basket, too, so that Mevlut could add the day’s yogurt to their tab before sending the basket back up. Mevlut’s father could not read or write, and before his son joined him from the village, he used to enter purchases into these ledgers with tally marks (one stroke was one kilo, half a stroke a half a kilo, and so on). He would swell with pride at the sight of his boy writing down numbers as well as more detailed notes, like “Yogurt with cream; Monday–Friday,” for some clients.

  But Istanbul had changed so much over the past twenty-five years that these memories now seemed like fairy tales to Mevlut. Most of the streets had been paved with cobblestones when he first arrived in the city, but now they were asphalt. The three-story buildings, surrounded by their own gardens, which had made up most of the city, had been razed to the ground and replaced with taller apartment blocks in which those who lived on the upper floors couldn’t possibly hear the call of a vendor passing in the street below. In place of radios, there were now television sets that were left on all evening, drowning out the boza seller’s voice. The quiet, browbeaten folk in gray and drab clothes who used to populate the streets had been replaced by rowdy, energetic, and more assertive crowds. Mevlut had experienced these changes in daily increments, not as a sudden shock, and so, unlike some others, he did not bemoan the transformation. Rather, he tried to keep pace with these momentous changes and always chose neighborhoods where he knew he was guaranteed a friendly reception.

  A place like Beyoğlu, for example! The most populous neighborhood and the one closest to his house. Fifteen years ago, toward the end of the 1970s, when the area’s ramshackle cabaret bars and nightclubs and half-hidden brothels were still in business, Mevlut was able to make sales in the backstreets until as late as midnight. The women who sang and worked as hostesses in stove-heated basement nightclubs; their devoted fans; the middle-aged mustachioed men who came from rural Anatolia to shop in Istanbul and, at the end of a long day, liked to buy drinks for the hostesses; Istanbul’s newest miserable arrivals and the Arab and Pakistani tourists who were thrilled to be sitting at a table in a nightclub with a few women; the waiters, the bouncers, and the doormen—they all bought boza from Mevlut even at the midnight hour. But in the last decade or so, the demon of change had cast its spell over the neighborhood as it had over the whole city, and the fabric of that past had been torn asunder, causing those denizens to leave and the clubs playing Ottoman and European-style Turkish and continental music to shut down, giving way to noisy new establishments serving Adana and shish kebabs cooked over an open grill and washed down with rakı. The young crowds who liked to go dancing had no interest in boza, so Mevlut no longer went anywhere near İstiklal Avenue.

  Every night for twenty-five years, around eight thirty, when the evening news broadcast was drawing to a close, Mevlut got ready to leave his rented home in Tarlabaşı. He wore the brown sweater his wife had knit, his woolen skullcap, and the blue apron that made such an impression on customers, picked up the jug containing the boza sweetened and flavored with special spices by his wife or his daughters, made an experienced guess as to how much it weighed (sometimes, on cold nights, he would say that they hadn’t prepared enough), put on his dark coat, and said good-bye to those at home. When his daughters were little, he used to tell them not to wait up for him, but these days he just told them “I won’t be long” while their eyes remained firmly fixed on the TV.

  The first thing he would do when he stepped outside into the cold was to shoulder the thick oak-wood yoke he’d been using for twenty-five years to carry his load, a plastic jug full of boza tied at each end; like a soldier about to step onto the battlefield he would check his ammunition one last time, his belt pouches and the inner pockets of his jacket full of little bags of roasted chickpeas and cinnamon (prepared at home either by his wife, his increasingly irritable and impatient daughters, or by Mevlut himself), and finally he would set out on his night’s endless walk.

  “Gooood booozaaaa…”

  He would quickly reach the upper neighborhoods and then, once he got to Taksim, he would head toward whatever location he’d picked for that day, making steady sales with only a half-hour cigarette break.

  It had been nine thirty when the basket fell to Mevlut like an angel that night, and he’d been in Pangaltı. By ten thirty, he was in the backstreets of Gümüşsuyu, on a dark lane leading up to the little mosque, when he saw a pack of street dogs he’d first noticed some weeks ago. Stray dogs never bothered street vendors, so until recently Mevlut hadn’t been afraid of them. But now he felt his heart quicken with a strange impulse, and he began to worry. He knew that street dogs attacked at the smell of fear. He tried to think about something else.

  He tried to think of his girls laughing as they watched TV; the cypress trees in the cemetery; the home to which he’d soon return and where he’d be chatting with his wife; his Holy Guide who said that you should keep your heart pure; the angel he’d seen in a dream the other night. But this wasn’t enough to banish his fear of the dogs.

  “Woof! Woof!” barked one approaching him.

  There was a second behind the first. It was difficult to see them in the darkness; they were a muddy-brown color. In the distance, Mevlut saw a black one.

  The three dogs and a fourth one he couldn’t see all started barking at the same time. Mevlut was gripped by a kind of fear he’d experienced only once or twice as a street vendor, and then only as a child. He couldn’t remember any of the verses and prayers that were meant to repel dogs. He did not move a muscle. But the dogs continued to bark.

  Mevlut looked around for an open door through which to escape, a doorstep on which to take refuge. Should he use the stick across his back as a weapon?

  A window opened. “Shoo!” someone yelled. “Leave the boza seller alone! Shoo, shoo!”

  The dogs were startled into silence, and then they walked away.

  Mevlut felt much gratitude toward this figure at the third-floor window.

  “You can’t show them your fear, boza seller,” said the man. “They’re mean bastards, these dogs, they can tell when someone’s afraid. Got it?”

  “Thanks,” said Mevlut, ready to continue on his way.

  “Well, come on up and let us buy some of this boza, then.” Mevlut wasn’t too happy with the man’s patronizing manner, but he went to the door anyway.

  It opened with a bzzzz from the buzzer. Inside the building, there was a smell of butane, frying oil, and paint. Mevlut took his time climbing the stairs to the third floor. Once he got to the apartment, they invited him inside just like kindly people used to do in the old days, rather than keeping him waiting at the door:

  “Come on in, boza seller, you must be cold.”

  There were several rows of shoes lined up outside the door. As he bent down to untie his laces, he remembered his old friend Ferhat. “There are three types of buildings in Istanbul,” he used to say: (1) those full of devout families where people
say their daily prayers and leave their shoes outside, (2) rich and Westernized homes where you can go in with your shoes on, (3) new high-rise blocks where you can find a mix of both sorts.

  This particular building was situated in a wealthy neighborhood. People here did not take their shoes off and leave them at the door before going in. But for some reason Mevlut felt as if he were in one of those new, big apartment blocks mixing the traditionally religious with others more Westernized. In any case, on those rare occasions nowadays when he was invited into living rooms or kitchens, he was always respectful enough to remove his shoes at the door, regardless of whether he was at an ordinary home or a wealthier family’s apartment. “Don’t worry about your shoes, boza seller!” they would sometimes call to him from inside, but he would ignore them.

  There was a strong smell of rakı in this apartment. He could hear the cheerful chatter of people already drunk before dinner was even over. A mixed group of six or seven men and women sat at a table that took up almost the entire length of a sitting room, drinking and laughing at the television, which was, as in all homes, turned up too high.

  The table went quiet once they realized Mevlut was in the kitchen.

  There was a man in the kitchen who was completely drunk. “Go on, give us a little boza, boza seller,” he said. This wasn’t the man Mev lut had seen at the window. “Did you bring any roasted chickpeas and cinnamon?”

  “I did!”

  Mevlut knew better than to ask this lot how many kilos they wanted.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “How many of you are there?” the drunken man called to the living room in a mocking tone. There was much laughter and argument in response, and the group at the table took some time to count.

  “Boza seller, I don’t want any if it’s sour,” Mevlut heard a woman say from the dinner table.

  “My boza is sweet,” Mevlut answered.

  “Then don’t give me any,” said a male voice. “Good boza is sour boza.”

  They started arguing among themselves.

  “Come here, boza seller,” another drunken voice called out.

  Mevlut went from the kitchen to the living room, feeling poor and out of place. For a moment, everything was still and silent. Everyone at the dining table was smiling at him, giving him curious looks. It was probably the novelty of seeing a living relic of the past that had now fallen out of fashion. In the past few years, Mevlut had grown used to getting this sort of look.

  “Boza seller, should proper boza be sweet or sour?” said a man with a mustache.

  The three women all had dyed-blond hair. Mevlut noticed that the man who had opened the window earlier and rescued Mevlut from the dogs was sitting at one end of the table across from two of the women. “Boza can be both sweet and sour,” said Mevlut. This was an answer he’d memorized over twenty-five years.

  “Boza seller, can you make a living from this?”

  “I do, thank God.”

  “So there’s good money in this work, eh? How long have you been doing it?”

  “I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. Earlier I also used to sell yogurt in the mornings.”

  “If you’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and if it’s good money, then you must be rich by now, right?”

  “I cannot say that I am,” said Mevlut.

  “Why?”

  “All the relatives that came with me from the village are rich now, but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m honest,” said Mevlut. “I can’t lie or sell spoiled food or cheat anyone just to buy a house or give my daughter a proper wedding…”

  “Are you a religious man?”

  Mevlut knew by now that this question carried political connotations in the wealthier households. The Islamist party, which was supported mainly by the poor, had won the municipal elections three days ago. Mevlut, too, had voted for its candidate—who had unexpectedly been elected mayor of Istanbul—because he was religious and had gone to the Piyale Paşa school in Kasımpaşa, which Mevlut’s daughters were now attending.

  “I’m a salesman,” Mevlut replied cunningly. “How could a salesman possibly be religious?”

  “Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “I’m always working. If you’re out on the streets all the time, there’s no way you can pray five times a day…”

  “And what do you do in the mornings?”

  “I’ve done all sorts of things…I’ve sold rice with chickpeas, I’ve worked as a waiter, I’ve sold ice cream, I’ve been a manager…I can do anything.”

  “A manager of what?”

  “The Binbom Café. It was in Beyoğlu, but it shut down. Did you know it?”

  “And now what do you do in the mornings?” said the man from the window.

  “These days I’m free.”

  “Do you have a wife, a family?” asked a blond lady with a sweet face.

  “I do. We have two beautiful girls. They’re like angels, thank God.”

  “You’ll send them to school, right? Will you make them cover their heads when they get older?”

  “Does your wife wear a headscarf?”

  “We’re just poor village people from the countryside,” said Mevlut. “We’re attached to our traditions.”

  “Is that why you sell boza?”

  “Most of my people came to Istanbul to sell yogurt and boza, but actually it’s not something we really knew in my village.”

  “So you first discovered boza in the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where did you learn to call out like a proper boza seller?”

  “You have a lovely voice, like a muezzin.”

  “It’s the emotion in the seller’s voice that really sells the boza,” said Mevlut.

  “But boza seller, don’t you get scared at night on the streets, or at least bored?”

  “The Almighty God will always look after the poor boza seller. I always think nice things when I’m out.”

  “Even when you’re in a dark and empty street, even when you walk past cemeteries and prowling dogs, when you see demons and fairies?”

  Mevlut did not reply.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mevlut Karataş.”

  “Go on then, Mr. Mevlut, show us how you say ‘bozaaaa.’ ”

  This wasn’t the first table of drunk people Mevlut had faced. When he’d first started working as a street vendor, plenty of drunk people would ask him whether there was electricity in his village (there hadn’t been when he’d first come to Istanbul, but now, in 1994, there was) and whether he’d ever been to school, followed by questions like “How did you feel when you first got on an elevator?” “When was the first time you went to the cinema?” In those early years, Mevlut would come up with amusing answers to endear himself to the customers who let him into their living rooms; he had no qualms about making himself seem more innocently ignorant and less streetwise than he was, and his friendly regulars did not need to ask twice to hear his rendition of the “Boozaaaa” call he usually reserved for the streets.

  But those were the old days. Nowadays, Mevlut felt a resentment he couldn’t explain. Had it not been for his gratitude to the man who had rescued him from the dogs, he would have ended the conversation there, given them their boza, and left.

  “So how many people would like boza?” he asked.

  “Oh, haven’t you given them boza in the kitchen yet? And here we were thinking you’d sorted that out already!”

  “Where do you get this boza from?”

  “I make it myself.”

  “No, really? I thought all the boza sellers just bought it ready-made.”

  “There’s a factory now in Eskişehir; it’s been there for five years,” said Mevlut. “But I buy the raw boza from the oldest and the best place, the Vefa Boza Shop. Then I mix it up with my own ingredients and turn it into something you can drink.”

  “So you add sugar to
it at home?”

  “By nature, boza is both sweet and sour.”

  “Oh, come on now! Boza is meant to be sour. It’s the fermentation process that makes it sour, it’s the alcohol, just like with wine.”

  “There’s alcohol in boza?” asked one of the women, with eyebrows raised.

  “Darling, you don’t know anything, do you?” said one of the men. “Boza was the drink of choice under the Ottomans, when alcohol and wine were banned. When Murad the Fourth went around in disguise at night, he didn’t have just the taverns and coffee shops shut down but the boza shops, too.”

  “Why did he ban the coffee shops?”

  This sparked one of those drunken discussions Mevlut had witnessed many times in bars and at the tables of seasoned drinkers. And for a moment, they forgot about him.

  “Boza seller, you tell us, is there alcohol in boza?”

  “There is no alcohol in boza,” said Mevlut, knowing full well that this was not true. His father, too, used to lie about it.

  “Come on now, boza seller…There is some alcohol in boza, though maybe not much. I suppose that’s how all those religious types got away with getting drunk during the Ottoman era. ‘Of course there’s no alcohol in boza,’ they would say, and then happily down ten glasses and get absolutely sloshed. But after the Republic was founded and Atatürk made rakı and wine legal, there was no point to boza anymore; that was the end of it right there, seventy years ago.”

  “Maybe boza will make a comeback if some of the religious bans are reinstated…,” said a drunk man with a thin nose, shooting a challenging glance at Mevlut. “What do you think about the election results?”

  “No,” said Mevlut, without batting an eye. “There is no alcohol in boza. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be selling it.”

  “See, the man’s not like you, he cares about his beliefs,” said one of the other men.