A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

  This big ugly jug held the smelly and scalding hot milk prepared down in the stinking kitchens from powdered milk that UNICEF distributed for free to schools in developing countries. Concentrating on his task like a good housewife, Mohini poured the milk into plastic cups of all sizes, which the students brought in from home, while the teacher on recess duty took out a blue box holding another UNICEF beneficence, the dreaded fish-oil capsules. He presented one of these carefully to each student, as some precious gemstone, before patrolling the rows to make sure that they were actually swallowing both malodorous kindnesses. Most of the boys threw the pills out the window toward the corner of the school yard where all the trash accumulated, which was also the designated gambling spot, or they would crush them on the floor for the simple pleasure of stinking up the classroom. Others loaded them into their hollowed ballpoint tubes and shot them at the blackboard. Wave after wave of fish-oil bombardment had left the blackboards of Duttepe Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School with a slippery sheen and an unpleasant aroma that made visitors queasy. When one of these projectiles hit the portrait of Atatürk in classroom 9C upstairs, an alarmed Skeleton called in inspectors from the municipal police as well as the board of education to investigate, though the easygoing president of the board, who’d seen plenty over the years, ably defused the situation by explaining to the officers enforcing martial law that no insult to the founder of the Republic or any government dignitaries had been intended by anyone. At the time, any attempts to politicize the powdered-milk and fish-oil rituals would fail, but years later there would be many histories and memoirs written on the subject, with the Islamists, the nationalists, and the leftists united in claiming that the state, under pressure from Western powers, had conspired to force-feed them those reeking, poisonous pellets throughout their childhood.

  In literature class, Mevlut loved reading Yahya Kemal’s verses about the Ottoman raiders rejoicing on their way to conquering the Balkans, sword in hand. When the teacher didn’t show up, they passed the hour by singing songs, and even the back rows’ most mischievous elements would temporarily assume a guise of cherubic innocence, and as he watched the rain falling outside (the thought of his father, out there selling yogurt, briefly crossing his mind), Mevlut felt as if he could have sat there singing in that cozy classroom forever and that, though he was far from his mother and his sisters, city life had much to recommend it over village life.

  Within a few weeks of the military coup, the reign of martial law, curfews, and house searches had led to thousands of arrests, until eventually, as usual, the restrictions were relaxed, the street vendors felt comfortable coming out again, and so the roasted chickpeas, sesame rolls, gum-paste sweets, and cotton candy reappeared with their respective sellers by the gates of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School on the same spots they’d occupied before. On one of those hot days of spring, Mevlut, normally a stickler for the rules, felt momentarily envious of a boy roughly his age who was among those breaking the ban on hawking. The boy, whose face looked familiar, was carrying a cardboard box that said KISMET. Inside the box, Mevlut could see a large plastic football and some other toy prizes that looked rather interesting: miniature plastic soldiers, chewing gum, combs, collectible football stickers, handheld mirrors, and marbles.

  “Don’t you know we’re not allowed to buy anything from street vendors?” he said, trying to look stern. “What’s that you’re selling?”

  “God loves some people more. Those people end up rich. He loves some people a little less, and those people stay poor. You take a pin and scratch off one of these colored circles, and underneath you’ll find your gift and your fortune.”

  “Did you make this yourself?” asked Mevlut. “Where do you get the prizes from?”

  “They sell the whole game as a set, including the prizes, for thirty-two liras. There are one hundred holes, so if you go around letting people scratch them for sixty cents apiece, by the end you’ll have made sixty liras. There’s a lot of business to be done in the parks on the weekends. Want to have a go right now and find out if you’re going to be rich, or if you’re going to wind up as that poor wretch everyone looks down on? Go on, scratch one and have a look…I won’t charge you.”

  “I’m not going to be poor, you’ll see.”

  With a flourish, the boy produced a pin, which Mevlut took without hesitation. There were still many holes left to scratch on the box. He picked one carefully and scratched away.

  “Tough luck! It’s empty,” said the boy.

  “Let me see that,” said Mevlut, losing his temper. Under the colored aluminum foil he’d scratched away, he could see nothing—not a single word nor any gift. “Now what?”

  “If it comes up empty, we give people one of these,” said the boy, handing Mevlut a piece of a wafer bar the size of a matchbox. “Maybe you’ve got no luck, but you know what they say: lucky at cards, unlucky at love. The key is to win when you lose. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Mevlut. “What’s your name and your registration number?”

  “Three seventy-five, Ferhat Yılmaz. Are you going to report me to Skeleton?”

  Mevlut waved his hand as if to say “obviously not,” and Ferhat made an “obviously not” face of his own, and they both knew straightaway that they would be the best of friends.

  The first thing about Ferhat that struck Mevlut was that, though they were the same age, Ferhat was already well versed in the language and chemistry of the streets, the location of all the shops in town, and everyone’s secrets. Ferhat said that the cooperative running the school was crawling with crooks, that the history teacher Ramses was an idiot, and that most of the others were a bunch of jerks whose only thought was getting through the day in one piece so that they could collect their salaries at the end of the month.

  One chilly day, Skeleton took the small army he had carefully assembled out of the school’s janitors and cleaners, the kitchen staff who prepared the powdered milk, and the guardian of the coal cellar and led an attack on the street vendors who camped outside the school walls. Mevlut and the others watched from the foot of the wall as the battle unfolded. Everyone was rooting for the street vendors, but power was on the side of the government and the school. A roasted-chickpea-and-sunflower-seed seller exchanged blows with Abdülvahap, who looked after the coal cellar. Skeleton threatened to call the police and the military command center. The whole scene etched itself into Mevlut’s memory as a demonstration of the state and the school administration’s general attitude toward street vendors.

  The news that Miss Nazlı had left the school proved devastating for Mevlut. He felt empty and lost as he realized just how much time he spent thinking about her. He skipped school for three days and later explained his absence by saying his father was very sick. More and more, he enjoyed Ferhat’s jokes, his ready wit, and his optimism. They skipped school together and took to the streets selling Kısmet in Beşiktaş and Maçka Park. Ferhat taught him plenty of jokes and bits of wisdom involving one’s “intentions” and “kismet”—fate—insights that he later repeated to any yogurt and boza customers who had a soft spot for him. He began to tell his evening boza customers: “If you don’t make your intentions clear, you will never find your kismet here.”

  Another of Ferhat’s achievements was his exchange of letters with some teenage girls in Europe. The girls were real. Ferhat even had photos in his pocket to prove it. He got their addresses from the section “Young People Looking for Pen Pals” in Milliyet newspaper’s youth magazine Hey, which the Groom would bring into class. Hey, which claimed to be Turkey’s first youth magazine, published the addresses of European girls only—never Turkish ones, as this would have offended conservative families. Ferhat had someone else write his letters for him, without ever revealing who this person was, and he never told the girls that he was a street vendor. Mevlut always wondered what he would put in a letter to a European girl, but he never worked it out. In class, the boys pored over the photos Ferhat had received from the Europea
n girls and either fell in love or tried to prove that the girls weren’t real, while some particularly jealous types ruined the photos by scribbling all over them.

  One day, Mevlut read a magazine in the school library that would have a profound influence on his future career as a street vendor. The library at Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School was a place where students were made to sit still and behave when a teacher failed to show up for class. Whenever unsupervised kids were brought in, the librarian, Aysel, gave them copies of old magazines donated by the retired doctors and lawyers who lived in the upper neighborhoods nearby.

  On Mevlut’s last visit to the library, Aysel went through her customary routine of handing out twenty- to thirty-year-old, discolored back issues of magazines like The Great Atatürk, Archaeology and Art, Mind and Matter, Our Beautiful Turkey, Medical World, and Knowledge Trove. Once she had made sure that there was one magazine for every two students to look at, she launched into her brief and famous speech about reading, to which Mevlut turned his full attention.

  ONE MUST NEVER TALK WHEN READING was the famous and endlessly mocked first line and refrain of her speech. “You must read inside your head, without making a sound. Otherwise you will learn nothing from the writing on the page. When you get to the bottom of the page you are reading, do not turn the page straightaway, but wait until you are sure that your classmate has also finished reading the page. Once you have done that, you may turn the page, but without moistening your fingertips or creasing the paper. Do not write on the pages. Do not scribble, do not add any mustaches, glasses, or beards to the illustrations. A magazine is not just for looking at the pictures; you must read the text, too. Read the writing on every page first before you look at the pictures. When you have finished your magazine, raise your hand quietly, and I will come and give you a new one. But you will not have time to read a whole magazine anyway.” Librarian Aysel went quiet for a second and looked around to see whether her words had had any effect on Mevlut’s class, and then, like an Ottoman general ordering his impatient troops to attack and pillage, she pronounced her immortal last line:

  “Now you may read.”

  There was a murmur and the rustle of curious boys leafing through old, yellowed pages. Mevlut and Mohini had been given the June 1952 issue (only twenty years old) of Turkey’s first parapsychology magazine, Mind and Matter, to share. They were gently turning pages, without wetting the tips of their fingers, when they came face-to-face with the picture of a dog.

  The title of the article was “Can Dogs Read People’s Minds?” The first time Mevlut read through the piece, he didn’t really understand much of it, but oddly, his heart started racing. He asked Mohini if he’d let him read it one more time before they turned the page. Years later, it wasn’t the ideas or the concepts explored in the piece that Mevlut would remember most vividly but the way he had felt as he was reading it. While reading the piece, he had sensed the way everything in the universe was connected. He had also realized that street dogs watched him at night from cemeteries and empty lots even more than he had ever known. The dog in the picture wasn’t one of those cute little European lapdogs you usually found in magazines but one of the mud-brown curs you saw on the streets of Istanbul; perhaps that was also why the article had made such an impression.

  When they got their final report cards in the first week of June, Mevlut saw that he’d flunked English and had to take a makeup exam.

  “Don’t tell your dad, he’ll kill you,” said Ferhat.

  Mevlut agreed, but he also knew that his father would demand to see his middle-school diploma with his own eyes. He’d heard there was a chance that Miss Nazlı, who now worked at a different school in Istanbul, might come back to proctor the makeup exams. Mevlut spent that summer in the village cramming for the English exam so that he could finish middle school. The Cennetpınar primary school didn’t have an English-to-Turkish dictionary, and there was no one in the village who could help him. In July, he started to take lessons from the son of a man who had emigrated to Germany and had just come back to Gümüşdere village with a Ford Taunus and a TV set. Mevlut had to walk three hours each way just so that he could sit down with a book in the shade of a tree and practice his English for an hour with this boy, who went to a German middle school and spoke both Turkish and English with a German accent.

  —

  Abdurrahman Efendi. The story of our dear, lucky Mevlut, who took English lessons from the son of that man who went to work in Germany, has once again brought him to our humble village of Gümüşdere, so I hope you will let me offer a quick update on the dark fate that has befallen the rest of us. When I first had the honor of meeting you in 1968, I had no idea how lucky I was, having my three beautiful daughters and their silent angel of a mother! After my third daughter, Samiha, was born, I tempted fate again. I just couldn’t get the thought of a son out of my head, and we couldn’t keep from trying for a fourth child. Indeed I had a son, whom I named Murat as soon as he was born. But not an hour after his birth, the Lord called him and his mother, too, covered as she was in blood, and so from one minute to the next, Murat, my heart’s desire, and my wife were both taken, gone to live with the angels in heaven, leaving me a widowed father of three orphaned girls. At first, my three daughters would get into their late mother’s bed next to me, sniffing in the last whiffs of her scent as they cried through the night. Ever since they were babies, I’ve pampered them like the daughters of the Chinese emperor. I bought them dresses from Beyşehir and Istanbul. To those cheapskates who say that I have squandered my money on drink, I would like to say that a man whose neck has gone crooked from selling yogurt on the streets can only entrust his future to his three beautiful daughters, each more precious than any earthly treasure. Now my little angels are old enough that they can speak for themselves better than I can. The eldest, Vediha, is ten, while Samiha, the youngest, is six.

  —

  Vediha. Why is it that the teacher looks at me the most during class? Why can’t I bring myself to tell anyone that I want to go to Istanbul to look at the sea and the ships? Why do I always have to be the one to clear the table, make the beds, and cook for my father? Why does it make me angry when I see my sisters talking and giggling together?

  —

  Rayiha. I’ve never seen the sea in my life. There are clouds that look like things. I want to grow up to be as old as my mom and get married as soon as possible. I don’t like sunchokes. Sometimes, I like to think that my departed little brother, Murat, and my mom are watching over us. I like to cry myself to sleep. Why does everyone call me “clever girl”? When the two boys look at their book under the plane tree, Samiha and I watch them from far away.

  —

  Samiha. There are two men under the pine tree. I am holding Rayiha’s hand. I never let go. Then we went home.

  —

  In late August, Mevlut and his father returned to Istanbul earlier than usual so that they would be on time for Mevlut’s makeup exam. At the end of summer, the house in Kültepe smelled of damp and earth, just as it had when Mevlut had first walked into it three years ago.

  Three days later, he was in the biggest classroom in all of Atatürk Boys’ Secondary School taking his exam, but there was no sign of Miss Nazlı. Mevlut’s heart broke. But still he did his best, answering the questions well. Two weeks later, when high school had begun, he went to Skeleton’s office.

  “Well done, ten nineteen, here’s your middle-school diploma!”

  All day long, Mevlut kept taking it out of his bag to have another look, and that evening he showed it to his father.

  “Now you can become a policeman or a watchman,” said his father.

  Mevlut would miss those years for the rest of his life. In middle school, he had learned that being Turkish was the best thing in the world and that city life was so much better than village life. They had sung in class all together, and after all the fighting and intimidation, even the very worst bullies and troublemakers sang with joyful innocence a
ll over their faces; Mevlut would think back on that and smile.

  7

  * * *

  The Elyazar Cinema

  A Matter of Life and Death

  ONE SUNDAY MORNING in November 1972, Mevlut and his father were planning their yogurt distribution routes for the week when it became clear to Mevlut that they would no longer be going out to sell yogurt together. The yogurt companies were growing and had started delivering their truckloads straight to shops and street vendors in Taksim and Şişli. The art of a good yogurt seller no longer lay in lugging around sixty kilos of product from Eminönü to Beyoğlu and Şişli, but in stocking up wherever the trucks dropped it off and distributing it as quickly as possible among the surrounding streets and homes. Mevlut and his father realized that their overall income would increase if they split up and followed different routes. Twice a week, one of them would also bring some boza home to sweeten with sugar, but that, too, they now sold separately, in different neighborhoods.

  This new state of affairs filled Mevlut with a sense of freedom, but it was to prove a fleeting illusion. Getting along with the restaurant owners, the increasingly demanding housewives, the doormen, and the people at the places where he parked his yogurt trays and boza jugs took a lot more time and effort than he’d anticipated, and he often found himself skipping school.

  Back when he used to stick to his father’s side, keeping accounts and adding weights to their scale, they’d had a customer called Tahir—Uncle Tahir to his friends—who hailed from the town of Torul. Now that he was working alone, Mevlut secretly relished the challenge of haggling with Uncle Tahir over the price of a kilo; it made him feel a lot more important than he ever did sitting in chemistry class staring blankly at the chalkboard. Two strong and capable young men from the village of İmrenler, nicknamed the Concrete Brothers, had begun to monopolize the diners and cafés in the Beyoğlu-Taksim area. To make sure he didn’t lose some long-standing customers from the streets of Feriköy and Harbiye, which he’d taken over from his father, Mevlut lowered his prices and made new friends. There was the boy from Erzincan whom Mevlut had gone to school with, who also lived in Duttepe and had just started working in a grilled-meatball restaurant that used up vast quantities of the yogurt drink ayran; meanwhile, Ferhat knew the Alevi Kurds from Maraş who owned the convenience store next door to that restaurant. In all this, Mevlut had begun to feel as if he’d grown up in the city.