A Strangeness in My Mind Read online

Page 26


  The drums and the woodwinds started playing, and Mevlut joined the other men on the dance floor. While he hopped and skipped about, his eyes followed Rayiha’s purple headscarf as she greeted each and every single young woman and middle-aged lady on the women’s side of the hall. That was when he spotted Mohini, who had made it back from military service just in time for the wedding. It wouldn’t be long before the guests started pinning jewelry on the bride and groom, when a burst of energy surged through the sweltering wedding hall and the crowd lost any semblance of order, drunk on their plain lemonade, the noise, and the stuffy air. “I can’t deal with all these fascists unless I’m looking over to where the Vurals are sitting, and drinking to their health,” said Ferhat, passing his friend a glass of vodka and lemonade under the table as discreetly as possible. Mevlut thought he’d lost Rayiha for a moment, but then found her again and rushed to her side. She was coming out of the toilets flanked by two girls in headscarves the same color as hers.

  “Mevlut, I can see how happy Rayiha is and I’m so glad for the both of you…,” said one of the girls. “I’m sorry I never got the chance to say congratulations in the village.”

  “Didn’t you recognize her? That was my little sister, Samiha,” said Rayiha once they’d sat back down on their red velvet chairs. “She’s really the one with the beautiful eyes. She’s so happy here in Istanbul. There are so many suitors that my father and Vediha don’t know what to do with all the love letters she’s getting.”

  —

  Süleyman. At first I thought Mevlut had skillfully kept his emotions in check. But then I realized—no, he hadn’t even recognized Samiha, the beautiful girl he’d written all those letters to.

  —

  Mohini. Mevlut and Rayiha asked me to make a list of the presents they were given and to be a sort of emcee during the gift-giving ceremony. Every time I picked up the microphone and announced a new gift—“The venerable Mr. Vural, businessman and construction magnate from Rize, generous philanthropist and founder of the Duttepe Mosque, presents the groom with a Swiss wristwatch, made in China!”—there would be a ripple of applause, setting off lots of gossip and giggling, and the misers who thought they could get away with a small gift saw they were about to be humiliated in front of everyone and quickly whipped out a bigger banknote.

  —

  Süleyman. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Ferhat in the crowd. Five years ago, this scumbag and his Moscow-funded gang would have been ready to ambush my brother and his friends on a street corner somewhere; if we’d known Mevlut was going to find some excuse to have him at the wedding—“He’s my friend, he’s mellowed now!”—you can bet we wouldn’t have taken the trouble to deliver his letters, sort out his marriage, and even arrange his wedding reception…

  But Comrade Ferhat looks rather disheartened. He was once the kind of guy who thought he knew everything, he’d stare you down spinning his prayer beads around like a key chain and acting like some Communist thug right out of prison, but those days are gone. Since the coup two years ago most of his comrades have been rotting away in jail or else tortured to the point that they’ve come out maimed. The smart ones ran off to Europe to avoid the torture. But since our comrade Ferhat can’t speak any other language but Kurdish, he has toned down his politics and stayed put, figuring that he wouldn’t get very far with the human rights crowd over there anyway. It’s just like my brother says: a clever Communist will forget about ideology as soon as he’s married and focus on making money; but a stupid Communist, like Ferhat, unable to make a living because of his ridiculous ideas, will make it his business to find paupers like Mevlut to “advise.”

  Then there are those types the rest of us guys naturally disapprove of: like the rich guy who falls for a pretty girl and visits her family’s mansion to ask for her hand, but when he goes in and sees that she has a prettier and even younger sister, he turns to her father right then and there and tells him that actually he doesn’t want the girl he came for but the little one playing hopscotch in the corner. That guy, we can all agree, is a true scumbag; but at least we can understand where he’s coming from. How do you even explain someone like Mevlut, who wrote a girl weepy love letters for years and then said nothing when he saw that he’d run away in the dead of night not with the pretty girl he’d fallen for but with her sister?

  —

  Rayiha’s pure, childlike joy magnified Mevlut’s happiness. She seemed genuinely delighted when people pinned banknotes on her, showing none of the feigned amazement Mevlut had seen on other brides. Mohini was trying to amuse the crowd with his gift-by-gift commentary, remarking on the amounts of cash or gold and jewelry being given by various guests (“Fifty American dollars from the youngest of all yogurt-selling grandpas!”), and as at every wedding, the guests were applauding in a spirit halfway between irony and politeness.

  While everyone was busy looking elsewhere, Mevlut secretly studied Rayiha. Her hands, her arms, and her ears all seemed beautiful to him, but so did her nose, her mouth, and her face. Rayiha’s only flaw right now was that she looked exhausted, but she still showed a friendly warmth that really suited her. She hadn’t found anyone to look after her plastic bag stuffed full of gifts, envelopes, and packages, so she’d leaned it against her chair. Her delicate little hand was resting on her lap. Mevlut remembered how he’d held it when they were running away together, and the first time he’d had a good look at it, in the train station in Akşehir. The day they’d run away together already felt like the distant past. In the last three months, they’d had so much sex, grown so close, and talked and laughed so much that Mevlut was amazed to realize there was no one he knew better than he knew Rayiha, and the men showing off their dance moves to the young women in the hall seemed to him like children who knew nothing about life. Mevlut felt he’d known Rayiha for years and slowly began to believe that his letters had been meant for someone like her—perhaps even for Rayiha herself.

  4

  * * *

  Rice with Chickpeas

  Food Tastes Better When It’s Got Some Dirt in It

  WHEN THEY GOT HOME, Mevlut and Rayiha were not surprised to find that many of the envelopes people had made such a show of giving them were empty. Trusting neither the banks nor the bankers, Mevlut took most of the money they’d received and bought Rayiha some gold bangles. He also bought a secondhand black-and-white television in Dolapdere, so Rayiha wouldn’t get bored while she waited for him at home in the evenings. Sometimes they would hold hands as they watched TV together. Mevlut had started coming home early on Saturday evenings when Little House on the Prairie was on and on Sundays when it was time for Dallas, as there would be no one left out on the streets to buy his ice cream anyway.

  When Hızır came back from the village at the start of October and took back his ice-cream cart, Mevlut was unemployed for a while. Ferhat had gone quiet after the wedding. Even if they happened to run into each other in a Tarlabaşı coffeehouse, they no longer had the conversations they had back in the day, when Ferhat used to tell him about a new business opportunity no one else had thought about, which would make the two of them “lots of money.” Mevlut went to the Beyoğlu restaurants where he’d worked in the past and spoke to the headwaiters and restaurant managers who spent their afternoons doing the books, or reading the newspaper and betting on football, but no one could offer him a job with the kind of salary he expected.

  There were some new upscale restaurants opening in the city, but those places were looking for people with some form of “hospitality training” who spoke enough English to understand “yes” from “no”—not someone like Mevlut who’d come from the village ready to take any job that came his way and had learned as he went along. In November, he started working in a restaurant somewhere, but after a couple of weeks he’d already given his notice. Some self-important guy wearing a tie had complained that his spicy tomato salad wasn’t spicy enough, and Mevlut had snapped at him before remorsefully casting off his uniform. But it w
asn’t a case of some sad and weary soul acting impulsively: these were the happiest days of his life. He was going to be a father soon, and he was planning to use all the wedding jewelry on a chickpea-rice business that would guarantee his son a future.

  A waiter introduced Mevlut to a street vendor from Muş who’d sold rice with chickpeas for years but had recently suffered a stroke. The indisposed street vendor wanted to sell his cart and “his” spot behind the Kabataş pier for car ferries. Mevlut knew from experience that most street vendors hoping to sell their businesses tended to exaggerate their claims to certain spots. Whenever one of them managed to bribe and cajole the neighborhood constable into letting him park his cart somewhere for a few days, he’d forget that the corner wasn’t truly his property but belonged to the nation. Even so, after years spent walking the streets with a stick across his back, Mevlut had high hopes and began to entertain dreams of having his own place in Istanbul, like a real shop owner. He knew he was overpaying a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to haggle too much with the elderly half-paralyzed street vendor from Muş. Mevlut and Rayiha went to see the man and his stammering son in a poor neighborhood behind Ortaköy, in the rented apartment that they shared with cockroaches, mice, and a pressure cooker, and after two visits, they’d learned the trade. Mevlut went back again one day to collect the cart and push it all the way home. He bought a sack each of rice and chickpeas from a wholesaler in Sirkeci and stacked them between the kitchen and the television.

  —

  Rayiha. Just before going to bed, I would give the chickpeas a good soak and set the alarm for three in the morning, so I could get up and see that they’d softened properly before putting them in a pot on low heat. After I took the pot off the stove, Mevlut and I would embrace and go back to sleep with the comforting gurgle of the pot cooling in the background. In the morning, I would fry the rice a little in oil, just the way the man from Muş had taught us, and then leave it to simmer in water for a while. While Mevlut was out buying groceries, I would boil and then panfry the chicken. I’d set some of it aside, removing the bones and skin with my fingers, adding as much thyme and pepper as I liked, perhaps one or two cloves of garlic if I felt so inclined, and I would split the rest of the chicken into four pieces, placing them beside the rice.

  —

  Mevlut would come back home from his morning shopping with carrier nets full of fruit or tomatoes, breathe in the delicious smell of Rayiha’s cooking, and stroke his wife’s arm, her back, and her growing belly. Rayiha’s chicken satisfied all of Mevlut’s customers—the clerks who wore a shirt and tie or a skirt to their desk jobs at the banks and offices in Fındıklı, the rowdy students from the neighborhood’s schools and universities, the builders who worked at the construction sites nearby, and the drivers and passengers killing time as they waited for the ferry. He soon had his regulars—the big, friendly security guard at the local branch of Akbank, who was built like a barrel and always wore sunglasses; Mr. Nedim, who sold ferry tickets in a white uniform from his booth on the pier; the men and women who worked for the insurance company close by, who always seemed to be mocking Mevlut with their smiles—and Mevlut always found some topic of conversation with any customer, perhaps the penalty Fenerbahçe had been denied in their last match or the blind girl who knew all the answers yesterday on the TV quiz show. He won the municipal police over with his charm and lots of free plates piled high with chicken.

  As an experienced street vendor who knew that chatting people up was part of the job, Mevlut never discussed politics. Just as in the days when he sold yogurt and boza, it wasn’t really the money that he cared about; what made him happy was seeing a customer come back again a few days later (which was rare) just because he’d enjoyed the rice and chicken, and be kind enough to tell him so (which was even rarer).

  Most of Mevlut’s customers made it plain that the main attraction of his food was that it was cheap and close at hand, and some of them even said so outright. Occasionally, though, customers were kind enough to tell him, “Congratulations, rice vendor, your food’s delicious,” and this made Mevlut so happy that he would temporarily forget the harsh truth he kept trying to hide from himself as much as from Rayiha: he wasn’t clearing much at all from this rice business. If the street vendor from Muş had spent eight years in the same spot only to die in sickness and destitution, perhaps it hadn’t been his own fault after all.

  —

  Rayiha. Most days, Mevlut would bring back half the chickpeas, chicken thighs, and rice I’d cooked in the morning. These leftover drumsticks, small chicken halves, and bits of skin would have lost their shine by then, the fat around them would be discolored, but I would add them all to the pot again for the next day’s batch. I’d also put any leftover rice to simmer some more. It tasted even better after it had been cooked over a gentle flame for a second time. Mevlut wouldn’t say we were using leftovers; instead, he would call it seasoning, the way jail-block bosses and rich inmates would take the awful food served in prison and have it cooked again using their secret stash of good olive oil, spices, and pepper. He’d heard about this from a wealthy Kurd from Cizre who’d been in jail and now ran a parking lot. Mevlut would watch me cooking in the kitchen and take great pleasure in reminding me that food always tastes better when it’s got some dirt in it— a truth commonly acknowledged by anyone in Istanbul who makes a habit of consuming street food. I didn’t like this, and I would tell him there’s nothing “dirty” about food that’s been cooked again because it didn’t get eaten the first time around. But then he told me that those bits of skin that had been in and out of the pan a few times, and the chickpeas that had been boiled so many times that they’d softened into mush, were usually his customers’ favorites, and rather than go for the fresher, cleaner chunks of meat, they would pick out giblets that had been cooked a few times over, smothering them in mustard and ketchup before wolfing them down.

  —

  In October, Mevlut started selling boza again in the evenings. He’d walk for kilometers every night with all kinds of beautiful images and strange thoughts crossing his mind. During these walks, he discovered that the shadows of the trees in some neighborhoods moved even when there was no breeze at all, stray dogs got braver and cockier where streetlamps were broken or switched off, and the flyers for circumcision ceremonies and cram schools pasted on utility poles and in doorways were all written in rhyming couplets. Hearing the things the city told him at night and reading the language of the streets filled Mevlut with pride. But when he went back to his rice cart in the morning and stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets, the power of his imagination waned, he sensed that the world was hollow and meaningless, and he felt the urge to return to Rayiha as quickly as possible, afraid of the overwhelming loneliness growing inside him. What if she went into early labor while she was at home alone? Yet he would tell himself, Just a little longer, and start walking in restless circles around the big wheels and glass box of his rice cart or just shift his weight from his right foot to his left, glancing at his Swiss watch as he waited.

  —

  Rayiha. “He gave you that watch because it was in his interest to do so,” I would say whenever I noticed Mevlut looking at Hadji Hamit’s gift. “He did it so you’d feel like you owe him, not just you but your uncle and your cousins, too.” When Mevlut came back in the afternoon, I’d make him some herbal tea with leaves I picked from the tree in the courtyard of the Armenian church. He would check on the boza I’d already prepared for the evening, switch on the TV to the only program they were showing, a high-school geometry lesson, as he drank his sugary herbal tea, and then sleep through his own coughing fits until it was time for dinner. He spent seven years selling cooked rice, and during that time, I was always the one who prepared the chickpeas and the rice, who bought, boiled, and fried the chicken; I also added the sugar to the boza so it was ready for his evening rounds; and I spent my days washing all the dirty tools, spoons, jugs, and plates that needed washing. Wh
en I was pregnant, I also listened closely to the baby in my womb, taking care not to throw up in the rice from the stink of panfried chicken, and treasured the little corner with a cot and pillows for the baby. Mevlut had found a book called Islamic Names for Your Child in a junk shop. He would flip through the pages before dinner and read out some names for my consideration during the TV commercials—Nurullah, Abdullah, Sadullah, Fazlallah—and because I didn’t want to break his heart, I kept putting off telling him that our baby was a girl.

  Vediha, Samiha, and I found out when we went to the Etfal Hospital in Şişli. I left the hospital fretting. “Who cares, for God’s sake!” Samiha said. “There are enough men roaming the streets of Istanbul already.”

  5

  * * *

  Mevlut Becomes a Father

  Do Not Get Out of the Van

  Samiha. My father and I came to Istanbul for the wedding and ended up staying. Every morning when I wake up in that room in Vediha’s place, I look at the shadows of the water pitcher and the bottle of cologne on the table, and I get lost in thought: I had so many suitors in the village that my father thought I’d find an even better match in Istanbul…But I have yet to meet anyone here other than Süleyman…I don’t know what he and Korkut have promised my father. I do know they’re the ones who paid for his dentures. He puts them in a glass before he goes to sleep; when I’m in bed waiting for him to wake up, I always feel like taking those false teeth and throwing them out the window. I help Vediha with the housework all morning and do some knitting for the winter, and we watch TV together when the programs start in the afternoon. My father plays with Bozkurt and Turan in the mornings, but they like to pull on his beard and his hair, and he ends up arguing with his grandchildren. Once, my father and I went down to the Bosphorus with Vediha and Süleyman; another time we went to the cinema in Beyoğlu and for some milk pudding afterward.