A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut, Every Winter Evening for the Last Twenty-Five Years Leave the Boza Seller Alone

IN MARCH 1994, twelve years after Mevlut and Rayiha eloped to Istanbul, Mevlut was selling boza on a very dark night when he came face-to-face with a basket lowered down quickly but quietly from above.

“Boza seller, boza seller, boza for two, please!” a child’s voice called.

The basket had fallen through the night to Mevlut like an angel. He was amazed to see it, because in Istanbul the custom of buying goods from street vendors by means of a basket tied to a rope and dropped down from an upper-story window had all but disappeared. It took him back to his middle-school days, twenty-five years ago, when he used to help his father sell yogurt and boza. Into the enameled pot in the basket, Mevlut poured more boza than the children upstairs had asked for — not just enough for two glasses, but almost a kilo’s worth. He felt good, as if he’d been touched by an angel. In the past few years, his thoughts and daydreams had frequently turned to spiritual questions.

Before we go any further, and to make sure that our story is properly understood, perhaps I should explain for foreign readers who’ve never heard of it before, and for future generations of Turkish readers who will, I fear, forget all about it within the next twenty to thirty years, that boza is a traditional Asian beverage made of fermented wheat, with a thick consistency, a pleasant aroma, a dark yellowish color, and a low alcohol content. This story is already full of strange things, and I wouldn’t want people to think it entirely peculiar.

Boza is quick to spoil and turn sour in the heat, so in the old days, when the Ottomans ruled, it was sold mainly in shops and during the winter. By the time the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, the boza shops in Istanbul had long closed down, pushed out by German breweries. But the street vendors who sold this traditional drink never left. After the 1950s, boza selling became the preserve of those like Mevlut, who walked the poor and neglected cobblestone streets on winter evenings crying “Bozaaa,” reminding us of centuries past, and the good old days that have come and gone.

Sensing some impatience from the children up on the fifth floor, Mevlut pocketed the paper money they’d left in the basket and set the change in coins next to the pot. He gave the basket a gentle pull, just as he used to do as a child when he and his father would sell their wares on the street, and off it went.

The wicker basket made a quick ascent, giving the children some trouble as it swayed from side to side in the cold wind, bumping against the windowsills and the gutters on the floors below the children’s window. When it got to the fifth floor, it hovered for a moment, like a happy seagull gliding on the perfect current. Then, like a mysterious and forbidden thing, it disappeared into the night, and Mevlut went on his way.

“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.

“You speak for yourself. I’m religious, but I also like my rakı,” said the one with the thin nose. “Boza seller, are you saying there’s no alcohol in boza because you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid of anyone but God,” said Mevlut.

“Oooh, there’s your answer, eh?”

“But don’t you worry about street dogs and robbers at night?”

“No one would harm a poor boza seller,” said Mevlut, smiling. This, too, was another of his practiced responses. “Bandits and robbers don’t bother boza sellers. I’ve been doing this job for twenty-five years. I’ve never been mugged. Everyone respects a boza seller.”

“Why?”

“Because boza has been around for a long time, passed down to us from our ancestors. There can’t be more than forty boza sellers out on the streets of Istanbul tonight. There are very few people like you who will actually buy boza. Most are happy just to listen to the boza seller’s call and remember the past. And that affection makes the boza seller happy, it’s what keeps us going.”

“Are you religious?”

“Yes, I am a God-fearing man,” said Mevlut, knowing that these words would scare them a bit.

“And do you love Atatürk, too?”

“His Excellency Field Marshal Mustafa Kemal Pasha passed through Akşehir, near where I come from, in the year 1922,” Mevlut informed them. “Then he set up the Republic in Ankara, and then he went to Istanbul, where he stayed at the Park Hotel in Taksim…One day he was standing at the window of his room when he noticed that the usual joy and bustle seemed to be missing from the city. He asked his assistant about it, who told him, Your Excellency, we’ve banned street vendors from entering the city, because they don’t have those in Europe and we thought you’d get angry. But it was precisely this which made Atatürk angry. Street vendors are the songbirds of the streets, they are the life and soul of Istanbul, he said. Under no circumstances must they ever be banned. From that day on, street vendors were free to roam the streets of Istanbul.”

“Hurrah for Atatürk!” said one of the women.

Some of the other diners cheered in response. Mevlut joined in.

“All right, fine, but what will become of Atatürk, of secularism, if the Islamist parties take power? Will Turkey become like Iran?”

“Don’t you worry about that; the army won’t let them do that. They’ll organize a coup, close the party down, and lock them all up. Isn’t that so, boza seller?”

“All I do is sell boza,” said Mevlut. “I don’t get involved in high politics. I leave that to my betters.”

Even though they were all drunk, they heard the sting in Mevlut’s remark.

“I’m just like you, boza seller. The only things I’m afraid of are God and my mother-in-law.”

“Boza seller, do you have a mother-in-law?”

“I never got to meet her, unfortunately,” said Mevlut.

“How did you get married?”

“We fell in love and ran away together. Not everyone can say that.”

“How did you meet?”

“We saw each other at a relative’s wedding, and it was love at first sight. I wrote her letters for three years.”

“Well, well, boza seller, aren’t you full of surprises!”

“And what does your wife do now?”

“She does some needlework from home. Not everyone can do the things she does, either.”

“Boza seller, if we drink your boza, will we get even more drunk than we already are?”

“My boza won’t get you drunk,” said Mevlut. “There are eight of you, I’ll give you two kilos.”

He went back to the kitchen, but it took a while to assemble the boza, the roasted chickpeas, and the cinnamon and for him to get his money. He put his shoes back on with an alacrity from the days when he used to have customers waiting in line for him and he had to hurry all the time.

“Boza seller, it’s wet and muddy outside, be careful,” they called from the living room. “Don’t let anyone mug you, don’t let the dogs tear you apart!”

“Boza seller, come back again!” said one of the women.

Mevlut knew full well that they weren’t really going to want boza again, that they had only called him in because they’d heard his voice and wanted to be entertained while they were drunk. The cold air outside felt good.

“Booo-zaaaa.”

In twenty-five years, he’d seen so many homes like this one, so many people and families, he’d heard these questions thousands of times. Toward the end of the 1970s, in the dark backstreets of Beyoğlu and Dolapdere, moving among the nightclub entertainers, the gamblers, the thugs, the pimps, and the prostitutes, he’d come across many groups of drunk diners. He became well versed in the art of not getting too involved with the drunks, of dealing with them “without catching anyone’s eye,” as some of the wily types in military service used to say, and getting back out on the street without wasting too much time.

Twenty-five years ago, almost everyone invited him inside, into the kitchen, where they asked him whether he was cold, did he go to school in the mornings, and would he like a cup of tea? Some invited him into the living room, and even to take a seat at their table. Those were the good old days when he was so busy hurrying off to deliver orders he couldn’t pause to properly enjoy people’s hospitality and affection. Mevlut knew he’d been particularly sensitive to it that night because it had been a long time since anyone had shown so much interest in him. It had been a strange crowd, too; back in the old days it was rare to find men and women having rakı and making drunken conversation in a proper family home with a kitchen and all the rest. His friend Ferhat used to tease him, only half jokingly: “Why would anyone want your three-proof boza when they can all get drunk together as a family on the state’s forty-five-proof Tekel brand rakı? There’s no future in this business, Mevlut, let it go for God’s sake! This country no longer needs your boza to get drunk.”

He took one of the side streets that led down to Fındıklı, where he dropped off half a kilo to a regular customer, and on his way out of the building he saw two suspicious shadows in a doorway. If he gave these “suspects” too much thought, they would know (as in a dream) that he was thinking about them, and then they might try to harm him. But he couldn’t help it; the shadows had seized his attention.

When he turned around instinctively to check whether any dogs were following, he was sure, for a second, that the shadows were tailing him. But he couldn’t quite believe it. He rang his bell twice with vigor, and twice halfheartedly, but with urgency. “Bo-zaa,” he shouted. He decided to avoid Taksim, taking a shortcut home down the steps to the hollow between the hills, and then back up to Cihangir.

As he was making his way down the stairs, one of the shadows called out, “Hey, boza seller, hang on a minute.”

Mevlut pretended not to hear. He gingerly ran down a few steps, with his pole balanced across his back. But when he got beyond the light of the streetlamps, he had to slow down.

“Hey, boza seller, I said wait! We won’t bite, we just want some boza.”

Mevlut stopped, feeling a little ashamed for being afraid. A fig tree blocked the light from one of the streetlamps, so the landing at the bottom of the stairway was particularly dark. It was the same spot where he used to park his three-wheeled ice-cream cart in the evenings that summer when he eloped with Rayiha.

“How much is your boza?” said one of them, coming down the stairs with the air of a bully.

Now, the three of them were standing under the fig tree, in the darkness. People who craved a glass of boza did tend to ask how much it cost first, but they usually did so in a soft, even sheepish way, politely rather than aggressively. Something was not quite right here. Mevlut quoted half his normal price.

“That’s a bit expensive,” said the beefier of the two men. “All right, give us two glasses. I bet you make loads of money.”

Mevlut lowered his jugs and took out a large plastic cup from his apron pocket. He filled it with boza. He handed it over to the younger, smaller man.

“Here you are.”

“Thank you.”

As he filled the second cup, he felt almost guilty about the awkward silence that had set in. The bigger man sensed his embarrassment.

“You’re in a hurry, boza seller, is there that much work?”

“No, no,” said Mevlut. “Business is slow. Boza is over, we don’t do nearly as well as we used to. No one buys boza anymore. I wasn’t going to come out at all today, but someone’s ill at home, and we need the extra money for some hot soup.”

“How much do you make in a day?”

“You know what they say, never ask a woman her age, nor a man his salary,” said Mevlut. “But you asked, so I’ll tell you,” he said, now handing the silhouette of the bigger man his glass of boza. “When sales are good, we make enough to live on for a day. But on a slow day like today, we go home hungry.”

“You don’t look like you’re hungry. Where are you from?”

“Beyşehir.”

“Where on earth is that?”

Mevlut didn’t reply.

“How long have you lived in Istanbul?”

“Must be around twenty-five years now.”

“You’ve been here for twenty-five years and you still say you’re from Beyşehir?”

“No…it’s just that you asked.”

“You must have made some good money in all that time.”

“What money? Look at me, I’m still working at midnight. Where are you from?”

The men didn’t reply, and Mevlut was afraid. “Would you like some cinnamon on top?” he asked.

“Go on then. How much is the cinnamon?”

Mevlut took his brass cinnamon shaker out from his apron. “The chickpeas and the cinnamon are on me,” he said as he shook some cinnamon over the two cups. He took two bags of roasted chickpeas from his pocket. Instead of just handing them over to the customers as he would usually do, he tore the bags open and sprinkled the chickpeas onto the cups in the dark of night, like a helpful waiter.

“Boza goes best with roasted chickpeas,” he said.

The men looked at each other and drained their cups.

“Well, then, do us a favor on this bad day,” said the older and bulkier of the two men once he had finished his drink.

Mevlut knew what was coming and tried to preempt it.

“If you don’t have any money on you right now, you can pay me some other time, my friend. If us poor fellows in this big city don’t help each other out in times of need, then who will? Let this one be on me, if it pleases you.” He moved to lift the stick back across his shoulders as if to go on his way.

“Not so fast, boza seller,” said the well-built man. “We said do us a favor today, didn’t we? Give us your money.”

“But I don’t have any money on me,” said Mevlut. “Just some small change from one or two glasses for a couple of customers, that’s all. And I need that to buy medicine for our patient at home, and I don’t—”

Suddenly, the smaller man drew a switchblade from his pocket. He pressed the button, and the blade snapped open in the silence. He rested the point of the knife on Mevlut’s stomach. Meanwhile, the bigger man had gone behind Mevlut’s back and pinned his arms. Mevlut went quiet.

The smaller man pressed the switchblade against Mevlut’s stomach with one hand, and with the other hand he did a fast but thorough search of the pockets on Mevlut’s apron, and every fold of his jacket. He quickly pocketed everything he could find: banknotes and coins. Mevlut could see that he was very young and very ugly.

“Look away, boza seller,” said the bigger, stronger man when he noticed Mevlut looking at the boy’s face. “Now then, you’ve got plenty of money, don’t you? No wonder you were trying to run away from us.”

“That’s enough now,” said Mevlut, shaking himself loose.

“Enough?” said the man behind him. “I don’t think so. Not enough. You come here twenty-five years ago, you loot the city, and when it’s finally our turn, then what, you decide to close up shop? We get there late, so now it’s our fault?”

“Not at all, not at all, it’s nobody’s fault,” said Mevlut.

“What do you have in Istanbul? A house, an apartment, what?”

“I haven’t got a single thing to my name,” Mevlut lied. “Nothing at all.”

“Why? Are you stupid or what?”

“It just wasn’t meant to be.”

“Hey, everyone who came to Istanbul twenty-five years ago has a house in one of those slums by now. They’ve got buildings sprouting on their land.”

Mevlut twitched irritably, but this only resulted in the knife being jabbed into his stomach a little harder (“Oh God!” said Mevlut) and in his being searched once again from head to toe.

“Tell us, are you actually stupid or are you just playing dumb?”

Mevlut made no response. The man behind him expertly twisted Mevlut’s left arm and brought his hand behind his back in a smooth motion. “What do we have here! It’s not houses or land that you like to spend your money on. You prefer wristwatches, don’t you, my friend from Beyşehir? Now I see how it is.”

The Swiss watch that Mevlut had received twelve years ago as a wedding gift was off his wrist in an instant.

“What kind of person robs a boza seller?” Mevlut asked.

“There’s a first time for everything,” said the man holding his arms back. “Be quiet now and don’t look back.”

Mevlut watched in silence as the two, one old and one young, walked away. In that moment, he realized they had to be father and son. Mevlut and his late father had never been partners in crime like these two. His father was always blaming him for something. Mevlut went down the steps. He found himself on one of the side streets that led to Kazancı Hill. It was quiet; there wasn’t a soul around. What would Rayiha say when he got home? Would he be able to rest without telling someone what he’d been through?

He imagined for a moment that the robbery was a dream and that everything was as it always had been. He was not going to tell Rayiha that he’d been mugged. Because he hadn’t been mugged. Wallowing in this delusion for a few seconds made him feel better. He rang his bell.

“Booozaaaa,” he called, out of habit, and realized immediately that there was no sound coming out of his throat.

Back in the good old days, when something happened on the streets to upset him, whenever he felt humiliated and heartbroken, he could count on Rayiha to cheer him up when he got back home.

For the first time in his twenty-five years as a boza seller, Mevlut rushed home without calling “Boo-zaaa,” even though he still had some boza left.

When he walked into his one-bedroom house, he deduced from the quiet that his two daughters had both gone to sleep.

Rayiha was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing some needlework in front of the television with the volume turned down, as she did every night while waiting for Mevlut to return.

“I’m going to stop selling boza now,” he said.

“Where’s this coming from?” said Rayiha. “You can’t stop selling boza. But you’re right, you need to get another job. My embroidery isn’t enough.”

“I’m telling you, I’ve had enough of boza.”

“I hear Ferhat makes a lot of money at the electricity board,” said Rayiha. “He’ll find you a job if you give him a call.”

“I’d rather die than call Ferhat,” said Mevlut.