style。
I wandered through the Chicken…Sellers Market in Bayazid; through the
empty square of the slave market; amid the pleasant aromas of soup and
pudding shops; as if searching。 I passed the closed doors of barbershops;
clothes pressers; an old bread baker who was counting his money and looking
at me in surprise; I passed a grocer’s shop smelling of pickles and salted fish;
and since my eyes were taken only by colors; I walked into a herbs and notions
shop where something was being weighed; and in the light of a lamp; stared
passionately; the way one looks at one’s beloved; at the sacks of coffee; ginger;
saffron and cinnamon; the colorful cans of gum mastic; the aniseed whose
scent wafted from the counter; and at mounds of brown and black cumin。
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Sometimes I want to put everything into my mouth; sometimes I want to fill a
page with a picture of all creation。
I walked into the place where I’d filled my stomach twice before in the last
week; which I’d personally named the “soup kitchen of the downtrodden”—
actually; of the “miserable” would’ve been more appropriate。 It was open until
midnight to those who knew about it。 Inside were a few unfortunates dressed
like horse thieves or like men who’d escaped the gallows; a couple of pathetic
characters whose sorrow and hopelessness caused their sights to slip from this
world to distant paradises; as happens with opium addicts; two beggars who
were at pains to follow even basic guild etiquette; and a young gentleman
who’d seated himself in a corner at a distance from this crowd。 I gave the
Aleppan cook a graceful greeting。 Heaping the meat…filled cabbage dolma into
my bowl; I covered it with yogurt and topped it off with handfuls of hot red
pepper flakes before taking a seat beside the young gentleman。
Every night a sorrow overwhelms me; a misery descends upon me。 Oh; my
brothers; my dear brothers; we’re being poisoned; we’re rotting; dying; we’re
exhausting ourselves as we live; we’ve sunk up to our necks in misery…Some
nights; I dream that he emerges from the well and es after me; but I know
we’ve buried him deeply beneath plenty of earth。 He couldn’t possibly rise
from the grave。
The gentleman; who I thought had buried his nose in his soup and
forgotten the whole world; opened the door to a conversation。 Was this a sign
from Allah? “Yes;” I answered; “they’ve ground the meat to the right
consistency; my stuffed cabbage is quite to my liking。” I asked about him: He’d
recently graduated from a miserable twenty…coin college and been taken into
Arifi Pasha’s patronage as a clerk。 I didn’t ask him why; at this hour of the
night; he wasn’t at the Pasha’s estate; at the mosque or at home in the arms of