Of course, things were very different in those days. Ten years ago, no one gave a toss about privacy, and Mustafa Bey would walk around the village with a clutch of phone bills, through which we would flick in search of our own, pausing only to comment on those of our neighbors (“Goodness, what have you been up to? Your phone bill is SOOOO big!”) Now, of course, the post office is as high-tech as it gets, and in the last few weeks, it has even acquired a protection system preventing any desperado who takes it into their head to vault the counter and make off with the takings.Mustafa Postacı is a quiet man, not given to wasting words. His is a life that has been touched by tragedy, his younger son having drowned in the Avanos River just weeks before he was due to start at the university. Not that you would ever guess that to meet him. Instead, as someone who has trouble remembering my own mobile number, I'm left open-mouthed with amazement as once a month Mustafa reels off my phone number for me before calling up my bill on his computer screen. “That's nothing,” he said modestly when I complimented him once on his incredible memory. “When I worked in Nevşehir I could remember literally thousands of numbers.”
So, to the poems which appear in a volume called “Blood Silk” published by the American poet Paulann Petersen, a regular visitor to Cappadocia. The first, called “Place Setting,” describes the perfect simplicity of a typical village lunch -- tomatoes and onions gently frying together, big hunks of bread by the plate, slices of juicy watermelon waiting. But really, it's a paean to the care with which such a lunch is served up to visitors -- each knife, fork and spoon carefully polished before being laid out on the sheet of newspaper that serves as a tablecloth for a table set up behind the counter (and can you just imagine THAT happening in a British post office, always assuming you could still find one open?).
That same sense of meticulous care is also celebrated in the second poem, “At the Postal Worker's Flat, Nevşehir,” which describes the tradition of pouring cologne over the hands of guests. Petersen remembers how Mustafa bathed her hands in Ralph Lauren cologne as lovingly as if it had been the finest and most expensive of perfumes and she the queen on whom it was being bestowed. The garden around the post office is tended with just this same loving care, roses tumbling joyfully down the wall beside the entrance. What a shame, then, that poor old Mustafa has to gaze out on a vista of the shell of a building that was half-built and then abandoned right in front of his post office a few years ago.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
