Bozuk Read online

  I have been dressing modestly. In this heat I would go naked, given my druthers, but I have used discretion. At home, on those rare occasions when it is excruciatingly hot, I strip to my birthday suit. It is a nice suit, fits me well. I haven’t bent it out of shape making children or eating myself to death. Not recently anyway.

  “Don’t show your arms or your breasts,” he says, and I feel a current moving from my knees to my groin. “Breasts.” What an intimate word. Odd that he should say it. “Breasts” was the first word I looked up in the dictionary when I learned to read. The dictionary didn’t say breasts were prurient. I remember reading something like “the chest from neck to waistline.” In those days, after the parson’s nose, the breast was my favourite part of the chicken. Not any more. Now I like dark meat.

  I will shower and then decide, I say to myself, but I already know what I will wear, to hell with the long coats.

  He sighs again when we meet in front of the fish tank full of glum bottom-feeders in the Metropol, which is also down the street from the Pera Palace. I want to see the grand old hotel where so many famous people stayed, even though the fifty-lira price tag for high tea is outrageous. “What ugly fish. They look like undertakers,” I say to distract him from judging my bare arms toned from giving hand releases to elderly gentlemen. I am wearing my black sundress with cross straps and a big straw hat. When I glimpse myself in the hotel window, I think I look more as if I am going to a garden party than to a mosque.

  “You will be asked to cover your hair and put on a coat when we get there,” he warns, me as we descend the hill toward the Galata Bridge after we’ve gawked at the stained-glass dome in the Pera and promised to come back another time for their expensive tea.

  I want Güzel to take me by the hand and lead me over the cobblestones, which are hard to navigate in my platform sandals, but he doesn’t. He walks quickly and I struggle to keep up.

  “This is the old Italian quarter. Byzantium was the biggest market in the world. Everyone planted flags here. The tower was part of the Genoese fortifications. Now the district is so touristic.” He says the word with tolerant exasperation. My dress code has clearly ramped up his irritability.

  A Muslim family passes us and I force eye contact with the wife. She does not return my smile. I am used to people smiling back at me. It is one of the prerequisites of an attractive woman. I enjoy it because, when I was an overweight adolescent, people looked at me with contempt or averted their eyes, as if I were an untouchable and contact meant contamination.

  “Speaking of fortifications,” I say, “the Muslim women do not look happy.”

  “It is hot,” he says. I am sure I would get a similar reaction in the middle of winter.

  “Would you believe I came here to hear the sound of the snow?”

  “Because you were reading Pamuk.” He rolls his eyes.

  “Why does that bother you?”

  “I told you. Pamuk has the perspective of Istanbul’s upper class. That is not the real Turkey. Since he has had so much attention, he now says what America wants him to say, because America fawns on him, as they did dissenting Soviet writers during the Cold War. Now he lives in the United States half the time. As far as real Turks are concerned, Pamuk is an American.”

  “Do we stop being who we are when we are transplanted?” I ask. Isn’t this why I am here? Do migrant birds have nationalities?

  “It is more complicated than that. He is mistaken.”

  “What about the headscarf girls? Was he wrong about them?”

  “He wasn’t right or wrong. It isn’t that easy.”

  “Is that a journalist’s objectivity, or are you contradicting yourself?”

  “Turkey is a contradiction.”

  “Is that why everyone is so polite, or are you afraid of insulting Turkishness?”

  “Ah, Madeleine, you are beginning to understand. We are living on the razor’s edge, some of us hoping for the simplest solutions, Occam’s razor, but there are no easy answers in a country where half the population wants to be European and the other half Persian.”

  “Do you mean Iranian?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What about Ataturk?”

  “Exactly. Turkey is not ideologies. Turkey is food that tastes like the earth it was grown in. That is what Ataturk knew. A real Turk can close his eyes and tell you exactly where the bees that produce his honey have foraged. We are God’s gardeners. That is the real religion and politic of my country.”

  “The formula for dirt.”

  “Exactly. The French call it terroir.”

  In the Tünel car, the oldest underground in Europe, we squeeze together. I am standing beside Güzel, holding on to a strap. When the train starts its rocking descent, I almost bang into him, something I would enjoy; but somehow he avoids contact. The men around us take notice. They almost smirk.

  “Why were the men looking at me that way?” I ask, as we walk across the bridge.

  “What way?”

  “I don’t know. Curious. Maybe judgmental.”

  “Don’t people look at one another in your country?”

  “Yes, but this feels different.”

  “You are nearly naked,” he says.

  “It is hot.”

  Güzel smiles when I quote him.

  “Does your wife wear a long coat?” I ask, testing, maybe teasing. Perhaps he will reveal this important biographical detail and I will find out if he is worth pursuing as a love interest

  “No,” he replies.

  “How far is it to the Blue Mosque?”

  “Five hundred metres.”

  At the mosque, we take off our shoes, and, as promised, a functionary asks me to put on one of the dismal coats and replace my hat with a headscarf. Güzel offers to take a photo with my camera, even though I have told him that I do not like having my picture taken. The verger, or whatever they call such people in mosques, asks me to put it away, so I hold my little Canon in front of me and take a quick snap before returning it to my purse.

  Later, I see it is a nice photo. This surprises me. I don’t think narcissism is one of my vices, but I am pleased. But I am not alone in the picture. There is someone standing beside me. It is hard to tell if that person is a man or a woman. It almost looks as if he or she had his hands on my shoulders. Maybe I am imagining it. The hands could be light leaking from the stained glass windows.

  I show Güzel the image in my digital camera when the verger turns his back on me. “I wonder who that is?”

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Do you operate on intuition?” We’re standing under the beautiful blue and gold firmament in the enormous prayer hall. “Or, speaking of Occam’s razor and St. Anselm, who had the best explanation, do you have evidence for the existence of God?”

  “When I am in a holy place, I believe, because of the wonder of its beauty. When I am not, I have to trust Anselm and the limit of my imagination, reasonable proof.”

  “Does that make you a pragmatist?”

  “We are all pragmatists in Turkey. The ones who were not were selected out centuries ago.”

  “Even the Muslims?”

  “Especially the Muslims. They are farmers and shopkeepers.”

  “The customer is always right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even the ones with their arms showing.”

  “The tourists with bare arms would not be asked to their homes.”

  “Would you ask me to your home?”

  “Of course.” I think he is telling me his first lie.

  “How far is your home from here?”

  “Five hundred metres.”

  “Can I buy you lunch?”

  “I have already eaten, but I would be happy to sit with you.”

  I order. It is his country and he is clearly proud of its cuisine, but he waits for me to ask the waiter to bring dolmas, fava bean salad, yogurt, hummus, mussels stuffed with rice and the round simits, which I at first mistook for bagels thou
gh they are bigger and flatter.

  “Would you like rakı?”

  I say yes because I am on holiday and I am nervous with Güzel. Normally I wouldn’t have alcohol at lunch. The drunken shade of my mother dances on the wall opposite the sidewalk café. She is always there. Besides, a drink will make me sleepy and we always have at least five hundred metres to walk.

  “We are going to visit the New Mosque next. It was built by a woman, the mother of Sultan Mehmet III, and once housed a school, a hospital and public baths. The Spice Bazaar was built to finance the mosque’s charities. You people have the wrong idea. Islam is founded on the idea of community.”

  I am not “you people,” not American, not English, Güzel, I think but do not repeat, because I have already told him, and if he asked me who I was I wouldn’t have an answer. That is what I am here to find out. Trust is an acquired taste.

  “Have you written about Iman yet?” I dare to ask.

  “There are two women in my story, but don’t ask me because I never discuss my writing until it is finished. It’s bad luck, ” he answers, and I understand I should not push him. I don’t want to undermine Iman’s journey with aggressive curiosity.

  After lunch, we explore the Sultanahmet Spice Market. The humid mix of sweat, perfume and spices makes me drowsy. I am almost tempted to accept one of the innumerable cups of restorative tea on offer. Do the people who come out of their stores and restaurants to invite me inside think that I might be a plenipotentiary for peace, a Canadian angel hovering over Arab Spring; or do they just want to sell me something? I don’t want a rug to take home. I don’t want a belly-dance costume with veils and jingling coins. I don’t want sex in a changing room. I want to know if God is good, or not, if I can live with goodness as a definition of the highest power. I want to taste panis angelicus with my invisible sister.

  I smell my food. Having graduated from the alcoholic widow’s menu of chip steaks and Wonder Bread to real food, I am intoxicated by the earth smells of root vegetables and the aroma of plant pollens. Perhaps it is also memories of my father that invite such a complicated emotional response to culinary odours.

  The spice shop is small and crowded with tourists. It smells like the hippy kitchens in vegetarian restaurants at home. “Merhaba.” A small man with a tooth-challenged grin bows his head, almost resting his crown on my breasts while grinding his groin into my thigh.

  I jump back, bumping into bins of aphrodisiac cumin, oregano, and mint. The earth-coloured scents cloud the crowded space. “You are çok güzel.”

  My clearly deranged spice guide advances, pushing crystal grains of sea salt into my mouth. “Good for sex,” he says, indicating my kuku.

  Güzel has warned me not to call out cuckoo when I mimic birds on the street.

  “Yok,” I say, my useful word, backing out the door. The spice merchant scoops a handful of costly saffron, grabbing my wrist with the other hand. The hand stained with crocus pollen pulls mine toward his crotch. “Yok!” I repeat more forcefully, and stumble on the stone step.

  A super-sized Amer-tourist, so huge he has to be a retired marine, catches me as I fall. “Thank you,” I say, as Mr. Green Beret nods then nudges back into the throng with the ubiquitous American uh-huh. His wife has a tattoo on her arm. A few minutes ago I noticed her playing tug-of-war with a vendor inside the Grand Bazaar. “Will you take five? Beş for this homely scarf?” I love the way she said “homely” and imagine it hanging over the bare light bulb in the trailer home where she and her overweight hero might eat Twinkies and watch Fox News. Bargaining is like foreplay for the merchants of Sultanahmet, the guidebooks say. This really turns on the middle-aged ladies with gold earrings that don’t move. Never mind, the merchants have families to feed.

  Güzel materializes.

  “Did you see that?” I ask, trying not to sound annoyed and disappointed that he has left my rescue to a total stranger, especially one that doesn’t fit my heroic concept.

  “Yes.”

  I hold up my saffron-coloured wrist. “You’d think he would have been intimidated by you. Who in their right mind would feel up a woman with a male companion?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t notice me.”

  The spice seller is still standing on his stoop, blowing me kisses. I wish I knew enough Turkish words to rat him out with his wife.

  HOME SWEET HOME

  Coon had a line out near the Gorge rapids and we sat together watching the sunrise over Mount Currie. I’d filled my jeans’ pockets with pebbles on the way up, but he told me he didn’t want to take part in my stone-skipping ritual. He said he couldn’t waste time playing. Being a kid was a luxury; and he had to feed himself.

  “You’ll scare the fish.”

  “These stones are for the water spirit,” I said, offering him half of the cold chip steak sandwich I’d wrapped in waxed paper. My games weren’t “play.” They were necessary. If a ritual didn’t exist, I invented one. My days and nights were separated by going-to-sleep rituals and waking-up rituals – mostly about keeping my room in order. There were no dustballs underneath my bed and no wrinkles in my sheets. Wrinkles would mean unexpected bumps in my life and I already had enough of those.

  I sat on the bath plug because, if I didn’t, our house would be deep-sucked into a sinkhole in the middle of the earth. I measured the distance between marbles and the space between hangers in my closet. Spaces were very important. Too little meant I couldn’t breathe and too much meant I could fall through cracks in the earth. My room was spic and span. I wasn’t going to let the tide of garbage invade my holy of holies. My father’s First Communion Bible lay open on my bedside table. Every night before I went to sleep, I memorized a verse and I can still remember lots of them. That is the part of my father I choose to keep, the comforting words. Coon may have put aside his childish things, like St. Paul said, but all things childish are not necessarily foolish.

  He had this way of appearing and disappearing. We didn’t plan our meetings. They just happened. Either I would find him in the forest or he would turn up wherever I happened to be – only when I was alone, of course. My new friend didn’t make it to school or any place where other people might have seen him. He had no interest in meeting my mother either. Why would he? If she’d given up on mothering me, why would she take a wild boy to her food-stained bosom?

  The night I used my magic to bring Coon back to our yard, he promised to tell me who he was and show me where he lived. I swore not to tell. I told him I was the boss of all the bushes and he wasn’t any different from any other kid. He had a funky smell. I thought I was going to gag on the stench of B.O. and pee.

  “Don’t you ever have a bath?”

  He said he went swimming sometimes, but I found out that he exaggerated. Coon didn’t really know how to swim. Of course, neither did I. After he caught a few herring, I dared him to jump off Dead Man’s Rock into the Gorge. We dog-paddled in the dangerous waters, and now I wonder at our recklessness.

  “Swimming isn’t childish,“ I argued. “Keeping clean is adult work.”

  We dried ourselves with cedar boughs and set off into the evening. I guess I still thought Coon was just a kid gone wild for the summer and the part about living in the woods was pure fiction. I thought he was taking me on a shortcut to his neighbourhood, to a domestic situation even more broken than my own.

  “Are you going to show me where you really live” I asked, as he kept going deeper into the forest and I followed right behind. I wouldn’t admit it, but I was getting scared. It was dark. I could hardly see the moon or the stars any more, just glimpses over the top of the trees. There had been cougar sightings near Victoria that summer. One wildcat came into a yard and took a baby right out of its carriage. I heard about that on the radio. I thought I heard owls hooting and the sound of a big cat or maybe a bear sharpening its claws on an arbutus trunk.

  “You’re just slumming. I’ll bet you live in a nice house with a swimming pool,” I said hopefully, “and a freezer ful
l of Fudgesicles.”

  Coon didn’t say a word. He just kept on pushing through the bushes, letting the brambles and branches snap back at me. My arms and legs were scratched and I felt warm blood trickling and drying on my skin. I was going to look like I’d been through a cabbage grater in the morning. If Stella were to wake up sober, she would ask questions.

  As if.

  “I trust you know where we’re going,” I said, trying to sound threatening rather than terrified.

  Of course, he did. Coon took me around and around in circles. If I had any brains at all I would have kept track of the stars, even though I could hardly see any through the dense foliage. He was careful to keep me away from open spaces until we ended up on some sort of bluff, a big rock covered with dry lichen and moss. Then he lay down.

  “Are we here?” I half-believed we were because I was tired and didn’t want to go any further.

  Yes, we were here, so long as here is wherever we happened to be at the moment. He had that figured out. Here was where he wanted to be, and it was nowhere near home or whatever he called the two-garage suburban mansion or woodland shack where he lived. Here was where I was about to be abandoned. Coon lay on his back for a few minutes, watching stars travel across the night sky. I lay down beside him and closed my eyes, smelling the pine needles and cedar boughs all around us, and the salt-drenched ocean breezes. When I opened them again, he was gone, silent as sweat leaving the body.

  Stay where you are, I told myself. Do not panic. I heard the mad singing of dogs and carnivorous nocturnal birds and folded into myself, my arms around my knees, and my head inside them. If I made myself very small I might not be noticed. I might be picked up by an up draught of air and floated back to my bedroom window, which I had, fortunately, left open. So this is how people begin to die, I thought, wondering if my father had left his heart on the same high rock in the forest behind our house. Was I dreaming myself closer to him?