Days of Moonlight

by Loren Edizel

  She was about to press the pedal and make noise. She removed the pins from her mouth, sticking them on the pin cushion I handed her and scowled. “Happy?”

  Our eyes met and we smiled.

  “Still waiting for your answers.”

  “It was steamy…. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe the drink… I’m not used to it.”

  She hit the pedal. I sat there holding the fabric while she manoeuvred the cloth this way and that for a while.

  “Were you wearing your usual uniform when you seduced him?” That sideways smile.

  “Dress, high-heeled shoes, and makeup. You’d have been impressed. I had my hair done too. Also the infernal corset you made me buy years ago. Remember?”

  “So who took that thing off? Did he struggle?” she giggled.

  “No, I hid in the washroom. I was worried he’d fall asleep by the time I got rid of it. Then, I had to suck my tummy in the whole time so he wouldn’t notice the difference. I stopped breathing, basically. Made him turn off all the lights.” I lied about the corset, and everything else to amuse her.

  She continued sewing for a while silently. Then she took her foot off the pedal and looked at me. “Would you have been happy with him, if things had turned out differently?”

  “How could I know? It was one night.”

  “Do you pine for him at all?”

  I shrugged. I told myself, the last time you said something about him, she left you. Now shut up.

  “Not really. But I do miss You… From the moment I open my eyes until I fall asleep. Even, while you’re still here. Soon you’ll disappear into another life, and I’ll go from room to room, remembering you in this chair, smelling your scent on the sheets, your profile as you glanced out the window, the tinkle of your pee, the shape of your toes. There so much of you to remember.”

  She did not ask if I enjoyed sex with Hans. Nor did she say anything about how awfully I missed her. My unreciprocated declaration was followed by the dull rhythm of the sewing machine. I continued to help her with the fabric, holding it up so she could manoeuvre. She wasn’t going to volunteer any information about her life with Ekrem. We were going to spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the valance.

  “What about you?” I blurted. “How is sex with Ekrem?”

  She lifted her foot from the pedal, stopped moving, her eyes still on the fabric. “You know what? I’m tired. Let’s take a break from working. I’ll make tea.”

  And that was that. We had tea. She told me some funny stories about her daughter. I pretended to be amused, even though I was preoccupied by my unanswered question. She never even got close to answering it the entire afternoon. I felt my ears growing hot with unspoken resentment. Finally, as we sat back to finish the sewing project that continued to nauseate me, she looked into my eyes before hitting the pedal. It was a gaze that felt like cool spring water, clean and unalloyed. “I will never speak about him to you. Just like I never speak of you with him. If you want to hear him somehow diminished in my regard now that I am with you, I might as well leave now. I’m not saying this to hurt your feelings; I just want you to know my life with him matters and it has nothing to do with you. I’m sorry I left so abruptly years ago. It was in part a fit of jealousy, I admit. I’m ashamed I seduced Aydın. I can’t say I was truly interested in him. I did it because I could. I didn’t contact you all those years because of shame. But I also have to tell you I wanted all that I have now, the child.… And I loved you more, so much more than you loved me. I did. And so, now that I’ve said all this, tell me why it is so very important for you to know about sex with Ekrem. How is any possible answer going to make things better for you? If I say ‘it’s good!’ will you be happy? Or if I say ‘not’ will you feel sorry for me?”

  She looked at the sewing machine and waited a few seconds. Then she hit the pedal focusing on the curves of the valance.

  Notebook I. The Journal

  A NEW NOTEBOOK TODAY. Bought it on my way back from visiting Aydın. I finished the last one after my return from Germany. Twenty years. One moment the smell of jasmine from the neighbour’s yard makes you dream of love. The next, you’re a sixty-year-old pensioner visiting the dentist too often and having teeth drilled and pulled and replaced by partial dentures that pinch. It’s a way to fill the days I suppose. My dentist can hardly walk. He is at least eighty. His pink, shrivelled fingertips smell like plaster. Whenever I visit him, I pass by Aydın’s apartment where he lives with a full-time nurse. His wife left him a few years ago. I take the elevator to the third floor. It’s a tiny, noisy elevator and the lights are always blinking. I’ve told the janitor on three occasions. He nods sideways and smiles, “sure, Abla,26 I’ll do it.” I come back weeks later and it’s still blinking. “Not my fault, Abla,” he protests, his oblong head bent to one side and still smiling. “The bulbs don’t last long. I keep changing them all the time. The apartment manager thinks I’m stealing them.”

  Visiting Aydın is a sad affair. He doesn’t remember me most of the time. At every visit I inspect the apartment, to make sure all is in order and nothing is missing. The cleaning lady goes on Thursdays and I tend to go on a Friday, to make sure she’s done a good job. I run my finger on the furniture and check inside the fridge to see if the live-in nurse is stacking the appropriate kind of food, and the amounts required. Once I found a large jar of Nutella. “What is this for?” I questioned ready to pounce on her competency. She replied it was a gift from his Hanım. She visits once a month or so, and brings him a jar. His wife says he likes it. “But he has diabetes,” I protest. “You know this.” She shrugs. His wife seems to think it doesn’t matter at this point.

  “Throw it out,” I order. She seems reluctant to touch it, as if it were some relic. I grab the jar and chuck it in the trash can; we both hear it hit the plastic bottom and bounce a little. Her eye is still on the swinging cover. “Do you like it, too?” I ask her. She blushes and moves her head sideways. “Well, if you’ll be eating it, I don’t mind.” I bend to fish it out of the can, and since the plastic bag in the can was completely empty, I tell her it is clean still, she can put it back in the fridge. She was keeping it there, she explained after we safely restored it to its rightful place, because it’s less tempting when it’s cold and hard. We talk about how difficult it is to keep things from entering our mouths; my tongue is a magnet she laughs, her massive belly going up and down, sweets practically fly straight into my mouth and then... She slaps her large thighs and sighs, her puppy eyes seeking complicity in mine. For me, it is baklava, I nod. If I buy a box, I’ll finish the whole thing in one day. We continue to commiserate about our gargantuan appetites as we enter the room where Aydın is sitting on a burgundy armchair with faded armrests and an assortment of cushions and pillows sticking out from behind his bony frame. “Go for a walk,” I tell the nurse, “get some fresh air. I’ll be here a while.”

  Every time I visit him, I approach his armchair with a lump at the base of my throat knowing he will not recognize or remember me. Sitting across from his shrunken frame, the crinkly skin barely covering large blue veins snaking up and down his limbs, the ever growing liver spots on his balding head, the sagging earlobes with curly white hair flourishing outwards, I recognize all of this as an aged version of the man I once loved above all. I accept this ruined husk for the wealth of memories it is still able to evoke in me. The lump comes from the unrecognizing, blank stare that greets me as I sit on the wooden chair across from him. The yellowed eyes move up and down my face and limbs, thinking me a stranger. He may say, “Are you replacing the other fatty?” Or “Why can’t I get a young nurse for a change?”

  He once said, “Come near me!” I approached him, hopeful he may have remembered something. He grabbed my breast and squeezed it with a demented grin and exclaimed a profanity I had never heard him utter before. “Show them to me. I’m paying you. I want to see them.” He kept clawing at my blouse. Yo
u’d think such desires would have been erased from his mind along with everything else.

  “Stop it. This is not done. Stop right now!” I scolded, holding his wrists, and he relented. His bent arthritic fingers returned to his lap and curled like sleeping cats. He started whimpering. “I’ll be good if you show them to me.”

  Today was an excellent day. I entered the room and sat on the chair expecting he would either ignore me and keep staring out the window or call me weird names. I forced a bright smile, “Good afternoon Patron! How are you doing today?” I don’t know why I said Patron instead of Aydın this time. He looked up and I saw the glint of recognition.

  “Giritli!” he exclaimed. After some hesitation, as if realizing something was off in the current circumstance he continued, “You still work for me?”

  I wanted to clap my hands and hug him for joy. “No, Patron. We’re both retired.”

  “We’re old.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “We had fun in Düsseldorf….”

  “You remember it?” He had miraculously recovered, I imagined.

  “First you told me you were a dyke. Then we made love. On the floor. Not easy to forget,” he smiled, showing greyish yellow teeth with gaps. After a moment, “After that, you rejected me.”

  “You were married, Patron.”

  “Am I still?”

  “She visits you.”

  He looked out the window. “She has all my money, doesn’t she?” After a pause he looked back at me. “I should have divorced. Did you wish for it?”

  “I didn’t think about it.”

  “I did. I wished for it. A lot of years. Too many. She would have made my life hell. Already she was…. What happened to … the woman with the black hair.”

  “Nuray? May she rest in peace, she died a while back in Canada. Her daughter Mehtap lives there.”

  “Another Mehtap….”

  “Yes.”

  “I slept with Nuray, too.” He grinned, offering a glimpse of the old Aydın, the flirtatious cad.

  “Patron, you used to sleep with anything in a skirt.…”

  “You wore pants,” he quipped.

  I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.

  “This is a wonderful day.” I leaned over and patted his hands.

  “Do visit me often, won’t you?” he smiled. “Do you remember the fig tree we secretly climbed in Hasan Bey’s garden when we were children? You got horrible diarrhea from eating too many figs.”

  From there on, confusion set in. He thought I was his cousin. I listened to his childhood stories mixed up with other remembrances tumbling out in anachronistic jumbles.

  “Do you want tea or a fruit?” I asked, tired of sitting on the wooden chair.

  “Is there scotch? Fatty hides it somewhere. Maybe in her room.…”

  “Wait here. I’ll look for it.” I rose and walked to the dining room. All the buffet doors were locked. I found the keys in a small decorative vase. I returned with two glasses of scotch on the rocks, the way he liked it.

  We clinked.

  “Şerefe!” he said.

  Here we drink to honour while elsewhere in the world they drink to health, cheers and so on. “To honour!” I repeated after him. “I wish you good health and memory.” I added, to deflect the absurdity of the circumstance. What’s honourable about any of this?

  He gulped the whole thing down in one shot and started sucking on the ice cubes, absent-mindedly, filling his cheeks with them, like hard candy.

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Next week Friday, same time.”

  He asked me if I remembered his father. I told him I’d never met his parents. They had already passed when he hired me. “He used to take me fishing…” he said and his voice trailed off. He became thoughtful.

  “So, when are you coming back, then?”

  “Next week Friday, same time.”

  He nodded and turned his head to look out the window. I heard the key turn in the lock and the nurse walked in, holding plastic bags. “I did a little grocery shopping while I was out. Did he behave?”

  I rose and put on my jacket.

  “Are you coming back soon?”

  “Next week Friday, same time. When I come next week, I’ll give you a haircut and a good shave.”

  “Will you bring me chocolates?”

  “Sure.”

  “Who’ll take care of me now?” He sounded alarmed.

  The nurse walked in, “I’m here Aydın Bey. I’ll take care of you.”

  “My Fatty,” he smiled and pointed at her. She shook her head and disappeared in the kitchen.

  I used to have a good cry after every visit. Nowadays, I come back to my house dry-eyed, make some tea and sit in the cumba sipping it, feeling depleted. It isn’t only the absence of the man as I knew him all those years that I grieve, but the erosion of our complicity, of my sense of self from his vantage point. So much of me was invested in him. I used to not give in to his entreaties after Düsseldorf so as not to feel reduced the moment his attention inevitably strayed. Now we’re wrapped in shrouds of forgetting. He can’t see me for who I am, and he is not there for me to recognize. I feel lonelier than when I used to wrap presents for his wife and mistress in the office next to his. Every day, we awaken to the future within us, impatient as children, reluctant as pensioners. Who wants to face illness and forgetting?

  Have I lived as I should have? This question haunts me. Have I taken all my chances, have I given life its due? How would I know if I’d done that?

  Those among my friends who are religious find solace in fasting and praying. I’m unable to envy them. Faith is not something that comes with dedicated practice. I’ve tried to look deep into my childhood to find that attachment to God and the absolute belief associated with innocence, thinking perhaps it unravelled with time and I could get it back. Being assured of his existence by trustworthy adults, I used to picture a fearsome and bulging eye in the sky that saw all you did- when you went peepee, it saw you, when you stuck your finger in your nose, it did too—from the most trivial to your most intimate actions and thoughts, it was your unblinking witness, covering your intentions with a sense of shame and invasion. You could never see it, but all it ever did, or wanted to do, was watch you and your nose-picking, and your little lies and your gluttony. All this was made worse by the knowledge that God was a He, and not a She. No other He would see your privates, but this He did, like the ultimate peeping Tom. I suffered his existence, a feeling slightly moderated by my grandmother’s belief in the Virgin Mary, whom I imagined in her floating robes and sheets blocking His view, my chronic constipation somewhat relieved by this vision.

  I did pray to him, whenever I needed or wanted something, before tests and for illnesses to pass and for my grandmother not to die. I prayed fervently. It was all about helplessness, I suppose. Being kept under tight surveillance on the one hand, and at the mercy of wish-granting on the other. God had grander designs and couldn’t bother with little old me every five minutes, I was told, whenever the prayers didn’t work. What grander designs? Watching wars unfold? Inciting people to kill in his name? The crippled or disfigured children I saw in the street, why did they deserve to inhabit such uncomfortable bodies, why did I deserve mine? Why did the creator of the universe and perfection personified see it fit to give me health and shelter and love, and took all of that away from others? Those were the wrong questions, apparently. My mind never found its way to the right ones, and I gave up trying. This is my secret. Even if on Judgement Day God in his magnificence will not judge you for the limits of your faith—which He is also responsible for, having put them there—people will. They will send you to hell. They are all waiting around the corner with stones in their hands, and matches, and froth on the sides of their lips, watching closely who is doing what, taking note and w
aiting for a sign to prove themselves God’s fervent and righteous goons.

  ANOTHER MORNING BY THE LARGE WINDOW of the cumba. Sunny with birds. Invisible sea and tea. Too many apartment buildings blocking the view. Some developer is patiently waiting in his office for me to die so they can tear this last house down, then build some condo monstrosity that will obstruct everyone else’s view. Someone, someday, in this very spot, twenty floors up in the air will see the Bay of Izmir, with its boats and creamy waves soldiering, indomitable, toward the shore to finally crash and disintegrate.

  Nuray’s ashes are afloat in the bay. I will ask mine to be scattered in the same spot. Not that her dust is waiting for me. Does it matter? I mean, asking that my ashes be scattered here there, or this or that to be done, all this symbolic preparation of our afterlife, who is it for really? Was Nuray’s wish a metaphor for her hidden grief of displacement? Or a figurative return to me, for having left me twice. A last wish made of guilt and forgiveness. Who knows? All posthumous gestures are absurd. They’re meant for others to decode. Her dust, meanwhile, may have landed in someone’s gourmet plate, derivatively, having fed a grilled sea bass in its better days.

  Ekrem asked me if I wanted to partake in the ceremony, in a letter he sent me before returning to Izmir with Mehtap and Nuray’s ashes. I never responded. I pretended not to have received it, arranging to be away in Bodrum visiting cousins when they arrived. I was out of reach. I couldn’t face watching all that grey flesh-and-bone dust spreading into the water, sucked into liquid darkness like stars in a black hole, sinking like ordinary dirt. My beloved with the curly black neigh, and the soft black lashes and the equestrian ankles. I did not want to shed tears and sobs for lost time, for missed years, for my heart’s deepest longing, under false pretences. My beloved. In our separate houses on distant continents, we were each other’s moonlight. I imagined her stepping out on her brick balcony in Montreal on a starry night to see the same ivory light shining upon her. And here, sitting in my cumba, gazing at the dark universe above, or strolling by the sea, she illuminated my utter solitude. We always had that. I could not be around those who loved her and were loved by her, and had stood in the way of my life’s happiness. In the end, we had all lost her. It was selfish of me. But I could not face it then.