Ramadan Ramsey

by Louis Edwards

  “You are such a little boy, Mehmet.” Ibrahim shook his head. “You need the bar mitzvah very bad. Now your brother, Ahmet—he is a man!”

  “Ahmet is crazy,” said Mehmet, walking away with the other boys trailing.

  “Why do you say that?” Ramadan asked.

  “Why? Because—because he wants to go to the war. I don’t like to talk about that. It makes me sad.”

  “Just like I say,” Ibrahim gloated. “Ahmet is a man! He ride the motorcycle. The girls like him. And now, now he go to war. Ahmet is a man, Mehmet. What do you want him to do? Stay home and be sad like you?”

  “He can stay home and be happy. Go to university. This makes him happy. And make his movies. This makes him happy, too.”

  Ibrahim pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and struck an intellectual pose. “Maybe he want to make a movie about the war. A big movie. You think too small, Mehmet.”

  “You don’t know what you talk about—”

  Ramadan interrupted the squabble. “What war?” He just wanted to hear Mehmet say what Emir had said yesterday—Suriye.

  But Mehmet didn’t answer. He paused and then, as if someone had fired a starter’s pistol, he took off in a full sprint. The street was sloping downward, so gravity helped him zip away. Ramadan and Ibrahim exchanged looks acknowledging that they were already beaten, but they bolted after Mehmet anyway, slapping at each other’s arms, trying to leverage the slightest of advantages.

  Old Istanbul was a blur. As they wound their way through narrow pathways and a dense mix of pedestrians, Ramadan heard snippets of at least five languages through the clatter and swoosh of their downhill plunge. With no idea where he was on a map, he looked up in casual wonder at this historic neighborhood. When he glanced back, an imposing brick medieval tower dominated the landscape. But the area was also marked with modernity. Blue-and-white Turkcell signs jutted from the façades of ancient buildings, reminders of the phone in his pocket, grounding him in his own century. With every stride, he submerged more deeply into the city, following Mehmet to wherever he was leading them.

  They turned one last corner and left all of the buildings at their backs. Ramadan felt a fresh, misty breeze assault his face, as Mehmet’s bobbing head came into view, silhouetted against the glimmering Bosphorus. Horns honked behind them as they made a final dash across the street to the water’s edge. A sturdy metal railing absorbed their momentum. Mehmet slammed into it first, followed in quick secession by Ibrahim and Ramadan. The air was so sea-drenched that it simultaneously restored Ramadan’s breath and quenched his thirst.

  “There,” Mehmet said through his own heavy panting, pointing straight ahead. Their eyes followed the line of his finger across the Bosphorus and beyond.

  “What?” Ramadan asked.

  “The war,” Mehmet replied. “Suriye.”

  Ibrahim repeated his mantra of envy and adoration. “Ahmet is a man.”

  Ramadan’s heart beat against the railing, and he brought his hand to his chest. It had occurred to him yesterday when he looked out his hotel room window that the thing he wanted most was close, but still beyond the Anatolian hills and their clusters of red rooftops, mosques, and greenery—beyond the beauty of Istanbul. But here on the ground, not ten stories up in a luxury hotel, his dreams seemed right over there, on the horizon.

  “Syria!” he called out, trying to get its attention, to let it know he was here, this close, trying to summon it out of its invisibility.

  * * *

  THEY CAUGHT THE tram at the Karaköy station. During the ride, Ramadan consolidated the contents of his shopping bags into his backpack, while sneaking peeks at Mehmet. They got off at Sultanahmet Square and walked toward the Blue Mosque.

  “I change the plan now,” Mehmet said. “This is the second quarter.” But he lacked the enthusiasm from earlier when he’d first envisioned their day as a game of hoops.

  Ibrahim looked at the mosque with skepticism. “Is okay for me to go inside?”

  “Now who is the boy, Ibrahim?” Mehmet asked. “You want to go to the Grand Bazaar instead?”

  “This is my only two choice?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Is good for Ramadan to see. You can wait here—if you are afraid.”

  Ramadan intervened. “Okay, okay. Let’s just all go in together.”

  He draped his arms over their shoulders and drew them close to him. Holding them all together, but keeping Mehmet and Ibrahim apart, felt like a truce. As they passed under one of the archways leading into the rear courtyard of the Blue Mosque, he projected his own composure onto to others: maybe Mehmet had let go of his anxiety about Ahmet, which had turned him moody; maybe Ibrahim had beaten back his bar mitzvah blues. They joined the entrance line and shuffled forward. Near the doorway, they removed their sneakers, and as they stepped inside, their feet cushioned by a vast red carpet, the voice of a man singing with a mellifluous urgency filled the mosque.

  “What’s that?” Ramadan asked.

  “It is noon,” Mehmet said. “I pray.”

  He left them and joined the worshipers separating from the tourists and gathering on the floor, all facing the same direction. Ramadan and Ibrahim watched Mehmet and the others perform prayerful rituals. Their dexterity—squatting, kneeling, bowing, rising—fascinated Ramadan. Prayer, as he knew it, was about language—speech and thought that, on a good day, inspired feeling. Well, for him, sort of. Sure, you kneeled sometimes, especially in supplication. Or stood up to profess faith during mass, though Mama Joon had always had to tap him on the head when it was time to rise. But here, the body—and its positioning and motions—seemed as important as the words. The glorification of God was a physical act. Praise required muscle. Which made Ramadan wonder: were these practitioners also gaining bodily strength from their spiritual conditioning? Like athletes, but holier? Then he looked at Mehmet out on the floor with the others, as supremely prostrate as anyone. Mehmet, whose nonreligious actions had held him rapt all morning. Was there something, then, about the body, the thing that moved and prayed, no matter what it was doing or saying, or where it was doing or saying it, that was itself divine? Everything Mehmet had done today had made Ramadan want to follow him, all the way here. Maybe God, as religion instructed, really was everywhere. In a pantomimed jump shot. In the leap onto a tram. In a race to the water’s edge. In a pouty confrontation with a friend. In this mosque. A breathy current blew by Ramadan’s ear and grazed his cheek and, alarmed, he looked up sheepishly at the monumental, glowing tiled dome, concerned that daring to think his friend holy had elicited a reprimand from God. But then he realized it wasn’t God—just Ibrahim, who was standing right next to him, entranced and huffing gently. Ramadan glanced at him, and saw that he was holding his hands at his chest, his fingers bending and arching with a balletic grace in concert with the congregants in the Blue Mosque, the place he had feared entering. It was as if Ibrahim were trying to master the choreography, memorize it, or reinvent it as his own.

  * * *

  AFTER THE NOON prayer, Mehmet seemed himself again—the team captain emerging from the locker room recharged, eager to play the second half. When they huddled outside, he said, “The third quarter!”

  He pointed across the square at the Byzantine cluster of gray stone and terra-cotta structures, embellished with silvery, mountainous domes, surrounded by a quartet of minarets.

  “Oh, no!” Ibrahim groaned.

  “What’s wrong?” Ramadan asked.

  “No more church today!” he said.

  “It is not a church,” Mehmet said. “It is a museum. Ayasofya!”

  “What is it?” Ramadan asked.

  “Oh, man,” Ibrahim said. He jerked the chain around Ramadan’s neck. “Jesus boy, how you no know Ayasofya?”

  “I don’t know,” Ramadan said, embarrassed.

  “I cannot say in English,” Ibrahim said.

  “That is why we go there,” Mehmet said. “For Ramadan to know.”

  Ramadan took out his pho
ne. “How do you spell it?”

  “Give me,” Mehmet said, taking the phone. He typed into a Google search box, and handed the phone back to Ramadan, who read the Wikipedia entry as they walked.

  Ibrahim whined, “What is happen to me? I go to temple, the Blue Mosque, and now this one, Ayasofya, all in one day.”

  Mehmet put his arm around Ibrahim. “Ibby, Allahu Akbar!”

  “That is what I mean! Every god want me today. My god, your god, now his god. I am just one boy. One almost man. Is too much god for me!”

  “It is okay,” said Mehmet, amused.

  “It is no okay,” Ibrahim said. “Is nokay! Ramadan, you have this word in English? ‘Nokay’?”

  “No, we don’t say ‘nokay,’ Ibrahim.”

  “Well, you should say it. You say, ‘It’s all good,’ and I say, ‘Nokay’!”

  Ramadan laughed as he read his phone, which had never felt more modern, informing him about the ancient structure up ahead. Half-listening, half-reading, he processed only a few highlights: Hagia Sophia—Mehmet had spelled it differently from the way it sounded—meant “Holy Wisdom”; for almost a millennium it had been a church, a Greek Orthodox basilica, and then a Roman Catholic cathedral; for nearly five hundred years after, during the Ottoman Empire, it was a mosque. He skimmed words like fires and riots and earthquakes. The surviving building, as Mehmet had said, was a museum.

  “Come, Ramadan!” Mehmet called to him. When he looked up, it took a few seconds to scan the scene—throngs of tourists, souvenir hawkers, a slow-moving police scooter. Mehmet and Ibrahim were on the right side of a dense part of the crowd, and he jogged over to them.

  “Okay,” Mehmet said. “My cousin Orhan is the guard over there. See?” At the main gate, Ramadan saw a tall, husky young man dressed in a dark blue uniform motioning for them to hurry. “Come, come, come.”

  Mehmet led them to Orhan. After the two of them whispered something to each other, Mehmet introduced everyone and explained the plan.

  “See the boy over there, the one coming now? We buy the special tickets from him, and then Orhan will bring us to the front of the line.”

  “Okay. How much?” Ramadan asked.

  “Twenty for all. Cheap, cheap. Thank you, Orhan!”

  Orhan shook Ramadan’s hand. “Allo, America,” he said. When the boy with the tickets arrived, he had a simple exchange with Orhan. Ramadan didn’t know if Mehmet meant American or Turkish currency, so he held up one of each. “Which one?”

  “These one!” the boy said, swiping the American twenty. Then he pulled three tickets out of his worn green canvas satchel, handed them to Ramadan, and rushed off. Ramadan gave Ibrahim and Mehmet their tickets, Orhan escorted them past about fifty tourists, and they went through the entrance with ease.

  Wikipedia had left Ramadan expecting more ruins than splendor, but inside the Hagia Sophia was so grand it seemed conscious of its own significance. Its saturation with history and religion gave the air a thickness, a humid wonder, that caught his “Ah!” in his throat. He raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross.

  Mehmet pulled his other arm. “Come, Ramadan. Let’s go see the beautiful from the top.”

  They started walking to the left side of the vast main nave and came to a wide walkway made of countless irregularly shaped pieces of stone, a mosaic cracked by both design and time. After they passed through a couple of doorways, Ramadan stopped. “Mehmet!”

  Mehmet turned and said, “I am here.”

  “I know. But where’s Ibrahim?”

  Mehmet arched his neck and looked behind Ramadan. Shrugging with resignation, he said, “I don’t know. Maybe he decided to wait outside. Too much god, he say. But Mr. Nokay is okay. We will find him later. Come on.”

  Ramadan adjusted his overstuffed backpack and trudged ahead. At first he felt as though he were regressing with each step. But after he reached Mehmet, he shifted gears—and they began walking up a cobblestone ramp, the dark, narrow, spiraling passage to the highest level of Hagia Sophia. It was a herky-jerky hike for Ramadan; a temporal glitch of a climb, wherein a five-year-old Ramadan (maybe in his dreams) was trotting up the ramps inside the Superdome, even as the twelve-year-old him was now ascending this surprisingly similar ramp. Dizzy with confusion, he stumbled on a gap between stones. He almost regained his balance, but the weight of his backpack toppled him over, and he landed in a heap.

  “Are you okay?” Mehmet rushed over and kneeled beside him.

  “Yes. My backpack is just kinda heavy. How much farther do we have to go?”

  “Not very far. I take the bag for you.”

  “No, no. I got it. Let’s just hurry up and get out of here.”

  Mehmet started walking again, and Ramadan stood and adjusted his backpack. Pressing his hand against the cool brick wall, he propelled himself into motion. As they wound their way up, the main light source in the dark space was sunshine angling in through small windows, and Ramadan noticed that Mehmet’s face was lit with a subtler blush of his gloom from earlier.

  “What’s wrong, Mehmet?”

  Mehmet kept climbing and tossed back, “My brother, he will leave us. When he goes, we will feel like Cleveland.”

  “Cleveland? What? Speak English!”

  “‘I am taking my talents to the South Beach.’ That’s what LeBron James say when he leave his home team, Cleveland. Remember, Ramadan?’”

  Ramadan laughed. “Oh, boy . . .”

  “Ahmet, he is take his talents to Suriye. He is the MVP of my family! You understand? If he leave, he might never come back. If he leave, we might always lose. This is why Baba do not want him to go. Me, too. We do not want to lose.”

  Ramadan groaned. Lugging his backpack was turning the climb up the ramp into a slog. Then, mocking his own feebleness, he had two visions: LeBron James soaring for a dunk; then, hoisting an NBA Championship trophy. “Mehmet, I’m going to talk to you in your language.”

  “Huh? You don’t speak Turkish.”

  “No—and it’s hard enough learning to speak Mehmet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you see? Ahmet has to go. He wants to play for something that matters. Something bigger, like Ibrahim said. He wants a chance to win the championship!”

  Mehmet stopped and turned around. “This is true, Ramadan. This is true.”

  “It is?” He had surprised himself. Then something else flickered at him in the darkness of Hagia Sophia.

  “Yes.”

  “It is,” Ramadan agreed, and the other obvious truth hit him like a spotlight now. “Mehmet . . .”

  “What?”

  “I want to play for the championship, too!”

  “What do you mean, Ramadan? You speak English!”

  “I want to go with Ahmet.”

  Staring at Ramadan, Mehmet kept blinking his eyes, as if he were trying to translate Ramadan’s words but was having no success. Then he turned and started walking up the ramp again.

  “Ibrahim was right—you need the Crazy shirt!” His voice echoed. “Ahmet will not take you with him. You are a boy! I don’t care how many smart things you say about Drake and the bar mitzvah. You cannot go to Suriye. You cannot go to the war. What do they teach you in America?”

  “To be free,” Ramadan said, following Mehmet closely. “That’s how I made it all the way here.”

  “Free, free, free! I think this is why Ahmet is going to fight.”

  “I don’t know how to fight.”

  “Why then you want to go to Suriye?”

  “To free me—it’s like I’m carrying this weight on my back.”

  “That is your backpack!”

  “No!” Ramadan said. “I’ve been carrying it my whole life. It’s bigger than a backpack.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s . . . a man.”

  “I no see him, this man on your back, Ramadan. No man is there! Maybe he is just in your head.”

  “Yes . . . I mean, no. He’s real. I t
hink. It’s my father, Mehmet.”

  “Your father is called Mehmet?”

  “No! Mustafa. He’s in Syria. Aleppo. Until I find him, I’ll never stop thinking about him.”

  “Like I say, he is in your head.”

  “You can’t understand. You have Mr. Emir.”

  “Okay, okay, so you think your baba is in Syria?”

  “I think so—and that means part of me is there, too.”

  There were only a few others climbing near them, a group of three up ahead and a couple several paces behind them. As they rounded the next dark turn, a tall, wide man taking up nearly half of the passageway appeared, heading down.

  Mehmet was looking back at Ramadan and saying, “Part of you. But I can see all of you, Ramadan. You are right here!” when the bulk of the descending man caught them by surprise. Ramadan grabbed Mehmet’s arm to save him from the full impact of the hulking presence, but the man’s mass and momentum slammed them against the wall, and they tumbled sideways. Ramadan hit the floor first, and Mehmet landed on top of him.

  “Ow!” Ramadan yelled.

  “Oh!” said Mehmet, face-to-face with Ramadan. “Sorry.”

  Ramadan heard the people who were behind them whisper something in a language he didn’t recognize as they stepped over them, continuing their ascent. His eyes widened as, over Mehmet’s shoulder, the silhouette of the man moved toward them. Stopping at their feet, the broad-chested shadow bent forward.

  “Whoa there, boys!”

  His American accent was itself accented by a humor-filled rumble worthy of his girth. Looking back, he called out, “Marge! You got us goin’ the wrong way. I just darn near killed these two lil fellas down here.”

  A woman’s voice lilted in their direction. “Oh, my lord . . . what now, Ray? You’re the one said, ‘Let’s go out the way we came in,’ when anybody with eyes could tell wasn’t nobody goin’ down this way. This is fer up. All I did was point to the doorway—and now it’s all my fault. Well, what isn’t? That’s what I wonder. What the heck isn’t?”

  An attractive, slender, fifty-something strawberry blond woman in a sky-blue magnolia-print sundress, Marge came around the corner and looked at Ramadan and Mehmet struggling to pull themselves up off the floor.