by Michael Helm
“Wait. Stop,” I said, but he didn’t stop, made no gesture toward me, didn’t change his pace at all. He disappeared down a side street and was gone.
In my room I unrolled the thing, tapped out the dry, odourless tobacco, and saw hand-printed there in tiny, elegant, almost illegible English letters an email address, a name, “Burhan Rihawi,” and “Istanbul.” In ten minutes I’d composed on my phone a simple email in English, explaining who I was and asking to meet. I sent the note off into grey, unimaginable space.
—
In Istanbul I walked for hours. Things happened more than once, each moment contacting all others, happened then happened again when I reviewed my phone shots and footage. Crossing the Galata Bridge with its hundreds of fishermen lining both sides. Standing before mosques watching tourists and the devout take off their shoes. Blue Mosque, New Mosque, Süleymaniye. In the spice market, politely declining. Taking a ferry to the Asian side. Across a city four times the size of Rome the carpet salesmen kept pace with invitations and questions and all claimed to have brothers in Toronto or Vancouver. The street dogs were always in pairs. In the Hagia Sophia I dutifully lost my sense of perspective. Most beautiful, along one side where workers were sprucing up the hand-painted tiles and frescoes, a black scaffolding towered, one architecture imagining the other, or as if in a sultan’s dream of New York. I wrote the line in an email to Dominic and he replied, “That should be ‘emperor’s dream.’ The place was built during the Byzantine, not the caliphate.”
The fourth day I spent in Davide’s small apartment, still waiting for a reply from Burhan Rihawi. I hadn’t slept well or enough. Davide was out late, away early. The couch was too short. At dawn the amplified call to prayer seemed emitted from the kitchen. Obvious thoughts beset me about the relation between deprivations, mind control, faith. Each morning in the laneway below, a man towing a fruit cart called out. Later came another man with a cart of junk for sale. I peered down from my little balcony and in the shape of the cart, the laid-out positions of copper wire strands, a green toy handgun, a piece of what looked like an old radio, I saw again a version of the image that haunted Pierluigi and the Keyholers. An old woman in a headscarf appeared in the window across the laneway from me and lowered a small wicker basket four floors. The junkman took the alms and moved on.
An email arrived from Gail. She’d found copies of the information forms that my father had designed for the volunteers from among the refugees who were helping with the food deliveries. One had been filled out by a Burhan Rihawi. From the form and internet searches of place names I put together a profile. He was from the city of Al-Hasakah, where anti-Assad infighting had broken out along religious and ethnic lines. Sunnis, Kurds, jihadists, Assyrian Christians. In a nearby town eleven nuns had been kidnapped and disappeared, and although all sides protested, the nuns never turned up. Rihawi was Sunni and spoke Arabic, Turkish, and English. Given his date of entry to the camp, he was likely among a group who fled the city when the Kurdish military took over their neighbourhood. The story was of shelling and killing, no electricity, trouble finding food, and the men volunteering or getting forced into militias.
As I related the details to Durant he interrupted me.
“And you think it’s safe to meet this man based on an exchange with a stranger who wouldn’t tell you his name.”
“I don’t always trust my instincts, August, but I hear them out. They seem to know more than I do.”
“Well, instincts or intuitions must have a drive for self-preservation.”
What I didn’t tell him was that the instincts that had led me to fall in love with the Londoner were now telling me she was not who she’d seemed. Hours earlier, playing a grim hunch, I’d sent her a short, newsy email and received a message that the account had been deactivated. I searched around online and found just one mention of her, on an eco-activist site listing the names of “possible infiltrators” into activist-protest groups. I examined timelines. We’d met after I asked the Turkish police to send me the accident report for translation. It had seemed a chance meeting. Her leading me to Three Sheets was an expression of understanding, I had thought, as was our lovemaking and movie watching.
Believing against myself, I spent the afternoon fixed in small devastations. From the Latin dēvastātus, meaning “laid waste.” Vastus meaning “empty.”
—
At dark I was half-drunk in a sixth-storey bar with Davide and five of his friends. An open-air view to the south. Out on the Bosphorus a cruise ship completely out of scale with the city was attempting a three-point turn. I’d eaten too little. Three bottles of Efes returned my thoughts through warped glass. The slight rocking underfoot might have been an earthquake or the music from the club below us, or it might have been me as I thought of the passengers on the ship deck looking at the vast, breathing city, wondering if they’d missed anything in their three hours ashore.
I’d lost most of their names, Davide’s friends, but somehow I knew they were two Turks, an Italian, a Swede, and a Czech, the last three being women, the Swede being Davide’s girlfriend, the Turks being in Davide’s jazz band, me simply, barely, being. The Czech woman, Adéla, asked me what Canada was “like,” thereby opening that familiar twenty seconds during which foreigners are willing to contemplate my country. I said, “Canada’s a place where if you come home and find a bear in your living room, you’re not entirely surprised.” They turned out to be less interested in bears than bear spray and a minute later they were telling tear gas stories. Months ago they’d all been gassed together in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, and now there’d been more clashes, more water cannons. But the stories were about ghost gassings, the ones that caught you unaware, the sudden, faint irritation of the eyes and throat when you turned a corner or stepped out of a store.
“You think you’re imagining,” said the Swede. She was big-eyed, dark-haired. She looked Turkish, in fact. I might have had the nationalities wrong.
“Someone coughs, maybe you. Then others start coughing,” the drummer.
“There’s always someone who panics a little and runs away,” said Davide.
“Then the coughing gets worse. But meanwhile others aren’t coughing at all. They’re just buying things or having conversations, maybe looking at you funny,” said Adéla, who was looking at me funny, I thought.
They started to list places where they’d had this experience. Gas real or imagined outside the Pera Palace Hotel, up north outside Kanyon Mall, at the funicular station at the base of Tünel.
“Maybe the little burning in your throat is just a rumour,” said the second guitarist. He had rings on the fingers and thumb of his right hand. They were all nursing their drinks. They weren’t drinkers or couldn’t afford to be. “But the rumours are usually true. Like the rumours the police are out of control in some other street. They’re in squads, they’re gouging out eyes. Which is true. It happened.”
“Beating people to death or near death,” the Italian, which was true.
“Leaving them for dead on burning trash heaps,” the Swede, truly.
“They’re all the same,” said Davide, meaning the police.
“Well, no,” I said. It was an outrageous statement, this no, and demands were made that I explain myself. I said that we all knew of police corruption and brutality. Some or all of us had witnessed or experienced this violence. But there were also stories of justice-seeking police, heroism, protection of the innocent, and self-sacrifice. To say of any outwardly similar group of humans that they were all the same was to ignore nuance, shade, a more precise kind of perception. It was bluntspeak.
“But bluntspeak, as you call it, has force,” said the second guitarist. “The world will end in bluntspeak.”
“Yes. And because of it,” I said.
“There are bad cops and a few good cops, you’re saying,” said the Swede.
“Yes, but also the bad and the good are sometimes within the same cop, though maybe not in any kind of balance. It�
��s hard not to think of them all as one thing when they wear uniforms and erect barriers and act as one. Maybe I’m just remembering a poem by the Italian filmmaker Pasolini after riots in the late sixties in Rome when students fought the police. He sided with the students’ cause, but with the policemen in the fight. He saw the police as disadvantaged, uneducated farm boys, the true proletariat, fighting the children of the privileged.”
“Simplistic and condescending,” said Adéla, though she was smiling at me.
“Yes,” I said. “And no.” I don’t know why Pasolini kept coming back to mind. I didn’t like his poetry or his movies. I think I admired his conviction. Even his hair had conviction.
I asked them to forgive me. I said I’d come to Turkey in hopes of settling a personal concern, and my hopes seemed to be riding on the possibility that police in the south would prove honourable. To my disbelief, Davide then told everyone the story of my parents’ murder. It turned out he’d heard it from Durant, who’d asked Carlo if he could ask Davide to look out for me. I’d never heard the story, of course, in the sense of having it told to me rather than by me or in my head in fragments. It was hard to listen to. I didn’t correct the errors in his version. The other five muttered in sympathy. Adéla leaned over and gave me a hug. I felt a sudden love for them and felt at the same time how shallow it was, or maybe not shallow but tenuous. We were attached by chance, on one small node of connection. They reminded me of the crowd I’d known briefly with the Londoner. We were all roughly the same age, and though from different countries, all poor and hopeful, meeting as partial representations of ourselves, combining and recombining, looking for meaningful arrangements. The word I’d learned from Durant was coalescent.
It was the drummer, thin-faced, wearing the same dark porkpie hat I’d seen in the street video Davide had sent me, who produced the pill and laid it on the table.
“Welcome to One Two,” he said.
I regarded the thing, rectangular, bevelled, yellow, looked up at them all. They were looking at the pill, smiling. Davide explained it was a new street drug, origins unknown. It had appeared first in Amsterdam or Berlin and made its way south as far as Cairo. Now it sat between us, troubling no one, it seemed, this thing in plain sight.
“You’re in a dark time in your life,” said the drummer. “The pill will help you through.”
I didn’t know what it was or what it did or, really, who had given it to me. I picked it up and held it before my eyes, as if inspecting a strange insect, put it in my mouth, swallowed it. The others raised their bottles and glasses to me, and I to them.
—
My dreams that night almost killed me. When I woke they had balled into a headache so intense I couldn’t move. In the dream that stayed with me I was walking in a landscape dark with floating petals of black ash. I stepped a few feet in one direction, then changed course and set off in another, then another, unable to find open air or the promise of light. At some point a shape appeared and began to grow before me, a human shape, coming closer, a woman with a skin of dry mud. She took my hand and led me into a cave, along a firelit rock face. We came to drawings of horned animals I couldn’t name, and she held her palm before me, showed me the cake of ash in it, and then spit into her palm and began to rub out the drawings. I understood that one by one she was extinguishing not just the drawings but the animals themselves, not just the animals but the species. I squeezed her wrist but she was too strong, her hand could not be stopped, and as she moved along the wall the animals grew more and more familiar, they stood, their heads turned, they looked out at us with familiar eyes, our eyes, blinking. We ourselves were there on the wall, she and I, watching us disappear ourselves at the end of the world.
The headache had receded by the time I woke again. It was late morning, I knew, maybe noon. Somehow I’d slept through two calls to prayer.
—
The experience of lost time is a dissociative amnesia of the kind reported by alcoholics and alien abductees. I had no memory of having left the bar or walking to Davide’s place, no idea if I’d done so with him or alone. Had I seemed drunk to others? Balanced of mind and body? I might have done anything and not known it. Was some Istanbul cop right now stringing together security footage of me scaling a wall or smash-and-grabbing window sweets from a baklava shop?
Davide was out, presumably renovating his father’s building. He’d left a note apologizing for leaving just a single egg for breakfast. I was looking at the French coffee press or whatever it was called and then I was sitting in the sun at the little table on the balcony without any memory of having made the coffee. I looked at the floor, which I must have just crossed, but didn’t even have a sense memory of my bare feet on the wood. I grew very still, told myself not to move. Somehow I’d wandered into a Godard movie. The term jump cut seemed especially unpleasant there on the third-floor balcony. Through a narrow gap between buildings I looked off at the Golden Horn, minarets in the haze. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them Davide’s girlfriend was standing at the balcony door, smiling at me. She wore a red T-shirt and white pyjama bottoms. Terrifying. Was she real? Her smile fell and she said, “You look confused.”
“That pill I had last night.”
“Oh, the One Two hangover.” She came and sat at the table opposite me. Her hair was all over the place. “The first time it happened to me I thought I’d been trapped in a French New Wave film. I thought this must be how Jean Seberg felt in Breathless.”
“I just had the same thought. Godard.”
“She was killed, Jean Seberg. Did you know?”
“No. When does it go away, this feeling?”
“Half a day, a full one. Some say the pill works for days. Stories differ.”
“Did I leave with you and Davide last night?”
“You left alone. You were asleep on the couch when we came in. Should I make us some breakfast?”
“There’s only one egg. He left a note for you. What happened to Jean Seberg?”
“The FBI tapped her phones, followed her constantly. Then they planted a story in the press that her unborn child wasn’t fathered by her husband. She went into labour early and the child died. That was the beginning of the end of her. For years she was suicidal on the anniversary of the child’s death until finally, on one of those anniversaries, she overdosed herself to death.” Strange phrasing, I noted, then remembered she was Swedish. “All this because she supported the rights of natives and blacks.”
“Surveilled to death. Are you an actress?” She laughed but didn’t answer. “In my condition, is it safe to be moving around?”
“It’s safe, yes. You know what you’re doing as you do it, even if you don’t remember. Davide loves One Two. He’s involved, buyer and seller. He wants to be a player. Davide the drug lord. It’s stupid. It’s not him.”
“Maybe he wants to piss off his father. He seems to hate Carlo.”
“He doesn’t hate his father. He hates himself for loving him. It makes him bitter.”
Now that I looked at us, we were both fully dressed. Apparently I’d elided two conversations.
“I think I’ll go out for a while,” I said. “I’m sorry I don’t remember your name. Unless it’s Anna.”
“Yes! That’s the One Two. It makes you know more than you know.”
—
One Two had me in trouble. As soon as I left the apartment it seemed I was sitting on sloping grass in Gezi Park, looking out at Taksim. There was a rally of some sort, a lot of men, all men, carrying red flags with yellow sickles that looked very like the national flag, though with some slight differences I couldn’t locate. There were more than a hundred of these men, maybe more than two hundred, and they seemed angry. Many held up large poster images of someone I assumed was a political candidate or dead victim. Beyond them were riot police, and around the rally and the police walked passersby not paying them much attention.
I tried to hold a sense of continuous memory. An old man cros
sed the square, a face with the half-cloaked world in it. On his head he was balancing a tall stack of pretzels, simits, they’re called, and he walked past me up the slope and began trying to sell them to people seated at the patio tables outside a tea kiosk. A young waiter appeared and I expected him to shoo the guy away, but instead he beckoned him and bought one of the simits. Then he went into the kiosk and came out and handed him a cup of tea and a cigarette and the two of them stood there looking out at the park and the square, talking, and when the tea was gone the old man went on his way, paying nothing. Simple transaction, made in kindness and respect. I’d never seen anything more dignified.
A strong urge overcame me to record the scene in writing—when had I last had this urge, not to interpret but describe? It had been a few years, my early twenties, back when I thought I might someday be a poet—but I had nothing to write with. I climbed up the slope, took one of the patio seats, ordered tea, got a pen from the same young waiter whom I was about to sketch in words. From my back pocket I pulled out the folded boarding pass from my flight of four days ago and stared at the blank side.
After fifteen minutes I’d written one line. “The sun is warm.” I couldn’t get past it. I tried again, stayed longer, until clouds moved in and the line was no longer true. I was not a poet. I’d already reconciled myself to the fact, but not to those parts of myself, griefs and dreams, I seemed to need fixed extra-cranially, in something beyond myself. The poem I’d wanted to write was about more than the waiter and the old man, even as it would be, like all poems, at the same time, about nothing. It was about those two things. I needed very badly to write about everything and nothing.
As the waiter cleared away the teacup and left the check, I was breaking down, becoming a mess. In time I was aware of a hand on my shoulder. The waiter was trying to comfort me. He spoke English but I’d seen him with the old man, I knew him, and I knew he wouldn’t ask what was wrong. I was sure he understood that once you try to answer, once you truly commit to such a question, you’ll never reach the end of what needs saying.