Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  We drive for less than fifteen minutes and then slow to a crawl. A year and a half ago, when Abed and I had made this trip, the land was rain-sodden. Now shimmers of heat desiccate the earth. Ahead of us dust stains the distant pavilions of Akçakale refugee camp, while an occasional cyclonic breeze scatters dirt skyward in tossed handfuls. We drive closer, coming to the road’s shoulder where I’d dropped Abu Hassar off before and to the ditch where I’d watched the old couple draw water. The camp’s residents shelter themselves inside their tents, avoiding the midday sun. The road is empty, an unwelcome premonition.

  We park in front of Abu Ali’s shop, which has no sign or adornment, just bare cement walls. There are a few half-empty inventory racks placed out front: potato chips, packaged cookies, dented boxes of candy bars whose brands I’ve never heard of. The shop’s door is shut. No one lingers outside. Then I tug the door handle and the room opens into a crowded cross-section of mustachioed, stubbled, paunchy or underfed Syrians. Cigarette smoke wafts up toward dueling air-conditioning units, which these men gather beneath like the chieftains of some lost tribal council. Their voices hum with a kind of throaty warble. Mixing with that noise, as well as with the stench of midday sweat, is the gentle tinkling of teacups on saucers.

  “Abu Ali?” I ask.

  My request is met with quiet consideration, as if I have just put a motion before this tribal council for review. Somebody lights a cigarette. Somebody else stubs one out. Matt gathers some bottled waters, some cakes, a few more chocolates. He sets them by a cash register on a chest-high counter. From behind the counter Abu Ali stands. His manicured hands sort through the few items Matt has picked. He plucks the cigarette from his lips so that he can mouth out some basic arithmetic. Nicotine stains line his teeth like tidal markers. When Matt brings over two extra bottles of water, Abu Ali runs his fingers through his thinning hair as he does the last of the math.

  “Do you remember me?” I ask before he announces how much we owe.

  I’ve interrupted his calculation, and he flicks his eyes up.

  “Abu Hassar,” I say, pressing the two edges of my index fingers together in a gesture that among Arabs means “friendship.” Something clicks, like Abu Ali has just found the equal sign he’s been searching for, and he begins to nod in rapid fire. He then ducks beneath the counter. Before I can explain that I am hoping to see his brother again, to reprise our conversation, to hear what’s become of him in this eventful year; before I can say any of that, he has shooed away two of the men who’d been sipping tea in his shop and he has installed both Matt and me in the center of the day’s gathering.

  At first Abu Ali speaks quickly, and in Arabic. Then I speak slowly, and in English. Then he speaks slowly and in Arabic. Then neither of us says anything. We can’t understand one another. Silently, we sip our tea.

  “Why don’t you call Abed?” Matt says.

  Thankfully, Abed picks up. I tell him that I’m with Abu Ali, that I’m hoping to track down Abu Hassar—will he explain this to Abu Ali? And would he be interested in sitting down with Abu Hassar again? I haven’t run any of this by Abed.

  “Okay,” he says. “Pass the phone to Abu Ali.”

  When Abu Ali hears Abed on the other end of the line, a smile tugs toward his ears and he reprises his rapid-fire nods. He says something to Abed, laughs, says something else, and then laughs again. Then his expression attunes toward listening. He leans forward, elbows on knees, pulls a cigarette from his shirt’s front pocket, lights it, and keeps listening. He exhales toward the ceiling, then answers Abed and hands me the phone.

  “He says no problem.”

  “So Abu Hassar is around to meet?” I ask Abed.

  “Not exactly.” Abed then explains that Abu Hassar had to leave his family in Akçakale to earn a living at a labor camp in Sakarya, an industrial city two hours outside of Istanbul. “Let’s discuss it when you get back,” he adds, and then hangs up.

  I pocket my phone. Matt comes to the counter where he’s left the snacks and water he’d gathered up. He takes money from his pocket to pay, offering it to Abu Ali, who refuses and who has now taken out his own cell phone, distractedly dialing a number. Matt insists, pulling a few bills from his wallet and leaving them out. Abu Ali also insists, stuffing them back into Matt’s pocket. Then, as he’s pushing us out of his store with our free snacks and water, he stops me at the door and holds up the phone. He points to the receiver. “Abu Hassar,” he says, and hands it to me, so I might speak with him.

  But I wave the phone away, not wanting to stumble along in half languages. “Please tell him that I’m coming,” I say. Vacantly, Abu Ali stares back, piecing together whatever I’ve told him.

  Then he resumes his nods.

  * * *

  Abed would’ve made the trip down to Tel Abyad that day, but he’s quit working with Matt. An opportunity has come his way, one he needs to take, at the expense of his job—though Matt is understanding—and possibly at the expense of his relationship with his Swiss fiancée, Laetitia.

  Soon after Abed first fled Syria for Beirut, he found his way from there to Egypt, where he and Laetitia had lived for nearly a year and where she had finally accepted his marriage proposal. Running short on money, Abed needed work; this is when Matt offered him a position at SREO in Gaziantep. Following a long separation from Abed, Laetitia has found a job at CARE International, a humanitarian aid organization with an office in Gaziantep. After having been forced apart for nearly a year while Laetitia remained in Egypt, this new job will allow them to again live with one another. At least that was the plan, until on a whim Abed applied for a scholarship to a prestigious master’s degree program at University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. He never thought he’d get in.

  Returning from Tel Abyad, I make dinner plans with Abed for the next night. He picks a Syrian restaurant in the posh Ibrahimli neighborhood near Matt’s offices. The restaurant is vast, built to accommodate the elaborate spring weddings of the local industrialists who own the textile factories that skirt the city. The night is hot, so we sit inside in the air-conditioning and sip soda while a teenage busboy in a kitsch sequined vest and skullcap lights paper lanterns outside in the garden. Abed stares at the base of his Coke bottle, turning it on the table between his index finger and thumb. A little ring of condensation eats away at the paper tablecloth. “You know I’d like to see Abu Hassar too,” Abed says. “It’s just, things are quite difficult right now.”

  A few weeks before, I’d foolishly asked Laetitia where she and Abed planned to honeymoon after their wedding, scheduled at the end of the summer in Switzerland. Laetitia, who is gentle and courteous, and who usually speaks just above a whisper, snapped, “There isn’t going to be a honeymoon, because Abed has chosen to leave me here so he can go to Scotland.”

  Abed continues to twirl his Coke bottle, his eyes averted from mine. “I talked with Abu Hassar a bit today,” he says. “Abu Ali gave me his number.”

  “And?” I ask.

  He glances up. “He wants to see us.”

  “And you?”

  “I want to see him,” says Abed.

  “So come to Istanbul.”

  Abed looks back at me. “The wedding’s going to be beautiful.”

  He talks about Lake Neuchâtel, an abbey on its banks, the Alps, but he stumbles over the descriptions, conjuring places he’s heard of but never seen. Then he becomes quiet. A long passage of silence hovers between us. To break it up, Abed flags down our waiter, ordering for both of us. He and the waiter then enter an extended conversation in Arabic, one that seems to range beyond our order, and one in which Abed seems far more at ease than when he is recounting the particulars of his master’s program in Scotland or his wedding in Switzerland.

  The waiter heads to the kitchen and Abed goes back to fiddling with his Coke bottle on the paper tablecloth. Then he looks up at me.

  “How far did you sa
y it was to Abu Hassar’s place in Sakarya?”

  “A two-hour drive,” I say.

  Abed cups his chin with his hand. “Two hours. He’s so close.”

  A THOUSAND DISCORDS

  SAKARYA

  The night before we drive to Sakarya, Abed sits on my living room sofa in Istanbul as I prepare my children for bed. I drape my daughter’s nightgown over her raised arms. I fasten my son’s diaper while he fusses at me. Then I shuttle them toward their bunk. They demand that our guest read them a story. Abed edges his way onto the bottom bunk. My children fall all over him and tug a book onto his lap, a compendium of fairy tales from around the world. My son’s favorite is “Baba Yaga,” a Slavic variant on “Hansel and Gretel,” where a witch waits for children who wander too far into dark woods.

  The next morning, Abed and I take to the road early, heading east. Our route to Sakarya skirts the Sea of Marmara, a shimmering table set with anchored freighters. We speed past them, winding nimbly up switchbacks, then across the mountain roads that abut the industrialized coast. Cranes dip over the harbors and smokestacks jut upward. But the operator cabins are empty and the furnaces aren’t lit; it is Sunday.

  Abed holds his phone to the passenger window. He snaps a picture of the vista below us. As he does, WhatsApp chirps with a new message. Abed begins to peck at his phone, composing a response. Then he glances up at me. “Abu Hassar’s anxious for his baklava. He’s asking when we’ll be there.”

  In a box on the seat behind us are the two dozen pieces Abed brought from Gaziantep. I hadn’t asked him to do this, and the fact that he brought them reminds me that Abed’s connection to Abu Hassar is as real as my own.

  I check my watch. “We should get in by eleven o’clock,” I say.

  Abed nods and resumes pecking out a response on his phone. When he finishes neither of us speak, as if saving ourselves for our lunch and the discussion to come. Then we turn inland. The Sea of Marmara disappears and the hills rise up behind us. The countryside becomes lush, overgrown with a canopy of shaded trees that we pass beneath, heading deeper into dark woods.

  * * *

  We park just opposite the Meydan, which is the main square in Sakarya. The streets are lined with retail outlets I’ve never heard of: clothing and electronics stores, cheap boutiques. All are shuttered. Teenage boys sweep the sidewalks in front of a few cafés while tweedy old men with pageboy hats wander inside, their wizened fingers clutching folded newspapers and backgammon boards. The police are out in force too, caps pulled low, one hand resting on the grip of their submachine guns and the other holding Styrofoam cups of morning coffee. Before I can ask Abed what he makes of the police, the two of us notice a band of migrant workers, apparently Arabs, assembling a steel reviewing stand in front of an Atatürk statue. It seems there will be a parade. I park our rental car along the main road leading into the Meydan. While I pay the meter and struggle to read the parking notifications, Abed remains in the front seat, texting with Abu Hassar. I wonder why he doesn’t just phone him, but then I remember how after a long separation from my family I never want to sully the moment of reunion by calling just beforehand.

  Then Abed springs from his seat. “Merhaba!”

  I’m bent over, feeding change into the meter, but straighten up at the sound of his voice. Abed slams the car door shut. A man in a neatly pressed short-sleeve shirt with khakis and Nike trainers wanders toward us. His hair is carefully combed, split neatly in a part. An ear-to-ear grin spreads across his face: it is Abu Hassar.

  “Merhaba!” he calls back to Abed, laughing as he speaks a Turkish hello to his Syrian friend. Gone are his as-salaam alaikum’s from our last meeting. When the two of them embrace, I am within arm’s length, and Abu Hassar clutches after me with the same affection a drowning man might show to a limb of passing driftwood. As we exchange our hellos, I wonder whether Abu Hassar’s secular greeting and reformed appearance indicate a change of heart or a change in circumstances as he ekes out a wage working among the Turks.

  I tell Abu Hassar that he looks good. His cheeks flush and he self-consciously hangs his head toward his shoes.

  “Shukran,” he says.

  The three of us amble slowly through the Meydan, past the Turkish police with their coffees and submachine guns, past the closed stores, and past the Atatürk statue with the grandstand assembled in front.

  “What’s going on here?” Abed asks Abu Hassar, pointing to the gathering.

  “A parade,” he answers, “for soldiers leaving to fight the Kurds.”

  Just a month before, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, won an unprecedented 13.1 percent of the vote in national elections. This victory made it impossible for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to form a government, so he devised a strategy to undermine the HDP. After scheduling a snap reelection for November, five months after the original election, President Erdoğan then breaks a two-year-old ceasefire with Kurdish separatists in both southeastern Turkey and across the border in northern Iraq, bombing positions in the Qandil Mountains where Matt and I had driven with Dara just a few months before and where the Kurds are fighting the Islamic State. Erdoğan imagines everyday Turks will be less sympathetic to a pro-Kurdish party if Kurdish separatists are combatting the Turkish state.

  “I should march in the parade,” Abu Hassar says.

  “Why would you do that?” I ask.

  “It’d be the easiest way for me to go back to Iraq to fight the Kurds.”

  Neither Abed nor I say anything. It takes a moment for us to parse Abu Hassar’s suggestion, in which the Kurds are a common adversary to both the Turks and the Islamic State. In the past three years, a two-sided war—rebels versus the regime—has become so multidimensional that a measure of logic exists in Abu Hassar’s proposal. Before either of us can reply, he leans toward me. “What’s that?”

  Beneath my arm, I’d been carrying the box of baklava.

  He forgets about fighting and we install ourselves at a sidewalk café along the Meydan.

  * * *

  The stray cats have two speeds: they either shuttle under the café tables, scrambling after food scraps, or they slowly wend through the shade cast by the Meydan’s heavy-limbed elms. Suited old men fill the tables around ours. They nose at their newspapers and smoke with abandon, the clouds of tobacco lifting behind the pages. When a cat comes too near them, they kick it. The resultant hiss mixes with the rhythmic clacking of backgammon counters. Rising just above the backgammon, the voices of the old Turks can be heard arguing. It is an absentminded type of arguing, one that hardly ever causes them to look up from their game or their papers, but with an election coming up I can’t help but imagine the subject is politics.

  Our waitress sets down three cups of tea. Steam tumbles off the top of the curving, oblong glasses. I set out the baklava, offering it to Abu Hassar, who takes the box from me and insists that Abed have the first piece, which he does. Then an awkwardness arises. None of us knows how to pick up where we left off nearly two years ago.

  I take a piece of baklava.

  “You look different,” I say to Abu Hassar, and then fill my mouth.

  Abu Hassar has also just had a piece, and for a moment we chew silently. Then he swallows and drinks some tea. “Much has happened since I saw you last. This time has passed like prison time. When Assad arrested me, I learned in three years what most learn in a hundred and fifty.”

  “So what have you learned?” I ask.

  Abu Hassar turns to Abed, speaking as if I’ve left the room. “He thinks asking questions is the same as listening.” Then Abu Hassar turns back toward me. “It’s not what I have learned but what you have.” His phone begins to ring. Before he answers it, he leans across the table and clasps my arm in sympathy, as if consoling a vanquished adversary. I light a cigarette in front of him, which I’ve never done before, not wanting to offend this pious Muslim. He shake
s his head at me. Leaning back in his seat, he takes his call while I sit across from him saying nothing, just smoking.

  Abu Hassar plants his elbows on the table, clutching his phone to his ear. With his chin hung toward his chest, he listens nervously to whatever he’s being told. Then he flings his head back. An enormous smile pinches at his temples. I think I can see tears beginning to form. Then he turns away. Overcome by this rush of joy, he covers his eyes with his free hand. He gathers himself enough to speak between small bursts of laughter that threaten to descend into sobs.

  Abed whispers, “His brother and sister have just arrived safely in Greece.”

  Abu Hassar quickly finishes his call. He sets his phone on the table between us and then pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “Excuse me,” he says. “I have one more call to make.” And he begins to dial. While he waits for the call to connect, his countenance sets. I recognize this look, the resolve and the skepticism. I remember it from our first meeting in Akçakale. Someone answers the phone, but Abu Hassar doesn’t offer a salaam alaikum or even a merhaba. He speaks to whomever is on the other end crisply. Though I don’t understand what’s being said, it is clear orders are being given. Abu Hassar’s warmth from a moment before is gone.

  Once again, Abed explains in a whisper: “That’s the smuggler. He has to arrange for the other half of his siblings’ payment.”

  The two of us remain respectfully quiet while Abu Hassar negotiates this last part of a deal, which I can only imagine has been some time in the making. He holds out his hand, searching for a pen. I pass him the one I keep in my notebook, and he takes it without a smile or a thank-you. He scribbles out a couple of notes on his pad. Then he gives a couple more orders. The call is over and he hands me back my pen. If Abu Hassar is curt with the smuggler, it’s to be understood. Just two days ago the image of Aylan Kurdi, a drowned three-year-old Syrian whose family was betrayed by their smuggler, appeared on the front page and home page of countless news organizations.