Lion Eyes

by Claire Berlinski

  “You run? Where do you go? The traffic here’s insane.”

  “Yeah, no joke. We just had to repatriate the body of this poor guy from Baton Rouge who got whacked by a taxi.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes! Cab hit him on the sidewalk.” She shook her head. “Worst thing was he’d been with his girlfriend that night, and, you know, he shouldn’t have had a girlfriend. So he didn’t have his wedding ring on. We found it at his hotel when we went to collect his personal effects. We figured we better stuff it on his finger before we packed him up, but by then he’s all bloated, and his finger’s about ten times the size of the ring. Oh, man, it was horrible—we had to use pliers.”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  “That’s not the worst of it.” She lowered her voice. “I was pulling, and the other guy was pushing, and . . . whoa, Pop goes the weasel! His whole finger comes right off. Had to tell his wife it got sliced off by flying glass.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Yep! What I do for my country. Anyway, so be real careful where you run.” She looked at me. “Say, you don’t know the city real well, huh?”

  • • •

  I checked my e-mail when I returned to Dr. Mostarshed’s apartment.

  From: Arsalan arsalan@hotmail.com

  Date: November 9, 2003 03:16 PM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: Burnt City

  Alas, Claire, my colleagues have received urgent reports of looting at the Burnt City. We have convened an emergency meeting by telephone, and concluded that a delegation, of which I shall be the ambassador, must go directly to the city and tour the surrounding villages. There we will meet local authorities and explain the significance of the city’s treasures. We will show them what we do and teach them how we work, telling them in simple language that these beautiful things belong to their families and their ancestors. We will explain to them that these artifacts are their heritage and that honorable men do not sell their heritage. We will also explain that if we put these treasures in a museum, the tourists will come and bring them more money than they would make by selling them just once. We are hopeful this will diminish the looting. It is a very urgent matter.

  Regrettably, I do not believe there will be access to the Internet in such villages, so for the moment, I shall not be able to look after your well-being with the care I should like. I have asked Dr. Mostarshed, however, to call frequently to make sure you have everything you might need.

  I am quite concerned about Wollef in my absence. The maid has promised to feed him, but I am not sure she understands how much supervision the animal truly requires. I found him caught by his toenails in the curtain the other day. He would have been there all day if I hadn’t freed him.

  Until the day I return, dear Claire,

  Everyone has someone, a friend to love,

  And work, and skill to do it. All I have

  Is a fantasy lover who hides

  For safety in the dark of my heart’s cave—

  I shall be thinking of you.

  Arsalan

  • • •

  The next morning was foggy and cool. Sally took me on a path where you could run on the sea wall, past fishermen bringing in the morning catch and the ruined hulks of old fishing boats listing in the water. As we ran we compared notes about our running injuries. We both suffered from runner’s knee. She’d had a stress fracture over the summer and was only just now recovering. We ran about five miles, watching the city come to life as the sun struggled up the horizon. Afterwards, we were starving. She invited me back to her place for brunch: “My husband’s making eggs Benedict and the best banana nut muffins in the world.”

  “That sounds great. I’ve just had it with kebabs.”

  “Istanbul will do that for ya!” She called her husband on her cell phone and told him to make a double batch.

  She told me as we walked up the hill that her husband was from Wisconsin too—they had been college sweethearts. She had grown up on a dairy farm and looked it: you could tell at a glance that her childhood had involved wholesome fresh air, crisp red apples, and cheddar cheese. Sally was not so much fat as large—big hands, big feet, big head, big everything. Her upturned Episcopalian nose was splashed with freckles; her strawberry blond hair was cut in a sensible chin-length bob; and she had the kind of ruddy skin and huge, calcium-nourished teeth that say American as clearly as a blue passport with an eagle on it. When she smiled, her teeth looked as big as packs of cards.

  She and her husband had been political science majors at the University of Wisconsin. They had both taken the Foreign Service exam, but only Sally had passed. “I nearly didn’t take the job,” she told me as we took the elevator up to their apartment, “because I didn’t think Dave would be able to stand it, being just a househusband, but he insisted I take it—he said if I didn’t I’d never stop wondering what I missed, and it would give him an excuse to try writing the novel. He’d always wanted to do that.”

  The slight, mild-mannered man who opened the door to Sally’s apartment wore a tie-dyed Cherry Garcia apron over his flannel shirt. His nose and John Lennon eyeglasses were dusted with flour, and his slightly graying hair was pulled into a ponytail. “Hey, gals,” he said after introducing himself as Sally’s husband. “Come here and look what I got down at the flower bazaar!” We followed him into the kitchen. He showed us a clear Pyrex bowl filled with water and leaves. “Aren’t they cute? Hey, Claire, do you want a celery-ginger picker-upper? I just juiced it.”

  I took a closer look at the bowl. They weren’t leaves. They had flippers. While pouring the picker-upper, Dave told us he’d gone down to the flower bazaar near the New Mosque to pick up some bug spray for his tomato plant. While he was there, he’d passed a pet stall with a tank full of squirming miniature turtles, each the size of a silver dollar. He was so enchanted by their cuteness that on an impulse he bought a pair as a surprise for Sally.

  I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. This was something I had learned at the Department of Agriculture: miniature turtles don’t exist. Those were baby turtles. They would grow to be the size of large dinner plates and live to the age of seventy-five.

  Sally was looking at the Pyrex bowl with a puzzled expression.

  “Dinner’s almost ready!” Dave said, still staring at the turtles, who were scrabbling frantically at the sides of the bowl. “Whoa, fellas! Just look at you go!”

  • • •

  From: Samantha Allen allens@aol.com

  Date: November 10, 2003 01:15 AM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject:Weekend with Lynne

  Dear Claire,

  Meeting Lynne was like coming home. It was like stepping into a warm bath on a cold day. There was no awkwardness. I had expected it to be strange at first, but from the moment I saw her I felt at ease. We began talking like old friends, and we never stopped, not for two weeks.

  I’d booked a room at a hotel, but over our first lunch, she asked me to stay in her cabin—not to sleep in her bed, just on the couch, she said. Later that evening, I told her I wanted to wait. I lied. I said I wasn’t into casual bed-hopping. I told her I needed to know a woman deeply before I could make love to her. She told me no man had ever said that to her before.

  We took her dogs for walks on the beach. I helped her renovate her terrace. We bought lumber together. I stained the wood. I built pedestals for her flowerpots, so she could see them from her writing desk.

  I wasn’t playing a role at all. I was completely myself, except that I tried to keep my voice extra-low, and I had to resist her, physically. It killed me. I massaged her shoulders. I kissed her fingers and the back of her neck. I smelled her skin. But when she put her hand on my cheek, all I could think was that she would notice that the stubble didn’t feel the way it should. When she took my hand, I thought she might be noticing that my wrists are too thin. I kept thinking, Now, now’s the moment, tell her. But I di
dn’t have the nerve.

  There’s something about her, Claire. She’s fragile. Like a flower. She’s been married; I didn’t know that. Her husband was some jerkoff anthropologist. Once she caught him with one of his students in his office. He told her he was reenacting tribal mating rituals. It kills me that someone could have hurt her that way.

  I tried a thousand times to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t do it. I hated lying to her. I didn’t just hate it because I was nervous about being caught. I hated it because I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want to be another man who disappoints her. She makes me want to be a better . . . man. I guess.

  Sam

  • • •

  When Sally and I went running again two days later in the Byzantine Hippodrome, Sally hinted at a certain frustration with Dave and his novel. “Maybe you’ll understand this better because you’re a writer too,” she said. “He started working on it when we went to Bulgaria, and it’s been four years now, but he just can’t seem to finish it—it’s like he can’t pull the trigger, you know? He keeps saying how he has to go back and change something. He has to tighten up the section about the victim’s grandmother, or the detective’s voice isn’t quite right . . . there’s always some reason not to show it to an agent. How long did it take you to write your novel?” “Oh, a really long time,” I said. “Novels are hard to finish.”

  It wasn’t her only complaint. Sometime between brunch and our run, Sally had discovered the truth about turtles. “They need a pool bigger than our bathtub,” she said. “They need a place to swim. To wade. To hibernate. They need a basking area that’s exactly the right temperature or their shells will rot. They need a water heater. They need an expensive filter because they crap so much. They need to have their water cleaned every day. They smell bad. They bite. They carry Salmonella. They get maggots.” She had to stop—she’d run out of breath. She put her hands on her waist and bent forward, panting. “And Dave’s all excited because on the Internet it says if we train them right they’ll play tricks and let us scratch their bellies.”

  “If you wash your hands after touching them I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “He’s spent the last two whole days building them this green plastic turtle house in the middle of the living room. I come back from the office and there are all these rotten leaves on the living room floor, and when I ask him why he says it’s a vegetative canopy. It’s supposed to remind them of the Mississsippi Delta.” She got up and began running again, then stopped a few seconds later. Her shoe had come untied again. “Damn it! How am I going to take seventy-five years of this?”

  I expected that since she spoke the language so well, Sally would be able to help me understand some of the things that baffled me about Turkey, but in many ways she seemed just as puzzled as me. While we were running, we passed another garden of satellite dishes rising from a neighborhood with no functioning sewers. I pointed this out; I wondered what she made of that. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess they’re like my mom and dad that way. Mom and Dad watch about ten hours of television a day. Mom has diabetes and Dad has high blood pressure. I started running because I didn’t want to be overweight like them.” Half a mile later, she remarked that you could buy satellite televisions cheaply at the Carrefour on the E5 highway. “You can get pretty much everything you’d get at Kmart there, really. It’s great. I can take you there if you need anything.”

  I had asked Arsalan the same question before he left for the villages.

  From: Arsalan arsalan@hotmail.com

  Date: October 23, 2003 03:16 PM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: Re: Eyüp

  This is a most interesting problem, Claire. Throughout the Islamic world, society is viewed in concentric circles of trust, starting with the immediate family and proceeding outward through blood relations. People will not share their family’s precious resources with those to whom they’re not related—hence do we suffer from an almost complete lack of public-mindedness. The tragedy of the commons is multiplied. The Turks, moreover, are chronically afflicted with the Genghis Khan Syndrome. They are not as clannish as the Arabs (or as sly as we Persians). But in their hearts they are still nomads on the steppe, waiting for the great khan to distribute the spoils. They expect the sewers to be handed down from Devlet Baba, the father state. Recall that in many Islamic countries, Turkey especially among them, public works have historically been the responsibility of distant, centralized authorities. Note the elaborate antique fountains still in use: they usually bear the tugra of the sultan or an inscription from one or another pasha. And do not forget, in the Ottoman Empire, all land was technically owned by the sultan. A complicated system of leases and grants permitted people to buy and sell land after a fashion, but nowhere near as easily as in Europe, where one could obtain title. Public authorities could, and would, seize property at any time, so it made no sense to develop one’s land overmuch. The consequence of this collective inheritance is the fatalism and resignation that leads the residents of Eyüp to buy satellite dishes rather than take the initiative, cooperate, and fix their own sewers.

  After that, every time I passed an antique fountain, I stopped to look at it. Arsalan was right—the tugra of the sultan was always just where he said it would be.

  • • •

  I was alone in Dr. Mostarshed’s bedroom the next evening, trying for the third time to compose a reply to Samantha, when a giant bat flew in through the window and began flapping madly from wall to wall, squeaking frantically. I ran from the room, slamming the door behind me. When I poked my head in the door fifteen minutes later, it was still flapping and diving, crashing into the furniture, all huge and black and hairy and nasty. It was hard to say which one of us was more unhappy that it was trapped in my bedroom.

  Sally had said, “Call us if you ever need any help with anything,” and in a moment of womanish hysteria, that’s just what I did, even though it was nearly midnight. “What should I do?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll come over,” said Sally.

  “What are you going to do, negotiate a consular treaty with it?”

  “Moral support,” she said. “Besides, Dave’s a guy.”

  I tried to pretend they shouldn’t inconvenience themselves, but I was grateful. I knew it couldn’t hurt me, but there’s a damned good reason no one wants a pet bat.

  Fifteen minutes later, when they arrived—Dave bearing a loaf of pumpkin bread—the thing was still bouncing off the walls. The way it was knocking into everything wasn’t much of an advertisement for sonar navigation. Dave poked his head in the bedroom door and blanched. “Yep, that’s a bat all right,” he said, shutting it again. He looked at Sally. She was staring at him with her arms crossed. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  “Well, I guess I should open the windows in there, and, uh, you know,” he said. “Okay, here I go. I’m gonna open the window. Here I go.” He dived into the room, ducking for cover, and raced over to the window. He opened the window all the way and ducked back out, slamming the door behind him. “Poor little guy; he’s frightened.”

  Five minutes later, the squeaking stopped. Either the bat was gone, we figured, or it had knocked itself out against one of Dr. Mostarshed’s antique vases. Dave opened the door: It was gone. “Thank God,” I said. “You’re my hero.”

  Since we were too keyed up with adrenaline to sleep, we made some tea and sliced up the pumpkin bread. We stayed up until about three in the morning, talking. Dave and Sally reminisced about the cockroaches in their hotel room in Costa Rica, which were evidently as big as human heads. I mentioned that I’d had trouble finding breakfast cereal in Istanbul, and Dave promised to bring me a batch of his homemade granola. “Exotic foreign food is great,” he said pensively, “but you just don’t want it for breakfast.”

  Before leaving, Dave checked the rest of the apartment to make sure all points of potential bat-entry were sealed. To thank them, I gave them the
only copy of Loose Lips I had brought with me; they admired it appropriately and said how much they were looking forward to reading it.

  Knowing they were there for me in an emergency made me feel a little less alone. I was about to write to Arsalan about the bat, but I suddenly realized that he wouldn’t receive the message.

  Imran, at least, had replied promptly to my last letter.

  From: Imran Begum imranbegum@gmail.com

  Date: November 11, 2003 03:45 AM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: Your concern

  Dear kind friend who has been so generous with good wishes, thank you for your care; it means a lot to me, having no siblings and only one interested parent. Morale is adequate. I am consoling myself with Marie, age 43, petite and feminine with a 38E bust. She has convinced herself she’s in love with me, and I’m not even trying to reason with her; no bloody point. I plan to begin speed dating again as soon as my Larissaschmerz is well boundaried, in three weeks time. Three new patients, so I’m flush as a bald eagle in a twister. I have purchased a new stereo amplifier to console myself for my loss, and I am endeavouring to eat more plaice, haddock, and cod for their mood-stabilizing omega-3 oils. Hydrate well, my good friend. Love, Immie.