The Lovers

by Vendela Vida

  “There are a few more spaces. The performance is at eight o’clock.”

  “And I can eat before?”

  The man smiled warmly and gestured upstairs. “Yes, it is included.” He told her the price and she handed him the money.

  “I’ll see you in one hour, at eight o’clock,” he said as he gestured once again to the stairs.

  The restaurant was located on a roof with a view of the Mevlana Museum and the mosque. From somewhere—the rose garden below? the mosque?—came the sound of a flute. She closed her eyes and listened. She wanted to swim in the sound. She was so light-headed she felt she might faint.

  She ordered eski ebelli because the menu said it was a specialty of Konya. When it came she saw it was a large round piece of dough with vegetables and meat wrapped inside. This was what all the women in Konya were making with their rolling pins.

  She ate greedily, ravenously, pieces of meat dropping onto her plate. Oil oozed onto her hands. The small thin napkins on the table couldn’t absorb the oil and her hands remained slippery. She hunched over her table so no one would be able to see the mess she was making, the grease on her face. She was the only person at the large restaurant who was dining alone.

  After eating, she felt calm. The sound of the flute and the night breeze relaxed her. It was five minutes to eight, and she decided she would watch the performance for a few minutes. She thought of the woman who dreamt of the dervishes. She longed for distraction.

  The performance room was filled with folding chairs and incense smoke. There was only one empty chair left, on the edge of the front row, waiting for her. She seated herself as silently as she could.

  Four men dressed in white robes and tall narrow hats moved to the center of the room: the dervishes. They were in their forties, all dark-haired and with medium builds. At once, they all began to move. With one slippered foot anchoring them to the floor, the other foot performed an elaborate act of slowly pushing off from the floor and raising to the calf of the opposite leg, before lowering and pushing off once again. Soon they spun quickly, all in the same direction, in perfect unison. They appeared to enter a trancelike state, and the hands of their extended arms turned in opposite directions, one palm up, one down. Yvonne watched, mesmerized. She could feel the breeze created by the swirl of the dervishes’ robes on her ankles.

  Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. They were still circling in their own realm, equidistant from each other. Yvonne was beginning to get dizzy. She wondered how much longer she could watch the spinning. She wondered if they always turned in the same direction. A small part of her wanted one of them to fall, or at least open his eyes. Anything to break the relentlessness of the turning, turning, turning.

  Finally she heard the padding of the right feet on the floor begin to slow, and she saw the dervishes were halting their private cyclones. The incense was stronger, and the room hotter, without the breeze from their robes. Yvonne stood and briskly made her way to the exit.

  There was no taxi in sight, so she walked. She knew the Hotel Mevlana was close. She consulted her useless map and walked down a street that bordered a stone wall. Farther down the street the wall was lower, and she could see that it circumscribed a graveyard, crowded with tall, narrow tombstones the size and shape of grandfather clocks. She looked closely at one to read the dates, to see if the bodies were recent or ancient burials, and she took in a quick breath when she saw the name: AHMET.

  She read the tombstone next to it: AHMET.

  She clutched her purse and ran down the street toward the hotel. As she ran, she continued to look for names on the tombstones, and every other tombstone, it seemed, announced the death of Ahmet.

  When she arrived at the end of the cemetery she was breathless. She looked up at where she thought the hotel would be, but there was only an empty gas station, now closed. She looked to her left and right. The only light came from cars as they sped past. She turned—she could retrace her steps, but that would mean passing the cemetery again. She was soaked in sweat. She felt hunted.

  “Taxi,” called a man, and Yvonne turned. “I take you,” he said.

  She had no choice. She followed him across the street and he asked where she was going. “Hotel Mevlana,” she said. He pointed her to a yellow taxicab. She stepped into the backseat, and a moment later the front passenger door opened. Another man was getting inside. Yvonne looked at the driver, who didn’t look at her. Instead he turned to his friend, who was lighting up a cigarette. She gripped her purse, ready to flee.

  The driver said something that included Hotel Mevlana, and Yvonne tried to take relief in this. This wasn’t an abduction; they would take her to her hotel after all. The taxi pulled out of the dark gas station and into the night, zooming past the cemetery. Yvonne kept her eyes on the backs of the men’s heads. She could smell her own sweat—meaty and spicy and strange. She smelled like someone else.

  When the taxi pulled up in front of her hotel, the meter read one amount and the driver quoted her a much larger one. She didn’t want to argue. He had smelled her fear. She had arrived back at the hotel safe from cemeteries and the twirling of men. She paid him the extra amount he was charging, and ran out of the taxi and took the elevator to the third floor. The lights switched on, startling her as she scurried down the hall. She closed the door to her room, bolting and chaining it behind her.

  She closed her eyes but did not sleep. She thought of herself awake, turning, her eyes raised to the sky, turning. She only wanted the turning to stop. She wanted to look straight ahead, to know where she was going. The turning, the eyes to the sky—it was impossible to find rest this way.

  A gray smog hung over Konya the next morning when Yvonne boarded the bus. She was wrecked from a night without sleep. She had passed the dark hours tallying her mistakes, regretting things she had said and not said to her children, regretting coming to Turkey, regretting subjecting that beautiful boy to her broken, needy self. And now she was going to Ahmet’s town with no notion of what she would do when she met his family. She had not rehearsed any words of explanation or condolence. Her mind raced through scenarios—the family shunning her, the family feeding her. The family condemning her, the family embracing her. Outside the bus window green haystacks were lined in neat, organized rows. She closed her eyelids, heavy with sleeplessness and sun.

  Yvonne awoke to find her forehead pressed fast to the window. Outside was an impossible landscape. The bus had descended into a wide gray valley, flat but dotted with hundreds of spiked rock formations. Each was fifty feet high or more, and tapered upward, like a narrow volcano. She had never heard of such a place. She knew only that Cappadocia was mountainous. No one had told her it was filled with a field of hundreds, thousands, of stone chimneys extending as far as the eye could see.

  The bus stopped. “Ürgüp, it is here,” the driver called out. She disembarked, and the driver retrieved her suitcase and set it beside her. Dust rose up around her as the bus drove away.

  A sign said CAVE HOTEL and pointed with an arrow, and she started the small climb up the hill. She would wash, settle in, and make a plan. It was still early in the day.

  From outside, the Cave Hotel looked like a small mountain with a door. She rang the bell, and a minute later a man came out to greet her. He was in his early sixties, with neatly parted hair and a square chin. He introduced himself as Koray, the hotel owner, and told her they had one room available—a suite. “You are here by yourself?” he said.

  He led her to a desk in a large room. It was only when Yvonne noticed the curved walls, the absence of windows, that she understood the room was a cave. She squinted at yellowish rings circling the gray chalky walls. Koray noticed her gaze.

  “From volcanic eruption,” he said. “This valley, these caves, made by volcanoes, and then the wind—” He gestured like a sculptor forming a torso from clay.

  She filled out the paperwork he required. Koray led her down stone steps into a courtyard, and to another door. “This will be yo
ur room,” he said. “One of the oldest caves in the region.”

  He unlocked the door and, once inside, switched on a light. He looked at the room with half-closed eyes, as though he didn’t want to see any detail the housekeepers might have overlooked.

  The room was cool and damp, with a small desk and a large, high bed. There were no windows. “Do you need anything else?” Koray asked, standing on the threshold.

  “Actually, I wonder if you could help me,” Yvonne said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Okay,” Koray said.

  “Well, I’m looking for anyone in the Yildirm family.”

  “I know Yildirms,” he said, in a way that scared Yvonne. Had he heard of her role in Ahmet’s death? “When you come upstairs, I have information for you.”

  She thanked him and closed the door.

  In the bathroom, Yvonne held a small white hand towel under the sink faucet, and rubbed at her underarms, which smelled tart, and then between her legs. She removed her sandals and lifted one foot at a time to the sink before stepping on the bath mat. She gargled with the small bottle of mouth freshener supplied by the hotel, and spit. She avoided looking in the mirror.

  She lay on the bed for a few minutes, staring at the cave around her. The bed was bordered by two night tables, each with lamps that had been turned on. She suspected she was the only person in the hotel who was traveling alone.

  Upstairs, in the room where she had checked in, Koray was talking to an Italian couple about a hot-air balloon excursion. Yvonne spotted a computer in the corner of the room, its screen on, a stool set before it. She logged onto her e-mail, and was surprised to see a message from Aurelia. The subject header was, “Greetings from Istanbul.” Istanbul! Her daughter was already here. Yvonne had no idea what day it was, or how Aurelia had arrived in Turkey so quickly.

  She hesitated before opening the message. She tried to picture her daughter making the flight across the Atlantic, using her anti-anxiety pills, polishing the cuticles of her nails with oil (her cuticles cracked on airplanes, she claimed—a result of all the dry air). Intimacy, Yvonne thought, was a ruse. She knew a thousand pathetic details about her daughter, and still wouldn’t be able to describe her accurately to a stranger.

  She opened the message and immediately was relieved to find that in the first few sentences there was no trouble, no desperate need.

  Mom,

  I made it to Istanbul and guess where I am? I’m staying at your friend Özlem’s house! I called the number you gave me from the airport and she surprised me by telling me I could stay with her (extra nice since I looked into prices for hotels in this city and they’re outrageous). Her place is really cool. Right by the Bosporous. She has such great things to say about you, but she also told me that maybe you’re not in Datça?!!!

  She said that I should ask you where you are, and that if I don’t hear back from you by this evening, she would tell me where you went. She said she wanted to give you a chance to explain things yourself, but that she didn’t want me to travel to Datça tomorrow morning as I had planned if you weren’t going to be there.

  What is going on, Mom? This is so strange. We’re supposed to join Matt on the boat in two days and I don’t know what to do. I really think we should get you a cell phone that works internationally if you’re going to keep disappearing like this. I know, I know. I’m one to talk. That’s what Dad would say right now. But today I understand some of the fear that you guys must have experienced those times when you didn’t know my whereabouts.

  I guess what I’m saying is, please tell me what’s going on and where I can find you! I’d like to hear it from you. All I can think is that maybe you’ve fallen in love with some Turkish man and have gone off to get married! Either that or you’ve been arrested, ha ha ha. Which is it?

  xoA

  Yvonne reread the e-mail. She could barely make sense of how Özlem and Aurelia had connected. All of it seemed impossible. But then, she had given Özlem’s number to Aurelia. Why wouldn’t Aurelia have called it? Yvonne was puzzled by her own surprise. Was it that Aurelia was suddenly so outgoing, so capable? Aurelia and Özlem were together in Istanbul, managing just fine, while Yvonne was in a moonscape of giant anthills, utterly lost.

  When Koray was finished with the Italians he turned to Yvonne, and wrote something down and handed her the piece of paper. “Many of the Yildirm family have gone out of town,” he said. “But one is here,” he said, and pointed to the address. “Mustafa can take you.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Yvonne said, taking the paper from him. She didn’t know who Mustafa was.

  “You wait here,” Koray said.

  Mustafa was a lanky man in his twenties, with gelled black hair. He leaned forward when he walked, as though pushing through a strong wind. “Madame,” he said, and gestured toward the door.

  Outside, she followed him to his car. He opened the passenger door for her and she got inside.

  After he sat in the driver’s seat she handed him the piece of paper Koray had given her.

  “I know,” he said, without taking the paper.

  “Is it far?”

  “No,” he said. “You could walk but you would not find.”

  A tattoo with Ataturk’s name circled his small bicep. He noticed her looking and pulled up his shirtsleeve. “His signature,” Mustafa said, pointing to the etched version of the president’s name.

  “Very nice,” Yvonne said, and quickly felt ridiculous.

  The car was stuffy and reeked of cigarettes. She rolled down her window. They passed more of the strange formations—triangles with boulders on top. “What do you call those things?” she asked.

  “Fairy chimneys,” Mustafa said.

  “What?”

  “They look like chimney to home of fairies,” he said. “The volcanoes come and then the wind shapes the lava like that. We get very strong winds that circle in the valley. The winds get stuck, like in a bowl. You see there is no green, no plants. Like a desert.”

  They passed a school, its courtyard empty now. Ahmet must have gone there, Yvonne thought.

  “A school for girls,” Mustafa said.

  She couldn’t decide whether she was disappointed. A part of her wanted to know every detail of what Ahmet’s life had been like, and another part of her wanted to believe he hadn’t left any mark on this town or its people.

  The car pulled up to a large house built into the side of a hill. With an impressive balcony and heavy wooden doors, it was much grander than the other houses she’d seen. A small crowd was gathered outside the house, taking pictures. It’s made the news, Yvonne thought. People were coming from all over Cappadocia to see where the boy lived. She imagined candlelight vigils at night, the tears of women glistening in the lights of the small flames.

  “You like to get out,” Mustafa said.

  “Sure,” Yvonne said.

  If Mustafa hadn’t said anything, she could have just as easily asked him to keep driving. The crowd of people surprised her. Would they know her face from the TV? She no longer resembled her passport photo—the picture, she assumed, that the journalists would have dug up to broadcast.

  Mustafa said he would park across the street and wait for her. He indicated a space next to a large bus—a tour bus. Yvonne had never imagined a scene like this. She assumed she’d be alone, or part of a small, intimate group, when she came to pay her condolences to Ahmet’s family. She now saw there would be witnesses, judges of her behavior, just as there had been at the beach that day.

  As Yvonne walked to the large front door of the house, she was intercepted by a woman of approximately Aurelia’s age, her eyes heavily made up. The woman was talking to Yvonne while holding something in her hand—something black and narrow as a pencil. Another woman nearby shouted. She too was holding a small pencil-like object in her hand. Yvonne guarded her throat with one hand, her heart with the other. The first woman was very close to her face now, still speaking, and lifted her hands toward Yvonne’s eye
s. Yvonne felt something on her eyelids, something stinging, but did not fight back, did not push the woman’s fingers away. I deserve this, she thought. Whatever retribution or punishment this is for Ahmet’s death, I deserve nothing less. The woman’s hands smelled of mint.

  Yvonne could sense when the woman had stepped back—the sun was once more on her face—and she opened her eyes. She had not been blinded. The woman was smiling, nodding. She reached into her pocket and extracted a small mirror, which she held in front of Yvonne’s face.

  Black liquid makeup lined the tops of both eyelids.

  “Like?” said the woman.

  Yvonne didn’t know what to say, so she nodded. The woman smiled. Yvonne noticed that all the women outside the house had eyes that had been similarly lined. A mourning ritual, she decided. She felt sick.

  She walked to the door of the house. No one stopped her. When she reached the threshold, she saw the door was ajar. She knocked lightly. A woman in her sixties, wearing heels, opened the door and said something in Turkish. She was wearing an expensive-looking silk blouse and a pearl choker.

  “Mrs. Yildirm?” Yvonne said.

  The woman looked confused.

  “Oh,” she said, after a minute. “Are you looking for Aylin?” Her English was excellent. Yvonne’s relief was immense.

  “I’m looking for anyone in the Yildirm family,” she said.

  “Aylin Yildirm works here, but not right now. Someone in her family has died.”

  Yvonne bowed her head.

  “She’s coming by today to get some things, though,” the woman said. “She’ll be here around five this evening.”

  “Thank you,” Yvonne said, and stepped away from the house. “I’ll come then.”

  She walked back to Mustafa’s car. Who was Aylin? Ahmet’s mother? What kind of work did she do for this woman? Mustafa was standing by the car, talking with another man and smoking. Both men had placed packs of Winstons on the hoods of their cars.

  “It’s not open?” said Mustafa. He was looking strangely at her face. Yvonne thought something was wrong until she recalled the eyeliner.