by Linda Rogers
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? You have an alibi. You were with me.”
“I’m sorry because they may think I am passing papers to you.”
“Who are they and what kind of papers are you talking about?”
“My novel.”
“Should I start smoking so you could collect the butts?”
“I won’t be creating a museum.”
“Are you insulting Turkishness?”
“Of course.”
A herd of goats appears from nowhere, and I manage to stop in time. I now imagine a car accident. Another group of anarchist animals will appear from nowhere. I will swerve to avoid them and we will be sent off a cliff into the Aegean Sea. Güzel’s wife will read about it in the louche Technicolor newspapers. I wonder if he writes for them?
“Who do you write for?”
“Myself. I am the only reader with integrity.”
“What will your wife think when she reads about our car crash?”
“I am not married.”
“I thought you said you were.”
“No, you asked me if my wife wore a long coat. I answered no; my wife does not wear a long coat because I do not have a wife, not in this life.”
“Ah,” I say, not quite understanding but unwilling to intrude further as we ride in silence, until Güzel tells me to stop for lunch at a roadside café, where I order lentil soup and foamy ayran, practicing my menu-Turkish.
“The less you know about me, the better,” he says, as I finish my glass of tea. “Through me you will find out about Turkey and from you I hope to learn how the world sees us. We both need to be transparent in ways that are helpful.”
“What’s the point of that? I am a very unimportant person. No one cares what I think of food or politics or anything else. I am a tourist, here to find out what Pamuk meant about hearing God in the silence of snow and hoping someone will help a woman betrayed by her culture.” I don’t add that I am also here to get rid of my father’s ashes. That is too many reasons, my father would have advised. One is enough. More, and you appear to be lying.
“You came to listen to our snow during summer?” he smiles.
“I came when I could.” This is my first trip abroad. I have never been anywhere except for annual ferry trips to Seattle and one trip to Disneyland on a client’s Harley. It is now almost three months since the rape and the world has turned its attention away from Iman.
“Where is Faith?” I ask.
“Don’t you understand that is the same question we are all asking? How will any of us hear God in the clash of civilizations? You will have your journey, and I will write about it.”
“What if I don’t find any answers?”
“One thing we have learned in thousands of years of history is that it doesn’t matter. We don’t have goals the way you do in your culture. Time is irrelevant to us. Turkey will be here long after we have passed through life. What matters to us is the next cup of tea, the pomegranate flowers, and the scent of our pine forests in summer.”
“Are you really writing about the elections?”
“Bakalım,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
“We’ll see.”
I live on a fault line, as do the Turks. The earth will move in spite of us. There is no magic, no politic to prevent the tectonic dance that is our destiny. Is this what he is telling me, that talk of white and black Turks, Christian and Muslim Turks, Jewish Turks, deep states, the invisible power, and visible governance, is just talk? Is life about not stepping on cracks?
If possible, we saw even more election flags in Izmir than in Istanbul.
“Western Turkey defends secularism. You’ll find the dedication gets more intense as you move down the coast. ” Güzel wanted to press on to Cesme where there is a rally this evening. On the drive along the peninsula to the seaside city I smell the famous pine forests through the open windows.
“It smells like heaven,” I say.
“This is heaven,” he answers. “Ask any Turk and that person will tell you that he or she would die for his country, just so he can get to stay here.” I notice he says “will” and not “would” as some people do when talking about their nation, their children or a special friend. Is that conditional? Many of the Turks I’ve been meeting talk about emigrating if the Prime Minister moves any further away from secularism. Many have already. “What will happen when politics, religion and climate change force the great Middle Eastern diaspora? How will your people live without pine forests and fresh figs?”
“We will live our way to the answer.”
I park at the end of the highway to Cesme, and Güzel heads straight to a boisterous rally in the square beside the Castle of St. Peter, a stone fortification built by the seafaring Genoese in the fourteenth century. At the Dinc Hotel, close enough that I can hear the massed crowd, I ask for two rooms on the same floor, facing the Aegean. The proprietor looks surprised by this Western woman making her own arrangements and gives me one key. I wish I could give a false name because now the government knows about me, but it is impossible. I have to hand over my passport at the desk.
After dumping my bags, I decide to walk over to meet Güzel near the speaker’s platform. The square is full of people. A howling child has dropped her ice cream and a small dog is licking it up. There are three trucks parked in the square with the photos of three different candidates painted on the sides. All three loudspeakers are blaring at once.
“How can anyone hear what they are saying?” I ask, covering my ears.
“They already know all the platforms.”
“I’m going to walk along the seawall and watch the sunset.” There are so many people taking pictures. Someone might be waiting to get one of us together, evidence of conspiracy or if, in fact, Güzel is married, evidence of adultery or intended adultery. I am getting paranoid.
I have never seen such glorious sunsets as in Turkey. It is not hard to believe the Turks have chosen a little slice of moon and a star for their national flag. I walk for five hundred metres, yes, I count my steps, until I no longer hear the election speeches. At a café by the water, I order an ayran and a fish sandwich, and then wait for the sun to drop out of sight.
Further along the beach, tourists lying on huge cushions in cabanas on stilts in the water also watch the sunset. I can hear their laughter. One couple is kissing, their shadows playing on sheer curtains. I let myself imagine.
At the end of my promenade, I hear the sound of a trombone and follow it into a restaurant with Turkish carpets and low tables with water pipes. The walls are open latticework covered in grape leaves and there is a refreshing breeze from the sea. What a magical theatre, I think, and, sitting near my blues band, I order an Efes beer. Jeff nods to me and begins to sing “Lost Lover Blues.” Am I ever!
During the break, he asks why I didn’t bring my new friend to his gig.
“He’s making Turkey,” I answer as simply as if it were Thanksgiving dinner. It is true if we believe what we read.
I am in bed studying my Eye Witness to Turkey when Güzel taps on my door a few hours later. “Have you had dinner?” he asks and I say yes, I have. “Well then, I’l keep working. Would you like to swim in the morning?”
Of course I would. I blow him a kiss through the closed door. Do I hear him catch his breath on the other side, or am I imagining it?
Bakalım. We’ll see.
FAIRYTALES
Coon told me all about his life and I told him about mine. I was surprised by what he knew and what he didn’t. He was smart and completely clueless at the same time. When we heard dynamite blasting the rocks in a new subdivision not far from his hiding place and I said, “Duck and cover,” he didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. But, while Coon knew less than nothing about war, he knew every inch of his woodland kingdom, every bush and berry, every squirrel, I swear. His mind was a map, even of the houses on my street. He knew who had fruit trees, who left their
basement door open, and who had shelves full of preserves ripe for the plucking. I have never met anyone wiser about plants and animals and five-finger discount shopping than Coon.
Most important, Coon was familiar with grief. He had experienced death early, just as I had. Since we’d sworn to be true to one another and never lie, I believed his story. There was no big fancy house, no mother, no father, no brother or sister, not even grandparents. I had half my grandparents, even if they did live far away in South Carolina, Freedomland. I could picture them.
He told me he’d started out someplace cold. He remembered seeing red splashes in the snow. His father broke his mother’s nose before she ran away with him in her arms. He’d looked over her shoulder and seen a trail of blood following them. I asked him if he was sure about that. If she were carrying him, wouldn’t he have been a baby? I knew from the kids I’d babysat that there comes a point when you can’t carry them anymore and that is about the same time they start to remember things. That was when I had to be careful about how much I ate out of the fridge in front of them. I had this trick of eating their Jell-O with fruit in it. I would cut right across, a little skinny piece, and then the parents would be none the wiser.
“I was five,” he said. “I remember everything.”
Sometimes Coon’s mother went back and sometimes his father found them, but one night, when he was drunk and raging, they ran away for good. His mum had experience waiting on tables. She took their old Pontiac and drove it right across Canada, trading work for food and gasoline and sometimes a bed. Most often they slept in the car or in motels. The motels were free when they got up before sunrise and booted it down the highway.
“My mother left every room nice and clean. We only used one towel, which she washed and left hanging to dry on the shower rod, and we slept on top of the blankets so they wouldn’t have to change the sheets. That was her way of saying ‘Thank you.’”
I believed Coon because I could see he might have inherited his mother’s talent for housekeeping.
“Was she pretty?” I asked. It was important to me that mothers were pretty. My own used to be. She was older than some of the other mothers, but she was still the most beautiful. Crying and drinking had made her face puffy, but other than that she still had some female charms. Her drawl was partly from drinking and partly vestiges of a Southern accent. My father, who met her at a dance contest, liked to talk about her “great gams” and her “bodacious bootie.” She was, he said, “a real tomato.” I, of course, was not. I knew that. My face was not going to appear on the cover of Silver Screen.
I was too fat. “Just baby fat,” Stella said. “It will melt off one day and then you’ll be the belle of the ball.” She was right, for once. I could have been.
My mother had lots of jewelry my father had given her. I was thinking of this when I came home from school one day and found her in a good mood. She’d actually made some Rice Krispie squares.
I asked her, “How many ways can you make a baby?”
“What do you mean by that?” she said, as she swirled her finger in the marshmallow and Rice Crispy mix and licked it off.
“I mean there’s the one where his peeper goes in her peeper and the babies swim out. Right?”
“Right.”
“This boy at school told me a boy can put his peeper in a girl’s mouth and get her pregnant.”
“Well, he lied to you. Either that or he was misinformed. You don’t get pregnant when you do that. That’s when you get jewelry.” She laughed at herself and I wondered if those squares would be safe to eat. Since then, I have not been able to regard my mother’s jewelry, except for the jet necklace, with any kind of respect.
Coon told me his mother was also a beauty. She had red hair and her nails and lipstick matched. I asked if she had jewelry and he said, no. His dad was poor. She had a wedding band and a watch. That was it. They lived in the Pontiac for a whole summer while she looked for work. Sometimes she brought guys back to the car, and he had to hide under her coat in the front seat while she entertained them in the back. “It’s eating money, honey,” he said she told him.
One hot day she said they weren’t going to the beach like she’d promised. She had a job interview. He was supposed to wait in the car while she went in and talked to a man who was going to hire her. First, they went to a gas station where she had a sponge bath and washed her hair while Coon sat on the toilet and watched. He told Mad he’d spent a lot of time watching and waiting. Then, she parked across the street from a diner with a neon sign. It wasn’t lit up. “Wish me luck,” she told him as she kissed his nose. Then, she got out of the car and started to cross the street. Coon wasn’t looking. He was watching a dog cross from the other side.
The guy in the black car must have been looking at the dog too, because, when he swerved to miss the animal, he hit Coon’s mother.
Her blood spattered on the windshield.
The guy in the black car kept going. Coon got out of the Pontiac and looked at his mother. He said she had blood coming out of her like all those other times when his dad hit her, but more of it. The way he said it was flat, as if he was giving evidence, as if he’d gone over it a thousand times to himself. This time his mother was still. Her hand didn’t move to take his and reassure him she was only playing possum so his dad wouldn’t hit her again. She was dead.
“Wish me luck,” she’d said, and that was when he found out he didn’t have any to give.
He ran down the beach, across some streets, through some bushes, over the blue bridge; and he didn’t stop running until he came to his cave.
Coon spent his entire life, from that moment on, living wild. His daddy hit his mother. A car hit his mother. The only thing that never slapped him in the face was nature. He trusted nature. I agreed with him one hundred percent. If a bee’s going to sting you, it’s because you got in its way. Just let a plant grow and an animal find its food and everything lives together in harmony. Why can’t humans live like that?
I think of Coon’s dead mother every time I cross the street in Turkey, but the only roadkill I have seen was a young woman in Kadıköy, a walking dead. The disfigured girl came and went with a traffic light near the feribots. I have no idea what hit her, but it could have been a bucket of acid. She was wearing a hijab but her face was uncovered. It looked like raw meat, but she held it up, defiant I thought, as her male companion led her across the busy street.
I couldn’t believe a Turkish man would do that. She must have been a Pakistani, maybe in Istanbul for plastic surgery. Perhaps the man with her was the lover she had chosen against the wishes of her family. Maybe he was a brother, parading her so the world could see what men do to women who assert themselves. I would never know. Freedom has a very high price. Coon taught me that. Iman taught me that. The lessons are everywhere.
I was half jealous of Coon because he was living the freedom life. I didn’t tell him, but if I didn’t have Stella to take care of I would have taken off myself. Many times I lay on my bed thinking about where I would go if I had the gumption to get up and leave. I thought of the paper shack or an old garage like ours that was all overgrown with weeds. Robinson Crusoe was my hero.
I’ve heard that raccoons are related to bears. I guess they live in caves too. Coon didn’t mind the name I gave him. Maybe, I thought then, he had a real one he’d forgotten because no one except me spoke directly to him after the day his mother was killed.
It might have been better if he’d been a bear person. His life would have been a lot easier if he could have hibernated in winter and foraged in the summer. In summer, there were fruit trees and vegetable gardens to raid and open doors to investigate.
He showed me where there was a baker who left his back door open in the heat. Coon just had to go under cover of darkness and sneak in the back way, taking whatever he liked. He stole bread, pies, cookies, cakes, pastries, and sausage rolls. The time I went in there with him, I had the hardest time deciding. In the end, I took a blackb
erry pie and it was delicious. We sat on the curb and ate it with our fingers. My blouse was black and blue from holding it against my chest, but I didn’t care. I bleached the stain out later.
I made a promise that I would help Coon get through the next winter. I could take him stuff from our house and I could charge stuff at the store. Heck, I did it for myself. It was a comfy feeling knowing I could help somebody out. Stella mostly took it for granted when I cared for her. She was a bit of a princess that way. Coon was different. He didn’t ask for help.
We talked for hours around the fire in his cave and toasted marshmallows, removing one caramelized layer after another. That was my idea. Coon didn’t know about burnt sugar. “Think of it as underwear,” I said. There were lots of things I taught him. I asked him if he missed his mum and he said he did. He asked if he could suck my nipples and I said no, because they were tender. I was too shy to show them to anybody, especially since I was getting ahead of the other girls in my class.
I’d heard some older girls in the school washroom talking about breasts. One of them told a story about a girl who wondered how she could get hers to grow. She said a mean girl told her to rub them with toilet paper every day. The girl went into the toilet cubicle and followed her instructions. A few weeks later, they were in the shower together after gym class. The girl who rubbed her chest with toilet paper was still as flat as a board.
“Didn’t you do what I told you?” the mean girl asked her.
“I did, but nothing happened. Are you sure it works?”
“It worked on your ass, didn’t it?” the girl said, and her friends cracked up.
What a dumb joke. Coon didn’t get it. He wasn’t used to jokes, and he didn’t know any songs or poems or stories either. You could have blown me over with dog breath when he told me he didn’t know how to read. School didn’t interest me much. I already knew how to read when I got there. As far as I was concerned, school was a place where kids got to make fun of my clothes and my lunch and my husky shape. I wasn’t exactly the teacher’s pet type either. To be honest, I loathed getting up in the morning. By my definition, a good teacher was one that left me alone at the back of the class with my library books.