Bozuk

by Linda Rogers

  “What was it?”

  “A shooting star.”

  “Did you make a wish?”

  “Of course.”

  We compare mythologies. How could they be so different and yet so similar? If I had seen the falling star, I would have wished that Güzel would gather me up in his arms and carry me past the concierge in the lobby up the winding stairs to my room. Why would I wish that, I think just as quickly? What would be the point? He would lie on my bed and wait for me to make love to him. Then he would politely, but firmly, ask me not to kiss him on the mouth. I know that is the invisible line between women like me and the women men like Güzel fall in love with and marry. I would pleasure him anyway. Perhaps I would wash his groin with grief and he would say he was sorry, kiss my eyes and swallow my tears. He would leave my room before morning. He might even leave the hotel, but not before buying me a bus ticket to Kars.

  “I had a friend once. We slept under the stars every night and we wished and wished.”

  “Did you get your wishes, Madeleine?”

  “No. He thought his mother had been cut up and made into stars and I thought my father was up there with her. We wanted to rapture up to them, but we always woke up on earth, just as we were.”

  “But you were already lucky to have one another. Perhaps that was enough good luck.”

  “My mother kept insisting the boy wasn’t real, and then he disappeared.”

  “Was she right?”

  “No.” What is real, anyway? Isn’t desire real?

  “Then perhaps he had gone to find his mother.”

  “Tell me if you see him.”

  “I think I do.” Güzel points. “Can you see the boy with the net? He is trying to capture every star in the heavens.”

  “You are a beautiful man, Güzel.”

  Perhaps he will still be here in the morning.

  ONE LAST THING

  My mother was a mess from the moment my father died until a few minutes before she died. “Slattern” would be the right word. She aged twenty years in the time it takes to say, “widow.” I watched her shut down and I heard her shut up. After the fire, she communicated by writing notes. All I got from her were grocery lists; always the same, so why did she bother?

  Tonic water

  Lemons

  Chip steaks

  Cigarettes

  Matches

  Bread

  Mustard

  Toilet paper

  The rest I had to think of myself. This went on and on until one day she just made loopy lines. After six years in her rest home, on the day the Twin Towers fell in New York, she quit eating and drinking and turned herself into Sleeping Beauty. I’ve seen this kind of transformation a number of times now and so I know I didn’t imagine it. When my mother pulled up her covers and closed her eyes for the last time, I was sure she could see my dad standing on the horizon holding an armfull of lilies, a big tangerine sky behind him; the same sun that does its lyrical descent over Sultanahmet setting on both of them.

  Like an infant pushing its way through the birth canal, she was rushing to meet him. My mum was a baby with a deadline, puffing and pushing, giving birth to herself.

  In those moments, her skin became soft and smooth, her hair opened like the petals around a flower. Her hands folded themselves exquisitely on her chest. She breathed; and the sound of her breathing was passionate.

  “Get out of my way,” she said. “You slut.” Those were her last words, and they were not spoken to me.

  The word for slut in Turkish is orispu. I love it. Oris for mouth and pu, well, that’s shit. Shitspeaker. Yes.

  Stella left a letter she had written when I was still a child. It was in her underwear drawer, hidden by a bag of lavender. On the outside she had written the word “Mother;” but inside she started off with “Madeleine.” She wrote: “Dear Madeleine, I know I am a bad mother. When I look into your eyes I see judgment. Can I hope for some understanding? Would you forgive me if I could find the way to love you more? I want to. I need your father to show me, but how can I make a dead man love me enough? When I looked at his body, I wanted to shake him alive so I could ask him. It wasn’t me who killed him. It was her. He had his first heart attack at home, but the second one happened in the hospital. When I rushed in to say goodbye, she was still in his room, her hair a mess and lipstick and tears all over her face, and she had the nerve to pretend she was just visiting. I knew. All those nights and weekends he was supposed to be working, she was working her candy counter. What a fool I was to order a couch for his office so he could take naps.”

  Didn’t my mother know he was riding the angel of death? My mother was as thick as cardboard. After I read her letter, I got every one of her precious Daddy-given china teacups out of the glass vitrine and smashed them.

  MUSTAFA LAUGHS

  The former dervish lives on top of a mountain near Kas. Güzel is navigating. He appears to know the road, a steep and winding nightmare with a sheer cliff and no guardrails. My foot is nervous on the gas pedal. We are driving at night, the headlights sweeping rock as we take the hairpin curves. I am terrified but Güzel reminds me, when I dig my fingernails into the steering wheel, that many Turks live on mountains and move as carefully as goats to avoid falling rocks.

  “Talk to me,” he says. “It will help free your mind.”

  “I am not supposed to end up here,” I say. “I was going to Kars, not Kas. I misheard what the band members told me on the plane. They were heading to Kas, nowhere near the silence of snow, where Noah parked his boat and Russian spirit wrestlers made an attempt to farm in peace and—”

  “What does it matter?” Güzel interrupts. “One letter. That is nothing.”

  “It’s because of the book.”

  “Kars means ‘snow’ in Turkish, but you can have snow anywhere you want.”

  “You mean anywhere that starts with the letter K, like kuku?

  “Why not,” he laughs? “At least you are going to a higher altitude. That is close.”

  “It is also closer to the sun.”

  When we arrive at the summit, his friend Mustafa comes out of his stone cottage with a large bowl of rice with fragrant herbs and chunks of lamb and, after inviting us to wash our hands in a small fountain built into the outside wall, leads us to a platform built over a sheer cliff. We settle into the big cushions in his aerie and eat from the communal bowl, dipping in flatbread. The food tastes like pieces of the moon. “Don’t look down,” Güzel jokes. “Look up.” The stars are even more intense than they were in Cesme.

  “There is nothing between us and God on this mountain,” says Mustafa, who looks more like a hybrid surfer hippie than a monk with his long hair and torn shorts.

  “Is that why you are here?” I ask, as I try to imagine him wearing a long skirt and tombstone hat like the dervishes I saw whirling in Istanbul.

  “Yes. You understand.” When Mustafa smiles, I see in the shimmering light that he is missing teeth. Sound whistles through the black holes in his smile. “I spin and pray and still I am depressed with world, so I come here out of world and make poetry and music.”

  While Güzel explains that musicians and writers come to Mustafa’s mountain for sacred experiences, our host runs back to the house to get his saz. I look down and realize that the plank bridge to the platform crosses a deep chasm.

  “What if he falls?” I ask Güzel – a stupid question. I think Mustafa has prayed his way out of a hole deeper than the slice in the side of the mountain on which this frail structure perches.

  In the peace of this night, I understand what is being offered. There are no thought police here, like the ones reading my mind on the streets or trespassing in my hotel rooms. I am afraid of the Jandarma with their automatic rifles, and the stories of captivity and torture I have read in the world press. So long as I am afraid, I will learn nothing. Mustafa knows better.

  I think Güzel is similarly enlightened. That may be the reason why he is with me. He may be my spi
rit guide, or am I deluding myself? Is it wrong thinking to assume that wisdom comes from men? Am I copping to the biological behaviour of women who lust after wise men in order to recreate wisdom? How long will we believe that we are as strong, as intelligent, and as talented as the elixir we sip? Is this the purgatory of girls whose fathers die young or is it an inherent gender fault?

  “My saz is bozuk,” Mustafa laughs. There are, he points out, cracks in the wood, but he believes it sounds better that way.

  “We are all bozuk,” I say, “in our various ways. We have a poet in our country. He wrote, ‘Forget your perfect offerings/ There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.’”

  “We know this man in Turkey. He is Leonard Cohen,” Mustafa says.

  “A Jew,” I say.

  “A Buddhist.” Mustafa adds.

  I feel as though I might have arrived at my moment. The night is balmy, the heat moderated by a wind that rises off the Mediterranean and climbs the side of the mountain. Our bellies are filled with comforting hospitality. Even the stars are warm.

  “Is this why you came to Turkey?” Güzel asks, while Mustafa tunes his instrument.

  “I told you I came to hear God and help Iman, but now I am distracted. I can’t even read a map.” I laugh. “Not that there are any maps in Turkey.”

  “We have stars for map. We have mountain and minaret. God listen. We don’t need map for God. I will try to call him for you,” Mustafa says gently. “In old day before Rumi, music not allowed in worship. Now, for seven hundred years, we have art, dance, music.”

  Seven hundred years ago, I think, our Aboriginal people were circling the fire and dancing. We were about to come and put out the fire, or die trying. I shiver and, even though he is lying on a cushion several feet away from me, I think I feel Güzel’s arm cover my shoulders like a soft snowfall, but it is Mustafa’s blanket.

  “In my culture, many men refuse to dance.”

  “In your culture, they might see dancing as sexual, not social,” Güzel says without embarrassment.

  “When I was a little girl, I would spin and spin until I felt so dizzy I fell down.”

  “What did you see then?” Güzel asks.

  “I saw stars.”

  “Exactly,” Mustafa says.

  “Now you hear God in the air between stars.” Güzel makes a big gesture that includes the whole sky.

  “Or the holes in snowflakes,” I answer.

  “Yes,” Güzel agrees, “windows like dragon breath.”

  As Mustafa begins to play sacred notes on his instrument, I hear it. Silence does not exist by itself. Of course, it was there all along, but I was blind, or deaf. I must make my own snow.

  “Maybe Pamuk means that snow exists in our heads. Kars could be Brigadoon or the Emerald City. It wouldn’t matter. We are always rushing to get somewhere before it melts, the point being that we are already there.”

  “Now you think like Turk,” Mustafa says.

  One night before I left home, I went to the outdoor theatre in Beacon Hill Park and watched the old Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. While the band danced on a field of polka dots, Ringo picked one up and put it in his pocket. “I’ve got an ’ole in me pocket,” he said.

  I’ve got a hole in me pocket and the pain is slowly leaking out, filling the valley below us with beautiful music.

  ALMOST MIDNIGHT

  Tonight, Sweet Papa Lowdown is playing on a platform stage set up on a rocky beach near Kas. The concert started late because of the heat. It is almost midnight and they are still in the first set. I am sitting alone at the band table, with a few mezze plates in front of me. Like a mountain goat, I graze the olives, fava beans and boregi. I like this careful separation of food.

  The band girls are sitting together: the mandolinist’s wife, the two beautiful sisters and Françoise, their father’s French lover. Güzel is off somewhere writing. I rode the dolmuş minibus to the outdoor club. Did I know, Naomi asked me earlier, that dolmuş comes from the same root as the mezze wrapped in grape leaves? No, I did not, but I like the idea of travellers wrapped in the safety of leaves from ancient vines and a minibus that departs when it is full.

  The chairs sit lopsided in gravel. I want to dance, but I am worried about spraining my ankle in my impractical sandals. A handful of English girls have come in a hotel shuttle bus. They peep like a flock of birds and the chirping gets louder the more they drink.

  The English girls are not afraid to dance on gravel in their platform shoes tied with ribbons. Their feet hardly touch the pebbles as they dance alone and in a flock, joining and separating. The girls are young and I enjoy watching them. Jeff is singing “When the Sun Goes Down in Harlem.” One girl spins like a dervish, saying over and over, “Foster, foster.” She spins perilously close to Doug, who is holding on to his sax for dear life and does not look amused. I assume she means “faster.” I am not sure whether she is giving orders to herself, to the band, or to life itself.

  Everything stops. It is the end of the song, but she keeps on spinning until her skirt lifts over her hips and her friends rescue her. The English girl is not wearing underpants.

  The band segues from embarrassment into a slow taksim introduction and Rick begins to sing “Istanbul.” “Foster,” the English girl shouts again and her friends abandon her, making their way to my table, inviting me to dance with them.

  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “No,” I say, and they insist, taking my hands and pulling me into the rocky space between the beach chairs and the band. They dance in a slow circle, holding hands, throwing their heads back and moving their hips. My feet forget to be nervous. I find my hips. Something else takes over. It isn’t the notes or the words – it’s the sound of the world turning.

  Sitting down for a glass of rakı during the band break, I ask Rick to tell me what he loves most about playing the blues in Turkey.

  “I love it when I catch a totally enshrouded woman tapping her foot to the music. Just when I don’t expect a reaction, there it is. It has nothing to do with listening. That is conscious. It happens when we feel it together.”

  Yes, we do, when we allow ourselves to be moved. I have learned something special tonight. We are all here: Iman, my mother, the Pinks (Sweet Papa’s girls), these hormonal English hounds off their leashes, when we feel the deeper music.

  GONE FOR GOOD

  I never liked the colour red. Red hits me with a closed fist, right in the guts. Pouf. It takes my wind, or it winds me up so I can’t think straight. I wouldn’t own a red car, a red dress, or a red pair of shoes. Firm red tomatoes give me the heaves. I threw up all over my breakfast the morning I discovered blood in my soft-boiled egg. Stella said the red spot was a baby chicken, but I could see it was blood, plain and simple.

  It was my father who got our first laying hens, and me who looked after them. They pecked the hell out of the garden, which eventually came to resemble a moonscape, and got him a citation for keeping poultry within the city limits. Our Pentecostal neighbours complained about the rooster racket and barnyard sex. Sex to chickens is just a squirt – no flowers, no foreplay, and no words of love. I have no idea why the miraculously born again objected to that. In the end, we shut them up with free eggs. The Pentecostals eventually left, but the eggs are grandfathered in and I still tithe a dozen a week to the new neighbours when my hens are laying.

  My father was a rooster, and it can’t be said that he lacked romance, even if he did spread it a bit thin. He gave my distraught mother a ruby ring the day after she thought she flushed a baby down the toilet at the age of forty-five. “It was my last chance.”

  Diamonds surrounded the ruby. “Your heart is protected by sleeping dinosaurs,” he told her. I didn’t understand at the time, nor did my mother. She cried and cried, but she never took the ring off. He gave me a cigar ring and it tore right away.

  One night, when he had been drinking, he confided to me that he had found the ruby ring under a seat in the m
ovie theatre. I wonder why he didn’t give it to his candy lady.

  My father kept on smoking cigars. I stopped flushing the toilet. How would I know there wasn’t a baby in it? Soon after that, my father left us, not in an anonymous swoosh of unconsecrated water circling the drain but in a convoy of wailing sirens. All the dogs in our neighbourhood sang the night my father left our house and didn’t come back.

  The life insurance wasn’t quite enough to live on. I got over my aversion to eggs. We ate a lot of them: fried eggs, chip steaks and eggs, scrambled eggs, egg in the hole – you name it. We called eggs “widow food.” When my mother died thirty years and approximately twenty-four thousand eggs and chip steaks and at least a thousand bottles of gin later, the ring slipped off her finger without a struggle. I put it on my pinkie. “My heart is protected by sleeping dinosaurs,” I thought whenever I looked at it.

  While I was feeding my hens the day of the tsunami that swallowed most of the beaches in Asia, my mother’s ring slipped off my fingers and fell into the snow and mud in the chicken yard. There was no such thing as dinosaurs, and God and my father are dead, I keep telling myself, but in my heart of hearts I hoped that one day I would crack open my breakfast egg and find her ruby.

  I’ve never had a passion like the one my mother had for my father. Sometimes I wonder if her loyalty was simple obsession or perversity because she always knew, deep down, that she couldn’t have one hundred percent of him. When we were kids, we avoided the pavement cracks. Step on a crack/break your mother’s back. That was the cardinal sin. Thou shalt not snap thy mother in half the way thy father killed crabs before throwing them in hot water or made her cry out in the night.

  I looked for the cracks in my parents’ marriage, the broken mirror or smashed concrete that had brought bad luck down on us – but there was nothing to be seen, not even the little touch me game he played with me. To be seen, the phrase that cops use to prosecute motorists who bump into invisible things, is in fact “there to be seen.”