Bozuk

by Linda Rogers

  Look what happened to Superman. He broke his neck and died a quadriplegic. Look what happens to all the men and women I have worked with. They die broken and old. The lucky ones forget. For them, life is a free fall. When they go, they jump without parachutes, welcoming the ground that comes up to meet them because they won’t remember the pain. I understand that I am the angel who rides with them, just as mine go with me. I won’t remember the pain either. Isn’t that what Güzel promised?

  I looked down on the ride up the mountain and all that fear pinched my heart. Now I am a transparency gazing down at the Aegean, remembering Roman ships coming with Empire builders and Menelaus sailing with his army to claim his adulterous wife on the shores of Troy. What a small fragment of sky I occupy. When I fall, and I will because I intend to jump with or without the help of God or the wind, the space I occupy will immediately fill up.

  Whose heart, I wonder, pumps the blood that keeps flowing to my hands and feet, my head? My father’s heart failed him and it has failed me as well. If he were standing here right now, wearing this harness with the empty chute lying on the ground behind him, I know what he would have done. He would have given up. The driver would have steered him carefully down the steep goat’s path and returned him to his hotel. My father would have tipped heavily and invited his driver to drink rakı at Ölüdeniz, the beach where restaurants advertise “Proper English Breakfasts.” He would have settled into a carpeted banquette at the Help Bar, with the pink Chevrolet with California licence plates stuck halfway through the wall, and the Turkish girls who dance all night, where he would have convinced his new friends that he was a family man. Jumping, he would have insisted, would be irresponsible.

  At this moment, when I have too much time to think about what is coming next, I hate my father for leaving us the way he did. What is heart failure but the failure to love? He didn’t love my mother and me enough to live. He didn’t love us enough to risk life.

  For years after he died, I believed he was watching my every move from some heavenly pasture. My mother invoked his presence, beginning every admonition with, “Your father,” just as she had done when he was alive. I thought the Our Father at the beginning of school prayers was mine, felt a kind of pride in his being singled out, the prerogative of orphans. “Wait until your father gets home!” my mother said. Slowly, too slowly, I realized that if he were, in fact, my guardian angel then my life would be going better.

  My father was nothing more or less than the urn full of ashes my mother kept on her bedside table, probably in the hope that they would transubstantiate into a man with a big erection, while she lay suffering from a widow’s erotic longings in her grubby cigarette-burned negligée. She continued to cry out at night and I wondered if she had, indeed, convinced herself that there was an angel in her bed.

  The sun is setting on the hills beyond Fethiye, rising again out of the devastation of earthquakes. I have never seen such sunsets. Snow and my father’s ashes brought me to Turkey but the sun has melted everything past and present. Memory. Even the Turks are astonished by the heat. Funeral corteges pass through the cobblestone streets every day, sweating men in suits following coffins born by trucks or thin horses pulling carts, with photos of the deceased pinned to their collars like the money attached to the wedding garments of Indian brides doomed to die on their husbands’ funeral pyres or live in poverty. My only relief has been taking the feribots that cross the harbours of Istanbul and Izmir, drinking the sweet çay that is served in glasses and feeling the wind in my face.

  The big star slides out of view as quickly as a yolk falls into a mixing bowl. I want to stop it. On this precipice, I should have the power. I should just have to reach out and catch it in my hands. In this country, they use the word yok to say “No, not now!” Yok! I say to the red yolk settling into the deep blue sea. Mavi, the Turks say, the word for the bluest blue I have ever seen. Blue is the colour of their compromised lives, their shops and hotels. They too are as deep as the sea, their secrets hidden in inscrutable waters, like the family heirlooms buried in the Golden Horn. I want to ride the sun into the blue and see what has been hidden from me. I want to see Iman al-Obeidi’s face looking fearlessly into the sun from her life prison.

  “When the sun goes down, we will have to go back.” My real guardian angel digs his fingers into my arms so hard I know I will have bruises. We now have a bond deeper than sexual intimacy. We have felt one another’s fear.

  “Go, go, go!” he orders, and we run as fast as we can down the rocky hill. I feel his knees bumping into my legs, pushing me forward. His fingers, if possible, dig deeper into my arms.

  Abruptly, we are weightless. The wind gathers in our chute and we are flying, as silent as snow. “We are everything and nothing!” I repeat Mustafa’s Sufi incantation, gathering my scattered thoughts.

  Güzel laughs. I laugh. Our laughter echoes in two parts. I am no longer mortal. Nothing hurts. Nothing weighs me down. We float over the rocky mountain peaks and the goats stop grazing to watch us pass over them.

  “Sevmek!” my flight companion shouts. “To love!” I understand. It is a toast. We are on top of the world. It is my turn to give the blessing. I am a snowflake.

  The sun hesitates before it disappears behind the silhouette of land into the horizon. The sky shifts from magenta to the most fragile lilac of spring. Little boats bob on the sea. I think I can see the feribot, Mavi Marmara, on which we crossed the Golden Horn. The sunset is red. The lagoon is as flat as glass. The beach is a bride’s ribbon. I am a bride, married to everything I see. I am free.

  “Baba Dag˘ı means ‘Father Mountain’ in Turkish,” he yells in my ear. This is my lightness of being.

  We hang in the sky for months, years; it couldn’t be minutes. I have no way of knowing or caring. Beneath me, the beach and lagoon are as perfect as the day they were made, when the earth moved or lava flowed from its growling belly. Tourists lie in quiet rows on the sand saluting the setting sun, street vendors squeeze lemon on mussels or salt and pepper roasted corn. The band completes their sound check in the palm-roofed club that will come alive with the sound of the blues after dark. The club is called Help. It really is. Later, we will spin like dervishes on the dance floor.

  “Would you like to rotate?” he asks. What a formal word he has chosen. “Rotate.” Before we jumped, after witnessing all kinds of scary air acrobatics, I said, “No tricks, please.” This is not a trick. It is the way it is. The world spins. We spin. Dizziness comes from resisting the clockwise movement of life. I get it.

  “Yes,” I say and, as we turn, sea becomes sky and the sun is not longer round but only one colour in the prism of light.

  We spin and I hear Güzel singing. I don’t know the words or the music, but deep down I do recognize it. We have come to the centre of the sweet onion spiced with sumak, cousin of the poisonous plant. It is not hollow. It is a dome filled with starlight. I am not dizzy. We fly by a flock of the multi-cultural Turkish crow doves, rising to defend their nests in trees on the shoreline. A plane flies over us. It could be Iman in Hillary Clinton’s airplane, hopefully leaving her terror and shame behind. I hope so. Do I see her wave from the cockpit, her hands on the controls? All is well, for now. In this moment, balanced in the clear Mediterranean sky, I think we have both found the God we seek, that of which we can conceive nothing greater.

  By the time we begin our descent, I neither need Güzel nor love him the way I thought I did. He has been my dear companion. He explains that he will put his feet down first, and on the command “Run” I should stand up and run with him until the ’chute is down and we are safe.

  The Mersey grandmother is waiting. It is into her arms that I fall, still running. “Thank God,” she says, hugging me so hard and long she could be my sister. “It is all right,” I say. “Beautiful.” She promises to meet me at the bar after I have changed and rested. She loves the band. Will I tell her everything then? “Yes,” I assure her. “There is nothing to be afraid of.”<
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  We fold up the parachute and put it in the back of the truck with the harnesses. I take off the boots I rented. The Mersey grandmother says that she photographed several descending paragliders thinking they might be me. She was looking for my girlie shoes but I fooled her with the borrowed boots. She has put her camera away.

  “Never mind,” I assure her. “I won’t need photos to remember this.”

  I go to my room at the Sugar Beach Club, rows of simple cabins on the lagoon at Ölüdeniz, and shower. No need to change to a room with a bath. No need to buy a bottle of rakı. I leave my father on the table beside my bed, just where my mother kept him.

  Sarp, the drummer, washboard and slide guitar player from Izmir whose family name means “sharp,” is singing. He is the only one in the band not wearing a Panama hat. “I love to hear that K.C. when she moans/ she sounds like she’s got a heavy load.” The song is about the train Kansas City. Two Turkish girls in black dresses, their grey headscarves fallen about their shoulders, sing along as they dance together. I am dancing by myself and I feel as if I have no load at all. I am as light as the air I fell through this afternoon. I open my eyes and see Güzel standing in the back, near the neon club sign, his shadow outlined in electric light.

  “My angel,” I mouth and wave, and he waves back.

  I begin to spin. It feels good and I am not dizzy. The music stops and starts again. Jeff leads off with “Prodigal Son.” I spin to the end of the song, and, when I look up, Güzel is gone.

  Vefa offers to walk me home at the end of the gig. The band is also staying at the Sugar Beach Club. The street is dark at two in the morning and silent, except for the sibilant whispering of cicadas. Neither of us speaks. I am listening for the camels I saw earlier in the day, for their camel breathing and spitting or the rustle of their beige bodies shifting in the night.

  Vefa is smoking. I almost comment, but hold back. Turks smoke. They don’t understand my North American attitude. Earlier, when Sarp showed off the darkness of his left arm, the suntanned one he rests on the window when he is driving, I asked him if he had any idea of the colour of his lungs. “They are black too,” he said, shrugging. “When we have regular earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts and invasions, why would we worry about cigarettes?” Why indeed.

  Vefa’s holder is an odd touch of elegance in his otherwise casual presentation – basebal cap, jeans and T-shirts. The holder, for some reason, marks him as a deep thinker. He translates philosophical writing. His father is a poet. Vefa is a manchild, waifish and yet sophisticated, a shape Coon might have grown into.

  A motorcycle speeds by. There is a girl in high heels riding bitch. “Sweet Papa Lowdown,” the driver cries out, catching Vefa’s instrument case in the beam of his headlight, and the girl repeats after him.

  “That is fame,” I say.

  “It’s that ephemeral, a voice in the night that drives away,” Vefa agrees. “So long as we don’t chase after it, we are OK. The voice can never be found again.”

  He is right and, after this afternoon, I am ready to hear him say such a thing without feeling grief. I touched the sky and I heard beautiful music. It is all done, and the fact of its ending doesn’t make any of it less perfect.

  “Shhh,” I whisper, and point to the pomegranate grove where the camels were resting when I walked by on my way to Ölüdeniz yesterday morning. The trees are still. We walk closer. I am careful in my platform shoes. There is manure scattered around.

  “They are gone,” I say. “Where could they be?”

  When I woke up this morning, I found a Turkish newspaper at the end of my bed. At the bottom of the front page is a story circled in pencil. I can’t read it but I do make out the words Iman and Libya. There is a photo from better days, perhaps when she graduated from law school. Iman is smiling at the camera. She is somewhere in America and I am here, both of us found, although not where I thought we would be.

  I was sure Güzel would disappear, one way or the other. I have googled the Turkish police and found reports of torture and other human rights abuses. Are these stories true or do the Iranians and the Syrians make them up for political reasons? I didn’t imagine that Pamuk and other writers have been arrested for insulting Turkishness. What could Güzel have done to warrant his disappearance?

  In the Turkey I have seen, men with humble businesses dig deep into their cash registers for poor beggars, people will stop what they are doing to guide visitors five hundred metres in the right direction, and a complete stranger will offer to share his food or his bed to a visitor. Do these kind and civilized people really torture one another?

  The old me would have rushed to the jandarma station and reported Güzel missing. I would have gone to the end of the earth, probably Mount Ararat where life began, or began again, and shouted his name as Greenpeace volunteers loaded the animals two by two onto the new Ark. I would have put up “Man Missing” signs along with the Sweet Papa Lowdown posters I have been taping to every available surface. I would have attempted to locate his family, and I would have informed the newspapers, “He was there one moment and then he wasn’t.” I translated my statement into Turkish and that made me laugh. I smelled orange blossoms.

  Güzel is not lost. I am found, home at last with my dad’s ashes and a bottle of Turkish orange blossom jam. Every now and again, I smell electricity and think of Haydarpasa Station, the crossroads of Europe and Asia, where the Orient Express meets trains to Asia and the ferries that cross the Bosphorus. When I heard that there had been an electrical fire at Haydarpasa, I wondered if I was psychic and if that was the fire of parthenogenesis, God’s weary finger reaching out for a last try at humanity. Perhaps.

  VICTORIA

  Recently, I watched Shall We Dance on television. It was late at night but Fred and Ginger kept me awake. I love her infamous gaucheries and Fred trying not to show exasperation, the benign expression my father wore for my graceless mother. In the middle of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” Fred dropped Ginger and stepped out of the television set, gliding across the room to where I waited for him to take me in his arms.

  “What do you know, kiddo?” my father asked, as I stepped onto his patent leather shoes and finished the dance. “How was Turkey?”

  “I think I found you,” I answered, meaning myself.

  “Now you’re getting it,” my dad said, making a one, two, three, reverse turn and disappearing into the night.

  The Turks have a present perfect tense for conjecture. It is called “mis” with a cedilla, which I do not have on my computer, under the “s.” I might say, “Once upon a time I knew a man called Güzel,” the verb ending revealing that I did not actually meet him in the reality we know as now. How beautiful are the semantics of innuendo, which allow the Turks to distinguish between “maybe” and “certainly.” It is the language of storytelling. Visitors have a hard time comprehending that. Maybe they are their own genre, a separate but parallel reality. Do we find romance in the uncertainty of English, maddening as it might be in a court of law? Do I, or do I not actually imagine this? Isn’t everything we perceive just perception? Thank you, Aristotle and Bishop Berkeley.

  This is the lesson of the Arab Spring, which decanted the old regimes only to create a hollow space, a place for insanity, where jihad bloodies the sand on Libya’s beautiful coastline, and where, according to recent reports from Colorado where Iman al-Obeidi is in jail for assault, she is not adjusting well to her own post-traumatic reality, life in “freedomland.”

  How far was it down the mountain? I write back, knowing it was more than five hundred metres, knowing Güzel will smile sadly because he knew the comforting memory of the saz and warm snow falling on my shoulders was magical thinking, temporary distraction from seismic rumblings and ashes, the new caliphate.

  I wonder if, trumpet in hand, my apostate angel will be waiting for me at Dabiq, where I intend to find him again.

  “Would you believe I found a ruby in my breakfast eggs today?” Could you please te
ll my father?

  GLOSSARY OF TURKISH WORDS

  Ağrı Dağı: Mount Ararat

  Ayran: whipped yogurt, garlic, salt and water, a refreshing drink,

  especially in the heat.

  Baba Dağı: Father Mountain in Southwestern Turkey

  Bakalım: we shall see

  Beyoğlu: the international district of Istanbul, a hub of

  Mediterranean trade

  bozuk: broken

  bozuk para: coins

  bozdurmak: change saved by storekeepers for the poor, who are

  welcome to claim it

  çay: tea, a key to understanding the linguistic relationship between

  Asian and Middle Eastern countries influenced by Islam,

  where çay is a common word from Istanbul to Delhi

  çok güzel: meaning full of goodness, a common expression for “terrific.”

  dolmuş: Turkish buses which depart when full, like “stuffed” grape

  leaves.

  feribot: ferry boat, essential transportation in Adriatic harbours

  hajib: covering garment worn by Muslim women.

  hamam: a steam bath

  İnşallah: go with God, a blessing

  iptal: cancelled

  İstiklal Caddesi: main street in Beyoğlu, Istanbul

  Jandarma: police

  jihad: holy war

  Kadıköy: Asian district of Istanbul. The hotel where Mad stayed

  was also the destination of the wife of the Paris kosher grocery

  bomber in 2015.

  Kitan – the circumcision ceremony. Young boys on the cusp of

  adolescence, dressed like princes and prepared for manhood,

  are celebrated on this day.

  kitapçı: bookseller