Oren raised his glass in a slow toast, sipped his Guinness, and licked the foam off his lips. Jeff found it comical to what lengths the expats went to imitate home. When, for instance, had he ever stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts in the States? But overseas he often craved a Bavarian Kreme and would travel an hour through traffic to get it. Friends like Oren went out of their way for Kentucky Fried Chicken. They bought newspapers—the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde—at outrageous prices two days late, in Taksim Square. And who, he wondered, among these compatriots at the Yeats, braved a Turkish dentist? Like him they went to the American Hospital, for even a simple cleaning.
On the dance floor, amid a circle of friends, Melodi was waving. Jeff smiled at her.
Oren said, “Your girlfriend’s the most incredible dancer I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s the hips,” Jeff said.
Oren squinted. “She’s not thin. I was noticing.”
“I like that. Turks call it fish meat. Balik et.”
Oren leaned across the table and started telling Jeff about his recent unlucky string of dates. He’d had three dates with three different women in the past week: a short athletic Turk, a long-legged Jew, and a dark Armenian with auburn hair. For the first two dates he had planned a film, but the women, as if conspiring against him, both showed up with a friend. With the Armenian he tried something different. They had arranged to meet at a fish restaurant on the shore in Beylerbey. It was Oren’s choice, a romantic setting on the Asian side near the Bosphorus Bridge, where the summer palace reflected yellow off the black water. One of the teachers at the girls’ lise had set them up, and he had been confident about his chances until his date showed up at the restaurant with her mother.
“I think we hit it off,” Oren said. “The mother and I.”
Jeff laughed in reflex, watching Melodi dance. He had barely been listening to the story. Oren sensed his distraction and changed the subject, lowering his voice. “She’s leading you on, man.”
“She’s not making me do anything I don’t want to do. I can break it off as easily as she can.”
“You know you wouldn’t do that.” Shaking his head, Oren watched Melodi a few seconds more. “I’ll say this once, and you’re going to have to forgive me. You’re too good for her. She’s a flirt. Nights you’re not here, I’ve seen it.”
Jeff laughed again. “Listen who’s dishing out the advice on women.” He glowered at Oren. His friend taught English at a prestigious Turkish lise. He had effortless good looks: blond hair to his shoulders, green eyes, a runner’s build. His left arm was covered in a network of tattoos that people struggled to decipher—an attention that Oren enjoyed. One tattoo showed a cartoon devil with a pitchfork; another, a snake swallowing a globe; the third, Krishna riding a chariot. Oren ran marathons and bragged he had finished the New York under 2:45. He owned a complete collection of Elvis Presley records on vinyl. He was confident and laid-back, and Jeff suspected he’d always had a crush on Melodi.
Oren said, “Consider yourself warned.” The two of them admired his girlfriend, her sequined halter top pulsating under the colored lights. Oren mumbled, “Where do these Turkish women learn to dance like that?”
She was twisting her arms, palms up, over her head. Her wrists rolled left as she gyrated her hips to the right. She made eye contact with Jeff, pointed, flung her hips twice in his direction, ran her hands over her breasts, and to the beat of the pop tune pulled her finger back three times, as if casting a spell. Cher was singing Believe—a song it seemed nobody in the world could escape. (Jeff would rail about the Turk’s love of Cher, but at home, alone, he hummed her songs to himself.) He smiled at Melodi and shook his head. She pretended to sulk and when the song ended strolled over to their cocktail table and leaned her head on his shoulder.
“Why so late?” she asked in Turkish, in her deep raspy voice. She took a quick sip of his beer.
“I got caught up.”
“Ah, yes. I see. Such a hard worker he is, no, Oren?” She was teasing him: nobody worked harder than she did, as a nurse in Bakirköy. She labored through twelve-hour shifts, five days a week. Once a week she worked overnight at the hospital. These shifts annoyed Jeff. She could never get out of them, and to make it worse, she was always agreeing to cover nights for her fellow nurses, a generosity rarely reciprocated. They could go for days without seeing each other, and it hardly seemed to bother her.
She sat on his knee and draped her arm around his shoulder. Her eyebrows were damp, and Jeff could smell the lilac-scented lotion she used on her face, the tanginess of her sweat. He was just beginning to tell her about work when the music started again—another Cher song.
“I love this song!” Melodi said. She whispered in his ear, “Dance with me.”
“A little later,” he said.
“You, Oren! Come!” Melodi kissed Jeff, grinned, and pulled Oren to the dance floor. Jeff yelled over the music, “Bring him back in one piece.”
He watched them strolling away. Oren was right: she was fleshy, not thin, with a straight, strong build and powerful legs, the kind Jeff liked, though they were thicker than his own. Her hair, died red with henna, ran down to her shoulders. What had attracted him first was her lovely, generous smile—so different from the sour looks he often received from Turkish women. He had met her the second summer after he had arrived from Kyrgyzstan. She was one of Oren’s private students. Jeff ran into them at a café in Kadikóy, and Oren had urged him to sit down so Melodi could practice her English. Under the cool shade of the awning they wound up speaking for over three hours. The coffee trays came and went a half-dozen times, and Melodi read their fortunes from the muddy grounds at the bottom of the cups. Looking into Jeff’s cup she had said, “You will have a long life, and deep love.” She told Oren, “You have a long journey ahead of you.” Two years later Oren was still bitter about that.
The pub was growing crowded. It usually filled up on weeknights by eleven. Stylish Turkish women in tight silk blouses, hints of red in their naturally dark hair, arrived in groups of four. Some had boyfriends—large, chain-smoking men who circled around them like secret-service agents. Others came to the pub on the prowl, hunting for a husband and a golden visa. They would meet a foreign man and with little shame start prying. “Where are you from? What do you do? That’s a pretty good salary, no?”
Rags of smoke wafted through the dance floor lights, up to a second-story loft. All evening couples climbed the wooden stairs to this platform, leaned over the candlelit tables, and held hands. It was one of the few places in the city where young Muslims, living with their families, could be alone. At the beer-soaked table Jeff glanced from couple to couple until he spotted Melodi near the far end of the dance floor.
Tonight they would have to take the ferry to the Eminönü tram, which ran to the end of the line, and then walk twenty minutes through the usual war zone of construction to her home. The apartment, all the way out by the Atatürk Airport, was the only place she could afford. Early in the relationship Jeff had asked her to consider moving in with him, but it had been out of the question. Her conservative parents wanted her to move back down south, out of Istanbul, to their house in Konya—they thought the city was too dangerous for a single woman.
Watching her dance now, he wondered how her feelings could have changed so dramatically. Their first months together they were inseparable, obsessed with each other. They had skied at Uludağ, earned their scuba certification in Antalya, and hiked together the ruins of the Lycian trail. He could not stop thinking about her: the depths of her voice, the way she slowly brushed back her bangs—once with each hand—the skill with which she cooked traditional meals, her combination of Islamic modesty and modern style. She was a woman still in touch with what was best about her culture. She taught him Turkish; she showed him the secret corners of the city: the best places to buy lokum, a famous confectionary on the old cobblestone streets of Moda, the fasti club where her friends listened to gypsy music. But over the
two years he had become increasingly aware of the small changes. She would take all day to return his calls on her cell phone. Over dinners with her coworkers she had stopped translating for him when he lost the thread of a conversation. She wore too much makeup for his liking, too much blush on her cheeks, strange-colored eyeshadow that he had not noticed earlier. He had been completely mistaken about the modesty of Turkish women. They were obsessed with manicures, pedicures, and facials, and they were constantly having their legs waxed (from all accounts of his expatriate friends, in the salons the stylists were brutal tearing wax off the skin). Yet, despite it all, he loved her; and the more her feelings seemed to fade, the more his grew.
Jeff had never seriously entertained the notion of settling in one place, with one person. But last year, surprising himself, he had broached the subject of marriage. Melodi apologized, saying her parents would never allow her to marry a man who was not Muslim. And even if they did, with marriage would come the immediate expectation of children. She said neither of them was ready for this. Jeff argued that he was and that she was already twenty-seven—past the age at which most Turkish women married. She said she had no intentions yet of becoming a Turkish wife, straddled with children, laundry, and housework, on top of her career.
Now each night they spent together seemed to cement the ridiculousness of the situation. Here they were, trading off turns at each other’s apartments, practically living together. All the tiresome precautions to uphold propriety! To avoid scandal! He could not telephone her at work, he could not answer the telephone in her house, and to make excuses, she called her family and friends from her cell phone whenever they were together. Last summer they had even taken a trip south to Konya, where they met her parents for the day and she had introduced him only as a friend, a visiting doctor in her hospital.
These cultural gaps cut too deeply, and Jeff sometimes wondered if it wasn’t the impossibility of the situation that made him love her. He half-expected she would tell him one day that her parents had found the right eligible Turkish man for her. “You understand, Jeff, don’t you?” she would say. “I was always honest with you.” Until then he was simply her foreign adventure, her secret rebellion. Oren was right: one of them needed to end it. Jeff was afraid it wouldn’t be him.
Under the disco lights Melodi had abandoned Oren and strutted over to a table of sweaty men from the Hash House Harriers. Oren was talking to a brunette in triangular glasses on the edge of the dance floor. As the second Cher song ended, he leaned close to this young woman, and Jeff could see her shaking her head. Soon Oren returned from the dance floor alone. In the strobe light his blond hair was a mess of tangled strings, his face dark red.
“How’d it go with her?” Jeff yelled over the music.
“She won’t go out with me.”
Jeff laughed.
“Said she needed to know me better. I asked her how she’s going to know me better if she doesn’t go out with me. Says that’s for me to figure out.”
“Give it up, man.”
Oren searched the dance floor again. “Do I look like a man who can give up?” He took a few consolatory sips of Guinness.
Melodi rejoined them and promptly sat on Jeff’s lap. He clasped her warm back loosely. She wrapped her arm around him and steadied herself not by his shoulders but by grasping the edge of his chair. Her cheeks had the chestnut flush she got when she drank too much. She was stroking her top lip, brushing at an invisible mustache she’d recently waxed.
Jeff nodded in the direction of the runners. “How are your friends?”
“They are all idiots! Do you know what they were arguing about? Whether Turkish women are servants because they don’t divorce unfaithful husbands. Mike says he knows a woman whose husband goes to the general houses every week, and she will still not divorce him. I told him the Turkish woman is faithful to her man. I told them they did not understand the Turkish woman. Divorce is not an easy thing for our families to accept. It is a tragedy when you spend so much time building the love, and then it is ended. Don’t you think it is a tragedy, Oren?”
“I’m going to get another drink.”
“No! You stay with us. I am talking.” Melodi lunged across the table, and Jeff directed her to the chair next to him. She regained her balance, sat up, and said, “What do you think, Oren? Do you think foreigners understand us Turks?”
Oren’s face colored. “You want to know what I honestly think?” he said. “I think the Turks are the most put-upon people on earth. You think everybody is always picking on you: ‘Europe doesn’t want us. The Arabs hate us. America uses us.’ You Turks spend your whole life complaining no one understands you. You’re obsessed with the opinions of others.”
“Don’t listen to him, Melodi.”
“No, Oren, you are right. We Turks are fools. We need others too much.” She picked a single roasted chickpea from the bowl on the table and bit it in half. Chewing, she said, “We Turks. Yes, the problem is, we don’t trust. Europe or Asia—we don’t know which direction to look. We want both. We want everything. But that doesn’t solve the problem. Can foreign men understand Turkish women? I think not. Those men at that table, they say we are all Oriental belly dancers. Everyone in America, they told me, thinks we are Oriental belly dancers. Or wearing the black sheets.” She covered her eyes with her hands, peeking through her fingers.
“I never thought that,” Jeff said.
“It is because I taught you differently. When I visited America on my exchange, everybody thought we were speaking Arabic. Always I was telling them we are not Arabs. One person thought Turkey bordered with India. India! Somebody asked me why Turkey wants to destroy Israel. I must teach them, we are the only Muslim friend of Israel. We are one of the most important countries in the world. How is it nobody knows us?”
Oren smiled, mocking her. “You see. ‘Nobody knows Turkey. Nobody understands us! The Turks have no friends!’”
“You, Oren, do not understand because you have not loved a Turkish woman. Jeff understands us, don’t you?”
“I try.”
She laughed and looked back at the group of runners, who had raised another round of Troys. “Now,” she said, standing, “I must go tell them what I think.” She headed off through the crowd. Oren shook his head. Jeff rose and elbowed his way to the restroom.
Above the sink the pub owners had papered the walls with pages from Yeats’s Selected Poems: “Who Goes with Fergus?” and “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.” Jeff wet his face and glanced in the mirror. He could feel the Istanbul grime on his skin, especially around his nose. His auburn hair was beginning to recede, his cheeks were getting looser. In college, when he had played club rugby, his neck had been taut, his shoulders broad. But now it was harder and harder to stay in shape. He had thinned out, faded, drooped. He would turn thirty in February.
He pulled twice at his goatee nervously, a habit he had to stop. He’d been experimenting with facial hair since he had left the Peace Corps. Over his first months in Istanbul he had grown a Grizzly Adams–style beard; but when the DHRO had hired him, he was warned that only imams in the mosques wore beards that long, so he had shaved, for the most part. He had kept a simple red goatee, whose ends he obsessively twisted into two tusklike tips. Tired of this, he attempted mutton chops, big thick, curly sideburns that wandered from his earlobes to his central cheeks; with the razor he could round the ends off or angle them so they pointed toward his eyes. His third year he shaved the chops entirely, replacing them with a bushy 1970s porn-star mustache. This he neglected to trim. For Melodi the mustache was a source of constant anguish—so much so that one night as he slept, she came at him with a pair of scissors and snipped off half. For nearly a month afterward, having his revenge, he sported a red soul patch, like a piece of shag carpet pasted to his chin. Melodi at last ordered him to grow back the less-repulsive goatee. She couldn’t appreciate a man’s need to experiment.
He found her still talking to the Hash House Harrier
s, her arm slung across the back of one man’s chair. Just as Jeff was greeting them, she pulled him onto the dance floor for two straight Tarkan songs. Afterward, they finished another round of drinks with the runners and agreed to call it an early evening.
Jeff searched out Oren to say goodbye and spotted him in the back room, behind the pool table, at the computer the owners had set up for Internet access. They charged practically nothing—a dollar an hour—to check e-mail or to surf the Web. All day expats lounged in the old green easy chair, searched the pages of hometown newspapers, and read reviews of the latest movies, which would not arrive in Istanbul for months.
“Jeff!” Oren yelled as he entered. “Check this out. Your old home.” He was flanked by Tom Delaney and two of his Swedish friends, and the four of them were surfing porn sites. Oren pointed at the computer screen, where he had typed Russian, Women into the flashing search engine. One of the results read “Women of Central Asia Seeking Love and Marriage.”
With a click, a grid of thumbnail photos showed heavily made-up Russian, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz women, wearing their best dresses, striking extravagant poses, their heads tilted, their chests raised. The site offered eighteen pages of women. Each one contained ten profiles. Oren clicked on random faces, sometimes hitting the nose, sometimes an ear, sometimes the neck. Piece by piece the half-screen photographs appeared, accompanied by text. Jeff felt his fury rising as he read:
Aisha #17562
City: Bishkek
Age: 25
Weight: 117 lb., 53 kg
Height: 5'7", 170 cm
Measurement: 35-24-35, 89-62-89 cm
Eye color: black
Hair color: black
Marital Status: divorced
In two lines of text below each picture, the woman described herself. Aisha liked volleyball and traveling. She was looking for a man devoted to his family. She spoke intermediate English.
This Is Not Civilization Page 17