Beneath this description two boxes appeared: Add Aisha to my order and See more women of Central Asia.
Tom Delaney said, “Aisha’s not bad.”
Jeff gritted his teeth, reading a line of blue text next to the photo: Overall I am extremely pleased. My responses as a result of using your service were excellent. CRA is one of the best investments I have ever made. I met Aisha one month after spotting her on your site, and she is everything I could have dreamed of in a woman. You should feel very good about what you do. I wonder if you know how many people’s lives you improve through your service. Keep up the good work.—Tom S., January 1999.
Oren clicked on more women. Michael and the Swedes crowded closer to the computer. They argued over which photos to follow, which pages to skip, which woman would be a good wife, which a good lay, until Jeff—his forehead burning—cried out:
“Stop! Go back. Once more.”
He thought he had seen Nazira. She was number 17463. He tore the mouse from Oren’s hand and scrolled down. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt, and her printed red blouse was open to her chest.
He scrolled farther down to the bottom of the page, but there was a different name. Gulnara. From Uzbekistan. It wasn’t Nazira.
“You like Gulnara, Jeff? Gonna order?”
“I thought I knew her.”
“You what?”
“I thought I knew this woman,” he said.
IV
10
LOST IN THE Egyptian Spice Market, Adam was jostled and spun by crowds vying for piles of turmeric, hills of saffron, and mountains of almonds. The hawkers shouted from beneath dangling confections of dates. Around him foreigners gawked at endless candies stacked high in boxes. A sign above a carton of Turkish delight read TURKISH VIAGRA. The scent of apple tea lured tourists into lighted shop fronts, where, like flies in a spider’s web, they were trapped by salesmen, who blocked the exit and with eager smiles descended upon their victims.
Adam pushed through and escaped the hordes. Outside, crossing the steps of the Yeni Mosque, he scattered a flock of pigeons, then hopped the tram lines and found his way up the waterside along the Golden Horn, toward the terminal marked USKUDAR. The ferry across the straits, from Europe to Asia, took fifteen minutes. He sat outside, at the rear of the boat, and watched the sun blur behind Topkapi Palace. He had arrived this morning without hopes or expectations; he had sought distance and achieved it. Fleeing home, he had found this—the weathered mosques, the sharp minarets, the hills rising above the maze of waters: the other side of the world.
Foam splashed against the ferry’s bow, and Adam thought how his mom would love it here. She delighted in the sea, the waves, things that, because they lived in Arizona, they had seen only once in his lifetime, on a family trip to Kino Bay, Mexico. He remembered swimming out through the choppy bay, digging for sand crabs with Verdena, buying shrimp with his parents off the boats docked at the fishing village. Driving home, the family had been mistaken for Mexicans and held for an hour at the border. His father had locked horns with the immigration officials: “We’re Americans, dammit. Let us in!”
Over the railing the foam churned in the ferry’s wake, and he tried to force the man’s face from his mind, to imagine what lay ahead—what, for instance, Jeff might look like now. Adam hadn’t seen him since his senior year of high school. He had called from the airport; Jeff sounded surprised when he heard that Adam had decided to visit, and then confused when Adam said he’d already arrived.
As the ferry approached the shore, he stood and flung the duffle bag over his right shoulder. Inside he had stashed his extra jeans, three pairs of cotton boxers, a second pair of high-top sneakers, Verdena’s abalone shell, and two crumpled T-shirts (his Red Cliff: Apache Proud! shirt, with the tribe’s great seal, and his faded Northern Arizona University 1997 Division Champions shirt). In his other hand he clenched the folded napkin on which he had jotted Jeff’s directions to his apartment.
Three white stone mosques towered ahead of him on the shoreline. Humming, then growling, the ferry docked. Adam crossed the wobbling blue gangplank and, past a row of magazine kiosks, dove headlong into the winding streets. Between wooden tables hawkers sold socks and winter hats and old men splashed water over bins of squirming fish. On the napkin he had written Fish and Sock bazaar. He was heading in the right direction. Up the street he stumbled on a circle of fruit and vegetable carts, with tall pyramids of tangerines surrounded by rows of pomegranates and piles of a green fruit he had never seen. Behind one cart a wizened old man used a dagger to slice the tan skin of a fruit. Juice dribbled out, and he offered Adam a red seed. Adam was too shy to take it; he could not ask what it was, he didn’t speak the language.
He followed Jeff’s map to a taxi stand, past a stall of nuts and a busy bakery with its rich brown scent. His head was foggy from the long flight, and the fume-filled air of this city made breathing difficult; but he had sat cramped on the airplane, and it felt good to stretch his legs. Three corners over he arrived at a hill too steep for vehicles, with cobblestone steps climbing its length. At the bottom of the steps a gypsy in a purple headscarf, nursing a baby, sold yellow roses. Adam consulted his napkin. Lots of stairs, it read. He switched the duffle bag to his other shoulder and ascended.
On the balcony Jeff, Oren, and Melodi studied the quarter crescent crown of the mosque across the street. They had just finished their second bowls of chili and were washing them down with glasses of raki when Jeff heard a soft, uncertain knocking from inside.
He flipped the dead bolt twice to the right, turned the keys in the doorknob to the left, jiggled them, and pulled open the door of his apartment. Framed in the light of the doorway stood Adam, seven years older than Jeff remembered him, a green duffle bag flopped over his shoulder. His hair was a mess, and his now-crooked nose gave a heaviness to his expression. He wore baggy Wranglers and a ragged Iron Maiden T-shirt under a denim jacket.
“I still can’t believe you did this,” Jeff said, smiling. When Adam had phoned that morning, he hadn’t said why he’d come, and Jeff assumed something had happened on the reservation.
Adam slapped his hand in greeting. His face was creviced from teenage acne, which lent a textured hardness to his stare as his eyes strained to take everything in. He entered, then lowered the half-empty duffle bag to the floor.
Jeff asked, “Mind taking your shoes off in the apartment?”
“No problem.” He bent and removed his left sneaker.
“You change your name?” Jeff pointed at the duffle bag, on which the words Larson Dale, Red Cliff, Arizona had been written in black marker, then crossed out in a thick, slanting zigzag.
“It was my father’s, is all.” Adam looked back down. “Goddamn knot in this one.” Jeff saw that the laces of the right sneaker, a dirty Adidas high-top, were tangled. Adam picked at the shreds of cloth with his fingertips—his nails were bitten to nothing. With the knot still in place, he managed to tug the shoe off.
Jeff offered him a drink, but he refused, so he showed him into the living room, which ran the western length of the apartment. They crossed the hardwood floors over the chain of violently colored kilims. Jeff motioned through the windows north to the straits, west across the water to Europe, the Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and then south, where the adjoining building partially blocked the view of the sea.
“Some place you got.” Adam stopped at the window and took a long look at a Russian tanker gliding north along the straits. “You sure it’s all right, me staying here?”
“I invited you. Let’s check out your room.” Jeff tried to show enthusiasm, though he was slightly put off by Adam’s sudden arrival and the imposition of an unexpected guest.
He walked Adam down the hall, embarrassed by the extravagant living conditions. It was wasteful, a single guy living in this three-bedroom apartment. When he had taken the job at the DHRO, he had not been looking for anything so luxurious. But how could he have turned it down, with its view, and t
he price fully within the housing allowance? He showed Adam into the second bedroom. Last spring a friend had visited from Tucson, and he had set up a foldout bed for him, which had gone unused ever since.
“Look, you can stay in here. The couch pulls out. TV gets five channels. You can practice your Turkish. That duffle’s all your stuff?”
“Don’t want a lot of stuff when you’re moving around.”
“Makes sense. So, the bathroom’s down the hall. Most of the time there’s hot water.” He stopped for a second. “You look like shit, Adam. What the hell have you been doing with yourself?”
“I was in New York.”
“New York! How long were you in New York?”
“Over three months. I worked security. At the Museum of Modern Art.”
“How’d you hook up with that?”
“I read it in the paper. The Village Voice.” Adam shrugged. “I applied, and they told me they needed more Indians working there.”
“Christ.” Jeff laughed. “And where’d you stay?”
“I found this old hotel. Ninety-third and Broadway. Three hundred a week.”
“I guess that’s not bad, for New York.”
“It was expensive as hell, and the place was a piece of shit. I didn’t even have a TV.”
“So you came here.”
“Once I got the passport and had enough for the ticket.”
“Adam fucken Dale,” Jeff said, shaking his head.
He led him out to the enormous balcony, which wrapped around the entire top floor of the building. The evening air had grown cool and wet. Oren and Melodi were lounging in the wicker chairs, their feet resting on the concrete wall. They introduced themselves.
“So you’re Indian?” Melodi asked.
“Apache.”
“Shit,” Oren said, “first Apache I’ve met in Istanbul.”
“First Apache I’ve met anywhere!” Melodi added.
“That right?”
Oren asked about Arizona and the reservation, and Adam mumbled his answers slowly, and finally said he didn’t feel much like talking about home. He stood silent, gazing out over the balcony.
Jeff was at a loss for something to say, but Melodi, with her indomitable instincts of hospitality, roused them. “We must show Adam our city. Come.” They walked halfway around the balcony, and she pointed north in the distance. “It is our Bosphorus Bridge. The sixth-longest bridge in the world. We used to be able to walk across it. Only too many people were jumping off, so they have closed it for walking.”
“Jumping to swim?” Adam asked.
Jeff laughed. “Swim? Christ, no, not to swim. Something like thirty people jumped off it one year.”
Adam squinted hard in the distance. “You’d think they could survive that, if they hit the water right.”
“One guy survived,” Oren said. “His jacket spread out in the wind, like a parachute. He floated down and landed soft enough to live. A fisherman dragged him out of the water.”
Adam said, “Some kind of miracle, isn’t it?”
Jeff watched the Apache staring across the steady waters at the bridge to Europe. He was a strange sight, and Jeff realized now his own memories of Red Cliff—the teen center, the Sunrise Dance, his old truck—were all linked to Adam. He wasn’t entirely comfortable having Adam here, crossing into this stage of his life. It made him self-conscious in a way he had not felt since Arizona.
Jeff ushered them back around the balcony and inside to the living room. “You sure you don’t want a beer? Pop? We’re drinking rakt.” Jeff pounded his chest. “Lion’s milk, they call it here. And we’ve got some chili, too, if you’re hungry.”
“I wouldn’t recommend the chili,” Oren warned.
Jeff gave him the finger. “It’s the last time you’ll see Oren in this apartment.”
“A shower first, if you don’t mind,” Adam said. “Then a beer. Look, you sure about this? You tell me if there’s a problem.”
“No problem. There’s plenty of room. Stay as long as you want. Only one thing—I’m leaving Saturday on business.”
“Well, shit.”
“I’m telling you, it’s no problem.”
“What kinda business?”
“It’s an interviewing trip, for refugees. I’ve got to go to Yemen.”
“Don’t even know where that is.”
“Kind of south, near the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia.” Jeff led him back to his duffle bag at the front door. “Over there, all day long people chew this leaf called qat. All the men, they have qat-chewing parties for lunch. By noon, the entire country’s sort of tripping.”
The Apache smiled. “That right?” It was the first Jeff remembered seeing him smile—a subdued grin, only the slightest hint of teeth, with the edges of his lips turned down, as if this gesture, like everything else, was burdensome.
“Makes it hard to get anything done,” Jeff explained. “Takes us a week. Paperwork we should be able to do in a day.”
“Qat, isn’t it?”
“I’ll bring you back some, if you’re still around.” He pointed to the duffle bag crumpled on the floor. “Well, go ahead, make yourself comfortable.”
Adam made himself so comfortable, three weeks later he was still there. It seemed an arrangement of mutual convenience, for him free rent, for Jeff someone to keep an eye on the apartment when he went abroad or stayed at Melodi’s. Space was no issue; the duplex was large enough to lose each other. Money was not a problem: the apartment came with Jeff’s job, a benefit the DHRO provided to make up for his meager salary.
When it was clear to Adam he would stay awhile, Jeff copied him a set of silver keys. He showed him how to unlock the three bolts to the downstairs door, an elaborate procedure.
“It would be easier,” Adam said, “just to kick the fucker in.”
Jeff led him on an instructional tour of the apartment’s defects. “The place looks nice,” he said, “all done up and everything, with these parquet floors and wood trim and all. But take a look at that. See how the molding’s about to fall off. There’s hardly a right angle in the place. Come in here.” He led him to the kitchen. “Look under the sink at that plastic pipe. You know how many times a month that breaks off? Shoddiness! It’s all a cover-up, Adam. That’s how you know you’re in a developing nation. Think about it. In America, you can flush toilet paper. You can’t do that here. Flush a square, and plastic pipes like that’ll burst.”
“You complaining?” Adam asked. The apartment was more spacious than any house in Red Cliff.
“No, I love it. I love this shoddiness. America’s so—easy. Everything works. You know what I’m saying?”
“Easy?”
“What I’m saying is, even on the reservation, you could flush toilet paper.”
Adam said, “Growing up we had an outhouse.”
Jeff promptly changed the subject.
In general he seemed glad for some noise in the huge apartment, for someone to throw ideas off of once in a while. And he respected Adam’s quietude. Only once did Jeff complain, saying that being in the same room during his guest’s silent spells made him edgy. But soon Adam found that when he was in a sour mood, Jeff kept his distance.
On his first Saturday, with Jeff gone, Adam met Oren and his friends at the W. B. Yeats for a beer. He kept mostly to himself, drank his Troys stoically, and simply watched what was going on. Oren checked on him now and then.
“You gonna stay in the city awhile, Adam?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I’ve got a job offer, if you’re interested.” It was possible, Oren told him, to earn fifty dollars an hour teaching English to wealthy Turks. There was little actual teaching involved: the students simply wanted practice. Oren, in addition to his responsibilities at the girls’ lise, had too many students and needed to unload one.
This was Burak Ekmekçi, a powerful twenty-five-year-old water-polo player on the Turkish national team. Queens College in New York had recruited him and offered a
n athletic scholarship. To be admitted, he had to pass the TOEFL exam with a score of 550. So far, benefiting little from Oren’s rushed sessions, the athlete had failed twice. According to Oren, Burak Ekmekçi was not a person who handled defeat easily. He was getting desperate. His wealthy parents believed a future depended on graduation from an American university, and determined to break 550, Burak wanted more tutoring hours, as many as possible. His father would pay generously. Oren simply did not have the time.
“You just sit there with him and go over his mistakes on his practice tests,” Oren explained. “At the end of two hours he’ll hand you a hundred-dollar bill. And I told him he was getting a genuine native speaker, so expectations are high. Only one thing—he’s a little intense.”
“I don’t know. I never taught anything.”
“Think about it. But let me know by tomorrow.”
The stuffy air of the pub became too much for Adam, and he left early. He preferred the long solitary walk in the wet evening air along the decrepit city streets. He liked the warmly glowing windows of apartment buildings, the shadows passing back and forth, the screams of children and rebukes of mothers. He spotted old men hurrying to neighborhood mosques after the call to prayer. It amazed him how, in the dolmuş—the shared minibuses—his money was passed up to the driver and back along the line of strange passengers; he would never have trusted half the people on the rez this way. And he especially liked the midnight ferry ride back to Asia, the palaces lit up on shore, the black tinfoil water reflecting the city. Rows of headlights glittered across the Bosphorus Bridge: cars full of people going somewhere.
He decided to take the work.
At Burak’s urging the daily sessions began the next day. Adam met him in an open-air card house in Ortaköy, beside a gleaming white mosque on the waterfront. They sat among the old men battling over backgammon, and the slamming of plastic pieces grew so loud that Adam suggested they find a quieter place. The Turk said he liked the noise, though—it helped him concentrate. Adam watched him puzzle over practice TOEFL tests and explained the meanings of difficult words. He had the sense the two of them made a comic pair. Adam was tall and athletic, but Burak was taller still, twice as wide, with hulking biceps and a back that stretched his tailored silk dress shirt. They sat hunched for hours over a stack of paper. Burak’s palms perspired as he worked. He smudged the answer sheets, and sometimes his thick fingers broke the pencil in half if he pressed too hard. He was brutish but sensitive. If Adam reminded him for the third time that the past tense of begin was began, or if he tried to correct his habit of pronouncing f’s as w’s, the big man’s eyes watered. Adam attempted to be gentler in his criticism, but it wasn’t much use. After a careless mistake, Burak would pound his head on the table.
This Is Not Civilization Page 18