This Is Not Civilization

by Robert Rosenberg

  “Let me ask you then, Nazira, who has been buying your leather jackets?”

  “Customers on the street. They seem eager enough.”

  “Friends of his.” Sashenka slapped the edge of the table, rattling the empty plates. “Friends of Faruk. That is who is buying your leather jackets. When Faruk has your confidence, you’re caught. You’ll start depending on him. Pretty soon you’ll sell all day for him, and take less of a cut. He’ll ask for your passport, and then you’ll be working for next to nothing. You’ll be desperate, doing him favors. I’ve been here for three years, Nazira. I too have a family at home, in Romania!”

  Nazira felt foolish. “I didn’t know.”

  “You have to be careful.”

  “No, my father wouldn’t let him take advantage of us. We’ll leave before any of that can happen.”

  Sashenka shook her head. “You’re such a simple woman! I was once simple too.”

  They ate their salads, and Nazira tried changing the subject; but about Jeff, Sashenka could offer little solace. “You haven’t mentioned it?” she chided. “You are staying with the father of your child, and he says nothing of it to you?”

  Nazira explained that she had not had a chance and then, having a chance, had lost her nerve. It was not important really. Manas had been an accident. A happy accident, she assured Sashenka. Jeff had not answered her letters, and she had never expected to see him again. “What can I do? Force him back to Central Asia with me?”

  “But money!” cried Sashenka. “Support! He’s left you with a tremendous burden and he’s given you nothing.”

  Nazira had never thought of her son as a burden. She remembered the way Manas collected his animal magazines, the delight with which he chased the dogs of Karl Marx Street. But now her friend was laughing at her. “You poor girl,” she consoled her. “He took advantage of you and just disappeared.”

  “No. That is not what happened.”

  Sashenka asked with an ironic smile, “What exactly happened then?”

  What had happened? She had never attempted to explain it to anyone. “It was just one night,” she said. “We were carried away. He was leaving, and there was something so final. We had this friendship. We could talk to each other. He seemed so generous then. And my father—”

  “Make the American pay,” Sashenka said, listening to her stumble to make sense of it all. “He owes you!”

  “Does he?”

  Nazira looked into her friend’s hard eyes. Sashenka assumed her actress air and drew imaginary lines on the tablecloth. “We women need to protect ourselves. We need rules that every woman must obey, if only to keep our dignity. You are breaking one of those rules, Nazira. You are allowing that man to get the upper hand and get away with it. You have to be stronger.”

  “I thought I was being the strong one.”

  “And braver,” she said. “You must be braver.”

  “Wasn’t I being brave?”

  “Neither. Where is he?” The Romanian stood up in mock seriousness and clenched her fists. “Show me where he is. I’ll tear his tiny balls out from under his fat American stomach! I’ll make him pay for this.”

  Nazira raised her hand to her lips. She had never heard expressions like this from a woman’s mouth.

  Sashenka exploded in laughter and sat down again. With a mischievous smile she said, “I would, you know. No man does that to a friend of mine.” She thought for a few seconds. “If your father needs money so badly, get it from the American. Make him pay some every month, for his child.”

  “No,” Nazira said. “I cannot do that.”

  “Why?”

  It occurred to her only then that she did not want Jeff to have a part. She knew now that she had never loved that man, and she didn’t have to tell him anything. “Jeff owes me nothing,” she said. It was an astonishing thought: her son belonged to her alone.

  Sashenka shook her head in frustration. They lingered over the rest of the lunch in an uncomfortable silence. It was only with some effort that Nazira broke the spell to ask for the bill.

  14

  IN THE dolmuş Melodi leaned against Jeff, pressed her cheek to his, and asked in a whisper where they were going. He had not seen her in over a week. Now, after a Friday night dinner in Beyoğlu, they had not yet decided whose home to return to. Around them the other five passengers sat in silence. The dark Kurdish couple sharing the back seat huddled arm in arm as the driver swerved between lanes, honking his horn in quick blasts. Since Anarbek had come, Jeff had limited his overnights at Melodi’s apartment to once a week, as he was uncomfortable leaving his guests alone. He knew he was more conscious of the separation than she was.

  He had yet to break the news of Nazira. Now, returning the whisper, he told her that another guest had arrived. She stared incredulously at him.

  “And how do you know him?” she asked louder, in Turkish.

  “It’s a woman, Anarbek’s daughter. A good friend.”

  “And she will be living with you like Anarbek? For weeks? For months?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” Melodi’s sudden jealously pleased him.

  “You cannot ask?”

  “Actually, no. I cannot.” Trying to calm her, he started to explain the Kyrgyz expectations of hospitality.

  “But you are not Kyrgyz, Jeff. You are American!”

  “Shhh. I owe them a great deal. When I lived in Central Asia, they were very good to me.”

  Melodi asked in English, “She is only a friend?”

  Jeff felt cramped and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. The passenger in the front seat swung her head back around, pretending she wasn’t watching, and the couple to their right looked steadfastly into their laps, but he knew they too were listening. Through the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes darted right and left, searching for gaps in traffic. Jeff held the back of Melodi’s soft hand and, intertwining his fingers with hers, squeezed once, then harder—a signal that they would talk about this when the dolmuş stopped.

  The force of the turning vehicle pushed them against the door as the driver ran a red light and swung through the traffic circle of the Beşiktaş İskele. They waited for the others to climb out, then Melodi slid her way over the shredded vinyl seat, not looking back at Jeff. Outside on the pier, shaded by a mulberry tree, she stood in silence, her arms crossed.

  “I need to go back to see if they’re all right,” Jeff said.

  “I think I will not go with you tonight.”

  “Will you go home?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I will go to the Yeats.”

  He knew she was asking him to plead. In the past, no doubt, he would have. But he didn’t want to introduce her to Nazira—too awkward, and with Nazira in the next room, he would be far too uncomfortable sleeping with Melodi. They had reached a turning point, and he was unprepared.

  “You want me to come with you to the Yeats?” he asked. “Or I could take you home first, then go back to my place.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll go alone.”

  Jeff stared at the wet sidewalk.

  “You have changed, Jeff. Since your friends have come, I have always the feeling that you don’t want to see me.”

  “That’s not true.” His voice was weak. How was she turning this on him? He had asked her to marry him.

  “Yes, I understand, Jeff. You have an apartment full of guests. You need to go check in on them. Good night then.”

  “No, it’s all right. Maybe they’ll be okay.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips. A young shoeshine boy, his hair matted, his ragged shirt torn at the collar, watched from a few yards off, waiting for them to finish the argument before he approached. Jeff gave him a fierce look, and the boy raised his wooden stool over his shoulder and stepped back to the water’s edge.

  Melodi asked again, “She is only a friend, this Nazira?”

  “Yes. Well, not really.” Jeff hesitated. “Actually, Nazira was more than a friend.”

  Mel
odi’s face—always lively, always bright—grew somber as she gazed at him. She closed her eyes, thinking, then lifted her chin and raised herself to what seemed a new height. “How much more was she than a friend?”

  Jeff simply shook his head.

  “And now she is living with you? You have invited an old girlfriend of yours to stay with you? It is wrong, Jeff.”

  “How is it wrong?”

  He was growing frustrated. She would not commit, she would not move in with him, but here she was, telling him who could stay in his apartment and for how long.

  “Where is she staying?” she asked.

  “In the study, with her father. I’m telling you, she won’t be here more than a week.”

  “That is what you said about Adam. You need to tell them all to leave.”

  “What difference does it make to you?” he asked. “They’re friends of mine. They’re not living in your apartment.”

  “It used to feel like my apartment, too, Jeff. It was not a hotel. I used to feel welcome there.”

  “So welcome you could have lived there, and you’ve chosen not to.”

  Her head snapped upward as if he had struck her. “Jeff, I think I will go home now. I don’t need you to take me. Iyi geceler.” She pronounced the words stiffly. This use of the Turkish plural—good nights—had always, in its logic, baffled him. But now it made her goodbye more than final, as if she was wishing him good night for the rest of his life.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She had turned her back on him, revealing the light nape of her neck, his favorite part of her body. In her hoarse voice she whispered, “There is nothing more to say. No, nothing else. I cannot believe you have done this.” She swung around again, facing him, and said in Turkish, “Go back to your guests, Jeff. They are important to you. Go back to your friend Nazira.”

  “I want you to understand. They are not more important than you.”

  She ran her hand through her hair. “I am beginning to understand. I have given a lot of time for us, Jeff. None of this is easy for me either, with my family and my job. And to come all the way into Taksim from the hospital, to be with you each week. But I do it happily. Why is everything always so difficult for you? You want more and more. You have never accepted all I give. And now it is this.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, I am sorry too. We have the Turkish expression: Akar akar da durulur.” A stream flows and flows, then settles down.

  He smiled weakly, nodding, but she walked off in firm steps to hail a taxi. He was burning to call her back again, to reassure her about Nazira, to admit he had been unwise and had made an egregious mistake. Circumstances divided them, he wanted to tell her—not love. In the twilight the shoeshine boy was still watching, taking in the entire scene. Jeff felt a wave of nausea and was suddenly furious. He wanted to grab the kid by the scruff of his neck and shake him. But he composed himself and strode resolutely to the ferry, to force the waters between him and Melodi once and for all. Sitting alone on the windy top deck he felt part relief and part loss. He looked back at the pier and saw her duck into a taxi; and suddenly he felt only a sharp regret, like a man who has purchased on impulse something he could not afford.

  Oren had been thrilled to hear that a woman like those on the Internet was staying with Jeff, and all week long he had been inventing tenuous excuses to invite himself over. He offered to return books Jeff had not, in fact, lent him. He wanted to bring an extra inflatable mattress in case someone needed a place to sleep. He suggested theme nights for dinner: they should all make stir-fry, or he could whip up some real American barbecue for the guests. But Jeff had told him he had enough on his hands at the moment.

  Just after Jeff returned home, though, disgusted with himself, Oren showed up. He had the Sunday New York Times from the previous weekend with him—he had bought it for twelve dollars at a newsstand in the Hilton Hotel. He bore it into the apartment like a lost treasure, dropping it with a crash onto the living room floor, and then immediately introduced himself to Nazira. Adam made a grab for the sports section. Anarbek perused the bra advertisements. Oren stared at Nazira, who carefully turned glossy pages of the magazine section, afraid to rip them. Adam had discovered pirated copies of his favorite heavy-metal CDs for sale on the streets in Ortaköy, and now he inserted them into Jeff’s stereo, and turned up the volume. Judas Priest and Guns N’ Roses shook the windows of the living room.

  “Can you turn that down?” Jeff asked. He felt like a chaperone.

  Into the evening, Adam and Oren sprawled on the woven rugs, their heads propped against antique grain sacks that Jeff had stuffed like pillows. Nazira and her father sat upright on armchairs. Oren entertained them all with a litany of dirty jokes, most of which Nazira did not understand, though she translated for her father, who listened with his mouth open in an expression of genuine puzzlement. Oren showed off his tattoos. He told how he had worked for a summer in northern California as a beekeeper’s assistant and then spent an entire hour explaining the mating habits of bees. As a high school student he had studied aikido, and he demonstrated with Adam various holds, throws, and defenses, knocking one of Jeff’s inlaid porcelain plates off a stand.

  Later in the evening Oren watched the chess game between Anarbek and Adam, offering both of them advice, which, rolling their eyes, neither man followed. From the hallway closet Oren pulled out a backgammon board and challenged Jeff to a match, which he declined. Nazira, conveniently, was the only one left, and she agreed to play him. She sat on the couch, leaning slightly forward, cupping her cheeks as if it helped her strategize, and she gave the slightest blow of air as she moved her pieces. Each time he finished his turn, Oren would lift the dice off the board and hold them out for her to pick from his open palm. Exasperated, Jeff couldn’t help but laugh.

  He sipped Nescafe and for long minutes observed the scene in his apartment. The percussion of Adam’s heavy-metal music was driving nails into his skull, and suddenly Jeff was overcome by a wave of fury, an urge to kick his guests out, boot every last one of them onto the street, let them fend for themselves. But he knew he never would. Near midnight they were still playing their games, Axl Rose was belting out “Welcome to the Jungle,” and Jeff served his guests a box of chocolate-covered Turkish delight and wished them all good evening.

  The apartment was perfectly quiet early Saturday morning when a steady pounding on the door roused him. The noise interrupted a dream he’d been having in which he was hiking down the Grand Canyon with Melodi. Through the early light streaming from the living room, he blundered down the hallway, furious. Such pounding on a door—this loud, at this hour—he had not heard since Kyrgyzstan, and he dreaded the arrival of some new ghost from his past. The heavy brass bolt stuck as always, and he had barely got it open when Oren crashed in, his eyes wild with excitement.

  “We’re going on a cruise! Get up!” he yelled. “Get up!” He pushed past Jeff, hurried through the foyer to Adam’s room, and rattled the knob. “Everyone rise and shine! Top of the morning, Geronimo! How about a free ride up the Bosphorus?”

  Jeff followed him down the hall, trying to quiet him, but he was already smashing the door of the study. “Let’s go, you Kyrgyz! Davai! Davai!”

  “What the hell, Oren?” Jeff whispered.

  “School’s taking the teachers on a free cruise up the Bosphorus. I decided you’re gonna join us. You’ve all been working too hard.”

  “You could have asked us last night.”

  Oren mocked him in an extra-loud whisper. “I forgot. Didn’t remember until this morning.” He pounded again and yelled, “Let’s go, sleeping beauties!”

  Jeff pushed his friend from Anarbek’s door. “It’s seven thirty,” he hissed. “Let them sleep.”

  Adam appeared down the hall in a T-shirt and boxers, his eyes half-closed. Anarbek opened his own door with a lazy frown. “Shto?” he asked. He scratched his hairy stomach, stretched his arms, yawned, and hurled a volley of Russian e
xpletives at them.

  The hired ferry was docked at the Üsküdar İskele, its top deck crowded with Turkish women who glared out from under wide-brimmed hats and pinched early-morning cigarettes between their fingers. Oren led the group to a row of open whitewashed benches, where they sat down and stared across the waters. To the west the straits shimmered in the morning brightness, the turreted palaces etched in relief against the stark blue sky, but to the north the sky looked threatening.

  Nazira pointed to the clouds ahead. “Maybe we should have brought the umbrella?”

  Jeff turned to Oren. “If it rains on us, we’ll make you regret this the rest of your life.”

  “Lighten up, Jeff. Have some fun for once.”

  At exactly eight, earsplitting Turkish pop music clamored from a speaker above the wheelhouse, and the boat pulled away from shore. Oren stood next to Jeff, spread his arms, and jerked his shoulders in imitation of a Black Sea Laz dance. “Get away from me,” Jeff said, but smiled despite himself. Nazira seemed smitten with Oren and snapped her fingers, urging him on, while some of the science teachers clapped and shouted his name. Adam leaned both elbows against the railing and laughed. Anarbek descended to the galley in search of breakfast.

  The slow boat ride was tedious for Jeff, who had made this trip a dozen times since he had come to Istanbul. He was still reeling from yesterday’s scene with Melodi; and staring down at the green depths, lost in thought, he had difficulty showing any enthusiasm when his friends gestured to the sights and asked what they were.

  Adam, though, appeared to be completely taken with the boat and the scenery. He swung his head in both directions so he wouldn’t miss anything. They sailed northwest against a heavy current, then began the long meandering back and forth across the straits. The captain interrupted the music to point out landmark yah, ornate Ottoman seaside mansions with boathouses built into their lowest levels. People crowded the railings and shot photographs of the Çirağan Palace. The boat docked to pick up another group of teachers near the white mosque of Ortaköy, on the seaside square where Adam said he tutored Burak. Angling back across the water, they passed directly under the Bosphorus Bridge. Jeff gazed up at its expanse with a chill of vertigo, feeling something this large might come tumbling down on them. A man had jumped off these heights and survived. From this perspective, the span seemed too high; surviving a jump like that no longer seemed possible.