The village of Kandili, halfway up the nineteen-mile straits, was famous for its yogurt. When the captain docked, three hawkers carrying plastic milk crates rushed onto the boat, screaming, “YOĞURT! YOĞURT!”
Nazira watched her father buy three cups for himself and shook her head in disbelief. As the boat reached the middle of the straits, Oren asked her to help him fetch everyone drinks. They descended into the passenger cabin, where they found a bar serving soda, juice, and raki.
“So, you miss Kyrgyzstan?” Oren asked as they waited for service.
“Of course,” Nazira said. “It is my motherland. You miss your motherland when you leave it.”
Past the bar through the windows she could see a group of wooden fishing caiques bobbing on the waves. An old man leaned over the bow of one boat, pulling seaweed off a tangled net.
Oren said, “We don’t use the word motherland very often in English.”
“Don’t you? My English, you can see, is very bad.”
“I think it’s amazing. Better than people I know in the States.”
She threw him a doubtful look. “That is not true.”
“It is. I teach English like you, remember?” He moved closer and leaned his tattooed arm against the bar. She puzzled over the paintings on his skin. She found him amusing, but also insincere. He tried too hard to entertain, and he reminded her of a movie star, of a character from one of the Rambo movies. From a speaker above, the driving rhythms of Black Sea music quickened. “So what do you miss about your motherland?”
“I miss my family, of course.” Nazira regarded a teacher next to them, gnawing on a piece of sesame-seed bread. “I miss our Kyrgyz foods, my garden, the flowers, the mountains. I miss the horses.”
“So you will go back soon?”
“This week, most definitely. I must convince my father he is acting stupid.” Nazira shook her head in doubt. “But he never listens to me.”
Screams from the upper deck could suddenly be heard against the music. Someone had spotted a pod of dolphins working their way down the straits, opposite the boat. Nazira gasped in astonishment, and they hurried to the windows and watched the gray animals curling through the water, then growing smaller, until they were distant specks, like rocks skimming off the waves.
Back at the bar Oren continued the conversation. “Don’t you ever dream of living somewhere else? I mean, when you’re in Kyrgyzstan, you’re in this tiny village in the mountains. Don’t you wonder what it’s like in New York? Or Paris? Don’t you want to see Australia?”
Nazira was quiet a few moments. Then she said, “I think more about people than places. The people I know are in Kyrgyzstan. My stepmother. My friends. What would they do if I leave them?” She pictured Manas and considered telling Oren about her son. But it had been hard enough to lie to Jeff the other night, and she didn’t want to go into that again.
“What if you fell in love with a very handsome foreigner, for example?” He raised his blond eyebrows. “Would you think of living somewhere else?”
She covered her smile and felt the blush spreading on her cheeks. “Where would a woman such as I meet a handsome foreigner?”
“Well, say you did?” He lifted his chest and assumed a regal air.
“I think when I fall in love with a very good man, I will want to be with him wherever he goes. But maybe he would want to be with me too. Maybe he would like my village in Kyrgyzstan.”
“Maybe he would.”
“But there are too many difficulties in this situation. He would not speak our language.”
“He’d learn.”
“And he might not like our traditions. We have our guest sing songs at dinner. We eat the eyes of sheeps. Has Jeff never told you?”
“If he loved you, this man, he would learn to sing for you. He’d eat sheep eyes every morning for breakfast.”
Nazira laughed. “And you? You do not want to return to your motherland?”
“Motherland!” Oren said, smiling.
“I mean—the United States. You do not want your children grown up in the United States? Or in your home, in California?”
“Maybe, but for me it’s more important who I’ll have those children with.”
“So, Oren, you are searching for a wife.”
“Well, yeah.” He lowered his voice. “But I’m not really searching. I kind of just figure she’s out here somewhere and we’re going to run into each other.”
Oren looked hard into her, a weighted stare. He was suddenly absurd, with his earnest expression, his painted arms and feminine blond hair and shredded cutoff jeans. She glanced out the windows at a ferry floating in the opposite direction.
“You think that’s possible?” he asked.
She returned his gaze. “I do not know about those things. I do not know.”
“Don’t you know? I’ve been thinking about you. All last night my eyes were riveted.” He leaned toward her. “I really like your freckles, and your accent. Your smile too. Why are you shaking your head? I think you’re—how can I say it? Exotic. You are exotically beautiful. I’d like to know you better.”
Like to know her better? She stared at his pointed chin. It was true, in Kyrgyzstan men could steal women, and the women had almost no choice. But this—this pronouncement of love in a public place, on a cruise, with the Turks drinking cola around them—this was something else entirely. Sashenka had warned her about Western men.
“Would you like to have dinner sometime this week?” he asked. “Just you and me? I know great restaurants in Istanbul.”
Nazira rose without answering, taking two glasses of juice.
“Don’t go just yet,” Oren pleaded.
She had lost her breath. “Yes, it is time to go up.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
But she hurried up the stairs to the sun deck, where she joined the other men. She gave her father his drink, and Adam shuffled over to make room for her on the bench. It was a relief, sitting next to this one, with no expectation of conversation, and she was perfectly content to gaze out over the railing. After a few minutes, though, Adam surprised her.
“You eat pig?”
“Excuse me?”
“I read that Muslims don’t eat pig meat. But I asked your father, and he said sometimes he did. And I asked my student, Burak, and he told me he tried bacon once. He liked it. What about you?”
“I would never eat meat from pigs.”
“Why not?”
“Adam, it is not clean.”
“Your father doesn’t care.”
“My father will eat anything.”
“Is it because of religion?”
“I never thought of it. We are not very religious, but the Kyrgyz just do not eat pig. They are filthy animals. I cannot even imagine.”
“You ever smelled bacon?”
“I don’t know what bacon is.”
“It smells delicious. I found this Polish butcher in Kadikóy. The only place in the city that sells it. If I fry it up, I bet you anything you’ll want to try some.”
“That is very kind of you, Adam, but no, thank you.”
The morning slid by, the wind rose. Passengers put up the hoods of their jackets, and the sun battled the thick gray clouds. At the narrowest point on the straits the boat passed Rumeli Hisar, the Fortress of Europe, and the air grew cool. Oren stood across the deck, talking to his teacher friends. Anarbek, Jeff, and Adam huddled close to Nazira, and they watched the green shores, lush with oak and pine, approach and recede. The wind bit her ears, and from the loudspeakers she heard a pop song about everything being blue—my house is blue, my car is blue, my girlfriend’s blue—and she couldn’t understand what it meant.
They glided under the dark expanse of the second bridge, past the Sweet Waters of Asia. Near noon the boat docked at Anadolu Kavaği, the final northern village before the straits opened out to the Black Sea. The sun had not reappeared for an hour, and the sky, still clear to the south, looked dense up ah
ead. In a garbled voice the captain announced that they would have two hours to climb to the Genoese fortress or eat lunch in the village before sailing back. Nazira’s father said he favored lunch first, but Jeff urged him to hike to see the view before the rain came. So she followed the men through the cafés and fish markets, past a simple stone mosque, and they began the climb. The fortress lay three hundred meters above them, perched on the edge of a cliff, a two-kilometer walk along a steep, curving road.
With a squad of teachers, Jeff, Anarbek, and Oren marched quickly ahead. Nazira preferred a more leisurely pace, and to her surprise Adam remained behind, as if to make sure she was okay.
The two of them walked in a steady silence until, at a right turn in the road, her foot slid on the loose gravel. “These paths are slippery,” she said.
“No traction,” Adam said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you fall easily. Like that. Careful.”
Her flats were not meant for hiking the steep hillside, and halfway up her feet had already begun to hurt. She glanced toward the fortress: the sky ahead was black. “I want to be up there,” she said, pointing. “The others are so far in front.”
“We’ll catch up,” Adam said.
And soon enough they did. The men were waiting for them at the top of the hill, on a level stone platform past the dirt parking lot. Her father reached out his hand and helped pull her up and then stood with one arm around her, trying to keep her warm in the wind. “It’s perfect,” Anarbek whispered in her ear. Before them stretched the Black Sea, an expanse of violent purple water, and over it now, approaching them quickly, loomed a grave black storm, cut by streaks of lightning.
“Rain’s coming in just a few minutes,” Oren said.
Adam pointed at the storm clouds. “Some view, isn’t it?”
“We should see the fortress,” Jeff suggested, “and get back down.”
Together they hustled along an uneven stone path to the ruins of the medieval fortress, a brown structure of seven rounded towers. In the grass near the entrance, around the fallen slabs of stone, groups of spotted cows were munching tall brown weeds. Anarbek stopped to admire them.
“Priditye!” Jeff called.
“Come on,” Nazira yelled back at her father. “We don’t have time.”
She waited for him, but he refused to hurry. After a minute, completely frustrated, she gave up and followed the others. Dinner proposals, offers of pig meat, her father’s dallying—she’d had too much of these men. They climbed one by one through a dark hole in the thick walls, emerging into the ruins of the castle, now open to the air. The remains of an outer wall surrounded a wide circle of grass, dotted here and there by sleeping pariah dogs. A few of the teachers sat on the northern stones, laughing, calling, snapping photos of the view, and pointing at the approaching storm. Nazira stepped away from the others, wanting to be alone. She strolled the grounds and noticed carved over the entrance portal an inscription of the cross. At the southern wall she leapt a ditch to reach an earthen walkway. From the steep heights she watched two oil tankers ply their way through the entrance of the straits below, like silver birds crossing a green sky.
Adam appeared from nowhere beside her. She had not heard him coming.
“The others said to find you. They’re heading back down. It’s about to pour.”
“Pour?”
“Rain.” The storm had just about reached them. The air was growing darker, more oppressive by the moment, and Nazira felt the first drops on her arm. “I saw a shortcut down there,” he said, pointing with his lips—a strange gesture. “We’ll cut down through the back of the castle and catch ’em.”
She didn’t understand why this man, who had rudely ignored her all week, was suddenly so attentive. They turned and jumped over the ditch, then followed the curve in the eastern wall to an opening between the stones. A dirt path led downhill, parallel to the road. The rain began to patter against the dusty earth, and with her poor shoes Nazira could not move quickly on the loose sand. Adam walked close behind her. Once, as she slipped, he grabbed her by the wrist and kept her from falling. His grip and lean arm were unexpectedly strong.
She glanced back up at him. “Thank you, Adam.” She was suddenly far more at ease in his presence.
His face was red, his lips tight. “Let’s keep going.”
A cold wind swept across her ears and the skies opened. The rain cascaded in slanting gusts, the most sudden rain she’d ever felt, and in seconds the two of them were drenched. She clasped the top of her red acrylic jacket. Her hair dripped and she felt the chilling wetness spreading under her light cowl-neck sweater. With each step the heels of her flats slid and twisted down the slick path.
“Take this!” Adam called over the wind.
He had removed his denim jacket and was wearing only a gray T-shirt, now completely stuck to his bony frame. He draped the coat over Nazira’s head. She held the front with one hand, and with the other she reached back and felt for his fingers. Squinting, they stumbled down the side of the hill, pulling back vines and branches that blocked the path. The percussive rain fell still harder, and her skirt became splotched with mud. Just when she thought the trail would connect to the road, it curved to the right, the opposite way. Bent over, she plowed forward through the bushes, but with a twist of her arm Adam pulled her off the trail.
He yelled against the storm, “Give it a minute!”
An olive tree with silvery leaves and pungent flowers offered some protection, and they crouched under its lowest limbs. A wave of gratitude swept over her. The rain continued to pour in front of them, but only dripped through the mass of branches above. She pulled the denim jacket to her shoulders, swiped her face, and blinked to clear her eyes. Adam squatted in profile next to her, shivering, breathing heavily. He was still holding on to her left hand.
With her other hand she reached out and brushed back the dripping bangs plastered to his forehead, revealing the scar beneath. His head jerked at her touch.
“In my opinion you are cold,” she said. “Do you want your jacket?”
“I’m all right.”
He kept hold of her hand, did not turn his head, but instead shuffled his feet slightly closer to her, so their legs were pressed side by side.
“This was not a good shortcut you found,” she said, laughing. She hadn’t been this close to a man in years, and realized she was enjoying the adventure, Adam’s nervousness, the pressure of his legs against her.
“I’m sorry.” His melancholy expression had softened.
“Here.” She removed the denim jacket and draped it over his shoulders. He leaned back, turned, and glanced at her. She shut her eyes, listening to the rain and thunder, and was reluctant to take a breath. Drops slid off the olive leaves and fell across her face. They crouched in silence for long minutes, her hand folded within his grasp, until finally the rain let up, and he lifted her back to her feet.
15
BURAK EKMEKÇİ was growing frantic—he had less than two weeks to prepare for his TOEFL exam. The morning after the cruise Adam sat with him in the bright sun at the waterfront café, the air unusually fresh after the previous day’s rain, but he could hardly concentrate on his student’s questions. His thoughts kept wandering to Nazira. He could still feel yesterday’s dampness in his skin, the warmth of her body under the olive tree. When they had met up with the others at the port, the two had pretended they’d gotten lost. Jeff bought them both T-shirts at a tourist bakkal so they could change out of their wet clothes. Adam had watched Nazira emerge from the restaurant bathroom in her dry shirt, combing through her wet black hair with her fingers. They exchanged a glance but, self-conscious, did not sit next to each other on the ship home and said little for the rest of the day. In the evening, though, playing chess with her father, Adam had felt her eyes from across the room.
“What’s wrong?” Burak asked him. “You were not listening tome.”
“A woman,” Adam said.
“Can I help?”
“Don’t know if anyone can help.”
He’d thought she was fairly attractive when she first arrived, but each day she’d grown more so. He caught himself going out of his way to catch a glimpse of her in the apartment, and too many times she had seen him staring at her like a fool. He hated to think he’d have to wait until tonight before he could see her again. But at four o’clock he met Mehmet at Fetih Pasha Korsu for basketball, and to his surprise he found everyone at the court: Anarbek in his oversize sweats, Oren and Jeff in their jogging shorts, and Nazira, following them, wearing a bright pink blouse and long flowery skirt, dark sunglasses, and Oren’s baseball hat.
Nazira watched them play from the stone steps at the edge of the court, and Adam worried she would disapprove if he scored against her father, so he took it easy. Anarbek’s basketball skills had progressed over the previous month. Despite his reluctance to dribble the ball, the big man’s natural strength and girth served him well—especially in an inside game, where he pushed the thin Turkish teens out of the way and rebounded for the team.
During the last game, Jeff and Oren returned, sweaty from their jog, and joined Nazira on the stone steps to watch. Afterward, as the players made their way off the court, chatting, Oren suggested crossing the water to the Yeats for a beer.
“You guys go ahead,” Adam said. “I’m heading back to the apartment.” He glanced at Nazira, and she offered to return with him.
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