Two Stories on the Islands
He loved the boat ride out, the wind
lifting away the city’s heat, the crowds watching the skyline fade into the
haze, the simit vendors with their wares balanced atop their heads, the gypsy
dancers with their tambourines, the hustlers and merchants hawking their
trinkets – vegetable peelers, fruit juicers – to mocking but captive audiences.
Above all, he loved the motion, the fresh scent of open sea.
David and Amjad were going to the
islands, aboard one of Istanbul’s hulking old city ferries, attractive wooden
ships with towering, but dormant steam stacks. They’d been sprung from work
because of the anti-Israeli protests around the city. Their office, by
coincidence, shared a plaza with the Israeli consulate. They’d both arrived in
the morning to find broken windows and a phalanx of riot police surrounding the
building.
“Strange that they’re protecting us for
once,” Amjad said with a smirk as the police pushed them away.
They got off the ferry at Heybeliada,
the third island, and with Burgazada, one of the quieter islands. The harbor
was lined with open air cafes fronting wooden, once-Greek homes, where families
finished late breakfasts. Beyond this promenade, the rest of the island climbed
to a central peak, the green hills stacked with grand, crumbling homes, a few
minor minarets rising from the cypress and pine trees.
After buying some nuts and dried fruit, and
a few plums, they climbed the hill away from town. Soon, they were into a pine
forest. The soft noise of the village faded away, and the cacophony of the city
was far off, glimpsed through the trees, sprawling endlessly – literally
endlessly – across the sea.
In its place was something unfamiliar – the sound
of wind in trees. It was only occasionally interrupted by the jaunt of a horse
drawn carriage rattling past.
The beach Amjad liked was on the
island’s far side, around a bend so that Istanbul, incredibly, was no longer
visible. The descended a steep hill to the cove. It was a stone beach, maybe
twenty old beach chairs. An older man and his family sat at a picnic table
outside a shack, inside which the grandmother brewed tea.
Save for a few German students, they had
the place to themselves. After sitting in the sun for a time, they swam around
the cove’s edge, where they found a cluster of rock chimneys rising out of the
sea.
They scrambled over a bed of mussels onto the rocks.
“Do you think we can jump?” David asked,
having climbed the highest chimney. The sea below was clear, the bottom far
off. Amjad dove from a lower rock, kicked his way beneath the surface for a
while.
“I couldn’t touch,” he said, breaking
the surface. “You’ll be fine.”
David stood looking for a while. Such
distances always look greater and more impressive from the top than the bottom.
There was no amount of preparation that would make the leap seem more
palatable, less risky. Eventually, he just had to push off and jump. He broke
the surface, the cold sea enveloping him.
They took turns leaping from the high
rock. On Amjad’s third jump, his toes barely grazed the bottom.
After a half dozen turns, David found a
place on one of the lower chimneys to lie. He found that a natural curve in the
stone fit his body perfectly, and he reclined there in the sun while Amjad sat
atop the tall chimney. He looked over the water. It was a dark, clear blue,
like blown glass. Sunshine spilled in long, glittering columns across its
surface.
“All this shit, man. All this shit. It
makes you hopeless, right?” Amjad said.
David smiled, his eyes closed. “That’s
what I feel right now. Hopeless.”
“You know what I mean. You don’t feel
guilty about this sometimes? Sitting here, lounging in the sun, happy. You and
I, here we are, jumping off a rock into the sea. Young, healthy. We have women
who love us, women we love. What’d we do to deserve that? Meanwhile, kids are
dying on a different beach. Families are being forced from their homes. Erdogan
is rounding up Syrians like dogs and shipping them off to prison camps.”
David saw them sometimes on his early
morning runs, Syrian families in tents in the park by his house. They stayed up
all night around a bonfire. The boys played football until dawn.
David opened his eyes,
“Of course I know. What are we supposed
to do?”
“I don’t know. Change it, somehow. Feel
bad about it.”
David laughed.
“I disagree. This,” he said, opening his
arms, “this is grace. It won’t last, for either of us. You know that. You get
on a plane and some whack job shoots it out of the sky. You get married and
your wife leaves you. A kid walks into a shopping mall and shoots you in the
head. Your son goes out to the play in the backyard and he hangs himself in the
rhododendron bush by accident. Your job treats you like shit. You get lost in
consumerism. Your family gets kicked out of its home by a predatory bank or
some nutjob with an AR-15.”
“I think ISIS uses AKs.”
“Whatever. You get the point. Don’t
waste this. If we do, what are we? The terror will come in due time. This ends
eventually. But it would be disrespectful to take this for granted.”
Amjad thought about his parents in
Tehran. It had been a year since he’d had his last, covert communication with
them. It was too dangerous. His father hadn’t said a word to him when he rushed
him into the trunk that would take him to Turkey. But Amjad remembered his
face, the disappointment on it – as if he already knew the opportunity would be
wasted, would be spent on this: days lounging in the sun. Then, wasn’t that all
he’d grown up wanting? The opportunity to choose this, to choose that living
this way had meaning to him.
Still, his father haunted him, his baby
sister haunted him. He should be working harder for them. He should try to
bring her with him. He should go back for them. He should live selflessly.
“I think it’s different growing up with
Islam,” he said. “Everything you call grace, that’s a sign. It’s a sign pointing
to God and demanding submissing to God, so that we can get the real gift in the
next life.”
“I’m going to enjoy the one life that I
have concrete proof actually exists.”
“You’ve never been tempted by faith?”
David felt the sun on his stomach. He
imagined, not for the first time, his brother being scorched to death in the
Kazakh desert, the sun slowly withering the life from him. It was how he had
decided Andrew’s end had come. He’d built up a story in his mind – a woman, a
whore, who was in love with her pimp, who had once been a Russian spy. The two
of them tricked Andrew, left him in the desert to burn. It was a story he told
no one.
“Sure I’ve been tempted. I’ve asked
questions, to the heavens or what have you. And all I got back was silence.”
“So the change of the seasons, the
mechanisms of your body, the cycles of the moon – all that’s silence?”
David smiled again. He’d always found
the laws of science the most compelling evidence for a God. But he also
believed that faith was something you felt, deep in your core, something
nameless but present. He’d opened himself, time and again – in mosques and
churches, in bars and bedrooms – and what he felt was an absence, a void, and
everything slid irrevocably towards that void.
“No, but when I followed the evidence as
best I could, what I found was absence.” David sat up, looked at his friend,
who was framed by the sun. “I didn’t know you were actually religious.”
“I mean, I’m not Muslim. That’s all a
bunch of nonsense to me, the strictness of the faith, how it asks you to set
aside reason, assume that an angel dictated a book to a guy 1400 years ago.
Especially when that guy had a vested interest in controlling an increasingly
vast populace.”
“Maybe that’s why I’ve never turned to
faith,” David interjected. “I’ve never wanted it to be out of fear – fear of
death, fear of damnation. And I do fear death. But I’m not going to claim faith
because I’m worried about life being meaningless. The truth is the truth, fear
or not. I’m sorry. I interrupted.”
“No, I agree. But I guess I do think
there’s something there, though if there is, I think it’s far more benevolent
than the Christian God or the Muslim God. I guess the best way to put it is, if
the Muslim or Christian God is the true God, that’s not a God I want to believe
in. I don’t want to believe in a God that’s an asshole.”
“I like that.”
“But I do feel something, though I don’t
usually feel it at times I expect, or if I’m trying to feel it.”
“When do you feel something?”
Amjad shrugged. “Strange times. I don’t
know.” He dove. David watched his form slice beneath the surface, his legs
propelling him like a knife. At that moment, though he did not know it, a plane
was being shot out of the sky over Ukraine, its fuselage being ripped open by a
rocket, its passengers – many of them who’d dedicated their lives to curing
AIDS – gasping for a moment, that mortal shock, before the void of
unconsciousness swallowed them and gravity, that immutable law, pulled them to
earth.
He climbed atop the rock and jumped into
the sea.
Seven hours passed quickly, the sky
growing a richer hue of gold, the sea turning from blue to pewter, the sun
flooding across it, a vast avenue of silver.
They climbed the hill and started back
toward town, their legs heavy.
“You know, I don’t think I ever asked
you what you think about Gaza,” David said.
Amjad smiled. “Are we sure we want to go
there?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I’m not sure what I feel. Obviously,
look, what happens to the Palestinians, what can you say? It’s apartheid. It’s
an occupation. It’s morally reprehensible. And I’m not sure what Israel expects
kids who grow up with guns in their faces to become, or to think. From a
humanitarian standpoint, I’m deeply sympathetic.
“At the same time, from a cultural
standpoint, it’s difficult for me to support a country that I know is going to
be deeply conservative, deeply hostile to women, and deeply restrictive. I
spent my whole life trying to escape that kind of country. The last thing this
region needs is another patriarchal country with an Islamic government – which
is what exists in Palestine. Honor killings, domestic abuse – this is common
place. Just as here. Just as in Iran.
“So how do I feel? Fuck if I know,
brother man. I feel fucking bad for the kids and the women, I’ll tell you that.
It’s a losing proposition either way.”
David remembered his conversations with
Maj about this – about her cousins who had been radicalized.
“You’re defending them” David had said.
“You’re defending terrorism.”
“No,” she’d said. “I’m not. I’m saying I
sympathize with the choice they made and think it’s a justified choice. You
grow up knowing that you’re always being watched by someone with a gun. You
know that at any point, someone can put that gun in your face and demand you
give them your identification. You know that you can’t move freely, can’t
choose to live freely. Why are we supposed to be the bigger ones here? Why are
we supposed to say, ‘we’ll endure this moral wrong pacifically, we’ll take this
injustice stoically’?”
“Because it might actually work? Because
it would end the cycle of violence? Because doing the right thing isn’t
supposed to be easy; it’s not supposed to feel good or satisfying?”
“Look, you know I agree with you. But I
understand what they’re doing. And I’m not going to condemn it. I’ll condemn
the circumstances that have driven them to this – circumstances that they
didn’t create.”
“What about you, brother man?” Amjad
asked. He smiled wryly. “Do I even want to know?”
David smiled. “I dated a Palestinian
woman. For a long time.”
“Really?”
David nodded. “At Oxford. We were
together three years. I thought I was going to marry her. I would’ve married
her.”
“I had no idea. You’ve been holding out
on me.”
David laughed.
“I guess that doesn’t have anything to
do with anything. But most of my information came from her. For what it’s
worth, she felt about how you do. ‘It’s very difficult to be fighting for
people who I know want to tell me what to do with my body. But they’re my
family and friends, and I will fight for them because what’s happened to us is
wrong, a much bigger wrong.’ She said something along those lines. I don’t
remember exactly.”
“But what about you, brother man?”
“Instinctively, I support Israel. I have
Jewish friends back home. It’s more known But ....”
“Yeah?”
“What’s happening now? I see the photos,
and I can’t understand it. Cars full of little kids watching their homes being
bombed. Children’s shoes taken from rubble. These parents destroyed with grief.
I can’t understand how you could do that. Or, I could, but it’s horrifying. The
whole thing makes me even more convinced that God doesn’t exist.”
Amjad laughed. “That’s a pretty
simplistic thing to decide.”
“Is it? Wouldn’t any sort of rational
God come in and deliver one side from evil, or deliver both sides?”
“Free will, brother man. The great
gift.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He’d heard it all before,
even if he knew Amjad was mostly joking. God went through all the trouble to
create this immensely complex, beautiful world just so his finest creation – so
the Bible and Qur’an call man – could go about destroying that world and
destroying one another. Maybe it was simplistic. But that didn’t make it wrong.
“Have you been to any of the camps?”
Amjad asked.
“In the southeast?”
“Yeah.”
David shook his head.
“You should go, see the anger up close.
Whatever some chick told you in Oxford, whatever you see here, whatever you see
in pictures, it ain’t worth a damn thing compared to seeing it up close. And
even if you do, it won’t be the same for you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you can leave, brother man.
You’re a white American man. You can always
leave.”
~
The boats, in winter, are much quieter
than in summer. Gone are the vendors and the swindlers, the gypsies and the
simit sellers. Gone, too, is Amjad, and this journey will, David suspects,
always remind of his friend. He made it to Bulgaria, and with the help of some
mutual friends, was able to sneak across the border and get settled in Sofia.
But his life there is difficult, and it’s one that is lived mostly out of
sight. He goes out only at night, when he is less likely to be noticed. He
sleeps during the day. He and David talk at night, when both of them are awake.
His friend doesn’t look good – he looks pallid, defeated.
Inside the ferry, the smell of tea
permeates everything, a muted, earthy aroma that sticks to the closed windows,
a fog that young girls scrawl their names in. David wipes it away with his
fist, revealing the roiling winter sea.
Nur returns with two cups of tea, both
steaming. She sits beside him, brings a hand to his forehead.
“Oh, canim, canim. I’m sorry. You look
miserable.”
He was. The fever had not abated, though
it had been five days. The sore throat made sleep difficult. David drinks the
tea scalding hot, hoping to burn the pain away. Nothing seems to work. Every
time he swallows, it’s like downing broken glass.
Soon, sedated by ibuprofen and rocked by
the heavy sea, he is into a fitful sleep. Nur takes his hand, which is sweaty,
warm. They planned this trip three weeks ago, and David didn’t want to cancel,
those he’s spent most of the week useless in bed, moaning, describing his
symptoms in acute detail. She teases him about it, but it makes her laugh.
Every day, his descriptions grow more vivid.
She leaves him to sleep and steps out
into the cold, the sea spray hitting her in the face. She watches the city,
narrow and grey, recede. This is a trip she and Andrew never took. She is
careful, not to relive their steps too much with David. Sometimes, without
knowing, David will take her someplace that his brother also took her. Their
tastes are not dissimilar. They like being on the water, and they also like
high vistas. He took her to the city walls and she let him think it was her
first time there, though Andrew had also taken her there. She does not tell
David about these overlaps.
It is not the ways they are the same
that strike her; it is the moments where she differentiates between the two of
them, when the fact of brotherhood makes them stand all the more alone, both in
person and in memory. With Andrew, there was always the impending fact of his
absence. He would eventually leave, though she didn’t know when, and it hung
over their every interaction, as if some invisible force was pulling him away,
always away. With David, it is his presence that defines him, his desire for
rootedness – though he himself might not be aware of it, it is in everything he
does. He thinks that by coming to Istanbul, he is mirroring his brother,
reflecting him. But by coming to Istanbul, he has renounced him. Andrew came
only to run, was in the process of running. David has come in search of a place
to set himself. She believes he has found it, that he will stay. He thought he
was chasing his brother, but he was actually looking for a home.
They disembark, David slumped against
her. She watches a school of gulls skim the surface of the sea. They suddenly
rise, climbing. Far off, it is difficult to distinguish between sea, city, and
sky. They are the same, muted grey.
Their hotel is on the edge of the
village, up a steep hill. In winter, the village has a sleepiness, a
barrenness, David likes. They walk past empty wooden homes that lurk behind
wrought iron fences and hibernating wisteria. It’s hard to believe how
different it will look in just a month’s time, when the world comes back to life.
He loves this quiet, this sense of abundance in remission. To love during
spring and summer is easy, the world is bloated with it. To love during winter
is a rarer, more refined thing.
The room looks down on the village, its
red roofs blunted by the cloudy sky and by moss. It amazes him how light moves
and enlivens, how its absence can be felt. On the water, the ferry is making
its return journey, churning silently.
Nur goes onto the balcony while David
collapses into bed. She comes back to him, running her hand up his back, which
is burning hot.
“Poor, canim.”
He rolls over, smiles morosely up at
her. She kisses him, tasting the fever on his breath. He runs his hand up her
tights. It’s been six months and her body is still a revelation, its lines
drawing him in.
She climbs atop him, feeling him hard
beneath her. He glances down her shirt – white, wrinkled, with buttons. He
loves the hang of her breasts. Her necklace, a gift from Andrew, dangles
between them, inert in the room’s dull light.
“I can take it off,” she said the first
time they went to bed.
“No,” he said, thoughtful, rolling it
between his fingers. It was a piece of amber, pearl shaped but irregular. Andrew
said he got it in Florence, but who really knew? He was full of half-lies and
elisions. “If you’ve been wearing it all this time, I don’t want you to take it
off on my account. I don’t want you to start making changes for me.”
She leans back, unbuttoning her shirt
while he slides out of his pants. The illness has given his body a sort of
wretched grandeur, the way all those poets who died of tuberculosis in the 18th
and 19th centuries must have seemed splendid. Whittled down to
muscle and bone, nothing inconsequential remaining.
During his sickness, they’ve mostly done
away with foreplay, which is fine. Kissing him, feeling him beneath her, is
enough to get her ready. He slides slowly into her. She moves all the way down,
one hand braced on his pelvis. His hands guide her hips. As they find their
rhythm, she can feel him moving with her, their bodies working in concert.
For these five days, this has been the
only time his illness abates. He is so consumed by her, his focus so narrow
around each part of her – the way her ass clenches each time she lowers
herself, her cunt growing wetter as she gets closer and closer – that he
transcends the physical pain that has taken his body. They’ve been temporarily banished
by pleasure. It’s unlike anything he has experienced before, the world falling
away except for the two of them.
In a strange way, it makes him miss
Andrew. He wishes he could tell him about this. He wants to say: whatever it
was you were looking for out there, I’ve found.
But it is ephemeral. When he comes, he
is immediately deposited back into the world – the grey light, the sounds of
gulls outside, the throbbing in his head and the daggers every time he swallow.
She brings her head down on his chest, listening to his heart slowing, feeling
him soften in their mutual wetness.
Later, they walk down the hill into
town. They find a restaurant on the water and eat pide and lahmacun. He drinks
ayran, which is the first thing he’s found that actually feels good on his
throat. He takes three home with him.
They drink scotch and make love again.
Afterwards, she goes into the bathroom and when she comes out, the sight of her
in the white shirt and no bottoms makes him hard again. He’s never been able to
fuck like this in his life. She’s brought something out of him.
During the night, a storm comes. He
wakes up in fits, listening to the wind and the rain falling against the
shudders. At one point he gets up and looks at the lights of Istanbul, murky
beyond the rain. He pours himself a scotch, each sip a torment. Why does he do this
to himself? He wonders. He remembers something Hasan told him: your body is not
your own. He feels age more than when he arrived, just over a year ago now. It’s
in his knees. It’s in his liver. It’s in the way he can’t function on less than
eight hours of sleep a night anymore. He misses his youth, but this is somehow
richer – life in all its shades. Everything that came before seems cast into
shade, inconsequential.
She stirs and sees him standing naked in
the window. He’s framed by the far-ff lights of the city, little more than a
shadow. One night, all those years ago now, she and Andrew made love almost
until dawn. It was early summer, shortly after they’d met. If you’d told her then
that all this was possible – the summer feverish summer with Andrew, his
disappearance, the years of doubt, and now this, his brother – she would’ve
laughed in your face. The possibilities of life are endless, and yet our
expectations are so often mundane.
They made love in her room with the
windows thrown open, but it was still sweltering. Her sheets were soon ruined,
the mattress below soaked. Down the street, a gypsy wedding was underway. A man
wailed on a clarinet and women shrieked at the tops of their lungs, their
voices hitting a primal octave he didn’t know existed. He fucked her from
behind. At some point, the humidity broke and an immense rain came down. The
wedding party was unfazed, the clarinet and the shrieks slicing through the
rain.
In the morning, she wakes up and reads
while David tosses and turns beside her. When he gets up, it’s the first
morning in six mornings that he’s felt better, instead of worse. The fever has
broken. The sore throat is beginning to fade.
They eat on the balcony – tomatoes,
cucumbers, white cheese and fresh bread crusted with sesame seeds.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Stronger,” he says. “Like I might not
die.”
She smiles. “You’ve handled this illness
so well, canim,” she teases. “With real stoicism.”
He laughs. Over the city, the sun is
breaking apart the clouds. Spring is on the way.
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