Two Friends Discuss Women and Politics

Posted on by Justin

 

David and Ar were perched along a railing on Tarlabasi Boulevard, looking down into Kasimpasa's stadium - or, the half of the stadium they could see. They were joined on the railing by a few hundred other Turks, almost all of them men, their collected breath rising against the cold. Pasa were playing Galatasaray. The streets around the stadium were packed with vendors selling scarves, old men pushing enormous cauldrons of rice, or grills of kofte. The lights of the stadium, which spilled onto the grass below, loomed over the steeply pitched roofs of Kasimpasa, the houses terraced into hillsides that sloped steeply down to the Golden Horn. The sight - grainy light hovering over homes - reminded David of being a boy in Philadelphia, walking to high school football games with his brother, the distant band playing unseen, streams of people converging on the bright lights above the roofs and trees.

"Turkish women don't make much sense," Ar said, taking a beer from David. Down on the pitch, the action disappeared beneath the stadium's awning. The crowd noise swelled, then pulled back; a missed opportunity. "They don't say what they mean. You must have learned this."

David laughed, took the beer back. "I guess I have."

"The problem is, even the most modern of Turkish women grows up in a family that is... What? How do I say it?"

"Religious? Conservative?"

"Both. Yes. Even the most modern family is conservative. When I try to explain Turkey to outsiders, what can I do? I tell them I have memorized two things from my school days. The daily prayers and the national anthem. That's Turkey. Islam and nationalism, tied together like a messy knot. Forever tied together. We grow up with these things. So even women who want to be modern are stuck to them, cannot escape them. They try, but they're still Turkish." Again, he took the beer. They watched while Kasimpasa brought the ball to their side of the pitch, a cross from the right side eventually being headed wide, the players lazily jogging back to the midfield. "They love you a lot though. They practically worship you."

"Turkish women?"

Ar swallowed the beer, nodded, passed it back. "Man do they love you."

"Your girlfriend left you."

"She was Kurdish."

David laughed, swinging back from the railing, eliciting a few stares.

"Turkish women? They live for you. They're attached to you. But then... I don't know."

"What?" David asked, lighting a cigarette.

"It's like, you stop living for you. Every decision is about them. It's like what they want, you want. They get into your brain or something, like a worm. It's like sickness. Turkish woman sickness."

"This really makes me want to find a Turkish woman."

"Hey, it's like anything. There's good, there's bad. The love is good. Sex can be weird, because of religion. Maybe you have to work for the sex."

"Or maybe not."

Ar smirked, lit his own cigarette, which he bit, exhaling between his teeth. "Your advantage is unfair. American men are safe. You won't judge them for sleeping with you. There's too much shame for Turks. Sex is not something you talk about. It's in the dark. Especially for women. Which is hard. Many men - not me, of course..."

"Of course."

"...will sleep with a woman and then, because she sleeps with him, think she is a whore, think she is not a person. They will keep sleeping with her, but that's all. They don't see them as more than sex. They're just whores. It's sick. Very sick, especially for women. Most men still want wives who are virgins. This is very important in families - purity. But this is not expected of men."

"You know, there was a woman I was seeing. Turkish. Very modern, in a lot of ways. And after we slept together, I remember being pretty disappointed with my performance."

Ar laughed.

"I wasn't very good, OK? I've done better. So later we were talking, and I was like, you know, I think we should try this again. I can do better. And she looked at me, very surprised, and said, 'You're concerned about your performance? You're concerned about if it was good for me?' This was a woman in her thirties. Very experienced, I soon learned. And she couldn't believe someone would actually care about whether she actually got off."

"That sounds right." Ar shook his head. He had a knobby smile, thinning hair, but a good jaw and attractive, brown eyes. "But in a way, Turkish men and women are good fits. We are both very jealous. We understand their fathers, they understand our mothers. You can't possibly understand. You can see, but you can't know."

David smiled. He was the same height as Ar, but about five years younger. His hair was getting long and his face was pale in the cold. Below them, drums beat in the stadium. Somewhere, a sahlep vendor called out. "Sahlep, sahlep," the copper vat atop his cart gleaming in the residual stadium light. In an empty lot across from David's office, gypsies would sometimes polish copper, the local vendors dropping by, a generator huffing and puffing black smoke, gypsy children sprawled barefoot in the overgrown lot. The high frequency whirr of metal on metal.

"They play games, we play games. Only we know the rules," Ar concluded. He patted David on the back, finished the beer, chucked the can into the parking lot below. "Maybe you will be lucky and find a good one. One who is tired of bullshit and games."

David laughed at this. "I'm beginning to think that adulthood, more than anything else, is just accepting that nothing lasts. That things will end and be ambiguous. And that no matter how hard you try, you're never going to understand someone else, or their motivations. All you can do is control how you react. You react well, or you react poorly. Adulthood is learning the self control to react well. Which is hard. Very hard."

"Not here. We're Mediterranean, Dave. We fight. We scream. We cry. Women leave us, we act like children losing our favorite toy."

On the way to work the day before, David had seen a couple fighting in a park. The woman shouted and the man held her shoulders while she shimmied and blindly slapped at him. No one else in the park seemed to find this at all out of the ordinary.

"You Americans are too German," Ar said. "You behave like stones. We aren't stones. We're flesh and bloody."

"Blood. We're flesh and blood."

"What?"

"You fucked up the expression. But it's fine. It worked." David thought about it. He remembered being in bed with the woman, Elif. She was more demonstrative than him, dramatic. It made him uncomfortable, if he was being honest. He tried to match her enthusiasm, her vocal enthusiasm, but it felt forced, wrong. "Maybe you're right. Maybe we're too restrained. I don't know."

"Men and women, abbi. The questions never stop."

David cracked open another beer, taking the first swig before passing it off. "Some police came to talk to me the other day. At work."

"Police?"

David nodded. "Three of them. Two officers, and a plainclothes detective. They wanted to see my documents. They didn't speak English, so I'm not sure what they wanted. They had a copy of the article I wrote the other week, in Zaman. About the schools."

"Ah. So they're checking you out."

"I guess."

"You're one of the Cemaat now. You work for them. You write for Zaman. That's Cemaat. And right now, Cemaat is enemy of the State. Enemy number one."

David laughed uneasily.

"I'm not joking."

"I know you're not."

"What did they do?" Ar passed the beer back, handed David another cigarette.

"I told you. Just verified my documents. Then they left."

"Well, I hope they don't come back. You never know here. Journalists disappear all the time. Be careful."

"I will be from now on."

"Did they ask about the protests?"

"No. I was careful about that," David said.

"Good. I had a friend. German. He was here in August with an EU committee. To investigate human rights abuses. You know, the Kurdish issue, journalists in jail, spying on political rivals. Everyday Turkish stuff."

David laughed.

"He had a three month visa. They were here five days, and could not see any sights they came for. On day five, the police call and say, 'your visas expire in one week.' The next day, they call and say, 'your visas expire, you are now illegal and must leave.' He can't come back for five years."

"Shit."

Ar shrugged. David felt something like a noose constricting his throat, his chest. Not since his Philadelphia years had he felt so comfortable in a place. For the first time, it occured to him that his life here might be threatened, tenuous, on the verge of being taken from him. All because of an essay, a throwaway he'd written at the behest of his boss. Because of political struggles that had been going on for decades, centuries - Islam and nationalism; Islam and materialism; Islam and Islam. In those battles, his own losses would likely be relatively minor. But they didn't feel minor. This was home.

Down on the pitch, Kasimpasa moved into their half. They reversed the ball, left to right. A pass carved to the heart of Galatasaray's defense. One more reversal, this one right to left, and a striker, his figure small on the distant grass, slotted the ball into the back of the net. The stadium thundered to life, drums beating, lights pouring down on the emerald grass, the hills of Istanbul rising and falling beyond, alight against the December dark, flickering and alive.