Two Friends Say Good-bye

Posted on by Justin

 
Amjad cleans out his desk.

The police had been there that morning, and they’d taken him upstairs to talk. He came back pale, quiet. They’d given him an ultimatum: he had three days to leave the country of his own accord and avoid the fines and penalties of being officially deported, or he could be deported, pay 5000 lira, be banned from the country for 8 years - and be sent back to Iran.

“For what?” David had asked, not entirely shocked, but still feeling like someone had ripped out his intestines.

“The cartoon I posted on twitter back in December. About Tayyip.”

“For that?” David asked. They’d both written - and published - much worse.

“Apparently.”

Unlike David - whose desk is cluttered with old magazines and newspapers stacked like gecekondus, business cards gathered at conferences and discarded, scraps of paper containing notes (poems, stray lines for a novella), and a half dozen empty tea glasses - Amjad’s desk is neat, even Spartan. He wiped it down at least once a week. On it was a coffee mug full of pens, a photograph of his parents from before the Revolution, his mother’s hair long and uncovered, and a clay model of a ballerina an ex-girlfriend had given him.

“Why don’t you get rid of it?” David had once asked, casually, looking up from a piece he was editing.

“What? This?” Amjad said, picking it up, twirling it casually in his hands.

“Yeah. To forget about it.”

Amjad shrugged. He was Iranian, with hazelnut skin, dark and long hair, a well maintained beard, and very dark eyes. When they went out for drinks, Amjad, not David, always attracted more female attention. “I guess by now I’ve had it so long that I consider it good luck. I’ve never been hurt or arrested. I’m superstitious.”

David smiled; he’d hung a few poems an ex had written him on the wall of his bedroom, though he rarely noticed them anymore.

“Besides, once in a while it reminds me of what we had, and that hurts. And it’s good motivation. It keeps it real to me.”

Now, he wraps the model carefully in newspaper and bubble wrap, puts it into a cardboard box with a few books and the photograph of his parents.

“Fuck, man. Just fuck,” David laments.

Amjad pats him on the back as he passes by to grab another book.

“Fuck,” David repeats.

“Nothing to be done. We know the deal. We’ve all got one foot out the door. No surprises.”

“Yeah, but this is different. Real.”

Amjad laughs. “It was real before.”

“Yeah, well, it’s like death. You know it’s out there. But until it hits …”

“I know. I know.”

“Did you figure out where you’re going?”

“Mombasa, for now. Just bought the ticket.”

“Christ.”

Amjad laughs. “I’m not you, brother man. The world isn’t exactly opening doors for me. An old roommate works for a wire service there. He said I could crash on his couch, freelance a bit. I’ll try to get a visa for London. My sister’s there. Maybe see if they’ll let me seek political asylum.”

“It’s unfair, man. I wish they’d gone after me and not you.”

Amjad had come to Turkey five years earlier. He’d done so after having spent six months in an Iranian jail. He’d been arrested as a political prisoner - even though he’d studied architecture - because his sister was a journalist in England.

“I got off the plane - I was coming from London, visiting my sister - and they literally arrested me the moment I hit the tarmac. No charges, no warning. Just cuffs, and then put me in jail. I was in solitary for 2 months before they let me even speak to anyone.”

He told David all of this the first day they met, after work, when they went out for dinner at a kofte place in Uskudar, near the Iskele mosque, where’d they’d gone to pray before dinner; it had been built by one of Suleyman’s daughters.

“Then I was in there another 4 months before, one day, they let me out for an afternoon to meet with my family. My father’s a judge - not one of the hardliners; we drink together, talk about sex - and I’m not sure who he had to bribe to get me out for an afternoon. I met them at a restaurant and an hour later I was in the trunk of a car, headed for the border. It took a day and a half to get there, which I spent in darkness. We stopped every five hours to piss, and to give me water. When I got into Turkey, they took me as far as Van, and then left me there. No money, and just the clothes on my back.”

He’d lit a cigarette, leaned his elbow on the windowsill. It was David’s first week in Istanbul, the beginning of spring. Outside, the day was softly dying, the smell of the Bosphorous in the air. Across the street was a busy fish market, and a few produce stands, their panoplies of color seemingly amplified by the clear air.

“I went to a teahouse and found someone who let me sleep in their spare room for two nights. They gave me fifty lira, which was extraordinarily generous, and found a friend who drove me to Ankara. From there, I hitchhiked to Istanbul. Turks are wonderful people. I mean, fucked up in a lot of ways - like all people - with their own biases, but to outsiders, they’re so fucking generous. You couldn’t ask for a better country to be stranded in with no money than Turkey. Anywhere in this part of the world, really. Iran, Syria. All the same: so, so generous. Almost impossibly generous. If you live there, you’re constrained by the rules. But if you’re passing through? The best places in the world. I hope you can get to Iran someday. It’s a great place, even if I can’t go back. Anyway. Turks are great folks. People let me sleep in their homes. I ate like a king. When I got to Istanbul, I went to the UN, claimed political asylum, and started working for them, counseling refugees.”

“How’d you end up in journalism?”

“I was pissed off about what had happened. I wasn’t political. But now I am. I wanted to let people know about what was happening. So, writing. If you speak English, there are a lot of opportunities here. It wasn’t hard to find work.”

Amjad closes his box, tapes it up. “It just is, brother man. It’s not about fair or unfair. We knew things had changed. I was the one who put that stuff on twitter, not you.”

“Yeah, but I’ve written plenty of stuff worse than that. Plenty.”

“Hey, it’s a scare tactic. A warning shot. I’m the one they chose to shoot. We all knew.”

David thinks about how much the country has changed since their first meeting, that innocent spring night, smoking cigarettes and drinking cold beer and watching the covered women buy fresh fish across from the port. They could still do that, of course. Superficially, at least, they can still walk around and smoke and drink. They can still talk critically - at least in Beyoglu, Etiler, Cihangir - about the government. They can still take girls home. But at the fringes, the noose has tightened. David had had to purge his Facebook account of any reference to the protests - a mutual friend, a professor at ITU, had lost her job because of her involvement in them. And there were the interviews with the police. Hell, they’ve been joking about being deported for months, a kind of gallows humor. There is a tension that didn’t existed then, a feeling that the country is tinder about to be set aflame. Certain Saturday nights, walking down Istiklal, David can practically feel the anger, the mutual disdain - the police in their riot gear down by the square, diffidently smoking cigarettes, their guns cocked beneath their arms; the increasingly drunk young men, boisterous and riled, the Kurds defiantly forming dance circles, others setting fires in trash bins, occasionally bursting into the old slogans - Everywhere is Gezi, Everywhere is Taksim.

“What do you think will happen?” David asks.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

Amjad shrugs, throws himself into his chair, the desk now barren in front of him. “Nothing good, I don’t think.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“No, not really. I’m tired of politics. So fucking tired. Talk to me about something else.”

“Women?”

Amjad laughs.

“God, I’ll miss your stories,” he says. “You have good stories. The next guy I share an office with has a lot to live up to.”

“Well, it’s good you’re leaving now. I don’t have any left.”

“I doubt that. You’ll come up with more, even if they’re 90% bullshit.”

“Most of them are 90% bullshit.”

Again, Amjad laughs.

“It’s not fair, man,” David says again. “You’ve been through too much for this.”

“I’ve had five good years here. Nothing lasts, brother man. You Americans want things to last forever. It’s better it’s me instead of you. I’m more prepared for endings.”

“I’ll get there. Inshallah.”

“Inshallah,” Amjad says, smiling to himself, hanging his head and then looking out the window. “I’ll miss the light here, in spring. That I’ll miss. I doubt Mumbasa gets light like this.” He motions outside. It’s a stunning day, lucid and adamantine, the city scrubbed clean by a heavy night rain. It reminds David of Wisconsin, summer, cold creeks. “Hell, I don’t know a damn thing about Mumbasa. I guess I’ll find out.” He breaks into a smile, broad and mischievous. “I heard a good rumor this morning.”

“Yeah?” The whole country is basically rumors these days - rumors at the teahouses, rumors on the buses, rumors outside the mosques, rumors in the papers. It’s election season, after all.

“March 25th. Mark your calendar. That’s the day someone - I can’t tell you who - is going to release a very scandalous sex tape.”

“Involving who?”

“The Prime Minister and the executive of a very big construction company.”

“Together?”

Amjad laughs. “I think that would break Turkey. The country would just stop. But no. It’s two separate videos, taken at the same party, apparently.”

“Who’s your source?”

“Anonymous. Like always.”

David smiles, shakes his head.

“It’s funny,” Amjad says. “He said they’re debating whether it’s even worth releasing. They’re worried that the blowback from it - the cries that it’s fake - would do more harm than the tape would do good.”

“Is it fake?”

“How the fuck would I know? Almost certainly.”

They fall into silence. Next door, they can hear the sounds of keyboards. Then, outside, they hear something that sounds like singing. It’s a sound familiar to both of them from last summer, voices moving as one. The sound gets closer, grows clearer, like a body coming to the surface of the sea.

“What’s that?” Amjad asks. He can’t see the window from his desk. David cranes his neck, but can’t see anything. They both get up and go to the window, pushing it open, letting the lustrous light flood across the dusty wood floor.

On the street, moving uphill, there’s a group of twenty-five or so kids. They can’t be older than ten or eleven, and their teacher - a woman, her head covered in an opalescent scarf - leads them. All of the children are wearing matching shirts, a picture of the earth on them. Many of them hold homemade signs - hand drawn globes and animals, sprinkled with glitter.

We are all earth.

Stop destroying our city.

Don’t steal our money.

Keep Istanbul old.

They march in unison, their small voices surprisingly strong when rising as one.

“What are they saying?” David asks. His Turkish, lamentably, is still terrible.

Amjad smiles to himself, rests his chin on his hand.

“Well?” David says.

“They’re saying, ‘Everywhere is Istanbul. Everywhere is Earth. Everywhere is Green.’”

They watch the children as they march up the street, cars pulling aside to let them pass. The kids move from sunshine into shade, and then disappear from sight, their voices lingering, fading, finally vanishing altogether. Even after they’re gone, the two men stay at the window, watching the place they’d been as if some miracle had happened, some grace of God. Distantly there is the hum of traffic, the drivers oblivious to what has just occurred; the city - the immense, impossible city - going about its business unaware, its old buildings coming down by the thousands, its trees being felled by the acre. The thrush of traffic, of progress, the irrepressible battalions of commerce.

“I’ll miss this city,” Amjad says softly. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be here again. And if I am, I don’t know if I’ll recognize it anymore. Yes. I'll miss it."