Lunch Outside the Office
David stayed, however. So, too, did Amjad. Once a week, they snuck out of work early, usually going down to the fish market by the sea in Uskudar, where they would buy fresh calamari and glistening whitefish, taking them to a nearby restaurant where the chef would prepare them in the kitchen. The tables were so close to the water that one leg actually hung over the Bosporus.
One afternoon they went to Kuzguncuk, a small neighborhood nestled in a valley. It was leafy and quiet, the homes painted vibrant oranges and yellows. It felt like a different world, a village removed from Istanbul’s chaos. They got a late breakfast at a café carved from a family’s kitchen. White cheeses, olives sprinkled with oregano, tomatoes and cucumbers drizzled with olive oil.
Afterwards, they climbed a staircase that had been cut steeply from the valley. They stumbled across a wedding taking place, the bride - who was covered - and groom holding hands chastely.
“How do you feel about the women here?” David asked, feeling out the terrain, knowing that the conversation might breach a new intimacy for them.
“In Istanbul?”
David nodded.
“I like them,” Amjad said. “On one hand, it’s easier than in Iran, where everything had to be so secretive. Here you can at least hold a woman’s hand.” He stopped, his face dappled with sweat, and turned.
“I remember kissing girls in basement parties in Tehran. Knowing that if we got caught, we’d all get thrown in prison. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once.” He smiled. “I miss that, strangely. It’s not the same here. The thrill is gone.
“But, Turkish women play games, too, don’t they brother man?” Amjad said, smiling fiendishly.
David demurred.
“Have you been with a Turkish woman?”
“Not yet. No.”
“Oh, man. That’s sad, brother man. You come all this way and you don’t sample the local produce?”
David laughed.
They kept walking until they came to the top of the stairs. They took shelter beneath a fig tree, looking down upon the water.
“You know, I missed out on marrying a woman when I got locked up.”
“Really?”
Amjad nodded.
“A friend of the family. My parents had set it up, but we knew each other well. If you catch what I’m getting at …”
David laughed again. “So you’d met up before in someone’s basement?”
“We had. She was lovely. A very old friend of mine. We always joked about our parents setting us up someday, I guess hoping that it would actually happen. My parent’s were smart, too. I think they knew we had something between us. They wouldn’t have arranged something if they knew I wouldn’t approve.”
“So what happened? Do you still talk? Can't you get her to leave?”
“And how would I do that, brother man?”
David shook his head.
“We’re Facebook friends, but a lot of her stuff gets blocked. And her parents are worried about her getting in trouble if she talks with me, so they keep a pretty close eye on her. I’m sure they’ll try to marry her off to someone else, before she gets any ideas.”
David put a hand on his friend’s back.
“I’m sorry.”
Amjad smiled. “You know what? If I’d married her, I wouldn’t have slept with all the women I’ve slept with here. So I guess it’s not that bad.”
They both laughed.
“No, really though. I’d give it up to be with her. I mean that. But it’s hard for me, in a way. Because I do love life in Istanbul. I love the city. I love the freedom. I do love the women. And I think about the life we would’ve had, and it would’ve been a good life, but a very different life. I sometimes try to weigh the two against one another, you know? Like, the goodness of that life against the goodness of this life, and try to figure out which one weighs more. It hurt losing her. She was what kept me going in prison. That was the first thought I had when I stepped out of that trunk in Turkey. Not, ‘I’m free,’ but, ‘I’ve lost Hande.”
He looked down, the red roofs falling away to the resplendent Bosporus, the first bridge rising majestically from the waters. On its roadway, the sun glinted off cars and buses as they sped from one continent to another. Below them, on the strait, a tanker bound for Russia trudged slowly northward, the smaller ferries flitting like bugs around it, their wakes crisscrossing on the surface of the sea.
“It’s hard to compare the two. Had I stayed, I’d know nothing of this life, what I would have been giving up. And because I’m here, I don’t know what life with her would’ve been like. I can imagine it, maybe guess at its shape. But I don’t really know, do I?”
He looked to David for confirmation, but David only smiled, remembering Maj. It had been a long time since he’d thought about her, something that had seemed unfathomable in the months after their breakup. It was strange how time could do that, could wipe away something that had once seemed so monumental, so unshakeable. It could diminish even the strongest love, the most unbearable pain, into little more than a footnote, a brief addendum to a longer story.
“I suppose I’ve decided you can’t really weigh the two against each other. For a long time I thought of it as a trade - that life for this one. Maybe because that’s the easiest way to do these things, one for one. But I think that’s probably untrue, because that life never actually happened, except in my imagination. It was never more than dreams. That doesn’t mean it weighs nothing, but it also means that this life did not replace it. This life simply is, and the memory of my imagination of what might have been is, too. One doesn’t justify the other, or make up for the loss of the other. They both simply are. Does that make sense?”
David thought, now, about his brother - about his brother and Maj, and what might have happened if their plans for a life together had come to pass. Perhaps it would have changed his brother’s trajectory. Maybe his brother never would’ve come to Istanbul.
But ultimately he can’t know these things, and he tried not to think in the hypothetical anymore. He spent the first few years after Maj thinking that way - where they might have been - and he did the same thing with Andrew. It’s dangerous business, to lose yourself in fantasy, especially when there’s so much still in front of you.
“I’m sorry,” Amjad said. “I’m going on.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just thinking.”
“About?”
“Women. My brother.”
Amjad laughed.
“We’ll talk about it another time. I’m enjoying being out of my head for a while,” David said.
“Hearing someone else’s miseries?”
“Not miseries. You’re not miserable.”
“No,” Amjad said slowly. “No, I’m quite happy. And I feel a little guilty about that. I think now about what I’d do if they let me go back, if I could go back and marry her. And I don’t know if I could do it.”
“Well, that’s all hypothetical.”
“It is. And maybe she’ll come here. Maybe we can live here together. I’d like to show her my life here. She would understand in a way very few others do.”
David smiled. He often felt this way, that there was a divide between his past and present, a great breach that no one from this life or the prior one could surmount. His parents and friends back home would not recognize his life here. Perhaps only Andrew would have. He saw everything with the eyes of an outsider, an outsider whose roots no one quite understood.
“Come on,” David said. “Let’s head down. I need some tea.”
Nice--loss and pining, and a vignette of brotherly love in the midst of gentle but clear political commentary; cool...