Days of Moonlight

by Loren Edizel

  “Promise me there will be no consequences when we return.” It came out of my throat in a subdued croak.

  “I promise you I’m not thinking of our return.” He bent toward my ear, whispering. “Shall we leave?”

  “Not yet.” I imagined the cool air outside slapping our faces, instantly dislocating this exquisite turmoil and leaving behind the grotesque shell of an unrealized dream, something painfully vulgar, a boss and his secretary in a Düsseldorf hotel room if he so much as opened his mouth to call for a taxi.

  We danced glued together for another song his breath making the hair on my neck rise. Lust was going up and down my throat like heartburn. I wanted out, I wanted in. I was in that state of utter paradox, every second split within itself, polarized between wanting and wanting not to. He caressed my back and wanting was at the essence of it, I realized, even wanting not to was wanting after all. Wanting him, wanting not to make love to him, wanting not to let him go, wanting not to be alone, wanting not to see him naked, wanting to see his sex, wanting not to awaken to any other kind of life that had no trace of this man who for once, exceptionally in Düsseldorf would give me the love, his love, that I craved all those years. Wanting not to awaken. Wanting the moment, split as it came.

  He ordered another drink for both of us. We sat very close, our thighs pressed together. “May I kiss you?” His voice was hoarse.

  “No.” I pulled myself away.

  He did not insist. He hung his head down, looking at the floor and took a few sips of his drink, nursing the glass in his hands, distracted. Wanting, wanting not to. I regretted the word as soon as it had come out of my mouth. I had not wanted to lose control; my countenance, my painfully earned … something…. What? Acceptance? By whom? By those who decided what mattered and what didn’t, who passed and who failed, who could speak and who couldn’t, what could be said and what couldn’t be mentioned.

  “If you kiss me,” my body trembled as I spoke, “if you do, it will never be the same between us again. We won’t remain friends. I will suffer so much more every time I have to wrap presents for your wife and mistress, every time I have to speak to them. I can’t bear to suffer more. And you will suffer too, every time you talk on the phone with a woman, with a new lover and you know I may be around. You will hide, you will become false with me, and see me as a burden to carry like the others, and I cannot bear that.”

  His lips twisted into a half crescent of a smile, “I’m afraid it is already too late. Maybe we’re already better friends, Mehtap. You know what there is to know about my petty life, my stupid habits and lies. I’ll never make any promises I cannot keep.”

  We continued sitting there immobile, silently watching dancing couples swaying under the dim smoky lights.

  “I knew I was an in-between guy for Nuray,” he started after some thought. “Perhaps I was someone she picked up to spite another who broke her heart. I knew she would leave me, but not so suddenly. She just disappeared one day….”

  “Yes, she did. Maybe one day, I will run into her on the street. I run into all sorts of people, why not her? And perhaps I will meet this child who has my name.”

  My heart was thumping in my left hand sitting on my lap; I felt the pressure and the rhythm of it and thought it peculiar. My heart in my hand, beating. We were sitting like sphinxes, facing the dance floor, not looking at each other, mouthing some words as the music changed and got louder, the couples pulled apart gyrating until the entire dance floor was covered by rubber men twisting this way and that, one’s face drawn into a frozen rictus, his partner’s in a pout with eyes closed. I envied their rubber limbs and freedom, sitting there heavily, my guts trapped in a corset, my breasts in a bra that I now realized was one size too small, my toes glued together in the narrow shoes. Aydın was saying something. I leaned over to hear his words.

  “Do you think the child is mine?”

  I pulled back, unable to answer.

  By unspoken accord we both rose to leave. Cold air hit my face, the way I expected it would, but there was no magic left to slap away. We were both reflecting on Aydın’s possible child with Nuray. I wondered if I would be able to tell by looking at her features. He said, “I wonder if she looks like me.” The streetlight was hitting the top of his head casting long green shadows that deepened the creases around his nose, aging him as he stood there in the cold.

  “Well,” I said reluctant to leave the reflective mood I had sunk into, “I suppose we should walk back to our hotel now.”

  We did so quietly, along the Rhine once again, surrounded by the city’s peculiar night drone. A couple passed us engaged in a heated debate. I was glad there was water nearby. The noises of a city that is near water are softer, it seems to me. You hear the barely audible lick of water on stone. Perhaps it is the smell or the humidity in the air that touches your skin. I don’t know. Something familiar from Izmir in a foreign land. I wondered how Kerime felt day after day being so far from home. I suppose I will find out soon enough. He took my arm and pulled me closer, hinting we could shut out the others, for one night. We walked, our breaths forming miniature clouds ahead of us and I leaned my head on his shoulder. He leaned his head as well, placing his arm around me in a protective gesture. I was nauseous with desire. I knew if I turned my face toward him he would kiss me. I could already anticipate the wet softness of his lips touching mine. I turned my face, my legs shaking.

  I have no idea why I let it happen. I had every intention not to, in my mind. Not from a sense of propriety, no—maybe from fear of self-destruction. That this kiss, this touch I had craved for so long was going to be the end of me, was going to bring the world as I knew it crashing down, like some immense and heavy mirror embedding shards of glass into my eyes and face and limbs, or a giant wave filling my orifices with its salty mass as it carried my helpless body into the depths of an ocean. Desire feels like a death wish with the wanting, wanting not to that keeps playing out its loop. We struggled through the door of his room, the boxers and slip and the torn nylons falling like pieces of discarded skin. My skin—my skin before him. I saw his sex for the first time in that struggle of semi-darkness, that ferocious thing, erect and blind and seeking. Perhaps we were growling. His hands and fingers and teeth. I pulled his hair hard, gasping in pain, both of us there on the floor, not having even made it to bed.

  I’ll be boarding the train in fifteen minutes and so must stop writing.

  I AM IN IZMIR. It has been almost two weeks now. Kerime’s life was not at all as I imagined. She lives in a small, bare apartment, two rooms separated by a small kitchen and a bathroom in the shape of a long corridor. Small cast iron coal stoves, one per room, into which she expertly shoves pieces of coal every evening to heat up the place. I felt miserably cold all the time. One night I even slept with my socks and a wool hat on. She must have gotten used to it; didn’t seem to appreciate how unhappy and clenched my teeth were in their efforts to stop from chattering. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, in fact she tells me she has separated from him. She keeps two jobs, one cleaning offices at night and one as a shopkeeper by day. Kerime looks worn out to me. I tried to convince her to come back and live in Izmir. I offered to put her up in my house, with all the space I have, and told her I could arrange for her to have a decent job, right away. She will not return, she says; likes her life in Germany. Perhaps it is a matter of pride, or I simply don’t understand the sense of freedom she gets from living there. “No one cares what I do, no one watches me. I belong to myself. Can you say that about your life? If you weren’t living in the house your parents left you, do you think you could have rented an apartment as a single woman? No way. Do you think you can come and go with a man if you so wish? The neighbours will spit on you, and call the police to arrest you for running a brothel from your house.”

  “But Kerime, you don’t have a lover now. You’re wearing yourself out with two jobs. Where’s your pleasure? Do you have frie
nds?”

  She said she did—some German girls and another Turkish one from Elazığ, from her office-cleaning job. “Well, invite them and let’s have a party. I will prepare everything. Just leave it to me. It’s the least I can do to thank you,” I said.

  She agreed somewhat reluctantly. I went to the supermarket down the street and bought food to make a Turkish feast with mézé23 and everything from home she would be missing; dolmas, eggplant salad, piyaz,24 green beans in olive oil, the works. I even found rakı and kaşar cheese. Her friends trickled in one by one. Two of the girls didn’t speak anything else but German, so we spent a lot of time bobbing heads and smiling as we gingerly ate our mézés and took small sips of our rakı. The girl from Elazığ wasn’t very talkative either, and when she did talk, you could almost smell the musty scent of nostalgia wrapped around her words. Maybe it wasn’t even the words, maybe just her body language; shoulders hunched forward as if wanting to make herself disappear by some act of prestidigitation and awaken elsewhere. I don’t know; perhaps that is how she always was. There was one friend, her name was Betta and she lived across the hall from Kerime’s apartment; vivacious and very pretty with long blonde hair and strong thighs in tight blue jeans. She spoke English, so we were at least able to converse. Apparently, she and some of her friends from university had hitchhiked through Greece and Turkey in 1963 or thereabouts, and they bought horses somewhere near Kars on which they rode all the way to Afghanistan. It sounded incredible to me, like a fairy tale. She was working as a criminal lawyer now for legal aid, defending petty thieves who couldn’t afford to pay lawyers. Betta seemed to like the taste of rakı which she kept calling ouzo, and took large gulps, eager to finish her glass to start another, I suspected. I was worried she’d turn out to be one of those drunks who plugged the bathroom sink at parties, at first; but soon enough it became apparent she could hold her alcohol well despite her slight frame. I asked her if she went on that incredible trip with a boyfriend. She got close to me, winked “I’m a lesbian, dear,” and gave me a toothy smile. It was all quite surreal, the selection of friends Kerime had gathered over the years, and this party where I only understood ten percent of what was being said at any given time.

  When everyone left, Kerime and I continued talking as we washed the plates and put the food away. She opened up to me about a man named Franz she was with until a few months ago. They had been together for some time; she was half-expecting a proposal which she dreaded at the same time, she told me, because of her family back home. They would be absolutely against it, what with his being a foreigner and all that. The only reason they didn’t mind her living in Germany by herself was because she was sending money back home. “Anyway,” she sighed, “it is no longer a problem.”

  “Why did you break up?”

  “His family didn’t like me, being Moslem and Turkish and all that. They kept putting pressure on him to leave me. I suppose he found it easier to let me go than put up with their fuss. Christmas gatherings were a nightmare I won’t miss.”

  She sounded matter of fact. This was the reason her apartment looked so bare. He had moved out recently and I felt all the more responsible to make her life more festive while I stayed there.

  Still, despite her diminutive quarters and hard life, I could also begin to see how she had succeeded as a woman in ways many of us fail back home, which is to have an independent life and by that I don’t mean economically—I am independent and successful; but socially, I mean she is free to define herself as she pleases, without the constant worry of how she will be judged by others. It is a blessing to live in an environment where you don’t feel shackled by tradition. Mind you, it is perhaps not the environment itself, which has its own particular traditions, but the fact that you don’t belong to them. There is another side to this, Kerime reminds me, lest I go back with a romantic notion of her life in Europe. “There are shackles here as well; every time I search for a job, or open my mouth to speak, I’m not a social equal to someone born here. I am die Gastarbeiterin.”25

  I enjoyed my time with Kerime. She has no artifice, no self-deceptions. We wept profusely at the airport thinking we may never see each other again. Kerime, my very best of friends from high school. I told her about my time in Düsseldorf. Only that. Only because she knows no one in my social circle and is open-minded. I couldn’t tell her about Nuray. I suppose I could have told Betta, if I had spent more time with her.

  IT’S HIS BIRTHDAY SOON. We have returned to our usual routine. What happened in Düsseldorf is locked up in that hotel room, forever, and in this notebook which no one else will ever read. He looks at me with tenderness in his eyes. His hand may linger on mine when I give him a letter or a folder. He kisses my lips lightly when I take my leave at the end of the day if no one else is around at the office. And he has offered to drive me home, something he has never done before, even on a rainy day when I used to wait at the bus stop. He would honk the car and wave without stopping. So things have changed a little after all. I accepted the offer to be driven home, of course. How many chances would I get to be alone with him again?

  He asked me how I was and how I felt, on the way, concerned for my well-being after Düsseldorf. I told him I was fine and not to worry.

  “I’m not lingering, if that’s what you’re worried about. We stole one night from fate. I have no further expectations.”

  He wished to see more vulnerability, I realized afterwards. Perhaps he had hoped for an extended affair that involved work trips together so we could spend time as lovers and I could be his Number Three. Flighty Aydın, who could never resist the thrill of an entanglement, an escape, a chase! As soon as he secured Number Three, he would be ready to move on to a fourth, or go back to his favourite nightclubs in search of amusement.

  He nodded when I told him I was fine. We drove the rest of the way in silence. He turned up the volume of the classical music playing on his radio. A feeling of peaceful well-being came over me. Music, driving through Mithat Paşa Avenue to get to my house, inhaling his cologne, occasional glances that brought a flock of memories from Düsseldorf.… I had him near me. I had made love with the man I had pined for all those years. I was not in need of repetitions.

  “Düsseldorf will always be my one of my favourite cities in the world, now. Not that I know many.…” I smiled after he stopped the car to let me off. I was thinking of Istanbul. The other one. He caressed my left hand and placed a kiss on top of it as I opened the car door. He pulled me back slightly so I wouldn’t leave and said, “Can you imagine favouring other cities in the future?”

  “Goodbye Aydın, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I managed and left the car quickly. Sure I could imagine favouring other cities, and being far from this narrow world of ours, and away from everyone else. Indeed, I could imagine this so clearly! What I couldn’t imagine was being left behind. Becoming one of his discarded conquests. You must leave him before he leaves you, I repeated to myself going up the stairs of my street. You must, while you’re still in control.

  Naturally I want the opposite: to travel with him, with hopes that this affair may turn out differently than all his others, since I am a different kind of woman, one to whom he relates on a deeper level—so he said. Why not take a chance? What have I got to lose now that I haven’t already? What am I afraid of? Solitude? Heartache? I know how that voracious worm eats its way through the heart, all its bites and squeezes, the breathlessness that precedes sobs, the blank stares fixed upon the ceiling when the rest of the world sleeps. Nuray has taught me all this. So why not take a few more trips, feel cozy and pampered a little before I’m taught the same lesson again? Why not?

  It is six in the morning. The fragrance of jasmine rises from the neighbour’s yard, tickling my nose into a sneeze as I write these words in the cumba sipping my tea. A tiny, lone rowboat is zigzagging up and down in the distance, lifted and crashed by tall, frothy waves. I wonder what has compelled its owner to go out on
such a windy day. Perhaps he too had a sleepless night enduring a futile battle between pride and desire. Perhaps he too knows such battles won’t yield victories. Nuray’s departure has gutted me. Aydın’s would diminish me, and I refuse to be so reduced. Soon the doves will start cooing in the neighbouring trees, the sun will climb a little higher losing its reddish glow. There’s the jasmine scent again. I should get dressed for work.

  23mézé: appetizers

  24piyaz: Turkish salad made with dry beans and onions

  25die Gastarbeiterin: guest worker

  Notebook II. The Cretans

  UPON THEIR ARRIVAL FROM CRETE, when Maria unpacked their suitcases and bags in the bedroom given to them by Inez, she had chosen not to remove the jewellery from the cloth belts into which they had been sewn, for safety. Instead, she had stuffed the two belts into a cloth sack which contained some lace doilies and fine tablecloths that her mother had given her as family heirlooms. The pieces remained forgotten in that cloth sack for some time, until the day she found out she was pregnant. She wanted to buy the finest of everything for her child; especially the carriage that she had spotted in the window of a shop where only imported European goods were sold. It had large wheels that imitated elegant horse drawn carriages. She had walked past it a few times, lingering in front of the window, and taken Mehmet for walks that deliberately led there, so she could tell him she wanted this and nothing less for their soon-to-be first-born. Some of the jewellery would pay for this, but she had to convince Mehmet it was a good buy. “It will last a very long time and we can reuse it for all the others to follow this one.” The sound of that declaration pleased him; it meant they would raise many children and become rooted here. He told her to use the jewellery as she saw fit.