The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  His mother was a prescient woman. This was how it would always be. Ayaana’s heart gnawed in her. Outside, a drizzle started. There was another layer to the pungent scent. She sniffed. “Do you smell that?”

  “What?” Koray frowned.

  It might have been the rain, the peculiar moods it wrought. It might have been guilt. The ship leader was still a phantom lurking in the peripheries of her gaze. She stroked Koray’s face. What did she want? Within the house, in a room nearby, voices were raised in clamor. Koray raised his head, alert. He then kissed her hard. A hand on her left breast.

  She studied him as if he were a Zao Wou-Ki visual—a riddle.

  She asked, “May I visit the ship with you?”

  He gave her a sideways look. “Ayaana…do not ask that question again…for your protection…and mine.”

  Silence. A door somewhere slammed shut. Voices. A shout. Koray was alert and still. Watching him, Ayaana imagined that, to be happy, all she needed to do was conform. Koray said, “I have targeted your heart for myself; I never miss.”

  In Ayaana, a smarting of eyes. A sting spread to her bones. It became goose bumps. A vision: a looming net designed to trap migrating ortolan buntings.

  She was flying blind.

  The house was in disarray that day. A single official-looking car. The usually invisible servants raced to and fro. Still, in the afternoon, Ayaana decided to dress up and wait for Koray in the small library. After an hour, she ventured into Emirhan’s office. The door should have been shut, as it usually was when Emirhan was not in the house. Ayaana poked her head in. The floor was bare. There were carpet outlines. Several pieces of paper were strewn on the floor, including a large map of the kind a large navy might use. On the opposite wall, there had been an attempt to wipe some dark spatters off the wall. The sense of menace in that room was tangible. Ayaana backed out. She needed air. She walked out of the house in defiance of Koray’s warning. She needed air.

  Outside, the clouds were heavy and black with rain. The threat of another all-engulfing storm brooded over the estate. She followed the Byzantine track up to a hill behind the house. From the top, she would view the city and its waters. As she swung left toward the hill, she saw the shoe. It was stuck in a nameless bush of brown-green leaves. As she reached for it, it fell into fallen leaves on the ground. She knelt to look. It was a man’s shoe. It belonged to his right foot. A single brown-laced overused object. Its sole had been worn into a thin layer. There was a hole near the uneven heel. The oxford shoes of a once-successful man. The insole was stained with a dark leak. The toe cap and tongue were as stained as the laces. She looked at it until she was again seven years old, keening over the still corpse of a cherished kitten. How has the world been changed by the fact that you no longer exist? Sinking into darkness. But she would get up slowly. She would keep walking as if she had not encountered anything out of the ordinary. Blind, deaf, silent. What had Muhidin told her? “The most important things are concealed in the unseen; the most essential truths inhabit the unspoken.” She would keep walking. She needed her passport. Which was Koray’s room? She had to go home.

  * * *

  —

  When Ayaana returned from her walk, the shoe had disappeared. As she had suspected it would.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana stared at the white walls of her room, seated on the edge of her bed. This day. Istanbul, the world’s heaving crossroads, gateway to feckless human hopes and all the opportunities war afforded. She prayed that those who could not pay did not have to die. She prayed that the man of the morning whose shoe had evaporated was alive. She prayed he would find his way home. She prayed that when he had said “doomed” it did not mean himself. There was no Internet signal. All her attempts to speak to her mother had failed. She kept trying. She needed her passport.

  * * *

  —

  She could not see a way out. What is real? At the family dinner that evening, Ayaana practiced wearing a mask of gracious blankness that was similar to that on Nehir’s face. The look suited her Audrey Hepburn black dress with a cinched waist. Her dinner conversation was adequate. She stayed close to Koray. He was like a lodestone as she tried to figure out which way was up and out. He had her passport. How had she let that happen? She listened to Emirhan’s expostulations on the economic destiny of Greece and the wars surrounding their boundaries, and glanced left. He said that ISIL were a purging force, a mirror of human choices. Ayaana nodded in the right places. When her gaze grazed Nehir’s, the woman raised her wineglass at her, her look amused and vulturine. Ayaana blinked her acknowledgment of Nehir’s recognition. Nehir mouthed, “Good luck.” Ayaana was struggling to breathe. Now she knew what it felt like to drown, to inhale water and hope that it was air while her body and soul howled in desperation.

  [ 73 ]

  “I would like my passport back.”

  “It’s safe with me.”

  “I would rather have it on me.”

  “No, Ayaana.”

  “You will return it.”

  “Nope, Ayaana.” Toying with her.

  “Why?”

  Koray smiled. “Because.”

  Ayaana stepped back, rebuffed by the horror of unreasonableness, disgusted by her helplessness.

  * * *

  —

  She ambushed Koray and raised the matter at the dinner table. “Koray, I need my passport. Having it will ease my mind as I walk the city tomorrow.” She smiled.

  Nehir exclaimed, “Walk the city? My dear. With all this uncertainty…Koray, why are you not protecting our Ayaana better? Have you explained things?”

  Emirhan was watching Ayaana. “In a realm of flux, passports are bounty. My beauty, surely you don’t feel…unsafe…here with us?”

  “No…I just…”

  “It is settled, then.”

  Emirhan, Nehir, and Koray exchanged glances. Ayaana stopped speaking, knowing that her every word would be turned, twisted, changed, rolled as a ball of wool for three human cats to play with. A chill. A tigthtening of lips. This was a game she needed to learn very quickly. She looked daggers at Koray.

  He said, “A little wine, canim?”

  “No, Koray.” Cold-voiced.

  “I’ve been most remiss in my duties as host, sweet Ayaana. I promise to set aside the weekend to show you my intimate cosmoi.”

  His parents offered a murmuring laugh, and Ayaana wondered why there was no sense of joy in this, either. Six more days, she told herself. Just another six days before their flight back to China.

  [ 74 ]

  Esmeray. The restaurant was named after a dark moon. It was located within the labyrinthine Tarlabaşı Quarter, which evoked the East African city-states for Ayaana, so much so that she had lowered her guard. They had walked southwest of Taksim Square, allowing the crowds of many nations to move them. The hard throb of life, music, lingering glances. A statuesque European woman who turned out to be a man. The smells of wicked things amid the citrus and spice. Ayaana clutched Koray’s hand, nervous about the many looks directed at her.

  “They are mesmerized by you.” He drew her closer to his side, then indicated eastward. “Tarlabaşı Boulevard. Renowned for its brothels. Think about it. These were once family homes. Greek. Before the exodus. If you had landed here illicitly, it is to this part of Istanbul that you would drift.” He suppressed a smile.

  Dark and light brown African faces, too, filled with frustrated hope, as if everything they had viscerally believed in when they had started their fantastical quest to an earthly idyll had, upon their arrival, simply evaporated. There was food on sale everywhere. But Koray was looking for a specific no-man’s zone. Only Tarlabaşı could have an Esmeray, a space thriving on paradoxes and trompe l’oeil façades. Anatoli rock music played as a crone in a colorful headscarf met Koray and Ayaana at the restaurant door. A round tab
le was set for them toward the back of the room. Ayaana sat down heavily, her perception of her world enhanced. She narrowed her eyes. Koray was reciting a litany of unexpected foods: cacik, lahmacun, pogaca, bazlama, manti, biberiye tursusu, pirincli tavuk cigeri, baklava, gyro, and labaneh bil zayit. Koray added, waving expansively, “Tahini halwa, sembosa halwa…pişmaniye…”

  Ayaana asked, “All this?”

  “And more.” Koray’s eyes danced. “No senses left unstirred.”

  Ayaana stared in silence.

  The woman whose features had been buried in the millions of lines crisscrossing her face showed up offering mercimek çorbasi with a lemon wedge planted on the tureen’s plate.

  Koray looked at Ayaana. “We all needed a break from the house.”

  Stillness. “I made arrangements. We will not be returning there for a few days.”

  Koray rubbed his face. He sighed. Ayaana’s eyes darkened. Her pulse throbbing, light-headed and almost blubbering, she exclaimed, “K-Koray, I d-do not have a change of clothes.”

  “Pick up what you need from the shops.” He rubbed his eyes. “Been a tough few days, canim. I owed you a holiday.” He collapsed into his seat, looking at her. “Uh…” Koray’s eyes shifted sideways. “News. Emirhan…to be expected…reason for his shittiness…pancreatic cancer. Confirmed. Trust the damn buzzard to find the most grueling way out.” A shimmer in Koray’s eyes.

  Ayaana half melted. Was it true? She lowered her head, partly in surprise at how much the miasma of the home on the hill had penetrated her.

  He looked at her. “Desperate handover season. That is what you saw. I am sorry; I had intended an entirely different holiday for us.”

  “I am so sorry about your father,” Ayaana said. Still she shifted, bending her neck forward. Uneasy. “Desperate handover season” did not explain everything in any way, not the mosaic of terror made of the faces of those who walked the passageways of the house, not the single bloodstained shoe in the garden. Not Koray assessing her as he did now, as if testing the impact of his words. She schooled her face, trying for bland sympathy.

  He lowered his voice: “Miss Ayaana, you can trust me,” Koray said. His touch lingered on her arm.

  Ayaana started. Was she so transparent? Just then, a young man with a faint haze of a mustache set out their food order. Koray said something to him. A minute later, the music changed. Koray listened for a second. “Omar Faruk Tekbilek,” he said. “Can just about tolerate that.” He smiled at Ayaana. “Gül serbeti to drink? I recommend it to you, Miss Sweet.” Though still wary, Ayaana eased back into her chair, and her stomach muscles unclenched. Breathing a little easier. Koray immediately started to speak of the news of the day: the implications of the stock-market crash in China, the depressive effects on ordinary people. “Chao-gu mentality,” he observed.

  Ayaana took a deep breath before retorting, “The so-called small people also have a right to their dreams.”

  Koray watched her. He dipped a finger into his Campari. “Unregulated fantasies that lead to collapse. This is a necessary purging. Fortunately, your China is too big to fail.” The young waiter delivered to Ayaana the rose sherbet Koray had ordered for her as they spoke of the sea, life, the end of the nation-state, career options, and shipping. Koray cracked jokes about the austerity in Greece: “What’s the biggest charity organization in the EU? Greece.” He spoke of al-Dawlah—ISIL—his fascination. “Strategic asset turned Frankenstein! The grotesque and death as aspirational brand!” He chortled. “Poor fucked-up world.”

  Ayaana tucked her hands in her armpits, mesmerized by this Koray: the charming chameleon, Koray the raving prophet, Koray the protective tour guide, Koray the man in control of fate and destiny, Koray the charm-oozing male with presence. He had revealed to her his Istanbul, the hole-in-the-wall outlets filled with treasures, secrets, and whispering people who offered to and could sell her anything, even a purple elixir for eternal life. He had led her into a cartographer’s shop that looked like an alchemist’s laboratory, and she had been lost in the universe of maps and their permutations. Her face mirrored her confusion and beguilement—awe, disgust, nausea. She was seduced. She could look at his face and find, again, its potency, its beauty. He had discarded his earring. This Koray was a palatable blend of campus Koray and Istanbul Koray. Koray the shape-shifter, able and willing to redesign her life so she need not think about the contours of the unknown. She imagined Koray meeting Muhidin and Munira. Muhidin, she knew, as she sipped her sherbet, would lure him into a fishing trip, and drop him in the deep waters to observe how he might cope…or not. She smiled. A carafe of wine appeared next to her. Koray reached for it and poured her a glass.

  “Big-girl drink. Was that a smile, Miss Ayaana?”

  “Emirhan,” she asked, “can anything be done for him?”

  A momentary bleakness in Koray’s gaze. He veiled it. “Life can be shit.” Koray tilted his head at her then reached over to hold her chin. “Little Ayaana, you do understand that life is not a human right, it is a roll of dice.” She gave him the look of a child whose one dream had been grabbed and smashed. “We are served our number,” he added.

  Ayaana sagged in her seat and scratched her skin. Koray tossed down his wine. “What can you do?”

  Ayaana waited for an answer. Outside, a wind started up on a thin whistle. Stillness pierced the room. Ayaana looked over her shoulder at the entrance as if some fanged fiend might saunter in. Dread, and its special questions: what was true or real? Ayaana’s fingers traced the Basmallah on the tabletop as her mind whirled before the meaning of so many wicked truths. Soiled fabric of being—what was she to do with it? Yet, in every mad muttering, she could still hear the resonances from her island’s muezzin call: the simple, imperfect, spare human truthfulness; despite everything, the many small gestures of joy. And then again the sense of the world in flames, visions of exodus, the agony of women, broken children of this, her broken age. And now the blurred montage of home: Nahodha Ali’s fishing fleet, his yearlong preoccupations with the run of the billfish, the blast of his belly laughter when the fishing was good, the insha’Allah to Life’s will when his boats returned empty; a mother’s garden pulled out of the dry, salt earth, and within it the mother humming her favorite songs, unaware that her voice was like incense. One of Pate’s storms. Thunder-rumbling, lightning-crackling, swell-and-wave-churning darknesses. Worlds, she concluded, were never meant to be the same.

  Outside, sounds of life. Bleating livestock, hooting cars, human voices, music, music, music, and the sudden screams from unseen woundings. Ayaana started then and remembered where she was.

  Koray contemplated the tenor of the moods of Ayaana’s face. He murmured, “If I could, I would never allow another to glimpse your face directly. But I would paint you and share my experience with only a few. I would paint you in the colors of my choosing.”

  Ayaana turned to him. Koray added, his voice low and soft, “I would protect you, yavrum. Just ask.” Ayaana blinked. Exhaled. She took the pot to pour spiced tea into a clay cup, focusing on the heat of the tea and the smoothness of her cup. “Ask,” Koray insisted.

  Ayaana spat out the tea she was trying to drink.

  “Your father…”

  Koray, grim: “…is dying. The pragmatist is unable to barter with death; he is unhappy with death’s insolence.”

  “Nehir…”

  “…who has made my father’s choices her life mission, is a worthy inheritor of his habits.” A glimmer in Koray’s gaze. It went out.

  Ayaana asked, “You have brothers…”

  Koray scoffed. “…who do not have the balls to grab hold of their fate. I am the sole heir.”

  Ayaana then asked, “What exactly is the family business?”

  Koray glared at her. He stared. He said, “Such questions are not healthy.” Koray then ordered a glass of cranberry juice. “No…change that
…Bring me a bottle. Shiraz. Choose right.” He gestured to Ayaana. “Your glass?” She shook her head.

  “You will drink wine someday.”

  “Not again.” She was certain of that. The wine she had sampled with her friend Shalom had tasted like a version of her mother’s wicked concoctions.

  Koray held her look. “I will tell you my secrets, but I want to be able to blame the wine. Join me.”

  She smiled, “If I drink, I will hear your secrets?”

  Koray still held her look. “My secrets: are you sure, Miss Ayaana? You cannot ‘unknow’ afterward. If I open that door, there is no return. Think.”

  Door creaking open and out of a Stygian cave. She could crawl away. She could run back to find the sun. Ayaana glanced at Koray. Circles under his eyes; she had missed that. Hands: long-fingered, large, with hair on the back, two gold rings. Her heart: hammering. She was sweating. She was drifting.

  Koray cocked his head. “Shall I tell you?” He watched her.

  Ayaana then recalled how her dirty-white kitten had waited a full day for a single mole to emerge from its safe subterranean home. It seized the mole. Even as a child, she had been struck by the mole’s resignation. It did not whimper. Here the clock ticked away. The playing music was a simulation of a Sufi’s dhikr. Sea nocturnes and underwater darknesses. There is a point when the desire to breathe ends. She relaxed, knowing time would recede. Touching her throat, Ayaana then looked directly at Koray, mouth half open, aware that she was sinking. “Yes,” she finally breathed.

  Koray offered her a slow, slow smile. He drawled. “We are pragmatists, Miss Ayaana. Have always been. Boats. Trade. We control passageways. Sea routes. We make our rules. If we say something is legal, then it is. We make money. That is our mission, our purpose, our compulsion. If the earth is a war zone, we make money out of that, too.”