Ramadan Ramsey

by Louis Edwards

  “Oh, my word,” she said, putting her right hand over her heart. “Ray-ay!”

  “There’re all right, aintcha, fellas?” Ray took a half-step toward Ramadan and Mehmet. “Boys fall, Marge.”

  “Well, they darn sure do if you bowl ’em over.”

  “Oh, shoot,” Ray said, disregarding her comment. “Come on, fellas, get up.”

  As Ramadan and Mehmet stood up, Marge said, “Oh, good,” and clapped her hands. “Oh, good.”

  “Magic!” Ray said, pointing at their jerseys. “You boys from Orlando?”

  Ramadan and Mehmet looked at each other, then at Ray, and shook their heads.

  “We’re from Tampa!” Ray said.

  “Where’re your folks?” Marge asked. “I want to apologize to them fer Ray almost mashing you to death in this dark itty-bitty ole tunnel.”

  After a brief pause, during which Ramadan and Mehmet offered only frightened-looking stares, Marge said to Ray, “Sweetie, I don’t think they speak English.”

  “Course they do. They answered my question about Orlando.”

  “Not by speaking English, they didn’t. All they did was shake their heads. Maybe that didn’t have anything to do with what you asked ’em. For all you know, they coulda been just rejecting the very idea of you. That’s been known to happen, hadn’t it?”

  Ray let a beat pass as Marge’s remark simmered, and then he filled the small space with another of his big-barrel chuckles. After a quick cuddle, they resumed their wrong-way stroll down the ramp. “Take care, fellas,” Ray said.

  “They’re cute as all get-out,” Marge said. “Aren’t they just as cute as all get-out?” She staggered a bit on the path and leaned into Ray’s bulbous shoulder, either for support or just to sneak a snuggle in the dark. “You know, I always wanted twin boys. Just like them.”

  “You did?”

  “Ray-ay, you know I did!” Her voice was dissipating but still drifted back up to Ramadan and Mehmet. “You know that!”

  “We tried, Margie, we tried.” They were out of sight now, but Ramadan heard Ray clear his throat and say, “Where the heck d’you think Fran and Jerry went off to?”

  Ramadan and Mehmet gathered themselves and then circled up the last few steps to the top of the ramp. As they exited into the wide upper gallery, they both sighed, creating a warbling harmony that had the tremulousness of an organ. They giggled from the ticklish feeling, then put their arms on each other’s shoulders, and walked straight ahead to a stony ledge, settling into a spot between two marble pillars. Leaning forward and resting their chins on their arms, they gazed out at the floor-to-ceiling panoramic view.

  “Do you see the beautiful?” Mehmet asked.

  Ramadan looked all around. Did he see the beauty? He didn’t trust his uninitiated eyes, so he took out his iPhone and turned its camera on. Its one eye, he had learned, was often more observant than his two. Maybe it could decode the beauty of Hagia Sophia for him. The same way it translated his touches into miles of computer code, then back into a language he could understand: words, images, sounds. He snapped picture after picture—snippets of semidomes; halo-encircled mosaics of the Madonna and Child; rapturous gilded images of Christ and John the Baptist; wildly feathered angels; Islamic calligraphic discs suspended in a planetary orbit. Mehmet seemed to take his shutter-tapping as affirmation that Ramadan was bearing witness to “the beautiful,” for he kept repeating, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes.”

  When Ramadan finished taking pictures, they huddled, gaping at the phone. Then they pressed their backs to the stone ledge, slid down, and sat on the floor scrolling through the photographs. Some of them were a blur. But others were majestic fragments of Hagia Sophia, accidental works of art, mini-masterpieces, incidentally cropped and lit into something new.

  “Beautiful,” Mehmet said. “You take beautiful photographs, Ramadan.”

  “Yes . . . ,” Ramadan said, feeling the power of having created the digitized images he was holding in the palm of his hand.

  He paused on a photograph of the mass of people milling about on the main floor. A hint of something recognizable had caught his eye, but he let it go. He was about to swipe to the next image when—

  “Wait!” Mehmet said. He took the phone from Ramadan and spread-finger zoomed into the center of the crowd. A lone figure stood isolated in the middle of the frame. Hands raised. Arms spread wide. Head leaning back, so that his face was ringed by a brim of curly locks. Black-framed eyes seemed to be staring up, directly into the camera. Or rather, they would have been—except they were closed, accentuating his enthrallment. It wasn’t just any face, or course. It was—

  “Ibrahim!” both Mehmet and Ramadan shouted.

  They jumped up and leaned over the ledge, searching the crowd. Ramadan spied a red shirt, the crescent-like sliver of the front edge of a blue yarmulke, and Ibrahim’s flapping arms. “There!”

  Mehmet asked, “What is he doing?”

  “I think he sees the beautiful,” Ramadan said.

  “With his eyes closed?”

  “Maybe he just feels it.”

  Mehmet watched a bit longer and then whispered, “It is a very good dance.”

  Ramadan agreed. “The feel-the-beautiful dance.”

  He and Mehmet exchanged the same conspiratorial glance that had inspired them to chase down the tram on Istiklal Caddesi. Without saying a word, they bolted from the ledge and raced back to the ramp. Ramadan, slightly ahead, had to veer at the doorway to avoid bumping into three tourists on their way out.

  “’Scuse me!” he said, starting the circuitous descent.

  Mehmet was so close at his heels that Ramadan thought his foot might hit one of Mehmet’s kneecaps. At every blind corner, they slowed down to avoid another incident. Unbeknownst to them, their shadows were gliding against the cloister-like walls lining the chamber. Their essences were cast into strange darts of darkness, ghostly semblances of them that ducked and dodged their way up, back into the bowels of Hagia Sophia, secreting themselves away somewhere, as if these phantoms intended to remain there and haunt the place long after their hosts had left the building.

  Once they reached the main floor, they went swerving into the hallway, and charging toward the wide entrance to the central nave. Ramadan’s heavy backpack was working against him now, and Mehmet rushed past him. Up ahead, in the middle of the crowd, he could see Ibrahim, still doing his little solo performance, and Mehmet, “Türkoglu” on his back, zigzagging toward him. Lagging behind, Ramadan saw the whole scene open up before him: Ibrahim flapping alone in the distance; Mehmet moving into the frame; Ibrahim, perhaps sensing Mehmet, opening his eyes (just a little, his lids drooping, making him appear high on Hagia Sophia), repositioning his glasses on his nose, but not stopping his dance; Mehmet goofily starting to flap his arms as well; museumgoers stopping to stare at them; Mehmet and Ibrahim looking Ramadan’s way, motioning for him to join them.

  Ramadan lumbered forward and, unable to resist the dance, started flapping his arms before he reached Ibrahim and Mehmet. Then he was in their midst, closing his eyes as he had seen Ibrahim and Mehmet do, the three of them forming a circle.

  As more people turned to gawk, sounds of surprise rippled through the area. When Ramadan heard the murmuring, he peeked and saw that an audience was inching its way toward them from every direction. Some people were holding up their phones and taking pictures and videos. Strangers pressing in, trying to catch some of whatever they had, a feeling. But hadn’t he and Mehmet looked down, seen Ibrahim doing his dance, and wanted to join in, too? Why had he just thought of these people, so coldly, as strangers? It was a question, like all sound in this holy cavern, with an echo—for there, shouldering their way to the front of the crowd were two strange, but familiar, faces.

  “Whoo hoo!” Ramadan heard Marge’s voice rise with femininity. “Whoo hoo!”

  She was waving to him with one hand and holding Ray’s arm with the other. Another couple was with them now, and Ramadan, letting t
he upsweep of his right hand gesture back to her, heard Marge say to the woman, “Aren’t they just precious, Frannie? Cute as all get-out!”

  “Y’all know ’em?” Fran asked.

  “Sure do. Ray darn near killed ’em back there in the tunnel. Didn’t you, Ray?”

  “Sure did.”

  “’At’s our boys out there!” Marge yelled, extending her hand toward Ramadan again, not so much waving this time as reaching, wiggling her fingers, as if trilling the notes on a keyboard to create something pretty, or simply to touch.

  “’At’s our—”

  Then, just as Ramadan was about to close his eyes again to let the full effect of the feel-the-beautiful dance rush over him, he saw Marge start to tremble and, unable to finish her sentence, bury her reddening face in the ample refuge of Ray’s chest. Ramadan couldn’t hear Ray when he spoke, but because he had heard him comfort Marge earlier—because they were not, in fact, quite strangers—he could just read Ray’s lips as he patted his wife’s back. That was the last thing Ramadan saw before he closed his eyes and sank completely into the beautiful: We tried, Margie, we tried.

  * * *

  LATER, WHEN THEY took a boat ride on the Bosphorus, Ramadan felt detached from the other boys—even as they stood close together leaning on the railing at the bow of the boat. He was haunted by Marge and Ray. Those cheery yet melancholy Floridians! You have to try harder, their disappointment said to him. Otherwise you wind up still wanting the thing you never got—whatever it is—long after it was much too late to get it. Calling “Whoo hoo” to some reflection of it, claiming it as yours, when you know in your broken heart it isn’t.

  “The fourth quarter!” he heard Mehmet proclaim this trip through the jugular of Istanbul, his voice so joyful it almost pulled Ramadan out of his meditative mood.

  “Yes!” Ibrahim said. “And overtime will be Saturday—my bar mitzvah!”

  “I will bring Ramadan,” Mehmet said, “and we will do the feel-the-beautiful dance again.”

  They leaned into Ramadan, who was recalling their arm-flapping dance and imagining taking flight over the hills to the east. Like Marge, the world had denied him something crucial, primordial—and it was just over there. With Ibrahim on his left, Mehmet on his right, he felt strengthened in his devotion to his cause, to himself. But he understood now that he wasn’t the only one like himself, the only one of these. These. Whoever they were. (He thought of them, including himself, as the lonely, though he really meant the dispossessed.) Marge was one. Something told him his aunt Clarissa was, too.

  He listened to the loud hum of the old boat chugging along, glad the group had turned quiet. Looking down at the water, he sensed that if his were a darker soul, or merely a more impatient one, he might be tempted to jump. He had no real memory, of course, of that time when, as a baby, he had done just that, and plopped onto the muddy bank of the Mississippi River, wanting something he could not pronounce. If he could have remembered that early act of bravery and stupidity, he might have seen his future, even more clearly than Miss Bea—for everything in him, all that had happened to him, was about to make him take another leap of sorts, just as impetuously and far more absurdly, into the muck of the world.

  13

  Mr. America Comes to Iftar

  So this is the Ramadan who came for Ramadan,” said Yonca Adem, who was waiting for them outside the family’s apartment building.

  He had just watched her affectionately greet her son and husband, and now it was his turn. Yonca was so starkly compatible with Emir and Mehmet that Ramadan felt he could have picked her out of a group of a hundred women. “That’s Mrs. Emir!” he would have blurted out once close enough to discern the contours of her character. “That’s Mama Mehmet!”

  In the last of the evening light, her bright orange hijab set her face aglow, and she patted his head and hugged him, just as she had Mehmet. Withdrawing reluctantly, Ramadan admired her light green eyes, which refracted the color of her shawl, and which, outlined with black pencil, seemed adorned to accentuate both beauty and bounty—his, not hers—as if being beheld by her was its own reward. As Yonca glided away from him, he noticed that her head cover was translucent; he could see the lines in his palm beneath it, for he had reached out to extend the embrace. He had to restrain himself from clasping a piece of her hijab and pulling her back to him—all because her warmth and kitcheny smell were making him swoon with a montage of Mama Joon memories. (Mama Joon, one wintry afternoon, a rosy red scarf wrapped around her head—not orange like Yonca’s, but close—a “tignon,” she called it, even though she wasn’t French, some vestigial thread of Creole woven into the fabric of her private vernacular, swinging the screen door open to let him in after school, standing on the porch with one hand on her hip, somehow knowing exactly when he’d come racing home; Mama Joon’s embosoming grasp, the defining physical interaction of his life, which from the day he was born had given him this urge to be held by women, like Yonca, who stood waiting for you whenever you made it back to them; Mama Joon putting a ten-dollar bill in his hand, sending him to the grocery store to buy a bag of flour, his staring at the bill inked with gray-green coding, not translucent, covering the lines of his palm, but still, like Yonca’s shawl, inciting the inclination to clutch.)

  But Yonca was not Mama Joon. She was Turkish, she was Muslim, she had green eyes, she was not his—she was alive. Her hijab cascaded over his hand, flowing away from him like the memories that had flashed so vividly, going dormant again now, letting Yonca be Yonca, and letting him be.

  Then she whirled away, yelling something to them on her way back into the building. Emir raised his hands in the air, mocking and surrendering, as he joined a group of men working on a car near where he had parked his cab.

  “Come on,” Mehmet said. “We wait in my room until dinner.”

  He dashed off ahead, but Ramadan paused to look at the exterior of the pale yellow four-story townhouse. A row of similar buildings, all colorfully painted, stretched up the block; a pink one on the left, a sky-blue one to the right. He knew neighborhoods like this from home, where the houses shared walls or were set close together, separated by narrow walkways. But Istanbul was not New Orleans, just as Yonca was not Mama Joon. And he was not . . . something he couldn’t quite figure out. Shrugging off his confusion, he was about to run in behind Mehmet, when someone called to him from above.

  “Hey, you, Ramadan Ramsey—Mr. America!”

  He looked up at a young man with long dark hair, leaning over the railing of a second-floor balcony. Even from this distance, Ramadan could see the man’s greenish eyes glinting at him, and he knew he was looking at another Adem. Mehmet was Emir’s son, but this one, at least physically, was more Yonca’s. His voice had traces of his father’s, but his face was a masculinized version of his mother’s, a squarer chin the most distinguishing feature. Or maybe it was just the way he was jutting it forward, with the nonchalance of a magazine ad model, that was giving the jawline its prominence. His whole demeanor was stylized, as if his appearance on the balcony was, in part, a performance. One elbow rested on the railing, and his opposite hand was on his hip, a thumb loosely hooked in his jeans pocket, and his tucked-in, faded blue T-shirt bunched at his belted waistline. He looked like a rake or a rebel—or both, and, Ramadan thought, more like “Mr. America” than he ever would. Smiling, he stood up now and draped his hair behind his ears. It was hard to tell if he was just striking a different pose or preparing to hear the response to his transatlantic tease. Either way, Ramadan took the gesture as his cue, because there was no doubt who he was looking up at—and he knew exactly what he wanted to say to him.

  “Ahmet! Ahmet!”

  “Hello, Mr. America!” Ahmet was waving now.

  Hearing the greeting again, Ramadan felt Ahmet was proposing some secret accord between them, a strategic alliance. He wanted his full attention—and something more. Maybe to verify that Ramadan was a genuine heir to the surname he’d bestowed upon him; or to test the
validity of that family’s fame. He must have been satisfied because now he truncated his wave and was angling a stiffened hand up to his forehead—saluting Ramadan! Ramadan put up two fingers and touched his forehead, sensing everything the act engendered: mutual respect, brotherhood, the esprit de corps necessary to a successful campaign. And then he raised both hands and shouted, with an implied global solidarity that belied his private motives, answering a question that had not been asked, accepting an invitation that had not been extended, “Yes, Ahmet, I want to go with you! I want to go with you to Syria!”

  As he said this, Mehmet came running back outside and rushed over to him. “Ramadan—no!”

  “Yes! I told you I want to go with Ahmet.”

  They looked back up at the balcony. There, a stone-faced, confused-looking Ahmet stood, his formerly saluting hand plunking onto the railing. His eyes, registering anxiety and fear, angled upward and beyond them. The boys turned, and a red-faced Emir, making quick, heavy strides, was heading their way, yelling and pointing at Ahmet.

  “What is he saying?” Ramadan asked.

  “Leave Ramadan alone! You with your big ideas! You want to save the world? You cannot even clean up your room! You think you can save the world? Maybe you need to save yourself first!”

  Ramadan looked at the balcony. Ahmet’s face had gone pale, and his eyes caught the fading light, which deepened them to a watery emerald hue. Ahmet shouted a retort, and his darting chin dotted the air with an exclamation point.

  “What did he say?”

  “Maybe I can do both at the same time!”

  Emir started shouting again, and Mehmet put his arms up in opposite directions, one pointing at his father, the other toward Ahmet. Translating his father and his brother, he had sounded to Ramadan like a play-by-play sportscaster; now he was a referee.

  “Baba . . . Ahmet,” he said, facing one riled-up relative and then the other. In the pause that followed, he raised his right hand, pointed skyward, and said, “Ramazan!”