Ali had no idea how Mustafa or Cemal knew that a drive was the best medicine for this matted head of curls on its squished child’s body. She didn’t think Elyas rang his uncle regularly to inquire about her. She couldn’t imagine him telling Cemal in the confiding tones of a doctor: “If she does such-and-such a thing, you just have to sit her in the car. Wind down the window and let her climb halfway out and smoke—she’ll soon come around.”
But now she came to think of it, why not? Why didn’t he ring? Why wasn’t he here? Where was Elyas when you needed him?
* * *
—
Mustafa and Cemal had said something about a theater—that’s where they were heading. A dance theater, very unusual—Mustafa had been before and recommended it highly, but she hadn’t been listening; she’d been staring at the newspaper that was sodden with rakı and whey, trying to project herself into the photos.
When they drove past Sultanahmet, the car was lit up for a moment; floodlights shone in at the windows, bright as the moon. Then it suddenly went dark again, and the road vibrated. Now and then the yellow light of the streetlamps broke the gray of their profiles.
“What have you seen of Turkey apart from Istanbul?” asked Mustafa after a brief silence. “Anything at all?”
Ali said nothing. She pressed her forehead and the tip of her nose against the window, leaving greasy marks on the glass.
“I could show you around the west coast. I was a tour guide for years. German and English tourists. All the sites—Pergamum, Troy. I could show you Olympus, if you like.”
“I thought that was in Greece,” Ali breathed onto the window.
“Greece was here.”
“I see.”
“Do you like that kind of thing?”
“What kind of thing?”
“Olympus. Traveling. Shall we go traveling together? We could hire a car and drive up from Antalya.”
Ali peeled her face off the glass and turned to look at him. What was left of Mustafa’s gray curls looked like her own. Is that how she’d look at fifty? Maybe it was. If she carried on smoking and started wearing suits, she might look something like that in twenty years. She’d give lifts to young women and offer to take them to Olympus—could do worse.
“I’m not here on vacation.” She scanned the inside of the car, hoping to find a tape player—something to silence Mustafa.
“Cemal told me why you’re here, but I meant if you wanted something to take your mind off things. I’m sure it would do you good. It’s important not to tense up; if you tense up, you won’t find anyone, and since you’re here, you might as well see some more of the country—or don’t you want to see anything?”
Ali smiled. “I’d like to see Kurdistan. Do you know your way around Kurdistan?”
Mustafa looked at her. He had very tired eyes and very tired skin that hung down from his cheekbones in tear-shaped bags, as if his skin were dripping off his face in slow motion. His big round pupils sucked you in. They rested expressionlessly on Ali.
The rest of the drive passed in silence.
* * *
—
When they got out of the car, Ali found herself surrounded by ads in Cyrillic letters. Neon signs in Russian promised discount furs and best quality pretty much everything. Dimly lit faceless window mannequins shimmered in snakeskin, arms extended, fingers splayed. Ali stopped outside a bridal-wear shop. The mannequins in white dresses had bridal veils covering their faces, and their heads were turned back over their shoulders.
It was too dark to work out what kind of theater they were entering—or whether it was a theater at all. There were no signs on the outside, not that there was anything unusual in that; you often didn’t know what bar or club or office you were going to end up in when you set off up the spiral staircases in the old alleyways of Beyoğlu. Ali had strayed here a few times, drifting among strangers in the hope of finding Anton—in the hope of finding anything at all. People kept a few centimeters’ distance; men talked about their jobs and the beauty of Almanya. They wanted to marry her and some were more direct and said they wanted to sleep with her, but they were afraid of her eyes—they said something about the evil eye—that she looked evil. Pure superstition, of course, but it helped keep unwanted arms off her shoulders.
A young man in a suit was sitting in the doorway, playing a game on his phone; it sounded as if he were smashing glass bottles. He glanced up and mumbled good evening, then went back to his phone. They climbed the stairs, Mustafa leading the way. Past the second floor, greenish neon morphed into a warm red flashing light and bass lines pulsed through the banisters like electricity. The walls were peeling and covered in graffiti; another young man in a suit stood outside the door. He looked at the two of them. Mustafa said they were on the guest list. The bouncer said he knew nothing about a guest list and Mustafa replied that he knew the owner—the bouncer should fetch Hafif. Ali lit a cigarette and leaned up against the graffiti. On the opposite wall someone had written Ich bin Ulrike Meinhof and some words she didn’t understand. She was stretching out an arm to point at them, when the door above her opened. “Gel,” said Mustafa. It was the first time he’d spoken to her in Turkish. He sounded annoyed.
The room looked like the set of the seventies films Cemal sometimes had on in the background. There was a large stage and a polished parquet floor with a few rows of plastic chairs. The entire ceiling was mirrored and hung with kaleidoscopic chandeliers resembling plucked parrots. Faces flashed red; Bülent Ersoy purred out of the speakers; the mirrors reflected the silver shards of disco balls. The few customers hovering undecidedly between the bar and the chairs were wearing suits; the waiters wore tails and white masks that came down to their nostrils. Ali tilted her head to one side and watched them come and go. She looked down at her jeans and sweater, and at Mustafa in his crumpled jacket. Then she went back to watching the waiters.
Next she made for the bar. Mustafa followed her, calling out to her, something like: “What will you have to drink?” But the question came too late; Ali had already ordered a vodka and tonic, and answered Mustafa by asking if he wanted the same. He nodded, fishing for his wallet, but again he was too late; Ali had paid and begun to suck on her straw before Mustafa had found his money. He propped himself up at the bar and asked if she knew who Bülent Ersoy was. Ali didn’t reply and Mustafa launched into a lecture about gender reassignment surgery, the military coup in the eighties and Bülent Ersoy’s exile in Germany. She turned away from him and left the bar to saunter across the room. Near the back, she found somewhere to sit where she had a view of the stage—a bulbous, red velvet sofa with a metal rod on top of the plateau that formed the back rest. She laid back and looked up at the bilious green plastic crystals of the chandelier overhead, and at her eyes between them, shattered and rearranged in the mirror. Then she saw her face again. A body just like hers, slender and rangy and dressed in the same black sweater and jeans and white sneakers, placed a vodka and tonic on the sticky parquet, sat down on her right and leaned back. Their shoulders touched, but nothing else; their heads lay resting on the sofa back, looking up into the mirrors overhead. They had the same curls—corkscrews that stuck up at their temples and hung down at their earlobes, scraping little cracks in the ceiling.
Ali looked into Anton’s face beside her and smiled, and Anton smiled back, an exact mirror image. She moved her little finger toward him along the sofa cushions in the hope of finding his finger, but didn’t take her eyes off him, keeping him pinned to the ceiling with her gaze. Then something flickered on Anton’s face and a crystal came adrift from the chandelier fitting, contorting his face and hers in the mirror and falling straight into the glass of vodka and tonic in Ali’s hand. She jumped, stared at the green stone in the clear liquid, swirled the drink in her glass, took a sip and laid her head back on the sofa. No Anton in the mirror, no little finger next to hers on the cushions; she looked at the ro
om reflected on the ceiling, without blinking.
The show began, or something like a show; you couldn’t have called it a play. The master of ceremonies wore a gold dress and a white mask that completely covered his face. The dress reminded Ali of her first dress from the west, which her mother, at risk of her life, had bought under the counter for an entire month’s wages. It was gold all over with puffed sleeves and Ali would rather have died than wear it; she wailed and screamed and even bit, but there was nothing for it: her mother wanted photos—why else had she put herself to the trouble? There was no peace until Anton climbed into the dress without being asked, even raising his arms and wiggling his hips as if he were dancing. Ali had a clear memory of that photo: her teary self in leggings and a vest—and Anton in the gold dress.
A drag queen greeted the audience and announced the program in a speech stuffed full of jokes and allusions that Ali didn’t understand. She wasn’t even sure that anyone in the audience was listening; whatever people had come for, the chink of glasses betrayed tension, anticipation. On either side of the stage, swathes of heavy, dark material fell from the ceiling, and two women in black underwear began to snake their way up them. The air in the room seemed to thicken to tar and a short, round woman in a velvet dress pranced across the parquet and sang “Sex Bomb” two octaves too low. Ali sat up, blew into her straw and raised her eyebrows, puckering her forehead. Her mother had always counted the wrinkles, plucking at them in front of Ali’s aunts: “One, two, three, four—don’t do that, Alissa. Don’t pull faces like that. You’re young now, but you know how you’ll look when you’re thirty-five?”
“No, how?”
“Like Uncle Seryosha.” Ali would push her mother’s hand out of her face and to avoid an awkward silence her aunts would twist the knife a little deeper: “If you’d stop running about like a dyke, you might actually make something of yourself.”
* * *
—
A waiter wearing a mask that covered the left-hand side of his face bent down to Ali and breathed in her ear, asking if he could bring her anything to drink. He came so close, she felt she ought to say, Yes, I’ll go to the toilet with you, but instead she said: “Votka, lütfen.” The drink came immediately and she paid. The room had filled up; the air felt sharply damp. Ali couldn’t see Mustafa and hoped he’d left in a huff or was at least getting drunk with the hungry-eyed men at the bar. She wondered whether Uncle Cemal would shoot his friend in the right eye, if he knew where he’d taken Ali, the way Yılmaz Güney had shot the public prosecutor.
As Nena’s “Neunundneunzig Luftballons” started up, a horde of scantily clad bodies in gold hot pants and black afro wigs threw themselves into the crowd and danced between the rows of chairs toward Ali. She suddenly realized that the thing behind her back that she’d taken for a pointless piece of metal, the remains of a flawed construction like those pipes on the fronts of the houses in Tarlabaşı that led nowhere, or that had once led somewhere but were now no more than a memento, an embellishment, something for the ivy to grow up and the tourists to admire as beautiful or, worse still, authentic—that this construction was a pole-dancing pole and very much still in use. One of the dancers came and stood right in front of her, evidently about to climb onto the plateau that Ali had taken for a backrest. Gold-clad hip bones stared Ali challengingly in the eyes. She didn’t move, but stared back, sucking on her straw, and the girl climbed over her. Setting her right foot on Ali’s knee and her left foot on the arm of the sofa, she pulled herself up and thrust herself against the metal pole. Spotlights stung Ali’s eyes. The audience had turned around; everyone wanted to see what the agile young woman would get up to with the pole. Ali had no choice but to press herself into the upholstery and look up. The dancer threw out her legs; they flew past Ali’s ears like white toothpicks, and the black synthetic wig tousled her curls. Ali chewed slowly on her straw.
She waited until the straw had nothing more to yield and the toothpick legs had disappeared—until the light had mellowed, turning dim and milky, and she could be sure that no one was watching. Then she heaved herself up off the sofa. The audience had split into little groups of hoping, laughing, waiting people. She found the toilet. She was sure the cubicle would be occupied by some couple with their noses glued to the cistern, who would no doubt stay and amuse themselves when they were done—but it was free and clean and strangely sterile, with a bright white fluorescent tube over her static hair and red eyes. She didn’t blink. She washed her hands and face slowly, then held her lips under the jet of cold chloriney water and checked in the mirror again. Anton looked back crossly. A woman came in. She seemed to have been laughing or crying a great deal; her make-up was smudged and she began to redo her face. Ali watched her dab color on her skin and paint lines around her eyes and mouth. Her lipstick was black. When she was finished, she turned her head. Ali asked if she could borrow the lipstick, took it and wrote Anton woz ere on the white tiles. The woman started to shout, something like: “You’ve ruined my lipstick, do you know what that cost?” Ali took a step toward her, grabbed the back of her neck, pulled her face close, kissed her on her newly drawn mouth and walked past her.
Just find the door and get out; you don’t need to be here, she told herself—then Aglaja came on stage.
She was wearing an accordion, or the accordion was wearing her; the heavy instrument took up the entire top half of her body and she played it as if she were ripping open the bones of her fishlike torso. A round head with short red hair stuck out at the top, and below, two legs in fishnet tights melted together into long, low black shoes, as if into a mermaid’s tail. Her arms, clasping the monster of an instrument, were clad to the elbows in black fish-scale gloves. She threw back her head as if someone had slapped her in the face, her red-painted lips swallowing the entire ceiling, her tongue poking out like a sticking-up finger. Her voice rose, trembling, from her throat to the crystals on the ceiling and into Ali’s guts. The fierce vibrato made Ali stop and stand still. Then she saw Aglaja’s face. Ali’s eyes widened, tears shot up, she began to blink. Then she looked again.
The crystals over Aglaja’s head swung to and fro; her long cloth-covered fingers slowly pressed the accordion buttons. Ali could have sworn she could smell the woman all the way across the room. She smelled of freesia and bergamot, of pineapple, oranges, cedarwood and vanilla. Ali opened her mouth and imagined the red hair growing into it. She imagined walking onstage and taking this woman away, somewhere, anywhere. She imagined everyone else leaving the room immediately—imagined that there had never been anyone there but the two of them.
The accordion player received a smattering of applause and left the stage. Ali sat down at the bar and waited. She craned her neck for a glimpse of the mermaid, but only saw Mustafa sidling toward her and quickly looked around for an excuse not to talk to him. A shaven-headed woman in gold hot pants, her synthetic afro tucked under her arm, was suddenly standing in front of her. She couldn’t tell whether or not it was the pole dancer who’d stripped above her head a little while ago.
The woman had opened her lips to say something, but now she looked down at Ali’s hand resting on the P&S packet. Could she have one of her German cigarettes?
She said her name was Kato, Katarina, Katyusha, like in the song “Vykhodila na bereg Katyusha”—“Katyusha Went Down to the Riverbank.”
“Do you know it?”
Of course Ali knew the song. There wasn’t a child whose mother tongue was Russian who didn’t. Ali knew that, Katarina knew that, and now Katarina came and stood between Ali’s legs (balanced precariously on the bar stool and doing their best not to shake) and quietly sung a few lines of the song in her ear. Of course, it wasn’t really about a woman who went down to a riverbank where “rastsvetali yabloni i grushi”—“the apple and pear trees were in blossom”; it was about a multiple rocket launcher that was developed during the Great Patriotic War of ’41 to ’45, and affectionately dubb
ed “Katyusha” in Russian. It’s true that the rest of the song was about powerful emotions—but not the ones thought by some to be the Russian soul howling for love.
Katarina sucked on her cigarette. Ali heard a harsh indrawn breath and a soft smacking sound as Katarina filled her mouth with smoke and released the cigarette from between her lips. Ali’s ears went red, especially the right one, at Katarina’s cheek. She gave a sudden laugh, drew back her head and stared into the face of this woman—a face as open as if someone had flung up a window. The far-apart eyes looked as if they might tumble down the broad cheekbones, so that Ali was tempted to catch them with her own. She followed the lines of Katarina’s eyes and cheekbones down to her mouth and saw her jaw tense. They spoke Russian; that sped things up. Katyusha the rocket launcher kissed Ali before she’d even ordered a second drink. Ali tasted thick oily lumps of paint, and then little else.
Katyusha studied Ali’s face, running the fingertips of her left hand over her eyebrows. Ali looked down and saw a thin gold ring on the fourth finger of Katyusha’s right hand.
Beside Myself Page 3
