The smoke from a bong got in her eyes, making her blink. She opened her lips, took a deep breath and coughed, looking across at the cloud of smoke around a mop top whose matted hair stuck up from his head like the legs of a fat spider. Then she turned back to Elyas; he was still looking at her. They headed toward one another, slowly, not purposefully—they had no purpose; they didn’t know what they wanted of each other, but not the usual, that was for sure. They danced sideways along the wall, heel-and-toeing it, closer and closer—and just as Elyas was about to turn to face Ali, a woman dived between them and Ali found herself with the woman’s bum in her hand, while the woman’s bare navel fitted itself around Elyas’s belt buckle. Ali’s hand jerked back; she wiped it on her trouser leg with a curse, put her glass down and looked about for the hostess to say goodbye. She pushed her way through the fluorescent polyester tops; out in the hall, a boy with no eyebrows squinted at her, barely of age, his head a polished wooden ball leaning against the door frame. When Ali felt for the door handle, he put his hand in her hair and closed his fingers to a fist, saying something Ali couldn’t make out. She raised an arm as well as she could in the crush, and slapped the boy in the face. He let out a yell and began to cry; someone shouted and took the kid into the bathroom, and someone else pushed Ali; she couldn’t see much now, but she saw Elyas’s eyes and felt his hand in hers, pulling her into an empty room. They lay down on the bed; they could hear people looking for Ali. Someone knocked on the bedroom door and without a word to each other, they rolled under the bed, pulling the sheets shut like curtains. Their eyes gleamed among the dust balls. Elyas’s glasses were slipping down his nose and he took them off. A dust ball settled on Ali’s face; she caught it between her fingers. Elyas grabbed another and tried to blow it away.
“I like this stuff.”
“What? Dust?”
“Yes.” Ali rolled onto her back and looked up at the bed slats and the bulging flesh of the mattress.
“I’m allergic.”
“I don’t do mouth-to-mouth.”
“That’s okay.”
They lay there breathing, uncertain whether or not to kiss; their needs were so different, but they didn’t really know what else to do. Kissing would definitely have been easier than not.
“When I was little, my dad often went to visit his parents in Russia, and the day he was due back from Moscow, my brother and I had to clean the entire flat till it shone. But he always found something. He went from room to room with his gloves still on, and we followed behind—my brother used to tremble like anything. And he ran his fucking finger down every groove—he even stood on tiptoe and felt all along the top of the doorframe.” Ali ran her nails down the cracks between the floorboards. “Then he peered at his fingertips and held them up to our faces.”
She felt sharp grit and dried-up dust gathering under her nails. “The top of the doorframe—no child can reach that high.” Her breathing was shallow, but the dust balls swirled all the same. “No child would even think of it. Would they?”
Elyas put his hands under his cheek and listened.
“Don’t think I’ve done any dusting since I left home. No intention of starting either.”
Ali felt the blood rush to her head. She didn’t know why she was telling him this; she never talked about her father—not at parties, anyway, and certainly not under beds with strangers whose ears seemed to go on forever.
“Can I ask you something?”
Elyas lay there without moving, his knees pulled up to his chest.
“Can you waggle your ears?”
They parted early the next morning outside a photo booth where they’d pulled faces, muzzy with tiredness, and posed with a plastic pistol that Ali had grabbed on her way out of the flat to keep other people at bay. (Elyas had grabbed a pair of sunglasses.) There was room for only one person on the metal stool in the photo booth, so they sat on each other’s laps and held each other tight, kept awake by the flash of the camera. Then they tumbled out into the cold of the morning and stood looking at each other’s feet, their bodies bent forward like blades of grass, their foreheads touching. They almost fell asleep like that, as the machine blow-dried their strip of photos. A week later Ali moved in with Elyas. Dust balls continued to be a topic.
Ali arrived with two trash bags full of clothes and comics. The flat was big and empty; you could shout into it and your voice would echo back at you. Elyas was sitting on the floor at the other end of the hall, tinkering with a door.
“I’m just mending your door handle.”
The 150-square-foot box that was to be Ali’s room had a big window overlooking a kindergarten playground; the noise level was as high as if it opened out onto a motorway. Ali looked down at the little heads flitting across the grass, lit a cigarette, ashed out of the window, looked some more.
The room was empty except for a mattress, and she left it that way. She piled up cardboard boxes, crammed socks, shirts, underwear and trousers into their ripped-open bellies, hung a curtain in front—she didn’t want everyone seeing that her wardrobe was entirely dark blue and black—and ashed on the floor. Elyas was always offering to help her look for furniture, but a wooden board over two small chests of drawers did her as a table and she didn’t feel the need for more. On the table she put Elyas’s housewarming present to her: a cut-glass ashtray with a silver-plated stubber. The walls of her room were bare of any sign that she read, any sign that she had friends. She kept the mattress that had been lying on the floor when she moved in and loved the dependable emptiness the room exuded. When she was away, she didn’t miss the room; when she returned, they greeted each other politely, then fell into a passionate togetherness, like lovers meeting only for wordless sex. Ali threw herself onto the mattress, digging her shoulder blades almost through to the floor and grinding her back to and fro as if she were trying to bury herself in the room.
She had no objection to furniture on principle; she bought crockery for the flat, amassed a collection of chairs that had been put out for the garbagemen and once pulled half a sofa through town on its casters and heaved it into the living room. She bought a kitchen table in a junk shop and even oiled the tabletop, though you could still see traces of their habits in the cracks—wax that had dripped down the empty whisky bottles that served them as candlesticks, crumbs of amaranth flakes and cigarette ash, and a black line that couldn’t be scrubbed clean even with a scourer and always reminded Ali of what she and Michal had been doing on the table the time that Elyas had come home unexpectedly. He’d hinted to her as tactfully as possible that she might at least close the door, and she’d said: “You have to mend the handle first.”
Elyas left for work early and came home late, and if Ali hadn’t budged from her room by then, he’d throw his car keys onto her belly.
* * *
—
“Oh well, at least she’s nice and brown.”
There was a packet of profiteroles on the table. Cemal and Elyas were sitting at the ivy-covered window, drinking çay—Cemal smoking, Elyas peering through the smoke at Ali, who’d walked all the way from Karaköy because the rush-hour traffic had been at a deadlock. She’d been in the antique shops, putting photos of herself in the boxes of picture postcards and old photographs in the hope that Anton would come by at some point and rifle through them, recognize her on the photos and lose his mind.
Her temples throbbed in the heat; sweat ran down her forehead into her eyes.
“What are you doing here?” she yelled at Elyas when he got up and walked toward her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Isn’t she wonderful? What did I tell you?” Elyas looked at Cemal.
“She’s nicer to me, I must say,” said Cemal, smiling.
Elyas put his arms around Ali; she felt his hands on her back through her sweat-soaked shirt. He kissed her temples, and she wriggled free and blinked.
�
�I had a sudden craving for profiteroles and this is the best place for them. So I thought I’d drop in.” Elyas sat down and poured tea for Ali, his eyes telling her to sit down too. Ali looked at Cemal.
“Can I roll myself a cigarette?”
Cemal pushed his crumpled packet of tobacco across the table and dug in his pocket for the papers that were so thin that Ali was always ripping them—she made the sticky strip too soggy when she licked it. The wrapper was marked with Arabic characters. Ali drew her eyes together and tried to concentrate on rolling.
“It’s my fault that Elyas is here. I told him to come and check on you.”
Cemal looked at Ali, eyebrows raised, mouth open, as if he’d just given her the best news in the world. And because Ali said nothing—just lit up and kept looking at him—he added: “I told him you cry at night when you think everyone’s asleep.”
Elyas pushed his spoon into the chocolate-covered profiterole on the dish in front of him.
“Uncle told on you. You can never trust family, you know,” he said, champing choux pastry.
“Cemal was only kidding. He can’t know what I do at night. I never sleep here.” Ali spat tobacco on the floor and peeled the strip of wet paper from her tongue.
“Yes, you do, kuşum, what are you on about? You lie here on this sofa and mew like a cat having its tail pulled.”
“No, I don’t. I never sleep here because you have bed bugs that bring me out in a rash and give me red spots and make me scratch myself raw. It’s disgusting. This sofa’s disgusting. I’d never dream of sleeping here.”
Cemal let out a soft wheeze, sucked in a throatful of air and got up. “I’m going out,” he said, coughing. “I’ll go and let your mum know you’ve arrived safely. Shouldn’t think you’ve got around to it yet, have you?”
Elyas looked up at his uncle, his cheeks puffed with cream. He shook his head and smiled, and Cemal smiled back. Ali jumped up and kissed Cemal on both cheeks, murmuring: “Say hello to Sibel from me.”
* * *
—
Ali knew Elyas’s mother from her visits to their shared flat, when she’d put cress sandwiches and stewed tea on the kitchen table for the children who weren’t children anymore, and expect them to eat up: “I don’t mind what you do, but you must eat.” Apart from that, Sibel was the gentlest of mothers. She had clear bright eyes beneath papery lids and still held herself like a young girl. Ali had never been able to guess her age and had never asked. She’d been a real young girl when she’d come to West Germany to work in a factory, and being one of the first in the home to learn the foreign language, she was soon the official interpreter for all the other women on her floor. She went shopping with them and accompanied them to the local authorities and lawyers and doctors; she knew all their most intimate secrets and complaints—whether bowel movements or embarrassing rashes or husbands. Sibel and Ali often talked about this. Ali had done the same in her asylum-home years, taking the old people on her floor to the doctor and having to listen to all kinds of stories in the waiting room because they thought the little girl was too young to register the word “vaginismus.”
Sibel told her that she’d learned German by looking up indecent words in the dictionary to write love letters for the other women, and Ali told her that she’d sometimes accompanied the old ladies to the hairdresser and looked on in silence as they pointed at the bald patches on their heads and tried to explain: “My hair says goodbye.”
Whenever Sibel was coming, Elyas scrubbed the flat and gave Ali a talking-to about the dust balls that were creeping out of her room. He’d bang the vacuum nozzle against Ali’s door and ask her to turn her music down.
“When Sibel gets here I’ll be the best-behaved child in the world—even better-behaved than you. But leave me in peace till she comes.”
“She loves you more than me anyway. Couldn’t you at least do the washing-up?”
“If you’ll lend me a clean shirt. Mine are all in the wash.”
When Sibel stood in the door with a box of éclairs in her hand, Elyas nudged Ali aside with his hip so he’d be the first to give his mum a hug. He wrapped his arms twice around her and picked her up off the floor, making her scream.
Ali and Elyas grew together, sharing mother and shirts and dust balls until they’d forgotten the existence of anything outside themselves—until they’d invented a language all their own and barely needed words.
* * *
—
“Is that my shirt you’re wearing?” Elyas asked, when Cemal had left.
Ali looked down at the shirt, then at her forearms, which really were very brown, then out of the ivy-hung window.
They sat there for a long time. Ali could have sworn she heard a clock tick, but it was only her own breathing. Elyas slid over to her, cream still in the corners of his mouth; Ali put her head on one side, Elyas mirrored her and they leaned against one another, heads touching. Then she buried her curls in the hollow of his collarbone, scraped her teeth against his stubble and closed them over his chin. He gave her a push, almost knocking her off her chair, and she climbed on his lap and moved her eyes around the ceiling, drawing patterns. Elyas put his hand over her eyes, making everything dark and cool, and she pulled him over her like a blanket. After a while he said: “Let’s go out.”
They sauntered along İstiklal and turned off into a courtyard crammed with wicker stools so low that the people sitting on them, drinking tea, seemed to be squatting on the ground. Waiters carrying silver trays full of tea glasses scurried through the crowd, calling out to ask who wanted more. Elyas and Ali sat down side by side. He followed her gaze as she watched the darting waiters like someone watching a game of pool. A red ball shot to the right, brushing a tourist clutching a plastic bag, who looked up in fright. Pocketed. A green ball rolled backward to fetch a tray full of tea glasses, then ricocheted back to its initial position. Pocketed. A black ball stood motionless in the middle of the courtyard, gesticulating as if under water.
“Come on, say something?” Ali said, as if to herself.
“What do you want to hear?”
“I want to hear your voice.”
“Are you seeing someone?”
“That’s your first question?”
Ali peeled the sugar lump out of its paper and threw it in her tea glass. She sipped the brown liquid cautiously and threw in another.
“Dunno. I could ask when you started taking sugar in your tea, if you’d rather.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you’re seeing someone, or yes, you’d rather talk about sugar?”
“Yes, I’m seeing someone.”
“A he or a she?”
“Since when has that mattered to you?”
Ali stared into Elyas’s gaunt face that suddenly resembled an old man’s. His cheeks were sunken and there was a shimmer of silver in his stubble and at his temples. She wondered if she had gray hairs too—and thought what a long time she must have been in Istanbul, if she hadn’t realized that her best friend was going gray. His ears seemed bigger too.
Elyas noticed Ali staring at the white threads in his hair and pushed the loose strands behind his ears.
“Of course it matters.”
“But why?”
“Because I have to know whether to ask if he is so important to you that you don’t want to come back. Or if she is so important to you.”
“A question of grammar?”
“Exactly.”
“Have you come to fetch me back?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Do I look like someone who wants fetching back?”
They stared at each other. Ali knew that Elyas saw Anton’s and Valentina’s faces in hers like shadows. Valentina had probably rung and asked him to find her and bring her back—she’d already lost one child; she couldn’t go losing the other as well. And Elyas ha
d probably promised her. He knew what Istanbul did to you; once the city had you in its grip, it was worse than the desert.
“We could catch a plane today. I’ve mended all the door handles.”
“I don’t believe you.” The corners of Ali’s mouth turned up.
“Why not?”
“Because none of the doors in that dump fit anyway.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Isn’t there anything you miss?” Elyas said, without looking at her.
“Can I ask you something?”
Ali took Elyas’s hands in hers; they were rough, and bonier than she remembered. Sibel hasn’t been around with éclairs for a long time, she thought, resting her face on his palms.
“A he or a she?”
“What?”
Ali felt the weight of her head in Elyas’s hands. Her chin filled the crack between his little fingers; her cheeks smarted with heat; the skin under her eyes was tense.
“When you look at me, do you see a he or a she?”
“Ali, what is all this?”
Ali pushed Elyas’s hands away with a laugh and cracked her fingers. She looked at the waiters again—all those men, far too many of them and far too young, who’d left their villages to look for work, any work, in the city, and were now hanging about, five to a broom handle, as people had said under socialism. One of the waiters had Marx’s face tattooed on the back of his hand. They came and went far more than was necessary, with their enormous trays full of bulbous glasses of tea which they pressed on the squatting customers, tearing half-empty glasses from their hands: “That one’s gone cold, here’s a new one for you, my friend.” Two waiters were bickering; one of them suddenly kicked up his leg and kneed the other in the ribs, sending him flying into the crowd of tea drinkers like a high jumper clearing the bar.
Beside Myself Page 19
