Ali leapt to her feet. Elyas said something like “don’t” or “stay here” or maybe just “Ali,” but she didn’t hear; she went and stood by the young man who’d been floored, to make sure he didn’t wring the other man’s neck. Other people had got to their feet too; a whole army of ants was tugging at the fighting men, but they were spurred on by the shouts and all the more determined to set on one another. Ali had hold of one of them; somebody else had hold of Ali. Elyas stayed put. An elderly man came slowly out of the teahouse, kneading a tesbih and gave the two young men a talking-to. Their heads were as red as squashed tomatoes, but they weren’t listening; they continued to kick their legs in the air, and Ali got her man in a lever hold.
* * *
—
Elyas looked at Ali and thought of the time she’d tossed aside her math studies to box. “It’s one or the other,” she’d announced, as if he’d demanded an explanation. “You can’t do sparring five times a week and sit up all night studying calculus.” Once, she came home black-and-blue and told him she’d provoked her coach until he’d grabbed her by the collar and lifted her twenty centimeters off the floor. She’d told him—calmly and scornfully—to put her down, and he’d hurled her against the padded wall of the boxing studio. It wasn’t the end of their friendship, though; far from it. After that, they fucked even more uninhibitedly than before, in the changing rooms, on the stairs, even in the men’s showers, which Ali had no qualms about entering with nothing on but flip flops. It made no difference how often Elyas tried to convince Ali that getting yourself hurled against walls was maybe not the only way of winning someone’s affection; he had the feeling that the more he went on at her, the more bruises she came home with.
The squashed-tomato faces seemed to have calmed down; the tussle was over. Ali came back to the table breathing heavily, a big smile on her face. Her curls were tousled; her shirt ripped on the left shoulder.
“I’ve no idea who you’re trying to impress. Your mum’s worried, I’m worried, Cemal’s worried, but you don’t give a fuck about any of us. You do what you like and ask stupid questions.” Elyas dug in his pocket for change. “I don’t know what it’s all about.”
“Are you going?”
“Yes.” He tossed coins onto the table; a couple of them rolled to the ground.
Ali picked them up and put them on the saucer. She lunged at Elyas, pulling at his trouser leg, fingering the hollow of his knee.
“Don’t.”
“You don’t want me to go?”
“Don’t be angry with me.”
“I’m not.”
“Please, don’t be angry. Please.”
He could tell she was crying from her voice, but he didn’t dare look at her. He sat back down on the stool and stared in front of him.
Ali dabbed at her face, trying to roll a cigarette at the same time.
“You know why I’m here.”
Elyas heard her dry lips stick together and smack open again.
“It’s not your fault,” he said at length.
The back of his hand touched Ali’s. She passed him her cigarette. He hated the taste of rat poison on his tongue, but he took a few fierce drags and stubbed out the cigarette in the gravel. The next morning he flew back to Berlin.
* * *
—
Gizli Bahçe was on Nevizade; you had to push your way through a sea of heads to get along the narrow passageway. His hand on Ali’s shoulder, Kato propelled the two of them through the crowd, ignoring the tables in the middle of the street, jostling the drinkers and whispering in Ali’s ear. They squeezed into a narrow doorway, past boys in bomber jackets who were playing war on their phones, and laughed their way up narrow stairs. Electronic music, people in tight jeans and baggy sweaters, fluorescent beanies and dark glasses, a horde of bobbing bodies; everyone seemed to be dragging on a cigarette, sucking on a straw. Like a window to Berlin, Ali thought, heading for the bar. Kato vanished behind the DJ’s console; a friend of his was spinning. A kiss on the right, a kiss on the left, bum to bum, and they were dancing. Ali peered through the smoky air across the dance floor and suddenly felt a hand on her spine—a cold, slim hand down her low-backed top. The hand ran over her bare skin and pinched her waist.
“Hi,” said the woman whose hand it was. Long blond strands tumbled over orange lips. She was so thin—a sketch of a person, Ali thought.
“Hi,” she said.
“Are you on your own?”
“No, my boyfriend’s on the dance floor.”
“Oh, your boyfriend,” said the girl, dragging the word out like an insult. But she wasn’t deterred. “My girlfriend’s not coming to Istanbul till next month, she’s Belgian, I kind of really miss her. You look like her, by the way, are you Belgian?”
“No.”
“What are you?”
Ali wondered what would be quicker—to go to the toilet with the girl and get it over with, or to try to explain that she wasn’t interested.
“Guess.”
“Spanish?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Wow, that’s pretty amazing. Can you say something in Spanish for me?”
“Idi na khui!’* said Ali, her voice sweet and low.
“That sounds so beautiful!” The young woman’s eyes fixed a mole on Ali’s throat. “And your boyfriend, is he Spanish?”
“No, he’s Tunisian.”
“Did you meet in Istanbul?”
“No, we met in Iraq.”
“Do you work for an NGO or something?”
“Exactly.”
The music came to Ali’s rescue. She saw the orange mouth opening and shutting in front of her face, but all that came out was the beat. She turned to the barman and screamed for a vodka and tonic. Then she saw Anton in the mirror above the spirits.
Between the Talisker and the Lagavulin, she saw his face that was her face, moving in profile about the room. She saw him pass her; she saw herself push through the crowded bar toward the door. She spun around.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” the orange mouth shouted. Ali pushed her away and burst out of the bar onto the empty stairs and from there onto the street. She swung her head around and set off at a run, knocking into the tables on Nevizade—waiters helped her up and gave her an earful, but she pulled free, her head buzzing, ran past the streetwalkers with their glittery eye shadow, slipped on the fish market, colliding with a father carrying his daughter on his shoulders—he only just managed not to drop her—and almost fell onto a chestnut seller’s griddle as she crossed İstiklal. She yelled “Anton!” as loud as she could. People turned to stare; all İstiklal turned to stare. “Anton!” She ran, talking to him as she went, in Russian: “Podozhdi. Podozhdi. Podozhdi.” Wait. Wait. Wait.
Outside the patisserie in Cihangir she stopped to get her breath back. Everything was a blur in front of her eyes; she’d run into nothingness. Her throat was on fire; she tore the skin from her lips with her teeth; her head was spinning and the road stretched like a bow. Everything went black and she sat down on the curb and stared at the mosque opposite. Somebody laughed.
“There’s a grain of joke in every joke.”
An old woman swaddled in shawls from head to toe, a shimmering, many-colored cocoon, had sat down next to Ali and was counting notes.
“I’m sorry?” said Ali.
“There’s a grain of joke in every joke,” the woman cackled.
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you speak Turkish?”
“Yes. No. Sorry.”
“In Africa they say there’s a grain of joke in every joke. And where is truth? That’s right. In Africa.”
Ali didn’t know whether she was having such trouble understanding the woman because of the shawls covering her mouth, or because she felt dizzy.
“In Africa they tell the sto
ry of a young man who wanted to marry a young girl.” The old woman stared into the crowd of people outside the mosque as if she were peering down a long tunnel. “But the girl’s father said to the fellow: ‘You’re too young. You’ve seen nothing. Go out into the world and look for truth and when you’ve found it, bring it back to show me and you shall have my daughter.’ So the young man set out in search of truth. He looked and he looked, dogged and despairing, convinced that he’d find it somewhere. He crossed a hundred and four borders, and drank out of a hundred and forty rivers. He saw war and murder; he saw what happened to people when the Earth shook or when fire broke out—how they fought each other, how they turned into wolves or gazelles, hunters or hunted. One day he sat down on the bank of the Angereb, tired and broken, and realized he couldn’t recall his beloved’s face or her hands or her smell, and that his only wish on Earth was to regain those memories. And as he sat there, he saw an ugly old woman walking along the water, dressed in rags, her teeth rotten, clumps of hair sticking up out of her head like gray wool. She reeked of foul apples, sickly sweet and festering. She sat down next to the young man who didn’t look young anymore, but old—lined and somber—and he asked her who she was.
“ ‘I am Truth,’ said the old woman.
“ ‘Truth!’ The young man leaped to his feet, suddenly remembering the reason for his journey. ‘Then you must come with me! I’ve been looking for you and now I’ve found you! You don’t know what I’ve had to go through to find you. You must come with me and I’ll show you to the father of my bride.’
“ ‘I can’t come with you, my boy. I’m sorry,’ said the old woman.
“ ‘But you have to. Five times I’ve almost lost my life and many, many times I’ve seen others lose their lives. I’d die for you, do you understand? But I can’t force you to come with me.’
“ ‘Too true,’ said the old woman. ‘And what happens if you show me to the father of your bride?’
“ ‘I can marry her at last.’
“ ‘Do you still want to marry her?’
“The young man looked out at the Angereb lying before him in deathly silence. He said nothing.
“ ‘I can’t come with you, my boy, but you can tell him you’ve seen me.’
“The young man looked down at the old woman. She was shriveled as a prune and when she spoke, her cloak moved as if her skin were creeping with worms. Saliva dribbled out of the corner of her mouth.
“ ‘And what shall I tell him when I get back?’
“ ‘Tell him I’m beautiful,’ said the old woman. ‘Tell him I’m young and beautiful.’ ”
The cocoon at Ali’s side fell silent. Ali looked at the body swathed in shawls, then at the hands that hadn’t stopped counting green and brown notes all through the story.
“Oh yes. That’s the story they tell in Africa.”
The woman looked at Ali, her eyes shining. She laughed again, throwing back her body, and Ali saw that she had a big white rabbit with her in a cage, and that the bottom of the cage was strewn with slips of brightly colored paper. She was one of those fortune-tellers who went from café to café offering her rabbit’s services to the tourists. At a given sign, the animal would lollop over the papers, picking out lots for customers, who would find their future revealed on the colored tickets. Ali had see it done. She’d followed these fortune-tellers a couple of times in her first weeks in Istanbul, to see the tourists being ripped off by a rabbit—to see if there really were idiots out there who let themselves be conned. There were.
The fortune-teller noticed Ali squinting at the bedraggled-looking creature.
“You want future?” she asked.
Ali dug in her jacket pocket and produced a note for the woman. The rabbit didn’t budge.
The woman rose, picking up the cage.
“Come with me.”
Ali looked up at her.
“Come on.”
They walked down to the water and turned into a side street that could have been in a Russian village; Ali could have sworn it was the Volga stretching out before them—the Volga with a big bridge across it, to Asia, and the family dacha just around the corner. There was a smell of cat piss and raspberry canes; she heard Anton’s laugh and turned to look behind her.
The fortune-teller led her into another side street—more of an alley, really, with corrugated-iron fences. Ali heard a rustle and saw that the place was covered with inch-long cats. The ground was a heaving mass of gray fur; it seemed to be made of the creatures, and they flocked around Ali, climbing up her, getting in her trousers and under her shirt, and tumbling out again through the slits between the buttons. The fortune-teller lifted her skirts and drew out a small knife. The blade didn’t flash in the dark, but Ali heard a soft chink of metal. The fortune-teller took Ali’s right hand and slashed her palm. Ali wanted to scream but didn’t know how. Blood dripped onto the ground and the old woman said something, but Ali could make no sense of the words.
* * *
—
Ali ran down Nevizade, afraid she wouldn’t find her way back to Gizli Bahçe. Then the reactions of the men in the restaurants told her that she’d stumbled this way earlier; they clicked their tongues and waved their hands as if they were swatting flies. She had no idea how long she’d lain unconscious on the road in Cihangir, no idea of the time. She imagined Kato’s furious face and was afraid it might not be waiting for her anymore. She found the doorway with the boys in bomber jackets and climbed the stairs. Her hands were bloody and smarting and she didn’t know why—had she injured herself when she fell? Must get it disinfected, she thought, disinfected with vodka.
Music was coming from the bar. She was about to push open the door when she saw Kato sitting a few steps higher up, looking down at her like a bird. His eyes were red.
“I’m sorry, I—” Ali began.
Kato let out a cry, a high, trembling note that gave way to a shrill staccato. Then he opened his mouth wide and groaned, sweat pouring down his face.
“They, they…there were…in the toilets…I went to the toilet and they—” It was only now that Ali saw the purple bruise below his right eye. She ran to him and clung to him and he trembled and vomited, and she held his forehead. Yellow bile sprayed onto her shoes and he screamed.
* * *
—
Ali took Kato to Uncle Cemal.
“We must tell the police,” he said, pressing a wet towel to Kato’s face.
“Careful, he’ll suffocate.”
Kato laughed from under the towel—or maybe he cried, but Ali thought it was a laugh.
“I’ll call my friend at the police tomorrow.”
“Ah yes, your glorious friend.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you here illegally?” Cemal looked at the huddled body on the sofa. Kato didn’t reply.
“Let him sleep.”
They went into the kitchen which was so narrow that they could only stand side by side. Ali perched on the stove and lit a cigarette; Cemal took it from her mouth and dragged on it.
“I told you, this country’s a den of wild animals.”
“It could have happened anywhere.”
“But it didn’t; it happened here, to you.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Where were you when your friend was being attacked?”
“Swimming.”
“What?”
“Cemal, please.”
They smoked. Cemal put a finger under Ali’s chin and pulled her face close to his.
“Why didn’t you introduce him to me earlier?”
“Because of that.”
“Don’t you think I’d have understood
?”
Ali pulled her face away and stared at the cigarette in Cemal’s hand.
“Don’t you agree he has a strange way of laughing? Like a woodpecker hammering away at your temple. Ratatata. Ratatata. Ratatata.” Ali drilled a finger into her head.
“Ali.”
“Yes?”
“What do you live off?”
“I’m—”
She almost said “on the game,” but thought better of it. She clasped her hands to her head, then spread her arms. Cemal grabbed her right hand and examined the fresh gash on her palm.
“And what the hell is this?”
“Tripped, fell on my hands, how should I know?” Ali climbed down off the stove and walked slowly to the door. “Can’t remember.”
She turned and looked into Cemal’s tanned face. Cemal, who never gave up hope and always knew what to do. Cemal, who could be relied on to understand everything in the world. Ali wished he’d pick her up the way he did at Atatürk Airport—pick her up and rock her in his arms.
“Cemal, be honest with me. Will your policeman friend find Anton?”
“No.”
“Then I’d like you to call me Anton from now on. Would you do that?”
* * *
—
Kato had agreed to go to the women’s part of Galatasaray Hammam with Ali. There were small individual cubicles to change in, glass-fronted down to waist height and white painted wood below. Kato and Ali shared one. They got undressed, took the disposable pants out of their packets and knotted the checked cotton scarves over their breasts. The purple under Kato’s eye was only a shadow now, but the bruises on his thigh had darkened. Ali had tried not to look when Kato pulled his jeans off, but he looked at her openly. When Ali tried to push past him to slip into her wooden sandals, he put his hand between her thighs. Her head shot up.
Eight candles hung in the middle of the room over a hot stone that was draped with wet bodies like discarded towels. Ali and Kato sat down next to the marble basin and poured hot water over each other’s shoulders. People were restless in spite of the heat; they all seemed to be talking to each other or muttering to themselves; the place was buzzing like a beehive and the noise echoed under the high dome.
Beside Myself Page 20
