by Vendela Vida
“You’re going to Istanbul?”
“I’m flying this afternoon. I think it’s hopeless for me to fix anything here. You should go home too.”
There was no time for a proper good-bye. Özlem held Yvonne gently, seeming afraid that Yvonne would crumble under any pressure at all.
After Özlem left, Yvonne packed her bags quickly. She would drive to Cappadocia. She didn’t know where it was or how long it would take, but she would get there. As she drove down the hill to the main street, she began to worry. What would people think when they realized she had left town altogether?
There was no choice: she would turn herself in. She had seen a police station on the main street of Datça. It was a sterile, solid building, with a dozen cars parked outside every time she drove by, as though the police force was so busy inside they could not leave.
She would go to the station and tell them what had happened. Surely someone there spoke English. She would tell them everything she knew about the boy, everything that had happened that day and on the previous days. She imagined a row of dough-faced policemen listening to her story. She would leave the decision to them.
She drove to the police station and parked in the front lot. She climbed the three steps to the building, and found herself face-to-face with a bust of someone whose name she didn’t recognize. She was staring at it when a policeman with a mustache greeted her. “Merhaba,” he said, and added something she could not understand.
“Merhaba,” she said.
She heard someone yelling and peered down the corridor. Holding cells lined the first floor, and the shouts of a prisoner had summoned no fewer than three guards with their batons lifted into the air like torches.
She turned back to the mustached policeman. He was staring at her, waiting for her to state the reason for her presence.
“Is there a bathroom here?” Yvonne asked him.
He didn’t understand.
“WC?” she said.
He shook his head.
Say something, she told herself. Confess.
“Ah, there you are,” said a voice behind her. She turned. It was Ali Çelik. “I saw your car outside,” he said to Yvonne.
Then he spoke in Turkish to the officer, and the officer responded. Yvonne thought she heard the officer say WC before smiling. Ali smiled, then turned to Yvonne and frowned. “Should we go, then?” he said. He grabbed hold of her elbow and led her out the door.
“I’m sorry about the car,” she said, not sure what he wanted from her.
“What were you doing there?” he asked, ignoring her apology.
“I don’t know,” Yvonne said. They were standing outside the station.
Ali stared at her. “Don’t be foolish,” he said.
“You know?” Yvonne said.
“Yes,” Ali said. “Some reporters called my house, and I was on my way to see you when I saw your car parked here.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the Renault. “Are you crazy?” he said.
“I wasn’t planning on—” Yvonne said, and stopped. She didn’t know what she had planned. “I was on my way to Cappadocia.”
“Why?”
She told Ali that Ahmet was from the region, how she wanted to go to his parents, to explain everything to them. The sun was hot on her dark hair.
“I think that’s brave of you,” Ali said. Yvonne was surprised. She had expected him to have the same reaction as Özlem. “Everyone needs to make amends,” he said. “I’m happy you think this way.”
Yvonne was so grateful she almost cried.
“But it’s too far for you to drive there. You’re in no condition to drive.” He looked at her then and looked away. She wondered what he was seeing. “I’ll take you to the bus station,” he added. “Give me the keys.”
Ali adjusted the driver’s seat of the Renault before turning on the engine. He drove her to the small office at the bus station, removed her suitcase from the car, and helped her get a ticket. There was no direct bus to the boy’s town. She would travel to Konya first, spend the night, and the next day go to Ürgüp.
Ali sat with her in the small, spare terminal. They had nothing left to say to each other, and soon he stood. He walked to the ticket office in the station and came back with a small man in a uniform.
“This man will watch you now,” Ali said.
“Thank you,” Yvonne said, and took Ali’s hand.
“Thank you for coming to Turkey,” he said. He had adopted a tone he might have used with anyone, any person who had rented his home and was now departing. “I have enjoyed meeting you.” He squeezed her hand and let it drop. Then he turned and disappeared out the door.
The man in uniform was the manager of the bus station. He invited Yvonne into his office. “You shouldn’t have to wait out there,” he said. She agreed to follow him. He pulled her suitcase for her and dusted off a metal chair next to his desk.
He wanted to show off his English. He showed her pictures of his wife and son. “You go to Konya?” he said.
“I’m stopping there,” said Yvonne.
“Konya is very religion,” said the man. “The Mevlana is in Konya.”
“The Mevlana? I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“The Mevlana?”
“No,” Yvonne said. She regretted coming into his office.
“Maybe it calls something else in English,” he said, and turned on his ancient computer, which made snoring sounds while flashing a series of green lights.
He typed using only his two index fingers, and then gestured to the screen as though he had just performed a magic trick. “Rumi,” he said. “That is what you call him.”
Yvonne nodded. She knew the famous poet, had seen his books in the homes of her friends. “Okay, now I know,” she said. She hoped that would end the conversation.
“I meet a woman once many years ago when I work in Istanbul. She is Londonish and she never come to Turkey before but she has a dream. In her dream she sees men in white hats spinning and spinning. So she visits the books to find answer to what are these men who spin. She finds they are dervishes in Konya. Her life is very difficult but she gets her money and leaves her husband and comes to Konya to see the men, and it is as in her dream. My friend thinks she is Muslim after that. She says she was saved.”
He looked at Yvonne expectantly, as though she too harbored such dreams.
“I’m just passing through,” Yvonne said. “I’m catching another bus there tomorrow morning.”
“But you stay in Konya?”
“A night, yes,” Yvonne said.
“Then you go see dervishes, and Mevlana’s tomb. It is in Mevlana Museum.”
Yvonne looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes until her bus left. She wanted to be on the bus before the police or the news reporters or anyone else discovered where she was. She wanted to go straight to Ahmet’s family. They were the only ones who needed her explanation, the only ones who would be able to forgive or condemn her.
“Your bus is here,” the man said.
The bus was large and white, a tour bus, though it appeared all the other people boarding were locals, some with their entire families—children and parents. She took a seat toward the back, next to the window, and forced herself to think about what she would say to Ahmet’s family. She had no idea where she would start, or, it occurred to her, how she would find them.
A young man walked down the aisle of the bus offering coffee and food. When he reached Yvonne, she declined his offer of coffee—she was jittery enough—but accepted the fluorescent green package he was providing as a snack. Fruitcake. She nodded at the man to say thank you, and he smiled at her.
She tried to sleep but wasn’t tired. She tried to read but felt carsick. She ripped open the fluorescent wrapper and ate the fruitcake in three bites. She looked out the window, watching intermittent signs for Konya. KONYA 310 KILOMETERS, KONYA 240 KILOMETERS.
The bus stopped at a small station
. Yvonne used a restroom where she heard a woman vomiting in the next stall. In the small station store, Yvonne bought a bag of pretzel sticks and water, and then stood outside in the afternoon sun. She saw a group of policemen chatting in the shade. Come and get me, Yvonne thought. Come and get me, she thought as each car passed. Standing in the bright sun without sunglasses made Yvonne feel less guilty, less like a fugitive. I’m here, right out in the open. Take me.
As she reboarded the bus, she passed the woman who had vomited in the bathroom. The woman caught her eye and quickly looked away.
At the Konya bus station, Yvonne asked a taxi driver to take her to a hotel, any hotel.
The driver thought it over for a moment. “Hotel Mevlana,” he said.
Yvonne rolled the window down. The fumes of the crowded city invaded the taxi, her nose. She concentrated on exhaling. Konya was composed of endless roundabouts crowded with hundreds of bikes and buses, and by the time they pulled up outside the Hotel Mevlana, Yvonne was dizzy from the turns, the heat. She paid the driver and circled through the revolving door of the hotel into the dark lobby. She checked in for the night and requested an early wake-up call; her bus to Ürgüp left at six-thirty in the morning.
She rode the elevator to the third floor and stepped out into a dark hallway. After a few steps, the lights sparked on and Yvonne jumped in surprise. Her room was also dark, until she inserted her room key into a slot. When the lights came on, so did the air-conditioning. The wallpaper in the room was gold, the bedspread a baptismal white.
She showered, washing the film of dirt from her body and face, and sat naked on the bed, waiting for coolness to settle into the room. Already she felt better to have escaped Datça, to have disappeared this much, this far. But thoughts of Ahmet quickly overwhelmed her. The faces all around her, splashing, yelling. She lay on the bed, feeling the man’s hand on her leg underwater, the man who thought he had found Ahmet. She needed to leave the room. She could not be alone here.
She thought of the bus-station manager, his story about the woman who had been saved by the Mevlana and the dervishes. What had this woman seen? She dressed quickly and set out from the hotel with a map in her hands. She reentered the hotel twice to get directions to the Mevlana Museum. “Right down the street,” said the clerk the first time. The second time he pointed: “A white building.” Embarrassed, Yvonne pretended she saw it in the distance and thanked him.
Each time she left the hotel, she pushed through the revolving doors, and each time she was assaulted by the heat and the smell of diesel. She left the hotel driveway and after two roundabouts she was lost again. There were no crosswalks anywhere in the city. The cars honked their horns and the bikes rang their bells. A family of four navigated through the traffic on a single bicycle, the father pedaling with one child on the handlebars, another child and the mother sitting behind him. She felt ill.
“Madame,” called out men selling pizzas and plates and souvenirs with pictures of the Mevlana, a man in a white beard. “Madame, what are you looking for?” Yvonne continued walking. She seemed to be the only tourist in Konya.
Finally, she found the Mevlana Museum. Half a dozen guards stood talking or smoking at the entrance. She hurried inside.
All the women in the museum wore head scarves, each of them bright with floral patterns. She touched her own head, trying to imagine what it would feel like covered. Her fingers found her oversized duty-free sunglasses perched on her head, and she quickly removed and stashed them in her purse. She stopped, as instructed, by a bin that contained blue plastic bags and pulled them over her shoes.
She stepped into a crowded room. A mass of women were walking reverently in a circle around a glass case in the center of the room. Yvonne walked around them, trying to determine what it was they were circling. In the case she glimpsed a pearl-colored box, but what was inside the box was unclear. She watched the women place the fingers of both hands together, holding them close and lifting them, as though cupping water they were about to drink. They did this over and over again while they circled the small box.
When the crowd thinned momentarily, Yvonne approached the box. A plaque revealed its contents: THE BEARD OF MOHAMMED. Yvonne was dumbstruck. She had no idea that such an artifact existed. Was there anything like this in Christianity? What could approach this? The Shroud of Turin? The vial of Jesus’ blood? She was envious of the women who could get so close to material evidence of their prophet.
A family began circling the box and Yvonne, feeling like an impostor, stepped out of the way. The father and mother were trailed by a young girl wearing a white dress patterned with pink sheep. The girl lifted her hands to her face, mimicking her parents. She caught Yvonne’s eye and Yvonne looked away.
The girl, the heat, the circling. Yvonne needed air, then food. She needed to leave the museum. She walked past the guards before realizing the blue galoshes were still pulled over her sandals. She removed them quickly and left.
Water trickled loudly from a large, tiled fountain, with small stools around its shaded perimeter. Men were seated on some of the stools, using tin cups attached to the fountain with chains to drink and wash. Yvonne seated herself on one of the low stools, filled a tin cup from one of the spigots, and poured water on her feet. Then she filled the cup again and soaked her head. Water trickled down her back as she walked away. The coolness traveled through her.
There was no place to eat. From a street vendor she bought a vanilla ice cream bar coated in chocolate. She ate it quickly, messily, to keep it from melting in the heat. She ran across streets, relieved each time she made it to the sidewalk. In store windows she saw huge wedding photos, outsized funeral wreaths. Women in basements rolled dough on large, circular tables. In barbershops men were shaved while seated in gleaming orange-and-chrome chairs. She passed a white building with a strange sign: a smiling dolphin wearing a police uniform and riding a motorbike. She quickened her pace until she came to a street crowded with restaurants and students.
She paused in front of a shingled building that was labeled teahouse and listened to the music coming from within. It was the same music playing throughout Konya—wordless songs without beginning or end. A young man in the doorway of the teahouse called out to her.
“Madame,” he said. “Your children. They are here.”
Yvonne shook her head, but the man—the maître d’—pointed up to the roof of the teahouse.
“Yes, they are here,” he said. “Upstairs.”
It made no sense that her children would be here, but the man was so certain. Had her children come to Konya to surprise her? How could they know she was here?
“Follow me,” the maître d’ said, and because Yvonne was hungry and thirsty and because anything seemed possible, she followed the man as he led her up narrow stairs covered with broken tiles, past walls decorated with dull pewter plates. Her stomach spun and her breath was short. She felt she would collapse on her children when she saw them. Gratitude overcame her. She would tell them everything. She would tell them how sorry she was that everything was not as it should be.
Yvonne followed the maître d’ onto the roof of the building, where students were talking animatedly in groups, or reading books alone. Yvonne scanned the tables, seeing girls in tight dresses and head scarves flirting with boys who took long inhalations from water pipes. She followed the man, her head turning everywhere, certain she would see her children before he did.
The maître d’ paused in front of a table, where a young man and woman sat writing postcards. They were pale-skinned with dark blond hair. They were not her children.
“Here they are,” the maître d’ said. The couple looked up at Yvonne, confused. The young man looked sympathetic. “Long day?”
Yvonne could not speak. She closed her eyes.
“Where are you from?” the woman said.
“Canada,” the man guessed.
“Netherlands,” the woman said, pointing to herself and her companion.
“App
arently we’re the only tourists in Konya not from Turkey,” the man said, smiling up at Yvonne.
Yvonne was just beginning to regain her equilibrium.
The maître d’ looked at the couple, and then at Yvonne. “No?”
“No,” the young man said.
“Oh, madame, I am sorry,” the maître d’ said. And suddenly Yvonne felt he did have something to be sorry for. She had thought for a brief ridiculous moment that she would find her children here, that they would hold her this night, take care of her and let her fall apart between them. They would ride with her on the next bus, their shoulders against her shoulders as they traveled to Ürgüp, to Ahmet’s family, to set things right.
Now she wanted to be away from this place.
Yvonne quickly descended the narrow, chipped steps, all the way down until she couldn’t go any farther. But she had gone too far. She was in the basement of the teahouse, with couches and a barber’s chair. The heavy scent of smoke and spice hung in the room. Though the room was empty, it still felt alive, as though a great number of people had congregated there the night before and departed in the early hours of morning.
Yvonne ran back up to the first floor of the teahouse, and then out onto the street. Something compelled her to look up at the roof, and she saw the two pale faces of the young couple who had been writing postcards. They were looking down at her, waiting to see where she would go. She walked quickly around the corner and continued past furniture stores with large gold beds on display, past cars and buses and bikes, the endless stream of traffic. Everyone in this city, it appeared, wanted to be someplace they were not.
Dusk was falling. She was so hungry.
She saw the mosque with its green tower and golden minaret and knew she was close to the Mevlana Museum and her hotel. She walked closer and saw men and women arriving at a restaurant by taxi. She followed them through the front doors and smelled hot food.
“You are here for dervishes?” said a man in the foyer. He was wearing a white button-down shirt with a beaded necklace and ironed jeans.
Yvonne shook her head. Then she said, “Maybe.”
