A few weeks passed, and I left Kosovo, saved up money waiting tables in Austin, then returned to the village six months later. By then, Kyle had moved to a different village, but Kosovo is small and there aren’t many English speakers. We became fast friends, upgraded to dating, then married a little over two years from the day we met.
Fifteen years later, we look back at our meet cute on a dirty Balkan farm road on August 1, and we admit to knowing that afternoon. I was a spry college graduate, rosy future before me, and I looked at him and thought, I’m going to marry him. He says the same thing, standing at that spot on the road next to the ramshackle market with cheap cookies and cold Fanta. He just knew.
Fifteen years have passed, and we want to show our three children the spot on the road.
It’s been more than twelve years since either Kyle or I have set foot here in Kosovo, and we’ve heard continual rumors about its changes since the early postwar era. We can only hope so. When we met in Kosovo, it was riddled with bullet holes, and backup generators compensated for spotty electricity. Now we’ve booked a guesthouse online in the capital city of Pristina, an indication that people actually visit. Some of my village students now live in the city, having left rural life for urban jobs and apartments where they can raise children near schools. They are all adults now.
The city air smells like mountains, chilled and unrefined, and I still breathe in secondhand smoke. The forecast calls for snow this weekend, and I debate trawling the market for faux leather jackets, the same one I shopped at fifteen years ago (the last time I bought a jacket at the market, it melted when I set it on a radiator). A high-rise that once lost a wall and revealed a grid of Soviet-era flats has now been razed and replaced with a gleaming glass building. A bustling coffee shop stands where I used to buy pirated CDs. On Wednesday nights, Kyle and I would ride buses into this city and listen to jazz music at a bar. I wonder if it’s still there. I doubt I could find it again.
We park the car in downtown Pristina and walk pink-nosed to where we’ll meet our Albanian friends.
“It’s so cold here!” Tate says between chattering teeth.
“I can’t believe I remember this, but want to know how you say that in Albanian?” I ask, speeding up to ward off the chill.
“How?”
I laugh before I can get it out. “Unë jamë ftöhtë!” I shout, and the kids peal with laughter. I remember now that this was my favorite Albanian phrase for its onomatopoeian quality.
“What else do you remember?” Reed asks. I look at Kyle and raise my eyebrows.
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “I don’t remember a thing.”
We turn the corner into the wind. I shiver and say, “Hmm, let’s see . . . I remember how to say ‘I’m full.’ That one’s fun.”
“How?” Reed says, giggling.
“Unë jamë plotë.” The kids howl, then start to practice the phrase.
We turn another corner and Kyle says, “Whoa. This wasn’t here.” Our friends told us to meet them on the walking street, but the last time we were here, it was a potholed thoroughfare for cars. It’s been transformed to a cobblestone boulevard where pedestrians now stroll in the early spring evening.
Skender is waiting for us on the street with his new wife, Jackie, an American English teacher. They met at an English-speaking high school in Pristina started by my former coworkers. Skender and Jackie now help run the place.
“Tsh! Kyle!” He waves us over.
We cross the street to hug Skender and shake Jackie’s hand. He looks like the same kid with a few extra laugh lines and gray hairs. Fifteen years ago he would sit at my kitchen table and recite her and hair, unable to hear the difference. I remember him walking in on a hot day and proudly declaring, “I am a sweater!” I affectionately nicknamed him Smiling Skender.
I hear footsteps, and a familiar voice says, “Mirëmbrëma, shoqet.” Beqir, Kyle’s old roommate, is standing behind him.
“Beq! What in the world!” Kyle says.
“Skender texted me and let me know you were here,” he says. He looks unchanged as well. The postwar years have been kind to our friends.
We walk to a trendy brick restaurant off the walking street, and we dine on wine and memories. The electricity never once blacks out and the Italian food is delicious. Skender tells us stories about a recent trip to Washington, DC. We can’t possibly be in Kosovo.
“The changes here are really remarkable,” Kyle says between bites.
Skender and Beq nod. “It’s not even the same country, right?” Beq says.
“I really can’t believe it,” I say.
“It’s not all perfect,” adds Skender. “Unemployment is huge here. Young people are all leaving for Germany because they can’t find jobs.” Earlier this morning I read something about this, about Kosovo’s growing pains as Europe’s youngest country.
“Well, looks like you guys lucked out,” Kyle says.
“It helps enormously to know English,” Skender says. His eyes are grateful. He now teaches in English at a school he helped found.
The next morning, we drive our rental car to the village. Kyle remembers the bends in the road and I remember the terra-cotta tiles on the roofs we pass, the same ones we passed countless times when we took the bus into the city and wondered whether our future included each other. The car curves around the lake embedded in the rolling hills that always marked our proximity to the village. We’re almost there.
Kyle pulls into the parking lot of the lakeside restaurant where we had our first meal, where we had dozens of meals afterward. Distorted music blares indoors, as usual, but the gazebo near the water is open and quiet. A waiter seats us, and he’s sporting the same white dress shirt and black tie uniform as before, better suited for a four-star establishment instead of an esplanade café.
We order our usual—chicken, a plate of fries sprinkled with feta cheese, sparkling water, wine. I’m disappointed that lake crap is no longer on the menu, but I’m glad they still proudly serve beefsteak in hell. The food tastes the same—hearty, simple, eastern European. The kids play on the restaurant playground after they eat and we sip cappuccinos. I don’t recall the playground’s existence in 2000, but it wasn’t on my radar then.
We pay our bill, then drive over a bridge that didn’t exist fifteen years ago (Milošević had bombed the original nineteenth-century bridge, so villagers built a wooden overpass, like a playground suspension bridge, only poorly constructed). I show the kids where I once lived—a kitchen window and balcony on the second floor of a Soviet-era concrete building, where I would check to see if Kyle was driving down the road.
The official spot on the road where we met was outside my kitchen window. We put our rental car in park, walk to the spot, and take a family photo with our hair flying in the wind. This is it. We made it back. These three kids exist because of this patch of concrete.
The kids are freezing and beg to return to the car, so they leave the two of us on the road. We kiss, and I imagine old ladies peeking from behind their curtains. Albanian children giggle around us. I want to high-five my twenty-four-year-old self, whisper in her ear that everything would work out with the lanky Oregon boy with the derelict Volkswagen van.
19
TURKEY
Our kids had never been to Kosovo, but they’d heard of it for years, their parents regaling them with romantic tales of a war-torn land as the backdrop for our family’s origin. Touching Kosovar soil meant connecting them to an important piece of their existence, context for future conversations. Turkey, on the other hand—they remember this place on their own.
Finn is the only one who hasn’t crossed the border to Turkey; we returned to the United States when I was five months pregnant with him.
Though we can’t stay in Turkey long, we need to be here. Reed took his first breath here, Tate grew from a toddler to schoolgirl here, and Finn was conceived here. This place is in our family blood. We lived here for three years and made a home for ourselves
, five stories up in an apartment high-rise overlooking the Aegean Sea. We’d watch cruise ships glide past as we ate our breakfast on the patio, made friends with the man down the street who sold the best rotisserie chicken, and learned the back routes to avoid traffic during rush hour. We were making plans for Tate to start kindergarten in Izmir when, due to health reasons, we suddenly needed to relocate to the States. We’ve long made peace with that abrupt transition in our lives, but we made an oath to keep Turkey a significant part of our life. It is good to step on its soil again.
It’s the first full morning in Izmir, city of four million, and I am nursing a latte from a park bench where I’ve sat many times before. The kids are playing on the playground as though five years haven’t passed. Our neighborhood grocery store is on the right, and I’ve just bought two of my favorite cooking staples from our life here—kaşar, a substitute for cheddar, and Milka bars for chocolate chips. Five years ago, I was annoyed that common American commodities were nowhere to be found, but this morning it is charming. How resourceful this made me, I ponder. How outside-the-box I had to think. My past self is rolling her eyes at me with contempt.
In the last hour, I have surprised myself. As if on autopilot, I knew the exact whereabouts of canned tomatoes, toothpaste, and gözleme. Those grocery aisles are hallowed. It’s where I learned to get over myself. Pity parties got me nowhere.
It’s hard to live far away from home, but Turkey can be breathtaking.
I curl my sleeves over my fists, shivering from wind whipping in from the Aegean a mile away. Snow pours over Kosovar hills seven hundred miles to the north, and two days ago we kissed good-bye to our Albanian friends from fifteen years ago, when I was a college graduate and in love with a boy. Now, I’m on a Turkish bench in the throes of young motherhood, thanks to the same boy.
“Hey, Mom, I remember this slide!” Tate yells from the playground.
“Yep. You’d go careening so fast you’d slam your bottom to the ground with a thud.” I’d have to scoop her in my arms with a peck on the cheek because of that steep slide.
“And I remember this swing set, how it’s so low to the ground, your feet drag!” she yells, running to the merry-go-round with the tacky ducks and bears, paint chipped and worn.
“That’s it,” Kyle declares, handing me his coffee. “I’m going in.” He climbs a ladder to a slide, spooks the kids, and they shriek with delight. Parents on benches next to me wide-eye him, incredulous a grown man would scale a plaything. Just the same, I think, recalling the familiar response to our parenting here. I smile and dig out my camera, and an old woman points at my youngest and shakes her head. I know she’s appalled he’s not wearing a winter hat. The temperature is sixty-five degrees.
Turkey is complicated, chock-full of paradoxes. It’s a delightful place to sightsee, with vividly colored rugs and ceramics, stunning beaches, otherworldly food, and more historic sights than you could explore in a lifetime. I remember one of my earliest visits, standing on a balcony overlooking the bay and someone saying, “Archaeologists have unearthed at least twenty layers of civilization underneath the surface. There’s a reason it’s taken so long to build a decent metro system here—every time we dig, we find something important.”
After two visits to Turkey ten years ago, Kyle and I knew we wanted to live here. But living here, raising a family and working as a foreigner, is different from being a tourist. Cultural mores are confusing—when company comes to dinner, when do we serve the çay and when do we present the bowl of fruit without being rude? Sexism is rampant—even in secular Izmir, women still cannot sign their own housing contracts. Schools are tough—the mathematics curriculum is impressive, but pint-sized bullies tend to run the place. The language takes years to conquer, a lifetime to master—the longest word in Turkish is Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine. Thankfully, it’s not very useful (it means “As though you are from those whom we may not be able to easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones”).
But . . . Turkey. Turkey has a sizable portion of the world’s best landscapes, historical sites, food, and humanity. For personal reasons, it’s for the best we no longer live here. But we’ll never tire of coming back.
High on our Turkish agenda: eating. I crave Turkish food on gray, drizzly afternoons—mercimek çorbasi, a creamy, tomato-based lentil soup, followed by a steaming cup of çay. I crave Turkish food when the summer sun is relentless—tavuk dürüm, a chicken wrap, chased with a chocolaty Magnum ice cream bar. God gave the Turks an extra dose of culinary prowess.
We make a list in our notebooks of the must-have provisions during our week: gözleme (several flavors), kiremitte, iskender, pide of various sorts—tavuklu, kuşbaşılı kaşarlı, kıymalı; tavuk dürüm, döner kebap, mercimek çorbasi, köfte, manti, lahmacun, baklava, and a traditional Turkish breakfast. There aren’t enough meals on our calendar, but we’ll try. Our gastronomical jaunt takes high priority.
Pide is Turkish pizza, long and narrow, edges folded to encrust melted sheep’s cheese and toppings like minced lamb, or my preference, chicken. Baked in a wood-fire oven, it’s served piping hot with a side of arugula, sliced tomato and lemon, and biber salçası, a cool, piquant red pepper paste. Pile on veggies, smear the paste, fold the pide in half, turn your head, and feast. We have this delivered to our apartment three times.
I stop for a quick gözleme whenever we’re out because it’s my favorite. One afternoon I’m having çay with an American friend who still lives here while my kids join hers for a community art class, and I order a pumpkin gözleme. This savory pastry is filled with anything from ground beef to spinach to feta to potato, but pumpkin takes me back.
“Oh, my gosh, I think the last time I had pumpkin gözleme was at the water park,” I tell my friend Andie.
“The water park? That’s weird,” she says.
“Yeah, but Turkey,” I reply, and she nods.
While the kids would swim in the neighborhood water park, I’d order this unconventional poolside lounge fare. Paper-thin circles of yufka dough are seared atop a large, round griddle; filling is then added and pressed into a half circle and folded again in thirds to create a triangular pocket. It’s Turkey’s answer to a French crêpe. In the urban areas of Istanbul and Izmir, you can find trendy gözleme toppings like orange zest, walnut, and smoked salmon served on a busy street corner, the line of hip, hungry patrons wrapping the block.
Nothing is as quintessentially Turkish as iskender kebap, named after its nineteenth-century inventor, İskender Efendi; it’s as commonplace as barbecue in Texas. Tonight, we take the kids to a restaurant with nothing on the menu but iskender kebap.
We walk through the doors, and the restaurant is packed with boisterous families. It’s a school night, and several kids wear school and soccer uniforms. IKEA is next door, and there is a sea of blue bags slung over chairs. A waiter cleans a booth, leads us to it, and sets down one menu. There is iskender kebap, there are sides of fries, and there are drinks.
“Iyi akşamlar,” the waiter says. “Ne yemek istersiniz?”
Kyle looks at me. “Well, I guess our choices are iskender or iskender.”
“I think we should order iskender,” I say. The waiter looks at me.
“Iskender kebap alabalirmiyiz,” I say.
“Tamam. Aile için?” he says, pointing to all of us. One for all of us?
“Um . . . evet,” Kyle says. Why not?
A few minutes pass, and the waiter returns with a colossal platter of iskender kebap, sizzling strips of thin meat piled high on top of chunks of flatbread soaked in tomato sauce and yogurt. I can’t imagine us eating all this.
A younger waiter approaches with a ladle and tureen and asks, “Tereyağı?” Would we like butter?
“Evet, evet,” Kyle answers. The boy dips the ladle in his tureen and pours bubbling melted butter over our meat. The gold liquid crackles. Before we can stop him, he pours a second round.
“Daha?” he asks
, ready for a third helping.
“Hayır, hayır!” I say, covering the platter with my arm. If he pours it again, he’ll sear my skin. The meat is swimming in butter, intermingling with the tomato sauce and tangy yogurt.
We pass out forks and dig in.
“Whoa,” Tate says after she swallows. “This is really good.” She has forgotten the taste of this.
“Mm-hmm,” Kyle answers, mouth full.
I don’t like gamey meat in the States, but I love lamb here—somehow, the nostrily punch of wet earth found in lamb meat feels more apropos on the streets of Turkey. It’s grilled for hours vertically on a spit, and its juices marinate each slice cut fresh per order. The taste is fresh, simple, hot, and succulent, with just a hint of cumin. The sweetness of pureed tomatoes and the surprising tang of cold yogurt is an impeccable pairing with lamb. The bread is seared directly on a grill, burned with perfection.
We order honey-sweet baklava for dessert and wonder why we ever left this country. We lick the platter clean.
Several years ago, two-year-old Tate pitched a fit one afternoon crossing the Aegean Sea bay, stamping her foot in protest on the ferryboat taking us to the north side of town for a playdate. The sun striped the deck and sparkled the gray-green waves; seagulls circled and scooped the water for lunch. The weather was sublime and I had successfully used my Turkish to navigate the two of us onto a bus and then the boat. I was in my second trimester with Reed, so queasiness had quelled and ferryboats were feasible at last. Tate was splayed on the deck at the front of the boat, throwing a toddler tantrum. I sat on the bench and ignored her, denying her attention so as to defuse the outburst, employing my remaining energy to ignore the staring multitude of commuters.
A caycı, the man who serves tea to ferryboat passengers, rushed over and offered her the last thing I wanted her to have: a sugar cube. Turkish toddler parenting called for more indulgence, a more laissez-faire way than my American style; plus, her blonde hair and blue eyes granted her local adoration. I snatched the sugar cube out of Tate’s hand before she could pop it in her mouth, her tantrum ensued, and I paid the well-meaning caycı for a tulip-shaped glass of çay. It wasn’t any better than a sugar cube, but I let my two-year-old have a sip. And another. And another. She loved tea. She left her tantrum on the ferryboat deck.
At Home in the World Page 20
