window collared in pansies, ignoring the equally lovely cactus or passageway behind their broad, camera-bag laden backs. But it didn’t matter which way they turned: each inch of Yemin Moshe had been photographed repeatedly, by so many different people, at every time of day, that it presented itself to their lenses as already framed.
I picked up one of the brochures off the cobblestones. The text read, “Yemin Moshe is especially lovely in the late afternoon, when the golden light warms the walls and casts long shadows on the cobblestones.” But in the late afternoon it was so crowded with camera-wielding Cyclopean tourists that it was difficult to get a clear shot. I preferred the late morning, when everyone else had fled the sun, even though the light was bad for pictures. I wasn’t immune to the picturesque: I took a picture of a rose cooling its flushed cheeks against a cream wall, a cat napping in the shade of an old stone archway. When I came home I posted the pictures on Facebook and I waited. It took less than a minute for the first thumbs up. I refreshed the page again and again for the sugar rush, one person, now two, now five. Cats and flowers, those were the pictures that got approval, rather than the photographs that I found unexpected or interesting, like the boy in the market leaning his arm on the decapitated head of a lipsticked mannequin wrapped in a keffiyeh. I could piggyback on that inherent unfair beauty. How was it, I wondered, that we didn’t get tired of this clichéd loveliness, so familiar that only its outlines needed to be sketched for us to say, “Ah, there it is.” Blue door, stone steps, eucalyptus. Late afternoon.
I had other associations with Yemin Moshe. Once, when I was very young, and living on my own for the first time, I had a desperate conversation by moonlight with a boy in its terraced, spiky gardens. I had forgotten the content of the conversation, had forgotten his name, and had even forgotten the face of this boy that I’d thought I loved, but I remembered the abyssal, hollow-hearted feeling of our encounter every time I walked down those paths, like a cloud covering the sun. Even though it was hot and crowded and the beginning of the day, somewhere in my memory it was night and deserted and the end of the world.
19.
We finally hit a spell of bad weather, and the skies, grey and spectral, contributed to my feeling that I was drifting ghostly through the city. I kept going back to the Old City in the day, when Simon was working and Sam and Gabriel were in school, drawn by its haunted charisma.
Jenna didn’t like the Old City. “Too many ghosts,” she said. “You can tell terrible things have happened there.” She shuddered even thinking about it, though she offered to come with me if there was anything I needed to buy. Jenna was convinced I was being constantly ripped off. She was always asking me how much I’d paid for some trinket or bag of spices, and then she would tell me how much it should have cost.
I loved trying to practice Arabic with the vendors, who were the only strangers who would talk to me, I suppose since there was profit in it. The one time Jenna did come with me, as she bargained in Arabic too quickly for me to follow, I saw men looking at each other behind her back, grabbing their crotches and winking. I wondered if that was what they’d been doing behind my back all the time, if what I had mistaken as curiosity and friendliness was in fact contempt and casual lust.
It reminded me of a trip I’d taken before I was married, to Turkey, where making a pass at a foreign woman was a courtesy, like offering tea or opening a door. I was hit on incessantly and impersonally. I had never received so many phone numbers scrawled on the backs of business cards and scraps of paper, had never been given so many lines, delivered without inflection or irony. As I walked down the street men would try to guess my nationality, knowing only that I was not from Turkey; they needed to know which language to use when they approached me. They had lines ready in English, in French, and in Spanish.
Some of the lines were sweet, if musty, “Is your father a candy maker?” Others were more direct, but never crude. When I had traveled other places alone the constant passes had been obscene and sometimes aggressive, and seemed in some way a means of exacting revenge on me for journeying, free and untrammeled, through places where few women had the social freedom to move around without a chaperone and few men had the financial freedom to travel to other countries for pleasure. But in Turkey they were dispassionate and businesslike. Flirting was another part of the commerce between foreign women and Turkish men. As one man said to me, “If you will not go out with me to the disco, at least you will buy my carpets.”
Back then, none of the men were particularly
persistent, except for George Michael. George Michael was not his real name, but it was almost the first thing he said to me: “I look like George Michael.” He then added, “Not like now, like he used to look, before he got old and fat.” He didn’t look like George Michael, except that he had dark hair streaked blond and eighties-style bleached jeans. He wore a dark sweater and a black pashmina knotted around his neck. As I wandered through the stalls I had smiled aimlessly at nothing in particular, out of pleasure in the beauty of the market and the day. Then George Michael stepped forward and announced, “You smiled at my friend and now you have to smile at me.”
Without asking my permission, he took out his cellphone and snapped a picture of me. He held it at arm’s length, frowning slightly. “Not a good likeness. Smile this time.” He handed his friend the phone and stood beside me. The phone came up again, and this time I smiled. He looked at the picture and said, “This one is better. You licked your lips. I like that.” Then, again without permission or invitation, he was at my side, striding through the market.
I love markets. I love the labyrinth of treasure, the promise of hidden bounty. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul has been there for hundreds of years, a shrine to the pleasure of commerce. Stall after stall of slippers curled at the toe, absurdly ornate ottomans, antique wooden spice boxes from Tibet, patchworked tapestries from Uzbekistan, tea sets made of glass, vases made of stone, lanterns made of copper, carpets carpets carpets. Also perfume, Tupperware, and Teflon frying pans, but I stayed away from those galleries in favour of the exotica. I didn’t know enough to tell the cheap and tacky from the common and lovely from the truly extraordinary, but I knew that the market held all of those categories of object and much that fell somewhere in-between. It was my third day in Turkey and I still could not find my way in and out of the same entrances, or back to the Aladdin’s cave of jewelry and illuminated manuscripts I had stumbled on my first day. George Michael appointed himself my guide. He said, “I grew up in this market, I can find you anything you like.”
Then he proceeded to tell me what I should like. Not the expensive colour-blocked weavings I had been admiring, row after row of subtle variations of red or blue that reminded me of the soothing vistas of Rothko paintings.
“What does that shit have to do with Turkish art? That has nothing to do with our traditions. They make it only for the tourists. It is extremely ugly.”
And not the small kilim I had bought that morning after what felt like hours of agonizing. “The colours are too bright. Not natural dye. This is nothing special. You should have waited until you met me to buy a carpet. But it is not bad. Don’t worry, you can tell your friends when you get home that some village girl wasted her eyes on this carpet for two or three months.”
George Michael said, “I’ll show you something special. I have a stand of my own. SVA-ROS-key. You know SVA-ROS-key?”
I didn’t. He led me weaving through the stalls, away from the tapestries and wall hangings and into a forest of crystal, stand after stand of hanging beads and fussy little ornaments, carefully poised rabbits and eagles forever about to take flight. I stopped walking. Swarovski. Now I knew what he was talking about. He gestured possessively at a stand that looked to me just like five other stands around it. Crystal drops threw twitching rainbows onto the cold pale floor.
“See. SVA-ROS-key.”
“I’m sorry.” I said. “I don’t real
ly like this kind of stuff.”
For a moment he looked mortally offended. “Everyone loves SVAROS-key.”
I shook my head. “I guess I’m just too clumsy. I’d always be worried about breaking it.”
Something like rage flickered across his face. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
“No problem. I will show you my father’s stall. That one is more Turkish. The old-fashioned stuff you like.”
He pointed to the rug under my arm, which I kept hoping he would offer to carry, “Like that. Only more nice.”
As we walked through the market, he’d nod his head or casually wave at many other salesmen, men like him who were in their twenties or thirties. I recognized some of them from my forays through the market, but this time, none of them tried to talk to me. It was as if, simply by walking at my side, he had taken possession of me. He kept telling me I had to go with him and his cousins to the disco, and I kept saying that I could not.
His father’s stall was in one of the oldest parts of the market, and held carpets, cushions, tapestries. He unlocked it for me and gestured with his hand to a boy to bring us tea, one of the boys who spent all day with silver trays balanced on their palms, weaving through the labyrinth of the market. We sat on stools in the cramped space and drank the sweet acidic tea that smelled of apples and came from a white powder. You could buy it in the market, of course; box after box, with pictures of idyllic orchards on the front, arranged next to glass and metal tea sets and seven different grades of Turkish delight. He held the cup delicately, with the tips of his fingers, from the top of the glass, and I did the same, taking small careful sips. One of his eyes was blue and the other was deep seaweed green.
George Michael showed me a carpet on his wall. “Now this one is a beautiful carpet, I would sell it to you except you already bought a carpet today. A shame, really, since this one is more special.” He went through a quick version of his spiel—the knotwork, the colours, the meaning of the pattern—but his heart wasn’t really in it and he was right: I had already bought a carpet that day. He said, “Only you must promise me that if you buy another carpet you will come back to me.”
I was ready to go. The indoor air of the market was beginning to give me a headache, and I wanted to walk outside. “Thank you for the tea,” I said, standing up. I had to stoop a little in the stall. He smoothly stood up too.
“And where will you go now?”
“I’m going to walk a bit, maybe into Beyoglu.”
“Then let’s go,” he said, and locked his father’s stall behind me.
It was at once a grey and golden afternoon, the light filtering through the clouds and turning the waters of the Bosphorus luminous. Fishermen bordered the bridge elbow to elbow, their long multi-hooked lines studded with fish like silver nails. George Michael kept up a steady patter about his foreign girlfriends. Mostly I didn’t believe him. The night before, at the hotel, the clerk had confided in me about his girlfriend in England. He was working, he said, to make enough money to join her there. They met at the hotel the previous summer; she stayed in my room. He was upset because he kept trying to call her but she was not at home, and didn’t call him back. This had been going on for days. I told him there was probably a good explanation, knowing there probably was not, or that the explanation was the simple explanation, the one he did not want to hear. And at the restaurant where I’d had dinner the previous day the owner had sat down at my table and told me about the German ex-wife who broke his heart.
But George Michael’s stories were not sincere or bittersweet; his were a list of scores, of notches on his studded, oversized belt. At one point he paused and said, “I am only telling you this because you already said you will not go out with me. If you were going out with me, of course I would not tell you. Actually, I am not sure why I am bothering with you except that, unfortunately, you are my type.” He sighed an extravagant, exaggerated sigh.
We were in Beyoglu, walking along the wide boulevard, when he stopped. Behind an iron gate was the open crater a bomb had left the month before.
“All the tourists want to see this,” he said, gesturing with his arm as though he were showing off something that was his possession. “Why, I can’t say. It is a sick thing to want to see. Also has nothing to do with Turkey. Just another way to say we are not ready to join the EU, even though we are the victims here. So many tourists cancelled their trips because they did not feel safe, but what choice do we have? We live here. Now everybody in the market is having money trouble because this is the time of year, around Christmas, when we usually sell the most, and now a whole day can go by and nobody will stop in my stall. Then the tourists who do come, this is what they all want to see. Except there is nothing to see. Only a hole in the ground. Are you finished?”
I was remembering the newscasts from the month before, the stumbling bandaged bodies being led from the scene, the bodies that lay still on the ground. The week before the consulate and bank were bombed, two synagogues were attacked. I had meant to go see them, but it was almost impossible to get in since they had tightened up security.
I hadn’t mentioned to George Michael that I was
Jewish, although a few things he said made me think that he knew. So I looked, in response to him and in defiance of him, at the hole in the ground. There were no signs of reconstruction, no guards posted, no people at all; it could have been abandoned for one year or ten.
Impatiently, George Michael lit a cigarette and stamped his feet to keep warm. “Lunch?” he said.
There was a small vegetarian restaurant off Istiklal Caddesi. From inside, you could have been in Paris or Barcelona or San Francisco except for the language of the menu; women in jeans and hippie scarves and sweaters drinking smoothies and eating salads. George Michael was irritated with the lack of meat on the menu; he seemed to see vegetarianism as essentially un-Turkish, like the Rothko weavings or militant fundamentalism, and said he didn’t want anything to eat. I ordered lentil soup, which was thin and lukewarm when it arrived, and a salad.
George Michael took tea and lit another cigarette, watching me eat a little too closely. He took out his cellphone and began to fiddle with it. I was starting to feel exhausted and irritable. He showed me the picture he had taken of me in the market. My hair was wild and my eyes looked crazy. “Not very flattering,” he said. “I will erase it for you. This one is better.”
He showed me the next picture, the one his friend had taken of the two of us, standing stiff and awkward side by side. He began thumbing through the other pictures and said, “Ah, here is a picture of my girlfriend from Australia, but maybe you do not want to see it.”
“I do,” I said, curious about the corroboration for something I thought he had invented.
“Very well,” he said. “My girlfriend and me—a certain part of me—that I will cover with my thumb.” He turned the phone around and there were the cartoonish startled eyes, the lipsticked top of the open mouth.
“That’s not your girlfriend,” I said. “You took that off the internet.”
I was gathering my coat, looking for my wallet.
“It is my girlfriend,” he said. “She is very attractive, much more attractive than you, and will be coming back in the summer.”
George Michael had become desperate and insistent, as if something more was at stake than my belief.
It is difficult to leave a vegetarian restaurant in a hurry; one quality that seems universal to vegetarian restaurants is slow service. I hailed a cab at the door. George Michael had recovered his composure. “Look for me in the market,” he said. The rest of the trip, I avoided his corner.
For a long time I thought I had gotten the better of our encounter. I hadn’t been convinced or compelled to go out with him; I had bought nothing at his stall and bought little of our conversation. I told Jenna about it one day. “He got exactly what he wanted,” she said. “You don’t understand. G
uys like that, they don’t get to talk about sex. They can’t do that with girls from their neighbourhood. And you know he told all his friends you slept with him anyway.”
I thought about what Jenna said, and remembered the photograph on his phone. With a sinking heart I said, “Well, you don’t know that.” She said, “What do you care anyway what people think? You’re never going to see him again.”
20.
If the days were for wandering and getting lost, then the afternoons and evenings were all about home, feeding the children, straightening up, getting ready for bed, all that relentless domestic Sisyphean labor. We had just come back from the grocery store, and I was unloading groceries and cleaning up the breakfast dishes. The boys were watching Tom and Jerry on the television, lying on the cold, hard terrazzo floor, which always seemed covered in a fine layer of grit no matter how often I mopped. We had bought the Tom and Jerry DVDs in Hebrew, hoping it would help them learn the language. Of course, I had forgotten how little dialogue there was, just the trill of the piano and the cat and mouse in their endless chase. Gabriel and Sam were addicted, and I was sick to death of both Tom and Jerry, especially that smug immortal mouse.
The phone rang. As I walked past the television to answer it, Jerry dropped a hundred-pound weight on Tom; the children snickered as Tom re-emerged, flat as a pancake, and walked on bowed legs back to his former roundness.
“Can’t they be friends once in a while?” I said, and Gabriel, who was like a Talmudic scholar of Tom and Jerry, said, “They are, in that one when the baby runs away.” As Gabriel took a deep breath to begin what I knew would be a long and detailed narrative of pursuit and escape and near-death I stepped over him and said, “Sorry, Gabe, I should get the phone,” and picked up the receiver, relieved to be spared.
Arabic for Beginners Page 13
