IN THE dolmuş Melodi leaned against Jeff, pressed her cheek to his, and asked in a whisper where they were going. He had not seen her in over a week. Now, after a Friday night dinner in Beyoğlu, they had not yet decided whose home to return to. Around them the other five passengers sat in silence. The dark Kurdish couple sharing the back seat huddled arm in arm as the driver swerved between lanes, honking his horn in quick blasts. Since Anarbek had come, Jeff had limited his overnights at Melodi’s apartment to once a week, as he was uncomfortable leaving his guests alone. He knew he was more conscious of the separation than she was.
He had yet to break the news of Nazira. Now, returning the whisper, he told her that another guest had arrived. She stared incredulously at him.
“And how do you know him?” she asked louder, in Turkish.
“It’s a woman, Anarbek’s daughter. A good friend.”
“And she will be living with you like Anarbek? For weeks? For months?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Melodi’s sudden jealously pleased him.
“You cannot ask?”
“Actually, no. I cannot.” Trying to calm her, he started to explain the Kyrgyz expectations of hospitality.
“But you are not Kyrgyz, Jeff. You are American!”
“Shhh. I owe them a great deal. When I lived in Central Asia, they were very good to me.”
Melodi asked in English, “She is only a friend?”
Jeff felt cramped and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. The passenger in the front seat swung her head back around, pretending she wasn’t watching, and the couple to their right looked steadfastly into their laps, but he knew they too were listening. Through the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes darted right and left, searching for gaps in traffic. Jeff held the back of Melodi’s soft hand and, intertwining his fingers with hers, squeezed once, then harder—a signal that they would talk about this when the dolmuş stopped.
The force of the turning vehicle pushed them against the door as the driver ran a red light and swung through the traffic circle of the Beşiktaş İskele. They waited for the others to climb out, then Melodi slid her way over the shredded vinyl seat, not looking back at Jeff. Outside on the pier, shaded by a mulberry tree, she stood in silence, her arms crossed.
“I need to go back to see if they’re all right,” Jeff said.
“I think I will not go with you tonight.”
“Will you go home?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I will go to the Yeats.”
He knew she was asking him to plead. In the past, no doubt, he would have. But he didn’t want to introduce her to Nazira—too awkward, and with Nazira in the next room, he would be far too uncomfortable sleeping with Melodi. They had reached a turning point, and he was unprepared.
“You want me to come with you to the Yeats?” he asked. “Or I could take you home first, then go back to my place.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll go alone.”
Jeff stared at the wet sidewalk.
“You have changed, Jeff. Since your friends have come, I have always the feeling that you don’t want to see me.”
“That’s not true.” His voice was weak. How was she turning this on him? He had asked her to marry him.
“Yes, I understand, Jeff. You have an apartment full of guests. You need to go check in on them. Good night then.”
“No, it’s all right. Maybe they’ll be okay.”
She stood with her hands on her hips. A young shoeshine boy, his hair matted, his ragged shirt torn at the collar, watched from a few yards off, waiting for them to finish the argument before he approached. Jeff gave him a fierce look, and the boy raised his wooden stool over his shoulder and stepped back to the water’s edge.
Melodi asked again, “She is only a friend, this Nazira?”
“Yes. Well, not really.” Jeff hesitated. “Actually, Nazira was more than a friend.”
Melodi’s face—always lively, always bright—grew somber as she gazed at him. She closed her eyes, thinking, then lifted her chin and raised herself to what seemed a new height. “How much more was she than a friend?”
Jeff simply shook his head.
“And now she is living with you? You have invited an old girlfriend of yours to stay with you? It is wrong, Jeff.”
“How is it wrong?”
He was growing frustrated. She would not commit, she would not move in with him, but here she was, telling him who could stay in his apartment and for how long.
“Where is she staying?” she asked.
“In the study, with her father. I’m telling you, she won’t be here more than a week.”
“That is what you said about Adam. You need to tell them all to leave.”
“What difference does it make to you?” he asked. “They’re friends of mine. They’re not living in your apartment.”
“It used to feel like my apartment, too, Jeff. It was not a hotel. I used to feel welcome there.”
“So welcome you could have lived there, and you’ve chosen not to.”
Her head snapped upward as if he had struck her. “Jeff, I think I will go home now. I don’t need you to take me. Iyi geceler.” She pronounced the words stiffly. This use of the Turkish plural—good nights—had always, in its logic, baffled him. But now it made her goodbye more than final, as if she was wishing him good night for the rest of his life.
“Wait,” he said.
She had turned her back on him, revealing the light nape of her neck, his favorite part of her body. In her hoarse voice she whispered, “There is nothing more to say. No, nothing else. I cannot believe you have done this.” She swung around again, facing him, and said in Turkish, “Go back to your guests, Jeff. They are important to you. Go back to your friend Nazira.”
“I want you to understand. They are not more important than you.”
She ran her hand through her hair. “I am beginning to understand. I have given a lot of time for us, Jeff. None of this is easy for me either, with my family and my job. And to come all the way into Taksim from the hospital, to be with you each week. But I do it happily. Why is everything always so difficult for you? You want more and more. You have never accepted all I give. And now it is this.”
“Listen, I’m sorry.”
“Yes, I am sorry too. We have the Turkish expression: Akar akar da durulur.” A stream flows and flows, then settles down.
He smiled weakly, nodding, but she walked off in firm steps to hail a taxi. He was burning to call her back again, to reassure her about Nazira, to admit he had been unwise and had made an egregious mistake. Circumstances divided them, he wanted to tell her—not love. In the twilight the shoeshine boy was still watching, taking in the entire scene. Jeff felt a wave of nausea and was suddenly furious. He wanted to grab the kid by the scruff of his neck and shake him. But he composed himself and strode resolutely to the ferry, to force the waters between him and Melodi once and for all. Sitting alone on the windy top deck he felt part relief and part loss. He looked back at the pier and saw her duck into a taxi; and suddenly he felt only a sharp regret, like a man who has purchased on impulse something he could not afford.
Oren had been thrilled to hear that a woman like those on the Internet was staying with Jeff, and all week long he had been inventing tenuous excuses to invite himself over. He offered to return books Jeff had not, in fact, lent him. He wanted to bring an extra inflatable mattress in case someone needed a place to sleep. He suggested theme nights for dinner: they should all make stir-fry, or he could whip up some real American barbecue for the guests. But Jeff had told him he had enough on his hands at the moment.
Just after Jeff returned home, though, disgusted with himself, Oren showed up. He had the Sunday New York Times from the previous weekend with him—he had bought it for twelve dollars at a newsstand in the Hilton Hotel. He bore it into the apartment like a lost treasure, dropping it with a crash onto the living room floor, and then immediately introduced himself to Nazira. Adam made a grab for the sports section. Anarbek perused the bra advertisements. Oren stared at Nazira, who carefully turned glossy pages of the magazine section, afraid to rip them. Adam had discovered pirated copies of his favorite heavy-metal CDs for sale on the streets in Ortaköy, and now he inserted them into Jeff’s stereo, and turned up the volume. Judas Priest and Guns N’ Roses shook the windows of the living room.
“Can you turn that down?” Jeff asked. He felt like a chaperone.
Into the evening, Adam and Oren sprawled on the woven rugs, their heads propped against antique grain sacks that Jeff had stuffed like pillows. Nazira and her father sat upright on armchairs. Oren entertained them all with a litany of dirty jokes, most of which Nazira did not understand, though she translated for her father, who listened with his mouth open in an expression of genuine puzzlement. Oren showed off his tattoos. He told how he had worked for a summer in northern California as a beekeeper’s assistant and then spent an entire hour explaining the mating habits of bees. As a high school student he had studied aikido, and he demonstrated with Adam various holds, throws, and defenses, knocking one of Jeff’s inlaid porcelain plates off a stand.
Later in the evening Oren watched the chess game between Anarbek and Adam, offering both of them advice, which, rolling their eyes, neither man followed. From the hallway closet Oren pulled out a backgammon board and challenged Jeff to a match, which he declined. Nazira, conveniently, was the only one left, and she agreed to play him. She sat on the couch, leaning slightly forward, cupping her cheeks as if it helped her strategize, and she gave the slightest blow of air as she moved her pieces. Each time he finished his turn, Oren would lift the dice off the board and hold them out for her to pick from his open palm. Exasperated, Jeff couldn’t help but laugh.
He sipped Nescafe and for long minutes observed the scene in his apartment. The percussion of Adam’s heavy-metal music was driving nails into his skull, and suddenly Jeff was overcome by a wave of fury, an urge to kick his guests out, boot every last one of them onto the street, let them fend for themselves. But he knew he never would. Near midnight they were still playing their games, Axl Rose was belting out “Welcome to the Jungle,” and Jeff served his guests a box of chocolate-covered Turkish delight and wished them all good evening.
The apartment was perfectly quiet early Saturday morning when a steady pounding on the door roused him. The noise interrupted a dream he’d been having in which he was hiking down the Grand Canyon with Melodi. Through the early light streaming from the living room, he blundered down the hallway, furious. Such pounding on a door—this loud, at this hour—he had not heard since Kyrgyzstan, and he dreaded the arrival of some new ghost from his past. The heavy brass bolt stuck as always, and he had barely got it open when Oren crashed in, his eyes wild with excitement.
“We’re going on a cruise! Get up!” he yelled. “Get up!” He pushed past Jeff, hurried through the foyer to Adam’s room, and rattled the knob. “Everyone rise and shine! Top of the morning, Geronimo! How about a free ride up the Bosphorus?”
Jeff followed him down the hall, trying to quiet him, but he was already smashing the door of the study. “Let’s go, you Kyrgyz! Davai! Davai!”
“What the hell, Oren?” Jeff whispered.
“School’s taking the teachers on a free cruise up the Bosphorus. I decided you’re gonna join us. You’ve all been working too hard.”
“You could have asked us last night.”
Oren mocked him in an extra-loud whisper. “I forgot. Didn’t remember until this morning.” He pounded again and yelled, “Let’s go, sleeping beauties!”
Jeff pushed his friend from Anarbek’s door. “It’s seven thirty,” he hissed. “Let them sleep.”
Adam appeared down the hall in a T-shirt and boxers, his eyes half-closed. Anarbek opened his own door with a lazy frown. “Shto?” he asked. He scratched his hairy stomach, stretched his arms, yawned, and hurled a volley of Russian expletives at them.
The hired ferry was docked at the Üsküdar İskele, its top deck crowded with Turkish women who glared out from under wide-brimmed hats and pinched early-morning cigarettes between their fingers. Oren led the group to a row of open whitewashed benches, where they sat down and stared across the waters. To the west the straits shimmered in the morning brightness, the turreted palaces etched in relief against the stark blue sky, but to the north the sky looked threatening.
Nazira pointed to the clouds ahead. “Maybe we should have brought the umbrella?”
Jeff turned to Oren. “If it rains on us, we’ll make you regret this the rest of your life.”
“Lighten up, Jeff. Have some fun for once.”
At exactly eight, earsplitting Turkish pop music clamored from a speaker above the wheelhouse, and the boat pulled away from shore. Oren stood next to Jeff, spread his arms, and jerked his shoulders in imitation of a Black Sea Laz dance. “Get away from me,” Jeff said, but smiled despite himself. Nazira seemed smitten with Oren and snapped her fingers, urging him on, while some of the science teachers clapped and shouted his name. Adam leaned both elbows against the railing and laughed. Anarbek descended to the galley in search of breakfast.
The slow boat ride was tedious for Jeff, who had made this trip a dozen times since he had come to Istanbul. He was still reeling from yesterday’s scene with Melodi; and staring down at the green depths, lost in thought, he had difficulty showing any enthusiasm when his friends gestured to the sights and asked what they were.
Adam, though, appeared to be completely taken with the boat and the scenery. He swung his head in both directions so he wouldn’t miss anything. They sailed northwest against a heavy current, then began the long meandering back and forth across the straits. The captain interrupted the music to point out landmark yah, ornate Ottoman seaside mansions with boathouses built into their lowest levels. People crowded the railings and shot photographs of the Çirağan Palace. The boat docked to pick up another group of teachers near the white mosque of Ortaköy, on the seaside square where Adam said he tutored Burak. Angling back across the water, they passed directly under the Bosphorus Bridge. Jeff gazed up at its expanse with a chill of vertigo, feeling something this large might come tumbling down on them. A man had jumped off these heights and survived. From this perspective, the span seemed too high; surviving a jump like that no longer seemed possible.
The village of Kandili, halfway up the nineteen-mile straits, was famous for its yogurt. When the captain docked, three hawkers carrying plastic milk crates rushed onto the boat, screaming, “YOĞURT! YOĞURT!”
Nazira watched her father buy three cups for himself and shook her head in disbelief. As the boat reached the middle of the straits, Oren asked her to help him fetch everyone drinks. They descended into the passenger cabin, where they found a bar serving soda, juice, and raki.
“So, you miss Kyrgyzstan?” Oren asked as they waited for service.
“Of course,” Nazira said. “It is my motherland. You miss your motherland when you leave it.”
Past the bar through the windows she could see a group of wooden fishing caiques bobbing on the waves. An old man leaned over the bow of one boat, pulling seaweed off a tangled net.
Oren said, “We don’t use the word motherland very often in English.”
“Don’t you? My English, you can see, is very bad.”
“I think it’s amazing. Better than people I know in the States.”
She threw him a doubtful look. “That is not true.”
“It is. I teach English like you, remember?” He moved closer and leaned his tattooed arm against the bar. She puzzled over the paintings on his skin. She found him amusing, but also insincere. He tried too hard to entertain, and he reminded her of a movie star, of a character from one of the Rambo movies. From a speaker above, the driving rhythms of Black Sea music quickened. “So what do you miss about your motherland?”
“I miss my family, of course.” Nazira regarded a teacher next to them, gnawing on a piece of sesame-seed bread. “I miss our Kyrgyz foods, my garden, the flowers, the mountains. I miss the horses.”
“So you will go back soon?”
“This week, most definitely. I must convince my father he is acting stupid.” Nazira shook her head in doubt. “But he never listens to me.”
Screams from the upper deck could suddenly be heard against the music. Someone had spotted a pod of dolphins working their way down the straits, opposite the boat. Nazira gasped in astonishment, and they hurried to the windows and watched the gray animals curling through the water, then growing smaller, until they were distant specks, like rocks skimming off the waves.
Back at the bar Oren continued the conversation. “Don’t you ever dream of living somewhere else? I mean, when you’re in Kyrgyzstan, you’re in this tiny village in the mountains. Don’t you wonder what it’s like in New York? Or Paris? Don’t you want to see Australia?”
Nazira was quiet a few moments. Then she said, “I think more about people than places. The people I know are in Kyrgyzstan. My stepmother. My friends. What would they do if I leave them?” She pictured Manas and considered telling Oren about her son. But it had been hard enough to lie to Jeff the other night, and she didn’t want to go into that again.
“What if you fell in love with a very handsome foreigner, for example?” He raised his blond eyebrows. “Would you think of living somewhere else?”
She covered her smile and felt the blush spreading on her cheeks. “Where would a woman such as I meet a handsome foreigner?”
“Well, say you did?” He lifted his chest and assumed a regal air.
“I think when I fall in love with a very good man, I will want to be with him wherever he goes. But maybe he would want to be with me too. Maybe he would like my village in Kyrgyzstan.”
“Maybe he would.”
“But there are too many difficulties in this situation. He would not speak our language.”
“He’d learn.”
“And he might not like our traditions. We have our guest sing songs at dinner. We eat the eyes of sheeps. Has Jeff never told you?”
“If he loved you, this man, he would learn to sing for you. He’d eat sheep eyes every morning for breakfast.”
Nazira laughed. “And you? You do not want to return to your motherland?”
“Motherland!” Oren said, smiling.
“I mean—the United States. You do not want your children grown up in the United States? Or in your home, in California?”
“Maybe, but for me it’s more important who I’ll have those children with.”
“So, Oren, you are searching for a wife.”
“Well, yeah.” He lowered his voice. “But I’m not really searching. I kind of just figure she’s out here somewhere and we’re going to run into each other.”
Oren looked hard into her, a weighted stare. He was suddenly absurd, with his earnest expression, his painted arms and feminine blond hair and shredded cutoff jeans. She glanced out the windows at a ferry floating in the opposite direction.
“You think that’s possible?” he asked.
She returned his gaze. “I do not know about those things. I do not know.”
“Don’t you know? I’ve been thinking about you. All last night my eyes were riveted.” He leaned toward her. “I really like your freckles, and your accent. Your smile too. Why are you shaking your head? I think you’re—how can I say it? Exotic. You are exotically beautiful. I’d like to know you better.”
Like to know her better? She stared at his pointed chin. It was true, in Kyrgyzstan men could steal women, and the women had almost no choice. But this—this pronouncement of love in a public place, on a cruise, with the Turks drinking cola around them—this was something else entirely. Sashenka had warned her about Western men.
“Would you like to have dinner sometime this week?” he asked. “Just you and me? I know great restaurants in Istanbul.”
Nazira rose without answering, taking two glasses of juice.
“Don’t go just yet,” Oren pleaded.
She had lost her breath. “Yes, it is time to go up.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
But she hurried up the stairs to the sun deck, where she joined the other men. She gave her father his drink, and Adam shuffled over to make room for her on the bench. It was a relief, sitting next to this one, with no expectation of conversation, and she was perfectly content to gaze out over the railing. After a few minutes, though, Adam surprised her.
“You eat pig?”
“Excuse me?”
“I read that Muslims don’t eat pig meat. But I asked your father, and he said sometimes he did. And I asked my student, Burak, and he told me he tried bacon once. He liked it. What about you?”
“I would never eat meat from pigs.”
“Why not?”
“Adam, it is not clean.”
“Your father doesn’t care.”
“My father will eat anything.”
“Is it because of religion?”
“I never thought of it. We are not very religious, but the Kyrgyz just do not eat pig. They are filthy animals. I cannot even imagine.”
“You ever smelled bacon?”
“I don’t know what bacon is.”
“It smells delicious. I found this Polish butcher in Kadikóy. The only place in the city that sells it. If I fry it up, I bet you anything you’ll want to try some.”
“That is very kind of you, Adam, but no, thank you.”
The morning slid by, the wind rose. Passengers put up the hoods of their jackets, and the sun battled the thick gray clouds. At the narrowest point on the straits the boat passed Rumeli Hisar, the Fortress of Europe, and the air grew cool. Oren stood across the deck, talking to his teacher friends. Anarbek, Jeff, and Adam huddled close to Nazira, and they watched the green shores, lush with oak and pine, approach and recede. The wind bit her ears, and from the loudspeakers she heard a pop song about everything being blue—my house is blue, my car is blue, my girlfriend’s blue—and she couldn’t understand what it meant.
They glided under the dark expanse of the second bridge, past the Sweet Waters of Asia. Near noon the boat docked at Anadolu Kavaği, the final northern village before the straits opened out to the Black Sea. The sun had not reappeared for an hour, and the sky, still clear to the south, looked dense up ahead. In a garbled voice the captain announced that they would have two hours to climb to the Genoese fortress or eat lunch in the village before sailing back. Nazira’s father said he favored lunch first, but Jeff urged him to hike to see the view before the rain came. So she followed the men through the cafés and fish markets, past a simple stone mosque, and they began the climb. The fortress lay three hundred meters above them, perched on the edge of a cliff, a two-kilometer walk along a steep, curving road.
With a squad of teachers, Jeff, Anarbek, and Oren marched quickly ahead. Nazira preferred a more leisurely pace, and to her surprise Adam remained behind, as if to make sure she was okay.
The two of them walked in a steady silence until, at a right turn in the road, her foot slid on the loose gravel. “These paths are slippery,” she said.
“No traction,” Adam said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you fall easily. Like that. Careful.”
Her flats were not meant for hiking the steep hillside, and halfway up her feet had already begun to hurt. She glanced toward the fortress: the sky ahead was black. “I want to be up there,” she said, pointing. “The others are so far in front.”
And soon enough they did. The men were waiting for them at the top of the hill, on a level stone platform past the dirt parking lot. Her father reached out his hand and helped pull her up and then stood with one arm around her, trying to keep her warm in the wind. “It’s perfect,” Anarbek whispered in her ear. Before them stretched the Black Sea, an expanse of violent purple water, and over it now, approaching them quickly, loomed a grave black storm, cut by streaks of lightning.
“Rain’s coming in just a few minutes,” Oren said.
Adam pointed at the storm clouds. “Some view, isn’t it?”
“We should see the fortress,” Jeff suggested, “and get back down.”
Together they hustled along an uneven stone path to the ruins of the medieval fortress, a brown structure of seven rounded towers. In the grass near the entrance, around the fallen slabs of stone, groups of spotted cows were munching tall brown weeds. Anarbek stopped to admire them.
“Priditye!” Jeff called.
“Come on,” Nazira yelled back at her father. “We don’t have time.”
She waited for him, but he refused to hurry. After a minute, completely frustrated, she gave up and followed the others. Dinner proposals, offers of pig meat, her father’s dallying—she’d had too much of these men. They climbed one by one through a dark hole in the thick walls, emerging into the ruins of the castle, now open to the air. The remains of an outer wall surrounded a wide circle of grass, dotted here and there by sleeping pariah dogs. A few of the teachers sat on the northern stones, laughing, calling, snapping photos of the view, and pointing at the approaching storm. Nazira stepped away from the others, wanting to be alone. She strolled the grounds and noticed carved over the entrance portal an inscription of the cross. At the southern wall she leapt a ditch to reach an earthen walkway. From the steep heights she watched two oil tankers ply their way through the entrance of the straits below, like silver birds crossing a green sky.
Adam appeared from nowhere beside her. She had not heard him coming.
“The others said to find you. They’re heading back down. It’s about to pour.”
“Rain.” The storm had just about reached them. The air was growing darker, more oppressive by the moment, and Nazira felt the first drops on her arm. “I saw a shortcut down there,” he said, pointing with his lips—a strange gesture. “We’ll cut down through the back of the castle and catch ’em.”
She didn’t understand why this man, who had rudely ignored her all week, was suddenly so attentive. They turned and jumped over the ditch, then followed the curve in the eastern wall to an opening between the stones. A dirt path led downhill, parallel to the road. The rain began to patter against the dusty earth, and with her poor shoes Nazira could not move quickly on the loose sand. Adam walked close behind her. Once, as she slipped, he grabbed her by the wrist and kept her from falling. His grip and lean arm were unexpectedly strong.
She glanced back up at him. “Thank you, Adam.” She was suddenly far more at ease in his presence.
His face was red, his lips tight. “Let’s keep going.”
A cold wind swept across her ears and the skies opened. The rain cascaded in slanting gusts, the most sudden rain she’d ever felt, and in seconds the two of them were drenched. She clasped the top of her red acrylic jacket. Her hair dripped and she felt the chilling wetness spreading under her light cowl-neck sweater. With each step the heels of her flats slid and twisted down the slick path.
“Take this!” Adam called over the wind.
He had removed his denim jacket and was wearing only a gray T-shirt, now completely stuck to his bony frame. He draped the coat over Nazira’s head. She held the front with one hand, and with the other she reached back and felt for his fingers. Squinting, they stumbled down the side of the hill, pulling back vines and branches that blocked the path. The percussive rain fell still harder, and her skirt became splotched with mud. Just when she thought the trail would connect to the road, it curved to the right, the opposite way. Bent over, she plowed forward through the bushes, but with a twist of her arm Adam pulled her off the trail.
He yelled against the storm, “Give it a minute!”
An olive tree with silvery leaves and pungent flowers offered some protection, and they crouched under its lowest limbs. A wave of gratitude swept over her. The rain continued to pour in front of them, but only dripped through the mass of branches above. She pulled the denim jacket to her shoulders, swiped her face, and blinked to clear her eyes. Adam squatted in profile next to her, shivering, breathing heavily. He was still holding on to her left hand.
With her other hand she reached out and brushed back the dripping bangs plastered to his forehead, revealing the scar beneath. His head jerked at her touch.
“In my opinion you are cold,” she said. “Do you want your jacket?”
“I’m all right.”
He kept hold of her hand, did not turn his head, but instead shuffled his feet slightly closer to her, so their legs were pressed side by side.
“This was not a good shortcut you found,” she said, laughing. She hadn’t been this close to a man in years, and realized she was enjoying the adventure, Adam’s nervousness, the pressure of his legs against her.
“I’m sorry.” His melancholy expression had softened.
“Here.” She removed the denim jacket and draped it over his shoulders. He leaned back, turned, and glanced at her. She shut her eyes, listening to the rain and thunder, and was reluctant to take a breath. Drops slid off the olive leaves and fell across her face. They crouched in silence for long minutes, her hand folded within his grasp, until finally the rain let up, and he lifted her back to her feet.