IT HAPPENED IN ISTANBUL, ON THE TRAM RUNNING BETWEEN Eminonu and Sultanahmet, one August night at about eleven. I’d been in the city for a few weeks, working with Turkish teachers of English, and was returning from dinner with my new friend, Gulayse, a novelist. We’d talked late at Hamdi’s, a restaurant near the spice market. Afterward she’d walked me to the tram stop at Eminonu. A bell clanged, the tram slid into the station, and the doors opened smoothly. Then they shut behind me, sealing the crowded car.
Three men stood facing the door. We looked at each other. “American?” the one closest to me asked. He was wearing a cotton shirt, short-sleeved, with stripes across the chest. His mouth was fixed in a little smile, his teeth faintly stained with nicotine. “American.” I nodded. “And you?” “Iraqi,” he said, looking at me closely. We were almost touching. “American kill Iraqi,” he said.
His face swam up in front of mine. “Terrible—” I said, looking down. His answer came swiftly. “No you,” he said. He spoke rapidly and I understood only a little. “Baby,” he said and with his arm made a motion of someone throwing something away. “Baby.” Again he flung his arm sideways. His face was inches from mine, his eyes rimmed with red. “I am so sorry,” I said. He watched me, his mouth still fixed in a little smile. Then: “It’s improve now. American leaving.”
Only nights before, I’d been sitting in a small café on the Hippodrome across from the Blue Mosque. It was the night of the full moon and I could make out the hieroglyphs on the Egyptian obelisk, the stalking bird at the top. After a while the final call to prayer poured into the square, the voice of the muezzin gliding from note to half-note. The call continued a long time, it seemed, longer than usual. “What’s happening?” I asked the waiter.
“This is one of the holiest nights of the year,” he said. “Tonight all Muslims ask forgiveness for the harm they know they’ve done. For the harm they don’t know too. Ask forgiveness for their daughters and sons, for parents who are dead. For everyone.”
I followed the sidewalk along the edge of the Hippodrome to the mosque, entered the enormous court crowded with people, some taking off their shoes to enter, some washing at spigots in the great fountain, others sitting praying in the side galleries, men and women, many children, too, moving between. The white moon behind the minarets appeared enormous. Seagulls, as always, drifted back and forth. When I walked out into the Hippodrome again, I noticed what I hadn’t before: that cars solidly filled the sidewalks, that people were sitting silently on the grass, hands lifted.
The waiter was still standing at the edge of his café. I told him I’d just been to the mosque. “I hope you do not take offense,” he replied, “but I pray for you too.”