III.

WE DECIDED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SUMMER WE’D TAKE one trip outside of Istanbul. I wanted to visit Berlin, where many Turks immigrate, and Cooper chose Konya, a city remarkable only for housing Rumi’s tomb in a Sufi mosque. In 1980, it was also where an Islamic party led a rally that my parents say was one of the many reasons General Kenan Evren went ahead with the coup that sent my parents to New York. I’d already been there years ago with my family on what Baba called an emotional pilgrimage. Cooper and I were going to decide fairly, with a coin toss, but when Dilek told Cooper that the boarding school that his grandmother taught at was only a four-hour bus ride from Konya, the bribery began. Cooper spoke of Rumi’s poetry constantly, reciting his poems like a human-size songbird on my shoulder, in my face, anywhere we went, sometimes in memorized Turkish. He spoke of my grandmother, how she is so generous to him, and how he wished I could have known his grandmother. As he narrated how his grandmother took only one handheld suitcase with her on a three-week voyage that carried her across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean to Istanbul then Adana, I imagined his grandmother disembarking from this ship in Istanbul and carrying her leather suitcase, and I saw, for only one moment, what she saw: ferries, seagulls, mosques, minarets, trams, and street cats. That’s not what I see when I see Istanbul, but I wanted to know what it felt like to see a city like this one for the first time. To feel awe. So I said yes, okay, why don’t we go to Konya and Tarsus.

Today is the hottest day of the summer yet and we put the fan at an angle where it hits my damp neck, his chest. Like my grandmother’s, Cooper’s apartment has no air conditioner, something he finds meaningful. Cooper wants to call the school to make sure it’s open when we visit. He wants to poke around campus. Tarsus American College, now coed, is just outside the historic city of the same name, where Saint Paul was born. They say Cleopatra first met Marc Antony in Tarsus. During an official meeting under olive-tree shade they made eyes at each other. I’m not sure what happened next.

Cooper is googling the school’s phone number and tells me that his grandmother never talked about that time in her life. It was before she met the man who would become his grandfather. At that time, he was serving in the Philippines.

My parents say she almost married a Turkish man, Cooper continues with excitement. I don’t know how it ended, though. She came back to California two years later, with a suitcase full of silk scarves, towels, and black charcoal sketches she drew of women in headscarves.

Remember, he says, recalling the one time I visited his family’s home, we framed those sketches. They’re hung up in my kitchen.

They’re beautiful, I say. I remember feeling moved and transported before them. I remember having told my father that Cooper’s grandmother worked in Turkey, at his same high school. I’d told Baba about the sketches and he got upset. Women don’t wear all black there, and especially not on their heads, he’d said, and began pacing our kitchen. He said Americans will never understand Turkey or Muslims, and that we don’t have the tools, temperament, or language to correct their misinterpretations. I was upset, and pointed out that yes, Cooper’s parents must think you are a bit barbarian for not letting him sleep over. Baba did not respond well to this, citing the doctrine that when I’m back in his house it’s his rules, and then my mother sat him down by pressing on his shoulders, motioning towards her own heart. Don’t tire yourself out, she’d said, and he’d held her gaze and nodded.

We sit on Cooper’s bed as he digs in his pocket for his phone. He’s more excited than he’s been all month, and each time he sees I’ve stopped paying attention, he touches my jaw to lead my head from its view of the window to face him. Nothing bad has ever happened to Cooper, which I point out to him sometimes. But it will, he often replies, and then he’s silent, sometimes for hours, and even if I crack jokes or play his favorite songs, but especially if I try to seduce him, he will only give me a small, sad smile, and apologize, admitting that he has lost some optimism, but he’s sure it will return soon.

Finally he manages to get in contact with the administration at Tarsus.

I have a strange request, Cooper says on the phone, my grandmother worked at this school in the 1940s. He takes his hand off my mouth and his eyes look vacantly into mine. I hear a muffled voice on the other end. Cooper laughs.

Yes, her spirit has sent me back here. I have no free will! He laughs again before becoming serious. This might be a stretch, but do you happen to have anything of hers, any papers, formal documents?

Outside, a group of boys throw around a rubber ball and yell insults at one another. They call one another pussies and vaginas and sons of whores. In the distance is the water, and farther back, the tall minarets far enough away to look like needles. A younger sister, or maybe love interest, stands at the edge of their circle. She has her thin arms planted on her hips and wears a green plastic clip in the shape of a bird in her hair. It looks like she wants to join, but one of the boys shoves her and she lands on her hands and knees. Then this girl’s mother flings open the front door and ushers her inside, and I can’t help smiling, comforted by familial care, until I catch sight of this mother’s throat. She has a tracheostomy. In New York, most of these holes are covered with plastic to make it easier to eat and breathe and consume liquids, but I haven’t really seen the tubes in Turkey. Maybe this woman is taking a break from her tube. Maybe she just cleaned the nooks and passageways of her tube and now it is on a drying rack in her kitchen. I wish I didn’t see the hole in her throat from this far away. I wish I had some way of not remembering my father.

WE’RE IN THE DOMESTIC TERMINAL A FEW DAYS LATER.

But tourists don’t go there, I tell Cooper again as we board the plane to Konya. Alara called me this morning, as usual. She expressed concern about rising tensions near the southeastern border, but she thinks this adventure will be good for me. Only my grandmother doesn’t tell me what will be good for me. I’m grateful that she feeds me and brews me liquid potions and that’s all. She sent us off with a packet of oily börek, which I carefully placed at the top of my backpack.

We move slowly in line. The moment I step off the boarding bridge and onto the plane, I have to incant a small prayer to Allah and murmur amen three times while simultaneously touching my hands to my forehead so that we land safely.

It’s only Muslim tourists who go there, I repeat after saying my prayer. And the Americans who read Coleman Barks like the Bible. And Coleman Barks doesn’t even speak or read Persian, did you know that? He just reinterprets English translations.

Cooper helps a woman with her baggage. Then he turns to me on the turquoise-carpeted aisle and mentions lightly that maybe it will be good for me to go someplace where I have an isolated memory of my father. I listen. I imagine Baba as a phantom floating beside us in Konya. I imagine he would tell me that I actually am a Muslim tourist. I wonder if he’d fizzle if someone walked through his image. Or maybe he’d be translucent throughout the hot day.

KONYA IS A LARGE, FLAT CITY OF STANDARD TURKISH buildings—gray and beige apartment complexes, all with dusty red roofs. In the distance there is a squat mountain range. We walk through the city and point out things that we find beautiful, interesting, sad. We learn that Konya was the capital of the Seljuk Empire one thousand years ago. We weave through crowds of people, women shopping, men sitting outside cafés playing backgammon and rolling tiny white dice in their fists. In a pastry shop, I tell Cooper to use his Turkish to get two börek, one meat, one feta and spinach. He smiles at the men behind the counter and orders with exceeding politeness. He apologizes for his accent. The Turks behind the counter look at me, this girl-woman with her blond boyfriend, and mutter what Cooper can’t understand, something mean, a limb of the Turkish lexicon he has not yet faced.

What did they say? Cooper asks me. He hands me a börek wrapped in wax paper. I stare at them and they stare back.

The börek were made just ten minutes ago, I say. I press his hand to the wax paper. See, how warm they are.

I kiss his ear and wrap my arm over his shoulders in front of them and the men behind the counter persist, lips snarling. This time they address me by saying my great-grandfather would rise from his grave in Gallipoli should he see this.

Cooper thanks me, for the ear kiss or the börek, I’m not sure. Neither of my great-grandfathers are buried in Gallipoli. My mother’s grandfather didn’t die in World War I, nor did he die in the Turkish War of Independence. He was thrown for dead into a pit in Palestine, where he croaked for help until a British soldier heaved him out and loaded him onto a ship to India for prisoners of war. He returned to Turkey eighteen years later, a bullet hole scarred over on his forehead, the left side of his body partially paralyzed, and is now buried in his village outside Bolu next to his daughter, my dead grandmother who is renowned in our family for falling in love with a Kurdish man whom she was not permitted to marry. The others are buried in Tokat, or Georgia, or somewhere else in Anatolia.

There is a long line to get into Rumi’s tomb and the sun is strong. I wrap my head up in a silk headscarf as Cooper reapplies sunscreen to his face and neck. As we wait I bend down to feed a cat some börek. There are no tall buildings around the mosque save for the turquoise minaret, bright green against the blue sky. The summer before Baba died, I was living at home. Cooper was staying in the dorms on campus with his friends, but one night, I decided I would sneak him into the house and make him sleep in my bed. I was testing my boundaries, because what girl doesn’t want to see what her body can get away with? But my father, he came upstairs to fix the radiators, which were not working properly because the pipes were full of trapped air, and when he opened my door and saw Cooper’s blond head poking out of my covers, he dragged me out of bed by yelling, dragged us out of the bedroom by yelling, as if his voice were a rope around our necks, and he dragged us down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he asked Cooper, Do you let your sisters act like this too? Do you let your sisters act like sluts?

Maybe my father would be happy to know that I am far from a slut. I have no excess of blood in me to cause sexual abandon. I think of the dried-up vulvas in the body exhibit. There was one woman who was embracing a man, and they made his penis look erect. You can’t tell what the woman is feeling, which seems meaningful.

Inside the mausoleum, Cooper’s blond hair is again the stalk of tall corn, high above the moving sea of coarse black hair and silk scarves. The other visitors turn their faces to him, even those at the feet of Rumi’s sarcophagus covered in gold-embroidered cloth, as if they all came to Konya to see this young man, Cooper. I’m embarrassed. There is a group of men weeping in the corner. Another man cries as he plays a reed flute. An American takes a flash photograph, something strictly forbidden. One man, praying on his knees with his hands open in front of him, stares at Cooper. The man keeps staring at Cooper the whole way through the tomb, his small pink mouth mumbling under his black, broom-like mustache, but Cooper keeps looking at me. He’s charting my facial movements. He wants to know how I feel. He wants to know if I’m feeling moved by Rumi’s dead, holy body and these acts of pilgrimage. He wants to know whether I’m reminded of my father’s grave, my lie, but he can’t find out that I never went. He already knows what happened at the funeral. He can’t find out anything else about me. I smile for him, it’s a weak smile, I think, but I’m not very sure what I seem like to him or to anyone anymore. I used to have a lot to say. I used to be choler: energetic and ambitious. People used to tell me to be quiet, and I would react violently. Now I am listless and tired. I’m phlegm, passive but sensitive, and sentimental. Maybe I am growing up.

And my father, he was otherwise silly and friendly, and he loved to dance to music with his hands up, his fingers snapping to the beat.

Later, on the hard bed in our hotel room, Cooper asks me how my head feels. Our hotel is near Alaaddin Hill, and cat and people noises float in through the open window that faces the park. Tomorrow we will be taking a four-hour bus to Tarsus. Cooper is very excited for our grand visit to the school, and his excitement, I’m hoping, makes up for my fear. Cooper is on his own family mission. His grandfather, a man he never met, died in a fire only a few years after marrying his grandmother. At the beginning of the summer, Cooper told me his grandfather reminds him of my grandfather the eye doctor, and how both our grandmothers spent a lifetime with dead husbands. What he said annoyed me. But my grandfather died in an earthquake, I’d replied, and much earlier in their marriage. Hmm, Cooper had said. He looked funny, as if he was lying. For such an open person, it’s always been hard to tell when he’s lying. He would be a great actor. A brief panic biles up in my throat when I think about how in all the time I’ve protected my lie about visiting the grave, I’ve never known if Cooper has a lie, too, one he is keeping hostage. And I should have known that when he shared his grandfather theory with me the week we first arrived in Turkey, the week I called the clinic and apologized, the week my grandmother began taking care of me instead of the other way around, the week my sister called me, saying, You were never like this, Sibel. Like what? I’d said. Well, unsure of yourself, she said. Depressed. Again, I don’t know, but I should have known that week that we would end up on a hard bed in the middle of Turkey at a hotel named Dream of Rumi on a mission to walk hand-in-hand through our world of the dead, a path Cooper has mapped out for me, and for him, a path that only leads me back to my father.

I steer Cooper’s hand to the muscles between my shoulder and neck until he begins to knead.

Do you know that tarsus, I say, in anatomy is also the word for fibrous connective tissue on the edge of your eyelids. The sheet of tissue that helps support your eyelid.

Oh, he says. I didn’t know that.

It also has something to do with bones, but I can’t remember that one.

He smiles. Finally, he takes my mouth.

THE SCHOOL IS NEAR THE EDGE OF TOWN, AND AFTER WE unfold our legs and walk off the bus, we hail a taxi and make our way to my father’s school. I recite my prayer and touch my forehead three times before we pass through the gates. I have to ask Allah that we spend this day with no accidents or trouble. Sometimes I dare to ask for more, like, Allah, may I please have good thoughts today, or, Allah, may I please not see my grandmother’s hand tremble today, or, Allah, may I please transform the feeling of guilt into good gut movements? When we pass through the gates we see the great stone building—the main school. Cypress trees line the perimeter of the campus. Cooper wipes his hands on his pants after showing me how sweaty he is with anticipation. Because it is summer break, there aren’t many people around, but there are many cats. The women who work in administration are very friendly. One asks me in Turkish if I’m an alum, and I politely tell her no. The same woman gives Cooper a package of his grandmother’s papers.

We made photocopies, she explains in English. So, it’s for you to keep. She smiles at Cooper and asks if she can help with anything else.

We say no thank you, and when she turns away, we remark on how kind she was, and helpful. We remark on the way the air here feels clean and windy, as if someone were trying to tell us something. I feel this often in Turkey. We stand next to a Turkish flag outside the school’s entrance and slide the soft pieces of paper out of the package. His grandmother, Joyce, looks very similar to a Turk in her photograph. Cooper points out that her nose ends in a small hook like mine. We do not know why this is significant.

The package also contains Joyce’s application essay and her résumé. Her essay is written in a neat, tiny script. Joyce explains that she wants to teach in Turkey because the world is in a very fragile state right now. We have to come together and understand one another’s differences in a time like this, she explains. The date on her essay confirms that she applied one week after the end of World War II. On her identification card for the school, someone wrote out her name and under her name and photograph, her religion. PROTESTANT is stamped in Turkish.

That’s funny, Cooper says, she wasn’t religious at all.

They had to write something, I say, my identification card says “Islam.”

We continue to sift through her papers, heavy in a packet, light when holding up just one sheet. I want more packages, receipts for clothing and kebap, evidence of how she spent her time. I want to know how she liked it here. She must have been choler, which made her courageous and adventurous. I want to see the man she almost married, the Turk. I want to know who broke whose heart in half and who kept which pieces.

This feels like we’re traveling through time, I say.

Traveling through time is harder than I thought, Cooper says.

But we’re doing it now.

I mean, emotionally hard.

It begins to rain, and we don’t want the papers to get wet. Cooper slips the papers under his shirt and we run along the side of the main building until we find a set of stone steps sheltered by trees. In the distance, two cats are playing. Maybe they are fighting. It is difficult to tell. Cooper has a peculiar look on his face.

What? I ask.

Don’t you want to find your dad’s records too?

I wave my hand through the air. Oh, I already know those. When he and his best friend refused to cut their hair—they had grown it past their shoulders—their physics teacher, a draft dodger from Kentucky, got so mad. Then they came to class with their heads shaved, and the draft dodger punished them by forcing them to copy out each page of the Oxford dictionary.

Wow, Cooper says. This was during the Vietnam War?

I guess so. Near the end of it, I think. He became a leftist here, too. All his friends had anti-NATO banners on their dorm room walls. One of his friends got kicked out for going to a demonstration.

What demonstration was it?

I don’t think he told me.

They probably have a whole file, though. And with more information. Maybe you can find out.

Maybe, I say. Maybe I’ll go ask.

He stands up. Well?

I make to get up. Why don’t we wait until it stops raining?

You don’t want to do it, do you?

I do, I really do.

He looks at me. He moves towards me, sitting on the step against the stone wall. He corners me like this. Look at me, he says, please.

This place reminds me of the place where we went camping in California, I offer.

Last year we camped in the redwoods and smoked weed and had sex against a tree. We went off the trail and hiked a hill. We could hear the voices of people on the path below us while Cooper had his whole hand in me. He reached up into my ribs and held my wet organs in a hard fist. We’d looked at each other, me and Cooper, as he continued to use his hand to get something from me. I remember feeling calm.

I know less and less about you, sometimes, Cooper says. He’s towering above me and his eyes water. Did you really go to the grave, Sibel?

Yes, I say. Yes. Cooper keeps his eyes trained on me, on my face. I want to ask him how he can love somebody so lonely. I want to nail his thin body down like a board for an answer. We’ve been together for two years, and Cooper and I have never once had an argument. Maybe it is because we were close friends first, but we slid into each other easily. We didn’t have to compromise ourselves for the other. We didn’t have to take turns with feelings. At the time, I thought that was what love looked like, but now I think love is something else. We are going to have to unearth the people we will become, slowly, carefully, but with a dedicated and calm labor, as if digging into dirt with special tools, tools that will not maim the tender thing inside the other that we find.

He sits next to me on the stone step. We’re sheltered from the rain. I point out the cats.

Do you think they’re fighting? he asks me.

Are we? I venture, afraid to say it.

No, he says quickly. No.

THERE IS TURBULENCE ON THE PLANE RIDE BACK FROM Adana to Istanbul. I make my hands into open bowls on my lap in prayer. Cooper is happily chatting in English with the Turkish man next to him. What kind of person is happy in the middle seat of an airplane row? What kind of person is happy talking to a stranger about developments in eye surgery?

I’m trying to complete my prayer, but my language is all wrong, and I have to resort to my own ritual, because if you don’t have a ritual to confront death, a ritual aligned with a religious practice, you have to fashion your own. The Turkish rituals are not my own. Medical bloodletting was born in Egypt, and Galen, a Greek who lived in Turkey sometime during the second century, often prescribed bloodletting and cupping in order to effectively release a bad humor. His theory that blood—as well as the humors and pneuma, which is essentially air, but in the human body became the spirit or soul—moves through the body via pulsing arteries was widely practiced until William Harvey, who served not only as chief physician to two British kings but also examined women accused of witchcraft, proved in 1628 that the heart is really a pump. Galen mistakenly believed that the heart produced blood for arteries, while the liver produced blood for veins.

All these ancient doctors, the more they mapped out the human body’s circulation, the more they argued about the location of the human soul. Baba believed you don’t have a soul, you are a soul. Baba, who said the Koran is the socialist Bible.

As a child on plane rides to Istanbul, I’d cup my hands in prayer during turbulence. Baba taught my sister and me the Arabic prayers, like water on his tongue, gravel on mine. I’m afraid, I told him on one plane ride to Istanbul. We were over the Atlantic, and I was certain that even if the yellow inflatable slide popped us out of the plane we’d still die in water. If we were to crash, I asked, would death be immediate?

He leaned in. His elbow slipped off the armrest. Yes, he said. Right away you become an angel. After so much life, he said, such little death.

EVERYONE CLAPS WHEN THE PLANE LANDS. I LOOK AT Cooper, who is smiling, and we clap too. We take a taxi back from the airport. Cooper gathers our luggage and I tell him to go inside, that I need to call my mother. Really I plan to smoke a cigarette.

If he’s suspicious, he doesn’t show it. He sees my grandmother on the balcony, looking for us, so he hurries to buzz the door.

I move behind a tree across the street from my grandmother’s apartment building, and I smoke my secret cigarette. My black smoker’s glove was stinking, so I washed it with my clothes before our trip and laid it to dry under my bed where my grandmother most likely won’t clean. But I carry toothpaste and hand lotion in my bag, also gum. I always smoke my secret cigarette behind this tree. It’s a good tree. I can still see my grandmother’s apartment but I am securely hidden. The crested wave shape of Cooper’s voluminous hair is visible through the window when my grandmother reaches forward to hug him.

Baba smoked in secret, too, and I picture his lungs as black, oily stones in his chest. The night Baba died in the kitchen while boiling water for tea, I heard him yell. It was a short yell, as if snapped off halfway. I continue to hear him yell and yell, a broken machine walking into a wall.

When I finish my cigarette, I suck toothpaste into my mouth from the tube. I rub lavender lotion on my hands, focusing particularly on my two fingers that once held the cigarette. Bloodletting myself will not cure me if I’m full of black bile. And when I first came to Istanbul this summer, my grandmother sat me down and said, I am getting closer to death, but in heaven there will be a spot next to me. I will save it for you. You will meet me there.

I’m riding the ancient elevator, thinking of my disguises. What story am I telling myself that is so different than that of my grandmother, and even my mother, the women who won’t tell me the full story of who they are and when they became people?