IV.

MY DAYS FEEL DIFFERENT, NOW THAT I’M LYING TO MY grandmother and Cooper. My grandmother has her reading glasses on and is flipping through her telephone book until she sighs and heads for the kitchen. The television is on, as usual, and the anchor is discussing the upcoming elections. There’s a plan to meet for dinner with Dilek and her friends.

I’ve got this headache still, I tell Dilek on the phone, I should stay home.

Are you sure you don’t want to come to this restaurant? Dilek asks. It’s a new seafood place I found. They serve sushi.

No, I say, but I’m sure you picked a very cool place.

Cooper is coming, she says. But sure.

Cooper is spearheading a new project at work to provide eye care for Syrian refugees. I didn’t think he had time for dinner. I’m collapsed on the couch, stalking Dilek on social media. She’s posted another photo of herself in a bikini. My grandmother comes back in with a tray of hot Turkish coffee. Her hand shakes as she places the tray on the lace tablecloth. She heard me tell Dilek that Cooper has been very busy lately, and now informs me that despite his various commitments, he graciously wants to tutor Emre in English.

I close my computer lid. But I was supposed to do that, I say.

You can’t do that from over there, she replies.

There’s video chat, I suggest. I can do something over video chat.

Can you assign homework? Can you print worksheets with vocabulary?

I’m not going back for another month. It’s basically in two months that I’m going back.

She’s doubtful. I can see it in the way she’s about to open her mouth.

He doesn’t speak Turkish, I remind her.

We’ve been talking, she says, defensive. He’s gotten very good. She hands me a cup of hot coffee on a saucer.

You can’t even speak the same language, I say again.

She ignores me. We watch the news while drinking coffee. She tuts her tongue at the television screen showing recent footage of what Israel is doing to Palestine and changes the channel to a soap opera.

I love this one, she says. She points to the handsome man. He’s in our Russia one, too.

The handsome man is from a religious family. He wants to marry a young woman from a wealthy, secular family. The handsome man gets yelled at by his mother, who covers her head in a silk scarf with blue flowers. We listen to her command her son to stop seeing the whore he’s dating. She curses the snobby family the whore comes from. She curses the fact that this woman does not pray. She curses god for her ill fate in sons.

What happened to her other son? I ask my grandmother.

He got married to a whore, too.

Oh.

The handsome man leaves despite his mother’s threats and takes a shared taxi through the streets of Üsküdar, the ferry across the Bosphorus, and boards another bus that shuttles him down the highways in modern Istanbul to the rich neighborhood in the green hills that the young woman lives in, with her family, who similarly looks down on the handsome man because he is religious and poor.

I forget, my grandmother says, does Alara have a boyfriend right now?

No, they broke up a few months ago.

My grandmother nods in approval. The women in my family love television. The Turkish shows are about family, culture, and inheritance. My mother, who likes American sci-fi and fantasy story lines, says that we, Turks, are simply not creative enough to produce television that strays from common, overused story lines populated with the same characters: a doting and controlling mother obsessed with her handsome son who falls in love with the wrong woman, all under the purview of an angry father. The father has a thick mustache only if he is supposed to be religious and poor. The rich fathers are clean shaven and wear silk suits in their Bosphorus mansions. Sometimes it is the boy who comes from the rich, secular family, and the girl he loves, then, is required to be from a poor neighborhood where all the neighbors are friends and come over for tea to gossip and the mothers are always obsessed with cleaning. There are obviously never any queer characters on these shows. The bad girls—the ones who make this star-crossed, class-based love story between the boy and girl even more difficult—are always tall and blond. The only exception to this formula of rich and poor, religious and secular, is the television show about the sultans where the socioeconomic situation is evermore complicated, as the feud is between the sultan’s mother and one of the sultan’s wives, who was formerly a Christian slave.

You know what my mother always says? I ask my grandmother. She looks up, her shaking hand in a bowl of cherries.

What? Her eyes are back on the screen.

This is not creative. This is too much like real life to be creative.

The mother wears a different silk headscarf now, this time embroidered with tiny red flowers. She’s gossiping to her friends at tea about how her only son cannot marry that girl.

It’s too much like real life, I insist. The censorship, too.

My grandmother shrugs and hands me the cherry bowl. What isn’t?

Then there are the talk shows about diets and makeup and hair dye and other vital lessons on well-being. We particularly enjoy the dramatic interpersonal programs. Yesterday we watched one where they brought in families who were no longer speaking to one another. A girl with heavy makeup sat on the green stage couch, attempting to make peace with her mother, but her mother refused to be on television, so the program showed her Facebook profile picture on the split screen as her daughter cried about abandonment.

When my coffee cup is ready, my grandmother mutes the soap opera and begins to read the grounds.

Well, she says, her nose in the tiny cup, wow.

What? I say. What does it say?

This shape, she says, is a field of dirt. There is soil everywhere. But here is your body.

I look into the cup. We fight for nose space to see into the thing. Sure enough, I see my body: a thin white line in negative against the brown sludge.

Those are the leaves, the trees, and finely packed dirt, says my grandmother. It looks like life is continuing above you, and you’ve covered yourself in earth. She holds the cup out of reach and regards me very carefully.

It looks like you are ready to die, she announces.

What? I say. I reach for the cup but she moves it, like we’re playing a game. That’s insane.

That’s what it says, baby. She shakes her head. This happened once to my cousin who was having stomach pain, not headaches. She said you have to take in the earth in order to gain your advantage over it. She bought fresh potatoes from the market and boiled them. But you have to leave the skin on the potatoes, she says you can’t even wash off the dirt that gets stuck in those craters. First, we have to make your stomach better.

My head, I say, my head hurts, not my stomach.

I think it will have the same effect, she says. Doesn’t your period hurt, too?

Your cousin is what, eighty? Ninety? One hundred and fifty?

My cousin is dead, she says, laughing. She died many years ago.

UPSET ABOUT MY FUTURE, I DECIDE TO MEET UP WITH Cooper and Dilek after all. I take the bus to the water, and when I walk into the fish restaurant I’m shocked at how black the Boğaz glints before me. Maybe it is not Istanbul itself that is black bile, but the Bosphorus. Most of Dilek’s friends have left, but Esra is still there. They’re sitting at a long table with a white tablecloth, a plate of fish bones before each of them, an ashtray for every few seats. Dilek is wearing a low-cut shirt and has taken her place next to Cooper. Her eyebrows are particularly neat and thick tonight. They’re talking about how Eda, Esra’s sister, didn’t come tonight. She’s been going straight home after work every day because she’s worried about what could happen on the metro, in crowded squares, in malls. She thinks even the ferries are dangerous. Their parents didn’t allow Esra to go to the Gezi anniversary because when she was at a demonstration last year in Nişantaşı, her boyfriend was arrested and she came home bruised from water cannons. I drop a chunk of bread for the street cat that rubs up at my ankles. Soon, more cats gather at my feet. That Cooper, an American, wants to stay in a country like Turkey renews Dilek and Esra’s waning hope, and they begin to talk about the upcoming election.

I ask the waiter for another bowl of bread. It’s funny that they didn’t end up ordering the sushi.

Cooper thinks it makes sense, Turkey’s state right now, because the poor always rise against the rich. The political divide reminds him of America. Dilek agrees, and calls Cooper so intelligent. I can’t tell if I saw him look at her body, or if he was charmed by the funny way she uses a knife. The cats have tripled and they sit at my feet patiently. I drop more bread on the ground. I know Cooper would never do something with her. He, like me, is a deeply monogamous person. We inherited this from our parents.

I clear my throat and say that according to the Istanbul municipality, 75 percent of the city’s 330 cemeteries are already full and space concerns push grave prices higher. Rich people can buy the graves that go for the same price as renting an apartment with a view of the Bosphorus.

Dilek shoots Cooper a concerned look, but I ignore it. The poor people, I continue, who receive minimum wage—the U.S. equivalent of $3 an hour—have fewer options. They have to wait five years to even bury a new body inside another family member’s grave.

Esra’s staring at me. She says, of course, that’s a concern. However, she thinks the biggest problem in Turkey right now is that the educated youth won’t pursue careers in politics or academia, a trend that started after the 1980 coup, when the Turkish upper and middle classes gave up on participating actively in politics because of decades of violence and instability. Or arts, she says knowingly. Everyone in Esra’s family, including her sister, warns her against writing. Her friends, however, are supportive. She finds it generous that her boyfriend wants to read the novels she loves, particularly because the novels are generally about sad young women who either lash out by acting rude or by being despondent and uncommunicative.

Does he like the novels? I ask her.

Esra shrugs. Sure, he finds them interesting.

Have I met him? I ask. Everyone looks away uncomfortably, and Dilek says he’s at school in America. Remember, I told you. He’s working at a—what do you call it?—think tank this summer.

Oh, I say. Sorry.

This conversation seems to end the dinner. As we’re kissing everyone goodbye on each cheek, Dilek pulls me aside to tell me she spoke to my mother on the phone the other day, and that she’s worried about me. What is she worried about? What I did to my father? I’m scanning her face, looking for a clue.

Do you want me to come to the grave with you? Dilek asks.

Remember, I say, I already went. I make to join Cooper, who is pretending he’s not eavesdropping, but Dilek grabs me by the fat on my upper arm.

But the end of Ramazan is coming up. We should go together, once Alara’s here.

Okay.

We can bring your grandmother, too. My dad wants to go as well.

Okay.

Dilek wants to push me but I’m not ready. And I know there’s only so much passivity a person can take. I smile at her and she smiles back. We stand there smiling. It’s nice, smiling. Then she hugs me, and her perfume is so strong, like I’m swallowing chunks of rotten flowers.

Cooper and I take the bus back to my grandmother’s, and as we pass the cemetery I think of the people who can’t afford graves. Their dead are buried on the outskirts of the city, in new cemeteries, making the dead not abstract, finally classless souls, but distinctly poor souls. Even when dead, the relationship between the poor and the rich continues to shape the parameters of this city. Then there are the Jewish cemeteries, and across Turkey, unmarked Armenian graves. Cooper, who’d been talking about how excited he is to develop a fundraising plan for his new project, has fallen silent. I ask him what’s wrong. Nothing, he says, but when he makes eye contact he says that he just can’t believe that we’ve already been here for one month. I say, Same, me too, and I make my face convincingly somber, although really time has been passing very slowly for me. I was nervous about Cooper coming here, a place no American friend of mine has ever seen. Silly, I thought, that I could take his heart into my chest cavity and let his beat in place of mine. Ancient Egyptians preferred the heart as well. Like me, it was the brain they didn’t understand. During the mummification process, they’d wield a bronze scalpel to dig into the corpse’s nose. I’m not sure whether they pulled the whole thing out that way, or how they were certain they’d latched on to the right organ. I’m not sure how long it took to dig out the brain.

When the bus pulls away and disappears down a hill, Cooper kisses me goodbye on the mouth. I don’t think time is passing in the same way for us. Nobody is around when we kiss.

THE NEXT DAY I TELL MY GRANDMOTHER I’M GOING TO A café to study for the med school exam, and I make a big show of putting my textbook in my backpack. My grandmother makes sure that I take a sweater, in case there’s a breeze. She is obsessed with breezes and thinks they give people head colds. My plan is to walk by the water. Ibn Sina, the Muslim father of medicine who expanded greatly on Hippocrates’s and Galen’s works, emphasized the importance of internal and external causes for illness, including environment. Clean, unpolluted bodies of water balance a person out. Water is an antidote. By the time I’m nearing the foot of the hill, my mother calls me. I’m on a tiny sidewalk, less than one foot wide, and I silence her call. Then she calls again. I pick up and explain that I’m doing well, don’t worry, and my grandmother is doing okay, too, but when she asks about Cooper, I can’t say anything. She informs me that I seem to have begun some new practice with Cooper. I seem to have split myself in half for him but only to show my exterior, the part that is lips and heavy-lidded eyes, and she tells me in Turkish, You’ve become a well and what he throws in you he’ll die trying to get back. I can hear my sister agree in the background. Alara most likely helped cook this theory up. Her school in California finished a month later than mine, and she’s at home for two weeks before she joins me here. My mom has only one week off in the summers, and she likes to save it in case there’s an emergency.

I think my mother just learned the word accommodating. I mention this, and she says, No, of course I know the word. I only just started to use it.

My mother can tell stories only in Turkish. Alara and I, in turn, don’t know the more intellectual Turkish words; phrases that delineate adult sentiments about emerging scathed or unscathed from a bureaucratic system. We always have to meet in the middle of language.

My mother asks me if I’ve visited his grave and I’m scared to lie, because if anyone will find me out, it’s her.

Yes, I say. I went. I wiped dirt off the grave with a wet towelette and I placed some flowers on the gray stone. Tulips. I don’t know if those are graveyard flowers.

That’s fine, she says, those are fine flowers. What else?

I spoke some prayers, I say, the ones you taught me.

She’s silent. I can hear her breathing on the other end of the phone.

You were always much better at the prayers than him, I continue. Nothing from her, still. I am terrified of my mother’s grief. I am terrified at how similar it seems to my own.

My mother remains silent until she asks me if I’m by the water.

I walked to the Boğaz to read. I’m having trouble studying, I add.

You’re not studying for the test? Are you feeling okay?

I’m okay.

Then go to his grave, baby.

Oh, I say. I can’t remember if I’ve lied to her and told her I went to the cemetery. Didn’t I just tell her I went? Does she mean me to go again? Again and again?

Go to the grave, baby. He’s there. I promise.

We’re quiet. I’m sucking on my hair, wondering if she’d hear me drag smoke into my lungs if I lit a cigarette. Finally, she says there’s nothing like the way the Boğaz glints under the setting sun. She says she met my father there, by the water, after her brother was released from prison. She remembers weaving between cars to cross the street, while her brother stood, ashing his cigarette, and opened his arms. She remembers acting coy, debating what the Sixth Fleet was still doing in Turkey and what would happen with the labor strikes across the city—the automobile manufacturing workers, the miners, the goldsmiths in Taksim—before finally allowing her brother to introduce her to his best friend, my father, who she at first thought was much too serious. She loves to joke that my father didn’t crack a laugh until three months into their relationship. My father rarely spoke about Turkey. I don’t even know what it was like for him growing up, because my grandmother never speaks about him as a child either. And Alara and I don’t know what our parents did in the late ’70s besides attending demonstrations and organizing. Baba did admit to us, only once and just last summer when Gezi began, that he distributed funds for purchasing weapons. That’s why he fled to the States in 1979 for a PhD he had applied to the year before on a desperate whim, and just in case.

Actually, my mother suddenly says, we met before then, and as she tells me these scant yet animate details of meeting him at a demonstration on a university campus in Ankara where three students were killed, I begin to resurrect my father. I’m doing it, I’m seeing him. He’s swimming.

I blink and the strokes that were his arms cutting through water is bobbing plastic trash.

I COME HOME AND AM SURPRISED TO FIND COOPER’S THERE. He’s cooking dinner with my grandmother. I elbow my way into the kitchen and he tells me he hasn’t eaten all day. He’s decided to fast for Ramazan’s last week. My grandmother understands our English, because Cooper was just clutching his stomach, and as usual she’s very impressed. My grandmother can no longer fast. If her blood sugar shoots up any further she’ll die on her sofa watching the news. She’s been having chest pain this year and she can’t take her Parkinson’s medication without food. We lick date pits dry, then we eat at sundown, the time in the summer holiday when families gather to drink Coke and dip bread in meat oil, while my least favorite broadcaster, the one with plastic blond hair, screams out the news, and each time I lower the volume my grandmother hunts down the remote to raise it back up. I would fast, too, but I can’t stop eating. Not this summer. My grandmother, who goes to the cemetery only on holidays and is planning on going soon for the end of Ramazan, asks me whether they fixed the stone of her husband, who died in an earthquake. I’m upset at myself. I made much too big a deal at the kebap house of visiting Baba’s grave. My grandmother doesn’t have a grave ritual. She would understand that I don’t have a grave ritual. I have only my humors. I fill my mouth with eggplant. I say, Well, I didn’t see, I couldn’t tell if it was whole, and I squint my eyes to look like I’m thinking but confused. She nods firmly and fills my glass up with Coke. She is so proud of me. Cooper looks down at his plate and cuts his eggplant into tiny pieces. He must know I’m lying. The last time I fasted was four years ago, and it was the only time, and I only lasted one day. My grandmother says, Maşallah, then tells me to explain what maşallah means. Cooper tells her in Turkish he understood, and they smile. We sit there, smiling.

COOPER CANNOT DECIDE WHAT WOULD BE MORE USEFUL today, taking me to another doctor for my headache, or buying flowers and going to my father’s grave himself. He’s disappointed in me. I’m lying on his slim twin bed with my feet sticking off the end, an ice pack on my forehead, a hot water bottle on my uterus. I need something better, though. Something holy.

You know, Sibel, Cooper says. I have some news for you.

I roll my eyes over to him. Something in him, or me, has aged.

Nermin, she told me something your father wanted you to know. Something that happened.

Now you’re calling her Nermin?

This is serious, Sibel. There’s something I need to tell you.

I know about her life, I say.

I don’t know, Cooper says carefully, if you really do.

I can’t look at him.

Sibel, you need to let this go. It wasn’t your fault.

Cooper digs into his backpack and emerges with a fat, ancient book. He splits the book open by the spine and lays it across our thighs.

Sibel, look. I found this at the library, so you don’t have to google anymore. Hippocrates penned the first book on healthy diets. And al-Razi, he was a physician and alchemist, said: as long as you can heal with food, do not heal with medication.

This is what you wanted to tell me?

No, he says, not this. I just want you to see this first. He repeats al-Razi’s line.

Stop it, I say.

But it says what you’ve been talking about, that the humor theory of medicine is not outdated at all, but rather points to psychology. And endocrinology. It’s all hormones. It’s a more understanding, maybe parallel, medicine. Well, not just medicine, but the spiritual, too. The soul. They were looking for the location of the soul.

I never went to the grave, I say.

Cooper closes the book, using his thumb to bookmark the page.

I didn’t go.

Cooper thinks about this for a moment before he opens the book again and turns towards me on the bed to continue reading, like I’m a child being put to sleep. He begins to move his hand in slow, wide circles on my back. Don’t touch me, I say. I hear my voice climb like it belongs to somebody else. He continues to draw circles on my back and me, I’m yelling, stop reading it, stop, open the window, open the window, and me, opening the window and forcing the book out the window, and him, putting his cold palms to my forehead, my cheeks, to make my face, hot from crying, puff down and cool, and me, slapping his hand away, hitting him, hitting him again, and wanting him to hit me back, and his sweat, soaking his sheets, and him, finally bringing his mouth to mine and getting my arms behind me and securing me in his lap on his twin bed with the window open and the call to prayer going and going and me, freeing my arms, my hand around his white neck. And me, opening. I want a titanic part of myself to stay open.