They sat side by side on the brown bedspread.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“To Istanbul.”
“You feel guilty, coming here and not there, to see your family.”
“That’s not it,” she said. “Let’s not ever do this again. Living on different continents, living completely different lives.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “But we have to finish what we started.”
Hectic flush, she thought, a phrase from the old novels she’d read when first learning English. The bright red spots on his now-clean though sunken cheeks, the fervor—fever—in his eyes. In those novels, the teacher explained, it was code for TB. She put her arms around him. To calm him, to cool him.
“The people I’m traveling with,” he said. “They are extraordinary. Spectacular”—Extravagant words, not the sort of words the man she married would use. Oğuz, kerido, where is my Oğuz? “We think of wellbeing as health and wealth. That’s our privilege. While to them, what they most fear losing is their culture. Their essential identity.”
“So if your doctoring is not valued, you are free to go.”
“Emine, kerida,” he said, “these people have nothing and they have shared everything with me. I must repay them.”
Then he told her, as though it were a perfectly sane idea, that he would go to Pakistan and acquire a bear cub and smuggle it back to India to replace confiscated Seemah.
The idea was mad, and she was crazy too to have imagined this would be a week of lovemaking and sightseeing. Sightseeing! She’d made a list: the Red Fort, Birla Mandir, Chandni Chowk, the Garden of the Five Senses, Jama Masjid. That’s what she needed to think of now, think of that list, think of anything but what you are hearing and thinking now. And she thought of the man with the tambourine back home who waited outside for the school day to end. Bam bam and the bear would stand, holding onto a staff to keep himself upright.
“I’ll meet up with them again,” said Oğuz. “I know they’ll be outside Talhan, for the festival at the mazaar of a Sufi saint.”
How did he imagine he could cross the border? Two hostile nations.
“People used to cross all the time,” he said. “They used to go through the Thar, the desert, but lately there have been...incidents. Then, of course, guards can be bribed. I won’t even need to do that, not with a Turkish passport and visa, and the bear drugged asleep in a sack.”
“They asked you to do this?” she said.
“No. Not at all.”
“If those people have put you in this position—”
No. It was his own idea.
She thought of what Maria had told her of parasites that can brainjack creatures, overriding their truest instincts. She should say that to Oğuz, in a joking tone of course, that he’d been brainjacked. Rennie said mixed marriages were best. When men love their mothers, other woman never measure up. If they hate their mother, they resent their wives when they remind them of her. But a wife who doesn’t look like Mom is freed of all those expectations. Her different race, religion, culture liberate both her and her man. It was true he spoke his love-words in Ladino, a language his mother didn’t know and couldn’t understand. So what did that mean now, when Emine felt more like a mother—wiser and more worried—than a wife? Like a mother she rocked him, held him to her breast.
Somewhere in the distance people were chanting, there were drums. In spite of herself, she kept straining to hear.
Oğuz sighed, then slept. She didn’t.