Folio Literary Magazine, Sprig 2018.
Winner of Folio’s 2018 Editor’s Prize
In imperial Rome, in Fiumicino airport, in a solitary bathroom stall, I weep. An odd occurrence since as a rule, I do not cry. It takes me a moment to realize what happened sitting there in the departures lounge, reading Ishiguro, and drinking a Coke Zero. I put down the book, peer at the screen—my flight to Toronto still four long hours away—and pop a red M&M into my mouth. And then it comes, a swift sensation, difficult to articulate, of, well, suffocation. But not the kind where you are straight strangled. It is the slower kind, a more casual choking, where the walls move in, the doors disappear, the windows vanish, oxygen gone, where you sense what will happen, can taste it, swallow it, digest it. It is the sight of all the people with their bags waiting to board their plane, an innocuous image really, a harmless, banal procedure I have seen countless times. But I cannot shake the feeling that each traveller has left something or someone behind and they are in the midst of making some life-changing decision and they are making the wrong one. I want to beg them to reconsider, to abandon the journey, and to go home. Please go home.
I cried once when I was a boy, seven maybe. I am living in an apartment with an elevator that has a front door and a rear one. On the ground floor, both doors open, the front one leading to the lobby and out into the world, the rear to a dark cavernous storage room where the building keeps its garbage. And one particularly sunny morning on my way to frolic in the playground, my mind immersed in imagination, when the elevator doors open, I take the back one and only realize my mistake when the doors rattle shut and I am in darkness. I do not think that I have simply wandered into some cellar. No. I think I have fallen down the elevator shaft and any moment the elevator will return to squash me like a bug. What I remember most other than the shouting and screaming and sobbing is the palpable sense of doom. Everything I know and love is over, kaput, gone. All doors have shut. My life has ended. And that is the worst part: I realize it and can do nothing. Only wait. Only watch.
In the stall, tears fall fast. My eyes are puffed, infected, bloodied, my breathing heavy and violent. I tell myself to get control, get discipline, get composure. A toilet flushes. My fingers dig at my legs. A door slams shut, bounces, and closes again, softer, and again, subtler, until quiet comes. My hands cover my face. Leather shoes step toward the sink. Stop crying, I say. A briefcase sits on the floor. Stop crying. A faucet runs. Stop crying. Water drains. Stop crying. The blow-dryer hisses. You fucked up. Another door swings, and the shoes are gone. I am alone again. I miss you, I whisper. No reply. Silence hangs in the air. I miss you. Nothing. She is gone. Gone.
……
Istanbul.
My city of earthquakes. An old city wrapped in a melancholic shawl, with its misty mornings, the fog rolling over the dozen hills to the Bosporus and its hundred shades of blue, shrouding Ortakoy and its backgammon players, tea drinkers, first-light prayers in haze, minarets poking through the gloom, and covering the antique trams and ferries crossing the Galata in grey. From the wooden seats and benches, tired passengers consider the fishermen hanging lines in the rolling waters among the diving pigeons, the merchants hawking carpets and newspapers and doner meat, and the sun struggling to break and climb over the hilly houses painted in chipped pastels, above the skinny apartment balconies with elderly women sipping coffee, up and up and up and over Hagias Sophia and the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace to a sight of Istanbul in all its labyrinthine glory.
Istanbul.
My tectonic city. A strong handshake. A weary bridge swaying in history’s winds and seducing conquerors and colonels from every corner of the globe. Thousands of years old, ancient Byzantium watched Darius of Persia, the Spartans, the Athenians, Alex of Macedon wrestle for it and squander it, and witnessed the Christians come under Constantine and christen it a New Rome, Constantinople—a city of juncture between the east and west, a wealthy city of merchants and goods, a godly city of patriarchs, iconoclasts, and schisms, a deathly city of plagues and pillages and of sacks and scourges—and waited for Mehmed II to arrive on that fine 1453 morning to breech its stone walls, tour its piazzas, and admire its churches with his Ottoman cavalry, a retinue worthy of a sultan, befitting an empire, an Islamic one.
Invincible Istanbul.
You have come to Istanbul to attend the wedding of your ex-girlfriend whom you have not seen in five years, the young hostel proprietor says in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He has carefully said each word, ensuring that each fits its syntactical slot and conforms to its grammatical code, not only because English in his second language—Turkish having its own strange subject-verb-object relationship—but because he cannot believe what he says, does not trust that absurd translation fumbling out of his mouth. He has just walked me through Taksim’s maze from where the taxi dropped me and now offers me a cigarette and pours me a coffee. It is six in the morning. I have just arrived from Kuala Lumpur. Istanbul stirs and wakes. Its streetlights covering the alleys in a dying, vibrant orange begin to concede the day.
The hostel walls are washed in light yellow with charcoal faces of Mayan jaguar gods. The tablecloths are rough and the colour of hallucinations. The caffeine and nicotine feel good, and I drift in and out of lucidity, the edge of exhaustion, where truth comes cheap. I corroborate my narrative and affirm his paraphrasing. He plays some music, and the soft, organic beats swell and enliven my spirits.
He has a confidence, an urbane swagger, a sweet and pleasing cockiness that must come from mingling with the world on a daily basis. He speaks with an authority, a didactic diligence, and explains with his hands, showy, demonstrative. He talks about the breakup with his Danish girlfriend, about how the distance destroyed it, about how he wants to go to Copenhagen, wants to see the world he has heard and discussed. But it is difficult as Europe does not think much of the Turks, has never forgiven the Ottomans for making Europeans doubt their own greatness. He says she is dating someone new and could not imagine going to her wedding. Copenhagen is a beautiful city I say, and shrug my shoulders.
My third time to Istanbul, I tell him, and he nods, impressed. Once with my mom, once with her, and now for her wedding. Yes, I met her at school in Toronto. Yes, she has dual citizenship. Yes, she moved back to Turkey. Little memories blip then balloon then burst of her and me, a bunch of us at a bar on Yonge Street cheering for Turkey against Croatia, summer 2008, Euro quarterfinals. He grins, too, remembering. No score for 119 minutes, boring, dull game. Am I right? Last minute of the game, Turkish goalkeeper Rustu goes for a stroll for no reason, and Klasnic heads home the first goal. One to nil for Croatia, and the Croats at the bar go wild, certainly no love lost between those two nations, right. Football is never simply football. And we are so dejected, too, man, so depressed and down in the dumps. She just shakes her head and sips her pint. But then a Croat foul, a Turkish free kick from centre, a bouncing ball that falls to Senturk who volleys it into the top corner, and boom! Tied game. We erupt at the table. Evet. High fives. Screaming and clapping. And then Turkey wins in the shootout. Astonishing, right? Un-fucking-believable. And after the game, walking along Bloor Street, Turkish flags cover cars and hang from windows, and she waves hers, just ahead of me, walking just a little away from me.
I sip my coffee and light another cigarette. She is a football fanatic. A Fenerbache zealot for life. He supports Galatasaray, he says, frowning. She watches the games with such a fervour, such intensity, I tell him. No talking. No jokes. No little comments. Serious stuff. We visit Montreal, right, and she just has to find a bar that shows the game. We do, on the outskirts of the city. And she barges in, all five feet of her, and plunks herself down like it was her place in front of the screen surrounded by burly men with less than friendly demeanours. Nothing scares her. Nothing intimidates her. Nothing unnerves her. Except the game. She bites her nails and makes squeaky, anxious sounds. Throws her hands in outrage at a questionable call or missed shot. Screams naughty Turkish words among the bigger boys around her and fears not their leering eyes. And when we leave, she just stares at them, so stoic and hard and unflinching. Outside, she takes my hand and giggles and asks what shall we do, canim. Her play has returned, from snow to sun, my cute little pterodactyl.
Light has bled through the night, and my host has begun clearing the makeshift ashtrays. The streets stretch and warm. I ask him about the Gezi protests, and he chuckles and says it would not be Istanbul without drama but adds, more seriously, to be careful if I go out tonight. She has protested herself, I say, and has posted pictures of people in gas masks and balaclavas, of cops in army gear firing water cannons and teargas canisters, of the streets and parks covered in low-lying gas, of protestors filling the streets, holding hands and shouting slogans and waving flags, singing and dancing, and then fleeing, running, seeking refuge in shops and apartments and hospitals, most surviving, most. Gezi is a symbol, he explains, so much more than developers destroying a park, although that is how it started. Gezi is a reaction against power, against the unaccountable AK party and Erdogan, against division and gentrification and impoverishment. Gezi is solidarity. Woman and man, Muslim and secularist, and gay and straight have linked arms to fight the orthodoxy that prizes profit over people. He says this to me, and I think about her feisty and ferocious, black hair and red high heels, leading the revolution, fighting for freedom, as she did when I knew her. And when I leave to meet her—close to Gezi Park, on Taksim’s edge, in front of a Burger King—he wishes me luck.
Taksim means “to divide” or “to gather,” and looking at the thin, claustrophobic corridor, Istitkal, streaking and bending its way to Taksim square, I understand such an ambiguous definition as apt. An area fraught with fiction, taut and tense, Taksim always teeters on the brink of action. In the 1950s, mobs gathered here drunk on conquest fever and grim geopolitics and looted and pillaged and ransacked the shops and homes of the community’s Greek, Armenian, and other minority residents until the streets were littered with shards of glass, burned tiles, broken bicycles, cracked ceramics, crumpled carpets, all strewn everywhere, now only rubbish, mere mounds of trash piling below the sad, bloodied faces of people ready to leave the city forever, frustrated by the police, army, and officials who always seem to arrive too late. This morning, however, the police have arrived, and I watch them all in green bumping along Istikal in the back of trucks, assembling steel fences, barking out instructions in their walkie-talkies.
The crowds are gaunt but growing, unlike that night I was with her here, along this stretch of stone, all those years ago, the crowds thick and heaving and ravenous, their breath floating innocently to the black of the evening, floating over nothing, like steam from a Bosporus battalion, some metalled hulk appearing on the glassy waters drifting and sailing as if over the night sky. All those years ago, a December evening, the snow melts under our boots, and rivers of sludge flow down the back alleyways with the bars and shops shooting a phosphorescent glow lighting our way over the planks and cardboard crisscrossing a drowning Taksim. She introduces me to her friends, translating words here and there, and I say a couple, mostly bad ones, and everyone’s faces brighten, our laughter dissolving with the boisterous bellies of those around us, his hand slapping my shoulder and I taking his cigarette and all of us, young and silly and excitable, smoking Marlboros and debating which bar to visit. And in one, upstairs in a building with a peeling and rusting and crumbling façade, we talk nonsense in fragments and drink Efes and sip Rakia, the candles flickering light on the tables full of the young and hopeful and beautiful. And then outside, later, we are alone, walking the emptying streets, and she stops at a man selling mussels and buys a dozen and douses them in lemon flecks and sucks the flesh from each shell.
Now in the early morning light, the lanes look haggard and worn, the shops decaying and breaking under the weight of a burdensome history, of a lost empire, of lost glory, of Russian and British defeats, of miniature massacres, of nostalgia for what was and melancholy for what is. And I feel it too, the unbearable heft of what might have been. Amid the theatres, bookshops, H&M and Adidas stores, I catch her sight below a whopper picture and beside a stand with a rotisserie spinning kebab. She wears jeans, blue ones. She talks on her cellphone.
……
After the wedding, five of us sit on a few chairs outside a bar deep in Taksim’s entrails sipping beer and bracing against the late-December cold. Inside, a rock band plays to a half-dozen diehards. We are her friends and have known each other for years, all having met in a small pub in a big university on the northern edge of Toronto, among the oil tank farms, drooping electrical lines, and fields of browning grass. We talk about what a wonderful wedding it was, so intimate and elegant, with the reception hall overlooking the Bosporus and the bridges and the twinkling lights and houses running down to the water. What a dazzling dress she wore, so white, a carnation drifting down the aisle. And what a nice sight it was seeing her dancing with friends and family and husband.
Her best friend sits next to me bundled in layers and strangles her beer’s neck while taking deep, impactful sips. Nudging her, I express my dismay at her having told me that the bride wanted to dance with me. I tell her, smiling, that I knew she was full of shit. What if I actually had gone up there, I insist. Her mouth widens into a mischievous grin, full of feigned outrage and a “what me, never” look, her eyes misbehaving like unorbiting planets. But she did, she replies, her accent a mangled constellation of various histories and places. And she informs me that she always has my best interests at heart. We fall into a familiar routine. Oh, I say, like the time at her party you thought I got trapped in the cupboard when I only went for a walk. Some real concern there, I say. She calls me a fucker, and explains that she was the only who did care that I was gone. And we laugh and tell more stories. About us. About her.
Sitting across from me, he says he finds it brave of me to come, so remarkable that she and I have remained friends all these years, so refreshing that her husband did not mind an ex-boyfriend attending his wedding. He does not know, I say. I am just some male friend. The table falls silent. Her best friend says that she should have told him. I shrug my shoulders and say then I would not be here and she will tell him eventually. After all, I am no threat.
The group gathers itself and gallops forth with mirthful conversation. His talk is hot, restless, and exhausting. He possesses the lungs of an auctioneer, the energy of jackrabbit. He is unrelenting, each sentence an unfocused stream of consciousness. He shares tidbits of wisdom, nuggets of advice, all the things I should, no, need to try. I am drained and in no mood. With each tepid response, my anxiety grows, my anger blooms, and he asks about my travels and if I have met any girls, and I close my eyes and we are on this bus a few weeks after breaking up. We talk and smile and then she leans her head on my shoulder like before, only for a second, before she realizes her error and removes it and wonders how it is we can be such good friends yet nothing more. Together, she says it was hard having me so far away. All that time fighting, she says I was so far away, so cold, so quiet, and she, so alone and angry.
Her friends and I are now in an empty basement club, drinking sweetened pink goo, the music piercing and everywhere. They talk about the parking situation in Toronto and how arbitrary the ticketing is, and I say I hope the fines go to noble causes, and they laugh at my sweet ignorance. Yet all I can see is her, that pouting and grumpy and sweet face telling me that she will move back to Istanbul, the wistful city, and I tell her we will make it work, excited at the prospect of space, maybe, excited at the sight of doors opening. They want to know about my time in Shanghai and its infrastructure and its organization, and I snap and remind them that I am not an urban planner, that I do not travel with an eye for structure. I travel for the feeling, but I can never hold it. And when the argument builds with them there or with her along Reeperbahn in Hamburg, las Ramblas in Barcelona, or le Champs-Élysées in Paris, it is because I cannot hold it, cannot care for it, and I lose it.
In my memory, I sit on a rooftop patio in Istanbul, a bright teenager, and fall in love with the sun sinking into the Bosporus, with its boats and bridges, then falling through the minarets of Sultanahmet, and shining over the worlds colliding. I eat manti with my mother and the rest of our tour group, and I speak with a glow that strikes me as odd, a hope that says despite the violence, the torment, and the suffering, people, even a city, can find solace in those brief springs of contentment, those ephemeral moments of pure joy, but only if nurtured, only if watered. The elderly gentleman nods in agreement. And looking at Istanbul, the unconquerable, I feel alive. I have it.
……
Exiting the hostel, I adjust my backpack, and she waits for me.
“Do you have everything?” she asks.
“Yes, I think so.”
We walk through Taksim. It is four in the morning, and the wind blows plastic bags down the empty side streets.
“Those two are tiring, aren’t they,” she says.
“I got into a fight with Sara last night”
“About what.”
“Parking in Shanghai.”
She laughs.
“Well, that was always your way.”
We walk further in silence.
“How is your flight back to Toronto?”
“Okay. A lengthy layover in Rome but maybe I can sleep. I will be home for New Year’s though, which will be good.”
“Give my best to your parents.”
“I always do. They send their regards of course. You know your dad gave me a big bear hug at the wedding.”
She smiles.
A row of taxis wait at the bottom of a set of stairs. The drivers rustle at our movements, and she approaches one and barks out a litany of orders in brisk, brash Turkish. I put my bag in the trunk, which the driver closes. He opens the back door and starts the taxi.
“Congratulations on your wedding. It was a lovely event.”
“Thank you for coming.”
We hug, and I tap her back three times.
“Let’s not wait five years to see each other again,” I say.
“Be well, Jesse.”
“Goodbye, canim.”
In the taxi, I watch Istanbul sleep. In a few hours, it will rise and struggle to its feet.
And stand it will.
But I am gone.
Gone.