“You look beautiful,” Engin tells me, also a lie. This feels like his tentative hand reaching across my back when I’m halfway asleep; thank you Jesus that he is five thousand miles away and I don’t have to have sex, thank you Jesus.
“Seni seviyorum,”
Ayşe comes over to the screen and I valiantly endeavor to make pleasant chitchat with her and I wonder if she hates me. I wonder this all the time. I mean I assume that she finds me in some respects incorrigibly savage because I don’t wear socks in the house or dry my hair before going outside, but I like to think we get along. Then again the current situation is one to try any mother’s—any grandmother’s—patience.
We click off, and then I hear it. “Seni seviyorum” the crone says. Ever since I started learning Turkish I’m always on high alert for people speaking Turkish, hear Turkish where it is not being spoken, and when it is being spoken put myself as close as I can to the speaker, and yet freeze when it’s my opportunity to speak, instead doing a strange thing where I am silent until the very last minute and then freak everyone out by revealing I understood what they were saying the whole time. Much like this woman has just done to me.
“Merhaba!” I venture to her. “Siz Türk müsünüz?” She just looks at me. “Are you Turkish,” I ask in English. “I went to Turkey with my husband a long time ago,” she says curtly, as if she were not the one who just told a complete stranger I love you in a café.
“Well, that’s quite a memory you’ve got,” I say in the voice I use with all elderly people and the insane. I am deciding whether to stay and draw her out and hear about how friendly the people were etc. but she looks off in the distance and says “I’m sure you want to be on your way” and there’s really no response to that but to say “Well, I guess so. Hope to see you again soon!” and start to roll Honey out and head in the direction of home where we’ll do god knows what for the rest of the day, but before I can put any distance between us she speaks again and says “It was the late 1950s, maybe 1960.” Jesus, I think, because that’s a long time ago, also a weird time, Turkey-wise—coup time, hanging time for what’s-his-name Menderes. I halt the stroller and start scooting it back over to her table, raising my eyebrows to her in an inquiry as to whether our continued presence is welcome or a hindrance. “He used to—my husband—he used to set a little alarm and study Turkish for fifteen minutes at a time,” she says. I lower myself into the empty seat at her table and roll Honey next to me. I’m worried she’ll immediately start freaking out which she sometimes does at the cessation of motion but she is looking very seriously, very gravely, almost the slightest bit skeptically at this new person. It is probably the oldest person she’s ever seen, I think, since Ayşe is under sixty and stunning and grandparents are an extinct species on my side of the family.
“I remember when we went there he was so frustrated that he couldn’t talk to anyone.” She stirs her coffee and sips it. “That’s how I felt the first time I went there too,” I say. I have a curious feeling of both wanting to stay and talk to someone and wanting to leave, because conversations are work and the elderly are work and I’m just not up for work of any kind but then I remember again the extreme quiet of the house and Honey is after all sitting here so rapt. “I remember we went to a mosque in Istanbul,” she says it the American way, IS-tan-bool, instead of the Turkish way, “İ-STAHN-bul,” which I insist on saying now even though it sounds horribly affected when you are speaking English. “He was so excited because the mullah or whatever you call it spoke Arabic, and they could have a nice conversation.”
“Oh,” I say, intrigued. “Is your husband an Arabic speaker?”
“Was,” she says. “He’s gone now.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and while I’m trying to formulate my next question she begins again. “I remember I was so sick I just wandered off into a corner and drank a yogurt drink a little boy brought me.” She looks at Honey. “I was pregnant, is why.” “Ah,” I say. “Twins,” she says. “Jesus,” I say, my instinctive reaction to the possibility of twins. “That was before I knew it was twins, of course. It took me a long time to get pregnant. Almost ten years.” Like my parents, I think.
