Life in Turkish is a story. The language, when translated into English, has a habit of sounding like a narration, a running dictation of events that are happening right before your eyes. If someone shows up at a dinner party unexpectedly, the guests will happily announce, ‘Cansu came!’ or ‘Barış arrived!’ as if it had occurred the previous night. When someone is about to speak, you will very often hear, ‘I’m going to say something,’ followed by a sentence that needed no introduction. The effect can sometimes seem quite literal. If an action doesn’t quite occur, for example – a person nearly falls, but recovers – one will say, ‘She wrote to the fall.’ When a man attempts to court a woman, he is said to be writing to her.
This linguistic quality is surreal and disorienting to hear, causing the line between ‘living’ and ‘lived’ to become incomprehensibly blurry, like the meeting of two oceans of differing salinity, never entirely merging, never clearly divided. The defined, linguistic boundary between past and present disappears, and left in its place is a wildly valuable sea change. When such a tenet of how the world is perceived is removed, it forces one to wander through the ruins of the great, temporal empire that they were once ruled by, now unbelievably bereft of what was long thought to be absolute and unending authority. The result is living in a way in which the past instantaneously and continually syncs right up to the current moment. It is an immediate cataloging of affairs into history, a vocal filter on a living photograph that hasn’t yet finished being developed. In short, ‘now’ vanishes.
It’s said that if you look at the left over grounds in the tiny, ceramic cups used to drink Turkish coffee, you can see a person’s future. Those who go to the mosques (and many who do not) will assert that all human beings have a definitive path set forth for them, an inescapable destiny that Allah has carved out specifically for each and every one of us. So, then, caught between a story that is never not being written in stone, and a pre-determined path through the future, our precious ‘now’ becomes no more than a boat on the Bosphorus, coming down from the Black Sea to the Marmara and out toward the Aegean and then beyond – our consciousness a mere bookmark of where we left off in our stories.
It is safe here, or we like to think it so. The divine has sorted the future, and nostalgia looks after our past. Can the people who live here be blamed for seeking solace in life in this way? This country is rife with death and suffering, with lies, the worst deceits, and great pain. And if language is inexorably tied to culture (it is), then one need not wonder long on why the Turkish language has evolved as it has. A heavenly assured future, it seems, was not enough to make the pain of life here bearable. The tongue needed to account for the past.
English does not have this feature. Our grammar lets us fool ourselves into thinking we can take on the present with a straight face and unhurriedly construct our past narratives whenever and however we please. But it would be disingenuous and outright dishonest for any of us to say there is nothing in our lives that we didn’t want to distance ourselves from. There is and always will be something that we are racing to overcome and turn into nostalgia, something that, because it now only exists in memory, we are able to cope with.
***
I met her down by the rocks by the sea after the sun had set behind the city in early March. What little snow there was in the city had by then gone, but the trees were still bare, and the air still cool. We greeted each other by awkwardly kissing cheek-to-cheek, something I’m generally terrible at. Doing so almost always leads to a near miss of two sets of lips that may or may not want to collide.
Conversation drifted from clichés to well-rehearsed answers, and that is as annoying as it is natural and innocent. The necessary cost of getting to know people. As we walked down the long path, waves crashing on the shore and the sea air rolling off them, we talked about the things that new people often do – travel, and music, and work, and where we were from. She, from the great and terrible city we now found ourselves in, myself the empty suburbs and rich farmland of the American Midwest.
‘You American boys! You’re just like how we see you in the movies. All rich towns and wide streets and house parties. I know you. I bet your parents bought you a car when you graduated high school, didn’t they?’
‘Cell phone, actually,’ I said, as if it made me any less privileged. ‘I’d ask the same for you, but I have nothing to compare it to film-wise – nobody in America gives a damn about Turkish cinema.’ I was certain what I said had been a lie, but needed something to hide behind.
‘Ok, American boy,’ she said, her tone indignant. ‘Tell me what it’s really like growing up in the States, then. Not in the TV series and the movies – tell me what really happens. What’s your family like?’
The wind stopped blowing in off the giant stones below us.
‘Family’s tough,’ I began. ‘You grow up stoic in the States, at least in the Midwest. We’re sort of afraid of our own emotions, or at least sincerely expressing them. Nobody is particularly good at it, either. If we didn’t invent the word ‘awkward,’ we certainly define it.’
She laughed a bit.
‘I wish I had been older when I went to the States,’ she said. ‘I think I would remember more. But I never really got that impression as a kid traveling there. Why do people deny their feelings like that?’ Her tone had turned inquisitive and nearly judgmental, but mostly she seemed sincerely concerned about what I had just told her.
‘So, you’ve been before?’ I asked, dodging the discomfort of having to confront my own thoughts, let alone trying to explain it to someone else.
‘Yeah, when I was little. Overseas language programs and all.’ And then back to the matter. ‘So, why all that denial, do you think?’ she asked.
‘My best guess is that it’s not about being strong and denying your emotions. We’re not so Puritanical as we sometimes think we are. I’d say it’s more of a containment. Pure, raw emotional displays are uncomfortable. You don’t always show that to each other, even if you want to.’ I thought about families in Istanbul, in Bursa, all over the country. The great displays of emotion. ‘It’s almost reverse, I think, what people do in this country. Americans aren’t usually so openly affectionate to their immediate families, but I think we give strangers the benefit of the doubt. It’s not so extreme on either end. I’ve never seen families love like they do here.’
She drew in a sudden breath as I finished my last sentence.
‘Why can’t you be close, I mean, what’s stopping you?’ she asked.
‘Hard to say exactly. In all honesty, it’s probably just the comfort of tradition. Nobody has the time or the energy to go around redefining relationships they’ve had their whole lives. I do envy it, sometimes, though. People here seem to have this innate ability to just lay everything out on the table, for good or bad. It’s insanity. And it’s part of the reason I’ll probably never leave. If someone cares about you here, they have no problem in expressing that affection – actually they can’t not do that. Over the past few years, this place has kind of thawed me out a bit. And I like the warmth.’
‘People here can be very devoted,’ she replied, after a moment. It was the first time I had heard her hesitate. ‘Inside the home, you’re the most important thing in the world to a father or a mother. There is the other side of it, too, though. If you’re a stranger. It’s really easy for them to hate you. To treat you like nothing.’
She was right. I thought about the street fights that so commonly broke out over nothing at all, and the inevitable shouting matches between taxi drivers that take place in every corner of the city at all hours of the day. Families, friends were close here – strangers, fair game.
‘Why the imbalance?’ I asked. ‘Why so extreme?’
‘I guess, for us, family is extreme love, it can’t be anything else. Anything less, and that isn’t love.’ She sounded slightly angry. ‘Maybe, we put so much of our love into our sons and daughters and relatives, we don’t have much left by the time we walk out the door.’
We shared a quiet laugh, and continued walking down the path, runners moving by us, the moon hanging giant and yellow behind the tree branches. The temperature had dropped enough for dew to start forming on the grass, and we decided to sit on one of the benches that stared out into the dark sea. The dew had taken up residence there too, and the cold of it penetrated my jeans and made me shiver. A man selling tea strolled by us, shouting into the air and hoping some young couple sitting in the grass would buy from him. No one did. As we sat, I looked her up and down again, taking in the collage of color on her legs, the montage of patterns on her arms, the alarm call shape of her shoes. Everything crackled at my eyes. She had only a year or two ago taken off the headscarf that had been prescribed to her from a young age, something I had learned through mutual friends, and by the looks of it, she aimed to never wear anything less than loud ever again. As abrasive as it looked, I couldn’t fault the sheer resistance of it all.
‘I’ve known people, friends of mine, who have very traditional backgrounds like you do,’ I began, trying to get the thought out without it sounding offensive. ‘But they live very grey lives, even aesthetically – they never expressed themselves like you do. The way you dress, the way you move. It’s all over the place.’
She smiled at the comment.
‘It’s like…jailbreak,’ she sighed, finally landing on the word. ‘When you finally knock down the walls of your prison, you don’t do it with a lowered head. You celebrate and dive into all of the things that you were never allowed to do before. My family – my father,’ she said, hanging herself on the word, ‘they never approved of any boy I wanted. My mother warned me not to have these dirty thoughts about boys and sex. They did not give me the chance of loving anyone, so I loved the colors instead.’
I smiled at the courage.
‘And what about your family? Your mother and father?’ I asked, truly curious to know. ‘What was it like growing up in this city?’
‘I have a big family.’
‘No surprise there,’ I smirked. She returned a faint smile.
‘My family,’ she began, looking down on nothing in particular, ‘were always giving and supportive. Especially of my education, despite being quite conservative. My father sent me to English camps overseas when I was a child, and he always did more for my upbringing in that way than most fathers do in Turkey.’
As she continued, her eyes lit up with the memory of a close household. She began to excitedly regale me with stories about family reunions and aunts with their wide hips and uncles with their big bellies and strong, wedge-shaped mustaches.
‘Every year, we go to back to our family’s village outside the city to spend time with our relatives,’ she began to recall, beaming. ‘Cousins, uncles, grandparents – everybody. For days we just spend time together, cooking and telling stories. When I was younger, we used to go out in the village forest at night, hunting. My father and my uncle would take their guns and lead me and my sisters out into the dark, and we would wait there, and listen for things to move. It was so beautiful. We would sit in the dark and quiet and watch as animals passed by, but, they never shot anything. Maybe they didn’t want to scare us. Maybe they just wanted to seem tough and manly, but didn’t want to actually harm anything. Anyway, after a while we’d come back to the village and I’d make tea for everyone and we’d talk into the night and eventually all go to bed.’
It really did sound lovely, that warmth – the things people did and said to each other that were here so easily and necessarily expressed. I envied it, despite the romanticism. My mind drifted for a moment to the family reunions I went to as a child, gathering under concrete-floored gazebos to eat masses of German-turned-American potato dishes after people poured out of church. It was a white affair, from the hair color of my aging great aunts, to the doily-inspired clothes they would wear, to the Sunday’s best shirt I always managed to dirty on the playground while the adults talked. Family was a funny thing.
‘When will you go to the village again?’ I asked, half hoping for an invitation to come along someday and see the woods she so lovingly talked about.
Her eyes dropped as she came back from the memory, and she let out a few deep breaths before responding.
‘I can’t. Anymore,’ she said at length. Her words felt crippled. ‘My father won’t – he won’t accept me without a headscarf. Not in public, not around foreign men. I haven’t actually seen him for a over a year, and that was on my birthday. Even then, it was hard for him to see me. ‘Happy Birthday,’ she said, as if to the sea.
I sat a few seconds, wondering how to respond. I felt very angry for a minute, and then empty. I tried to think of something to say, something comforting, but there was nothing. Sometimes there are moments when things are just out of place, when the wrong thing happens, and nothing can be done to help it. This was one of those moments, and we both knew it.
‘My mother,’ she said, limping on, and graciously relieving me of my social ineptitude, ‘she keeps a picture of me – the headscarved me – on a little table next to my bed at home. It’s like she’s still mourning my death. She probably is.’
And just like that, the hospitality of Turkish love was gone, the warmth of the family, the openness of it all. It was a lie. Nothing measured, nothing calm and reserved. Only a binary love.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, unable to pull together any other sentence. She nodded her head slowly.
The cold air gave us an excuse to start walking again, and we went back along the same stretch of water, neither of us saying anything this time. When we finally reached the street she lived on, we kissed each other goodnight as friends do, cheek to cheek, and walked on home.
All images courtesy of Eric Beyer.
