“No,” she replied immediately, “we’re of here.”
We wondered whether everyone in the town knew one another, and they said that it was one big family, actually: Turks and Kurds.
We needed a restaurant, and asked the girls for advice. It was the night of the national soccer finals and yet everything was closed except for the k?fteci, the man who made meatballs. It was empty and had about four tables, a pleasantly wooden place of the sort twee Brooklyn cafés tried to imitate. One man stood behind a counter, his back to an oven. We gingerly sat down, and the girls mistook our exhaustion for wariness. “Really, this is a very good restaurant,” one girl said. “Promise.” She looked so sad that the foreigners might be disappointed that I smiled with all my might.
The k?fte was in fact very good. At some point, without even a goodbye, the girls had scattered, but later I saw them watching us from a balcony across the tiny street. The owner seemed pleased when we told him how good the k?fte was, after he’d come around from the dusty counter to bring more bread to our table, swinging his stocky, strong body with the help of a crutch. He had only one leg.
Numerous men in Turkey had only one leg, and I realized I didn’t know why. What could be the cause? Some outdated disease I wasn’t familiar with? Some war I’d forgotten—the war with the Kurds, a stint in the army, an accident at work? This leglessness told me that there was something that I as an American, long isolated from the world’s horrors, could not understand about a country like Turkey, maybe any country for that matter. This was a place where people lost their legs, and hobbled on crutches for the rest of their lives. They did not always have replacements fashioned on the knee, and they did not even bother to cover up the fact that they were legless. I watched the man’s stump as he hopped back to his counter, and at that moment in the k?fte restaurant in the middle of Anatolia, I realized I also had no idea how to meaningfully incorporate these people into my world, how to do them justice.
*
ONE EVENING, RANA invited me over to show me what she wryly called “a proper Turkish house.” Her five-room apartment, which she shared with her mother, revealed little, if anything, “Turkish,” save maybe the cabinet by the front door filled with slippers to wear after you removed your shoes. In Turkey, if you only moved between the Westernized homes and cafés—they didn’t have to belong to wealthy people, just families who supported Atatürk’s modernizing reforms—you wouldn’t really feel as if you were in a foreign country at all. Even in those houses and cafés, however, there were things that reminded you that you were in a foreign country, like when, at some point in our conversation, Rana told me about a conversation she had with a Turkish man after September 11:
“I was horrified, of course,” she said. “And I remember I spoke to a guy at a corner store that day who said something like Finally, it’s happened to them, too. We’re not the only ones.”
I had been telling her about a passage in one of Orhan Pamuk’s essays, in which he said that what Americans didn’t understand about Muslim men around the world was their sense of “humiliation” by the West. “The real challenge is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited people who have been excluded from its fellowship,” he wrote. What drives men “is not Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.” I was impressed but confused as to why Pamuk had come up with this idea, because I thought that someone like Pamuk, a rich White Turk, had probably never been humiliated in his life.
Now here was Rana saying more or less the same thing about this male Turkish store clerk. It wasn’t that I was surprised by these thoughts in general, but I was surprised by these thoughts coming from a Turk. What had “happened” to them? I wondered. Clearly something else was going on, some deeper emotional response to September 11.
Rana had once told me how as a child she felt she had to choose between the Soviet Union and America—she had to choose sides. She chose America because she liked the cartoons.
“Come on!” she had said. “Can’t you see that for my whole life so much has been defined by America?”
I could not. But then, I hadn’t known anything about Turkey at all. For someone like Rana, America defined her life in the broadest terms; it was an American world, with American-made international laws, American wars on her borders, American military bases on her country’s soil, American movies in her movie theaters, American songs on the radio, American monetary exchange rates, American economic policies, American-style marriage proposals, and four whole pages devoted to American news in the Turkish newspapers. As we spoke, I could see that foreigners grew up without the very thing that Americans cherished so much about their American selves—their self-made story. In America, we believed we shaped every bit of our own history. Much of the rest of the world felt at least in part pushed along by an unseen force. We had good-and-evil narratives, and pop anthems of renewal. Turkey’s music was all about despair and longing and loss. While I drew conclusions about Turks from their music, I had never applied such analysis to myself; I didn’t stop to think that the way I was looking at Rana, at Turkey, at the world, was born of this particular place that I came from. I also had not been conscious at all of what my country had done to get to that place of dominance, while for Turks, for Turkey, that dominance meant so much.