“Another,” he says. The innkeeper flashes a toothless smile and brings an entire carafe of raki to the table.
“They call it lion’s milk,” the soldier says, pointing to the carafe. He picks up his empty glass and his fez and takes a seat across from Kemal. “Women or money. Which is it?” he asks, helping himself to the bottle.
Kemal wants to tell the soldier to mind his own business, but the man’s age and his uniform stop him. “It’s nothing,” he says, taking another swig. “Just a girl.”
“Ah yes. Women can ruin you, if you let them. Let me guess, she represented all that is good and pure. All that is possible in the world. Am I right?”
Kemal nods. Already the raki is drifting up from his belly, past his heart, his throat, up all the way to the top of his head, where, if he closes his eyes, he can follow its ethereal dance.
“Women are the whips of Satan, my friend. And there are many to choose from,” the soldier says.
“She’s different,” Kemal mutters, swirling the remaining contents of his glass.
“Oh? How so? Wait, don’t tell me.” The soldier waves an open palm in the air. “Her beauty causes the moon to blush . . . silences the nightingale. Am I right?”
Kemal pours more water on a fresh glass of raki.
“And maybe she’s rich. Richer than you? Daughter of a sultan, maybe?” the soldier continues, eyeing Kemal’s country clothes.
“No, it’s nothing like that, ” says Kemal, not wanting his problems so easily categorized.
“Then how is it? Tell me,” says the soldier.
“She’s no sultan’s daughter.” Kemal’s words, burdened by raki, leave his mouth slowly and with little grace, but he continues talking nonetheless. “She’s Christian. Learned. Reads like a cleric, rides like the wind,” he says. “She was going to teach me my letters,” he adds, though this isn’t exactly true. “With her, I could be something . . . other than what I am.”
“Ahh, Habib, we have a poet on our hands!” The soldier shouts to the khan keeper who flashes his toothless smile. “Well, it sounds like this little Christian girl did not see or want the poet in you. Am I right?” He slaps Kemal’s back. “Or maybe she saw the poet but couldn’t find the man . . . hmmm?”
Kemal nods into his glass.
“It’s just like a Christian to enjoy the splendor of our land while they thumb their noses at our provinciality. It’s time we take Turkey back for Turks. You know, you could show her, young . . . what did you say your name was again?”
“Kemal.”
“You could show her, young Kemal. You could get out of this hamlet and see the rest of the world. You could become rich and powerful, cultured, and educated. You can become all these things without her. Despite her.”
These were the thoughts circling around Kemal’s foggy head when he reported to the conscription office. In the years ahead, he would think back to that moment in the damp khan and remember only two things: the unruly eyebrows of the enlisting officer and the idea of escape burning in his chest.
PART III
1990
CHAPTER 14
Selling Minds
ORHAN SETTLES HIS jet-lagged body into the starched white sheets of his hotel bed, wedging one of four pillows under his neck. The land of plenty indeed, he thinks, reaching for the phone. He calls the Tariq offices in Istanbul first. The head weaver insists his new designs are too intricate and confusing. The weavers are having a hard time telling one shade of any color from the next.
“Too same same,” insists the head weaver.
“That’s the point,” says Orhan. He’s going for incremental changes in color, so gradual that the eye and mind are softened into the transformation. Nothing abrupt, no stark contrasts. In fact, no contrasts at all. “Keep trying,” he says, before hanging up.
It’s two o’clock in the afternoon in Los Angeles, which makes it somewhere around 7 p.m. in Karod. Auntie Fatma will have already served his father dinner. Mustafa would be sitting in front of the television now, watching some government-sponsored program. The ringing of the phone, one of only two in the village, will startle him. It may even throw him into a rage. He might even take it out on Auntie Fatma. Orhan decides to make the call anyway. Auntie Fatma knows how to handle his father. She was always better at that than Orhan. It takes six rings for her to pick up the receiver.
“It’s me,” Orhan says, lighting a cigarette.
“Yes, yes. Who else would it be? My friends don’t use the telephone, and your father hasn’t got any friends,” she says. “Have you found her?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She’s an old Armenian woman,” he says. “Lives in a nursing home.”
“Nursing home?” She clucks her tongue in disapproval.
Decent people don’t put their loved ones in nursing homes. Even he knows that.
“Does she speak?” Auntie Fatma asks.
“No, not really,” he answers, hearing her breathe a sigh of relief at the other end.