“A scab is much better than an open wound,” he says, thinking about his own past. His memories of prison are never visual. They always begin with the feeling of being cold and naked in an all-encompassing darkness; a feeling of despair that lodges in his chest and stops his breathing. He was blindfolded within minutes of entering the police station and remained that way for the rest of his three-week stay. Remaining in complete darkness, without light, without the ability to see, let alone capture anything.
The first few beatings were painful but unimaginative. They quickly gave way to more sinister kinds of torture designed to entertain the guards and strip him of his dignity. They hung him backward, with his wrists tied together behind and above his head for hours. It was a special torture known as a “Palestinian hanging,” the entire body’s weight resting on the shoulders, causing them to dislocate. Questions about the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, and its members were wielded his way, followed by electric shocks to the groin, the tongue, and the buttocks. Someone kept calling him an “ass licker for the PKK” and demanding a confession. That last beating entered his body and lies there still, dormant, nestled in his blood cells, muscles and organs, materializing unexpectedly for the rest of his life. These days, it is not an image or a memory that drags him back to that cell, but a feeling.
The last thing Orhan remembers about his time in custody is screaming in agony and soiling himself. He discovered later that he suffered from five broken ribs, a bruised kidney, and a collapsed lung. His face and head were so badly beaten that Dede had trouble identifying him.
Orhan was labeled a political activist, an honor he never sought and didn’t think he deserved, before Dede managed to put him on a plane to Germany.
Propping herself up in bed, Seda turns her head toward the window, where the California sun is finally descending.
“Shameless,” she says.
“Pardon?” asks Orhan.
“Shameless,” she repeats. “The sun. It is shameless. Like everything else here, it has no modesty. Always parading around like a harlot, regardless of the time of day or season.”
“I’m sorry it offends you,” says Orhan, smiling warily and thinking he’s going to need another cigarette before defending the virtues of the sun.
Seda gives him an amused smile.
“I am so sorry about earlier,” he says.
“Never mind that. You don’t have to apologize. You’re a good boy. I can tell,” she says, tapping her index finger to her temple. “Your name is Orhan?” Her question sounds like a demand.
“Yes,” he answers.
“Do you like Turkey, Mr. Orhan?” she asks.
“Yes, very much.”
“What do you like about it?”
“Nothing and everything,” Orhan says, smiling sheepishly.
“Like what nothings? What everythings?” she asks.
“Like the taste of hand-picked apricots in the spring. And the bulbul’s birdsong,” he answers.
“I remember. Like she is happy and suspicious all at once,” she says.
“Yes. Like that,” he says.
“But you didn’t fly all this way to talk about birds singing in trees, did you, Orhan?” she says finally.
“No,” says Orhan. “My grandfather was my hero. I came to make things right and to understand why he did this.”
“Then what? You’ll go back to your kilim business?”
“Yes,” he says.
“And your photography?” she asks.
“I haven’t taken a photo in years.”
“Yet there’s a camera hanging from your neck,” she says.
“It is complicated,” he says.
“All extraordinary things are complicated.”
“You do not understand,” he begins.
“I understand more than you know,” she says. “Places and things stay with us, and sometimes we stay with them. I left Turkey decades ago, but my g?bek ba??, and with it my spirit, is still buried in Karod. You see?”
Orhan says nothing.
“How much do you know about your history, young Orhan?”
“I know my mother died of childbirth,” he answers.
“No, not that history. I’m talking about Turkey. How much do you know about Turkey besides what I’ve just told you?”
“I know some . . . enough, probably more than most. I am an exile, remember?”
“I remember. And you think this makes you an expert. How were you exiled?”
“How?” asks Orhan.
“Yes, how? By boat, by plane, by submarine? How?” she asks.
“I left by plane,” he answers.
“How very civilized.”
“I would not call it that,” he says, trying not to think about the dark cell.
“Did they mark your door?” she asks.
“What?”
“They marked our front door with the word sevkiyat,” she says finally.
“Transport,” whispers Orhan.
“At first, we treated it as just another example of the building tension. There was always tension, you see. It would come and go, like the tides of the river. And like the tides, it would subsist. We were used to it, our Muslim neighbors and us. We were part of a community, an extended family. Families fight, but they go on, don’t they?”