At seven-thirty in the morning, Juli and Bernadett walked with me to the train station. They kept saying I mustn’t fall asleep or I would wind up in Prague. Various mothers had given me provisions for the trip: several peaches, a bag of yellow plums, a kilogram of cookies, and six rum chocolate bars. At the station platform, I heard my name and turned to see Nóra galloping toward me, followed by Margit with Feri. Margit handed me something in a plastic bag. I hugged each of them again and again. The train came into sight, rumbling closer, bringing the feeling of aliveness and plenitude inherent to incoming trains. Just then, Gyula came running across the vacant lot waving his arms. He made it to the platform just in time to heave my suitcase up after me onto the train. “Goodbye, Selin! Goodbye!” they all shouted, and I shouted, “Goodbye,” and the doors closed.
As the train accelerated out of the station, the doors flew open again, like a hole in the world. They couldn’t be pulled shut until the next stop. I looked in the bag Margit had given me. It had the kind of sandwiches I liked best, with thin slices of meatball and green pepper. I stood in the corridor the whole way so I wouldn’t fall asleep and wake up in Prague. A friendly gay guy was walking up and down the corridor, waving an unlit cigarette in a comic manner. I gave him a book of matches. He put his hands together and bowed. Then he stood next to me smoking out the window until his stop, at a tiny station in the middle of nowhere. There was only one person waiting there, a man with a crew cut standing in the shade. The two friends looked so happy to see each other. The first thing the guy with the crew cut did was offer his friend a light.
? ? ?
In the airport check-in line a girl smiled at me and I smiled back, and then she came over and told me the story of her life. Her name was Teodora, she was Romanian, and was going to meet her husband, who was third in command on a cargo ship the size of a small town. Her husband’s ship normally circled nonstop between Denmark and China, but now it had broken and would be docked for three days in Istanbul, so she had a chance to visit. “I haven’t seen my husband in two months,” she said. For a moment the words “husband,” and “two months,” with all they implied, seemed to open an abyss between us.
This was Teodora’s first time on an airplane, though of course she had spent a lot of time on ships. She had never been to Turkey. “Are there lots of people like you?” she asked, with a hopeful expression.
“Definitely,” I said, wondering what aspect of me she was referring to.
She asked my age. Something flickered across her face. “I’m twenty-six,” she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. “It isn’t the age I feel like.”
“What age do you feel like?”
“Nineteen—like you.”
But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.
When we reached the check-in counter, Teodora started to explain something really complicated to the airline workers. There was something special about either her ticket or the way her baggage was to be handled, because of the international status held by her husband’s ship. The workers were not familiar with this status. Teodora seemed to think that they doubted her husband’s credentials.
“How can I prove my husband is third in command on a ship?” she mused. “I have anchors on my shirt!” The airline employees were only moderately impressed by her shirt.
? ? ?
Most of the passengers on our flight were middle-aged Turks with ravaged faces, heading home from a package tour of Mallorca.
“You can’t believe what we’ve lived through,” one man told me in Turkish at the gate. At first I thought he might have mistaken me for someone he knew, but then I saw from his abstracted expression that he neither knew nor cared whether he knew me.
“It wasn’t nice?” I said.
“What was nice about it? Nobody spoke Turkish there. We had a guide, if you can call him a guide—a sadist, in the clinical sense. What can you say about a man like that; he searched in life for his foothold and he found this one.” He shook his head, apparently reviewing the places in the world where clinical sadists could find their footholds.
? ? ?
All the way to Istanbul, the tiny plane rolled and pitched to and fro. From one side, all you could see was the crazily zooming and retreating ground; from the other, only sky. Overhead bins flew open. A giant cheese went tumbling down the aisle. Then the plane lost altitude so suddenly that several people hit their heads on the ceiling. Each new violent movement was met by groans, cries, and laughter. Some of the older passengers were praying. One guy threw up in his airsick bag, and then everyone started doing it.
The worst part was the descent. Every second was more sickening. You could feel your soul sloshing around in your body, bouncing around in there like goat shit on a boat. Teodora gripped my hand, and I squeezed hers back. Then suddenly the last clouds fell away behind us, and there was the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, as shimmery and living and inscrutable as the flank of some gigantic fish. Teodora leaned raptly toward the window. “It’s my husband’s ship,” she said, pointing at the freighters far below. “Somewhere, one of them.” I looked at the nape of her neck, at the downy hair that had escaped from her ponytail, at a delicate gold chain with an Sshaped clasp lying on her freckled skin—all things that her husband must have known so well.
? ? ?
I was going to stay the night with my aunt Belgin and cousin Defne before we all went to Antalya, on the Mediterranean, to meet my mother and other aunts. Belgin and Defne were my only relatives in Istanbul, a city I hadn’t visited since childhood. I had spent more time in Ankara, my mother’s hometown—the city Atatürk founded, the capital of the secular republic. My mother thought Istanbul was sad, with its narrow streets and run-down buildings. But I wanted to see it, because Ivan had talked about wanting to go there, because it sounded like the cities in nineteenth-century novels: sprawling, multilayered, heterogeneous, aswarm with parvenus, monomaniacs, and dealers in used furniture.
My aunt Belgin worked at a national laboratory chain that processed medical tests. They had said they would send a driver to the airport. I couldn’t find the driver. I tried to call the lab, but the AT&T code didn’t work—you had to buy phone tokens. I didn’t have Turkish money, and the currency exchange wouldn’t take either Hungarian money or traveler’s checks.
I went back to the pay phones and was trying to figure out how to make a collect call when a neatly dressed young man appeared at my elbow. “The phones are operated by means of tokens,” he said. He went on to explain the concept of a token—“It’s like a coin, but it works only in the telephone”—and offered to buy me one, if I gave him the money. I explained that I had only Hungarian money.
“Let it be Hungarian, then,” he said tolerantly.
“How much should I give you?”
“Whatever you think is fitting.”
I handed him a bill. He dashed off at an incredible speed, then came back holding the same bill. “The exchange doesn’t take Hungarian money,” he said.