“They don’t take it,” I agreed.
“Oh, well, give me the Hungarian money,” the young man said after a moment. “Who knows, maybe I’ll use it someday. I might come across some Hungarian tourists on their way back to Hungary. Then they can give me their last Turkish liras, and I’ll give them my Hungarian money. They’ll say, ‘Thank you,’ and I’ll say, ‘Goodbye, safe travels.’” Seemingly cheered by his future exchange, he handed me a token and I called the lab. I got transferred four times. The fifth person I talked to said that the driver had left, and would be here soon.
The young man carried my suitcase from the phones to the customs exit. Periodically a wave of devastated-looking air passengers would pour out of the gate. Some of them had people waiting for them; others trudged on alone.
I tried to give the young man some more forints, but he said he had enough. “After all, maybe I’ll never come across any Hungarian tourists.” He didn’t want any cookies, either. He said he didn’t have good relations with sweets. Then he offered to buy me a beer. Beer again! I wondered if Ivan would have accepted—if he and this guy would have ended up friends, through their shared love of beer. In parting, the young man gave me another telephone token. “You might need it,” he said. “If not, it will be a memento.”
? ? ?
The only person who had been standing at the customs exit as long as I had was a man holding a sign that read ROYAL EMIRATES TOURISM WELCOMES MR. AHIB SADEEN. At various points, two different women also rushed up to me and asked if I had seen Ahib Sadeen yet.
“Not yet,” I said.
A man came out of the gate in a blindingly white shirt and jacket accompanied by four women in black burkas. It was Ahib Sadeen. For some reason, his arrival was the decisive event that made me feel I had been waiting too long. I went to the information booth and asked them to page “the driver from Güven Laboratories.” They said it wasn’t possible to page a person unless you knew their name. I pointed out that I knew the name of the laboratory. They said you couldn’t page a laboratory—it wasn’t done.
“Couldn’t you just do it as a kindness?” I asked. My mother often talked about kindnesses in her conversations with Turkish service employees. Compared with Hungarian, Turkish sounded clear as water, but speaking was really difficult. To say anything, I felt like I had to search my brain for every phrase I had ever heard before and then redeploy the one that best matched the circumstances.
They eventually agreed to page “Güven Bey”—Mr. Güven—which obviously wasn’t going to accomplish anything, because Güven was a common given name, it meant trust, and it wouldn’t be used on its own, without a surname, to page someone at the airport. I waited around awhile anyway. Nobody showed up.
I used the second token to call the lab again. “What—you mean Yusuf Bey hasn’t come yet?” a secretary said.
A wave of hilarity rose in my chest. I knew Yusuf Bey. He had been my grandfather’s driver in Ankara for years. He was never on time anywhere. Once, he broke a car by driving over an enormous boulder that was sitting right in the middle of the road. When my grandfather asked, “Yusuf, why didn’t you drive around the boulder?” he said, “I thought it was paper.”
Once I knew it was Yusuf Bey, I found him right away. He was standing in a corner eating sunflower seeds.
“Oh, so you’re Selin Han?m,” he marveled, brushing off his hands. “The last time we met, you were shorter.”
“I was ten years old.”
“Ah, so that’s why.”
? ? ?
Everything in Belgin and Defne’s house was tiny—the chairs, the plates, the notepads. My toes barely fit in the slippers. Belgin had made a beautiful dinner with stuffed grape leaves, battered mullet that you ate whole, and cranberry beans stewed in olive oil.
After dinner, Defne’s and my cousin Ayhan came to visit. In the years since I had seen him, he had become sinisterly handsome, with tousled chestnut hair and penetrating blue eyes. He had just started a new job in an office run by his father, having been fired from his previous position for biting a man’s ear.
The four of us watched the evening news. A bomb had gone off in Atlanta, harming nobody. A forest fire had been raging for weeks in Marmaris; it was now thirty fires, and nobody knew how to put them out. In Valencia, a matador had been gored to death. They showed his body being tossed around by the bull, so lightly, it seemed, and then his coffin was borne away on a sea of shoulders. Aunt Belgin changed the channel. African men in loincloths were bounding across a field of tall yellow grass.
“Ah, the Japanese Dracula,” said my cousin Ayhan. “How they can jump.” He repeated the phrase “Japanese Dracula” several times.
“How can they be Japanese, it’s Africa,” said Defne.
“The Japanese Dracula may also be found in Africa. If only I could jump like that. Can you imagine? I’d come home from work in the evening and jump, like this.” He stood up to demonstrate, capsizing a little table but catching it before it hit the floor. “So, kids,” he said. “Are we going to a bar or what?”
“To a bar, now? Are you crazy?” Defne said. “Selin just got off an airplane, she’s tired.”
“Anyway, don’t you have work tomorrow?” Aunt Belgin said.
“Not until eight-thirty. That means I have to get up at seven-thirty. I sleep for three hours a night—four hours, maximum. So there are five hours to go to a bar.”
“Jump home to bed, Japanese Dracula,” Aunt Belgin said.
“If only!” said Ayhan sadly, picking up his jacket.
? ? ?
The rim of the bathtub and the top of the mirrored cabinet were crowded with products for dry or damaged hair. I saw a deep recovery healing shampoo for deep damage repair, a dry remedy moisturizing mask for damaged curly hair, a total repair conditioner for hair damaged and dried by styling products, an ultimate moisture conditioner for very stressed hair, and a bottle that just read EMERGENCY TREATMENT: HAIR DAMAGED BY DRYNESS. I stood under the shower, luxuriating in the hot water yet troubled by a mounting sense of unease about my relatives’ hair.
? ? ?
The sofa bed was designed for someone different from me—not just smaller but also, it seemed to me, with a different personality.
? ? ?