In the morning, Defne took me to see the famous university where she studied business management; it stood on a hilltop overlooking the Bosphorus, just above a fifteenth-century fortress that had figured in the siege of Constantinople. Even though it was the summer, the university had an atmosphere of late nights and intense relationships, of the oldest and the newest books, and for the first time I felt a flicker of excitement about going back to school in the fall.
We visited Topkap? Palace, where we paid extra to go inside the harem: an exquisitely tiled labyrinth formerly known as “the golden cage.” The harem was beautiful, but I felt relieved when it was time to leave for our next destination, a giant shopping mall, where we sat in a courtyard and ate Belgian waffles. All around us, women and teenagers were also eating Belgian waffles. The mall had a Japanese stationery store, where I bought a new spiral notebook. It had the most supple and creamy paper, and a pink cover decorated with a maroon anthropomorphic bean. The bean had one hand on its hip, and was waving with the other hand. It was a marvelous notebook.
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Our plane got to Antalya at ten at night. My mother had arrived some hours earlier. As usual, she had elegant new things I had never seen or thought of before: eyeglasses with extra-thin lenses and thick frames, the palest taupe sandals with kitten heels, a wine-colored leather overnight bag. Her toenails were painted almost the same taupe as the sandals but even paler, a color I had never before seen on nails. The sandals were mesmerizing, they themselves looked like two well-turned women.
My mother couldn’t understand how I had so much energy after a plane trip. “It isn’t normal,” she said. “Have you taken something?” I said that maybe it was because I hadn’t taken anything. The worried expression on her face didn’t change. “Take this,” she said, and gave me half a Valium.
My mother herself had taken half a Valium on the plane from New York a few days earlier, and had subsequently lost her passport and entered the country in some way that she said it would be better if I didn’t know about. Later, in Ankara, my mother had been walking down a street and had fallen down because the pavement was so uneven. A grocer’s helper ran out of a grocery, picked her up, called her “sister,” and offered her a cigarette. Well, that was Turkey: the roads were crap, but people were respectful to their elders.
“This came for you in Ankara,” my mother said, handing me a postcard with a picture of the Bridge of Sighs. The back was covered with compact, curly handwriting.
Hi, Selin,
Well, I made it to the birthplace of your literary hero, Casanova (ha, ha). The atmosphere is very decadent, almost unreal. I keep feeling like I’m in “Death in Venice” and about to succumb to the plague on my way to trying to ravish a small boy or something. Bill just left. We had an extremely intense time, with even more ups and downs than usual, not to mention our standard “debate” about art in every single cathedral. Also, I’ve been having really freaky dreams here. I think I might be subconsciously affected by the fact that Venice has no classical history. It was only founded in the fifth century (by refugees from Attila the Hun). I guess with my classical sensibility it makes sense that I felt more integrated in Rome. Then again, who knows, maybe I’m just freaked out about going back to Belgrade. Anyway. Speaking of Attila, I hope you’re faring well in the land of the “devil incarnate” and nobody is chasing you with antlers. I really wish we could have one of our long talks. I wanted to tell you about a dream I had involving an orgiastic carnival with nuns, but I’m out of room as you can see.
Love, Svetlana
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There was something unnerving about the Antalya hotel—the constant hissing of sprinklers in the undergrowth, the startled expressions of the staff members in their gold-braided uniforms, the shrubs on which huge orange-red blossoms gaped like demented lions with rigid sticklike tongues. I heard Russian everywhere: the beginning of my course of study in the Russian language had coincided with a boom in Russian tourism to the Turkish Mediterranean. Though it was August, the leather stores were full of Russian people buying enormous sheepskin coats. They were planning for the future.
There was a dinner buffet, with a kebab station and a swan made of butter sweating in a tub of ice. We all sat at a long table—me, my mother, Defne, Aunt Belgin, aunts Seda, ?enay, and Arzu, Arzu’s son Murat, and Murat’s new girlfriend, Yudum. Whenever Yudum stepped away for a minute, everyone started criticizing her. Defne took exception to her name, which meant “sip.” “Who has a name like that?” asked Defne, whose name meant “laurel.”
Yudum had to share a room with Murat’s mother, Arzu, who worked for the secret service, had a mania for cleanliness, and was always climbing on chairs to dust the invisible tops of things. Murat got his own room, but Yudum wasn’t allowed to stay with him—she had to stay with Arzu. Together they dusted the top of the wardrobe.
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I tried to hang out with my peer group, Defne, Murat, and Yudum, but was unable to assimilate myself to their mode of being. They seemed always to be waiting for something, for the removal of some obstacle—for a business to open, for the sun to move, or for someone to come back from going to get something. Whenever they actually did anything, like go in the water, eat lunch, or walk somewhere, they did it in an abstracted, halfhearted way, as if to show that this was just a side diversion from the main business of waiting. All they talked about was when the thing they were waiting for was going to happen. But whenever that thing did happen, nothing seemed to change. The sense of provisionality was the same, it just gradually found a new object.
In the end I spent most of my time alone, reading or swimming. I was more into swimming than anyone else in my family—that came from being an American. I also walked around more. “She goes from there to here, from here to there, from there to here again,” Aunt Arzu observed more than once.
“She’s been like that since she was a child,” my mother said proudly.
My mother swam for half an hour a day, holding her head very upright. Sometimes I joined her. Once when we were swimming along like that together we came upon a gigantic turd floating at eye level. Thinking it might be some kind of a stick or small log, I pointed it out to my mother. “It’s shit,” she said with a pained expression.
None of my aunts believed what we had seen. They kept trying to refute us on theoretical grounds. “Shit would have fallen apart into small pieces,” Aunt Arzu said.
“It would never float intact like that,” ?enay agreed.
“Who heard of shit floating? Does shit float? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Seda chimed in.
“I say this as a doctor,” said my mother. “Go swim over there and you’ll see shit floating.”