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Cooking Lessons
In retrospect, I can pinpoint the exact moment when everything began to unravel. In our favorite bar, the one you didn’t want Suleyman to know about, I knocked a glass of whiskey into your lap. It started with your suggestion that the Turks should pay reparations to the Armenians for the 1915 genocide. You wanted to hold ghost empires responsible for their past misdeeds: the Ottoman Empire, the Old South. You wanted reparations. “The Turkish government needs to admit what happened,” you said, staring hard at our best friend in Istanbul, Suleyman. “Of course, you can never compensate someone for their suffering, but admitting the truth of the past is a first step.” I saw my own guilt mirrored in yours. We came from the same places. In our childhoods we both had black nannies who couldn’t read, who wore cheap cotton housedresses and smelled of camphor and biscuits. But what we hated about privilege licensed our presence: here, in this bar, in the streets of Istanbul, in any country where our eagle-embossed passports admitted us without question. Suleyman, who was studying to be an architect, couldn’t go anywhere. He wanted to talk about Chicago, the first steel-frame skyscrapers, Fallingwater and Central Park. But you wanted to embarrass him with talk of genocide. In Turkey there were some subjects we didn’t discuss. “Tell me, Suleyman the Magnificent,” you said, the whiskey cutting at the edge of your voice. “What do you think about Armenians?” The Turkish woman at the table next to us, a tiny thing with a breathy, baby voice, had stopped talking, her head tilted in our direction. You looked at her for a second too long. My hand made contact with the rim of your drink, the whiskey spraying across the table and into your lap. I ran out into the night and made you chase me down the cobbled streets, your sense of protection outweighing your anger. At that moment I didn’t care what happened to me. Losing you, the sense you were already lost, was worse.
Istanbul had seemed as good a place as any to teach English: daring, exotic, impenetrable. It was the summer after graduation, and we had no real reason to be anywhere. The future was wide open. We moved into an apartment in a neighborhood filled with transvestites, behind a casino and a mosque. A Vegas of garish lights competed with the loudspeaker from the mosque, admonishing the believers to come to prayer. “All on one street, and in a Muslim country,” you remarked. At the vegetable stand on the corner I jostled for the best eggplant with the she-males, last night’s makeup no longer fresh on their faces, the first shadows of beards stippling their chins. Their voices, flirting with the young, embarrassed shopkeeper, teetered a high wire register between male and female. When it was my turn, the shopkeeper held up a ruddy pomegranate for me to appraise, offering a price for the tiny rubies within.
The English lessons began to bring us friends, some of whom were our students—we laughed at the idea of “our students” in the possessive, at the idea that we had any sort of expert knowledge to give them. Suleyman was “our” student, in love with all things American. He was pleased when you told him he could pass for a Native American, with his long black hair and almond eyes. One day we took a ferry to a nearby island where we rented bicycles, riding them up into cool, piney forests high above the sea. Afterwards we coasted down to the shore for a lunch of grilled fish and beer. Suleyman’s hands, lifting a shrimp to his mouth, were delicate and precise.
That fall I worked on graduate school applications. The words I wrote in Istanbul seemed poignant, weighty, as if they might make something important happen. I sensed my future was about to take off. Years later, I am still waiting. You wanted to stay in Europe for a while before your parents sent you to business school, or maybe you’d go to Prague. Everyone was saying it was like Paris in the 1920s. I doubted this. “Nobody can know the value of a place until they’re not in it anymore,” I argued, trying to keep you there with me, in the present, not already planning for the moment we would separate.
Sometimes we walked down to the sea, where narrow wooden houses from the time of the Ottomans still stood. The landscape reminded you of something out of Dickens. Ferries sledded along the Bosphorus, and across the water Asia sprawled out before us. Over there Suleyman shared an apartment with three other students. I went there sometimes when you were not around, to see how our students lived. The apartment was spare and institutional, Suleyman’s bed a tiny pallet in a cell. On the wall he had tacked up two photos: Che Guevara next to a Polaroid of his mother, a small, dark woman lost in a dusty village. On another tip of landscape we could see the former palace of Ataturk, the Father of Modern Turkey. Down the shore the glassed-in, contemporary palaces began, overlooking the water—we had a friend in the foreign service who lived in one of those. We discussed becoming a foreign service couple, getting posted to faraway dots on a map: Addis Ababa, Quito, Bamako. We imagined staying in Istanbul and living in one of the narrow wooden houses, some of which collapsed, years later, in an earthquake.
I wanted to learn to cook. Suleyman was willing to teach. He arrived at our apartment with a wedge of salty feta, sheets of paper-thin phyllo dough, and a bouquet of parsley. I was still young enough to assume that everyone would always be this thoughtful. “My mother,” he said, unwrapping the pungent cheese, “does not like to think of me going hungry all alone in the city.” You weren’t interested in cooking, preferring instead your long rambles by the Bosphorus, writing in your journal and watching the boats tack along the horizon. To cook Turkish even the act of chopping required a certain rhythm. Moving behind me Suleyman corrected the way I held the knife, covering his hands with mine. Up close his skin smelled of cinnamon and tasted of olives. “It took you all afternoon to make this?” you wondered when you came home, examining the plate of cigar-shaped pastries we’d made, the slices of honeydew, the half-empty bottle of raki liquor. Your face, flushed from the sun, betrayed no signs of suspicion.
In Istanbul Turkish pop stars were everywhere. Suleyman pointed them out, and we recognized them from the music video channel. There was the sensitive, folksy one, the Bob Dylan impostor who always wore a white wool hat and carried a guitar. We spotted the singer who once taught elementary school French, strutting in crimson tights and platform heels. Her music had a nationalist message, Suleyman said. She sang of being liberated in her miniskirt. When Cat Stevens arrived to promote his new album of Islamic children’s songs, we went to see him. The concert hall was evenly divided among warring factions of headscarves and denim. As Yusuf Islam, he had renounced his past, his old songs. He spoke from behind a veil of gray beard, his voice still bearing a clipped British accent. Of all the singers, Cat/Yusuf was the only one that interested Suleyman. “I wonder if someday we’ll renounce our own pasts,” he said, looking from me to you. You rolled your eyes slightly, thinking it was an adolescent comment.
We had a favorite bar, just off Istiklal Street, past an Armenian church, suspended on a balcony over a forgotten alley. You didn’t want Suleyman to know about it. Intellectual Turks in wire-framed glasses sipped wine and talked about weighty matters, and we pretended to do the same. By winter our drinking had begun in earnest. We downed bottles of Efes beer and Yakut wine in our apartment before going out. Sometimes we sat in tavernas filled with old men thumbing their prayer beads, where we sipped anise-flavored raki under the portrait of a debonair Ataturk, dead of cirrhosis of the liver at fifty-seven. One night, inviting Suleyman to the favorite bar became unavoidable. From his reserve I could tell that he found it pretentious. You were reluctant to see it through his eyes. You brought up the Armenian question, laying out the words that began the irrevocable domino tumbling of our relationship. A chain of consequences: Suleyman’s embarrassment, my guilt, your whiskey.
In spring the letters that would decide our future began to trickle in. There was no Internet in those days. An American Express office inside a Hilton was our lifeline. We were always writing: letters, postcards, anything to remind people that we were here, and they weren’t. It took thirty minutes to walk to the Hilton, where the heavy security made getting to our mail feel like we had breached a fortress. One day you were accepted to teach English in Prague. I received a fellowship to grad school, to a place that would make me realize that words had no consequences. My writing would, in fact, make nothing happen.
Today I am making meze, Turkish appetizers, for a party. Nestling spoonfuls of spiced meat into little envelopes of dough, I float dumplings in boiling water, then lavish baklava with honey and rosewater. Years later I imagine I’m over everything, but then the cooking lessons begin to come back: The parsley must be chopped until it flutters down like snow. To know the sweetness of a melon you must tap its surface. I remember Suleyman’s hands, folding dough over filling with such great care, as if he were swaddling a baby. Is it any wonder I might have wanted the same attention? Later you flipped through my notebooks, asking how so many lessons could result in so few recipes. The absence of words was evidence. You did not care enough to be direct, I thought. Or else you cared too much.
In summer you left for Prague. Prague, according to reports from those friends who imagined themselves in Paris of the 1920s, was “where it’s at.” I was not “it,” or a place you wanted to be “at.” But in the end I left you first, even though you didn’t know it. It was a matter of pride. I found a way to make going back impossible.
The guests have arrived. They marvel over the meze, pronouncing the little appetizers “cute.” They swap their own Turkish travel stories, of kilim carpets, hookahs and smarmy men. Istanbul is distilled into an exotic theme party. So much of what happens is contingent on acting, on what I didn’t do. I might have broken your heart, but this time openly. I might have faced Suleyman, bringing him with me into America and the architecture of the present, its steel towers bleeding out into ugly suburbs. Or I stay behind, there with the vegetables, the transvestites, the mosques, everything growing familiar until objects lose their taste and the past loses its sting. Istanbul fades away, becoming a closed border, an absence, a place I was, once. |
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Rachel Newcomb’s work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, New Delta Review, Crucible, Interim, and The Baltimore Review. She has an MA in the Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Her website can be found at www. rachelnewcomb .net. |
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Date of Publication: 29 Oct 2007 |
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