The Lovers (19 page)

Yvonne followed the maître d’ onto the roof of the building, where students were talking animatedly in groups, or reading books alone. Yvonne scanned the tables, seeing girls
in tight dresses and head scarves flirting with boys who took long inhalations from water pipes. She followed the man, her head turning everywhere, certain she would see her children before he did.

The maître d’ paused in front of a table, where a young man and woman sat writing postcards. They were pale-skinned with dark blond hair. They were not her children.

“Here they are,” the maître d’ said. The couple looked up at Yvonne, confused. The young man looked sympathetic. “Long day?”

Yvonne could not speak. She closed her eyes.

“Where are you from?” the woman said.

“Canada,” the man guessed.

“Netherlands,” the woman said, pointing to herself and her companion.

“Apparently we’re the only tourists in Konya not from Turkey,” the man said, smiling up at Yvonne.

Yvonne was just beginning to regain her equilibrium.

The maître d’ looked at the couple, and then at Yvonne. “No?”

“No,” the young man said.

“Oh, madame, I am sorry,” the maître d’ said. And suddenly Yvonne felt he did have something to be sorry for. She had thought for a brief ridiculous moment that she would find her children here, that they would hold her this night, take care of her and let her fall apart between them. They would ride with her on the next bus, their shoulders against
her shoulders as they traveled to Ürgüp, to Ahmet’s family, to set things right.

Now she wanted to be away from this place.

Yvonne quickly descended the narrow, chipped steps, all the way down until she couldn’t go any farther. But she had gone too far. She was in the basement of the teahouse, with couches and a barber’s chair. The heavy scent of smoke and spice hung in the room. Though the room was empty, it still felt alive, as though a great number of people had congregated there the night before and departed in the early hours of morning.

Yvonne ran back up to the first floor of the teahouse, and then out onto the street. Something compelled her to look up at the roof, and she saw the two pale faces of the young couple who had been writing postcards. They were looking down at her, waiting to see where she would go. She walked quickly around the corner and continued past furniture stores with large gold beds on display, past cars and buses and bikes, the endless stream of traffic. Everyone in this city, it appeared, wanted to be someplace they were not.

Dusk was falling. She was so hungry.

She saw the mosque with its green tower and golden minaret and knew she was close to the Mevlana Museum and her hotel. She walked closer and saw men and women arriving at a restaurant by taxi. She followed them through the front doors and smelled hot food.

“You are here for dervishes?” said a man in the foyer. He was wearing a white button-down shirt with a beaded necklace and ironed jeans.

Yvonne shook her head. Then she said, “Maybe.”

“There are a few more spaces. The performance is at eight o’clock.”

“And I can eat before?”

The man smiled warmly and gestured upstairs. “Yes, it is included.” He told her the price and she handed him the money.

“I’ll see you in one hour, at eight o’clock,” he said as he gestured once again to the stairs.

The restaurant was located on a roof with a view of the Mevlana Museum and the mosque. From somewhere—the rose garden below? the mosque?—came the sound of a flute. She closed her eyes and listened. She wanted to swim in the sound. She was so light-headed she felt she might faint.

She ordered
eski ebelli
because the menu said it was a specialty of Konya. When it came she saw it was a large round piece of dough with vegetables and meat wrapped inside. This was what all the women in Konya were making with their rolling pins.

She ate greedily, ravenously, pieces of meat dropping onto her plate. Oil oozed onto her hands. The small thin napkins on the table couldn’t absorb the oil and her hands remained slippery. She hunched over her table so no one would be able to see the mess she was making, the grease
on her face. She was the only person at the large restaurant who was dining alone.

After eating, she felt calm. The sound of the flute and the night breeze relaxed her. It was five minutes to eight, and she decided she would watch the performance for a few minutes. She thought of the woman who dreamt of the dervishes. She longed for distraction.

The performance room was filled with folding chairs and incense smoke. There was only one empty chair left, on the edge of the front row, waiting for her. She seated herself as silently as she could.

Four men dressed in white robes and tall narrow hats moved to the center of the room: the dervishes. They were in their forties, all dark-haired and with medium builds. At once, they all began to move. With one slippered foot anchoring them to the floor, the other foot performed an elaborate act of slowly pushing off from the floor and raising to the calf of the opposite leg, before lowering and pushing off once again. Soon they spun quickly, all in the same direction, in perfect unison. They appeared to enter a trancelike state, and the hands of their extended arms turned in opposite directions, one palm up, one down. Yvonne watched, mesmerized. She could feel the breeze created by the swirl of the dervishes’ robes on her ankles.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. They were still circling in their own realm, equidistant from each other. Yvonne was beginning to get dizzy. She wondered how much longer
she could watch the spinning. She wondered if they always turned in the same direction. A small part of her wanted one of them to fall, or at least open his eyes. Anything to break the relentlessness of the turning, turning, turning.

Finally she heard the padding of the right feet on the floor begin to slow, and she saw the dervishes were halting their private cyclones. The incense was stronger, and the room hotter, without the breeze from their robes. Yvonne stood and briskly made her way to the exit.

There was no taxi in sight, so she walked. She knew the Hotel Mevlana was close. She consulted her useless map and walked down a street that bordered a stone wall. Farther down the street the wall was lower, and she could see that it circumscribed a graveyard, crowded with tall, narrow tombstones the size and shape of grandfather clocks. She looked closely at one to read the dates, to see if the bodies were recent or ancient burials, and she took in a quick breath when she saw the name:
AHMET
.

She read the tombstone next to it:
AHMET
.

She clutched her purse and ran down the street toward the hotel. As she ran, she continued to look for names on the tombstones, and every other tombstone, it seemed, announced the death of Ahmet.

When she arrived at the end of the cemetery she was breathless. She looked up at where she thought the hotel would be, but there was only an empty gas station, now closed. She looked to her left and right. The only light came from cars as they sped past. She turned—she could retrace
her steps, but that would mean passing the cemetery again. She was soaked in sweat. She felt hunted.

“Taxi,” called a man, and Yvonne turned. “I take you,” he said.

She had no choice. She followed him across the street and he asked where she was going. “Hotel Mevlana,” she said. He pointed her to a yellow taxicab. She stepped into the backseat, and a moment later the front passenger door opened. Another man was getting inside. Yvonne looked at the driver, who didn’t look at her. Instead he turned to his friend, who was lighting up a cigarette. She gripped her purse, ready to flee.

The driver said something that included
Hotel Mevlana
, and Yvonne tried to take relief in this. This wasn’t an abduction; they would take her to her hotel after all. The taxi pulled out of the dark gas station and into the night, zooming past the cemetery. Yvonne kept her eyes on the backs of the men’s heads. She could smell her own sweat—meaty and spicy and strange. She smelled like someone else.

When the taxi pulled up in front of her hotel, the meter read one amount and the driver quoted her a much larger one. She didn’t want to argue. He had smelled her fear. She had arrived back at the hotel safe from cemeteries and the twirling of men. She paid him the extra amount he was charging, and ran out of the taxi and took the elevator to the third floor. The lights switched on, startling her as she scurried down the hall. She closed the door to her room, bolting and chaining it behind her.

She closed her eyes but did not sleep. She thought of herself awake, turning, her eyes raised to the sky, turning. She only wanted the turning to stop. She wanted to look straight ahead, to know where she was going. The turning, the eyes to the sky—it was impossible to find rest this way.

A gray smog hung over Konya the next morning when Yvonne boarded the bus. She was wrecked from a night without sleep. She had passed the dark hours tallying her mistakes, regretting things she had said and not said to her children, regretting coming to Turkey, regretting subjecting that beautiful boy to her broken, needy self. And now she was going to Ahmet’s town with no notion of what she would do when she met his family. She had not rehearsed any words of explanation or condolence. Her mind raced through scenarios—the family shunning her, the family feeding her. The family condemning her, the family embracing her. Outside the bus window green haystacks were lined in neat, organized rows. She closed her eyelids, heavy with sleeplessness and sun.

Yvonne awoke to find her forehead pressed fast to the window. Outside was an impossible landscape. The bus had descended into a wide gray valley, flat but dotted with hundreds of spiked rock formations. Each was fifty feet high or more, and tapered upward, like a narrow volcano. She had never heard of such a place. She knew only that Cappadocia was mountainous. No one had told her it was filled with a
field of hundreds, thousands, of stone chimneys extending as far as the eye could see.

The bus stopped. “Ürgüp, it is here,” the driver called out. She disembarked, and the driver retrieved her suitcase and set it beside her. Dust rose up around her as the bus drove away.

A sign said
CAVE HOTEL
and pointed with an arrow, and she started the small climb up the hill. She would wash, settle in, and make a plan. It was still early in the day.

From outside, the Cave Hotel looked like a small mountain with a door. She rang the bell, and a minute later a man came out to greet her. He was in his early sixties, with neatly parted hair and a square chin. He introduced himself as Koray, the hotel owner, and told her they had one room available—a suite. “You are here by yourself?” he said.

He led her to a desk in a large room. It was only when Yvonne noticed the curved walls, the absence of windows, that she understood the room was a cave. She squinted at yellowish rings circling the gray chalky walls. Koray noticed her gaze.

“From volcanic eruption,” he said. “This valley, these caves, made by volcanoes, and then the wind—” He gestured like a sculptor forming a torso from clay.

She filled out the paperwork he required. Koray led her down stone steps into a courtyard, and to another door. “This will be your room,” he said. “One of the oldest caves in the region.”

He unlocked the door and, once inside, switched on a
light. He looked at the room with half-closed eyes, as though he didn’t want to see any detail the housekeepers might have overlooked.

The room was cool and damp, with a small desk and a large, high bed. There were no windows. “Do you need anything else?” Koray asked, standing on the threshold.

“Actually, I wonder if you could help me,” Yvonne said. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Okay,” Koray said.

“Well, I’m looking for anyone in the Yildirm family.”

“I know Yildirms,” he said, in a way that scared Yvonne. Had he heard of her role in Ahmet’s death? “When you come upstairs, I have information for you.”

She thanked him and closed the door.

In the bathroom, Yvonne held a small white hand towel under the sink faucet, and rubbed at her underarms, which smelled tart, and then between her legs. She removed her sandals and lifted one foot at a time to the sink before stepping on the bath mat. She gargled with the small bottle of mouth freshener supplied by the hotel, and spit. She avoided looking in the mirror.

She lay on the bed for a few minutes, staring at the cave around her. The bed was bordered by two night tables, each with lamps that had been turned on. She suspected she was the only person in the hotel who was traveling alone.

Upstairs, in the room where she had checked in, Koray was talking to an Italian couple about a hot-air balloon excursion. Yvonne spotted a computer in the corner of the
room, its screen on, a stool set before it. She logged onto her e-mail, and was surprised to see a message from Aurelia. The subject header was, “Greetings from Istanbul.” Istanbul! Her daughter was already here. Yvonne had no idea what day it was, or how Aurelia had arrived in Turkey so quickly.

She hesitated before opening the message. She tried to picture her daughter making the flight across the Atlantic, using her anti-anxiety pills, polishing the cuticles of her nails with oil (her cuticles cracked on airplanes, she claimed—a result of all the dry air).
Intimacy,
Yvonne thought,
was a ruse.
She knew a thousand pathetic details about her daughter, and still wouldn’t be able to describe her accurately to a stranger.

She opened the message and immediately was relieved to find that in the first few sentences there was no trouble, no desperate need.