The Lovers (20 page)

Yvonne reread the e-mail. She could barely make sense of how Özlem and Aurelia had connected. All of it seemed impossible. But then, she had given Özlem’s number to Aurelia. Why wouldn’t Aurelia have called it? Yvonne was puzzled by her own surprise. Was it that Aurelia was suddenly so outgoing, so capable? Aurelia and Özlem were together in Istanbul, managing just fine, while Yvonne was in a moonscape of giant anthills, utterly lost.

When Koray was finished with the Italians he turned to Yvonne, and wrote something down and handed her the piece of paper. “Many of the Yildirm family have gone out of town,” he said. “But one is here,” he said, and pointed to the address. “Mustafa can take you.”

“Okay, thank you,” Yvonne said, taking the paper from him. She didn’t know who Mustafa was.

“You wait here,” Koray said.

Mustafa was a lanky man in his twenties, with gelled black hair. He leaned forward when he walked, as though pushing through a strong wind. “Madame,” he said, and gestured toward the door.

Outside, she followed him to his car. He opened the passenger door for her and she got inside.

After he sat in the driver’s seat she handed him the piece of paper Koray had given her.

“I know,” he said, without taking the paper.

“Is it far?”

“No,” he said. “You could walk but you would not find.”

A tattoo with Ataturk’s name circled his small bicep. He noticed her looking and pulled up his shirtsleeve. “His signature,” Mustafa said, pointing to the etched version of the president’s name.

“Very nice,” Yvonne said, and quickly felt ridiculous.

The car was stuffy and reeked of cigarettes. She rolled down her window. They passed more of the strange formations—triangles with boulders on top. “What do you call those things?” she asked.

“Fairy chimneys,” Mustafa said.

“What?”

“They look like chimney to home of fairies,” he said. “The volcanoes come and then the wind shapes the lava like that. We get very strong winds that circle in the valley. The winds get stuck, like in a bowl. You see there is no green, no plants. Like a desert.”

They passed a school, its courtyard empty now.
Ahmet must have gone there,
Yvonne thought.

“A school for girls,” Mustafa said.

She couldn’t decide whether she was disappointed. A part of her wanted to know every detail of what Ahmet’s life had been like, and another part of her wanted to believe he hadn’t left any mark on this town or its people.

The car pulled up to a large house built into the side of a hill. With an impressive balcony and heavy wooden doors, it was much grander than the other houses she’d seen. A small crowd was gathered outside the house, taking pictures.
It’s made the news,
Yvonne thought. People were coming from all over Cappadocia to see where the boy lived. She imagined candlelight vigils at night, the tears of women glistening in the lights of the small flames.

“You like to get out,” Mustafa said.

“Sure,” Yvonne said.

If Mustafa hadn’t said anything, she could have just as easily asked him to keep driving. The crowd of people surprised her. Would they know her face from the TV? She no longer resembled her passport photo—the picture, she as
sumed, that the journalists would have dug up to broadcast.

Mustafa said he would park across the street and wait for her. He indicated a space next to a large bus—a tour bus. Yvonne had never imagined a scene like this. She assumed she’d be alone, or part of a small, intimate group, when she came to pay her condolences to Ahmet’s family. She now saw there would be witnesses, judges of her behavior, just as there had been at the beach that day.

As Yvonne walked to the large front door of the house, she was intercepted by a woman of approximately Aurelia’s age, her eyes heavily made up. The woman was talking to Yvonne while holding something in her hand—something black and narrow as a pencil. Another woman nearby shouted. She too was holding a small pencil-like object in her hand. Yvonne guarded her throat with one hand, her heart with the other. The first woman was very close to her face now, still speaking, and lifted her hands toward Yvonne’s eyes. Yvonne felt something on her eyelids, something stinging, but did not fight back, did not push the woman’s fingers away.
I deserve this,
she thought.
Whatever retribution or punishment this is for Ahmet’s death, I deserve nothing less.
The woman’s hands smelled of mint.

Yvonne could sense when the woman had stepped back—the sun was once more on her face—and she opened her eyes. She had not been blinded. The woman was smiling, nodding. She reached into her pocket and extracted a small mirror, which she held in front of Yvonne’s face.

Black liquid makeup lined the tops of both eyelids.

“Like?” said the woman.

Yvonne didn’t know what to say, so she nodded. The woman smiled. Yvonne noticed that all the women outside the house had eyes that had been similarly lined.
A mourning ritual,
she decided. She felt sick.

She walked to the door of the house. No one stopped her. When she reached the threshold, she saw the door was ajar. She knocked lightly. A woman in her sixties, wearing heels, opened the door and said something in Turkish. She was wearing an expensive-looking silk blouse and a pearl choker.

“Mrs. Yildirm?” Yvonne said.

The woman looked confused.

“Oh,” she said, after a minute. “Are you looking for Aylin?” Her English was excellent. Yvonne’s relief was immense.

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

“Aylin Yildirm works here, but not right now. Someone in her family has died.”

Yvonne bowed her head.

“She’s coming by today to get some things, though,” the woman said. “She’ll be here around five this evening.”

“Thank you,” Yvonne said, and stepped away from the house. “I’ll come then.”

She walked back to Mustafa’s car. Who was Aylin? Ahmet’s mother? What kind of work did she do for this woman? Mustafa was standing by the car, talking with another man and smoking. Both men had placed packs of Winstons on the hoods of their cars.

“It’s not open?” said Mustafa. He was looking strangely
at her face. Yvonne thought something was wrong until she recalled the eyeliner.

“What’s not open?”

“The museum. You don’t stay?”

“Museum?” Yvonne said, turning to look at the building again. There was no sign, save for a gold plaque near the front door. “What kind of museum?” she asked.

“The television program
Asmali Konak
was filmed here. In the house. Very famous. And now they make museum.”

“A TV show was filmed here?”

“Everyone loves it. Is about the family with lots of money. People love seeing the rich so unhappy.”

Maybe Ahmet’s mother was an actress of some sort.

“Now there are other programs. Much more scandalous. Married women leaving their husbands. Every Thursday, women across Turkey watch to see the new possibilities for Turkish women.”

Yvonne thought of Özlem.

“Can I take you somewhere else?” Mustafa said. “Another museum.”

Yvonne was still piecing it together. The house was a museum to a now-defunct television show. And someone in Ahmet’s family worked at the museum.

“No, not a museum,” Yvonne said. “Is there somewhere else we can go? Can we see the fairy chimneys…or something?” Her voice sounded more pleading than she had expected. The truth was she didn’t care where she went as long as it wasn’t back to her room.

“In the afternoon is too hot to walk around fairy chimneys,” Mustafa said. “You will see. It gets very, very heated.”

She looked at his fingers on the steering wheel and noticed his hands were shaking. “Are you okay?” she said.

He looked at her and she gestured with her chin toward his hands.

“It’s a problem I have,” he said. “I once was a waiter and got fired the second day.”

Yvonne nodded. Peter’s hands had started shaking when he was in his forties. He tried to hide them, sitting on them like a child.

“I know a place that is interest to you,” Mustafa said. “They are caves.”

On the way to the caves, sand blew against the windshield. Mustafa turned on the wipers and leaned forward to the window so he could see. “We wait until the storm ends,” he finally said, and stopped the car at a restaurant where the owners knew him. The restaurant had three floors, the bottom two filled only with empty tables. But the third floor was crowded with lunchtime diners, men in business suits and tourists in groups large and small. Yvonne and Mustafa sat at a table underneath a needlepoint of Ataturk’s face.

“That is the picture you see the most because he smiles,” Mustafa said. His own mouth frowned. “But more of the time he didn’t smile, for a reason—he knew he had big job in front of him.”

Mustafa continued on about Ataturk, how he walked and
talked, how he was loved. Yvonne nodded often, happy not to speak. History was a comfort—it wasn’t about her.

The food came and she ate and pretended to listen. Her thoughts were untethered, rising up in the heat. She was running through the sentences she would say to Ahmet’s family, and none of them were adequate. She thought of the woman who had approached her door all those years ago, saying, “I want you to know that your daughter just landed my daughter in intensive care.” Yvonne had not known how to respond, and not a month went by without her wishing she had said something, anything besides what she did say, which was, “Are you sure it was Aurelia?”

She thought of the woman who had killed Peter, how she too had been speechless. How she had said, “I have to go,” before she disappeared.

When Yvonne started paying attention to Mustafa again, he was explaining why Ataturk never had children. “He did not want a dynasty. He did not want anyone trying to hurt him through his children. People might hurt his children, and he could not have this.”

Mustafa paused, as though to see if Yvonne had been listening.

“Yes,” she said absently. “People would do something to the children.”

Yvonne paid the bill and they returned to the car. The wind had stopped and the heat of the day had peaked.

Mustafa drove a few more miles and parked in front of a
row of tented shops, many of them selling carpets and embroidered blouses. He and Yvonne followed signs pointing toward the cave. The signs had been translated into many languages—Yvonne recognized the Italian word
grotta
.

“I have to tell you something,” Mustafa said as they stood outside the entrance. “I cannot go inside with you. I am unable to be in there.”

“Claustrophobia?” Yvonne said, and tried to explain what this was by placing her hands close to her head.

He nodded. She was relieved to be left on her own. “I will wait here for you,” Mustafa said.

Yvonne turned toward an archway in a small mountain. “What am I seeing?”

Mustafa stepped toward her. “You will see underground city where Christians lived when they hid from the Arabs. Some lived entire life down there, never come up for anything.”

Yvonne followed the tourists in front of her—a short man and his tall girlfriend. They seemed to be speaking German. She ducked as she walked down the steps of a tunneled passageway and found herself in a chamber of empty rooms. The ceilings were lower on each new level, and she continued to stoop. When she had descended four levels, the air was noticeably thinner. Yvonne had to inhale deeply. Some of the tourists near her turned back. “I don’t need to see any more,” she heard an American woman tell her husband. “I’ve gotten the idea.”

Yvonne continued down through the tunnels, the ceilings
becoming increasingly lower. She tucked her elbows in as the passageways narrowed. She passed through one room that had been a kitchen—she overheard a British guide saying so to his group—and she could see the soot on the ceiling above her head. She ducked through another chamber that must have been a church. She could still make out the crosses that had been etched onto the main wall. And it was here that she realized she was alone.

She needed to stop before moving on. She sat on the ground and pulled her knees to her chest. It was significantly colder now. She heard voices moving around her but couldn’t judge their distance. The darkness was almost complete. What was she doing? She was seven or eight levels below the surface, lost in a soft-stone maze, alone. She was in Cappadocia, a place not included on any itinerary she’d made. She had traveled to Turkey to regain something of what she had had with Peter decades earlier—and failing that, she had befriended a boy. A Turkish boy who spoke nothing of her language. And now he was gone, and she was again searching for some remnant of someone she had lost. Had she ever been so lost herself? She must have seemed—to Özlem, to Ali, to Mustafa—profoundly so. A sad, aging woman with no anchor. Fumbling in underground caves.

Yvonne took in a deep breath, but it gave her no strength. She tried to inhale again, and felt nothing. She began to panic. Her voice called out and was echoed back at her. She didn’t belong here. She needed to get back to the surface. Running as fast as she could, she ascended one of the narrow
upward passages, and, while doing so, she hit her head. She touched her brow and felt her own blood. She kept her hand to her head and followed any upward ramp she could find. How far down had she been?

The light grew. She stumbled on, seeing more people as she made her way up the slippery stairs. Finally she emerged out of the mouth of the cave, gasping and coughing. She heaved so violently a stranger offered her his water bottle, and a woman put her arm on her stooped back. “You are okay?” the woman said.

“Yes,” Yvonne said.

“Who are you with?” she asked.

“Um,” Yvonne said. She was with no one. She looked up and saw Mustafa standing near the entrance to the cave.

“Him,” she said, so relieved to see this man she did not know.

He reached his shaky hands to her and she walked toward them and held them until her hands and his were both still.

Mustafa found ice for her head and she held it close to her cut until the cubes began to melt. At five o’clock, Mustafa took her to the museum. She had not come to any conclusions about what she would say to Ahmet’s relatives. It was only after she knocked on the museum door that she realized she didn’t even have an opening sentence.