part i: the baristas
On a Wednesday night in Istanbul, S. opens the door of the cab directly into a passing motorcyclist.
There is some gesturing in the street, a few familiar curse words cherry-picked from a language we don’t understand. The police are called, but after 20 minutes M. checks his phone and says something about a reservation for the third time. We are late for the boat and dinner, but the driver has my credit card information, and S. does not want to look as if we are fleeing the scene. His family is from Armenia, descended from refugees of a controversial genocide[1] conceived here a century ago, and we are all foreigners in this place.
In the end, I offer the driver a cigarette. He leans in and cups a hand against the Bosporus breeze so that I can light it, then tells me through the translator app on my phone that we can go, that an accident report will be filed and the bill sent to Uber. We leave and never hear about this incident again.
S. is fuming. M. is hungry. It is nighttime in the middle of January, and the lapping black waves of the river devour the lights of the city straddling its shores. We have missed the last ferry and our dinner reservations, so we fall into the nearest café for something to eat and smoke.
We take a seat against the window looking onto the river and order a mixed hookah – what they call narghile here. It is a word that will linger in our collective vocabulary long after we leave Anatolia and return stateside, like abi (“brother”) and merhaba (“hello” and “welcome”). Months and years from now we will greet each other with these words at bars and weddings and barbecues, calling back to the week when we were three American dudes in their 20s on vacation in Istanbul. The city bends to accommodate us. The world is our oyster.
The servers set the table around us and lay out two narghile pipes we didn’t order along with the spread. We try to explain that we only requested one hookah – with the two flavors mixed in a single tray – but the concept is not landing, no matter how many ways we phrase it in the translator app or wave and gesture at the table, so we invite the servers, who look to be about our age, to join us. We could afford to make some new friends in this strange city and, with the exchange rate, the price of the additional pipe is negligible for us.
The two men look at each other and we hear something unlatch in their glance – a most pivotal moment for expats making friends abroad. Like watching a doctor remove their glasses and drop them in their coat pocket before leaning forward to confide a candid opinion, the hierarchy between served and server begins to fade into the background of our shared humanity. We are no longer attendants and patrons but real, living men sharing space, time, and company. They say something when they leave to make a final round of the café before coming to join us, but the only word we catch is “abi”.
When they return, they are looking us in the eyes. This is the signal to begin exchanging names. They are F. and Y.
The conversation S., M., and I shared with F. and Y. this night, like all the ones recounted here, is largely private. Over two and a half hours, there was talk of many things ranging from love and family to economics and politics. Nobody recorded the conversation, and if I had a hundred pages I could never hope to recreate it in its full authenticity.
We are quickly humbled by the things we take for granted beyond subscription services and takeout: things like craft beer and cocktails, sleeping in our own bedrooms, access to reliable banks and safe accounts, freedom from ethnic persecution, holidays.
The Anatolians are somewhat surprised when we admit that our futures and the collective future of our country is uncertain, but they nod in agreement. They are troubled by developments in the United States of late, because things that can happen in the free world where everyone is watching have always been greenlit for upstarts and aspiring extremists elsewhere – not least here in Constantinople, at the metropolitan intersection of the global East and West.
F. lowers his voice when he says that he is worried for his erratic cousin, because if racists killing young men on camera in Minneapolis or Houston are not held accountable by tax-wielding Americans, then who will stand up when a nameless Kurd is brutalized in the Fatih of Istanbul? This is when S. reveals his ethnic identity to F., who nods somberly and says that he is sorry, that it is terrible what people with power will do.
When they bring the check, it is nearly midnight. They haven’t charged us for our beverages, and only one narghile ultimately made it onto the bill. Before M. leaves a week of the men’s wages on the table as a tip, F. tells us to come back anytime as guests. On the way out, Y. shakes our hands one last time and S. leaves another week’s pay in the man’s palm.
The evening costs us roughly as much as the cheeseburgers and shakes we will get as soon as we land back in America.
part ii: the students
Two nights later I find an open seat on a café patio in Karaköy, a chic neighborhood on the northern peninsula. S. and M. left yesterday, but I still have the weekend to myself before my flight to London on Monday morning. Men control most of the commerce here, which breeds a certain fraternity between quick-talking restaurant staffs and a trifecta of American men with open minds and empty stomachs. It does not feel right to return to F. and Y.’s café – nor to any of the other businesses where we have made an impression this week – alone, so I am wandering the city with my notebook for company.
Even though it is 8pm, I have developed an attachment to Turkish coffee, so I order one from an impatient waiter. I am learning to savor the sediment that lingers on the surface of my teeth nearly as much as the pronounced flavor of the drink itself. It has become a part of the experience that enhances the taste for me, like carving a ribeye off the bone.
Like most men, my influence over strangers is different when I am alone – not totally diminished, but perhaps not as compelling as when I am surrounded by my pack. When I try to order a narghile, the waiter tells me frankly it is too late in the evening. They are about to close.
“I just saw you bring them one.” I point to the table beside me, where two men slightly younger than me are puffing on a fresh pipe. “Can I get one like that?” I ask, but this seems to be just beyond the limit of his command of English. He shakes his head and walks away.
When I turn to the men to ask what their secret was, they inform me that they are friends of the waiter’s and invite me to pull up my chair. This, in my experience, is how most people are all around the world: friendly, hospitable, good.
We begin chatting about where we are from, our thoughts on Istanbul and the surrounding neighborhood. The men are students from nearby Syria. They are refreshingly uninterested when I tell them I am from the United States, but their eyebrows go up when one of them tells me he is from the capitol and I respond with the city’s proper name. When I also name-drop the cities of Homs and Aleppo, they are positively dazzled. I have been a geography geek for some time, but it is not common, I have found, to meet Americans who can name more than a handful of places outside the U.S. Even most of us who travel abroad have no reason to familiarize ourselves with places, cultures, and landmarks that are not pertinent to our itinerary.
It is usually something of a compliment to hear the name of one’s home on a foreigner’s tongue. They ask how I have come to know these places, and I say that I hear about them often on the news. This is my in to ask about the situation in their country.
“You mean the war?” says the one wearing glasses, whose English is slightly better than his younger companion.
This is what I mean. I ask, cautiously and in so many words, who they are rooting for. They look at each other and laugh.
The younger one sitting closer to me, who is twenty years old, runs his palm back and forth across the table, around my coffee. “We are here,” he tells me. “You, me, our families, the people of Syria – down here. We always have been here.”
He raises his other hand in front of his face in an arc high above the table.
“The government, the armies, Bashar al-Assad, CIA, Russia – they are up here. This is war.”
He makes a sprinkling gesture with his fingers, like rain falling on the commonfolk.
“This is also the war, but for us.”
I nod along and he bumps his fists together, high in the upper echelons of society. I see sparks fly between his knuckles. Air raids and chemical weapons and refugee crises rain down on the table, on us, on these men and their families, from the stormfronts high overhead. His friend nods. I sip my coffee. It has gone cold.
“We do not care who wins the war,” he tells me, then quickly reconsiders: “Or, it does not matter. We will not win. Syrians have lost.”
I nod again. I have read about Syria for years, watched coverage of the civil war on the news and held court over my own opinions on it – if they can be called mine, having been informed entirely secondhand by sterilized media coverage and remote debates. I know about the war – have used the words injustice and rich man’s war and cannon fodder in conversations about it – but these men know and love people who have fought in it, and even more who have died. Their futures are being written today and forevermore by the fallout of al-Assad and Hezbollah and the Islamic State and Moscow and Ankara and Washington, D.C. A thousand kilometers from home, they are living the war every day, as refugees.
We are roughly the same age – young adults, early-to-mid-twenties – but S. and M. and I flew in here on a Turkish Airlines flight from Los Angeles with a pre-approved tourist visa. These two rode through the mountains on a bus, passports clutched in palms that perspired as they handed them over to the border guards. And I am the guest at their table.
“Will you ever go back?” I ask, moving my notebook to my backpack. It is getting late, and the café is beginning to clear out.
The bespectacled one shrugs. They do not know.
“We hope,” he says, “that things will return to normal someday.”
“What if they don’t, in our lifetime? What if Damascus is never the same? Or, what about when someone else takes power?” I wave my hand over the table, in the realm of the oligarchy. “What if it never becomes safe for you to return?”
He frowns at my waving hand.
“This has always happened,” he says. He bumps his fists high up together: power struggles, political strife, ethnic persecution, refugees and civil unrest. Then he places his palm flat on the table. “In the end, we have always been here—or, we hope to always be here.”
The waiter brings the bill for me and they wave him off, laughing as we smoke the last of the narghile.
“Wouldn’t you also like to go home someday?” he asks me.
part iii: the shopkeeper
Writing about our time in Turkey is an exercise in restraint because the most resonant experiences during my week there are not pertinent or appropriate to share in this kind of public context. Even without explicitly naming individuals or businesses, I can’t help but fear some measure of retribution for the people who showed us such kindnesses as comped goods and unguarded opinions during our brief visit to their city. There is a raw sweetness to the interactions shared in a place where strangers invite you to sit and have a chai for no other reason than that it is freshly made and your heart is beating on this side of their doorway. If I take too many of these moments out of the freezer of my personal notebooks and hang them out on display for anyone to read, they would lose their flavor and quickly go bad. Some memories belong to Istanbul.
I ache to broadcast my encounter with Z. the shopkeeper, though the finest details of our encounter are the ones that could most easily give away his identity to a scrutinizing reader – particularly one with the authority to punish him for showing me such raw hospitality. I will not recount here which street I stumbled into Z.’s shop from, nor what it was he was looking to sell me. I cannot share the number or nationalities of the various cousins and men called abi who we sat around with, the things we talked about, or the substances we indulged in together on my last night in Istanbul – aside from a very healthy serving of American whiskey on ice.
When I told Z. that I was a writer, he made me promise not to publish any details of my time in his shop. It is a promise I am hard-pressed to keep.
What I can share is that, later, as I walked back to my hotel alone to pack my bags for a flight to London the next morning, I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the moon.
The crossroads of the world have converged for two thousand years at Constantinople, alias Istanbul. Where East and West meet over the Bosporus Strait, bridges stretch like ribs over the black-blue heart of the former Ottoman Empire, connecting two halves of a torch that burns from Europe to Asia and back again. In Byzantium, our forebearers came here along the Silk Road to trade in exotic goods and affairs, to peruse the bazaars and marvel at the city’s thousand mosques – and I am fortunate to have been able to follow in their footsteps a hundred generations on, if only to bop around and smoke narghile.
On my final night in Istanbul, the Isha call to prayer rang through the brick valleys of the ancient streets and, for the first time all week, I stopped moving. A million people from around the world swirled around me on the sidewalk as I looked up, past the decorated fences and ancient walls and towering minarets, and found the moon, alone in a night sky charred by the halo thrown over the glowing metropolis.
It is a unique privilege to visit a place by choice, and leave by the same accord. To have something – and, inshallah, someone – to return to someday is nothing short of a gift. Surely the world is a dangerous place. It is terrible what power will do to most men, and what some will do to hold onto it.
But in the end, people are good. Alhamdulillah, kindness is everywhere.
TG
[1] A note on the Armenian genocide, if this is your first time hearing about it: It happened. The link above will direct you to an official page of the Turkish government which, to this day, denies allegations and represses factual evidence that more than 1 million men, women, and children were systematically massacred by the ruling Ottomans. I provide this link here to communicate that, over a century on, this is still a delicate topic to bring up within the borders of the former Ottoman Empire – particularly under a so-called “Justice and Development” regime.
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