About the Night (10 page)

No, she thought, taken aback; this was a premature wish. It was the nature of women to want more.

“What is it?” he asked, trying to understand her silence.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Does nothing mean ‘good’?” he asked.

“Better than ever,” she said.

Along the Black Sea coast, they discovered vistas that seemed to have been created just for them. While driving, she called out his name.

“Yes, Lila,” he responded.

“How is it that you were brought to me?” she asked.

“I really don’t know,” he said.

Something in the way he shared with her the wonders that he had collected in his world touched her heart. He was generous and effusive and welcomed her into his life as though he had been waiting for quite some time for such openness and closeness. In the corner of a cobblestone square, where pigeons encircled an old man in a cap who was tossing them breadcrumbs, they found a shaded table in a restaurant called Ariston. He ordered stuffed grape leaves for her and a dish of yogurt and a cucumber salad with lemon, beets, and cumin seeds, and
lakhmajun
, rounds of warm, flaky pastry topped with spiced ground beef.

The whirl of the ceiling fan was relaxing, and the restaurant owner attended to them as though Elias were a sultan come to visit his subjects in a backward province. He plied them with
kirmizi şarap
, the local red wine, and told them how to identify chestnut trees on their trek eastward. He and his son took long hikes, collecting chestnuts fallen from trees, and his wife would roast them on embers of burned citrus trees, then peel and prepare chestnut cream. The next time they passed through, he would serve them such a cream, and they would think they had entered paradise. “We’re already there,” Elias told him.

The day had nearly come to an end; the heat had settled down, and the humidity was rising. Elias caught sight of the pickup truck belonging to their hosts at the rendezvous point next to a sign for the Firtina River falls. The roar of the cool water could be heard from the high cliffs of the valley. Lila closed her eyes and listened to the water as it flowed some distance from them and thought she could even feel the earth as it trembled beneath them.

Women in head coverings made their way from the fields to the village. They wore long-sleeved, embroidered dresses and upon seeing the foreign guests, they waved. They were singing “Yakinda Sonbahar”—“It Will Soon Be Autumn”—and Lila would have translated the words for Elias were it not for the presence of their host, who was telling them, “These women and their husbands are our tea growers, they come from Caucasia.”

Lila was presented to Mr. Kuchon, whose name meant “Little Man” in Turkish, and she very nearly laughed aloud. With the same ease with which Elias had asked her that morning to stand next to him in front of the mirror so that he could look at her while he shaved, he told the Turk that Lila was an agricultural expert trained in France. Their host asked if he might query her as to her area of expertise.

“Medicinal plants,” Elias responded.

Clever man, Lila thought. He was ladling his mother’s knowledge into the fictional version of Lila he was creating.

Kuchon drove them to a small village on the outskirts of the city of Trabzon, where they took two rooms in a family inn. Elias got rid of Mr. Kuchon, who, in spite of the late hour, was in no hurry to part from them. “Tomorrow at seven in the morning!” Elias called after him, sighing loudly in relief, the whole village able to hear just how happy he was to be done with their escort for the evening.

The owner of the inn brought them a tart lentil soup and
balik
, a fish caught that very morning, which she fried in a pan and served with
cacik
, a dish of yogurt, cucumber, and mint. She would not hear of them skipping dessert, and she cut them slices of
kadayif
pastry. There was only one bathroom in the hallway, with thin white piqu
é
towels. When the inn’s lanterns had been extinguished, and the only sound that could be heard was the cries of seagulls, Elias stole into Lila’s room and in the bed of an ascetic with iron springs made love to her as he had not yet made love to her.

From a distance, the women looked like beetles climbing the steep slopes; only from up close was it possible to see that they were harvesting, their work rhythmic and harmonious and part of the scenery. They clipped the tea leaves with shears in a skilled, downward motion from the crown to the base. This was the highlight of a process that took a year, or two, or three before the leaves could rest in the women’s knapsacks. The excitement on Elias’s face was palpable as the fresh leaves fell into the hands of the people who had grown them. It was the end of the harvest, and the shears clicked away, reminding him that he was there, in the mountains with her, overjoyed that he could express his wonderment to her with a single glance.

Before this, he had seen tea orchards in Ceylon and China, where everything was so foreign to him—the climate so much steamier—and where he was unable to exchange a single word with the locals. Even when the love of tea was common to them all, the culture gap was still very difficult to bridge.

But here, on the hills by the Black Sea, with his beloved beside him, it seemed as though tea had always been growing in this place, even though it had only been brought to Turkey a few years earlier and planted where there was ample humidity and rainfall throughout the year. Perhaps, he pondered, it was the way the two of them completed each other that had its effect on the entire place. Tea cannot grow in sooty or polluted places; it needs clean air, quiet, and inspiration.

Elias wished to travel with the farmers who baled the tea leaves and brought the sacks to the factory for processing. Lila accompanied him, which meant that Kuchon, with his brilliantined hair, was forced to climb along with them onto the truck in spite of the bumpy road, the dust, the heavy humidity, and the sweat of the workers.

Impatient, Elias cut off Kuchon’s endless prattle. He wanted to see firsthand how the leaves were processed: the withering, the fermentation, the rolling, the drying, and the curing. He wished to know what the Turks had learned to do with the miraculous bushes that had been growing in the East for thousands of years.

“It was all a coincidence,” Kuchon said as he wiped away with a handkerchief the drops of sweat dripping from his brow. “It happened because of the terrible economic crisis in the region. People were starving, so the authorities decided to promote the commercial production of tea and make it a monopoly. Importation of tea is forbidden, and now we are beginning to export.”

“Since when do you people drink tea?” Lila asked.

“We were a nation of coffee drinkers,” he answered like a researcher of cultures. “Tea was only drunk by the ill until Atatürk decided to bring about a change. He ran a campaign about how coffee was dangerous and tea, healthy. Turkish coffee was replaced with tea simply thanks to the vision of that greatest of leaders, may he rest in peace.”

A strange and pleasant thought pushed its way into her consciousness: that all this had occurred for a single purpose: bringing Elias and Lila far from home so their love could take root. A broad smile bloomed on her face.

There was something clean about her that he loved, how she spread warmth and was pleasantly curious, and that way she had of listening and letting him delve into his own thoughts. Once again he was yearning for her, and he would wait for her even though he wanted her now, in the wet heat, for there she was facing him on the bench of the vibrating truck, her khaki trousers showing off her waist, and her white blouse accentuating her face. She was flushed with his love for her, with their nights together. The truck stopped in the town of Rize, and they descended, dusty and slightly stiff from the ride.

He disappeared into the darkened wooden huts and fingered the leaves, sniffing and mashing with his fingers, and he chatted with the workers, who were responsible for making the Turkish tea industry prominent. He was happy that Lila was sharing this experience and could see for herself what work went into producing a pot of tea. And he had another moment of thanksgiving, for that first conversation with Lila, on the spectators’ stand in Jerusalem, about his passion for tea. It was, to him, miraculous that it had occurred and was now made real.

At the end of this long day, they returned to the inn. The plan was for Mr. Kuchon to return to meet them in the evening.

“Come with me,” Elias said to Lila, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

“Where?” she asked.

“We’re going to disappear on him,” he said.

When Kuchon went to refresh himself, Elias and Lila slipped out the back door of the inn, where someone was waiting beside an impressively large black motorcycle.

“This is the inn owner’s son,” Elias whispered. “I had him meet us here.”

The two shook hands. The young man said, “This is the Benelli,” as if he were introducing a favorite child to Elias. “It’s a 1939 model, one of the last ones made by the Italians before the war. Exactly the kind Ted Mellors, the champion of racers, would have ridden,” he said, stroking the leather seat.

Elias was no less enthralled than the young man, and he wanted to show off his knowledge. “Do you know how this Ted Mellors died?” he asked.

“In an accident,” the young man replied.

“The most idiotic kind for a motorcycle rider,” Elias told Lila. “It happened in his own garage. He suffocated on the fumes from the exhaust pipe he was fixing. Not even on the road or in a race. His own motorcycle choked him to death.”

“When I have enough money,” the young man told them, “I’m going to visit his grave in England. I’m willing to bet the guy died deaf.”

The two men burst out laughing.

“You’ll understand in a minute,” Elias told Lila.

The young man gave a key to Elias and went inside the inn through the service entrance. Elias made sure that Kuchon was nowhere in sight, then sat on the bike and turned the key. A deafening rumble overtook the yard. With his eyes, Elias signaled to Lila to mount, which she did after a moment of hesitation. It only took a moment after they began to ride before Lila wanted to spread her arms and shout at the top of her lungs for all of Turkey to hear.