After James (24 page)

I put the letter back in the envelope. The diners resumed their evenings.

That someone had marked my arrival, my name, and Erkin had taken the time to compose the warning, suggested that a next event awaited. In literature, letters are so often plot devices. I sat there thinking of letters in plots, the letters in
Othello
, love letters in Tolstoy, a stolen letter in Edgar Allan Poe. Somewhere Poe writes that perfect plots are unattainable “because Man is the constructor. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a Plot of God.” What would Poe have said of the Universe in his last hours, dying in the streets of Baltimore, cause unknown, and for reasons unknown, wearing another man's clothes?

As if to court the next thing, I went walking in the near-empty streets around the hotel. A young man with a
vendor's cart tried to interest me in a scarf. He spoke enough English to ask where I was from and wanted to know if my country was filling with Syrians. Already he'd wrapped a scarf around my neck and head in two swift motions. He asked if Canadians thought all Muslims were terrorists—his understanding came from American TV shows—and I assured him most Canadians were better informed than to think that. He held up a mirror and there I was in a blue keffiyeh, looking ridiculous. He said, “But you are not believers.” I gave him about five dollars in lire. I said we didn't have to share religious beliefs or even hold such beliefs in order to respect those who did hold them. It occurred to me we couldn't extend things much further, not into either of our orthodoxies, not into the place of women, for instance, without ruining the fellow feeling, and so that feeling was ruined anyway, but I smiled and said it had been nice talking with him and moved on.

I unravelled the scarf and draped it around my neck. In defiance of good sense, I turned down a stone alley and came out on a quiet street that afforded a view of the hill and fortress that marked the south edge of town. I walked in what I guessed was the general direction of the hotel and thought about human event grown so complex that no human and likely no god could comprehend it and then I stopped walking for a moment and heard steps behind me and then they stopped, too. I turned to see a man about my age standing and looking at me at a distance of six small parked cars. There was no one else in sight.

“My friend,” he said. “I am talk to you.”

His beard wasn't full. I tried to find significance in this detail. I checked for human shapes in the parked cars. The ones nearest were empty, those farther down the street, obscured.

“You are James.” He held his hands open before him in a gesture of weak surrender. “I am for you.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I come from camp. I know your father.”

He came closer and stopped just past arm's reach.

“I not tell you my name. I am help.”

He said that he and a friend had met my father three times, helping him unload supplies. My father asked them if any of the trucks were arriving with less than full loads and they described such trucks. Then he asked them about their families and lives.

“What happened to my parents?”

“I am safe.” He withdrew something from his back pocket. “Please.”

He pressed it into my hand, a crudely rolled, bent-up cigarette.

“Is to read,” he said. He looked briefly down into his palms and mimed reading a book. He turned and walked back up the street.

“Wait. Stop,” I said, but he didn't stop, made no gesture toward me, didn't change his pace at all. He disappeared down a side street and was gone.

In my room I unrolled the thing, tapped out the dry, odourless tobacco, and saw hand-printed there in tiny, elegant, almost illegible English letters an email address, a name, “Burhan Rihawi,” and “Istanbul.” In ten minutes I'd
composed on my phone a simple email in English, explaining who I was and asking to meet. I sent the note off into grey, unimaginable space.

In Istanbul I walked for hours. Things happened more than once, each moment contacting all others, happened then happened again when I reviewed my phone shots and footage. Crossing the Galata Bridge with its hundreds of fishermen lining both sides. Standing before mosques watching tourists and the devout take off their shoes. Blue Mosque, New Mosque, Süleymaniye. In the spice market, politely declining. Taking a ferry to the Asian side. Across a city four times the size of Rome the carpet salesmen kept pace with invitations and questions and all claimed to have brothers in Toronto or Vancouver. The street dogs were always in pairs. In the Hagia Sophia I dutifully lost my sense of perspective. Most beautiful, along one side where workers were sprucing up the hand-painted tiles and frescoes, a black scaffolding towered, one architecture imagining the other, or as if in a sultan's dream of New York. I wrote the line in an email to Dominic and he replied, “That should be ‘emperor's dream.' The place was built during the Byzantine, not the caliphate.”

The fourth day I spent in Davide's small apartment, still waiting for a reply from Burhan Rihawi. I hadn't slept well or enough. Davide was out late, away early. The couch was too short. At dawn the amplified call to prayer seemed emitted from the kitchen. Obvious thoughts beset me about the relation between deprivations, mind control, faith.
Each morning in the laneway below, a man towing a fruit cart called out. Later came another man with a cart of junk for sale. I peered down from my little balcony and in the shape of the cart, the laid-out positions of copper wire strands, a green toy handgun, a piece of what looked like an old radio, I saw again a version of the image that haunted Pierluigi and the Keyholers. An old woman in a headscarf appeared in the window across the laneway from me and lowered a small wicker basket four floors. The junkman took the alms and moved on.

An email arrived from Gail. She'd found copies of the information forms that my father had designed for the volunteers from among the refugees who were helping with the food deliveries. One had been filled out by a Burhan Rihawi. From the form and internet searches of place names I put together a profile. He was from the city of Al-Hasakah, where anti-Assad infighting had broken out along religious and ethnic lines. Sunnis, Kurds, jihadists, Assyrian Christians. In a nearby town eleven nuns had been kidnapped and disappeared, and although all sides protested, the nuns never turned up. Rihawi was Sunni and spoke Arabic, Turkish, and English. Given his date of entry to the camp, he was likely among a group who fled the city when the Kurdish military took over their neighbourhood. The story was of shelling and killing, no electricity, trouble finding food, and the men volunteering or getting forced into militias.

As I related the details to Durant he interrupted me.

“And you think it's safe to meet this man based on an exchange with a stranger who wouldn't tell you his name.”

“I don't always trust my instincts, August, but I hear them out. They seem to know more than I do.”

“Well, instincts or intuitions must have a drive for self-preservation.”

What I didn't tell him was that the instincts that had led me to fall in love with the Londoner were now telling me she was not who she'd seemed. Hours earlier, playing a grim hunch, I'd sent her a short, newsy email and received a message that the account had been deactivated. I searched around online and found just one mention of her, on an eco-activist site listing the names of “possible infiltrators” into activist-protest groups. I examined timelines. We'd met after I asked the Turkish police to send me the accident report for translation. It had seemed a chance meeting. Her leading me to Three Sheets was an expression of understanding, I had thought, as was our lovemaking and movie watching.

Believing against myself, I spent the afternoon fixed in small devastations. From the Latin
dēvastātus
, meaning “laid waste.”
Vastus
meaning “empty.”

At dark I was half-drunk in a sixth-storey bar with Davide and five of his friends. An open-air view to the south. Out on the Bosphorus a cruise ship completely out of scale with the city was attempting a three-point turn. I'd eaten too little. Three bottles of Efes returned my thoughts through warped glass. The slight rocking underfoot might have been an earthquake or the music from the club below us, or it might have been me as I thought of the passengers on the
ship deck looking at the vast, breathing city, wondering if they'd missed anything in their three hours ashore.

I'd lost most of their names, Davide's friends, but somehow I knew they were two Turks, an Italian, a Swede, and a Czech, the last three being women, the Swede being Davide's girlfriend, the Turks being in Davide's jazz band, me simply, barely, being. The Czech woman, Adéla, asked me what Canada was “like,” thereby opening that familiar twenty seconds during which foreigners are willing to contemplate my country. I said, “Canada's a place where if you come home and find a bear in your living room, you're not
entirely
surprised.” They turned out to be less interested in bears than bear spray and a minute later they were telling tear gas stories. Months ago they'd all been gassed together in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, and now there'd been more clashes, more water cannons. But the stories were about ghost gassings, the ones that caught you unaware, the sudden, faint irritation of the eyes and throat when you turned a corner or stepped out of a store.

“You think you're imagining,” said the Swede. She was big-eyed, dark-haired. She looked Turkish, in fact. I might have had the nationalities wrong.

“Someone coughs, maybe you. Then others start coughing,” the drummer.

“There's always someone who panics a little and runs away,” said Davide.

“Then the coughing gets worse. But meanwhile others aren't coughing at all. They're just buying things or having conversations, maybe looking at you funny,” said Adéla, who was looking at me funny, I thought.

They started to list places where they'd had this experience. Gas real or imagined outside the Pera Palace Hotel, up north outside Kanyon Mall, at the funicular station at the base of Tünel.

“Maybe the little burning in your throat is just a rumour,” said the second guitarist. He had rings on the fingers and thumb of his right hand. They were all nursing their drinks. They weren't drinkers or couldn't afford to be. “But the rumours are usually true. Like the rumours the police are out of control in some other street. They're in squads, they're gouging out eyes. Which is true. It happened.”

“Beating people to death or near death,” the Italian, which was true.

“Leaving them for dead on burning trash heaps,” the Swede, truly.

“They're all the same,” said Davide, meaning the police.

“Well, no,” I said. It was an outrageous statement, this no, and demands were made that I explain myself. I said that we all knew of police corruption and brutality. Some or all of us had witnessed or experienced this violence. But there were also stories of justice-seeking police, heroism, protection of the innocent, and self-sacrifice. To say of any outwardly similar group of humans that they were all the same was to ignore nuance, shade, a more precise kind of perception. It was bluntspeak.

“But bluntspeak, as you call it, has force,” said the second guitarist. “The world will end in bluntspeak.”

“Yes. And because of it,” I said.

“There are bad cops and a few good cops, you're saying,” said the Swede.

“Yes, but also the bad and the good are sometimes within the same cop, though maybe not in any kind of balance. It's hard not to think of them all as one thing when they wear uniforms and erect barriers and act as one. Maybe I'm just remembering a poem by the Italian filmmaker Pasolini after riots in the late sixties in Rome when students fought the police. He sided with the students' cause, but with the policemen in the fight. He saw the police as disadvantaged, uneducated farm boys, the true proletariat, fighting the children of the privileged.”

“Simplistic and condescending,” said Adéla, though she was smiling at me.

“Yes,” I said. “And no.” I don't know why Pasolini kept coming back to mind. I didn't like his poetry or his movies. I think I admired his conviction. Even his hair had conviction.

I asked them to forgive me. I said I'd come to Turkey in hopes of settling a personal concern, and my hopes seemed to be riding on the possibility that police in the south would prove honourable. To my disbelief, Davide then told everyone the story of my parents' murder. It turned out he'd heard it from Durant, who'd asked Carlo if he could ask Davide to look out for me. I'd never heard the story, of course, in the sense of having it told to me rather than by me or in my head in fragments. It was hard to listen to. I didn't correct the errors in his version. The other five muttered in sympathy. Adéla leaned over and gave me a hug. I felt a sudden love for them and felt at the same time how shallow it was, or maybe not shallow but tenuous. We were attached by chance, on one small node of connection. They reminded me of the crowd I'd known briefly with the Londoner. We were all roughly the
same age, and though from different countries, all poor and hopeful, meeting as partial representations of ourselves, combining and recombining, looking for meaningful arrangements. The word I'd learned from Durant was
coalescent.

It was the drummer, thin-faced, wearing the same dark porkpie hat I'd seen in the street video Davide had sent me, who produced the pill and laid it on the table.

“Welcome to One Two,” he said.

I regarded the thing, rectangular, bevelled, yellow, looked up at them all. They were looking at the pill, smiling. Davide explained it was a new street drug, origins unknown. It had appeared first in Amsterdam or Berlin and made its way south as far as Cairo. Now it sat between us, troubling no one, it seemed, this thing in plain sight.