The Lovers (21 page)

A young woman appeared at the threshold. “
Merhaba
,”
she said, before saying something else. It sounded like a question.

“
Merhaba
. I’m looking for Madame Yildirm.”

“Yes,” the young woman said. “I am Madame Yildirm.”

“Oh,” Yvonne said. The woman was too young to be the boy’s mother. “I think there’s a mistake. I’m looking for the family of Ahmet Yildirm.”

“Yes. I am his sister.”

Yvonne was silent, staring at the woman’s thin face. Her mouth was like Ahmet’s.

“Can I help you?” the sister said.

“Sorry, my name is Yvonne.”

“My name is Aylin. How can I help you?”

Yvonne took a breath. “I knew Ahmet. In Knidos.”

Aylin’s face seemed to narrow. Even the tips of her ears suddenly appeared pointed. “Come in,” she said. “We can sit in here.”

Yvonne followed her into a small room, a living room. The couch was a plush burgundy suede, and the room was filled with mirrors framed with elaborate, baroque metalwork. The photos on the walls featured what Yvonne assumed was the family from the TV show. The men wore fine suits and silk ties. The women wore black dresses, diamonds, and heavy liquid eyeliner. Yvonne now understood why the woman outside had painted her eyes—so Yvonne could look like she was on the television show. Aylin sat on the couch and Yvonne seated herself on a chair, its armrests painted gold.

“My parents are there now, near Knidos, getting his body,” Aylin said. “They are bringing it back here for the funeral.”

His body.

“How did you know him?” Aylin asked.

“Well, mostly I bought shells from him.”

Aylin stood, and then sat back down. “So you’re the one,” Aylin said. “My grandmother told me about you.”

“She didn’t care for me.”

“She doesn’t care for anyone,” Aylin said.

“I came to apologize,” Yvonne said.

“For what?” Aylin’s earrings, tiny diamonds, blinked.

“I feel it was my fault.”

“Because you paid him to get shells?”

“Yes.”

Aylin stared at her a moment and then laughed a short laugh. “You Americans.” She flattened her skirt beneath her legs.

“What do you mean?”

“You think that everything has to do with you. That everything—good or bad—has its origins with you.”

“But I paid him money for shells. I commissioned him.”

“So you gave him money. He needs no money. He doesn’t care about money. To him, it is a game. Let me tell you something about Ahmet. He always swims too far into the ocean, and jumps from high cliffs. He does what he wants to do. This is why he was sent to be with my grandmother. He has always been this type that causes my parents trouble.
You, you are just someone who wants to think you have an effect on someone’s life. On a young Turkish boy’s life.”

The conversation was not following the path of any of the scenarios for which Yvonne had prepared herself. She was acutely aware of the touch of the couch beneath her. Her mind was stunned, her body still.

“Why did you come here?” Aylin said.

“Because—because I know what it’s like,” Yvonne said. “I lost my husband two years ago. And I liked your son—I mean, your brother. I know what you must be going through.”

“You don’t know what I’m going through. How can you know? Everyone’s grief is different.”

Yvonne closed her eyes against the coming tears. “I’m sorry.” She stood to leave.

“Sorry,” Aylin said. “I didn’t mean to be so—”

“There’s no reason for you to apologize,” Yvonne said. “Really. I expected anger. In fact, I think I came here to receive your wrath. It would almost make me feel better.”

“I can’t do that for you,” Aylin said. “But I will tell my family that you were here. They will be glad to know.”

Yvonne was out of words. She smiled, the tears overtaking her. She stepped out the door and ran to Mustafa’s taxi and was gone.

Back at the hotel, Yvonne was greeted by Koray.

“I have a question,” she said. “How far is it to Datça?”

“To get anywhere by plane, you fly to Istanbul first. There are many flights each day. A little more than an hour by
plane to Istanbul, and then to Datça, I don’t know. An hour and thirty minutes maybe. Are you going there?”

“Not now,” Yvonne said. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

Koray looked out at the sky and Yvonne followed his gaze. Three clouds formed a row of dots—an ellipsis.

Before she returned to her room for the night, she logged onto the hotel’s computer and wrote to Aurelia.

She was tempted to write more, but how could she explain her friendship with Ahmet, and his death, in an e-mail? She would see Aurelia on the boat and tell her everything then.

Her cave room was cold. In the mirror she saw the paint on her eyes was smeared. She was washing her face when the phone rang.

“Oh good. It’s you.” It was a female voice. “All roads lead to Mustafa.”

“Excuse me?” Yvonne said.

“Everyone knows Mustafa. He told me where to find you.” She paused. “It’s Aylin, Ahmet’s sister.”

“Yes,” Yvonne said. She sat down on the bed.

“I want to apologize for the way I talked to you today. It was kind of you to come.”

“Thank you,” Yvonne said, and suddenly lost her breath. She wanted to fall into the arms of Aylin. “Please, do you think…can we talk some more? I don’t know what I want to say, but I want to tell you about him, about your brother, if you like. I liked him very much. He was a beautiful young man. I could tell you stories of his time in Knidos…” Yvonne felt ridiculous. “I only say this because after my husband passed away, I wanted to know everything about him, any detail anyone knew.”

There was a long pause.

“I would like that,” Aylin said. “You could come to the museum or I could come to the hotel tomorrow.”

Yvonne tried to picture them talking on the patio of the hotel, next to guests making inquiries about camel rides, or in the museum where Aylin worked, under the disapproving gazes of a wealthy and troubled family. Yvonne felt trapped by rooms, by caves, by Westerners wanting to live like Turkish people and Turkish people wanting to live like Westerners. “Can we go for a walk tomorrow?”

“We can walk in the valley beneath the castle,” Aylin suggested. “I go there often. It’s not far from your hotel.”

“Okay,” Yvonne said. “What time?”

“Eight in the morning?” Aylin suggested.

“I’ll see you then,” Yvonne said.

“Yes.”

“Thank you for calling,” Yvonne said, but Aylin had already hung up.

Yvonne awoke early the next morning, hungry from not having eaten the night before. She dressed in turquoise, her missionary dress. She left the coolness of the cave room and walked into the accumulating heat of the day. The sun, an ancient coin, was rising over the horizon.

An elderly couple sat at a table near Yvonne’s. They both had white hair cut the same short length. The woman was plump and the man was thin, his legs long and pale.

“I’m thinking when we get home,” the woman said, “we should plant some orange flowers by the front hedge.” She had a faint Southern accent.

“Why orange?” said her husband. He was eating eggs. She was eating yogurt.

“I saw it in a magazine,” said the woman. “I saw some orange flowers and they looked really…uninvasive.”

“I know you’re worried about invasiveness.”

“I just think orange would be nice. Or maybe red.”

“I think it’s really going to make a difference,” said the man. “A big difference.”

“You don’t have to be so negative,” said the woman.

“That fountain worked out great,” said the husband.

“I said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it. I think it’s nice.”

“It sounds like someone’s perpetually pissing in our garden.”

The woman appeared as though she might speak, but then thought better of it. Instead, they both turned sullen, like punished children.

Yvonne knew their anger, recognized it instantly. She and Peter had spoken to each other like this toward the end of his life. It had been easier to justify their resentment of one another when Aurelia was causing them strife, but when she turned twenty-one and turned sober for good, and they still didn’t get along, they had no one to blame but each other. And so they fought. They fought about how much money to leave as a tip at an Ethiopian restaurant. They fought about whether or not a student should have been expelled for cheating on his SATs. They fought about the placement of the rug in their living room, about Yvonne’s tendency to leave half-full glasses all over the house. They had grown so accustomed to resenting each other that they didn’t know how to stop. And they could no longer blame Aurelia.

The white-haired couple had finished with breakfast. Their chairs screeched against the patio, and Yvonne avoided looking at them as they returned to their room. She stared at the cave houses before her, in the near and far distance. They were all crumbling, and Yvonne couldn’t decide if the view resembled a civilization at its start or its finish.

Mustafa drove Yvonne to the valley. The landscape was lunar, everything white and gray, the rock formations seeming more illogical and make-believe now with their shadows so long.

“Should I wait here?” Mustafa asked.

Yvonne declined. She knew the way home.

She stared at the many entranceways that had been carved into the mountains. She could make out Turkish flags hanging above many of the doors. People still lived there.

“Hello,” a voice behind her said. It was Aylin, dressed in a silk blouse and a black skirt. Aurelia would have approved of the silk.

“Are you okay to take a walk? I don’t want your clothes to get dirty.”

“There’s a café in one of the chimneys,” Aylin said. “We can go there.”

They walked down the narrow path of sand.

“I feel I should apologize for just showing up at your work yesterday,” Yvonne said. “I shouldn’t have shocked you like that.”

“I was not prepared,” Aylin said. “But I didn’t need to be so rude. I don’t blame you for what happened to my brother. But I wanted to ask you how you recovered from death.”

“From Ahmet’s death?”

“No,” Aylin said. “You said yesterday that your husband died. I am curious what you did to make it easier. My family, you see, they are all devoted Muslims. They have the mosque, and my father will cleanse my brother’s body there before
the burial. And Ahmet will be dressed as though for his circumcision. He will wear a suit and a hat, and have a baton. And across his body there will be a sash that says
Masallah
. It means, ‘May God Protect.’ But I am not religious. I don’t believe what they believe—I decided that long ago. But their faith is giving them structure now. Answers. A way to go through this. I feel different. I have no answers.”

Aylin was sweating in the heat, and small wet circles appeared down the back of her blouse, where her spine touched the silk.

“Should we sit?” Yvonne said. Even this early in the morning, the sun was punishing.

“Yes, good idea,” Aylin said. “The café is in there.” She pointed to the fairy chimney to their left and they walked inside the main archway. Immediately it was cooler. Yvonne followed Aylin up a staircase, carved into the stone, and they emerged into a shallow room lined with books. At the end of the room was a balcony, where they sat on a cushioned bench.

A young boy approached them, and he and Aylin exchanged a few words. “Coffee?” Aylin said to Yvonne, who nodded. Aylin said something else to the boy, and he walked away.

“I don’t know how to answer your question,” Yvonne said. “I had a lot of help when my husband died.” As soon as she said it, it sounded false. She had not had a lot of help. She had only had Aurelia. “It was my daughter,” Yvonne said, working out the thought as she spoke. “It was her. She brought order to things. She was…miraculous.”

And suddenly it was clear. It had been Aurelia. In the aftermath of Peter’s death, Yvonne and Matthew had braced themselves for Aurelia’s reaction: most of her life, she would have used even a parking ticket as an excuse to drink, to steal, and accuse, and throw tantrums. When Peter died, Yvonne and Matthew had made sure Aurelia was not alone. With a real excuse, she seemed capable of anything.

And yet it was Aurelia who had been calm. Who could have known that in the face of real tragedy Aurelia would thrive? It was as though now that everyone else was finally living in the realm of passion and intensity with which she had conducted her life, she was at peace. Matthew and Yvonne turned to Aurelia for solace. It was Aurelia who washed the dishes and made the beds and stocked the kitchen with tea and milk and starches (that was all they could stomach then: bread and rice, the diet of sick children). It was Aurelia who had dealt with the life insurance company, with the questions from the police, the details of the funeral. It was Aurelia who had opened the windows to let in fresh air, and calmly told off the telemarketers who called and asked for Peter.

Yvonne finished telling Aylin all this, and the young woman nodded reverently, as if she had been told the story of a magnificent hero of history. “She is strong, your daughter,” she said.

“No,” Yvonne said. “Actually, I guess yes. She never used to be. But something changed.” It was only now that Yvonne understood this to be true. Her daughter had changed a long time ago—even before Peter’s death. It was only Yvonne’s
idea of her that had remained unaltered. She had not opened her eyes to her daughter in years. Aurelia was no longer a broken thing to be tinkered with. She was a woman, a person, and Yvonne needed her.

The boy brought them their coffee in small teacups. Yvonne looked toward the other fairy chimneys, at other tourists sitting on other balconies, being served by the very people who had once called these bizarre structures their homes.

“You just need to wait for the days to go by,” Yvonne said. “It might be hundreds of days, a thousand, but one day, you find that the pain has dulled. That it no longer clouds everything you see.”