Awkward Abroad: Istanbul (chapter) by  Regis Sprockett

The plane finally touched down amidst beige fields of brush and an ugly profusion of modern apartment buildings.  Barish wanted to help Will in the airport.  With a queasy, Midnight Express-situation shakiness, the high school teacher approached passport control.  Hyper Barish pushed and gave orders, was often a nuisance, but offered a chaotic feeling of welcome to his homeland.  Behind the control booth, a beautiful, strong-jawed woman flashed her mean blue eyes and stamped Will's passport hard–like a  kick in the groin.
Then they rushed over to the luggage belt.  Barish told Will that he "beytter geet some fuckeen Lira now!"  Will darted to another booth and exchanged one hundred bucks, about 850,000 Turkish Lira, and used his first Tesekkur ederim on the unshaven, cigarette-sucking bloke behind the counter.  As Barish jumped around like a belly dancer on speed, Will's head was whirling and twirling with the Arabesque music blasting from a nearby radio.  The sight of beautiful women with dark, mysterious eyes and the earthy, sweaty smells assailed his senses.  In a stream of perceptions flashing like  jewels, his consciousness mixed waking dreams and nightmares as the fatigue played games with his eyes and stomach.
Barish told Will he could offer him free lodging that night in an apartment atop a private high school.
"My freend owns deh building.  He leyt's me use eet to take prohsteetutes or my girlfreend weekeynds.  He fucks there, too!  Ho-ho, hee-hee, hah!" the frenetic Armenian announced and laughed.
	Oh, God, sleep in a school building?  the tired teacher thought.  But he accepted the offer; the flight from Rome had been expensive.  
An hour later, Barish's car was still crawling slowly on a crowded freeway.  So here I am in Istanbul, ancient capital of splendor and  intrigue, Will pondered.  Constantinople.  Byzantium.  Onetime seat of the Eastern Roman Empire.  God, this is horrible!  he almost cried aloud.  Where was the city that the Turks had fought so hard to conquer in 1453?  That was centuries ago, obviously, but historical representations still lingered in his mind.  He was traveling through the ugly, urban sprawl of modern Istanbul, the outskirts of the core city, toward the districts of Yeni Levent and Maslak.  It looked like it had been bombed and rebuilt overnight: rubble, crumbling pavement, barbed wire, featureless concrete apartments,  gecekonkuler (urban "homesteads" built by Anatolian settlers), squatters'  tenements, and litter strewn across an injured landscape.
After stopping to eat a dinner of roast lamb, rice, cucumber salad and yogurt at the Namli Kepap restaurant in Levent, they arrived at the school in Maslak as the sun was setting into  smog.  The school, a set of prefabricated concrete block boxes, rose inconspicuously on a plateau next to a Turkish army base.  A few  soldiers  patrolled an area beyond the barbed-wire fence.  Green hills rolled endlessly into the  distance.
The apartment was large and newly furnished.  Will took a leak in the modern bathroom and noticed for the first time the  bitter mildew odor that he was to encounter throughout the city.
"Fuck man!"  Barish yelled amiably and poked his finger in Will's chest as he was zipping up his pants.  "I gonna peek you up tomorrow in morneen.  Theyn you come to my Kürk .  It's  fur make shope, shop– I   fur-ee–ur.  I make fur coats."
"OK, Barish.  Thanks.  Tesekkur ederim.  Later," Will said.
"Sonra Gürusüruz!" said Barish, and left with the key.

Will sat in a comfy armchair and watched Turkish television: dubbed rebroadcasts of American talk shows, dubbed phone romance ads from California, a silly Turkish musical, circa 1958, and the  national news.  
He looked out a window and saw a new high-rise office building and a large white banner announcing  Satilik in huge red letters draped across the top floor windows. The building stood in marked contrast to the peasant hovels, abandoned warehouses and rusting junk heaps surrounding the school.  He wondered what this word meant.  Probably "For Rent" or something.  He had learned a new word.

Soon the Kansan fell asleep.  He was walking near the Hagia Sophia in a dream.  Tourists strolled and souvenir vendors hawked their goods in the shade of huge green trees before the reddish-pink, 1,400-year-old former church that Mehmed the Conqueror had converted to a mosque in the 15th century.  Happy to hear the English language, he followed an American tourist group over to the Topkapi Palace, not far from the ancient Christian edifice.  He hesitated at Babu's Selam, the turreted and towered Second Gate; for some reason, he did not want to enter.  He heard a roar and saw two vans passing beneath the arched gate; he lurched to the right, but one van knocked him down.  Head spinning, he attempted to stand up.  He limped in painful delirium and then fainted amid a group of  men counting worry beads on a string.
The nightmare carried him into the harem.  Ibrahim the Mad, a 17th-century sultan, was eyeing his concubines, and William looked down in horror to see his own fat, hairy legs beneath a silky gown.  He blanched with terror noticing  himself wearing emerald necklaces and gold-polished toenails; he tried to run away as a eunuch seized him and shouted:  "You are gozde!"  They explained that he was "in the sultan's eye" and that he must stay in this room of ornate tiles and intricately embroidered pillows.  My God!  Will looked at his reflection in a mirror encrusted with diamonds: he was dressed like the other concubines!  His eyes were painted with blue mascara; bright red lipstick covered his trembling lips.
"He going to kill us!" cried a lovely Circassian girl. 
Several girls were now being trussed with leather ropes.  Screams filled the perfumed air. 
"Well, why?  What did we do to deserve this?"  Will asked, eerily feeling himself part of the harem.
"I don't know!  I think his mother's died!  He's just crazy!"  the girl's pretty eyes glistened with tears that ran in rivers of black mascara across her rouged cheeks.  "He throws many of the girls into the sea!"
Before he could wink a painted eye, Will and the other concubines were at Seraglio Point, being sewn into weighted sacks.  He saw groups of tall eunuchs heaving sacks filled with live bodies off the Point as if they were tossing plastic bags of garbage into a New York dump truck.  He wondered what he was going to do as rough fabric was gathered together over his head.  He was not hysterical; he did not fight off the hairy seamster as the other concubines were.
The sack smelled pleasantly of roses.  Somehow, this could not really be happening: life was tough, but reality was not this macabre, at least in his normal life.  Only ridiculous.
Cradled by the eunuchs' muscular arms as they carried him to the edge, a bizarrely maternal comfort soothed him.  An abrupt, sickening weightlessness followed, and then the cold,  splash of impact.  Sinking in the mixed waters of the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara, the Kansan imagined he was being enveloped by the currents of Lethe, somehow forgetting the past, the present, and the specter of the future in some liquid eternity crowned with azure skies.
"FUCK MAN!"  Barish Çalisir yelled.
"Huh?  What do you want?"  Will mumbled sleepily. 
"Geet up, man.  We go to fur shope now.  My shop.  Waayk up!  C'mon!"  Barish ordered.  He laughed and vigorously pinched Will's cheek.

Barish drove them to the district of Sishane and Galata, situated above the Golden Horn.  He parked in a vacant lot beside a derelict 19th-century building that appeared as if it were about to tumble over on top of them before the wrecker's ball had another chance.  
"Look, over there," Barish said.  "It's the Pera Palas Hotel.  Remember Orient Express movie?  This is where people go after treep."
Will gazed at a shadowy street beyond the lot.  They walked rapidly past the hotel, jogged through a dark warren of alleys and buildings, turned into a narrow passage, and then went down another street where Barish pointed out the American Embassy.
"Thees is where you go if you have trouble,"  Barish advised.  "You remember movie Midnight Express?  Fuck man, that guy was stupid.  So are Turks.  Fuckeen Turks!"
A shoeshine man seated behind a fancy brass workcase glared at them as they crossed the street.
"But you're a Turk, Barish," said Will.
"Yeah, but I'm really ArMEEnian, man.  My family is ArMEEnian.  It's Different.  The Turks kill Armenians.  A lot of Armenians, Turks gave us death."
They entered the building in which Barish' furrier shop was housed and climbed four flights of mildewed, greasy stairs. 
"Front of shop is Istiklal Caddesi and Russian Embassy man," said Barish.
After passing through a  sitting room of shiny mink coats, ornate rugs, antique mirrors and Victorian sofas, they entered a cramped work room and Barish introduced Will to his cousin Ilyas who was sewing together strips of  mink and sable with a seemingly ancient sewing machine.
"He's from L.A. man!"  Barish exclaimed.  " Oh!  Çay!" 
Before Will could correct him, Barish was calling the çay giy to order some tea.  Ilyas smiled at the foreigner and said "Nasilsin? " while dutifully pushing  fur underneath a whining needle.  A  wooden board supported by four oil drums was covered with ten rectangles of fur that had been stretched out and nailed down under patterns.  From a  plywood shelf above three sewing machines, a radio whispered snaky Arabesque melodies.
"HEY man!"  Barish yelled and squeezed Wills shoulder hard, tweaking tendons and bones sharply, yet amiably, as Will politely suppressed a cry of agony.  "Want a seegarette?"   
He shook a pack of Iki Bin brand cigarettes and aching Will pulled out a hearty-looking smoke.  The hyper Armenian jabbed a flame in front of the Kansan and then lit his own and inhaled with  pleasure.
"How long do you think I can stay in that school apartment?"  Will asked.
"Maybe five days.  But then you gotta go.  If you go Ortakoy then you have meet people: Americans, Canada, England people.  You can leeve cheap.  Rent apartment with new freends."
A drilling ring interrupted the conversation and Barish opened the sitting room door to let in the tea waiter.  He carried a silver tray of small, tulip-shaped glasses filled with steaming brown liquid surrounded by sugar cubes on white and red-striped porcelain dishes.  Will was reaching for his wallet when his Armenian friend stopped him: "No.  Free."  The waiter, a skinny middle-aged man wearing grimy jeans and a white apron, said  "Allah korusursun.  Güle, güle, " as he left the room. 
"Where's Ortakoy?" asked Will.
"It's near Bosporus Breedge.  On the Bogaz.  Small place.  Town.  Girls."  Barish put on a  work apron and seated himself at his sewing machine beneath a fading centerfold from a Turkish girly magazine.  Over the machine's annoying roar Barish yelled:  "You got money man?  We start business together.  "
Will's new friend resembled a  crow, a devilish yet imbecilic bird, alternately smiling and frowning, worried and elated. 

The next day Will took a bus to Ortakoy, a pretty village of ochre-colored buildings and sliding roof tiles huddled on a quay beside the Bosporus under a 3,542-foot suspension bridge.  Behind rose hills  toward the upper-middle class district of Ulus.  To the left, the strait flowed past a  mosque toward the Black Sea; to the right, the old section of Istanbul floated purple and orange in the hazy distance, above sparkling waters, its minarets piercing the afternoon sky.  
Will drank apple tea beside the quay.  The sun warmed him as he watched fisherman reeling in  fish and children frolicking.  He could see the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and the Blue Mosque from his table.  With a sweet, spicy Iki Bin  and the hot  liquid,  he felt like a king of the world.  He didn't have to do anything, and this realization comforted him.  Sure, he was slightly ruffled by all the weird people he had met–the two Texans, Petra, Mr. Fehr, Barish–but he was sporadically entering the "fifth zone", his designation for a pattern of thought which extended beyond desire, reasoning and decision.  Maybe he was touching that alternate reality he would read about in the Englishman's physics book.  Who could say?  He had not found his soul mate or seduced any European women.  Actually, he might judge his adventure a  failure.
It was always while smoking and having a beer or caffeine that he had these tenuous revelations–some new insights that entertained his yearnings.  But, then they disappeared, drifted away like the smoke.  A tight pain gripped his muscles and his heart pierced his chest like a hot knife.  A thousand worries crowded his brain, and he dropped into a wintry abyss.  Will called to the Universe, which he imagined spreading as a pure firmament far above the world and its hectic din of cultures.  Somewhere over that minaret lies a peaceful utopia, an eternal state where people can communicate clearly and never live in fear.
Presently, a laughing group of  people strolled into Will's view: a tall, redheaded women, a   serious-looking man, and a scrawny, pale, chap.
"Peter you're gross!  God, what an imagination you have!"  the tall woman said.
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