“What are you doing here?” she said.
“I’ve come to steal you.”
“As if I were a bus? Go home. You’re drunk.”
I wasn’t drunk. It had been just a tiny glass. She was no bus, I said, and I asked her to help me up.
“Three weeks,” she said. “Not once did you come to seek me out. To see if I was still alive.”
“Damn it, Elif. I mean it.”
But did I really? I wasn’t sure and she could sense that.
“Go home, American. Get a shave. Take a shower. Sober up.”
The hell I would. I spoke with resolution, hoping that a firmness of the voice would convince not just Elif, but also me — this was no joke. It only seemed to be.
But even when I told her that I wasn’t leaving I could see: for her, I’d left already.
“Marry me!” I said in desperation. My voice dipped, so I repeated, I shouted it again.
“Do you mean it?” she said, and I said, yes I meant it, I meant it with all my heart.
“You are a cruel man,” she said. “It’s all a game to you. Go home.”
TWO
I CRIED A GREAT DEAL that night. I knew tears did not become a real man, but I wasn’t a real man after all. I knew I was upsetting Grandpa, but honestly I couldn’t help it. Over and over, I kept reliving the humiliation under Elif’s window. Going there to steal her, as if she were the village bus. Then asking her to be my wife.
At last, unable to sleep, I went out to splash some water on my eyes. The sun was still behind the mountain; a mist was rolling through the yard. And by the well, Elif was waiting. She cradled a rucksack in her lap and on her face her father’s slap still burned scarlet. She didn’t wear a headscarf.
“Did you mean it?” she asked so quietly I thought I had imagined it. And when she said it, all doubt, embarrassment, and fear dissolved before the simple truth.
I held her tightly and she gasped for air.
“Let go, you loon!”
And then she kissed me. For the first time a real kiss. Not a stolen one, not one of demonstration before her father or the world. I kissed her back. I felt so dizzy, so weak with joy, I filled the bucket from the well and dumped it on my head. To wash the night away. To start anew. I splashed a bucket on her head. Her short hair was dripping rivers, there in the courtyard by the well.
“You idiot,” she cried. But she was laughing.
It was then that I heard Grandpa call me from the terrace. Saint Kosta clacked his bill. What room was there for words, I asked them, for reasons and for explanations? What time was there to waste with plans? Wasn’t it obvious to all who cared to see?
Elif and I were getting married.
THREE
WE GOT ENGAGED in the yard that morning, Grandpa and Saint Kosta standing witness. I filled a gourd with well water and brought it to Elif’s lips so she might drink. She held the gourd to mine so I might drink. I broke a piece of bread and fed her; she broke a piece and fed me. We were making it all up, of course. A silly ritual to seal a promise that was anything but silly. We gave bread to Grandpa, then to the stork. Elif cried and laughed, and so did I. Grandpa kissed us on the forehead.
I said, “Let’s go. This very minute. We’ll sign in the Civil Office in Burgas.”
She shook her head. “I can’t get married as I am. I want to be another girl. You understand? A brand-new girl.”
At first the bus driver refused to take us. Without a word, we climbed inside the bus and left him with the ticket money. We sat together holding hands. Every now and then, I lifted hers and kissed it. Every now and then, she leaned her face on my shoulder. We watched the Strandja out the window — the trees astir with morning wind, the skies perfectly clear. And in the glass our own image watched us back, ghostly thin, transparent, foreign. It was as if some other boy, some other girl were holding hands, floating across the world with each turn of the bus. Now on a distant slope, now in a treetop, now up in a corner of the sky, the boy and the girl sat together, beautiful, serene.
“Look at them,” I told Elif.
“That’s us,” she said, and kissed me.
By noon we were in Burgas. Seeing the courthouse crowded as it was gave me a proper fright. The noise and stench of human bodies turned my head. I’d grown unaccustomed to their presence. But wherever we went, the crowd parted at our feet; when we sat down on a bench to wait our turn, the others waiting scattered.
“You look like a mountain rebel, a haidut,” Elif said, and tugged on a tress of my oily hair. “And smell like one.” And I suppose I did, and was.
At last, it was our turn to stand at the counter.
“I want to change my name,” Elif said to the clerk who hid behind it. The woman nodded lightly. Her glasses slid down to the tip of her pointy nose so she could have a better look — first at Elif and then at me.
“What’s wrong with your current name?” she said.
“I no longer like it.”
“You need a better reason.”
“I have a hundred better reasons. My father—”
“Poor child,” the woman said, and slid a stack of papers across the counter. “I can’t afford to listen to a hundred reasons.” She tapped the papers with a nail, the red polish of which had all but flaked away. “Write them down. Let the court decide.”
We took the papers to the side. A long time Elif chewed on the black pen. A few times she began to write, only to scratch it all away.
“Don’t think too much,” I told her. “The first thing that comes to your mind — write that.”
I’m tired of my Turkish name, she wrote. I’m tired of people calling me kaduna. Of my professors grading my exams more harshly. I’m tired of wearing headscarves and going to the mosque, of my father treating me as though I were a stock animal, like a sheep, or maybe a goat. I am a woman. My own. I was born in Bulgaria and I want a name to prove it.
“Elena,” she said to herself, and turned to me. “You like it?”
But before I could answer, she was already writing on the form.
We asked the clerk how long until a decision. She took the forms with a disgusted laugh. We may as well have asked her for the winning numbers to the lotto.
“It will be ready when it is,” she said, and waved us off the line.
FOUR
“LOOK HERE,” I told Elif outside the courthouse, and showed her what Grandpa had given me that morning. One whole pension. An engagement gift. “Look here,” she said, and took the roll her mother had given her in secret — a year’s worth of savings.
“We shouldn’t spend it all,” I said.
“It would be very stupid if we did.”
To save money we bought a pair of scissors. But it didn’t feel right, her cutting my hair on a bench in the park. “Listen,” I told her. “We’re saving on a barber. How expensive could it be, really, to find a more secluded place?”
So we found a hotel and rented a room, a first time for Elif. The floor, the curtains, the wallpaper — everything stank of bleach and cigarettes. The TV refused to work, but there was an AC unit and that’s what got Elif excited. She turned it all the way up and stood underneath the icy stream. I hugged her and, eyes closed, listened to the buzz of the AC, to her breathing, which grew sharper, more intense. It was a rush to feel her skin break out in goose bumps, to feel her shiver in my arms.
“You smell like feet,” she cried, and broke loose from my grip.
She cut my hair in the bathroom and laughed a great deal in the end, though I didn’t think the result was that bad or funny. When I stepped out of the shower, she threw a bag of clothes at my chest. She’d gone out shopping: a new T-shirt, pants, and flip-flops.