Behind him on the screen is his mother’s tidy apartment, which is where he stays. He says “Finally, Defne”—in Turkish I’m Defne—and I laboriously flip a giant rusty lever in my brain to speak Turkish again and I say “Look Honey it’s your baba look look” and she looks at me with some suspicion to hear the strange words and she looks at him and there is a pause and I am holding my breath and thinking please don’t cry please don’t squirm please don’t hide but she smiles and stretches out her arms to him and he says “My cub, my darling, do you miss your daddy,” and they coo back and forth at each other which puts off the moment when I have to apologize for running away and Honey touches the screen and says “Hi! Hi! Hi!” and I say “Say merhaba to your baba” and then my mother-in-law Ayşe is in the frame boxing Engin out entirely and there is a torrent of affectionate pitter-patter for Honey and it fills Sal’s coffee shop and I look around at the proprietress and the teens and the old woman but nobody seems to care very much. Ayşe brushes away a tear and blows a kiss to me and says “Come to us my love, we miss you,” and then she recedes and Engin lights a cigarette—it seems we’re both smoking—and addresses himself to me and Honey stares rapt at the screen. “Don’t smoke in front of the baby, yaa,” I tell him, I mean come on, and he stubs it out with a rueful look and I feel guilty and smile and say “How was Belgrade,” a sally whose fundamental insincerity he perceives and brushes off accordingly.
“Why are you in the steppe? Don’t you have work?”
Although I have had plenty of time to ponder this I don’t have an answer for myself let alone a soothing lie for Engin, which would be a reason of some kind, any kind, and not just a sudden urge for flight.
“Things were, ahh, not busy at work,” I say, in Turkish, always in Turkish, I loved Turkish before I loved Engin. “And I thought I haven’t been up to the house for a while and I should go look at it.” My grammar is distressingly lumpy. “Okay,” says Engin in English, but I can tell he thinks it’s weird, it is on its face weird, because had I been planning some recon mission I would have let him know in advance.
“Are you okay?” he asks. I begin to cry so suddenly and so copiously it’s not a taktik or a refleks but more that my tears are a well-trained army and always mustered ready to unleash hell.
“My love, my soul, don’t cry.” Turkish has lots of endearments freely deployed. “Come on, why are you crying?”
I don’t want to make him feel bad by saying I am crying because I am here and I am here because you went to complete a certificate course on postproduction in Istanbul and when you came back halfway through to see us surrendered your goddamn green card to DHS under pressure and under false pretenses that contravene established immigration practice and U.S. law and are undoubtedly rooted in xenophobia not to say Islamophobia, and because you were then sent back to Istanbul on the next flight at our expense rather than spending three desperately needed weeks with your wife and child, and because your second application submitted through the even more arcane National Visa Center for overseas consular processing is stuck in limbo due to what I learned after twenty-six nonconsecutive hours of waiting on the phone and the eventual expenditure of a thousand more dollars may in fact be a “click-of-the-mouse error”—theirs—and which we have already paid an attorney to ameliorate and resubmit through the correct channels and will presumably have to pay more to stay on top of until it is seen through and I am alone with our child whose first steps and first words you are missing and I sometimes fantasize about meeting you at the airport with her and kissing you passionately and then throttling you until you die, so I just say “I’m feeling sad,” which is also true.
Honey twists around, bored, with her last bit of banana in one hand, and gives my descending bun a yank. Engin smiles at her while somehow simultaneously frowning at me. She finishes the banana and starts putting her fingers on the screen of the Institute’s computer and I am still crying. The teens in the corner are openly staring. “How was Belgrade?” I manage to get out again. “Nice, actually,” he says, joining the folie à deux of normalcy. “Really nice. We should live there.” We are always opining about places we should live, which are always somewhere else than the place where either of us is living. “Tolga’s thing is shit, though—really disorganized” but now I am crying again and unable to take in Tolga and his endless dubious multipronged film and web marketing schemes. Engin in his heart of hearts wants to be a video artist—make outlandish Björk videos and such—but to make money he signs on to shoot Tolga’s promotional videos for private schools and Eastern European banking concerns instead.
“Tell her to bring my granddaughter and come here,” his mother hollers from the kitchen. Engin smiles wanly and shrugs and says “You know you can come here” and I say “Do you want me to come there” and he says “Well you were staying there because you have a good job but if you are not going to work then I don’t understand why you wouldn’t come here” and I realize this probably cost him something to say because he thinks Hugo and Meredith are grifters but he knows also that work is important and that his work is feast or famine and not ideal for the maintenance of a family unit and then he says “As far as I know we hadn’t planned for you to live… there,” and he gestures at Sal’s behind me and I nod. “I know,” I say. “I thought maybe I’d go through some of my mom’s stuff in the garage to see what I can sell.” “By yourself?” and that leads us back to the fucking green card and I say “I’ll leave the heavy stuff for when you come” and then I just feel so done and tired of talking I take two deep breaths and say “Honey has to have her nap” and “Really I’m fine, just feeling down” (Moralim bozuk, my morale is spoilt) and “I’ll go back to work, I promise” and “Give your mother a kiss from me” and to Honey I say “Say bye-bye to your baba, give your baba a kiss,” and she finally brings the palm of her hand to her mouth and lowers it toward the screen extravagantly open and proud of herself and I blow a kiss too and shut the laptop more abruptly than I intend.
I wipe my eyes and blow my nose on Honey’s bib. I open the laptop again. I e-mail Meredith and Hugo to say that I am still sick. I message the daycare to say that Honey is sick. I need a treat of some kind and when a suitable interval has passed and I stop sniffling I hoist up Honey and leave our stuff at the table and buy a rice crispy thing from the basket next to the cash register. I wonder if the proprietor is going to ask whether she needs to call somebody but she just says “What language was that?” “Turkish,” I say. “My husband’s Turkish.” I never have any idea what that will mean to anyone.
“Oh, my son used to live over there,” she surprises the hell out of me by saying.
“Whaddayacallit, Injik, when he was in the air force.” İncirlik, she means.
“Oh wow,” I say. “Did he like it?”
“He loved it. Said it was just beautiful. Nicest people in the world.” Everyone seems to agree on this point. “Turkish hospitality is famous,” I say stupidly, aware of the clammy puff of my face and the crying hives and the runnels left by tears in my poorly moisturized undereyes. “Sorry,” I gesture to my face and smile ruefully. “It’s just hard to be apart sometimes. Gotta get him back here.”
“What are you doing all the way up in Altavista?” She has an incredibly kindly look on her face, a narrow tanned white face with bifocals on an upturned nose and I just want to tell her everything.