Aralık

It never crossed my mind that Ahmet would jump from that minaret. I didn’t think he had it in him. Over the year I’d spent with him I’d only seen what could be called intent in his eyes briefly, just once, toward the end of my time in eastern Turkey. He was a man of absence. If you grew comfortable with this fact he became your friend. I had no choice. I knew no one else in that town.

I met Ahmet in Iğdır. I had moved there from Gaziantep after a Foreign Service Officer found me a teaching position at Iğdır University. He was tall, and thin, a graduate student from Aralık, a village a few hours southeast of town. He wore white dress shirts that were always pressed and primly tucked into his slacks, billowing shirts that gave only the faintest hint of a body beneath. He was writing his thesis on some aspect of the province’s soil. He seemed more of an idea than a man.

Iğdır University was two years old and existed, more or less, on the fifth and sixth floors of an abandoned shopping complex in the center of town. The days were dusty and the sun hung as if on a rusty wire, moving across the sky at an interminable pace. Dust blanketed everything. The buildings were layered with it, as were the streets. I tasted it in the food. It made its way into the water, the air, even my mind, which makes me wonder if I am misremembering certain people, or places, or occurrences. When it rained the unpaved streets and empty lots turned to mud.

The rector of the university was a plump man who had spent four years studying in Texas. He had a dark mustache and thick eyebrows that rose and fell with the intonation of his hoarse voice. He seemed eager and incompetent. The day I arrived, after tea in his office, he passed me off to Ahmet, who took me to my university lodging, a decrepit öğretmenevi on the edge of town, a block away from the north-south highway that cut Iğdır in half and led to places like Tuzluca and Kars and Doğubeyazıt. From my window I could see the highway leading off into the distance, running parallel to the plateau that formed Ararat, which also ran north and south, as though everything in that part of the world ran north and south and there was no other choice, no other direction. At night the headlights of trucks beaded the dark road, their engines roaring as they zoomed in and out of town. Clusters of lights marking distant villages dotted the hills. I’d stand by the window, looking out at the desert and the highway and the wavering lights, fingering the American flag pin my father had given me the day I left Washington, almost two years before.

In the mornings Ahmet would come for me at the öğretmenevi. We walked everywhere. We would wander the streets and alleys, stopping at different teahouses, and eventually for börek or simit. Our conversations always started the same way. In each teahouse Ahmet would explain the specific process each owner used to make tea, and how it differed from the others, and how it was better or worse. Then he would talk about the Black Sea coast, how the closer you got to it the fresher the tea became. That would lead him to describe the hamsi from Trabzon and the mantı from Sinop. Then he would talk about his thesis and how when he was finished he wanted to move back to Poland, where the girl he had met during his Erasmus year lived. His tone always grew serious when he brought her up. He would speak about the emails she sent him, and sometimes even bring a copy, ask me to read it and tell him what I thought. I would tell him that I wasn’t good with women, but he would insist, slide the pages across the splintery table of whichever teahouse we were in. Her responses were vague and overly polite. It was immediately clear she was trying to distance herself from him. Each email surprised me—the many ways she had to say nothing, promise nothing. I tried to sound both uncertain and positive. We never made much progress.

After the fourth or fifth stop we would head across town to the rektörlük, where I taught the university’s agriculture professors. There was a fence around the building, and a security gate at its only entrance. Students stood around in clusters on the courtyard’s patchy grass. There was a gazebo and a pile of bricks and that was it.

At night I had trouble falling asleep. I would lie awake in the early morning hours terrified of the stillness before the call to prayer. Its warble seemed forever imminent. I would close my eyes and wait in dread for its first notes, unable to relax until it had passed. After it came I would fall asleep until my neighbor switched on the morning news, or whatever it was he watched at full volume, and the sound would thump through the walls. A little later Ahmet would come for me and we would start our routine. Whatever the cause, I couldn’t sleep. I had nightmares. My eyes started retreating into my skull.

One day Ahmet asked me what was wrong.

“I’m having trouble sleeping,” I said. “I miss home,” I added, after a moment.

“You miss home,” he said. His tone was flat, devoid of everything but the words themselves. I couldn’t tell if he was questioning me, mocking me, or even determining if and how he could help me. An impossible determination to make, yet somehow I felt it held the key to everything that followed.

“Would you like to come to Aralık?” he asked. “To see my home?”

I didn’t. It was far, most likely, and I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to sit in my room and imagine my impending return home. What my first meal would be, who I would visit.

“Sure,” I said.

We left that afternoon, in Ahmet’s rusted Iranian sedan. Halfway to Aralık the left front tire went flat. Ahmet and I got out to replace it. While we were changing it a man in a gray suit biked past us. I wondered where he was going. There didn’t seem to be a house around for miles. Eventually we fixed the wheel and continued on our way. When we were almost there it started to rain, a shower that smeared the layer of dust on the windshield, creating a grainy paste that was impossible to see through or clear with the wipers. Ahmet cranked his window down and stuck his head out and drove like that the rest of the way.

In the village there were cows in the street, and deep puddles in the potholes. At scattered tables in front of storefronts, and on rickety staircases leading to second floor rooms and sometimes to nowhere at all, men hunched on low stools around low tables, holding tea cups, handling prayer beads, watching the sporadic cars that came and went down the main street.

We pulled up to Ahmet’s home, a low cinderblock structure with a rusted metal roof. Ahmet told me we were even farther east than Iğdır. Right up against Armenia. He pointed down one end of the street, into the middle distance, past a stream and a clump of trees too sparse and scraggly to be a wood, and said it was just over there. That if there was time we would head through the trees and look at the line that separated the countries.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

He thought for a moment, nodded.

His mother was cooking when we walked in. She smiled at me and shook my hand slowly. I wondered if this was for me or if it was how she normally greeted guests. The floor was covered with rugs, and from where I stood in the front room I could see into the kitchen. She said something to Ahmet and he nodded.

“We will eat in thirty minutes,” he said.

He spoke to his mother, turned, and went out the door, motioning for me to follow. We walked through the yard, past a strutting rooster and out the front gate. Some children were playing soccer in the street. They paused to let us pass, watching us in silence. We crossed the main avenue and continued down into a ditch and over a crude bridge of stones across the stagnant water of the stream, which upon closer examination was really more of a canal, or maybe a drainage ditch. We wandered through the copse of trees and then up a hillock where ahead of us stood a rotting guard shack and some spindly posts linked by rusted razor wire. I had never seen a military front before and it looked just as barren as I had always imagined one would. There was a sign with a cartoonish picture of a uniformed soldier warning, in Turkish, not to approach any further. I asked Ahmet if there were landmines and he shook his head.

“It’s not that kind of border,” he said. “Besides, this is not yet it.”

In the distance we could see a guard tower and something glinting in the late afternoon sunlight that I imagined to be a tank, but was probably just a truck, or maybe a jeep. We stood for a moment in silence, looking off toward the east, toward the Armenian side. The land looked no different. A sluggish river winding through the cracked earth, a few low trees here and there, some bushes. Then Ahmet spoke.

“There,” he said. “Do you see that?” He was pointing off past the guard tower. I squinted and tried to follow the imaginary line that connected his finger to whatever it was he was signaling at, but it was hard to see, even though the sun was behind us.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There,” Ahmet said, still pointing.

And then I saw it, but only for the scattered cars parked beside it sparkling in the light. A church. Rounded domes, brown shingles, a burnt-red façade. I imagined all of this, of course. It was too far away to see any detail. Really, it could have been anything. But Ahmet told me it was a church. One of the most famous in Armenia, or oldest, or most important. We stood staring for a while. Then Ahmet said that dinner was probably ready, and we turned and retraced our path back toward the village.

We ate in near silence on the floor of the front room. Ahmet’s mother appeared only to bring more tavuk sote and lavaş or to clear away dishes. By the time we had eaten and had tea it was late. Ahmet rose and said it was probably best that we return. I thanked Ahmet’s mother and said goodbye. We walked outside and Ahmet abruptly stopped. He told me to wait, and disappeared inside. The village was silent, except for a dog barking in the distance. There was a full moon, or a near full moon. In its light Ararat was easy to find. A heavy presence on the horizon, reaching up past a house at the opposite end of the street from the path we had taken that afternoon. An enormous mound, all muscle and rock. There were no stars in the sky, a symptom of the smog that plagued all of the villages and towns in the east. Finally Ahmet reemerged. He apologized, and we walked to his car.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Then, about half an hour after we left his village, Ahmet started talking about his mother, and Iğdır, and the girl from Poland he had met, or was friends with, or had slept with.

“Between the border and the mountain there isn’t anywhere to go,” he said.

I nodded.

“Of course this isn’t true,” he said. “There are roads. An airport in Erzurum.”

“Yes,” I said. In that moment I was thinking of that airport, how soon I could make it there, where I could go.

“I would leave,” he said, as though guessing my thoughts. “But there is my mother.”

He didn’t need to tell me she was sick. I already knew. It was the smell of the house, as thickly settled as Iğdır’s dust. Ahmet removed a tape from his breast pocket and put it in the cassette player and turned up the volume. Through the scratchy speakers I heard a woman’s voice over a sparse beat.

“That’s her,” he said.

I didn’t understand.

“Ania. The girl from Poland.”

“Ah,” I said.

“She sings,” he said. “Sometimes she travels to sing. She nearly came to Istanbul last year. I told her if she did I would come see her.”

“That’s nice,” I said, staring out the window at the landscape blurring past. The horizon seemed to be glowing, almost imperceptibly, as if some object at the smudged meeting of land and sky were giving off a precious and delicate energy.

“When I was with her in Krakow we were inseparable,” Ahmet said. “We spent whole nights walking around the city. She told me everything about her life. Then the sun would come up and we would wander into one of the city’s cheap cafeterias. I think they were called milk bars. We would drink coffee and eat little pastries. She even took me to her hometown. I taught her brothers how to make gözleme.”

I tried to picture Ahmet and this girl, imagine his feeling toward her, his feeling toward his home, what it would be like to grow up here, grow old. I wondered if I could do it. One of the girls who taught English at the university was pretty. I imagined settling down with her, working at the university, maybe even starting my own school. I squeezed the flag pin in my pocket, felt the prick of its pointed edges on my fingertips.

The song ended and Ahmet removed the tape from the player and returned it to his breast pocket. The highway began to curve. Soon we would be approaching the outskirts of Iğdır. We passed a shuttered fruit stand, the charred remains of a house.

“Do you have a minute?” Ahmet asked. “I want to show you something.”

I shrugged, and immediately realized I should have been more affirmative. “Yes,” I said, a little too forcefully.

He pulled off the highway and onto a dirt track. We rumbled for a few minutes, bouncing up and down on the car’s worn suspension as we rolled over the pockmarked route. We crested a slight rise and Ahmet pulled to a stop. He turned off the car and got out. I followed. The moonlight seemed weaker here, as though the plateau had taken it and scattered it, dispersed it in ever-decreasing amounts until its effect was negligible. It was almost impossible to see more than a step ahead. I felt as though we were being watched, then felt immediately embarrassed for thinking this. Ahmet led the way with a sureness that made me certain he had done this many times.

We walked beside a row of bare trees and then I glimpsed what I presumed to be our destination, its angular shape almost indistinguishable from the pitch black night surrounding it, shadow upon shadow. The outline of its lone minaret pierced the emptiness.

The mosque’s walls were unpainted cinderblock. It was clear that the building had been abandoned while still under construction. Many of the mosques in town were like this: suspended in some indeterminate state. Still, the structure had a charge to it.

We entered through the gap where the door should have been. The floor was packed dirt. A pile of smashed wooden crates in one corner, a mound of trash in another, ashes and charred wood scattered in a loose, hurried pattern. It looked hastily abandoned. I wanted to ask Ahmet why we were here, but my voice felt stuck, as though it had dried in my throat. I tried to cough and something hoarse and not quite human came out.

“Come,” Ahmet said, and led me through the vacant space. I could not see the doorway or the crude cement steps spiraling upward into the emptiness until we were upon them. The minaret. Ahmet started up its staircase.

“Come,” he said again, as though chanting. The steps were uneven. I had to feel my way against the wall as I climbed. At any moment I thought the wall I was pressing against would give out, and I would fall toward the earth in an avalanche of cinderblock and mortar.

We emerged from a small doorway onto a crude crow’s nest of cement and wood planking about forty feet above the ground.

“This is a very special place,” Ahmet said. He spoke staring straight ahead, as though addressing someone out in the darkness, or maybe someone in his mind. He raised his hand slowly, as if cupping something, then extended his finger and pointed off at the horizon, alive with the distant, wavering lights of Armenia’s capital.

We stood for a moment in silence. Then Ahmet spoke.

“When my mother can live without my help I’ll return for Ania,” he said.

I knew Ahmet would never leave, that his mother would die soon, and that Ania would exist, for the rest of his life, in the sad scratch of a cassette and the distant glow of a city across a closed border. At the time, I thought he couldn’t see this, and that's what gave him such power. His oblivion, willful or otherwise, at the sad details of his life, looking out across the border at the lights of a city a world away. A city only he could see.

“You are leaving soon?” he asked, turning to me.

I nodded.

“When?” he asked.

“When the semester ends.”

“You miss home,” he said.

I nodded.

“I would also leave,” he said.

I searched for something to say.

“I know,” Ahmet said. He smiled.

“Here,” I said, reaching into my pocket for the pin. “Take this.”

It was a pathetic gesture. I knew it as soon as I spoke, but it was too late to stop.

Ahmet took the pin, turned it in his fingers. He nodded, whether in acknowledgement of the gift, or in resignation that after all he’d shared with me this trinket was what I chose to give him. What he said next I’ve been turning in my head ever since.

“Sometimes, up here, I feel as though that is not Yerevan, that this is not Turkey. That if I jump I will not fall,” he said. “That I will just . . .” and he trailed off, made a motion suggesting he would just float away, or maybe that he couldn’t find the right words in English, or even that the right words didn’t exist.

“Maybe I will leave soon, too,” he said, after a long silence. He pinned the flag to his shirt. We turned and descended the spiraling stairs.