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Wasn’t that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the “reality” that happened elsewhere?
I had previously been looking down on the people who were already panicked about the summer, frantically applying to work at Merrill Lynch or to build houses in Tanzania. I now realized that I had been wrong: I had to start panicking, too. Somehow, I had to get someone to pay for me to leave the country.
What was the relationship between leaving the country, ruining people, falling in love, and havin...
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At first, it seemed unfair to try to gain a financial advantage from being “a woman,” when things were so much easier for me than they had been for my mother and aunts. On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that literally nothing was fair.
hahahahaha
He moved his hand farther down. “We’ll take it very slowly.” And then it was like slipping back into the water again after lying on hot sand, and knowing you were going to go back and forth like that, between the beach and the sea, until the sun burned up and sank into the water.
How close I felt to him, and I felt him feel it, too, and I thought: Would it have killed him to have coffee first? We went through the bizarre ordeal of climbing onto his bed. I understood the point of faking an orgasm. Clearly, he wasn’t going to stop what he was doing until something changed.
The preferred state was for me not to be fascinated. It was for me not to be thinking about the condom factory, wondering why they called it Trojan when the Trojan horse was a story about permeability, about how the Greeks swarmed out and foiled the Trojans, who had believed themselves to be protected—and in the moment that he pushed me onto my back I realized, with elation, that I could prefer that state, too, that I didn’t need to be thinking about those things.
It went on like that all day: the previous night replaying over and over, seeming to confer a kind of weighted legitimacy onto all the routine, boring parts of the day, making me feel like I was in a movie.
Sex wornholing! Yeah gal
In general, he looked down on women, and thought of them as “the lower race,” even though he always needed to have one of them around and was always having affairs with them and then forgetting about them.
Elsa stayed one night with me, until Riley’s glares, in combination with the bouquet of cat effluvia and sandalwood, drove her to Lakshmi’s.
Selin, Sometimes I don’t understand you at all. Why can’t you do anything like a normal person? When I see how you behave it makes me feel quite helpless. I used to wonder this last year: how could you be so graceful in writing and so clumsy in life?
He must be sacrificed
Was it possible that was why I had written it—to hurt him? As I had been hurt, and hurt, and hurt, for two hours, on the skull pillow and on the desk?
So maybe Ivan was the guy who didn’t want to marry you, whom you had to trick every day for the rest of your life.
Yes he js run
I hadn’t had a clear mental picture of Juho’s new girlfriend, Lara, and realized that I had almost expected her to look blurry. Of course, she turned out to have a normal level of material reality, with gray eyes, dimples, and tangled-looking hair that was gold and brown mixed together. She was wearing ill-cut boxy overalls that somehow managed to look both cool and flattering.
The second most striking thing about Lara, after her beauty, was her eagerness to be liked: not the overeagerness that drove a person away, but a radiant, Bambi-like hope, that seemed, in this instance, to be specially directed at me—as if I were a particular friend of Juho’s whom she needed to love her. (So, she loved Juho.)
Such good characterization
He said he would vouch for me to the geneticists, and would tell them I wasn’t an axe murderer. (How could he know that?)
and called themselves “expats.” (Were my parents expats? Somehow, it felt like only British and Australian people were expats, just like only Russian and Polish nobles were émigrés.)
My mother offered me Valium, telling me not to put it in my novel.
And I felt pleasantly disinterested to say, about the profiteroles, “Why don’t you have one,” since I didn’t particularly like them myself. My indifference to cream and puff pastry was spoken of admiringly by my mother and aunts. But my mother almost never did order profiteroles.
Sme girl, eclairs
The best part of the Hittite Museum was when my mother read from the stone tablets with hieroglyphs. One was about a goat who lost his clothes, and took a vest from somebody’s clothesline. Another involved a bird who was studying to be a plumber. On some level, I knew that my mother was inventing the stories, and not reading them, but on another level—when she pointed out the glyphs of the Two Crossed Monkey Wrenches and the Broken Faucet—I knew she was reading them.
When we came to another tablet on the other side of the hall, by which time I had all but forgotten the goat, my mother said, thoughtfully: “Ah, of course—this one is about the goat’s neighbor.”
This is how elif baufman writes!!!
She said that children were people, whose dignity and privacy were worthy of respect. She was the only person I had ever met or heard of who thought or said anything like that.
My grandmother often spoke in proverbs that I didn’t understand. I was used to tuning them out. Now it occurred to me that, if this had been a “foreign” country—if it had been Russia—I would have been trying to learn the proverbs. I started writing them down. Some featured my old friend, the fakir. “The fakir chicken lays eggs one at a time”: that was about not being in a hurry, and seemed somehow directed at me. Another saying, “The egg didn’t like its shell,” was used for people who tried to distance themselves from where they came from, or who disrespected their parents.
A daunting thought: How would I eventually root out from my mind all the beliefs that I hated?
I knew from music theory class that, when Middle Eastern music sounded like wailing, or like it was out of tune, it was because our ears—my ears—had been desensitized by the conventions of Western music. The Middle Eastern scale had twenty-four tones per octave and was actually more true and real than the twelve-tone version that European people had invented to make a piano work. But I still didn’t like to listen to more than one or two Sezen Aksu songs in a row.
At some point, he asked what I was studying, and when I said Russian literature, he almost had a heart attack. I kept forgetting that Turkish army people were still mad about … the Crimean War?
Whereas a nice, well-brought-up lady”—he inclined his head deferentially—“can stay ten years in a room and it looks exactly the same as when she came there! The property value doesn’t change at all!” I felt relieved, because I was sure I would manage not to break the windows, and it was pleasant to receive what was clearly intended as a compliment. At the same time, there was something disquieting in the image of a well-brought-up lady staying ten years in a room without leaving a visible trace.
“A researcher!” Velih said, while we waited for the messengers. “How nice.” “You and I should do some research one of these days,” Mesut told him. “Very true. You and I live here all our lives and don’t do research. Then from America they come and research all kinds of things.” “Even in Ahmetpaşa, they research something.” “And rightly. Isn’t there something to be researched, in every corner of God’s creation? Isn’t that what you’ve found, miss, in your travels?”
His heartbeat: was I feeling it or hearing it? In Turkish, you could “hear” a smell. Why did aftershave always feel like it was hacking your brain? “What
The moments, isolated at first, when I started to feel like I understood it—like I understood why it was desirable, how to appreciate it, and how to draw it out—reminded me of the first time I managed to follow a Shakespeare play, and understood not only what all those people were talking about, but why their mode of speech was considered admirable. How all the things that went unspoken in a real conversation—because they were secret, or because nobody had realized them, or put them into words—had been translated into a measured multi-syllabic torrent that unfurled so ceaselessly from the
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Afterward, when Mesut had gone into that weird trance, I wondered if I should get up and go to the bathroom and try to do it by myself in peace. But it always felt like more hassle than it was worth.
How present and alive he was, how strong and substantial. Yet this was itself a form of limitation. An inextricable aspect of his strength and solidity was that he existed, not everywhere, but in a particular place. Unlike my feelings, which were dimensionless and followed me wherever I went, he was person-sized and staying here.
I felt just like I had for the whole fall. I couldn’t imagine how I had lived like that. At the same time, I felt lucky to feel it again—to be here again. It was as if some portal had swung open. Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility. This seemed to prove the material reality of thoughts and feelings.
Mesut gave me a gift-wrapped packet and said to open it later, and touched my face to brush away a tear, and it was unbearable that he was being so kind, and that this moment was already compromised by being the last one, and presenting so few possibilities.
and the first song was called “This Girl Will Be the Death of Me.”
Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me—nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?
Oh selin :'''''(
The taxi driver who took me to the old harbor told me the story of his life, and started to cry.
At Let’s Go, the fact that you couldn’t travel between North and South Cyprus was spoken of with humor. It was part of the aura of provincial quaintness that surrounded so many of other countries’ problems, especially those related to “ancient ethnic conflicts.” America’s position, moderating between these groups of unreasonable people, was inherently comical. Like: the Turks and the Greeks “hated” each other, yet both were NATO allies. What a funny, delicate position for America!
After Antakya, which turned out to be the same thing as Antioch,
I eventually gave up trying to explain anything to anyone. It did no good. Everyone was too afraid.
But Let’s Go acted like not paying for things wasn’t just advantageous, but noble. Conversely, to “pay the tourist price” wasn’t just to lose money, but to capitulate to panderers: to fail to support the truly deserving and authentic. The way you supported the deserving and authentic was apparently by paying them less.
How much of not wanting to be “a tourist” came down to stinginess?
It made me remember the last chapter of Either/Or: “The Edifying in the Thought That Against God We Are Always in the Wrong.” In relation to travel, too, I felt, we were always in the wrong.
It was easier, in some ways, to have a guy with you. Interactions with other people tended to go more smoothly. And yet, nearly everything the guy himself said was insane. We drank wine, smoked cigarettes, and had screaming arguments in the street. It felt somehow important and universal to be arguing in such a way with a man.
Finally, to shut him up, I said we could do anal sex. He used sunscreen as lubricant. When I told him it burned, he almost died laughing. He didn’t want to stop, but then I kicked him.
cRaZY PARA
I had always thought of myself as someone who didn’t judge people for dressing informally. And yet—how could those people wallow like that, in shorts, reading The Alchemist?
HAHAHAHAGAA
The work of art she was creating was her own character: how she acted, how she was, how other people saw her. From this perspective, the aesthetic wasn’t really the opposite of the ethical. The way Isabel wanted to be, and act, and seem, was generous and brave. Her main goal was to avoid meanness, jealousy, and cruelty—not because God said they weren’t permitted, but because who even wanted to be like that?
Isabel, then, was like Shahrazade, with whom I had always identified, and who used stories to postpone the moment of death. (Wasn’t that what I had done, when I had written to Ivan: kept myself alive for another day?)
And so one had always to be thinking. “One must always be thinking,” Isabel told Ralph. “I am not sure it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless.” And Ralph replied: “For weak people I have no doubt it’s a greater happiness.” It was a confirmation of my own idea of strength—of my determination to be strong.
Isabel’s values made sense to me. She wasn’t interested in ruining destitute women, or electroplating a tortoise. She wanted to fathom the human condition. She valued reading, travel, and relationships with radically different people: the kinds of people who didn’t necessarily get the point of each other.
