Many Worlds
Defne and Mete were at the Moda promenade when they saw their old friend. It was so strange to run into him there that they didn’t immediately recognize him. They were with other people, about to find a bar where they could watch the Euro Cup semifinal.
It was their first summer in Istanbul since they’d moved back the previous year. They’d gone to the waterfront in the late afternoon with Defne’s cousin Sinan, who had invited some of his friends, and the friends had brought along others. Soon, the group had taken up most of the grassy stretch behind the walkway, their beer cans, bags of chips, and pouches of tobacco scattered all around. A conservative-looking man had said something disparaging in their direction as he passed. “All right, uncle, you go on home now,” Sinan shouted at his back, much to Defne and Mete’s shock—both of them were still far too polite, as if they were visitors. But, instead of getting into a fight, the man simply continued walking. At one point, after the group had got flatbreads from a nearby bakery and more beer, someone suggested playing a game, and Mete downloaded Taboo on his phone; by the end of all the guessing, they had the feeling of having completely bonded, just as they used to at the parties of their youth.
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This was one reason that Defne and Mete had wanted to move back—for their families, of course, but also for the sake of a community that seemed more robust, far-reaching. Already, they’d met many new people; they could show up at any place in Cihangir and run into someone they knew. It was still the good times. Turks they’d known in the U.S. were also returning, with something like pride—as if they had chosen a noble path—though it was also true that many of them were from well-off families and were coming back for what looked like a prolonged holiday. Later, many of those acquaintances would leave again, some through their jobs, others by making investments in European countries which secured them citizenship.
For half a decade, Defne and Mete had lived in and around San Francisco. It was a slight embarrassment to both of them that they’d met at a Turkish Society fund-raiser. They detested such events—the organized camaraderie, the explicit homesickness. They were both doctoral students in social sciences; they’d read far too much theory to be earnest about such things. They had mostly untangled the dogmas of their national education, and that meant doing away with any sentimental nationalism as well. But it was a fact that they were lonely—the researchers in their departments were engrossed in their own lives, and the city was impenetrable, intoxicated with its style. And so, whatever their misgivings, they had turned up at the event to be close to their countrymen.
They’d stood next to each other during the welcome speech. Mete caught a sarcastic look on Defne’s face and leaned in to follow up with a joke. During dinner, they realized that they had both grown up in Etiler and that they had attended sister high schools. But they were careful not to make too much of these coincidences—they resisted nostalgia. Anyway, they both knew that these were not really coincidences at all but, rather, the rigid order of the world. Everyone from Turkey who ended up at a graduate school in the U.S. was bound to have attended one of four schools; it wasn’t impossible that their families were acquainted. This, too, was something of an embarrassment, as if it proved that they hadn’t ventured very far. But it was their cautious attitude that warmed them to each other, a sign that they were aligned in deeper ways than mere geography.
There was a lot of food left over from the picnic, and Defne gathered everything in a bag to give to a homeless person, though there were not so many here, unlike in San Francisco. Besides, she was not entirely sure whether such a gesture was appropriate. But it was perfectly good food; it would be a shame to throw it away. Soon, she saw a man approaching her on the boardwalk, with many bags and many layers of clothes. She hastened toward him, an arm outstretched with the leftovers. The man lifted a hand, as if he were greeting her. Then he stopped and spoke.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s you.”
Her first thought was that the man was deranged. It was not so much his words but the calm look on his face, as if he were talking to someone in a dream. She had an instinct to turn away, but then the face of the stranger shifted.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, wow. Aleksi.”
Still, she could not shake off the bizarreness of the situation. More than the fact of seeing him after such a long time, it was the way he had spoken, as if he had known that she would be there.
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“What’re you doing here?” she asked.
From the corner of her eye, she could see the rest of the group waiting for her. One of them said something to Mete, who started walking quickly toward them. He must have thought she was being held up by a homeless man, she realized, and he was coming to rescue her.
“Mete,” she shouted preëmptively. “Look who I just found.”
Aleksi raised his arm once again in greeting.
Defne saw the look of bewilderment on Mete’s face, though he quickly composed himself.
“Hey, man,” he said. “What the hell.”
“I was wondering if I’d see you,” Aleksi said, maintaining that air of calmness, almost foreknowledge.
The three of them stood in silence, trying to determine an appropriate next step.
“Do you want to come watch the game?” Mete asked after a moment. “We’re with some people.”
“Sure,” Aleksi said. “Who’s playing?”
This was a surprise. Aleksi had always been more informed about football than any Turk. Back in San Francisco, he would get up in the middle of the night to watch European games, often persuading Mete to do the same.
The group looked at them a bit quizzically when they introduced Aleksi as an old friend from California. Defne thought about her first impression, when she’d seen Aleksi walking toward her. His clothes were torn, unwashed. His hair had grown long, though not in any groomed or deliberate style. His skin was thick, like that of sailors or farmers, so tanned it looked dirty. But, more than this, it was his tranquillity that made him appear different, as if he were looking at them from another plane. Defne couldn’t recall whether he had always been like this, or whether he had indeed changed considerably.
Defne and Mete had decided to move in together a few months after the fund-raiser. They were old enough to skip a prolonged courtship; they’d known from the very beginning that they were perfectly harmonious. They had no need to play games or tease things out. They were excited about getting a place of their own, putting up bookshelves, cooking meals, reading and writing together. But it was tricky to leave their separate tiny studios, which had been so difficult to find in the first place—the city and all its surrounding towns were expensive beyond belief.
Quickly, they’d realized that there was nothing they could afford for just the two of them, so they began to look for shared houses, with some resignation. Even then, the options were few. They were about to settle for a dingy carpeted apartment with depressingly civilized house rules when they saw an ad for a room in a condo behind the Menlo Park train station. They were the first to arrive for the viewing; they wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise—what was on offer was too good to be true. The previous tenant, Amal, had been a Middle East scholar who’d moved to Lebanon for research. Defne knew her peripherally, because their areas overlapped. The remaining occupant, Aleksi, talked about her at some length—the little-known Sufi order that she was studying, how she would read every morning under a tree, her eclectic taste in music—as if trying to initiate them into her cult. Defne and Mete had the feeling that they had to live up to this woman their prospective housemate held in such esteem. Perhaps this was the reason they were so friendly with Aleksi from the outset, trying to prove themselves.
Aleksi had lived in the condo for several years, though the place was mostly empty. There were no chairs or curtains, nothing in the living room on which to place a mug. Still, it wasn’t at all gloomy, like the other places they’d looked at. The few items of pottery in the kitchen cupboards were handmade. A wooden dining table had been painted white. When they came for the viewing there was a jar of daffodils on it, although it did not seem that Aleksi was precious about any of this; he seemed simply to have a natural sense of order and beauty.
Most of the furniture that had once been there had belonged to Amal, they found out, and she’d put it all in storage when she’d left for Lebanon.
“Isn’t that weird?” Defne said to Mete some weeks later at IKEA, after they had moved in. “Why not just let him keep it until she’s back?” She was already protective of their housemate, and suspicious of this other woman.
Aleksi said he would split the cost of anything they bought, but he couldn’t come with them—it was his shift that afternoon at the bookstore where he worked. He said he trusted them with whatever they decided to buy, which endeared him to them even more. He’d cooked dinner for them their first night there; he’d said to help themselves to anything in the fridge. Defne and Mete couldn’t help but remark that Aleksi was just like a Turk, even though he had grown up in California. They’d never had such a friendship in their years in the U.S., though perhaps this was because they had been so focussed on their studies, on figuring things out.
Aleksi had been a graduate student in philosophy, but he had taken a leave of absence the previous year and started working at the bookstore down the street. He wasn’t clear about his reasons for leaving school. He had obviously been very passionate about his area of study—their late-night conversations often turned to philosophy, particularly the question of subjective experience. If one could learn every possible property of a bat, the famous inquiry went, would one know what it felt like to be one? Aleksi was good at providing the various sides of an argument in order to ground them in the debate, though he would quickly skip ahead to his own convictions, which seemed untethered from academic frameworks. He’d been disillusioned by academia, he told them, but he never quite explained what, exactly, this disillusionment amounted to. Defne and Mete were aware of the problems, of course—the competition and inflated egos. In principle, they were all for Aleksi pursuing this other sort of life. He often commented on the fact that his work brought him face to face with “real” people, rather than the strange, inbred species that populated higher education. Still, Mete and Defne thought it would be best for Aleksi to get back to his doctorate. They were academics through and through; they could not envision another way with which to come to terms with the world.
It had nonetheless been a shock for them when they started teaching in Istanbul. They were so used to the comforts of their graduate programs—the resources, the luxury to explore in a pure intellectual vacuum, detached from practical worries—that the everyday concerns of Turkish academia, its lack of funding and its political precarity, seemed an affront. Their colleagues were either exhausted or jaded; they appeared more concerned with getting through each day than with their research. Perhaps this was how it was everywhere—the longer one stuck around, steeped in hierarchies, the less noble the pursuit of knowledge became. Six months after they’d moved back, Defne was offered a position at a development agency. Of course she’d had some misgivings; the whole point of her training was to investigate without agenda, but she’d had so little time to do that at the university. And the salary was a relief. It was one thing to be graduate students in a house share and another to adapt to adult life in a metropolis. Defne hoped that Mete might consider a similar change—it saddened her to see how much he was struggling with the bureaucracy, how ardently he fought for his students and for grants, with so little in return.
On their way to the bar, one of their group stopped to buy an ice cream, and everyone else decided to get one, too. The historic Ali Usta shop was a little farther down the street, but this was a new Italian place, with many unusual choices and toppings. The city had changed so much in the years they’d been abroad; it was a little disappointing that it now had all the same kinds of trendy businesses as San Francisco. While they were standing in line, Defne’s cousin, Sinan, asked how the three of them knew one another.
“We lived together,” Defne said. “We must’ve told you about Aleksi.”
“We had the best time,” Mete added. He was going to say something more but checked himself.
“And what’re you doing in Istanbul?” Sinan asked Aleksi.
“Nothing much,” Aleksi said. “I’m sort of wandering around.” He explained that he had been to India, Jordan, and Lebanon on this same trip.
“Oh,” Defne said. “Did you see . . . what was her name? The old roommate. The one who took all the furniture.”
It was a little awkward to talk in the register of their old friendship, though just as awkward not to.
“Amal,” Aleksi said. “I saw her in Beirut, but it was brief.”
“Did she rob you of any belongings?” Mete asked.
“Grand theft furniture,” Defne jumped in. It was a joke they’d settled on soon into their cohabitation. At first, Aleksi had been defensive of the woman; later, his loyalties shifted.
“No, she didn’t,” Aleksi said earnestly. “But she was a different person.”
It was their turn to order, so they didn’t have a chance to ask him how this was so. Defne and Mete got a single scoop each. Aleksi declined their offer to get him one, too. Perhaps there was the slightest note of sarcasm in his demeanor—something about that shop, the exorbitant sum they’d just paid for those tiny cups. And perhaps it was to make up for this that, when Sinan led them all to a chic bar, Mete suggested going to the run-down place across the street instead, where the neighborhood men were gathered.
Aleksi accepted the beer Mete bought him and watched the game with silent interest, though in the past he had offered commentary throughout. At halftime, he rolled himself a cigarette—or a joint, Defne couldn’t tell—from a large plastic bag, then walked away to smoke it.
“Is that a grocery bag full of herbs?” Defne asked. “What on earth is he smoking?”
She was increasingly startled by Aleksi, but Mete did not exactly acknowledge her alarm. He even seemed a little hurt that Aleksi hadn’t invited him to join, though it was true that he rarely smoked these days.
That night, Defne explained to Mete how Aleksi had appeared to her on the boardwalk.
“He was just a bit dishevelled,” Mete said.
“But you thought so, too,” Defne said. “At first, you thought he was homeless.”
“Just for a moment. It was all out of context.”
“And he seemed totally off, didn’t he? Like he was stoned.”
“Maybe he was,” Mete said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Most evenings in Menlo Park, the three of them would sit on the floor in the living room smoking and drinking whiskey, continuing the conversation of the previous night. They had an animated rhythm of debate; they pushed one another to extremes. Often, Aleksi would put forth an outrageous idea—that there was no such thing as consciousness, that the many-worlds interpretation was surely true, thereby throwing into question any notion of a self—and Mete and Defne would come together in opposition. Eventually, Mete might break off to side with Aleksi, to try to make room for his vast and unrestrained thinking, which seemed to challenge every assumption and norm. Sometimes he relied on pure illogic; other times his arguments were refreshing, even ingenious.
Following their move, and the thrill of their new home life with Aleksi, Defne and Mete had fallen a little behind in their research. They’d missed several conference deadlines and their teaching had become somewhat careless. But it was, without a doubt, a golden era. The three of them went for long walks in the evening, cooked dinners, camped. Defne and Mete had never set up a tent before, or made a fire; they could barely follow a trail. Aleksi taught them all these things. It was as if they were growing into other selves, or fuller ones, within the security of their relationship, and in the presence of a third person. Aleksi allowed them joy in their coupledom, perhaps because he enabled a sort of performance and prevented them from settling into monotony and habit.
It did not seem particularly unusual that Aleksi wasn’t seeing anyone or that he didn’t really have any other friends—Defne and Mete enjoyed having him to themselves. They speculated that Aleksi had been in love with Amal. He still talked about her from time to time, with a sort of pain. He topped every dish with za’atar, listened to Levantine pop songs. It all belonged to his personal mythology, ardently protected and revered.
Defne had also wondered, fleetingly, whether Aleksi might be a little in love with her, too. It was self-flattery, of course—but wasn’t it the case that all friendships involved some amount of attraction? It was the engine of curiosity, the mystery that propelled any relationship forward. And so he must also be a little in love with Mete. The two of them were so sweet with each other, so enthusiastic. And, to be sure, Defne and Mete were a bit in love with Aleksi as well.
After the game, Aleksi departed quickly, saying he had plans. This didn’t seem very likely to them. Aleksi had said himself that he was just wandering around. He was probably overwhelmed, they thought, by all the people at the bar; he had always been sensitive to big groups. They agreed to meet up again the following weekend. Aleksi told them that he had a new e-mail address, which he wrote down on a napkin. He didn’t have a smartphone but would find an internet café to check his messages. The e-mail provider was one they’d never heard of; when they asked him about it, he said that he felt more secure this way.
There were other small signs like this—little oddities they could not quite remember from their friendship—when they met him a second time, at the Kadıköy port. Aleksi was talking to a seedy-looking man in front of a sim-card shop. The man must be a dealer, Defne thought; Aleksi introduced him as his friend. Then the three of them wandered uphill, through the fish market, and back to Moda, to the streets they had walked the previous weekend, then to Fenerbahçe. Aleksi was the one who kept walking farther—he didn’t want to sit down anywhere, and they could see that the cafés they suggested seemed unwelcoming to him, as if Aleksi no longer belonged to the same clan as them. Anyway, it was good to walk, despite the heat of the day, because they were finding it hard to settle into conversation. Aleksi held back from revealing too much about his current life. He told them again the countries he had visited on his travels, without much insight. He seemed afraid of stepping back into familiarity, afraid of what he might find there. Defne and Mete offered news on their move, their lives in Istanbul. It was easier to talk about all that had changed, than about the life they’d had together in California. That morning, they’d discussed whether they would bring up Aleksi’s departure from the house. They’d never got an explanation; the friendship had ended abruptly, though of course there had been months when Aleksi had grown sullen and they’d known that he was not happy. It was better not to say anything, Defne felt. If Aleksi wanted to talk about it, he would bring it up himself.
“How’s the teaching?” Aleksi asked.
“Great students,” Mete said. “But the resources are limited. And there’s a lot of bureaucracy.”
“Must be better than teaching all those entitled kids,” Aleksi said.
This had been among his grievances regarding academia, though Mete and Defne had once been comfortable enough to point out that he hadn’t had a very difficult life, either.
“I couldn’t deal with the bureaucracy,” Defne said. “I quit.”
“Huh,” Aleksi said. It sounded as if he wasn’t surprised. Amal, he told them, had also quit research and was now working for an evil institution.
“Evil how?” Defne asked.
“Evil as in evil,” Aleksi said. “Isn’t it all the same thing?”
It occurred to Defne that Amal’s work might be similar to her own. But she didn’t feel inclined to tell Aleksi about her job, or to ask about Amal’s. She did not feel like defending herself.
At lunchtime, Aleksi again declined their suggestion to sit down somewhere. He was not very hungry, he said. Besides, he was on a sort of detox regimen. He looked at them cautiously as he said this, waiting for a reaction.
“How does it work?” Defne asked.
He’d met a healer on his travels, Aleksi said. This man had measured the buildup of industrial chemicals in his organs and had given him herbs to flush them out. Again, he looked at them, searching for a reaction. Defne kept silent, whereas Mete asked him whether there was any proof of this buildup.
“It’s in your excrement,” Aleksi said. “You see it all coming out of you.”
“Listen, man,” Mete said. “I’d be careful with that stuff.”
“You’re right,” Aleksi said, reasonably. “There’re a lot of people who can lead you off track. But there are still some who know what they’re doing.”
When they parted from him, they walked silently for some time. Then Defne said that it was all a bit of a shock.
“Yeah,” Mete said.
“I guess something’s off.”
“I guess so,” Mete said. He sounded so forlorn, and, for some reason, this upset Defne.
That week, they were invited to a housewarming party at the home of a couple they’d known in San Francisco who had recently moved back to Istanbul. Mete and Defne had always found this couple a little annoying, but maybe they’d been too judgmental. The things that had put them off in California no longer felt very important in Istanbul; perhaps they were more relaxed here. Perhaps they’d grown up.
There were others at the party they’d known in the U.S., as well as common friends from Istanbul. It was still surprising to them that their lives should be populated by the same handful of people, no matter where they went. The newly arrived couple was starting a kombucha business, together with a friend from high school. The friend had persuaded the couple to move back; it was the right time for such a venture, he’d said, and he had many connections in Istanbul to help get things off the ground. He recounted the whole story triumphantly at the party, which was also a celebration of the trio’s new business. They offered samples of their drinks, with exotic ingredients and purported benefits. The business was modelled on a company in San Francisco—several, in fact—though it would be the first of its kind here. Most of the party guests were excited about some new venture: another recent arrival, from London, had founded a co-working space, and everyone agreed to frequent it. Defne and Mete talked at length to a group of ex-housemate engineers who were creating a peer-to-peer payment service. Soon enough, they were listing friends they had in common.
After the party, as Defne and Mete walked the short distance back to their apartment, they said it was sweet how everyone seemed so familiar, like cousins. And there was so much enthusiasm regarding everyone’s work.
“At the same time,” Mete said, “it’s a rich-get-richer situation.”
“Isn’t it always?” Defne said.
“I was thinking of what Aleksi would say if he’d been there,” Mete said, chuckling.
“His opinion hardly counts,” Defne said. “I mean, he’s totally lost touch with reality.”
“He did manage to do a tour of the world,” Mete said. “He’s bizarre, but he’s also living his life.”
“Are you serious?”
“He’s stood by his principles.”
“I don’t think taking laxative herbs counts as principled living.”
“He’s always been very good at doing the things that interest him and somehow making it work.”
“Aren’t we doing what interests us?” Defne said, aware that this sounded insecure.
“That’s not the point,” Mete said. “I just remembered how the three of us would hang out and have those epic conversations. We’d talk about so many things that mattered, you know, rather than fermented drinks.”
Eventually, in California, Mete and Defne had settled back into their research. They’d even returned to it with heightened enthusiasm, no doubt energized by their new life—their communal curiosity. They made friends in their departments with people who had initially seemed dull to them, or standoffish. They invited some of them over, proud to show off their home, their tribe of three—so much more alluring than the living conditions of most graduate students, idyllic, even. On these occasions, they were eager to launch into one of their conversations with Aleksi, but he was more reserved around others. Defne and Mete discussed the possibility that he felt self-conscious among academics, having dropped out of their world, but they were certain he would soon adapt.
At the end of their second year of living together, they found a long wooden table at a yard sale and set it up outside, beneath a tree they decorated with fairy lights. When the weather was nice, which it usually was, they encouraged their friends to stop by spontaneously. Mete and Defne likened the arrangement to summer houses in their childhoods, when everyone ate outside on makeshift tables, calling out to neighbors. Often, on their walks with Aleksi, they discussed alternative ways to live, to be a community, patching together theory and anecdotes, romanticized notions of past generations. That table beneath the tree seemed a good first step toward those ideas.
One time, in the glorious spring months, they brought people together for an afternoon of reading poetry. Neighbors showed up to listen, and also graduate students from other departments. Defne had gone to the farmers’ market to buy boxes of stone fruits that she’d baked into cakes decorated with wildflowers. Aleksi had seemed eager about it, but he left shortly after the readings started, when the yard was filled with people, many more than they’d expected. He had made up an excuse—surely that’s what it was—about covering a shift at the bookstore. But it was a beautiful gathering, full of joyful spirit. So they were surprised when Aleksi made a remark some weeks later, about how everyone had seemed so pleased with themselves. They let it pass—what would it have served to argue, when Aleksi had clearly meant to hurt them, in some way, for his own vulnerabilities. Still, Defne was a bit more impatient with him from then on. She called him out during discussions, questioned the logic of his arguments. Sometimes she stayed behind when the boys went out for a walk; she didn’t join them to watch movies or football. She had begun inviting people over more frequently, without always warning Aleksi that they’d have visitors. And friends did indeed stop by spontaneously several times a week, just the way Mete and Defne had wished they would—a real community. They sat beneath the tree to have a drink and share departmental gossip.
Defne didn’t think they would see Aleksi again, after their long walk. But it turned out that Aleksi and Mete had been in touch and arranged to meet up, once more in Kadıköy. This seemed to be where Aleksi was staying, though he was evasive about an exact location. He’d met some people, he had told them, and they were hosting him. It was a relief not to have to offer their guest room, but they wondered who the hosts might be. Aleksi would probably not realize if he got mixed up with shady people. The evening of their walk together, Aleksi had sent Mete an article about detoxification. In his message, he had written that Mete might find the contents interesting and added that he was in Istanbul for another week or so, though he hadn’t suggested meeting outright.
“I felt sorry for him,” Mete told Defne by way of explanation. “He must be lonely. And, after all, he’s our friend.”
Defne didn’t say anything to that, and she agreed to come along, though she really didn’t see the point. It was apparent that Aleksi had changed, and that he was perhaps in need of help, which she and Mete would likely not be able to provide, even if Aleksi were willing to accept it. But the topic of their old friendship had always been sensitive—Mete had been heartbroken when Aleksi left, and he thought that they were responsible, that they should have been more attuned to the signs of their friend’s distress. Of course, he never singled out Defne and the way that the tensions had initially formed between her and Aleksi, though Defne would have preferred for him to say it once and for all.
Aleksi was with a group of young men, standing by some flower sellers, when Defne and Mete stepped off the ferry. As they approached, one of the men patted Aleksi on the back fraternally, though he didn’t greet Mete and Defne; it was not in any unfriendly way, but as if they were invisible.
“Who were those people?” Mete asked, when they began walking.
“My friends,” Aleksi said. “I’m staying with them.”
“What do they do?” Defne asked, trying to sound neutral.
“Lots of things, here and there. They’re seeking asylum.”
“What’s their background?”
Aleksi made a snorting sound, as if he’d been expecting the question and was pleased to be proved right. “Are you with the police or something?”
Defne was startled. “I just mean that those people might be employed in terrible places. Or, you know, they might get into dangerous situations. You don’t know how any of this stuff works.”
“And you know all about it?” He had his eyes half closed, like a wild cat. She couldn’t remember this look of his; it put her on edge.
“Aleksi,” she said, “this is my city.”
“Sure,” he said.
She thought about pointing out that both her research and Mete’s dealt with topics of immigration, but she realized the ridiculousness of such a statement. Instead, she looked at Mete for help.
“How did you even meet them?” he asked.
“I’ve learned how to find my way around,” Aleksi said.
“Listen,” Mete said, “you could also stay with us.”
He avoided looking at Defne.
“Thanks,” Aleksi said. “I’m O.K. They’ve been so nice to me.”
“The offer stands,” Mete said. “You should know that, of course.”
“Thanks,” Aleksi said again.
“Don’t you think that maybe you shouldn’t use the resources of people in need?” Defne said. “I mean, they’re not a youth hostel.” Even back when they discussed purely abstract matters, Defne wanted Aleksi to commit to some practicalities. She did not have much patience with all those emerging universes, where atoms split every which direction, taking on other lives, or with the unique night vision of the bat, which could somehow be embodied if only she let her mind expand.
Now she was upset, but she couldn’t yet locate the cause. Mete pulled at her arm, cautioning her not to continue.
“You’re right,” Aleksi said thoughtfully. “It’s not a hostel. I have to be more mindful.”
They walked toward Haydarpaşa. It seemed this time that Aleksi was leading the way. Eventually, they ended up at a tea garden—modest and spacious—frequented by families. It had been years since Defne and Mete had been to such a place. How nostalgic to see those plastic chairs, the thick glass sugar bowls. They all asked for tea—Aleksi placed his order himself, seeming proud. He was wearing new clothes that day; he no longer looked so bedraggled, though there was something odd about his outfit. It looked as if it had been bought from the shops in Kadıköy, which also supplied the clothes of the men at this tea garden. The peculiarity was in the fact that he seemed completely at ease here; he seemed, almost, to fit in.
In the evening, Mete and Defne took the ferry to Beşiktaş, and from there walked to Cihangir. They’d parted with Aleksi casually, but it seemed clear to all of them that they would not be meeting up again. There was no animosity; they’d had a very pleasant afternoon, actually—they’d even discussed some of their old topics. Aleksi, it turned out, had kept up with his reading of philosophy, though his arguments were liberally sown with obscure, esoteric sources. Defne and Mete didn’t fully challenge him on his logic, as they might have in the past, because they didn’t want to get into an argument. They just wanted to have a nice time together. Perhaps the niceness was what made it apparent that they would not be meeting again.
In Cihangir, they decided to get pizza rather than go home. They hadn’t talked much on the way, though Defne had been composing her words. As soon as they sat down, she asked Mete why he’d invited Aleksi to stay with them without checking with her first.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Mete said. “He’s our friend.”
“Is he, really? He left without saying anything and never got in touch again.”
“But we also pushed him out.”
“You mean I did,” Defne said.
Mete sighed. “I didn’t think he would ever accept the invitation.”
“That’s not the point,” Defne said, and she might have raised her voice if the waiter hadn’t come to their table. Usually, they would get a pizza and a salad to share, but this time they each ordered for themselves.
When Aleksi moved out—in secret, one afternoon when they were both teaching—they’d felt not only shocked but betrayed. They’d watched their friend grow silent and mistrustful in the preceding months. Defne had been more agitated by his demeanor than Mete, but they both presumed it was temporary; they had not asked him outright what the matter was.
In the weeks that followed his departure, they were embarrassed, as if Aleksi had exposed a secret—as if he had called them out on their silence. He didn’t respond to their e-mails or texts, except to inform them that people would be coming to see the room. He’d paid his share of the rent that month, and the utility bill in full—the gesture embarrassed them further, though Defne pointed out later that he was being showy in his magnanimity. It was certainly calculated to make them feel bad.
Defne spotted two friends—acquaintances, rather—outside the pizzeria, looking at the menu in the window. They hadn’t yet noticed Mete and Defne; Defne quickly looked away.
“Also,” she said hastily, “isn’t it weird that he’s squatting with asylum seekers? Like he thinks it’s cool or something. Like our lives are somehow fake.” She wanted to get everything off her chest before the couple came in. She wanted to convince Mete that they’d been faultless, to go back to the way things were. She was angry at Aleksi for his unabashed naïveté and for the disruption he had caused. After his departure, they’d needed to come up with another story of their first years; it was too upsetting to remember that time together.
“I don’t know,” Mete said. “I don’t think he would think like that.”
By now the acquaintances had seen them and walked in, waving cheerfully.
“Hi, neighbors!” they called out, and then they asked the waiter to join the tables. ♦