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The Saint of Istanbul

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Contents

Native Speaker.........................................................1Breakfast..............................................................4Old Fashioned Things...................................................6My Dear Landlord.......................................................12An Afternoon Tea with Tatiana..........................................15Symphonies at Dawn.....................................................17The Full Froth Laundromat..............................................22Café Tootsie......................................................25Yakup & Yvonne.........................................................29Love Castration........................................................33The Kitchen Buddha.....................................................38The Fifth Azan.........................................................44Good Morning Berlin....................................................50A Tribute to Anatole Broyard...........................................57Lunch @ Torch Club.....................................................59The First State of Love................................................62The Saint of Istanbul..................................................66The Miracles of Mehmet Ali.............................................76War is Elsewhere.......................................................79The Two Gods of the Two Valleys: Gates vs. Coppola.....................81Bukowski: My Kind of Guy!..............................................83A Divorcée in London..............................................85The Bitch..............................................................93

Chapter One

English is a funny language. It looks easy but not every Tom, Dick and Harry can speak it as it should be spoken. Everyone thinks they know English when they're in their own country but when in the United States they realize they only know a few words and they're not worth a damn! After whizzing by the airport, restaurants and cafes, I too, like everyone else, realized I didn't know English when I turned on the TV to find out what was happening in the US. The ruthless presenters weren't speaking English; they were merely swilling the words and spitting them out! Their words couldn't accommodate rookie ears like mine. After cold sweats ran down my neck while watching presenters blurt out the words like a Ping-Pong match trying to keep up with their word marathon, I fell asleep. When I woke up I turned on the TV to see if I had dreamt the whole thing—there it was again! I realized that I couldn't understand a word of English! I had gone to the best schools, read a million English books but the result was still the same. I had come to this country for seven months; I needed to get away from everything, needed to long for my country, my job, my lover and maybe, most important of all—myself. You know, however painful, longing is an important necessity. The most tangible thing I was going to do during my time here was to improve my English at Tutorium—a prepschool in the University of Illinois. However, things were not going as well as I had hoped. Everyone in our class was Korean except for a stuttering Slovakian, Ana Maria from Colombia and a Japanese guy who was the son of a CEO of an automobile company. All the teachers did was to try to get us to talk to each other. Because of the bad accents of the Koreans, my not so well English was almost becoming extinct. My English needed CPR but it had been suffering ever since I'd got here. I kept on watching the newscasters on TV just like a Ping-Pong match: Left cheek, right cheek ... Left, right ... Some jaws were even more exhausting to watch—Jay Leno's for example. He dribbled his words constantly and sometimes he bounced them off of his chin only to catch them right in his mouth. Yes, this guy was a real word juggler; he masterfully mumbled the words that seemed like ping pong balls that never touched each other. I couldn't keep my mother's advice "if you really want to learn a language you must speak it at all times" because I was busy dialing all the phone numbers of Turkish people that had been shoved in my hand ever since I'd arrived in Chicago. I had outed myself ... After all, we the Mediterraneans are very hot-blooded and everyone was racing to invite me to dinner. For days, I was a guest of crowded Turkish families, student homes and Turkish restaurants. In short, I managed to be at every place where only TURKISH was spoken. Sometimes, those families even forced their children to speak English with me as a token of Turkish hospitality. Finally, the Turkish colony acknowledged the fact that I had to talk to a native speaker in order to improve my English. I still had hope of that when I drove my busted beige Volvo to a faraway Chicago suburb to where a Turkish guy named Ahmed and his family lived. No doubt he had invited me so that I could speak English with his American wife Elisabeth. When I finally arrived there after a horrifying traffic jam and getting lost while looking for the house, Elisabeth greeted me with her two kids among smells of food. It was my first time there and it was dinnertime. What was she going to do? Not ask me to dinner surely! Elisabeth would be cooking in the kitchen and naturally I was going to improve my TURKISH with Ahmed! He, on the other hand, was sensible enough to suggest that it would be good for me if I spoke ENGLISH with Elisabeth. At first, as I didn't how difficult it was to find a real American in America, I couldn't quite understand why she was singing in SPANISH in the kitchen. Her husband had told me that Elisabeth was originally Puerto Rican but she was born and raised in Chicago. Frankly, none of this mattered to me because all I wanted to do was to speak a little English, that's all! I realized I was dead wrong when I saw her Puerto Rican relatives' storm into the kitchen at dinnertime. I had found myself smack in the middle of a happy family barbeque but the language of happiness was Spanish. Trying to be polite, Elisabeth squeezed in a couple of generic questions for me while juggling two babies and serving, no doubt I answered them quickly & correctly. The Puerto Ricans congratulated me on my fluent English. Before I parted, I said "Muchos Gracias" to Elisabeth for dinner. I had really liked them—they were friendly people like us Mediterraneans. In the meantime, my mother kept calling me with words of encouragement, "A language is like popcorn, my dear," she said, "Suddenly it will start popping!"

In the meantime, I was really getting along with the Koreans in Tutorium. In fact, it looked like they had picked up on my obsession about accents so they had dragged Guido of Bari from an upper grade and introduced him to me as a present. I tried to chat with him in the cafeteria for a while. Sure, he was better than the Koreans but as a pure bred Italian—except being damn good-looking—Guido rolled his r's, slammed his t's in my face and tramped his p's. It was obvious that things weren't gonna work out with Guido either.

The other Turkish student in the class, Uzi—his name was Ozgur but it was a miracle to hear a foreigner's real name in America—promised me he would let me speak English with his girlfriend Tammy if I let them use my flat so that they could make out once in a while. Tammy was...