I Am My Country by Kenan Orhan

Author:Kenan Orhan [Orhan, Kenan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

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Necla marries Hasan the following spring. What does he do but listen to her? What does he do but call her darling, sweetest, dearest? What does he do but shower affections and attention upon her? So he wants to go back to Ankara, and she will go with him. How lovely is it that he says to her she has a good face for smiling, says to her he likes the way she wrinkles her nose at him, pulling her lips up and flashing teeth she no longer cares are too sharp.

For a time, they joked about having to schedule the wedding around Emre’s walk to work—he ventures out so rarely otherwise. Then Necla couldn’t stop thinking of this, a wedding parade marched through the streets of Istanbul. From the minarets would come the vows, shouted to them by beautiful muezzins. They could hire the open-air tour buses for the guests to ride along beside them, put the string quartet on a platform truck, rig a large bolt of velvet carpet to the back of a car that would drive ahead as she and Hasan walked hand and hand into their union, Emre doting along, in his work clothes on his way to the office. The city would watch her. Hasan has a grove of oranges somewhere in Anatolia he’s inherited. He believes himself to be a businessman, a budding tycoon.

She watches him with eyes curved like crescents. When he talks, his fists can get away from him, but he’s still a good man, she says. Sometimes, when there is a dried-up well in your chest where there is supposed to be a cistern of affection and care and attention, any font that aims to fill it is a welcome one, no matter if at times it stings with poison. This was Hasan to Necla. It’s not so hard to understand, even abuse is seen as love by those whose lives are trained on the trellis of neglect.

It was an accident, their wedding night, when he stuck a fork into her arm. She had said something about Ankara, about staying here in Istanbul, and he wouldn’t have it. Then she said the people here were kinder, they were open-minded, so he grabbed up the fork from the room-service tray and stabbed quick into the top of her arm. They left it in, both of them surprised. Necla didn’t feel a thing. Hasan was in a clean shirt, his jacket on the chair, his bow tie come undone. She still had her heels on. She was on the corner of the bed. He had been bringing her the tray from room service. What had they said to each other after? What had they explained of themselves? She forgets, but she likes the memory of the fork, silver, glinting, and cold, breaking suddenly from the contour of her warm and sunbaked arm. She felt noticed.

The phone in the living room rings. Emre gets up from his bed, puts on his slippers, and scratches over the tile floor.

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