"We All Have Our Double-Cross to Bear"

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     When Muhammad went out Friday night, you could say life was on his ass.

He’d followed a girl to Istanbul only to find she was homesick for Nebraska cornfields and beer in red Solo cups (“but habibti, I will buy you plastic glasses. I thought only you wanted glass ones,” he had told her to no avail). His flatmate hadn’t paid the power bill, and his house in Aleppo was no longer a home. It wasn’t even a house. Assad had bombed the shit out of it, and ISIS was fighting for the scraps.  To top it off, he had tried to cancel his Turkish landline and wound up owning three, with a TV subscription comprised primarily of daytime marriage programs and late-night conspiracy talk shows thrown in—“for friendship.”

     Muhammad didn’t own a television.

     He figured he’d better stay in Istanbul, not least because he couldn’t go back to Syria (the official term was “refugee”), but what better time than the present to become a journalist? These days, his parents didn’t have time to nag him into finishing his business degree. With English fine-tuned by his paramour, Muhammad could skip Istanbul altogether. He could go to Europe—maybe even New York or Nebraska.

     Not literally: a few months after being jilted by Kelly, his mom phoned from Syria to say his cousin joined ISIS. She asked Muhammad to call and convince him to drop out. Muhammad called The Huffington Post and said he had some contacts in ISIS; he could be their Arabic-speaking fixer. Before he knew it, he was paying his bills feigning empathy for people he hated so much he didn’t want History to dignify them with names—especially not ones they chose for themselves.

     “Already these sadists have too much power over their image,” he had told his editor, but “Daesh” wasn’t sticking, so ISIS was still hitting some of its PR goals, which bummed him out.  America hardly got satirical acronyms in English, the editor dismissed, so the semantic particulars of “Daesh” as cutting insult to ISIS sure as hell weren’t going to emerge intact after schlepping from the Levant. Forget that ISIS would understand and feel disrespected—Americans were not used to their institutions being dumb vessels for other countries’ propaganda wars. 

     “That’s at least 14 hours on a plane that word would have to travel,” Jim had concluded.      “You see anything look the same getting off a 14-hour flight as it did getting on? Most Americans can’t point to your country on a map, and we are obligated to keep up with the Kardashians. Have you seen our ad numbers lately? Have you seen Kim’s ass?”

Muhammad had.

     “We’re sticking with ‘ISIS.’”

     Muhammad thought of Kelly’s ass. No, that wasn’t what made him fall in love. He knew he loved Kelly when someone at the Shabha Mall Carrefour asked if the four year-old weaponizing celery sticks in Produce was hers. “You think I would let my child misbehave like this?” she had scolded the clerk. Then she’d turned to wink at Muhammad, who had skipped accounting to join her for a soda.

     Until that wink, he’d felt like a guest at her party—politely tolerated but by no means essential. He liked his promotion to co-conspirator. Moreover, most white girls on exchange at the university would be scandalized they looked “old” enough to have children, never mind making a joke. Forget the other salibis, Muhammad reflected. Kelly was his queen.

     Now she was in America, land of Armenians with war-eclipsing asses, with her mom.  What do these ISIS fuckers know about queens? They spit on them and throw them from rooftops, sending him victorious previews of such “purifications” for the Ummah before broadcasting them online. He wished he didn’t know Hollywood got its portrayals of gunshot deaths wrong. He’d wanted to be a journalist, but he never wanted to take it so personally.

     His “Brothers” in jihad definitely couldn’t know he was out drinking right now.  He checked his burner phone for their texts as often as he checked his regular phone for Tinder matches. With some relief, he remembered they would be at Isha’a prayers now. 7pm in Istanbul and the azan hadn’t sounded, but it was dark in Syria. 900 kilometers to the east, and Syria was one hour behind Istanbul now that the Turkish government decided to scrap Daylight Saving Time in favor of “endless summer.”

     No, Muhammad shook his head. He had had enough of this postmodern life. He wanted to forget. He needed transcendence. He needed a woman.  He had: Salam, Ali, a hipster bar in Beyoğlu, and a couple of Turkish pilsners.

     “Wallahi, bro, they interrogated him for five hours—searched his car, too.” Salam was laughing so hard he looked faintly villainous.

     “Why?”                                      

     “Because the poor bastard cannot say a ‘P.’ You know how bicycle pump is ‘hand pump’ in Turkish? ‘El pompası.’ He asked for a hand ‘bombası,’ and the shop owner freaked out. Called all the police in Mersin.”

     “They should learn. We are two million here.”

     “Did you hear about the announcements Turkish Airlines is making on flights from Beirut?” Ali interjected. “The flight attendant is telling Syrians not to steal lifejackets from under the seats.”

     “Are you being paid by Turkish Airlines?” Salam asked.

     “No, I’m being paid by logic. Do you want to steal something in the last two days of your life and die a thief?”

     “It wouldn’t be the last two days of their life if they took the good $80 lifejacket.”

     While Salam and Ali debated the moral penalty of stealing from an Islamic airline, a girl caught Muhammad’s eye. One of those Bodrum babes (well, before Bodrum became a smuggling departure port for Greece): light hair the color of her skin, fashionable, see-through black shirt. Animated. She was probably in the arts—or in advertising.

     To Muhammad’s surprise, she drifted toward him. He was unaware of his sad-puppy charisma, but if Muhammad looked like anything, it was a wounded husky—eerily beautiful, if deflated in a way that indicated he was not exactly ready to run the Iditarod.

     “Hi there,” she leaned over the table jauntily. “Where are you from?”

     “Syria.”

     A flamenco dancer wouldn’t have straightened her shoulders so fast. She had to use the toilet. She had to check on a friend. “Too much wine,” she said. Muhammad knew it was too good to be true.

     “Did you hear about that ‘interfaith’ dialogue Sara is trying to invite us to?” he tuned back in to Ali saying. “I told her, look, bro, we both believe in Mary. Meryem. Maria. Call her what you want.”

     “Believe her?” Salam replied. “Of course. I believe her. But I can’t listen to anything she says. She’s too hot, man.”

     “The Virgin Meryem,” Ali clarified.

     “No, man. That chick who works at the Starbucks on Bağdat Caddesi. Meryem with the cat eyes. Definitely not a virgin.”

     Twice more it happened, women approaching only to leave after Syria made an appearance.  Muhammad drained his next two beers regretting that he did not live in a country where people eroticized dark, sad men in need of a hand as “soulful.” With recent bombings, Scandinavian tourists weren’t visiting. Forget sentimental Americans: Tinder was an endless parade of Zeynep’s, Kübra’s, and Elif’s, none of whom were interested in their country’s unwelcome guests.

     “Fuck this,” he announced. “I will go, guys.” He stood up to leave.

     Ali pleaded with him to stay, but Salam took matters into his own hands.  “This is our friend, Avi,” he clapped Muhammad on the shoulder, presenting him to a brunette at a nearby table. “He is from Israel.”

     Muhammad glared at Salam, but when the woman brightened, he ordered two more beers. “I love the beaches in Tel Aviv,” she said, introducing herself as Kübra. “People are so much more energetic there. I went for a Zumba festival last April.”

Turks, he thought: her parents name her for the Prophet’s first wife and she’s hot for Israelis.  His editor better not find out about this, he muttered to Salam as they left the bar. Jihadi contacts thinking he’s…it’s a security compromise.

     In the privacy of his flat, Muhammad began to relax. Switching off his phones, he even began to enjoy the perks of petty identity theft. Kübra had an elegant neck, and the assumption that Jews wouldn’t judge you for premarital sex seemed to relieve her of inhibitions a similar tête-à-tête with a Muslim “brother” might inspire. She even made the first move. Kübra may have been a fifth grade Turkish teacher, but tonight she could be a Swedish woman on her worst holiday behavior in Alanya.

     Endless summer indeed, Muhammad toasted the prime minister.

Feeling festive, he almost put on Omar Souleyman before remembering Israelis wouldn’t listen to Dabke music. Well, the Björk remix could have been okay. He put on Bob Dylan just in case.  Kübra marveled at his bookshelf. “No wonder your English is so good,” she said. “You have a whole library here. You must have read everything!”

The books, purchased at the estate sale of Turkish democracy, were the spoils of last July’s failed coup d’état: academics fleeing a purge might tell you emphatically that a book was purchased for 40 lira when 40 lira was a lot of money, but they will sell their libraries for a bargain. The English, however, was Kelly’s legacy.

     “Can I pour you another drink?” he said, finishing his own.  As Kübra undulated to                “Hurricane,” he resolved to live in the present. The swell and sway of her hips would not buoy him home, but it would do. Tonight, it could even be his anchor.  He stood up to join her.

     Kübra, Muhammad later smiled to himself, smoking a cigarette, Kübracım—better that I call you Klara. Swedish Klara to his kafir, he thought ruefully. By morning he was feeling so magnanimous he wouldn’t have minded watching some of those marriage programs if she’d wanted to—that is, if he’d had a television. 

 

     Muhammad decided to be Israeli every time he went out in Beyoğlu. He could learn Zumba. He vowed to do more sports and smoke less. He came up with an argument by which Israelis could like Omar Souleyman. As Kübra began to leave first a toothbrush, then clothes at his house, he felt sympathetic, even grateful towards Salam for his bar trick.  Life was starting to seem tolerable when, one month later, the city center near Muhammad’s house was bombed.

     Since August, the Turkish military had been encroaching on ISIS territory. In Adana, İncirlik Air Base had been busier than Atatürk Airport. The US was conducting air strikes, reinforced by ground troops. Muhammad hadn’t seen a tourist in months. Smoking two packs a day, he had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. This time, the suicide attack’s targets were foreigners—three of whom were Israeli.

Muhammad was at home on the phones. Shortly after the government unblocked social media, the news began to circulate. At dusk, Muhammad received a call from Kübra. Listening to his lover’s voice, the radius of his already-limited movement shrank.

     “I read that three Israelis were killed, and two were injured on Istiklal,” she measured out, stricken, and his white lie’s newfound gravity pinned him to the spot. “Did you know them? Are you alright?”

     “Yes,” Muhammad replied. “Thank you for asking.”