Balcony

It was not yet noon, and we were sitting out on the balcony. You were dressed in blue, your long hair tousled by the gentle breeze. You kept looking at my face, perhaps in search of the origins that had seeped into my skin; your eyes sought the shape of my hands, the curve of my lashes.

As for me, I had closed my eyes, fearing that they would grow wide, for it was as if I, too, would grow with them: that the ancestral shiver of handcuffs would begin to glow on my wrists, that the chained-dog spirit of my soul would grow wilder with each clink of the chain, that searing notes would rise from the pipe of my nomadic past, that the desert eyes of my granny, grown barren in the shadow of men, would look through my own, and that my voice would speak the silence of the steppe in my heart.

That day, the most difficult puzzle God posed to himself was you, and I was happy as if it befell me to solve it. Your hands were too beautiful to get lost among the red oleaster peels and the crack-cracking of the sunflower seed shells, your fingers were a scattering of questions, and you were too exquisite to adorn yourself with small affectations.

The kettle on the small gas bottle had begun to bubble quietly when the sound of trumpets and rumbling tanks rose from the avenue below. You must remember how we later heard the boom of the drums and, with that rattling beneath our ribs, dreamt of the broad, dancing figures of the Aegean zeybek who dare to defy life. Along with the sounds that filled our ears came a fluttering of images, a reel of visions playing out beneath our eyelids. Billowing clusters of people frequently changed colors as they watched from windows, balconies, and terraces. Following the band were horses, their tails tied with red ribbon, their manes beaded. Sluggish, with large, horizonless eyes, they looked nothing like those that reared up out of our history books to gallantly transport our childhood from one battlefield to the next. The white-bearded veterans on them were stooped, either from the weight of their medals or the fatigue of their memories. Going through the motions of greeting, by now slack from repetition, wearing calpacs bereft of the smell of gunpowder and bearing mottled mausers, their lifeless parade trampled over the glorious image of the National Forces.

When I opened my eyes, you were still there next to me, an utterly complex puzzle, undoubtedly basking in your own beauty. By now the sound of trumpets below had receded into a distant fairy tale. Tanks squashed emotions, rolling over murder, escape, love, oppression, pressing forward to the printing houses with their cowering entryways so fearful of tax clerks and police officers, before finally mixing with the blood of lead letters and entering the pages of books. Still, they left in their wake indelible remnants of images that no cleaning boy could erase. From now on, under the shadows of those remnants, shirts would be sewn, shoemakers' foreheads would wrinkle much too soon, faces of chiselers would grow paler than ever, and barbers' hands would begin to tremble before their time. Perhaps after that day, the rumble of the tanks dangling in the air would spoil a few notes in every song, and the roll of the metal treads would smudge architects' sketches of stairways.

Our tea had brewed and you were pouring it into the glasses. The rising steam veiled your hands. Just then, birds passed through the shiny silver tea tray, spilling half of their songs on our balcony, half on the tanks. The sky embraced everything, turning an intense blue, pouring down onto the surrounding apartment buildings, avenues, hands, and shoulders, filling the crates of the trucks, the canteens without lids, the mouths of the trumpets, and the barrels of the rifles.

Our being together on the balcony surely fed our being apart, and we were silent. Getting lost in thought, our melting smiles...