The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 30

No credit card, no passport.

No reputable hotel would have me, but a cab driver had a friend in Zetinburnu who knew a place run by his mother-in-law. The house was four storeys tall, and had been in the family for seventy-two years. Now it was a refuge for the dispossessed: migrant workers who’d entered the country illegally; newly released prisoners thrown onto the street with not a hundred lira to their name, nowhere to go. Wives fleeing husbands; husbands thrown out by their screaming wives. Twenty lira bought a mattress on the floor; forty got the bottom of a three-storey bunk bed.

The matron’s voice whined high as a mosquito. She clung onto my arm as she showed me my room, buzzing, buzzing all the time in heavily inflected English, “Little thing, dear thing, lost your passport, lost your friends, dear thing, I’ll be nice, you’ll see, very nice.”

She gave me a cup of tea in a cracked tulip glass, a slice of thick brown bread with a dollop of jam on the side.

“Dear thing,” she tutted, as I tried a few cautious nibbles. “So hard to be alone.”

As the sun rose, I slept, and when three in the afternoon came she marched into the room and exclaimed, “Who are you? Who are you? What are you doing here?” and threw her shoe at me as I fled.

I sat on the pavement round the corner from her apartment for half an hour, then went back. She’d found her shoe and was studiously sweeping the concrete path to her door.

“Dear thing!” she exclaimed, as I enquired about a room. “Little thing, dear thing, I’ll be nice, you see…”

She gave me back my old bed, still disturbed from the shape of my sleeping body.

In the night I woke wheezing, burning, fire in my legs, fire in my chest.

From the phone by the door, I called a taxi, and went straight to the nearest hospital.

Four hours in this hospital.

Then four hours in that.

I moved from emergency room to emergency room, and waited patiently while they diagnosed me every time — burns, smoke inhalation — and tutted and gave me more cream and another round on the nebuliser. After twenty-eight hours I could recite every procedure, list every medication by rote, and my medical Turkish had taken a leap for the better, to the point that I could stagger through a door and whisper duman inhalayson to every curious nurse who came my way. After thirty-two hours, the problem was beginning to become one of over-medication, and I carefully revised my reporting of what had happened to reflect the dosages I’d been receiving. In every hospital someone approached me with forms forms forms, are you ready to claim for your insurance? and I filled in a few vapid lies and waited for them to forget before folding the documents into paper aeroplanes and gliding them into the bin.

After thirty-six hours and seven different hospitals around Istanbul, I released myself into unexpected, blinding sun, and realised I didn’t know where I was. I had seventy lira left, no phone, no clothes that weren’t stolen, and shoes that didn’t fit. I had somehow worked my way near to Zincirlikuyu Mezarligi, though I didn’t remember crossing the bridge at Galata or how I’d come to be here.

So I stood, and had no sense of place or time, of memory or distance travelled.

Here.

I stood.

And that was all that there was.

I closed my eyes, counted my breaths.

Lost count at four, started again.

Five, six, seven.

The pop of a motorcycle engine jerked me from my reverie.

I found that I was shaking, and thought perhaps I should go back to the hospital, get that looked at.

I found that I was sitting on the ground, and still shaking, and didn’t know where to go.

Closed my eyes, closed my eyes.

Remembered

goddesses of the sun

comedy night in New York City, someone was sat next to me all the way, even though I cannot remember

remember

a man had set fire to a warehouse in Istanbul, and a woman had nearly burnt alive

and now only I remembered

no better than a fantasy, a thing not-shared, an experience made not-real because I

was the only one who knew

Luca Evard, drinking small beer in Brazil

I opened my eyes.

Did he think of me?

He thought of someone whose actions were my own, whose face, when he looked at it, bore my features, who had walked in places where my memories were and performed deeds which had shaped who I was now.

Whether such a one could be characterised as I, myself, I wasn’t sure. But it was something.

It was a start.

I went looking for help.