Citizens of the World by Mark Jacobs

Two days before they leave Turkey, Philip Powell walks across the cobbled streets of the village, making for the bluff. Every moment, every step is a valediction. Every fiber of the man resists making it. He can’t get the notion out of his head that goodbye means death.

For Tabitha, who is not up to walking this morning, it quite likely does.

At the ragged, weedy edge of the bluff, he stops. In the April morning, the stiff breeze is cool. He puts his hand in the pockets of his jeans, looking out and down with the old sense of vertigo. Big seeing, he has learned, has its cost. A hundred and fifty feet below, the Aegean looks up at him with a serene contempt he admires. Hah! You’ve forgotten me, and I haven’t even left yet. Bravo. Farther out on the glassine water, a sailboat is visible. Its intercourse with the wind is consensual, an act of grace. The single sail is purple, representing triumph.

The movers are coming today. Having lived in Ebelik for sixteen years, the Powells have acquired stuff. Philip half thinks they should burn down the house and everything in it rather than ship their belongings to Charlotte, North Carolina. He does not share the thought with Tabitha. She has her hands full. Her cancer demands strict attention. She will not be snuck up on. She is becoming adept at reading the signals of her pain, although sometimes she gets them wrong and panics.

Neither of them has been to Charlotte. They chose it for the cancer center there, and a recommended doctor. Philip is seventy-four. His wife is seventy-five. They have lived abroad since they were in their middle twenties. In the decades they have been away, America moved. It’s no longer in the location they knew it to be, growing up.

It’s preposterous to leave the Aegean in April, just as the wildflowers are bursting into bloom wherever you look. Poppies, above all, the hilarious bright red of the poppies. But carpets of blue and yellow and white are thickening along the roadsides, running in self-made thoroughfares up the sides of ancient hills, spreading puddles of exuberant color across windswept fields.

Reluctantly, Philip leaves the bluff. He walks back home, stopping at the bakery for a loaf of bread. The baker, Oktay, is standing outside in front of the place, smoking a Meltem.

“Is it true?” he wants to know, squinting against the wreathing smoke.

“Yes. We’re leaving. The day after tomorrow.”

The baker nods. He has a broad red face, a mangled hand from an accident, the look of a character actor in a film whose title you can’t remember. He will have heard about Tabitha’s cancer, so he does not ask why they are leaving Türkiye. Why would you leave such a place as this? He will take no payment for the bread, which is taze taze, hot from the oven, as he wraps it in a sheet of newspaper.

Ebelik has grown since the Powells moved there, but not obscenely. The village has been spared the worst ravages of tourism. It does not sit right on the beach, for one thing, and there are no picturesque ruins in the near vicinity. It has a look of civic virtue they love, clean whitewashed houses of one story, blue and green painted shutters, wooden signs on iron poles at the barber’s, the grocery, the laundry. Even the service station on the edge of the village, going west, looks like it belongs. The mechanic, a wolfish man named Abdullah, plays drums in a folk music band on the weekends.

It’s still early when Philip comes into the house. Tabitha is reading the newspaper on her iPad, drinking a cup of tea, still in her nightgown. She is a slight woman with an elegant shape and an innocent opaline face that camouflages the willfulness in her. Until she got sick, she was handling the vicissitudes of age better than he.

“Mehmet Ali is coming over,” she warns him.

“I wish he wouldn’t.”

There is a delicacy in her slight shrug, a fillip of acceptance that will do for most of the shit life throws at her, but not the cancer, which is rare and vicious.

He slices and toasts the bread, puts currant jelly in a small pot, butter in another. Carries her breakfast on a tray. They sit side by side in the living room, crunching toast. Something of Oktay, the baker, resides in the loaf, although Philip would be hard put to say what it is.

“I’ve developed a bad habit,” Tabitha tells him.

“Is it sexual?”

“You wish.” A pause, then she tells him, “I keep imagining what people in Charlotte will say to us.”

“Go on.”

“When they learn where we come from, I mean.”

“Give me an example.”

“They’re all Muslims over there, aren’t they? Weren’t you afraid of someone kidnapping you and cutting off your head?” 

Through the years, living and working in a succession of countries, they have developed a sense of themselves, singly and as a couple, as citizens of the world. They were teachers, working on contract in private high schools around the world. Tabitha taught science, Philip history and social studies. A good life, a life rich in experience. They have witnessed a coup, with tanks rolling down deserted dark streets. Gotten drunk with a famous Colombian painter whose lover had just slit her wrists in a fit of despair nobody saw coming. Lived through concurrent bouts of malaria, and Philip contracted dengue fever in Honduras. They smoked hashish in the Atlas Mountains under a sky of inky splendor, the stars a rash of heavenly white. Watched a goatherd die in horrible pain from a shotgun wound to the belly inflicted by his little brother’s errant shot. They have ridden high-speed Japanese trains and gotten lost in a raging snowstorm outside Astana.

As a result of their experience, they have become snobs. They didn’t want such a thing to happen. Periodically, a random comment, an instinctive reaction, will snap them to attention. They become aware of the defect of character they are displaying to the world. It embarrasses them. They question their assumptions and enter a period of self-criticism, putting up a fight against their sense of superiority. But it never goes away completely. It’s the reason they cannot imagine going back to live in the United States. Tabitha is from Taos. Philip was born and raised in Buffalo. They cannot picture themselves living the remainder of their lives in either city.

Charlotte, North Carolina? Jesus.

Aegean Turkey is what Tabitha calls their spiritual homeland. They are meant to be here. Years back, they taught for three years at a Defense Department school in Izmir, an hour’s drive from the ruins of Ephesus and the majestic Celsus Library. A halcyon in their life together. The school closed when the Pentagon shifted forces, but the spell of the Aegean that was on them endured. When it came time to retire, the decision was easy. Ebelik, a village that has maintained its cultural integrity in the face of modernity’s onslaught, had exactly what they were looking for, including an affordable house on the main drag, within walking distance of everywhere. They do not own a car.

After breakfast, Tabitha gets dressed. She has always been a brisk person, focused and efficient, and Philip finds it painful to see her move so slowly, taking time and trouble with a mundane task. He makes another pot of tea a la Turca, in the double boiler, doing his best not to think about anything that matters.

At eleven, a knock on the door announces Mehmet Ali. He is their best friend, a widower who taught English at a high school down the coast in Kemer. He is a secularist of the old school, aghast at the changes the Islamist regime has imposed on the country he loves. It’s almost too easy to get him going on the decline of the secular republic. The Powells are among the few to whom he can rant safely, without fear of whispers making their way to the wrong ears. It’s a time of great social anxiety, and there are Turks who look for enemies within.

“You’ve changed your mind,” their friend says brightly, stepping inside and removing his shoes, which gleam. “You won’t go away and leave me after all. That’s wonderful news.”

Mehmet Ali is fastidious. Somewhere in his sixties—it’s hard to pinpoint precisely where —he dresses carefully. Sometimes, as now, he puts on a tie and jacket for no apparent reason. A gray mustache gives his longish face a thoughtful look he knows how to trade on. In a group, people turn to him as an authority.

He hands Tabitha a bouquet of flowers—he never shows up empty-handed—and shakes Philip’s hand with courteous enthusiasm. Philip pours tea for all of them, and they sit comfortably close in the small living room.

The government has just shut down an online paper that was intemperate in its criticism of a governor who appointed his son-in-law to a position for which he is not even close to qualified.

“Bakın,” says Mehmet Ali. “They won’t stop with Kelebek. Democracy is dying in Türkiye, my friends. You know this. It cannot survive without a press that speaks painful truths.”

The Powells will miss these conversations. They take them in like milk and are nourished. Such talk feeds their sense of who they are. Who they are is what they have witnessed, what they have been a part of, what they now know.

Mehmet Ali proposes taking them to dinner this evening at Bal Tepe, a fine fish restaurant that draws foodies from around the region.

“You can’t cook,” he points out. “Not with the movers packing everything up and making a mess.”

Philip assumes that Tabitha will say no. Lately, the least demanding outing taxes her strength, which she must husband. But she accepts the offer with gratitude Philip finds reassuring. Mehmet Ali beams and stands to leave. He will not mar his victory by overstaying.

When he is gone, Tabitha moves to the bedroom, from which Philip has removed as much of the furniture and furnishings as he can manage on his own, piling things in the other rooms, leaving each of them a suitcase of essentials with which they will leave Turkey. She will rest and read and play Solitaire while the movers work, keeping out of the confusion.

When Ege Ekspres shows up, it’s as bad as Philip has assumed it must be. There are four men in neat blue belted overalls, polite and efficient. They work steadily, seldom stopping for a break. For Philip, hovering, it’s like watching their life being dismantled, a memory at a time. It’s not the things. He cares little about their possessions. It’s the ritual of undoing, which feels dangerously close to unbecoming. He is being pulled apart.

In three hours, the movers have stowed their belongings in boxes. The boxes are lashed with tape and twine, their contents labeled in English. Tomorrow morning, early, they will return to load the truck. On the off chance that it will be a different crew, Philip tips the head packer, whose courtesy is impeccable.

He tiptoes to the bedroom and opens the door. Tabitha is asleep in a fetal hunch in the bed. Good. She looks, not exactly girlish but younger, freer, maybe. Unharassed. He returns to the living room and sits uncomfortably on the sofa, which has been wrapped in felt blankets. Idly, he imagines the minutiae of moving into an apartment in Charlotte, shopping for a car, learning where the grocery store is, the pharmacy for Tabitha’s medications. Reverse culture shock, they call what he and Tabitha are slated to undergo. He has to learn to be an American again and is not sure where to begin.

He constructs a next-door neighbor in an apartment they have not yet located: an IT worker in one of the big tech companies. Call him Chuck. He has never traveled outside the U.S. He does not read books; he watches videos. He signs online petitions. Passing them in the hall, Chuck sees the Powells with brutal frankness as the oldsters they are.

Enough.

That evening, when Mehmet Ali picks them up in his well-tempered Ford sedan, Tabitha reminds Philip of a princess in exile, inured to strangeness. She is reenacting, eyes open, the dream of conquest her father, the king, was long ago obliged to abandon. And the restaurant is just right. Quiet, with framed photographs of Turkish landscapes, Turkish seascapes on the walls. The instrumental background music is tasteful and not too loud. The owner, a slim and watchful man from Istanbul, comes to their table to recommend the sea bass.

They order a bottle of white wine. Disconcertingly, the waiter who brings it to their table radiates a disapproval so blatant it amounts to hostility. He is a thickset man of fifty with a prepossessing bald head that makes Philip think of the busts he has seen in Greek ruins. In two thousand years of exposure, they have not lost their noble shape. His skin is pale, and he appears to want to grow a beard.

“An Islamist in the making,” Mehmet Ali tells the Powells when the waiter has left the table. “It is almost more than he can bear, bringing alcohol to people.”

“Olmaz,” says Tabitha. “Maybe he’s not feeling well.”

They speak a happy mixture of English and Turkish that Tabitha calls Turklish. She is a polyglot. In every country they have lived in, she has picked up the language more quickly than he. Since getting sick, she has been dreaming in Spanish, diving down to a packed sediment of mysterious memory where outlandish creatures bide their time.

As the restaurant fills up and the noise level rises to an agreeable burble, they eat a leisurely meal, conversing as friends who know each other’s rhythms. The food is first-rate and skillfully prepared. The subject of Dr. Simsek naturally comes up. She is their doctor in Izmir. Mehmet Ali takes pride in having recommended her. By chance, it turned out that Dr. Simsek studied medicine at the University of Buffalo, where the Powells met and went to school. And it was she who did the research that resulted in their choosing the Charlotte Cancer Center.

This is the most successful Tabitha has managed a night out since her diagnosis. She is delighted. So is Philip. As the evening’s author, Mehmet Ali is elated. After the waiter has cleared the table, removing the wine bottle and glasses with theatrical distaste, Mehmet Ali asks Tabitha if she would like a nightcap.

“A rakı would be just right,” she tells him.

Talk about triumph. Mehmet Ali summons the waiter, who is attending another tableful of diners. He comes reluctantly, dragging one foot as if crippled, suspecting what he is about to be asked to do.

“A half bottle of rakı, please.”

A look of belligerent appraisal from the waiter. He shakes his head.

“What do you mean, no?”

“Our religion forbids the drinking of alcohol. Surely you know this, effendim. We must keep a clear head to contemplate our unworthiness. The Qur’an demands sobriety of us.”

At least that’s what Philip thinks the waiter tells Mehmet Ali. It’s the basic idea, he is pretty sure. Mehmet Ali is flummoxed. As the Americans’ host, he is mortified. At the same time, the waiter perfectly encapsulates the nation’s downhill slide into fundamentalist Islam, and anger rises red in the retired teacher of English.

“Shut up and bring the bottle. Now.”

“You will burn in hell,” the waiter predicts, shaking his head.

Mehmet Ali is on his feet now, shaking a fist and shouting in fury. People at nearby tables put down their glasses and their forks and stare. Mehmet Ali is on a tear. But the waiter gives as good as he gets, from what Philip can make out of the high-volume dispute in fast, angry Turkish.

In a minute and a half, the owner is there, calm and competent. He susses out the situation and sends the waiter packing. He apologizes to his guests.

“The fault is mine,” he tells them, speaking slowly enough that the Powells are able to follow him without difficulty. “I suspected he had those tendencies, but he told a sad story about losing his job at a factory in Izmir that had just closed down, and I took him on. It was obviously a mistake. I thought he could restrain himself and earn a paycheck.”

The proprietor sends a bottle of rakı to the table to make up for the unpleasantness, and Mehmet Ali pours shots all round. They drink it over ice. As the clear liquid comes into contact with the cubes, it turns milky, and the smell of anise rises to their nostrils. Nice, not to say very goddamn nice. But the evening’s equilibrium has been thrown off by the waiter and his fiery denunciation. It happened in a moment. People around them have already gone back to their meals. Still, it rankles, and when Mehmet Ali drives them home, gloom goes with.

It’s the waiter’s tirade, of course, and what it portends for Türkiye. But it’s also their last meal together, a raw end to a friendship that has meant much to all of them. It’s their shared consciousness of Tabitha’s illness, Tabitha’s pain, their increasingly frail bodies. A fifty-year idyll is over.

Mehmet Ali will be there to see them off when they leave Ebelik. They’ve hired a van to take them and their luggage to the Izmir airport. They fly home through Istanbul and Zurich to an unknown American city named after the wife of King George the 3rd. It’s the last place in the world Philip expected to wind up.

Back at home, Tabitha does her best to shake off the funk. Lacking furniture, they sit on the bed and eat a slice of Oktay’s good bread, slathered with butter. She shuffles a deck of cards, and they play gin rummy, spreading the cards on the coverlet.

“I had a wonderful time tonight, Philip.”

“You were on.”

“I want to stay on.”

“You will.”

She looks quickly at him, deciding whether he can possibly believe what he has just said. No matter, she will take it at face value. After their second game, she is tired. She undresses, pulls a nightgown over her beleaguered body, and gets into bed. Philip is not ready to sleep. He goes to the living room and unwraps the felt pads from a high-backed wooden chair they bought years ago in Morocco. The chair is imbued with invaluable nonspecific memories.

But he can’t settle. He grabs a sweatshirt against the night chill and goes out for a walk. A wind has come up off the Aegean. Like any adversary worth its salt, the wind has a personality and a strategy. He turns his back on it and walks the streets of the village neither fast nor slowly. Thinking would be a mistake. Feeling is as much as he can handle, right now.

He has no destination; he has mental souvenirs of destinations past. Emotions, that’s the word for them.

The wind drops, then rises again.

Approaching the outskirts of Ebelik, he senses someone behind him. There are no streetlights out here. It’s late, but not all that late. Could be anybody. Nevertheless, the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He stops, turns back, stares hard into the darkness. He thinks he hears a human sound. A cough, the labored uptake of breath?

“Kim o?” he calls. Who’s there?

No answer. He hesitates a moment, then resumes his walk. Tabitha wants to be cremated. He imagines sneaking her ashes onto an airplane, coming back here, and scattering them on the turquoise sea on the brightest morning of summer. And if he were to die first? It would be a gross dereliction of his duty. He will live, he will see her through.

Another half block, and now he is sure someone is behind him. There is only one road out of the village, one road in. If he turns back, he will come face-to-face with whoever is following him. Because, for no reasonable reason, he is sure that he is being followed.

It’s the waiter from Bal Tepe, out of work again, it has to be.

Philip has zero doubt. 

What does the man want?

“Amerikalı, dur!” a hoarse voice behind him calls. American, stop.

Philip hears distress in the voice; he hears outrage. There may also be something like resignation in it. His first impulse is to call out that he is not an American. That would be stupid. He needs to separate his fear of the unknown from his fear of death. That’s important. A first step. Toward what? A man is coming toward him now, dragging a foot, flinging imprecations that Philip does not begin to understand. Whatever this is, he tells himself, I’ll get through it. How clever of death to send a messenger ahead.