Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

During the Mehmetoğlu visit I was gripped with anxiety about making some hospitable tableau out of the limited tools available, torn between warring inclinations: to try and re-create some approximation of the warm casual “drop in any time” of my grandparents, who had vodka and chips and peanuts on the deck every evening at five, or trying to do it nicer, with wine and cheese and an elegant home-cooked meal, and to arrange it all without making some careless cultural blunder. But Honey was also six weeks old, and nursed all the time, and really all anyone needed was to sit and hold her on a couch, could be any couch, and the realization that I had brought them all this way essentially for no reason paralyzed me with embarrassment for the entire time we were there. Fortunately Ayşe is an adventurous woman and an excellent sport, and Elifnaz, her whole life spent in the great navel of the universe, served as a kind of comic teen Greek chorus of one, constantly exclaiming “I can’t believe anyone lives here,” which finally allowed me to relax my strenuous efforts at historical interpretation and apologia and laugh along with Engin and his family, because it was, yes, absurd how long it took to get anywhere.

Engin indicated to me later that the visit was actually a stroke of deranged genius, because his mother and Elifnaz now have a sort of trump card of insights into America when the topic is brought up. I can see beautiful Ayşe, with her coiffure and her rakı and her occasional cigarette, sitting on the balcony in her apartment block in Kadıköy, trying first to describe the encampments of homeless people around San Francisco’s City Hall, then trying to find the words to communicate the vastness of the high desert, the unsmiling plains, the pink sponge of tomato that graced her salad at the Golden Spike. “The main thing you must understand about America is its barbarism,” she probably says.

The now beet-red Honey has been tiring herself out running through the cemetery grass in the heat and I see her approach the outer reach of the plateau and spring after her, catching her near the edge of the property where she’s looking as though transfixed by the expanse of sagebrush and patchy farmland of the basin. I pick her up and kiss her and plod back to the gravestones where our stroller is parked. I didn’t bring any flowers with me so I fold up Honey’s bib and put it on Mom’s stone. “Love you Mom,” I say. “I wish you were here,” and a slow leak of tears starts up again. “That’s your grandma,” I tell Honey, who is stomping her little foot on someone else’s stone. I pack her up in the stroller struggling and I’m suddenly exhausted and as I’m trying for the seventh time to buckle at least one of the buckles as she thrashes and strains resolutely forward to prevent me I say into the air “I’m going to fucking kill myself” which I sometimes do when I’m trying to cope with her equipage and I instantly feel bad since I’m sure we are standing on the final resting place of many untimely ends, shotgun blasts and death by drinking and getting rolled on by your horse. Finally I get her in and we roll down the hill to Deakins Park and I let myself think about Istanbul, about Engin and Pelin and Savaş and Elifnaz and seventeen million people or more humming along on either side of the Bosphorus in the June heat. She’s asleep when we arrive and I scoop her into the Pack ’n Play so easily that I think my ancestors are rewarding me for visiting them.

I step outside to have a cigarette and Cindy Cooper is there on her deck and we each take a few steps in the other’s direction and exchange greetings. “What do you do down there in the City,” she asks me after a minute. “I work at the University.” I could leave it there but I am curious so I say “At the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations.” As it happens Cindy has unreconstructed views about Islam and she begins airing them to me over the fence. “Gotta do something about them,” she says and I say “What do you mean?” and naturally she means beheading people, murdering at Charlie Hebdo , etc. etc. I think about stubbing out my cigarette and going inside but this is honestly the easiest hill of tolerance to ascend and moreover my job as an employee of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations not to mention as a member of God’s human family. “You know my husband is uh… Muslim,” I say, wincing inside, since he would take grave offense at this, since as far as he is concerned he is not a Muslim, if he has a religion it is Morrissey, and he is in fact so much not a Muslim that he won’t even say inshallah or mashallah or other things that warmly enfold the name of God into daily speech. I have heard Ayşe use what I am pretty sure but not positive is a pejorative term for heavily veiled women meaning “squished-head” but she is interested in spirituality and transcendental meditation and “Eastern” things although I do not know whether she actually does them. Engin’s father, who is divorced from Ayşe and lives in Izmir, is a somewhat dissolute Marxist, anti-Islam, anti-Erdoğan, anti-American for that matter. But their parents were Muslims so they are loosely speaking culturally Muslims and since Cindy is starting from “Muslims are bad” and America more or less treats “Muslim” as an ethnicity rather than a religious choice it does not seem like a time for nuance, so for now I decide to deploy them as pleasant cultural Muslims in the jihad of tolerance. “Well,” she says. “He’s from Turkey,” I say and she moves the corners of her mouth down as though to say Whaddaya know.

“Yeah, and he’s stuck there now because the U.S. government has anti-Muslim policies.”

I give her the rough outline of the unlawful relinquishment of his green card in the bowels of the San Francisco airport. So far the only thing worse than dealing with the green card situation has been explaining the green card situation to other people, even to know its full madness firsthand requires a graduate seminar in the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unit and then the Department of State’s National Visa Center and all associated forms and procedures and phone menus, menus where you press 3 to be hung up on after an hour of holding; numbers that due to the high volume of callers must be called back between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00; numbers that ring and ring and ring into the void, a human voice answering one in a hundred times; websites giving you instructions like “If you are granted an immigrant visa, the consular officer will give you a packet of information. Do not open this packet.” I just tell her that he had one and they took it under false pretenses.

“There’s this rule you have to spend six months of the year in the U.S., and Engin—that’s my husband—went to do a course thing back in Turkey that was six months long, and when he came to visit us halfway through the course the border guys convinced him he was violating U.S. law by going back and forth, and that if he didn’t voluntarily give them the green card he would be banned from the U.S. for five years, none of which was true. And since we had a baby, he got scared and gave it to them and signed the form they gave him. And it was illegal. And now he has to reapply a completely different way through a different agency since he’s outside the U.S. And there’s not a lot we can do now except wait for a new one which they are apparently too incompetent to get done.” This seems almost to move Cindy, in some direction. She rolls her eyes.

“It’s not very comforting,” she says. “If they could do that with some normal person who’s just trying to be with his family imagine all the terrorists they could just let in because no one was paying attention.” Jesus Christ, I think. “Yeah,” I say. “But I think the reason they did that to Engin is because some people think anyone with a possibly Muslim name is a terrorist, and now he can’t be with me and our baby, so that’s not a good policy either.” Nonetheless I allow myself to agree without difficulty with her assessment that the Federal Government is a godawful bureaucratic clusterfuck and can be counted on to heartily fail at many things it undertakes. I suspect I don’t want to hear whatever else she has to say about the Government, what she has to say about Barack Hussein Obama. I’m sure that’s how she says his name, emphasis on Hussein like that is A Sign of Something and not one of the most common names in the entire goddamn world.