The pigeon island dört yol at the corner of Tunalı and Esat is quiet at 5:00 AM. The clubbers and the urban racers have all gone home. Only a few early pigeons are about.

 

 

I went downstairs to Ziyafet for lunch the other day, probably for the last time. Ziyafet is a TSR (Turkish Standard Restaurant) that opened recently on the ground floor of the building just beside us. To my surprise there was an American couple there. The man had dark hair and a rather handsome, matinee idol visage. The woman had little or no makeup and wore her longish blonde hair pulled back.  Both were slim and in their mid to late thirties. They were eating their lunch in a stiff and very American manner, that is, with forks in their right hands and their left arms lying across their laps below table level. Turks do not sit this way when eating, not at all, so that made them noticeable. But more than that, the man had tremendously upright posture, his head high and his torso vertically aligned as if on a steel rod. The woman also kept her back straight, but as our meals continued I saw that she was not as precisely vertical as he. Instead, she leaned forward a little, her neck curved some, and her gaze bowed down and to the side.

 

Were they a matched pair, as I thought at first, with their good posture, their identical table manners, similar heights, summery dress casual clothes, and careful conversation? Both pairs of eyes were veiled, as windows to the soul generally are, but behind the veils I sensed or imagined a whole universe not of sameness but of difference. On his side there was a fierceness, sharp and dark though kept in check, and the skin of his face was stretched precisely on a cubic frame of skull. But her face was rounder, drier, and more slack; and behind her eyes there was an endless play of light clouds, parting at intervals to reveal idyllic landscapes not quite real.

 

Such are the dangers of going out to lunch in a foreign city.