The chief of police is shouting something at me in Turkish.  It’s two AM and behind him, a middle-aged prostitute in a pink tank top is trying to bully a deputy into giving her a ride somewhere.  She looks like a bar fly from one of the country music clubs back home.  Anatolian folk songs blast from the television.

“Dad,” Hakan says, turning the volume down.  “He’s not deaf.  You just have to speak a little more slowly.”

The chief lowers his voice, smiles sheepishly at his son and then repeats his question.

“Have you seen ‘Midnight Express’?”

“No,” I answer.  “But I know about it.”

“Well the movie’s a big lie.  Would you like to see our cells?  You will see how nice they are.  Hot water, a soft mattress, a view of the mountains.  This jail is the best and cheapest hotel in Kütahya!”

“Better than my house, maybe,” my friend, Ekrem says.  He has been fairly quiet and letting his old high school buddy, Hakan, do all the talking.  It is Hakan’s father after all, and thus, his show.  In any case, I figure Ekrem is enjoying the break from playing tour guide.  We have been together almost a week straight, twenty four hours a day.

The chief stands.

“Come on, we’ll take a tour.”

He walks the three of us toward the stairwell, passing the prostitute and the deputy who rolls his eyes at his boss, gesturing at the woman with his chin. She is chattering away, though, and doesn’t seem to notice or care.  “Yok, yok,” the deputy is saying with a bored smirk.  “No, no, sorry.” The chief talks the whole time as we make our way down the stairs, and tries, for my sake, to speak a little bit more slowly.  I can tell he’s not sure he’s succeeding.  He keeps looking at Hakan and Ekrem for verification that I’m understanding him.

“Look at him, Dad,” Hakan says.  “Not us.”

“Evet. Right.”  He grins up at me from a few steps down but continues darting his eyes at them.  “Police work is the easiest job in Kütahya!  No murders or rapes.  Nothing big at all.  Every once in a while I have to go round up some drunks, but that’s about it.”

The last sentence, Hakan has to translate for me--which means repeating it in slower and easier Turkish. 

“My son translates from Turkish to Turkish!” the chief observes.  His smile is boyish and massive.  In fact, his whole head is massive, like a hunk of beige stone chiseled from the cliffs outside the city, all angles and flat surfaces. 

The cells are clean and tidy.  The beds have all been fastidiously made, with yellow comforters and white sheets turned down and fluffy pillows at the head.  Extra blankets sit at the foot and there are pretty blue curtains on the windows.  A private bathroom is down the hall. 

“The sheets have all been freshly laundered,” the chief says.  “But no guests to enjoy them.”

“My friend told me that in the States, the toilet is in the room,” I say.

“Well, not here,” the chief says.  “Here we give you your privacy.”  He shrugs.  “What do you think?  Nice, huh?”

“I like your jail very much.  When they get tired of me at Ekrem’s, I’m coming here.”

“We’ll reserve a room.  Let’s go have tea.”

Tea is a universal in Turkey.  Whether you’re sitting down for a haircut, getting a refund on a broken cell phone, visiting your friend’s house, or at the city lockup at two in the morning, someone is going to bring you a cup.  It reminded me of home, of the glasses and glasses of tea my father could put away.  Of course, in Florida, it was iced tea and brewed sweet.  On one summer day, my father could easily go through two pitchers, each with a cup of sugar in them.  It was the first thing he’d bring out when a guest came to the door.  Some of my best memories of him are of sitting out on the back porch at night, drinking glass after glass and listening to his stories of his boyhood in Georgia, punctuated by clinks of ice. 

Over tea, the chief grills Ekrem and his son about the events of the evening.  They tell him about the nightclub and the hookah bar. Hakan makes a joke that I don’t quite catch and everyone erupts into laughter--the chief shaking so hard his tea sloshes onto his pants.  He is utterly, fatally charmed by his own son.  It is obvious from the way he watches his every move, the intentness of his eyes and the way his lips hang open as Hakan talks, as if anticipating the words so fiercely, he wants to say them himself.  It’s always a little painful for me to watch a father and son whose bond is so visceral, so bared to the world.  I blush through this whole conversation.  At what, I don’t know.  I don’t even understand eighty percent of what they are saying.

On the way home, Hakan and Ekrem walk me by their old high school.  It is surrounded by a brick wall nearly twice my height.  At two in the morning, the building is nothing but rows and rows of black windows.  Hakan points to one of them.

“Bak!” he says.  “Look!  That was our class room.  And bak!  Here is where Ekrem and I used to play soccer when we skipped school.  The teacher would look right out of his window, see us, and shake his fist.”  Hakan shakes his fist to demonstrate.

“You know what?” Ekrem tells me in English.  “I have been a really good guide.”

“Yes, you have. I agree."

“You’ve even seen a Turkish prison!  I think I’ve been even a better guide than you were back in America.  I never got to see a prison.”

“It could be arranged.”

“And you never took me to a funeral.  Remember?  I wanted to see a funeral and you refused to take me.  What an asshole!”

Hakan laughs.  This is a word he definitely understands.  “Which one is asshole’?” he asks both of us, trying out his English.

“If and when you ever come back,” I say.  “I promise, we’ll hit the first funeral home I can find.  On the way home from the airport.”

“Good.”

"Hell, if you’d been with me just last month you could have gone to my grandmother’s funeral.  Except, of course, there was nothing traditional about it.”

Ekrem gets quiet.  I had just told him about my grandmother’s death the night before--my father's mother--and he walks a little closer to me so that his shoulder barely touches mine.  Or maybe its me who moves toward him.  I tend to fall toward his gravity recently, when memories of my father's death have resurfaced, and the need for closeness to a male grows more palpable, like something that sticks in my throat.  He keeps his eyes on the ground, looking thoughtful as Hakan asks him to translate what I said.

Despite the sharp and taut currents of repressed bitterness flowing out of just about everyone attending, my grandmother’s funeral was funny in that Flannery O’Connor sort of way.  With eight people, she’d had a better turnout than my dad had had six year’s earlier.  The plan was to dump her ashes in Lake Santa Fe, the North Florida lake where she and my father had spent a good ten years of their lives together.   One of my older cousins, Chris, had borrowed a decrepit old pontoon boat from a friend and towed it behind his new pick-up to the boat launch.  The ramp was set off from the lake down a canal that ran through the middle of a strand of tall, swaying cypress.  The trees dangled their beards of Spanish moss over us as we unloaded the truck.  There was lunch--styrofoam trays of fried chicken we’d bought at a side-of-the-road chicken shack in town--flowers, life jackets, and of course, the little white take-out box that carried my grandmother’s ashes.

My grandmother died on my Dad’s birthday.  I wondered if it had been unconsciously planned on her part, her stroke maybe induced by the guilty part of her brain that blamed herself for the suicide of her younger son. 

Piled onto the rickety little boat was my rather large uncle--my father’s older brother--decked out in the same blue jump suit he always wore.  I was assured by my youngest cousin, Karin, that he owned a lot of them, but I suspected he never changed clothes.  It looked like it belonged to some sort of company, a uniform for a garage or shipping dock, but the man had not worked in years.  He had the usual pipe clamped between his teeth and barked orders at his kids.  All four of them were there--my two oldest cousins, Alan and Mark, both more than twelve years my senior; our boat driver, Chris, who was three years older; and Karin, who was three years younger.  Chris brought his own wife and son, and Karin had her four-year-old daughter, Allison.  Seven of them and one of me, with the ghost of my father hanging behind.              Ekrem was there, too, in a sense.  I texted him furiously, though I most often failed to get a signal there in rural Florida, and even when I did, my messages went off into the vacuum.  For whatever reason, he didn't message me back. 

"U could have a real lesson in Southern culture 2day," I typed.  "At grandma's FUNeral."

Now the Gibbs’ are, with the exception of me and Karin, a large people, both in girth and height.  We loaded up onto that boat amidst much rocking and lurching that calmed down once the motor was revving hard and we were speeding down the length of the canal at a fair clip.  The lake was just as I had remembered it.  Cattails and pond pines along the shore.  Cypress knees and minnows in the gold-brown water.  Turtle heads ducked for cover as we passed, and one gator head lay far in the weeds at the mouth of the canal.

We bore straight out into the middle of the lake.  The wind beat the water into high waves and it was cold for Florida, probably just under sixty degrees.  American and Confederate flags flew from various docks on shore, one below a black POW banner.  I sat out on the front of the boat with Chris’s son, Sean, a fourteen year old kid who was larger than any of us there.   He was sucking intently on a straw from his Big Gulp, decked out in Ray Bans and a Budweiser cap.

Everyone was talking about what they remembered. 

“She used to have a brick barbecue in the back yard.” Mark said.             

“Remember the guys that lived in the house next door that always used to sunbathe naked?” Alan added.  “They were the Scotts, a bunch of hippies or something.” 

“Or the Irish setter that had its nose bit off by a snapping turtle?  Her name was what?  Satin?  No, that was the Doberman.”

“Was the house that green one over there?” Chris asked. 

“No,” I said, “her house was on Little Lake Santa Fe.”  I remembered two lakes connected by a little canal.

“This is the little lake,” Chris corrected.

I had been away a long time, coming back perhaps twice in the past fifteen years, and I had not been on this lake since sailing with my dad at the age of eight.  I was the definite outsider, the sole surviving part of my father who himself was an outsider in his own family, hating and hated by his older brother, and at constant war with his mother despite the fact that he lived with her till the day he died.

Chris slowed the boat to confer with his brothers about the location of the house, and as soon as the motor quieted the entire boat began to tip forward, nose first, down into the lake.  Two inches of water raced over my shoes and I leapt up.  Everyone started shouting at Sean.

“Move, boy!  Damnit, you’re too big!”

“I’m moving!  I’m moving!” The poor kid cried and began to lumber with his Big Gulp toward the back where the rest of us were now cowering.  Grandma’s ashes were tipping left and right on the water filling the deck--my uncle had dropped her in the mad dash to safety.  Sean scooped them up and as soon as he crossed the driver’s seat, the boat righted.

“Okay, son” his mother said.  “You can’t pass this point from here on out.”

She drew an invisible line down the middle of the boat.

We found the house at last.  Much had changed.  The beach was now overgrown with cattails.  The dock looked like it was falling down and the empty lots on either side where my dad and I had built forts and played horseshoes were now fenced off and had huge houses sitting on them.

“Well, who’s going to dump her?” I asked.

“You do it, Jeffrey,” my uncle said.

“Why me?  You’re the last surviving son.”

“I think she would have wanted you to do it.”

“Or maybe you’re just too scared to stand up.”  Everyone laughed nervously.  With Sean at the back, we seemed safe, but nevertheless Chris was careful not to slow the boat too much.  I took the box from my uncle and undid the little wire clasp that held it closed.  Inside was a thick plastic bag full of grey ash.  They looked the same as my father’s had eleven years earlier. 

“Here, Jeff.”  Alan handed me a card.  “This was the prayer someone said at my Uncle Jimmy’s funeral last week.  Maybe you could read it.”

A few of the others rolled their eyes, in particular my Uncle. 

“Goddamn it,” he said under his breath.  “Can’t we just get this over with?”

As if reading a second hand prayer were somehow an overly sentimental thing for a grandson to do at a funeral.  I opened the card and saw the words, “In Memory of James Patrick” followed by the twenty-third psalm.  Psalm in my left hand, I began to pour with my right.

“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”

I had the feeling I was a poser, reading this Bible passage.  My grandmother had always made a big show of being religious, and it had been one of the most irritating things about her.  She’d gone to Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and even Mormon churches,  but never learned to be kind to people.  And I had not set foot in a church in years.  Little white flakes of her bobbed on the surface of the water, and as soon as I hit the words “fear no evil”, fish began to snap at them.  "Yea, though I walk through the valle of the shadow of death..."  Splash.  "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies..."  Plop, plop, splish.  I started to giggle.  By the time I was calling on goodness and mercy to follow, I was red in the face and couldn’t stop.  "I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever," I howled.  The fish were still jumping.

“I guess they like her more than we did,” someone said, and Alan tossed a bunch of roses into the water.  Everyone was smirking mournfully as we sped away, the roses receding into the distance, looking like a bright red wound on the surface of the water.

“Was that legal?” my uncle asked.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I asked the state back when I buried your dead brother.”

“Well next time one of us eats fish out of this lake,” he said.  “You kids can think of your grandma.”

“Sure.” I said.  “Serve her up with some hushpuppies.”

I looked at my phone screen.  No message from Ekrem.  Was it this new blast of loss that made me need to talk to him so much?  My cousins and uncle grew quiet, staring out over the dark lake.  The blue Florida sky was spotless and lonely.  I started typing again, furiously.  "I have a good story 2 tell U.  Almost died feeding grandma's corpse 2 fish."  There, he'll have to answer that.  I quickly typed another, "Wish 2 f''in hell I was in Turkey with u right now," but the signal went out as we entered the cypress shaded canal.  Spanish moss whipped in the wind overhead. 

Attempt failed.  Try again?

My father’s funeral had not been nearly as slapstick, nor as well attended.  There'd been an audience of three--me, my mother, who’d been divorced from him for years, and my brother-in-law, a man who had never even met my dad.  In my brother in law’s company truck, we'd ridden from Florida up to my father’s birthplace of Omega, Georgia--a dying little town in the farmland and pastures west of Tifton.  In the truck bed was a shovel, a baby live oak tree wrapped in a garbage bag, some fertilizer, and a milk jug full of water.  I carried my dad in a box on my lap. 

He had killed himself just a few days after his mother’s birthday, April 19th., “parked his ass on the railroad track” as my aunt put it, and waited for the morning CSX freight to knock him into oblivion.  Now it was already early May, and I’d rescued his ashes from my grandmother’s house not four hours before.  She had always been less than stable, and was well on her way to nuts since my dad’s death.  She’d told the family she was going to get rid of the ashes herself before I could ever get to them.  “He was my son,” she’d bragged.  “Not Jeffrey’s.”

My cousin, Karin, drove me over to pick them up, and I remember pulling into my grandmother’s dirt driveway and having the entire car suddenly surrounded by a white, billowy cloud.  Ash.  I stared at Karin in horror, both of us mouthing at the same time, “She couldn’t have.”  But when I knocked on the door, after some restrained, Southern small talk and clichéd words of consolation, she passively yielded up a sealed box with my father’s name on it.  A quick investigation revealed what appeared to be a full plastic bag of burnt dad.

We arrived in Omega in the late afternoon and cruised quickly through town, passing the lone grocery store which had been in business since my Dad was a boy, passed the shacks of Mexican migrants workers and the BP gas station with its taqueria, then turned off the highway at a sign for the town graveyard.  It was a lonely little plot of gravestones on a hill set off in a strand of pine and oak.  Red clay roads ran on all four sides, separating the dead from the surrounding fields of cotton, tobacco, collards, and sweet potato.  When we got out of the car, the only sounds were the industrial sprinklers watering the crops.

After some searching, I found my grandfather’s gravestone--Robert Lenward Gibbs--the same name as my father’s.  He was buried in a little clutch of relatives that included his mother, stepfather, and two sisters.  I found a clear place near my grandfather and set the shovel blade in the sandy soil--not so close that I might hit a body, but not so far that my father wouldn’t be counted among the dead buried there. I began to dig. 

I wasn’t completely sure that what I was doing was legal.  In Florida, where he’d died, it was most definitely not.  One needed permits and papers and a lot of money to pay for both.  When I phoned the Georgia state offices, a woman just told me that “no, honey, we don’t have any rules about that kind of thing here” and laughed as if I’d asked her where I might find the nearest monument to the Union dead.  Lord, we were Southerners.  We didn’t have rules!  The South or not,  I didn’t really believe that I was just free to go digging around in a public graveyard, so I was rushing to get the hole done before someone caught us.  Once dug,  I took the tree out of the trash bag and freed up the roots.

“I’m about to have a new Daddy,” I told my mom.  “He’ll be a little bit taller than the old one.”

I'd picked the live oak as a symbol of the South, the old genteel part of my heritage that my father embodied.  He’d had a deep basso voice and spoke in an easy, syrupy Georgia drawl; wielding that accent, he'd been able to sweettalk the angriest of men or women with his wit and old fashioned manners.  The giant oak was a reflection of the size and timbre of his voice.  They dominated the green Florida pastures where I grew up, huge and lonesome--ancient temples set among the cows--and they were the best, most beautiful trees in the world for climbing.  Sometimes their gargantuan arms ran along the ground and you could walk right up them like a staircase.  And I loved the Spanish moss that made them look as if they had netted a swarm of flying grey ghosts.  At sunset, as the sky darkened from blue to red to black, if you stood under a live oak, your back to the trunk with the wind rushing through the leaves above making the moss snap and dance like spirits come to life, the world felt bewitched.  God and His Angels walked.

I took my dad’s ashes, mixed them in with some fertilizer and potting soil, and then planted the oak right in the middle of him.  I had a gravestone, too, but the tree was what mattered, a living thing that would feed off of him and grow and produce seeds that would grow in turn for hundreds of years to come.  Raw life--a huge living thing that would tower over everything else around it. 

We'd driven back to Florida in the dark.  On the stretch of road from North to Central Florida, much of Interstate 75 is like some rural backroad, black walls of pine forest on either side.  The only light came from the orange mercury lamps lining the pavement--no towns or cities or stores, just lonely little country byways snaking off into nowhere.  My mom and I were somber, listening quietly to my brother-in-law weave his endless stories about ghosts and guardian angels.  He claimed that he’d picked up a young female hitchhiker once.  She’d been quiet and insisted on sitting in the back seat where she stared forward, answering every question turned upon her in monosyllables.  He never saw her face clearly; it was too dark, too shadowcast, but suddenly, she'd demanded to be dropped off on the sidewalk.  “Here!  Here!” she’d screamed.  My brother-in-law obliged, and as soon as he pulled over, two cars smashed into each other just ahead of him.  When he turned to say something to the girl, she’d vanished.

“That girl was my guardian angel,” he said.  “I would have been in that crash if it wasn’t for her.”

“She probably just ran off,” I suggested,  “You know, when the accident happened and you didn’t notice.”

“No,” he answered.  “It wasn’t not the first time I’d seen her.”

The story made me shiver.  It was past midnight and we were traveling the deserted State Road 441 through Florida’s Green Swamp, a stretch of marsh full of its own stories about phantom semis and Big Foots.  I wanted to believe in my brother-in-law’s ghosts.  After burying my dad, I’d stood and waited for some kind of sign that he still existed.  I looked out across the freshly turned fields and then at a dead oak tree along the barbed wire fence lining the cemetery.  I turned my eyes toward the tree I’d just planted and toward the rows of gravestones sticking out of the red clay.  There were no signs or signals from beyond, no voices or visions, no messages from my suicide Daddy.  Nothing.

My mother would break into my brother in law’s ghost tales and ask if I was okay.  I was fine, of course.  I had the two of them with me, and there were droves of friends and family ready to help me out in the days and months to come.  But, riding back from a funeral that no one but us three even knew about, what I really wondered about was him, my father, who had lived alone and now died alone, erased completely from the world.  He had been so cut off at the end.  Problems with alcohol had rendered him jobless for the last fifteen years of his life.  He’d lived like a recluse with his mother, hating her and the rest of his family for reasons I never learned.  For companionship, there was only me on the occasional visit I would pay him from my college in Orlando.

Ekrem, I think as we pile in his car to drive Hakan home, the funerals I could have shown you!  What the hell would you have gotten from those?

The funeral Ekrem shows me is much different than either my dad’s or my grandmother’s.  There is a Muslim way of thinking about death, or at least, an Anatolian way of thinking about death, and in Kütahya, for better or worse, my father’s lonely little service never would have taken place. 

We are staying at Ekrem’s parent’s house in the middle of the city, across from a shady park full of tea shops and young college couples.  I spend a few evenings kicking back on the balcony with his father, commenting on the women who stroll past the row of trees below. 

“Bak, Jeff.  Bak,” he says.  “Look, look!”  And point to some young brunette clacking across the road in high heels or a group of college girls drinking tea at one of the outdoor cafes. 

“Very pretty” I agree.  “Does you wife know you do this?”

He grins.

Ekrem’s father is in his late fifties.  Already bald, he has dark, piercing eyes, every bit as intense as his son’s, crowned by a thicket of black and grey eyebrows.  When he isn’t grinning, his face falls into an expression of fierce thought--like a general planning that morning’s final, desperate assault.  Sometimes Ekrem’s mother comes outside, complains about her husband’s smoking, and then stands beside him, her hand on his shoulder, talking wistfully about how much Kütahya has changed and grown.

As I said before, a close family like Ekrem’s, where everyone is still married and no one is an alcoholic and no one has restraining orders out on anyone is a little freaky.  Their normalness makes me absurdly self-conscious, and I am full of timid “ma’am’s” and “sirs” and “pleases” and “thank you's” for the entire week I am there.  Not being entirely sure how to say these things in Turkish only makes me more awkward.  

Ekrem’s mom is singularly focused on getting me fat.  Because I have such a short time in her home and because I have expressed interest in Turkish cuisine, she sometimes prepares three or four entrees a night just so that I can try as many different dishes as possible before I leave.  I have lentil soup and mantı and stuffed peppers and dolma and çig  kofte and pilav and inegol kofte--the first four all in one sitting.  And we have mammoth, luxurious breakfasts--with raw milk and butter, honey with the comb, bread brought fresh at the bakery, tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden, various kinds of cheeses, sour-cherry preserves, figs, apricots, Turkish sausage, and cheese borek. 

A hundred little things about Kütahya remind me of the South.  I’ve mentioned the tea, but there is also a love of big meals, and of sweets in particular.  People pay careful attention to manners and display a fussy cleanliness.  There is a slightly defensive pride in history and tradition, and pervading everything, a quiet piety.  Whereas a picture of Christ hung above my grandmother's bed, on every wall in Ekrem’s house hangs either a picture or a poem of the Mevlevi, the mystic Sufi sect known as the Whirling Dervishes in the West.  Ekrem’s brother has thousands of Sufi songs on his iPod, and everyone in Ekrem’s family is capable of playing one of the typical instruments in the Sufi orchestra.  Ekrem and his brother both play the ney, the legendary reed flute of which Rumi wrote endless poems, around since the days of King Midas who had actually ruled near Kütahya thousands of years before the Turks arrived.  According to folklore, its voice, of all the instruments, sounds most like a human being‘s.

There are differences between the South and Anatolia as well.  The Islam of Ekrem’s family has a sophistication largely absent in the Christianity I know back home.  Whereas one of my Florida friends, at the age of twenty-one, had burned all of his metal CDs upon joining his church because demons lived in the lyrics, Ekrem had read and could quote Rumi’s classical Persian poetry preaching universal love.  In fact, every Turk I have met knew the mystic’s most famous lines, “Gel!  Gel!  Come, come, whoever you are, even if you may be an infidel, a pagan, or a fire worshipper, come!”

And while I had spent a few summers in early adolescence attending tent revivals and watching films about the Anti-Christ and his Beast, preparing for the day all non-Baptists would be cast into the Pit, Ekrem had come with me while he lived in Boston to a Quaker ceremony, a Pentecostal church, and a Buddhist meditation session, believing that all religions are on different paths to the same God. 

Ekrem is a devout Muslim, but he never proselytizes.  He is no evangelical--not like I was back in my teenage years trying to preach to family and friends about the coming Rapture.  I can remember in tenth grade earnestly talking to a skater kid in my class about Christ because I was afraid he was going to hell for listening to the Violent Femmes. Ekrem wears his faith with dignity and calm, exuding both great pride and humility.  Like all the religious people I have ever admired, he never speaks a word about his beliefs unless asked.  He rather sets an example.  When we go to the Friday prayer at the Ulu Camii--the Great Mosque on the edge of Kütahya’s old quarter--he tells me that I can either join him or stand in the back and watch.  No one will mind either way.  I join him. 

The Friday prayer is the most important time of the week for the male Muslim.  In rural Anatolia, it means that at around one o’clock, when you hear the call of the imam, you have to drop whatever you’re doing and come to mosque.  You go first to the şadırvan in the courtyard and perform your ritual ablutions from the water that bubbles up out of Kütahya’s mountain springs.  Then you slip off your shoes, put them on a shelf with a thousand other pairs, and enter the mosque, padding in your socks over the ornate carpets to assume your position in the line of worshippers.

Ekrem and I are late, and hurriedly run through the ablutions outside.

Not sure what to do, I am, of course, the slower one.

“Hurry!  Hurry!” Ekrem hisses behind me.

I trip up the steps to the mosque, my foot stuck in my shoe; I hop over to the shelves on my one shoeless foot and pry off the other.  Inside, the first floor is full, jammed with male bodies all the way to the entrance, heads bowed, packed shoulder to shoulder, and so we push our way through them all to the stairwell, racing upstairs to the section reserved for women.  On Friday it doesn’t matter.  The cuma namaz is a male duty and there are no women here today. 

I originally thought that the women’s section would be dark and small, probably shielded from the main hall by one of the screens I have seen in other mosques, but this one has a wide balcony overlooking the first floor and offers a spectacular view; we can see the long, high windows pouring sunlight over the worshippers; we can see all of the Greek columns that supports the domes, the blue tiled fountain, the richly carved platform from which the imam speaks and the bodies prostrating themselves below him. 

But the women’s section is full, too. 

“We’re too late,” Ekrem says.  “Come on, we’ll have to push.”

Ekrem shoves between two young guys in the front row and then urges me to get behind him, pointing fiercely to a two inch space between one very large teenager and another squat, fat old man. 

“There?” I mouth silently.

“Hurry! The imam is about to start speaking.”

And so I move forward and stand as close as I can to the two enormous bodies wondering how the hell I will ever be able to go through the physical motions of the prayer without magically becoming boneless, but as soon as they feel my presence behind them, the two men, young and old, open up in a flurry of welcoming arms, pulling me between them and whispering “gel gel gel”, “come come come” and then I hear the imam’s voice rise up in a verse of the Quran and I am a part of a line of God seekers that stretches the entire length of the balcony, perhaps thirty strong, and there are just as many in front of us and just as many behind in a third row rapidly forming and down below a whole sea.

I read an issue of Discover Magazine with an article about the incompatibility of Islam and science, how religiosity in the Middle East hinders research and development.  When describing Cairo, the writer ominously states that “it looks like a modern city and yet five times a day, when the muezzin calls, the men of the city stop what they are doing and fill the mosques”.  And yet five times a day…There is an inherent critique in that statement, that I, as an American, accepted without a second’s thought, but standing with my fellow man under these ornate domes, preparing to prostrate myself before a Being of perfect good, who, according to the Mevlevi writings I have been reading, is a Being within, known only through the kind of love that breaks your mind, I see only beauty in the call to prayer and to the answer these men are giving, beauty and humility and a childlike sense of wonder.

We perform our prostrations, falling to our knees and pressing our foreheads to the image of a doorway woven into the carpet.  I hear loud exhalations around me, some of them breathing out “Allahu Akbar”, God Is Great, some of them wordless, unintelligible, like great sighs of passion heaved out from the gut. 

When the prayer is over, most of the crowd leaves, but not all.  Several men gather around the imam in the front of the mosque at the mihrab--the niche that shows the direction of Mecca.  Ekrem grabs my arm and pulls me down the stairs.

“I want you to see this,” he whispers.

“What?”

“It’s a funeral.  Come on, let’s find a place.”

I pull back.

“I can’t go to a funeral!”

“Why not?”

“We don’t even know him...or her.  Whoever it is.  I mean…”

“It’s not like that here.”  He is speaking quickly, in his we-really-need-to-hurry-up voice.  “You see, you don’t know that you don’t know him.  Maybe yesterday we passed him in the car and you nodded or maybe you sat next to him on the bus or bumped into him on the street.  Maybe he was a waiter at one of the restaurants we’ve been to or maybe he cut us off in traffic or something.  You don’t know.”

“Yeah, but…no one minds? I mean, his family?”

“No one minds.”

Together we assume our place in line, this time right next to each other.  Another man stands on the other side of me, shoulder brushing mine and when yet another man stands behind us, both of us, without thinking, step sideways to let him in, and there we are, bodies crushed together and heads bowed.  The imam is reciting the first surah of the Quran, the Fatiha which I have learned, and others follow others that I haven’t.  His voice holds the final vowels like a wail, like a cry for help, and chills race up and down my spine at the end of each verse.

Everyone begins to mumble something.

“Helal olsun,” Ekrem whispers.

“What’s that?”

“You have to say it.  I’ll explain later.”

“But…”

“Just say it.”

“Helal olsun.”

The ceremony is brief and when it is over, Ekrem and I go to the fountain in the middle of the mosque and sit on the edge of the tiles.  He looks up at the windows, blazing white with the full force of the sun now directly overhead; the light falls over his face and glitters in his dark eyes.  He picks up a string of beads off the floor and begins ticking them off in his fingers, but absent mindedly.

“Do you remember what we said just a minute ago?” he asks after a moment.

“No, I’m retarded.  Of course I remember.  Helal olsun.”

“I didn’t say you were retarded.”

“I know.”

“But I was thinking it.” He winks.  “Do you know what helal olsun means?”

“Helal.  Like Muslim ‘kosher’.”

“Yes it’s the same word, but that’s not what it means here.  It means like ‘he’s all yours’  No, not that.  I don’t know how to explain it.  Give me a second.”

He sinks into thought and clicks the beads as the water prattles behind us. 

“It’s like this,” he begins.  “When you die, you have affected many people.  So okay, maybe some of these people were mad at the dead guy.  Maybe he flipped them off or something like that and they are still feeling angry.  So you say helal olsun, as kind of like, I forgive you.  Don’t worry about it, man.  You can go in peace.  We all come here to say that, to give him to God together.”  He frowns.  “I wish I could explain it better.”

“That was just fine.”

“No, it’s not quite right.  And I wish I knew what cemetery they were taking him, too.  We could go and see.”

“That’s not private either?”

“No.  Death is a thing…well, we do it together.”

My father died alone and was buried with just two of the people he had touched in his life.  I wish I could have gathered hundreds to witness it, thousands, but there was no one to gather.  And yet here is this man, this Turkish man living in the middle of Anatolia, and somehow I am part of this process of sending him to his Maker.  All of us, we strangers, came together and tried to bless him in whatever small way we could.  And these pious men did not come out of ceremony or mere manners, but out of a sense that he belonged to all of them.  And this is the religion so many people demonize back home?  This is the kind of thing we are afraid of?

My eyes water up.  I’m going to cry, and embarrassed, I turn to the fountain and begin to wash my face.  Ekrem lays his hand on my back.  He is good at this.  I can hide my face, I can be thousands of miles away and talking to him through a microphone on a computer, but he always guesses how I’m feeling.

“Here,” he says.  “Drink some of the water.”

I grab a cup from the top of the fountain.

“No, no!  Don’t use that.  Everyone uses those.  You don’t know how dirty they are.”

I grin.  I suppose the communal spirit does not cover other people’s germs.

“Use your hands,” he orders.

I obey, bringing the water to my mouth in my cupped palms and drinking deeply, again and again and again.  It is hot outside and I haven’t drunk much all day.  Ekrem is laughing.

“What?”

“There’s a legend that says if you drink this water, you will stay in Kütahya for seven years.”

“Does that mean I’m going to break both my legs or fall and lose my memory or something and have to stay?”

“No!  It’s a happy thing.  For a good reason.”

“I can think of a lot of good reasons to stay here.”

I think of him, of Ekrem, this friend who I have lost and found again.  There are times when he is an ordinary twenty-four year old guy--a lot of fun to have around, but young, inexperienced--and then there are times when he seems ageless. 

That afternoon we drive up to the old Seljuk fortress that rides the spine of the mountains behind the Great Mosque.  It commands a view of the entire city and of vast stretches of valley and mountain beyond them.  The sky is open and a pure Prussian blue and below us is the static of city sound--shouts of children and car horns and the rev of engines.  We stand on a parapet that stretches out over the lip of a steep drop off.  Ekrem points across to another mountain top where the red Turkish flag flies over a tower. 

“That’s the other side of the fortress,” he explains.  “I think they still use it for something.”  He points in the other direction, across a stretch of hills and toward a small cluster of pinkish buildings.  “That’s my university over there.  We’ll have to drive out and see it.”

I am thinking of my father, and how I might have felt if a group of townspeople had showed up for his burial--all those strangers present at one of the most private moments of my life.  I had taken such pains to not invite his brother and mother; to have none of his family there at all.  Maybe it would have haunted me less if I had shared it with a wider world.  But would all these good Muslims have come to his funeral, a ceremony for a suicide?  Would it have made any difference to them?  I don’t know.

Just then, I hear the call to prayer rise up from the maze of streets and alleys below us.  Another starts from a different mosque, further to the east, and then another.  The sound echoes off the canyon walls and rises up to engulf us before spreading out to cover the whole land.  Then silence before the next verse.  Each line moves like this, and I stop and listen and feel this incredible sense of waiting in those silences.  There was a strong breeze coming down on us from the castle walls and it’s cool on my sweating skin and I close my eyes as the muezzins’ voices bounce off the rock, growing and expanding, up over the city, into the boundless sky above.

I want to ask Ekrem to say helal olsun to my father, but I can’t.  It’s too late or too affected a gesture or too weak.  I’m not sure I’m thinking of my father at all, or just of God, of the possibility inherent in the idea of God, and so I keep my eyes closed and listen to the line of the call that says  “hayy ‘ala l-falah” which means “come alive to flourishing,” but to my ears, it sounds like “high, high infinity” and today it gives me goose bumps.  I think then, as I have several times since arriving in Turkey, that it is possible for me to again believe in God.  There is a sense of something far greater than me, beyond all the cliches, something so powerful that it could shatter all my old ideas of love and mercy and friendship and replace them with something new and stronger, quieter but at the same time brighter than the Anatolian sun that now blazes down onto my eyelids, coloring the darkness there a deep flame red.