Turkey – a travel journal – Day 5

The Russians have taken over the coastline – they are buying up the hotels and they are coming in droves – inching out the Germans who used to come and used to own. We wonder what the Russian maids think of us covering our painting with Putin’s picture. Gul is elected in Turkey – his wife appears beside him with her birka – a lackluster smile on her mouth. And we swim again in the Mediterranean late in the afternoon after we have slept. At dinner we sit and have fish outside and midway we hear the call to prayer – it is a beautiful, haunting sound and we all stop and listen. And then we hear a story, told just barely above a whisper, that makes us all draw closer into the table:

I was in New York then, dating a Chinese American girl, we had been going out for one month. We were at a party and she drank too much, she was very drunk. So I took her to her apartment and undressed her, and put her in her bed. I was leaving her room and she said, can I ask you a question? And I said, tomorrow, my love, you are drunk and need to sleep, and she said, just one question? She told me about being in Turkey a year earlier with her work people. She said I drank too much like I’ve done tonight and I went to my hotel room and got in bed and was half passed out, half dreaming, half awake and I heard a voice singing. What was he saying? I kept listening and started crying because I never wanted him to stop, it was so beautiful. I prayed he wouldn’t stop.

I thought how my father prayed in this Oriental/Sepharadic melodic way and I will never hear his voice again and it makes me ache to hear him sing again too.

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