Ismail Songül

Ismail had forgotten how to ask a girl out. Sometimes, it was hard for him to remember if he ever had. When he’d asked Aylin if she wanted to meet him for tea Tuesday evening after her class, though, she’d said yes, so clearly he still knew a thing or two. Aylin was this young woman who came to the Kurdish Cultural Center on Mondays and Wednesdays when the support groups for newcomers were held and went around talking to the participants. She was about to finish her master’s and become a therapist, and she visited the center because she enjoyed serving her community. “I know therapy is still a taboo for the older generations,” he heard her say once, “but I want to do my bit to change that.” Maybe that was what had grabbed Ismail’s attention, her desire to do something, to change things—that she was an idealist, to a degree, like he had once been.

At first, he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to pick her up at the university, or if waiting for her at the tea house would suffice. Granted, all he needed to do was ask her, but he also felt like those were the things that were supposed to come naturally to men, at least to those in the outside world. He was a bit ashamed to ask her, to maybe look outdated or even childish. It was one thing for him to admit to himself that he has no idea of how even the simplest things in life worked, but it was a very different one to let her see that part of him.

When Ismail first noticed her, Aylin was talking to another person, Birgül Kaçmaz, an elderly woman, who had been in Paris for almost two years now, and for whom the Kurdish Center was her home away from home. Birgül xanim had lost two sons and a pregnant daughter-in-law when the Turkish military raided her village, and after that, her eldest daughter had pleaded with her to join her in France. Not an easy transition, to say the least, and Ismail had noticed that she’d cry a lot during the meetings; it was a miracle to see her standing after having lost so much. Aylin would talk with her for hours at a time, and it was like that that Ismail started to notice her. It was not only the fact that she was beautiful—because she was—but more than that, there was a certain familiarity about her, although he couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was.

As he made his way out of the métro station, for some reason he remembered the last time that he was so nervous. Turned out there’d been a time in his life when maybe he hadn’t known how to ask a girl out, but he sure had known how to sweep one off her feet. Her name was Nurcan, and she was going to become a doctor. That was the way she had introduced herself once they’d finally met, when he was a first-year student and she was close to finishing her fourth year. Word around campus was that Nurcan was too full of herself, that because her dad was one of the richest men in Van, she thought that she was better than everyone else. But Ismail found this confidence charming and, far from dissuading him, it made him fall head over heels for her, even before exchanging a word, just by hearing about her. He didn’t go looking for her, though, telling himself instead that if it was meant to be, then they would find their way to each other. And they did, one day at a demonstration that some leftist students were holding on campus. Ismail was there, bağlama in hand, singing revolutionary songs in Kurdish

“Oh my god, what are you doing?” It was Nurcan, looking at him from head to toe. It seemed as if she were just passing by, two-to-three books in her hand. “Stop it! Stop singing in Kurdish!”

Ismail stopped immediately and looked at her in the eye, “Why should I? I can tell by your accent that you’re Kurdish, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, looking away.

“Oh, come on. Everybody here knows you’re from Van. Your dad is the owner of all those buses and stuff. We get it, you have money, but that doesn’t make you Turkish. You’re Kurdish, and you should be proud of it.”

“Ugh,” she said, seemingly annoyed but relaxing her shoulders, putting her guard down, “you sound just like my brother. He’s in the mountains now, you know, his pregnant wife is staying with her parents to hide her shame. Promise you’ll never do something like that to me.”

He wasn’t sure what he meant by that last sentence, but he was too afraid to ask, so he focused on the first part of her statement, “She has nothing to be ashamed of, it’s an honor to fight for the freedom of your people.”

He meant that, every single word. He had heard a lot about the men and women who had taken it to the mountains to fight the Turkish army, but Nurcan was the closest he had ever come to someone who had actually gone.

“You would never do something like that to me, right?” She repeated, leaving him confused once again.

“To you? I don’t get it.”

“Tell you what, I have to study some, so I’ll be in the library later today. You can wait for me outside and walk me to the dorms.”

And this, so simple, was the beginning of their relationship, of a love that would burn so intensely and for so long that it would calcify in his heart. Yet the love for his nation was greater and he ended up breaking the only promise that had really mattered. A little over two years after they’d met, Ibrahim didn’t make it back to start his fourth year; he was deep in the mountains, a weapon over his shoulder. He didn’t tell Nurcan, who had gone back that summer to Van to tell her family there was this Political Science student from Muş who was going to ask for her hand in marriage. Ismail had sent her a letter right before he was due to leave. He never knew if she had ever gotten it. He didn’t last long in the mountains, though, and one winter day, wounded by the Turkish army, he was thrown in jail and left there to rot. He’d asked his sister to tell Nurcan that he had died for the freedom of their people, surrounded by the only friends a Kurd would ever have.

Maybe he should tell that story to Aylin, maybe she would find it interesting, although he doubted that a girl like her, so educated and sophisticated would find interest in such things as love and loss. It would probably be more fitting to tell her some of what he had seen and lived through in prison for twenty years, the longest of his life yet somehow the shortest, too, almost as if he had only lived for the first twenty. He realized then that he didn’t know a lot about Aylin either, other than by things he’d heard here and there. She was eighteen years her junior and she spoke Kurdish fairly well; he knew that because that was the language they’d speak together. He’d heard some people in the Kurdish Center say that her father had fallen martyr in the mountains of Kandil, and that she had moved to France with her mother when she was only a couple of years old. When he had wanted to double-check that information with Birgül xanim, though, she had been very reticent, saying she found it outrageous for a forty-something-year-old man to have an interest in a twenty-something young woman. “That was the way things were done before, birêz Ismail,” she’d said. “We know better now.” He said nothing, not even attempting to explain. After all, how could he? He himself had a hard time understanding that maybe and just maybe he was still that wounded twenty-year-old that had entered that prison in Erzincan all those years ago.

He stood across from the building where Aylin took her Tuesday class, and he waited. And waited. Then, he heard an infectious laugh in the distance and when he looked at the door, he saw it open right on time for three girls to emerge, books in hand, laughing with such liveliness that it ignited something in him. And then, he saw it. It was there, all over her face. Aylin’s laughter, the way her face lit up, even the sound, everything took him back to that cold night outside of the library. It was her, it was Nurcan. And when she saw him there, waiting, Aylin looked at him and stopped laughing, giving him a wide smile instead as she waved her friends goodbye.

“Ismail, you came,” she said, bringing him into a hug, but he was frozen in place, unable to react.

“You…you…” it was all he was able to get out of his mouth.

“Look, I know I said we could go for some tea but I think I have better plans. I have been looking at your file for quite a while and, if it’s okay, I thought you might want to come by my house. There’s someone I know you’d like to meet.”