Out of the dozens of fellow students Sinan met during orientation at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in fall 1993, only Cengiz made an impression. Sinan was 10 minutes early for the final session of the morning and sat close to the exit near the back of the auditorium of the Temel Bilimler arts and sciences building. Students arrived in small chattering groups as he browsed the course schedule, which was printed in English, the language of instruction at Boğaziçi. Sinan silently debated whether he should pronounce the word “schedule” the mushy British way, which sounded funny, or the crisp American way, which sounded brash. He had heard the word pronounced both ways in his foreign language classes in middle school and high school, but he hadn’t had to choose, until now.
When the auditorium was nearly full, an older woman in a navy blue dress suit walked onstage. At that moment, someone emanating the syrupy scent of Brut cologne dropped into the seat next to Sinan and let out an exasperated sigh, which made Sinan turn and look. The latecomer brushed a loose black curl from his forehead.
“Merhaba, ben Cengiz.”
“Selam. Sinan.”
That was all they could manage before the university registrar began her opening remarks. During the parade of short speeches that followed, Sinan couldn’t help but glance from time to time at Cengiz, noticing his fitted orange shirt and the faded Levi’s that exposed his right knee. Meanwhile, Cengiz kept shuffling between the schedule and the notebook he scribbled in. After the registrar’s office finished its long-winded presentation with a discussion of final exam protocol, Cengiz said, “I’ve got to make a quick stop at my department. Görüşürüz,” gathered his stuff, and left in a hurry. Cengiz’s sudden departure made Sinan face the prospect of lunching alone. He wondered if they’d meet again.
The Orta Kantin cafeteria was full to the brim, so Sinan bought two poğaças, one with feta and another with black olives, and a cup of hot black tea and left for the quad, taking small steps so as not to scald himself. One of the benches that lined the perimeter was miraculously empty, so he ate there and watched the passersby while soaking up the late September sun. Soon he felt warm and overdressed in his brown turtleneck and blue jeans, and his scalp was itchy under his short brown hair. He ran his fingers through his hair from back to front, brushing his bangs sideways over his forehead.
When he had finished his poğaças and was sipping the last of his tea, Sinan spotted Cengiz walking his way through the quad and waved. He took in his tall frame and observed his relaxed and confident gait maneuvering through the crowd.
“Naber?” Cengiz said as he plopped on the bench. He held a KitKat bar in his hand.
If Sinan hadn’t seen him, the Brut would’ve given away his presence.
“Iyiyim, a bit tired. You?”
“Same,” Cengiz said as his eyes panned over the quad, “So, what do you think of this place?” He sounded skeptical, like an indecisive customer sizing up merchandise.
“It’s pretty. People seem nice.”
“Well, isn’t most everyone, at first?” Cengiz’s face wore a playfully charming expression. He unwrapped the KitKat and bit into it with gusto.
“True,” Sinan said but couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I’ll major in biology. What’s your major?” Cengiz asked.
“Literature.”
“So… novels and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“What will you do with that later?”
Not this question again, Sinan thought. People from his hometown who neither read nor wrote beyond daily exigencies frequently posed it to him.
“Teacher? Translator? I haven’t decided, yet. What will you do with bio?” Sinan said and raised an eyebrow.
“Umm, scientist, I suppose,” Cengiz said, mock-creasing his forehead as if this was the first time he had ever considered the possibility.
Cengiz leaned back, took another bite of his KitKat, and continued, “Why literature?”
“I don’t know, I like reading,” Sinan said, “What about you?”
“I like learning how organisms work,” Cengiz said in earnest with a sweeping, almost theatrical gesture of his hand toward the quad, “You know, what makes all these creatures, including us humans, tick.”
The lawn was full of students, some lounging in the shade of the evergreens and others sheltering their faces or necks from the sun with their notebooks. A stray cat looking for food brushed against legs and feet, and a dog slept under a soon-to-turn deciduous tree.
“Interesting,” Sinan said, “I was in the literature division in high school but still had to take bio. I’ll probably take it again to fulfill my science requirement here.”
“What do you remember most?”
“DNA, cells, stuff that everyone should know.”
“Nice. Exactly what I’m interested in. The stuff we can’t control. Like our genetic makeup and instincts.”
“Cool,” said Sinan and checked his watch. The afternoon session was about to start. He suggested walking back together. Cengiz deftly threw the last bite of the chocolate bar into his mouth, and they took one of the crisscrossing paths of the quad toward Temel Bilimler. Other first-year students, with the course schedule tucked under their arms, strolled to their respective schools’ orientations in different parts of the campus.
◆
Sinan didn’t expect the campus to be so old and beautiful. He was from Bursa, an Anatolian city south of the Marmara Sea famous for its soft, thick towels, candied chestnuts, and Zeki Müren, the Liberace-like doyen of Turkish classical music who was born and raised there. Sinan’s high score on the annual national college exam qualified him for the Western Languages and Literatures Department at Boğaziçi. It was the top English program in the country, so he hadn’t even bothered to take the six-hour bus trip to Istanbul to visit campus prior to orientation. Now a state university, Boğaziçi was formerly Robert College, which was founded in the 19th century as the first American secondary school outside the United States. It was on the European side of Istanbul, perched on the wooded hills that flanked the Bosphorus Strait. The panoramic view of the waterway down the hill featured a couple of suspension bridges, two old Ottoman citadels, and seaside mansions, yalis, with ornate woodwork, as well as newer villas with private pools and manicured lawns in gated communities. The section of campus with tree-canopied benches facing the strait, where students often read or socialized outside class, was called the manzara. Some residence halls had views of the Bosphorus, too, which made Sinan think of old Turkish movies with rich male protagonists who dazzled poor and innocent ingénues who had just migrated from small towns or villages in Asia Minor.
The reality of dorm life turned out to be somewhat unluckier, however, as students were not allowed to choose their first-semester housing. Together with Cengiz, he was placed in the unimaginatively titled Dördüncü Yurt, or “Fourth Dorm,” a sprawling two-storied building that was built into a steep hillside. The larger upper floor consisted of a single high-ceilinged room that was previously a gymnasium, along with a restroom on the side of the building that faced the Bosphorus. The smaller lower floor had the showers and storage. Indeed, the upper floor looked just like the stomping grounds for jocks and their cheerleader girlfriends in American movies from the ‘80s, except for the dozens of bunk beds and lockers. On their first day in the men’s residence hall, they discovered to their amusement that the corner restroom had the only clear view of the Bosphorus in the building.
“If only the urinals faced the other way,” said Cengiz to Sinan as they relieved themselves, with the windows to their right and behind. They had to strain their necks sideways to see Rumeli Hisarı, an Ottoman maritime fortress, on the hillside and, behind it, the Fatih Sultan Mehmet suspension bridge—named after the 21-year-old Ottoman ruler who conquered the city in 1453.
“Enjoy it while it lasts!” said Sinan, “This is probably the only time in our lives we’ll be able to afford to live in a place like this with such magnificent views.”
“I do hope I won’t ever live in a restroom,” said Cengiz.
Sinan laughed and stuck his tongue out at him over the shoulder-high partition between them as he zipped his pants.
The gigantic towers and taut steel cables of the Conqueror Bridge, as it was called for short, glinted in the distance as it straddled the strait from Europe to Asia Minor.
Sinan thought of their residence hall as a bizarre social experiment in which 60 young men from across Turkey were brought together in their first year away from home to somehow learn to live in a single oversize room for an entire semester. Initially, he was shy about dressing and undressing since there were no walls, nowhere to hide, but he also found this open communal living oddly intriguing. He didn’t let the reason behind that fully coalesce in his mind. Being a military brat, he knew who he was supposed to be: a man’s man who flaunted his interest in drinking, soccer, and women. Like his father, an officer in the army, who yelled at the TV when Beşiktaş, his favorite team, lost and toasted when they won, and slapped him on the back while pointing at the models on the screen during commercial breaks.
When he reached puberty, Sinan’s father talked to him about sex in clipped, portentous sentences.
“If you don’t pull out, the woman will get pregnant,” he said.
Sinan, who was 12 at the time, nodded and averted his eyes. His father moved on to the subject of cleanliness, touching the tip of his index finger with his thumb and saying,
“Make sure to shave your pubic hair regularly. If they are longer than a grain of barley, it’s günah.”
Sin? While his father drank and didn’t pray, except during Ramazan, he made sure to give his only son, whom he named after Mimar Sinan, the famed Ottoman architect and engineer, clear instructions regarding the ablutions required after any sexual activity, including masturbation or a wet dream.
“Wash your body thoroughly, rinse inside your mouth and nose three times, and ask Allah to cleanse you.”
His father ended the talk with a final note, “Don’t forget: Our religion doesn’t approve of livata.”
Sinan didn’t know the word but remained silent. He looked it up in the dictionary afterwards and wondered what prompted his father to mention sodomy.
He dated a few girls in high school. Kissing and fondling in the park or at home parties were exciting transgressions, but the slippery wetness of spit was unpleasant. To preserve her virginity for marriage, no girl in her right mind would go all the way, so he didn’t explore further. Even if it was all everyone talked about in high school, dating felt inessential.
As Sinan adjusted to dorm life, the near-complete lack of privacy led to some interesting knowledge about others: who had the biggest balls, literally (the general consensus was that it was Murat, in whose absence tongues wagged about the possible medical causes); who snuck out to drink and get high; who had a hot temper; who had girlfriend problems; who was or passed himself off as a womanizer; and who kept to himself. In this environment, Sinan inevitably saw Cengiz naked many times. On one occasion, he stared at Cengiz a bit too long, which Cengiz noticed and responded to with a smile. Sinan quickly turned away.
◆
Sinan spent most of his first semester enjoying Cengiz’s company outside classes and during weekends. They went to movies and art exhibits and frequented cafés in Taksim. Cengiz loved chocolate bars and desserts and insisted on sharing, and Sinan couldn’t refuse—a bite was just a bite. Reiko, an exchange student from Japan in Sinan’s Survey of English Literature class, begged to differ; she called Cengiz and his predilection for sweets “funny.” After seeing Cengiz offer him cake in the cafeteria many times, she warned Sinan, “Your funny friend eats sweets all the time. If you don’t watch, you’ll both get fat soon.”
Cengiz was a fan of the soundtracks to Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musicals. He made a mixtape for Sinan of The Phantom of the Opera and Cats from the tapes he received from a friend’s older sister who studied journalism in London. Sinan found the idea of an entire musical about cats at best whimsical and at worst stupid, but The Phantom intrigued him.
“What’s it about?” he asked and bit into a Twix bar Cengiz handed him. Despite what Reiko said, a Twix had two bars and so was perfect for sharing. They were at Orta Kantin for a snack following an afternoon class. A tabby cat napped on their table, and a few students were studying or chatting at other tables.
“Hmm, how do I summarize it?” Cengiz twirled the bar like a baton. “It is about a brilliant musician with a terrifyingly deformed face. He haunts the Paris Opera House. He loves Christine, his beautiful ward and an inexperienced opera singer. But alas, she’s in love with Raoul, a young, handsome aristocrat.” He bit the tip of his Twix.
“Sounds tragic.”
“Yeah, but the music is beautiful.”
“How does it end?”
“The phantom demands that Christine stay with him. He threatens to kill Raoul. What does Christine do? She kisses him!”
“He must’ve looked handsome and mysterious with that mask on.”
Cengiz gave him a sideways look and raised his bushy eyebrows.
“What?” Sinan said and took another bite.
“Nothing.” Cengiz put his hands through his hair, gathering it into what was almost a proper ponytail before letting it loose again, and said, “Anyway, this is the phantom’s first experience of kindness and compassion, so he sets them free and disappears.”
“Cool. So, it’s about love.”
“Evet. The unrequited kind. And learning what love really is. And, umm, how you can’t make someone like you,” Cengiz sighed. He eyed Sinan from time to time as he quietly ate the rest of his Twix.
Feeling Cengiz’s gaze, Sinan smiled and gave a quick thumbs up. A guy and a girl who sat at a table across the room packed up their textbooks and left for another class. Cengiz and Sinan followed suit.
In the spring semester, Sinan roomed with Cengiz alone in another residence hall. A sofa and a bunk bed dominated their new, small room, a welcome change from the gymnasium setup. Sinan slept on the upper bunk, and Cengiz below. Cengiz’s hair got longer that semester; long, shiny, black curls cascaded around his face. He also started plucking his eyebrows.
On a Sunday afternoon, Sinan met with Cengiz, who had just returned from visiting his parents in the seaside Moda neighborhood on the Anatolian side of Istanbul. They sat at the second-floor café in Mephisto Kitabevi, a bookstore in Beyoğlu, Taksim. Their table overlooked the crowds milling about on Istiklal Street, the main drag for shopping and entertainment. As they people-watched, Cengiz said, “Yesterday, we were having breakfast in the kitchen in front of the television, and my mother asked me if I was plucking my eyebrows. I almost choked on my toast.”
“What? How did you respond? I mean, other than saying yes.”
Cengiz dug into a slice of chocolate cake with his fork and said, “Here, have some.”
Sinan took the fork and complied.
“What could I say? You don’t need a guide to a village you see in the distance, as the saying goes.”
“Imagine that, a whole village with beautifully plucked eyebrows.”
They both snorted with laughter.
“I actually pretended I didn’t hear and tried to change the subject. She wouldn’t let it go. She said she’d take me to a therapist if necessary.”
“Allah’ım.”
“Not happening, but I said I’d let her know. Fortunately, Valentina, her favorite show, came on, so she moved on.”
“All hail badly dubbed Mexican telenovelas.”
Cengiz rolled his eyes and said, “Let’s share the last bite.”
Sinan had met Cengiz’s mother. She was an elementary school teacher with watchful eyes. She had visited a few times since the beginning of the academic year and called the dorm frequently. Each residence hall had a single phone line that could only receive calls, and when a resident was called, the hall security attendant would page their name. If Cengiz was out, which happened often, his mother would ask for Sinan. She wanted to know where her only son, gözünün nuru, the light of her eye, her Genghis Khan, went at all times, whom he went with, and when he returned. During one such call, she complained to Sinan that she had offered to buy Cengiz a cell phone, which was just becoming available and would thus constitute a major expense, so that they could communicate easily, but Cengiz had told her he would shut it off and not use it. After he hung up the communal phone in the foyer, Sinan shuffled in his slippers back to their room and thought about this audacious response to parental authority. He wondered if he’d have had the nerve to do the same if he were in Cengiz’s shoes.
Strangers also noticed Cengiz. At times when they were off campus, especially on the outskirts of Istanbul, people stared at him disapprovingly as he threw back his hair or licked pink cotton candy off his fingers. When this happened, Sinan remembered watching stories on the evening news as he was growing up about the death of travesti sex workers, that portrayed their grief-stricken, protesting friends as freaks who were likely doomed to a similar fate at the hands of their müșteri tricks or the police. The onlookers interviewed by reporters would call them ahlaksız—immoral—or sapıklar—perverts—and scream for the government to cleanse the city of their dirty presence. Sinan worried that somebody would curse at Cengiz or, worse, do him physical harm. He wished Cengiz would curtail his flamboyant manner for his own protection.
◆
For all but the most stubbornly blind observers, the direction of Cengiz’s affections was readily apparent, particularly when it came to his frequent seismic crushes on men. He first fell for a neuroscience graduate student he worked with in the biology lab on campus, and Sinan heard him make certain comments in passing.
“The new TA I work with is so brilliant, and I want to get to know him more, but he won’t socialize outside the lab.”
Sinan could imagine the scene in the lab: Cengiz would euthanize mice in preparation for the day’s work, and would inevitably make sheep’s eyes at the graduate student as they spent the day slicing up diminutive brains together. Sinan found this idea highly amusing, but when they came across the graduate student together on campus one day, he gained a more well-rounded perspective on Cengiz’s interest: the graduate student was good-looking and seemed nice, too—perhaps too nice to say anything about Cengiz’s not-so-subtle advances. Cengiz was shaking visibly during their brief chat, and Sinan felt bad for him. Nothing came of Cengiz’s crush on the graduate student. Unfazed, he moved from one infatuation to another, talking to Sinan endlessly about the man of the moment.
Meanwhile, Sinan made attempts at dating college women, convinced that he was going to meet the right one soon. Classes and campus events, like the art club or the ballroom dance club, offered plenty of opportunities to meet bright and beautiful women. Early in the spring, he asked out Ilkay, a classmate in Modern Drama. True to her name, which meant “first moon,” she was pale-skinned, and she had green eyes and shiny straight hair like the models who would whip around their coiffed manes in shampoo commercials. Sinan found her name romantic, and she was beautiful, so he thought it could work.
When Cengiz heard about Sinan’s plans with Ilkay, he wanted to join them, but Sinan told him it was a date, which elicited a quizzical look from Cengiz. During the date, they talked about classes they liked and complained about homework and disorganized professors. It could’ve been a meal out with any classmate. He was polite toward Ilkay, and she was gracious, but as the dinner went on, he felt like he was leading her on. After the date, their interactions were limited to awkward pleasantries when they saw one another in class.
Later in the semester, Cengiz’s newest crush was a fellow biology major. After hearing Cengiz gush about his new acquaintance for a few weeks, Sinan finally got the chance to see what the big deal was about. Sinan and Cengiz were sitting on the “steps,” the amphitheater-style seats in front of Temel Bilimler building that overlooked the quad, when Cengiz grabbed Sinan’s arm and pointed enthusiastically into the crowd. Serdar looked like a Benetton model with spiky hair, nerdy thick-rimmed glasses, a bomber jacket and cargo pants. Serdar waved at Cengiz and walked by; Sinan wondered whether such a well-dressed man would be into guys or girls. He learned the answer a few days later, when Cengiz invited Serdar to hang out in their room, and he showed up with Yeșim, his beautiful girlfriend.
While alcohol wasn’t allowed on the premises, Serdar and Yeșim snuck a few bottles of Efes beer, a bottle of vodka, and some orange juice in their backpacks. Sinan and Cengiz had some peanuts and sunflower seeds to go with the drinks. Sinan didn’t know them at all, so he felt awkward and sat on the lower bunk, drinking most of the beer. The others indulged in the hard liquor as they sat around the old wooden desk by the window and gossiped about the biology department. Around midnight, after a couple of rounds, Yeșim switched to Serdar’s lap, and Cengiz, who wasn’t a heavy drinker, said he was dizzy and stretched out on the sofa. After a few more rounds, Cengiz passed out and Sinan clambered to his bed, at which point Serdar and Yeșim stumbled into Cengiz’s bunk and started making out. Sinan tried to fall asleep, but hearing Serdar be intimate with Yeșim in the bed below him, he felt nervous and warm and needed air. He got up and left the room.
Around 3 a.m., Sinan was chatting in the study room with a mutual friend, a philosophy major who had a habit of studying late after clubbing, and Cengiz walked in looking groggy and uncharacteristically disheveled.
“I’m sorry,” said Cengiz on the way back to their room. “They’re gone. I didn’t think they’d start having sex. They woke me up and told me you had left.”
“It’s OK,” Sinan said. “I thought I shouldn’t be there, and I couldn’t really tell them to stop, either, so I decided to remove myself until they were finished. Are you OK?”
Cengiz looked down and sighed. He seemed defeated. Sinan patted him on the back as they walked back into their room. As soon as Sinan closed the door, Cengiz turned around and pulled him in, hugging him in the semi-darkness. They lingered for a few seconds until Sinan felt Cengiz’s lips on his lips, his stubble on his skin, and his arms around his neck. Cengiz was a little taller than him. Sinan’s breathing got harder when Cengiz started caressing his back and pulled off his T-shirt. Sinan didn’t protest and slid his jeans off. Not knowing what to do next, he sat on the sofa and watched Cengiz undress. The boundaries of friendly affection, already blurred, faded in the moment when both were naked, and a pleasurable urgency Sinan had never felt with anyone else before soon overrode everything.
◆
At dawn, Sinan woke up in his bunk to the sound of the call for morning prayer that seemed to travel and swirl in the wind. Taking care not to wake Cengiz, he got up, showered, and did his ablutions. It felt good to be clean. There were still two hours before his morning class, so he returned to the warmth of his bed and pondered the previous night’s events. Outside their window, Judas trees in full purple bloom swayed in the wind in the manzara while the mighty Bosphorus down the hill streamed quietly against the rising sun.
Mixed feelings collided and threatened to pull him apart. He had enjoyed intimacy with another man and wanted more, but felt a profound guilt at the thought of his parents, especially his father. What about Cengiz? How would this change their friendship? And what would others think about them or say to them if they found out? After an uneasy hour accompanied by relief that Cengiz was still asleep, he resolved to skip his Friday classes and leave town for the weekend. He changed quickly and tossed a few clothes and a textbook in his backpack. He couldn’t go to his parents’ house—he didn’t want to deal with their probing questions and exhortations to overeat, much less his already-worsening feelings of shame, so he opted to stay with his uncle’s family on the Anatolian side of Istanbul. He visited once a month anyway, and he’d be back by Sunday, so he decided he didn’t need to tell Cengiz where he was going.
His uncle, aunt, and two adult cousins lived in the middle-class Içerenköy neighborhood, a former village that was long ago swallowed by Istanbul’s sprawl. His uncle, a high school principal, and his aunt, a retired textile worker, asked him about school and his plans after college graduation. School was going well, graduation far away, thankfully. They otherwise let him be. He got along well with his cousins, who took him out to eat and shop at the Alış Veriş Merkezi, which everyone called AVM. The recently built shopping mall was located in a nearby new housing development with high-rise apartment buildings. Such luxury rezidans projects swarmed the empty areas around the E5 and TEM highways that connected the old, coastal Istanbul to its suburbs.
Sinan’s cousin Mustafa, a 25-year-old accountant with thick-rimmed glasses and a receding hair line that revealed a shiny forehead, was engaged to be married soon. His fiancée Pınar, a bank teller, met them in the mall dressed in a pant suit and heels. They joined Sinan and his other cousin Semra for a quick but pricy Burger King meal before they left to do some wedding shopping. Semra, in her first year at Marmara University and majoring in nutrition, was an avid shopper who never missed an opportunity to look at high-heeled shoes and handbags. Her excessive makeup and dyed blond hair attracted attention wherever she went. Sinan was happy to go along as she hunted for the next shoe-handbag combo. They strolled through AVM‘s shiny perfumed halls, where Muzak constantly played. Semra hung on his arm like they were a couple. His cousin was like a sister to him, but not knowing better, female shoppers would smile at them approvingly, while men ogled at her and cast jealous glances his way. The strangers’ misperceptions of their relationship amused him, until he caught himself regarding some of the men in a way he had never done so before. When one or two seemed to return his gaze, it set his blood on fire because of his altered sense of possibilities, however uncertain. How easy and difficult it is to be one thing on the inside and another on the outside, he thought.
Over the course of the weekend, he realized this unnamed state was his new normal. He felt freshly grounded and exhilarated, like visiting a place for the first time yet feeling at home, but he knew he couldn’t confide in his cousins or anyone else, which made him feel unmoored. Late Sunday night, he took the municipal bus back to campus. The midway point of the two-hour trip was crossing the Boğaziçi Bridge, which soared from Asia to Europe high above the dark waters of the Bosphorus Strait, flanked on either side by neon city lights. As the bus sped through the air, he contemplated what he had been drifting toward all along: a fundamental secret that, if revealed, would have serious ramifications, with Cengiz at its center.
◆
When Sinan arrived back in the residence hall, it was past midnight, and Cengiz was asleep. He closed the door quietly and went straight to bed. When he woke up in the morning, Cengiz had already left for class. For the next couple of days, Sinan stayed out late studying in the library and slipped into the room late at night, with Cengiz always seeming to be deep asleep. He knew they should speak about what happened at some point, but not knowing how to have that conversation, he was grateful about this elaborate dance of mutual avoidance.
On Wednesday, Sinan had just finished his lunch and was sipping hot black tea at the manzara when Cengiz sat down next to him on one of the benches facing the Bosphorus. Sinan was pleased to see a generous slice of tiramisu in the transparent plastic container Cengiz laid on the seat between them.
“I want to tell you a story,” Cengiz started, “Will you listen?”
“Of course,” Sinan said.
“I had this best friend in high school. I liked him, and I think he liked me, too. But once we both knew it, it became a burden. He stopped coming over to study, ignored me at school, and began dating a girl. I know he was scared. So was I. But I was so hurt that he dropped me as a friend. I still am.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sinan said.
“It’s okay. I was stupid. What did I expect? That we would be together and live happily ever after? Anyway, I’m telling you this because I need to ask you: Will you promise me you won’t stop being my friend?”
Sinan looked away for a moment and then looked back and said, “I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I’d never do that to you.” He looked away again. “I like you, and I want to be your friend. I know that.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Cengiz said as he opened the container and passed a plastic spoon to Sinan.
“You know, Reiko’s still surprised that I eat so much dessert!” Cengiz said.
Sinan observed that lately, Cengiz and Reiko had been bonding over Turkish coffee during study breaks in the garden outside the library. Cengiz would tease her by calling her his Japanese aunt because she’d always say he put too much sugar in his coffee. Relieved about the change of topic, Sinan said, “Well, I was surprised, too, when I first met you. But at this point why is she so shocked about it?”
“Apparently, in Japan, boys are supposed to abstain from sweets as they grow up and become men.”
Sinan paused for a moment. The trees in the manzara were in full bloom. Down the hill, sunshine reflected off the water that streamed quietly, and freight ships and oil tankers slowly wound their ways through the strait. New construction dotted the hills beyond the water. He slowly raised the spoon in his right hand, let it hang in the air, and said, “Does Reiko know all Japanese men?”
Cengiz laughed and said, “She’s not that kind of a woman, you know?”
Sinan snorted.
“I mean, how can anyone be sure that all Japanese men do that?” Sinan continued.
“If they do, that’d be a life lived bland,” Cengiz added.
“I agree,” Sinan said.
They looked at each other and chuckled. They spooned the last bites of tiramisu, chewing the wet, spongy ladyfingers, and savored the bittersweet taste of coffee, alcohol and sugar.