Scratches from Olive Branches

by Leyla Brittan

Azra’s ears are filled with the cries of gulls, her nose with the scent of salt water. She stands on the riverbank, watching the first rays of sun climb over the dusty, minaret-studded skyline. A watchtower stands alone, painted pale gold by the early morning light; boats drift past, leaving slow, crimson ripples in their wake. A red dawn has crept up over the river.

She closes her eyes and breathes in the humid air. She listens to the wind, the shifting of the tide, and in the distance, the waking of the city.

Then there is the warm aroma of garlic roast chicken in the air. The sea breeze fades away, the cries of the gulls become the dainty notes of a classical piano, and she opens her eyes to see her glass tipping toward the ground. She very easily could have spilled her white wine all over her boyfriend’s parents’ even whiter carpet.

Azra shuffles her feet into a wider stance; they’re aching in their tasteful black pumps. Why would anyone choose to wear shoes indoors?

Brian’s father is lecturing about something, and Brian’s listening, nodding politely. When he feels Azra’s mood shift—he has always had that gift, of attunement—he takes a step closer and grabs her hand, squeezing gently. 

Her eyes meet those of the father, whose gaze unnerves her, so she looks away, back toward the painting. 

“Do you like it?” His voice is deeper than his son’s, filled with innate authority. 

Azra nods and smiles. “The colors are beautiful.”

His shoulders shift back with pride. “Let me tell you,” he says, “I saw it and I thought, that feels just like the city. It’s not just the colors. It’s the feeling. The light. That blend of east and west, so captivating. I’ve said it before: No one understands Istanbul until they’ve been over there.”

“Dad,” her boyfriend says, and there is a note of guilt, of embarrassment. “You know that Azra’s…” He trails off.

When the father looks at her again, it’s a question. There’s a light slick of sweat on the inside of her cream-colored silk blouse, and she pinches it away from her back, trying to air herself out. “I have family there,” she says, and she wishes her own voice weren’t so small. 

His eyes narrow—or is she imagining it? “I was wondering,” he says.

“Dad,” Brian says again.

“What? Is that not right for me to say? That I was wondering?” Brian says nothing, so his father continues, “That doesn’t bother you, Azra, does it?”

How many moments like this has she endured, how many times has she been called upon to lie for the sake of someone else’s comfort? How many times has she considered telling the complicated truth; how many times has she decided it’s easier not to? She gives a nervous smile, a tiny nod. “It’s fine,” she says, too quickly.

The father smiles and looks at the painting, and so does she. Now she can recognize that it is not quite the Bosphorus that she knows—it is someone else’s dream, where the stench of hashish hangs in a dawn haze over the river, where faceless men in bloodred turbans make careful strokes with their oars, barely disturbing the surface of the water.

Later, at the dinner table, the ornate carvings on the antique wooden chair press uncomfortably into her shoulder blades. She sits up straight and watches the chandelier and tries to think of clever and polite things to say to get the parents to like her. 

“Sweetheart,” the father says to his wife, “did you know that Azra is Turkish?”

The mother pauses, the tongs in her hand hovering centimeters above the salad bowl. Her blue eyes dart to Azra, eyebrows raised. “Really? How interesting.”

Azra nods.

“Did you grow up there?”

“No, no, I grew up in New Jersey,” she says—again, too quickly. 

“But she’s spent time there,” the father says.

Azra doesn’t want to elaborate, she wants to do anything but elaborate, but the longer she waits, the more pressing the silence at the table becomes. “I spent a lot of summers there,” she says. “When I was a kid.”

“That must have been so interesting,” the mother says. “What an experience to have as a child.”

“She’s told me a bit about it,” Brian says. “It sounds amazing.”

“Experiences like that must give you such a different perspective on the world,” the mother muses.

Suddenly, all the sound in the room—the clink of silver against ceramic, the classical piano that plays over the sound system—fades, and Azra’s ears are flooded with the call to prayer, a far-off voice cutting cleanly through the thick air. It’s been years since she last heard it, but it comes back clearly: the shape of the prayer, the catches, the articulations. They sink through her skin, through her muscle, deep into her bones, into the place where the words live. She hears the quiet purr of one of the thousand stray cats that roam the streets; she smells döner kebab sliced fresh off the spit and wrapped in warm bread, and the sesame-seed-covered simit sold by warm-eyed street vendors. She finds that there is dust in her eyes, blown in by a breeze off the Bosphorus.

She wonders if they can smell the salt on her hands, in her hair, if they are wondering why their son brought a woman home straight from the fish market. Do they see the scratches of olive branches on her arms and her knees? Do they now see her skin, say it’s dark like honey, and think of black stone beaches and wooden boats with rippled crimson sails? 

“Azra,” the mother is saying, “what are you studying?” 

“Political science.” She is handed an orange ceramic dish piled high with roasted potato wedges, sprinkled with rosemary or thyme or something. She scoops four onto her plate.

The mother raises her eyebrows—is she surprised? “That’s a good, practical major.”

“You’re just what Brian needs: a good, practical girl,” the father says. He’s smiling like this is a joke, but she doesn’t understand. “Your parents raised you right,” he adds. 

Her boyfriend starts to say something about how English is a perfectly practical major, but his father interrupts. “So, Azra. Let me ask you another question. Isn’t Turkey an Islamic country?”

There is silence again, and all three heads turn toward her. There is a hand on her knee, under the table, and it takes her a moment to realize that it belongs to Brian, that he’s trying to comfort her, to make something like an apology. She finds her voice. “Most people there are Muslim, yes.” 

“What about your parents?”

Her boyfriend mutters something that she doesn’t hear because she’s found herself elsewhere again, this time not in Istanbul, but in the fishing town where she lived through summer nights hot enough and dazzling enough to burn their outlines into her mind forever, so that even years from now, when she is grey-haired and blurry-eyed, a part of her will still be six years old and full of life, awestruck by the fluorescent lights of the night market, asking her mother for a couple lira to buy a doll, a multicolored flashlight, a plastic charm on a cord necklace. Still six years old and standing on the edge of the marina, her eyes tracing the line of streetlamps down the winding cement pier. In daylight, the pier leads to a lighthouse, long since defunct and decorated with the detritus of a hundred teenage love stories: signatures and tags, hearts and arrows. At night, the streetlamps are reflected in the dark water, a twin row of lights, will-o’-the-wisps in the sea. Still six years old and sitting in the grass beneath an olive tree, disgusted and seduced by the smell of its fruits, taking them in her hands, tossing them back and forth with children whose language she doesn’t understand but wishes she did, enough that she asks her mother for lessons later that day.

“They are Muslim, yes,” she finds herself saying.

“But you’re not,” Brian’s father says.

“Why do you think that?”

“No hijab,” he says simply.

When Azra was eleven years old she fell in love with a boy named Jason. Blond hair, blue eyes, and really good at gym class dodgeball. She told Katie, and Katie told Christopher, and Christopher told Jason. And that afternoon, Katie was the one to tell Azra that Jason liked her back.

Two days later, her teacher called her up to the front of the classroom to talk about her parents. She asked about the mosques, about the prayers, about the people—they were in the middle of their World Religions unit and the word “Muslim” was still a foreign and frightening one for some of the children whose earliest memories were threaded through with the ghost of those towers, that column of smoke. Their teacher thought, perhaps, that to pair a peer’s face with the lesson would help amend that. She had no way to know about the whispers that would follow Azra through the halls the next day, or about the girl who would joke that Azra was hiding bombs in her training bra. She had no way to imagine the look that Jason would give Azra the next time she passed by his table at lunch.

The next Monday Azra heard that Jason had kissed Therese at Hannah’s birthday party over the weekend, and she knew it was all over. 

The mother is speaking to her again.

“I’m sorry?” 

“Do you know what you want to do after graduation?”

“No need to put her on the spot,” the father says.

Azra opens her mouth to speak, and she wants to tell the truth, she wants to say law school, she wants to say it’s all planned out, but something else spills out. “I want to paint.” 

Then it’s out there and she can’t reverse its momentum, take it back behind her teeth, slip it under her tongue, let it sit there and just be. Instead she has to wait and wonder why and how and where did that come from because she’s never wanted it before, never that she knew.

Eventually, the mother’s bright smile reappears, but it’s broken this time, out of alignment: a cart with a faulty wheel. “Oh,” she says. 

“What do your parents think about that?” the father asks, but he’s not looking at her. He’s looking at his son, and his son is looking at her.

“Honey,” the mother says.

“It’s a religious thing,” the father says, and his voice is louder now, buoyed by confidence, by the thrill of knowledge. “Muslims aren’t allowed to create images of living things.” 

He looks to her, and for a moment she thinks he’s asking for confirmation, for her permission to lay out the rules of a world he barely knows, but then he continues, “Unless you do landscapes. Or abstract work, I suppose.” His distaste at this last thought is clear. 

“What do you paint?” the mother asks.

Istanbul, she wants to say. The dreams of my ancestors, she wants to say. The shadows of my homeland. Instead, she says, “Nothing. I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from. I’m going to law school.” Then: “And my parents wouldn’t care. No one in my family really practices.”

They nod; they settle back; they release a collective breath.

It is only now that she realizes that she isn’t really in the house at all, nor is she in the fishing village, nor on the shore observing the red dawn. No, she is in the tower, looking out over the river, watching a boat’s wake sending slow ripples out into the distance, toward the tiny white sailboats that venture farther and farther away toward an unknown horizon, where the water fades into sky.

Published August 23rd, 2020