On Agra-Dag

Agra-Dag and Yerevan in Spring Image by Սէրուժ Ուրիշեան (Serouj Ourishian) )

You always buy the same thing. Always the same, she says.

They are in a farmacia. He has a bottle in his hand. There is a screen with a newscast . A window has been wrenched from a plane in flight. No-one was injured. He looks away, at her, again, without seeing.

Her eyes say this could be an oblique farewell, but he accepts the words as something simpler, less direct. Now, in this place. He did not foresee this, and he is shocked. She has named him vagaji, some mix of languages that amuses her but not him. His name is Paul, or Emin, he can’t decide. Both conflate in his head, crushed amongst fractured tender memories.

Now he isn't sure what he should say or do next. It's ethereal, this dislocation of time and space. The overlapping chemical and perfume smells in the shop upset him, give him a headache.

The door opens automatically and a young woman comes in. Warm air rushes out. He glances at her and quickly turns away. Too quickly and vertigo assaults him as if he tilted a ladder and was snap frozen by fear. The door opens for him, he steps quickly out and devours icy air.

He is rimy, unable to think. By habit they get in a gondola and ply aimlessly between buildings and bridges, piazza and campo. He is silent, she is overflowing with words but unsure whether the gondolier will understand and mock her, pity him.

They ride the canals. There is music ahead, a band playing in a bar covered by striped awnings that sag sadly with light snow. The gondolier’s song is louder as they skew around a corner. The water seems clean but dark green, sprinkled by expanding rings of doubt.

He doesn't know if he should hold her hand, or if she will perhaps raise her voice or shrug him away. Everything seems suspended by the softness of water, lapping and shushing, constant motion. He can't fix where he is or should be. Who he is. What he wants to feel and what he doesn’t.

The echoes under the bridges make it feel much colder as they bounce. He ducks, even though the gondolier is standing, then blushes.

A cruise ship has come in. It looms over the grand canal threatening the vaporetti that swarm alongside. The narrow alleyways are caulked with hats, coats, scarves of many colours. It’s impossible to walk now. He can't look the jousting tourists in the eye. Can’t find a way ahead. They retreat to the hotel.

The sound of gondoliers rings through the stone walls. A boy is playing the grand piano in the hall. Yesterday this boy played soccer in the piazza with others, shouting as they dodged the ball around the diners at the tables, skidding across the stone cobbles, a door for the goal. A woman shouted at them, and the game stopped suddenly.

Within the thick cold stone walls of this small and ancient palazzo, beside the too warm bed, she says he has cut her vagina with his penis or his tongue. She has a mirror. He turns on the torch of his phone. There's a mark. A cut or fold, difficult for him to tell. He has nothing to say. She throws the mirror at the wall.

You do it wrong, every time, she shouts. Hold your tongue like this, slowly, slowly. How many times do I have to tell you?

He is cowed, not yet beaten, too weathered to be shamed. The hall mirror is Italianate, rococo, gilded frame, tarnished glass. He is sad in his reflection, adjusts his scarf, opens the door and leaves.

It is drizzling rain and there is nowhere to go that is not drowning in gabbling crowds. No café, no bar, no bridge, no piazza, no gondola. He walks across Campo Santa Maria Formosa following yesterday’s soccer game and heads north to the Ospedale Giovani e Paolo where it is quiet. He watches the ambulance boats come and go and looks across to San Michelle, where the vaporetti are leaving tourists at the cemetery, the Tomba Pacifica Ceresa a magnificent lichen-caped marbled sorrow.

He feels the sadness of the legacy of the city upon him; recumbent stones slowly drowning without the strength to rise. He is drowning, too. Flawed, deeply cut, he knows. Grief binds him to a mound of earth and stone far away.

There are gulls, disturbed by the wake of a barge, they scream and wheel in disarray, each out for their own piece of flesh. A mist comes in from the north, cold on his face. Sounds are less violent, more lambent, softened by the weight of moist air, travelling more slowly.

He is ponderous yet as flimsy as the mist surrounding him. He takes a photo of the vanishing boats and sends it to himself with a text: if I should disappear.

As he stares into the swirl seeking clarity and definition he sees himself in another mist on the narrow crumbling trail on the mountain where she turns back and calls to him. He can’t hear so he canters up his foot now against the flank of her horse and she says again: you always do the same thing! the same thing, and he kicks out and she disappears.

To quench the roaring grief he looks at another image on his phone. A laughing couple but one is not her, not here, not now. This is Emin and he cries the other’s name into cupped hands, like a gull mindlessly screeching at the sky, in another time and place.

In a lift within the pillar of the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul they are stuck between the deck and the ground. An older Turkish woman and her children are frantic, the thin stainless steel of the cubicle shakes with her shouts, and the cables jostle as she bangs the walls.

He speaks softly to the young English woman, to calm her. She can't smile, she is scared, perhaps more of the woman than the fractious lift. There is a jolt and screams and the lift starts suddenly and they are lowered slowly to the ground. The Turkish woman is sitting on the floor crying, her children urging her up.

He gets into a taxi with the English woman and they go to Topkapi, to a café. They are laughing now and take a photo with his phone. Later they kiss in the dark of a park but he can't go to her room in this country.

She is heading east. In the morning they meet for breakfast and then find and take a bus to Cappadocia.  She wants to see the temple at Göbekli Tepe and trek on Agra-Dag, go on to Iran. He is afraid for her.

This beginning is embedded in the metadata of this photo on Paul’s phone. A hundred and ninety-two images later is the ending, the one that anchors his grief.

Seven months after Istanbul they are on ponies descending below the summer limit of the soft snows of Agra-Dag to their camp in the valley where there is bread and cheese and hot tea brought to them by shepherds. She has cantered ahead, around some rocks, when there is an earth tremor and avalanche. He sees her fall from the pony, hears her screams, but can't see her through the roiling white cloud. This is the story Emin tells himself. This is the story that flows with grief.

Three days later he places the last stone on the mound above her breast and steps back, without words. The sun is hot. He can't leave and he can't stay. The police arrived this morning and they force him into the truck.

It has just begun for Paul and will never be over for Emin.

He turns his phone off and sits in the chilling mist, his hands feeling the burning ice and rock he dug through to find her, hating them for what they discovered. Back in Istanbul he was lost for months, sleeping in doorways and parks, selling blood to buy food, avoiding people as best he could.

Then she found him, a vagrant, a wastrel, in the same park he had been joyous in more than a year earlier. She digs him out, takes him to lunch, buys clothes and takes him to her room in the small hotel with the tiny lift out of sight of the desk clerk.

Slowly she brings him forward, to the present, to this life that he must accept or reject. To Paul. She is strong, this woman, demanding, and he is fragile, timid, cowardly, unsure of life. He has not told her of the two lives he carries in his head, both pain seared.

They came to Venice to escape Emin but he is everywhere and nowhere. Tomorrow there will be sun and scarves and parkas. Winter has not yet left. Nor has she.

He walks east, follows a straggle of tourists and in the shelter of their flock boards the cruise ship, two by two.