The Next Right Thing

Road trips, sonic booms, and getting evicted: Love Letters to Türkiye, Part III

It wasn’t easy to think of writing another love letter to Türkiye after I got kicked out of my apartment.

It was Saturday night, and I was out with friends. My superintendent texted, telling me that Django had been crying.

This was not the first time this had happened. But the last time, he’d texted again, 5 minutes later to say never mind, the crying had stopped. Another time, I returned home to complete silence. I had since asked two sets of neighbours whether they heard anything. They said no. I know my dog does not exactly have a healthy attachment style, but I couldn’t gauge whether this was becoming a thing.

Narrator: “It was definitely becoming a thing.”

On a possibly unrelated note, late one night, maybe two days after I moved in, this same superintendent sent me a text.

“By the way,” he wrote. “I am a massage therapist.”

He shared a photo of his massage table in his dimly lit apartment, which was directly above mine. He added, helpfully,

“You only have to book one day in advance.”

For reasons I don’t have to explain here, I did not book, ever.

Anyway, that Saturday night, I raced home. When I arrived, the door to the flat opposite mine was open. I leapt inside to calm Django, and a very tanned woman emerged from the open door and started shouting at me in German.

“I am sorry,” I said.

She shouted louder.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said, "but I am very sorry.”

There’s nothing like being berated in a language you don’t understand, by a person who knows you don’t understand. It’s like being told,“Even though I know you don’t know what I’m saying, I’m going to scream at you anyway because that’s what a piece of shit I think you are.”

Know what’s fun? Do a stock photo search for “angry shouting person” and you’ll gt pictures from anti-genocide marches. Anyway, this Unsplash photo is by Lewis Roberts

I was, at this point, crouched on the floor, holding Django.

The tanned lady’s husband stormed down the stairs—the same man I had asked, days previously, if Django was bothering him.

“No problem! No problem!” he’d said. Now, he started screaming, too, but in English. He screamed that he was going to speak to the owner of the building and get him to kick me out.

“This,” he pointed to Django, “is an animal!”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that—perhaps that I’m some sort of dog torturer?—but I just kept saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” not because I didn’t want to yell back at them both, but because I was trying to de-escalate the sitauation, especially since we were (at that point) still neighbours.

They slammed their front door. I started shaking. Django started shaking. Massage guy was conspicuously absent. Half an hour later, he texted me and asked me to move out in five days’ time.

I am not trying to be dramatic about this. I am not unhoused. I have family here. If I didn’t, I have friends. I live in a peaceful country, where I am safe. This apartment wasn’t meant to be long term. But still, it was an awful, awful night. All kinds of shame came up, and anxiety, and too-late imagined conversations where I said what I should have said, where I should have told them to shove it, and, most helpfully, how I am now not just a single, middle-aged woman with a dog and no children, but also, I was about to move back in with one of my parents.

Thankfully, I am learning better these days how to allow myself to experience emotions without getting into stories about them.

I did let myself rage, but not too much. I called three people in my program and let myself be my shame-filled, shaken self. And then I fell asleep.

At 4:30am.

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I’d already planed to take a road trip the following week. There was going to be an air show, an annual thing here, with practises ahead of time. These consist of fighter jets flying over the city at a low altitude, creating sonic booms. I know war survivors who dropped to their knees in the middle of street when it happened last year, and friends who burst into tears. More than a few of us called each other to find out if we were being attacked. The whole thing is meant to celebrate one of Turkey’s first fighter pilots, which makes sense: why not commemorate a war hero by terrifying everyone? Never mind the livestock and pets. Django, it will not come as no surprise to you, shook for two solid hours.

So the road trip could not be postponed. Which meant I had to essentially move out the next day. I packed up all my stuff, picked up my rental car early, carried everything to my dad’s (yay!), dragged it up 6 flights of stairs, unpacked it, packed again for the trip, and collapsed.

Early Monday morning, we hit the road.

---

We drive inland first, and then along the coast in the direction of Antalya. Our destination is Demre, an area that appears, from my research, to be full of nature and ancient cities. But we are barely out of Fethiye when I spot a sign for Xanthos, an ancient city I’ver never gotten around to seeing. On a whim, I take the exit and follow the cobblestone and then dirt road.

One of the things I love most about this country is that dogs are welcome at most ancient sites. I believe this is largely because most ancient sites are already inhabited by a crew of street animals, and sometimes a herd of sheep. Still, Django hops out of the car, and the guy working at the front gate greets him as if he’s long-lost kin.

And off we wander.

We are, once again, the only ones here. The whole place is so quiet. The past 24 hours start to settle as we meander around an inscribed Lycian tomb, and through what was maybe a bath. Django pees respectfully on some 4000-year old column stumps, and I stop and touch the carving indents, as I always do. A person just like me made this with their own hands so long ago I can’t begin to conceive of it.

After a while, I see we are actually not alone: there’s a team of archeologists working on an impressively sized mosaic. We find more patches of mosaic among the ruins.

Before we drive away, I text a photo to my dad.

I write:

“Remember how we used to stop at Tim Horton’s on road trips?”

We drive on. The rental car is slightly younger than the average Lycian tomb, and the driver’s seat so low that when I picked it up I was barely peering over the dashboard. I borrowed a patio cushion from my dad’s, and am now more like a driving cartoon giraffe. But also, I was so frazzled when I picked up the car that I realize now I have no recollection of what paper the rental place guy said I should show the cops if they pull me over, which is something that happens fairly regularly here.

All I remember is him saying,

“If you are in accident, get police report and you can be insured. But,” (he shook his finger,) “you must be zero percent alcohol. No drunkie!”

I stifled a giggle. Given I had slept three hours and been hauling suitcases and bags of food all morning, I’m not surprised he was concerned.

I thought, “I just got evicted and am driving alone in Turkiye with my dog. Being drunkie behind the wheel is not on my agenda.” Obviously this did not come across.

“No drunkie,” he repeated.

I just nodded, and took the keys.

---

We stop in Kaş, which is about halfway to our destination. I can be very slightly obsessive about travel planning, especially when it comes to where to eat, so I’ve chosen a breakfast spot here. The place is as cute and croissant-filled as advertised, but something about it feels… off. The staff and patrons are grim. One guy keeps scrolling on his phone, pausing, frowning at Django, passive-aggressively stroking the cat next to him, and then scrolling more.

Kaş is ridiculously pretty—one of (I hate this description) the most Instagrammable places in Turkiye. I had forgotten how much I actually dislike it here. Also, I have forgotten that westernized establishments in non-western countries usually have little to no soul. But by this time I’ve ordered my colonizer breakfast, so I eat quickly, watching scrolling guy scroll, and trying to catch the gaze of the woman next to me so I can give her a smile. She’s having none of it. On the way back to the car, a street dog almost attacks Django.

I have, however, had no time to look into Demre itself. If I’m honest, I thought it might be like Kaş but less annoying, given its proximity to archeological sites and being the birthplace of (I’m not kidding) Santa Clause.

But it’s refreshingly un-westernized, and not at all built up. The street I’m staying on contains one small supermarket, two shuttered restaurants, and a handful “bungalows”: little A-frame houses like the one we’re meant to be sleeping in for the next three nights. I drive up and down it a few times, searching for a sign of where our lodgings might be. I spot a twenty-something woman walking along the side of the road, pull up next to her, and ask if she might know where we’re meant to be going.

She furrows her brow.

“Wait,” she says.

She trots ahead and asks the man in front of the supermarket. She trots back.

“He doesn’t know either,” she says, then offers to ask someone else. At which point she spots the lady who manages the bungalows, who has come to the side of the street and been waving at us to turn into an unmarked driveway.

Our new friend leans through the driver’s side window and pats Django on the head.

“Çok tatlı,” she tells him. (“You’re so sweet.”) She tells me to have a good day. We beam at each other as we wave goodbye.

It’s amazing how day-changing such a small gesture of kindness can be.

along the beach in Demre

I unload Django and all our stuff into the A-frame, which is Arctic Circle level cold. The owner cranks on the heater. The bed is on the top floor, up a stair-ladder thing that I have to carry Django up and down. The upper level windows look out onto a towering olive trees. It’s so much warmer up there that it’s where we spend most of the next three days.

Every morning, though, we walk on the beach: a long stretch of white pebbles that is almost disconcertingly quiet, with zero hotels and two cafes, only one of which is open. We poke around Santa Clause’s church. We take red dirt paths along cliffs. Django plays with new friends and I take in the sky, which feels like something god painted in their dreams.

I eat an entire package of grocery-store donuts, as an homage to road trips and Tim Hortons past—although these ones are freakishly good. And most importantly, I only have three more imaginary conversations with the ex-neighbours. The rest of the time, I accept that this is what happened. That never would have happened before recovery.

And, of course, we visit more ancient sites. My favourite is a hill where priests of Apollo used to come to be guided by an oracle. I mean, come on.

It’s surrounded by meadows of daisies and olive trees. After exploring it, we find a big rock and sit there for a long time, taking in the view.

And I bow my head in gratitude.

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