Kirmizi_ada

I was translating this Turkish love story into English a few weeks back. The word gecekondu [ge-je-kon-doo] was the hardest part. You could maybe translate it as “tenement.” But it means something more like “put there at night,” [gece=night, kondu=passive simple past of “to put”]. It is used to refer to city dwellings that—because they were built over-night on public property—may not be torn down under common (old Ottoman) law. Sovereign because sudden, the gecekondular make it to eternity by crashing into it sideways, just before the sun rises. And then you get up the next day and there they are, inscrutably close. And you get up the day after, and find you are living in one.

We buried my dad last week. Twenty-three years before that, he and my mom had bought a postage-stamp lot in North Eastham, Massachusetts, for $11,000. Six years old, I had never seen a house get built around me: the 4 X 8 plywood coming in sideways through the sunny pre-fab doorframe, the dusty sawdust. Splintery elephant beams holding up the place like an overnight prayer tent.

Early March this year took over for February with a fast and sober incredibility. Everything had a Brechtian lowness. Perhaps I’ve just been sitting too close to the stage. My dad’s 10x13 horse photograph (“Cheyenne!”) hanging chandelier-like from the kitchen beams, trying to burst out of its two dimensions. A hundred phonecalls a day in and out, and each voice like a basket of color tabs. The priest at the church wafting his incense like a dried salmon. The nun singing Amazing Grace like a Twin Peaks cameo. The metal trolley rolling the casket back down the center aisle of the church, (when we six could have hoisted him up easy, like a pallet of glass stars!) The control console in the back of the limousine, Cape Cod Bay iced shut like a forgettable century, the graveside kids spinning their black and peach rosaries.

After we buried him, we came back to that house (now with its own street number!) and saw how sedentary it had gotten, how sorely and blindly loved. I saw the curling edges where the whole thing might fly off into the Atlantic some December if you didn’t watch out. We settled in to all of its gentle brokenness. My brother made pancakes, my lover made buttermilk biscuits, and I drank some of that Pig’s Nose my uncle had dropped off for me. We counted the twin beds for sleeping and found there were enough, because dad’s bed was free.

When he died in that sunny room, the question was: where’d he go? My mother and I drove up the Cape Cod Canal. We went over the Sagamore Bridge. I wondered if we could overtake him there, I wondered if Cape Cod would be deep enough to keep him, or if he’d sneak out into the Bay through some kind of pre-Columbian escape hatch.

But when he went in the ground—“put there over night”—the whole land went magic. You could see all the common things, the critters, becoming eternal and quiet. You could feel the color on old elementary school maps draining and refilling again, the grim winter sandbar of the Cape starting to stir with blood comets and volatile names. I looked around a minute before leaving that hillside in Welfleet. I saw rumble-seats and Astroturf and abandoned Dairy Queens. I saw angels and Alaskans and aliens waving from their gleaming, wing-backed chairs.