So I whispered back to Arzu that if she saw fit to do business with them, so did I. I’d love to go see their workshop, and besides, this was an opportunity for me to get to know a new part of the city.
When we finished at Arzu’s, the “radical fundamentalists” and I hopped into their beat-up Toyota sedan and took off for their part of the city. The Toyota’s suspension worked like it hadn’t been serviced since the Reagan administration, and we could feel every tiny bump in the road as we careened down the road through a sparsely populated section of the city along the Halic.
The Halic is a river that begins on Istanbul’s outskirts as a tiny rivulet visitors don’t even notice unless someone points it out to them, and then it quickly grows into a wide body of water running into the Bosphorus. By the time it reaches the Bosphorus the Halic is crowded with ferries, cruise ships, heavily-trafficked bridges, and hundreds of fishermen casting their lines into water so polluted the fish practically grow extra heads.
On the drive to the fundamentalists’ workshop we quickly exhausted my knowledge of Turkish. We had plenty of goodwill spirit left though, so we gestured and grinned our way through the rest of the drive. Much of the conversation was the same “America good, Bush bad” conversation I found myself enduring 20 times a day until Bush was reelected in November of 2004 and the rest of the world just gave up.
After about 30 minutes on the road we pulled up in front of a dusty old lamp store that looked like it was A) closed, and B) the last place anybody would ever go to buy a lamp for their home. The doors were locked, the lights were off, and the store was completely unmanned, but my new friends insisted this was their factory, so inside we went.
A narrow set of stairs in back of the store led down to a cramped, poorly lit basement where a dozen workers stamped, shaped, and polished very plain-looking metal fixtures. There was no sign of chiseling or carving or the making of any of the decorative flourishes I was looking for. I knew immediately I was in the wrong kind of metal shop.
This was their life’s work though, so I politely let them show me around before we went back upstairs to the “store.”
It was getting late and I wanted to go home, but they absolutely insisted we sit and drink tea together first. As the last of the daylight disappeared and the lamp store descended into darkness (yes, I am aware of the irony), we drank tea and talked busily even though we didn’t understand a single word of each other’s language.
When our glasses were empty the father-son duo insisted on driving me the three blocks to the bus station. We took the short hop in their car, they pointed to the bus I wanted, I hopped onto it, found a seat, and mumbled to myself, “Thank god that’s over, what a day.” The fundamentalist duo and I had parted good friends, but we had nothing in common and we would never see each other again.
You know the saying, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”? Well, Muslim fundamentalists don’t want to kill us, Muslim fundamentalists who want to kill us want to kill us. I may not have found a workable business opportunity that day, but I did learn to laugh it off when people equate Muslim fundamentalism with violence, and any day we become less afraid of the world is a good one.
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Fundamentalist lamp store” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]