Stranger
Yabanci means foreigner, or stranger, in Turkish. I lived in America for many years without knowing myself. Living in Turkey, I accepted that God knows all our hearts. Turks are always thinking I am from Germany or Syria. My name is Schmidt but I speak no German. Because I am from America, a country that taught me the lie that Arabs are uniformly swarthy folk, I was surprised to find so many blonde and blue eyed Syrians. Today a Syrian pauper tried to sell me a packet of tissues. I showed him a packet I’d bought from another Syrian pauper, and rejected his offer. He didn’t speak in Arabic, which I don’t understand beyond a few mispronounced verses of the Holy Quran. “Are you German?” He asked in broken Turkish. “Me foreigner too,” I replied in equally broken Turkish. “Are you tourist?” He asked. “You are tourist,” I told him. Now he insulted the cruel hearted New Yorker in me. I know myself, how I can step over a body on a winter sidewalk like the three strangers in front of me. My heart can whisper fuck you in English or Spanish. I will burn in hellfire for being a native New Yorker and John Milton will burn for being a Protestant. My daughter should be a Muslim Turk if her mother has her way, but not too manyak with the religion either. I kept watching her play on the slide in the park. The second Syrian pauper was hard selling me on his tissue, but he surpassed my broken Turkish and ran straight into my don’t give a fuck. God knows my charity—every cent, each crumb of sincerity or conceit of it. But this guy rubbed me wrong. I waved him off. What do I know about myself? I am American. I would starve that man’s entire family to feed my daughter a cupcake. I don’t pretend to be better than that. Maybe tomorrow he’ll be the first Syrian and sell his snot rags. Maybe I will die of something horrible. I used to dig graves— dying might be horrible, but death is banal. Gravediggers fart in the holes of county clerks, preachers, and deadbeat used car sales men all the same. The hallowed ground is full of strangers. Our civilizations could dignify none of them. We pray or we dissent from prayer, and neither adds nor subtracts from the glory of God. Still, in foolish glances, we look for some flatulence of glory in the mirror, but most of us settle for an ineffable stranger’s gaze. Most of us Americans anyway.