ISTANBUL DAYS,ISTANBUL NIGHTS
This is a multi-character novel about foreigners who live in Turkey and work alongside Turks at a fairly new university devoted to the performing arts in Istanbul. The university is entering its fourth year and the director, Bekir, approves a proposed bi-lingual, musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet in the hopes that it will generate much needed publicity for the university that could increase enrollment and help make the school financially profitable in the near future. The production is the brainchild of the theatre department’s chair, Michael, an expat American, and will involve other students and faculty from the other university departments.
The novel follows ten main characters as they interact in romantic and near-romantic relationships culminating in a few happy endings and a few bittersweet ones. There are also five students as supporting players in this novel structured as a play who are also grappling with their own romantic dilemmas. A cast list of the characters in order of appearance in the novel helps to give some background to each and also serves as a who’s who of the actors in this romantic comedy of the difficulties embarking on a romantic relationship that cuts across the barriers of language and culture.
CHAPTERS
It begins at a funeral, never an easy place to begin in any country, in any culture, though there are some who use it to commemorate a life well lived, with photographs of those important events in all our lives: birth, school days, graduations, weddings, children, if we are lucky, vacations, family picnics, friends and relatives gathered around on holidays, changing hair styles and hairlines, fashions come and gone, smiling faces around dinner tables, in backyards, on trips to warmer climates with beaches and sand. But here, today, we have no such photographs for here, today, we bury a young man, only 36, a man who was still in the process of acquiring those moments yet to be captured on camera and stored away in our collective memory. We stand at the mosque as the Imam reads from the Qur’an and there is murmuring of voices following along, hands raised palms up, female heads covered, moist eyes, and some sobbing, a solemn group of friends and colleagues surrounding the young widow, a woman named Katja who endures the burial of her husband. She stands mute, numb, one supposes, from the shock, and her knees buckle as she throws first a white rose onto his body covered in a burial shroud lying there in its grave, then a shovelful of dirt onto his body, that body she had clung to not so long ago as they slept in the bed that will now offer no comfort to her again. But Bekir, the university director, holds her firmly on one side and Michael, the theatre department chair, on the other and they both help her move off to the side while other friends and colleagues from the university, some former students of his, and some of the university staff all pass by, dropping a shovelful of dirt onto his cold, still form.