The Wives of Nasruddin Haji

I had a Muslim friend named Muhsin, who used to share his hookah with me. I realize now that I should have felt very honoured that he would share his hookah with me, because I am not a Muslim, and that meant that he had accepted me as a friend.

So I would go over to Muhsin's from time to time, and he would fill the bowl of his hookah with some exotic tobacco, and we would smoke it. If it was during the month of Ramadan, where all the Muslims fasted from sunrise until sunset, his wife, Sami, would cook an elaborate dinner for the evening meal, and invite me and her who was my wife, until she ran off with some other guy.

As he commiserated with me over my wife's scandalous departure, Muhsin said to me, "A woman is a sometime thing, my friend, as that old song goes. A woman thinks that a man mainly wants somebody to clean and cook for him, when what he really wants is sex. So a woman may not understand why her husband is suddenly unhappy that he isn't getting it every night. But a woman wants somebody to put food on the table and put a roof over her head, and be able to fix things when they need fixing. She's looking for a pay cheque, and she wants your pay cheque."

To all that, I replied, "A woman wants a man who can open jars, and a man wants a woman who can choose the right tie. My wife can open jars by herself, apparently, and I choose my own ties now."

Then I added, "You Muslims have it made. If your marriage doesn't work out, you can have a second wife without having to divorce the first one."

As Muhsin was filling the bowl of his hookah, he said to me of his tobacco mixture, which looked the grease used to pack ballbearings in, except that it was red: "This has anise in it. These are the dregs of Turkish raki. The Greeks and the Turks like to get drunk on licorice, basically, only they call it raki in Turkey and ouzo in Greece. The only difference is that the Greeks light a fire over the top of the glass to burn the dregs while the Turks let the dregs sink to the bottom."

Then, Muhsin said to me, "The Qu'ran allows Muslims to have up to four wives, but there's a reason why polygamy is discouraged rather than encouraged."

And then he told me a story:

There was a man from northern Lebanon who was a haji, because he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, or shaoums, at some point in his life. Though Nasruddin Haji was a pious man, he was also weak. He had a good job in America and a wife and three or four children when his wife, Zina, suffered a stroke at the age of thirty-five or forty.

Now, Nasruddin Haji loved his wife and tried to take care of her, but working full time and taking care of three or four children, as well as a invalid wife who couldn't even speak, soon proved to be too much for him. As well, his virile member lacked a means of expressing its virility.

His widowed mother in Lebanon feared that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so she came to America to help him take care of Zina, his wife, for a while. But when Nasruddin Haji picked up his mother at Pearson International Airport, she was with a distant cousin of hers named Layla, whom he knew but not very well.

As it turned out, Layla was thirty-five years, and a widow with three children because of the war in Lebanon. With the presence of Layla, Nasruddin Haji's virile member now had an outlet for its virility, and he and Layla fell in love— which is what Nasruddin Haji's mother had wanted, believe it or not.

So Nasruddin Haji and Layla were married before an imam at an Arab cultural centre in Montreal. Since polygamy is illegal in Canada, Nasruddin Haji had to divorce himself from Zina, the first wife, but not to worry: Nasruddin Haji's mother took care of Zina until she went back to Lebanon, and then Layla would take care of her afterward.

Now, Zina made amazing progress under Layla's care. That's because Layla was a nurse who had worked with stroke patients before. Soon, Zina was walking and talking normally, and able to do the simple things, like eating with a spoon, that she hadn't been able to do immediately after the stroke. Layla had worked a miracle! However, Zina took up all of Layla's time, so that Nasruddin Haji really didn't have any wife rather than having two.

While Layla was busy with Zina, Nasruddin Haji had taken up with a dancer that he had met on Papineau Street, whose name was Caroline. Together, they committed adultery, which is a sin in both the Muslim and Christian faiths. But they don't stone people for adultery in Canada, because Canadians consider themselves to be much civilized then Arabs, though a Canadian man may shoot his wife if he catches her in bed with another man, and he has a gun ready.

However, Canadians are much more blasé about things like adultery, and even homosexuality, than their cousins south of the border, and they have stricter gun laws than the US does.

While Nasruddin Haji was busy with Caroline, Zina and Layla became very close. In fact, the unthinkable happened: they fell in love. Though there were about seven children in the household, they all had to go to school, so Zina and Layla had plenty of occasions to be alone. It was simply a matter of taking the time to watch television in Zina or Layla's bedroom and cuddle in bed in front of the television set. It was easy.

As often happens with cuckholds, however, Nasruddin Haji came home from work early one day and found his two wives in bed together. He couldn't believe it! If he had a gun, he might have shot them, but fortunately, Canada has much stricter gun laws than the US does, and he wasn't armed.

Now, Layla had a way of explaining herself very articulately: "I love her. She makes me feel things that I have never felt before."

Zina merely nodded her head in agreement, though she had regained the gift of speech, which she had lost after the stroke.

There is a reason why Arabs like big houses: that's because the Arab family is, for the most part, an extended family. It is not unusual for several generations, even three or four, to be living under one roof, and Arabs tend to have lots of children. Remember, Nasruddin Haji was taking care of three or four children with Zina, and three stepchildren with Layla. As well, there might come a time where Layla might admit him to her bed, and she could end up having a child with him.

With him seeing Caroline, however, Nasruddin Haji was seriously thinking about divorcing himself from Layla. After all, he was a pious Muslim, and he couldn't have two lesbians living under his roof. What would his neighbours think?

Or could he?

While Nasruddin Haji was dealing with the scandal of having both of his wives involved in a lesbian affair, Caroline and her little daughter, a toddler named Chantal, were evicted from their apartment for nonpayment of rent, and they had nowhere else to go. So Nasruddin Haji did what he thought any compassionate Muslim would do under his circumstances: he invited Caroline to come live him and his family.

Now, you might think that a good Muslim family would have a problem with a ballerina living in their midst, but when they saw little Chantal, the women and the girls of the household fell in love with her immediately. With blond hair and blue eyes like her mother, Chantal was the most beautiful, most angelic baby that they had ever seen. As well, her mother, Caroline was just gorgeous, a blond-haired and blue-eyed goddess— what Hitler would have called a perfect Aryan.

I probably wouldn't be exaggerating very much if I said that Zina and Layla were taken by Caroline as well.

Zina, Layla, and Caroline all had one thing in common: they liked to dance. From Zina and Layla, and the older girls of the household, Caroline learned to do the belly dance. As she had been dancing her entire life, learning ballet as a child, and jazz dancing as an adolescent, Caroline soon caught on; she was soon as proficient at the belly dance as the other females of the household. What's more, she soon was able to speak Arabic with some fluency, because she and her little girl heard it all the time in the household.

However, in Nasruddin Haji's dirty little mind, the three women became associated with the Three Graces of classical Greek mythology, as he had fantasies of them dancing together in the living room au naturel with their arms around each other's shoulders and kicking their legs out like Rockettes. Whether they really did such a thing, of course, is beside the point: what's more important here is the perception of reality rather than the reality itself. So Nasruddin Haji became concerned that his wife, his de jure ex-wife, and his concubine were engaged in lesbian ménages à trois while he was at work.

Of course, Nasruddin Haji never thought to ask his women if they were actually doing such things, because what would they say? Nor did he pay any attention to what his children were saying, if indeed they had anything to say. Surely, if something was amiss, one of the little innocents would have said something, right?

Proverb: Children are the eyes of God— they see the things that God is too busy to pay attention to.

Then Caroline became pregnant. She insisted, with all sincerity, that the unborn child was Nasruddin Haji's. "I swear, my dear," she said, "I love nobody but you."

And then she kissed Nasruddin Haji on the lips.

For the first time, religion became an issue. Up until Caroline became pregnant, nobody had any problem with the fact that she still considered herself to be a Catholic, and that she wanted to raise little Chantal in the Catholic Church as well. In fact, Zina and Layla were charmed by how the little one knelt beside her little bed each night and said the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. How cute! they thought.

The problem with the unborn child was his religion, since Nasruddin Haji was considered the father: was he to be raised a Muslim or a Christian. For Nasruddin Haji (and Zina and Layla), the issue was already settled: the unborn child would be raised as a Muslim until he made the haditha, or confession of faith, for himself: "I believe that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is His Prophet." Then he would actually be a Muslim.

Well, for Caroline, the issue was also settled: there would be a christening soon after birth, and then the little one would go to Catholic school, along with his sister. On this issue, she was just as obstinate as Nasruddin Haji.

"So what happened?" I asked Muhsin. "Did either of them budge?"

Muhsin sadly shook his head and said, "No, this is a case of good loving gone bad. Caroline decided to make it easier for everybody. She moved out, and the Three Graces were no more. If there were ever any lesbian ménages à trois, they were a thing of the past now."

Then he concluded his story:

It could have gotten messy, however. When Caroline was moving out with little Chantal and the newborn, whose name was Joseph, Layla and Zina literally tried to snatch the baby out of her arms, possibly to spirit him to Lebanon, where he could be raised as a Muslim, but Zina's oldest daughter, Aysha, fired a pistol into the ceiling to shut everybody up and restore some sanity to the situation.

"We all know who the mother is," Aysha pointed out, "but the father could be anybody. Are we going to take the word of some ballerina just because she says that our beloved father is the father of this baby? If she wants to leave, we should just let her leave."

Adolescents can be so articulate!

According to rumour, after the birth of little Joe, who, they say, was in the spitting image of Nasruddin Haji, Caroline ran off to the Middle East and started a career as a belly dancer. On some nights, she made over $50,000, mostly at bachelor parties. After two years' time, dancing in all the sexual cauldrons between the Rock of Gibraltar and the Persian Gulf, she was a millionairess, because she saved her piastres. Then, during the Cannes Film Festival, she met a Christian business man from Lebanon on a nudist beach and married him.

"And what of Zina and Layla?" I asked. "I'm sure they continued to watch TV and cuddle together while the kids were in school, right?"

Muhsin slowly nodded his head and replied, "Yes, only Layla started working at a hospital full time as registered nurse, in case Nasruddin Haji filed for divorce and she had to support herself and Zina. However, Nasruddin Haji hasn't filed for divorce. Layla approached him and said, 'I want a child, or I will divorce myself from you. It wouldn't look good, my dear husband, if it became known that you fathered a child with a stripper out of wedlock but not with your own wife.'

"Nasruddin Haji has had not one but two children with Layla, a son and a daughter. So, you see, Layla and Zina have the best of both worlds. They can have each other in the daytime, and yet be respectable at the same time. As the Arab community sees it, both are good wives and loving mothers, because both of them have produced children for Nasruddin Haji. And if Nasruddin Haji divorced himself from Layla, he would have to pay alimony to support the children that he has had with her, because that's the law is in Canada. If there are any ménages à trois in that household now, they involve Nasruddin Haji— probably another reason why the Prophet discouraged polygamy."

"But isn't it true," I asked, "that a wife's testimony is only worth one-quarter of that of the husband?"

"Yes," Muhsin conceded, "but that's because a Muslim can have up to four wives at the same time, and can easily produce four witnesses against himself."

Then Muhsin told me another, much shorter story to illustrate his point about polygamy: "There was an old man who had two wives, one old and one young. Both wives loved him to distraction, but the first wife, who was old, would pluck her husband's dark hairs while he slept in her bed at night, because his dark hairs reminded her of her long-lost youth. Then the younger wife would pluck his grey hairs whenever he slept in her bed, because they made him look like an old man. Then, he woke up one morning to find that he had hair on neither his head nor his chin.

"So in conclusion, polygamy is a bad thing, because a Muslim man must love each wife equally."

Of course, I didn't say it, but if Nasruddin Haji really had three bisexual women living under the same roof, they could have broken off into pairs each night, and everybody would have been happy.

But I didn't say it.

The Rose of the Algarve

Robert was a student on holiday in the Algarve of Portugal during the 1970s. He was walking down a little cobblestone street in a village, where he noticed that the sidewalks were done in elaborate mosaics. That's what he liked about Portugal: the sidewalks in mosaic.

Then, from a distance of about fifty metres, he saw a woman on the balcony of her little apartment, all dressed in black. From that distance, she looked like a beautiful señorita, and when she waved to him and bade him to come, he made his way through the crowd to her building.

It was like a dream. Surely, she was an afternoon will-o-the wisp. But that afternoon, he thought that it was his day; he was going to get lucky.

With long strides, he bounded up the stairs of the building to her apartment on the third floor. But alas, when she opened the door to let him in, he was frankly disappointed: she was not the young and beautiful maiden of his fantasy, but in reality a matron over forty. And she was large, not petite, like he had imagined.

However, when she smiled at him, he saw her Iberian beauty, and he was in love with her again. When she told him to come in, he obeyed her; or rather, he obeyed his desire. He entered her little apartment and sat down at table with her in the little kitchen while she made him lunch.

As they talked, she told him about herself: how she was forty years old, how she was the mother of five children. Her husband was killed in the war in Angola, and she was now a widow. That was the reason why she was all dressed in black. Her name was Rosa.

On the red-brick mantel in the living room were pictures of her deceased husband in uniform and her five children. Her two oldest children, son and a daughter, looked like adolescents in the pictures.

Robert, on the other hand, was from Quebec, from Montreal. He wanted to backpack from Lisbon to Istanbul. From Portugal, he would cross into Spain, and then into France. He would backpack through the Alps of Switzerland and the Tyrol, and then the Dinaric Alps of Yugoslavia before arriving in Istanbul. It would take him the whole summer. His favourite place, he would recall later, was Sarajevo, where he met his first wife, a Belgian student named Katrina.

After lunch, she led him to her bedroom, where they stripped before falling together on a big brass bed that had been in her family for several generations. What he would remember most about her later was her enormous breasts and her belly as she was spread out before him like Eve.

She was large, well in the flesh. However, she was beautiful to him: the paleness of her skin, which never saw the harsh afternoon sunlight, and her long and thick tresses the colour of henna that fell over her shoulders. She was a goddess! And when she was ready, she took his cock with both hands and guided it inside her.

As he thrusted inside her, he would look at her face from time to time. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were curled into a petite smile, though she would sometimes open her mouth as she felt a wave a pleasure.

Then she craned her neck forward, put her tongue to her upper lip, and cried out as she arched her back before she fell back to the bed, her body limp.

A moment or two later, he also came, as he exploded deep inside her.

When they cuddled afterwards, she was very shy, but her shyness had some allure. Then he looked into her small round eyes the colour of ebony and said, "You're very beautiful, senhora." She smiled beatifically and said, "Obrigada, senhor."

And then she kissed him tenderly on the lips.

But he soon had to leave her, however, because she was expecting her three youngest children home for lunch; they were in elementary school. However, she told him to come back the same time the next day.

During the fortnight that he was in the Algarve, he saw her as often as he could, but he had to leave Portugal after the expiration of his temporary visa.

Ah, but she was good to him, with food for the stomach and love for the soul. And her neighbours envied her.


La Rose de l'Algarve

Robert était étudiant en vacanses à l'Algarve du Portugal pendant des 1970. Il marchait en bas d'un petite rue en pavé dans un village, où il remarqua les trottoirs en mosaïques élaborées. C'était ce qu'il aimait du Portugal : les trottoirs en mosaïque.

Alors, à la distance d'environ cinquante mètres, il vit une femme sur le balcon de son petit appartement, habilée toute en noir. A cette distance, elle ressemblait à une belle señorita, et quand elle faisait signe de la main à lui en lui disant de venir, il sortait dans la foule vers sa bâtise.

C'était comme un rêve. Bien sûr, elle était une feu foulet d'après-midi. Mais cet après-midi, il croyait qu'il était sa journée ; il allait être chanceux.

Aux enjambées longues, il bondait en haut de l'escalier de la bâtise vers son appartement sur l'étage troisième. Mais hélas, lorsqu'elle ouvrit la porte pour le laisser entrer, il fut franchisement déçu : elle n'était la belle pucelle jeune de sa fantaisie, mais en réalité une mère de famille passée le quarantaine. Et elle était large, ne pas petite, comme il avait imaginé.

Cependant, le moment où elle sourît à lui, il vit sa beauté ibérienne, et il tomba amoureux d'elle à nouveau. Lorsqu'elle lui dit d'entrer, il obéit à elle, ou, c'est-à-dire, il obéit à son désir. Il entra dans son petit appartement pour s'asseoir à table avec elle dans la petite cuisine pendant qu'elle fait cuisiner pour lui le déjeûner.

En parlant, elle lui dit d'elle-même, comment elle avait quarante ans, comment elle était la mère de cincq enfants. Son époux fut tué pendant la guerre en Angola, dit-elle, et elle était veuve. C'était la raison laquelle elle était habilée toute en noir. Elle s'appelait Rosa.

Sur le mantel de brique rouge dans le salon étaient des tableaux de son mari défunt en uniforme, de ses cinq enfants. Les deux enfants aînés, un fils et une fille, ressemblaient aux adolescents dans les tableaux.

Robert, en revanche,il était du Québec, de Montréal. Il voulait faire le backpacking de Lisbon à Istanbul. Il lui prenait l'été entier. Du Portugal, il traversait dans l'Espagne, puis à travers les Pyranées dans la France. Il faisait le backpacking dans les Alps de la Suisses et du Tirol, puis dans les Alps dinariques de la Yugoslavie avant d'arriver à Istanbul. Son endroit meilleur, il se rappelait plus tard, était Sarajevo, où fit la reconnaissance de sa premièreépouse, une étudiante de la Belge qui s'appelait Katrina.

Après le déjeûner, elle le mena dans sa chambre à coucher, où ils se foutirent à poil avant de se tomber sur un grand lit de cuivre jaune qu'avait dans sa famille plusieurs générations. Il se souvenait plus tard de ses énormes seins et de sa bedaine le plus, tandis qu'elle se tendait devant lui à l'Eve.

Elle était large, bien en chair. Cependant, elle lui était belle : la pâlleur de la peau, que ne voyait jamais le sévère ensoleillément d'après-midi, et les mèches longues et épaisses couleur d'hènne que tombait sur les épaules. Elle était une déesse ! Et quand elle y fut prête, elle prit sa pine de tous les deux mains pour la guider dedans elle.

En poussant dedans elle, il regardait son visage de temps en temps. Ses yeux étaient fermées, les coins de ses babines, racornis dans un petit sourire, bien qu'elle ouvrait la bouche parfois en sentant des vagues de plaisier.

Alors, elle tendait le cou avant, mettant la langue à la lèvre supérieure, et elle s'écria en arquant le dos, avant d'elle retomber au lit, son corps, rélâchi.

Un moment, deux moments plus tard, il jouit aussi, en s'exposant profond dedans elle.

Pendant qu'il se serraient en bras après, elle était très timidie, mas sa timidité lui avait allure. Puis elle regardait fixement dans seys petits yeux ronds couleur de noir d'ébène en disant : « Vous êtes très belle, senhora. »

Elle sourît béatifiquement en disant :

— Obrigada, senhor.

Puis elle l'embrassa tendrement sur les babines.

Mais il devait partir d'elle bientôt, pourtant, parce qu'elle s'attendait à revenir au foyer pour déjeûner les trois cadets de ses enfants ; ils allaient dans l'école elementaire. Cependant, elle lui dire de l'appeler une bonne fois le lendemain après-midi.

Pendant le quinze-jour où il était dans l'Algare, il la revoyait aussi souvent du possible, mais il fallait qu'il partir du Portugal après l'expiration de son visa temporaire.

Ah, mais elle était correcte avec lui, ayant la nourriture pour l'estomac, l'amour pour l'âme. Et ses voisines étaient envieuses d'elle.

I Like My Women Cheap

They say that prostitutes make the most money on the first and fifteenth of every month. On those days, the automobile workers get paid and people receive government cheques. Among the flotsam and jetsam of people who are homeless, or who look like they are homeless, are the people that the whores know are supposed to get cheques.

You can run into a prostitute anywhere: in or outside a bar, at a diner or truck stop, on a street corner or bus depot, or even in a parking lot. You can go to them at the massage parlours, like the ones on Wyandot East, if you like, or you can let them come to you.

I have seen skinny, wraith-like black women in Detroit with blond wigs, ten-inch heels, and short skirts that looked old enough to be grannies, but most of the ones that have accosted me looked ordinary, neither sexy nor particularly whorish in appearance. They could have fit in anywhere: at the supermarket or at a Zeller's, at a corner bar or at a picnic. None of them were beautiful, and almost none of them were even remotely attractive to me.

November is perhaps the worst month of the year, if you live out on the street in a city of the northern temperate zone. The trunks of the bare trees all look more grey than brown. Though you may get a sudden but brief Indian Summer, it's also grey and windy that month, and you can get rain, sleet, or snow, sometimes all on the same day. As well, people have to change their clocks back, because usually it's the end of daylight savings time that month. Therefore, there's that extra hour of darkness, that extra hour of gloom. Winter always comes before people are ready for it.

I met her in a parking lot on the first, or fifteenth of November, somewhere on Huron Church Road. I guess I looked to her like someone who had just received a cheque, either a pay cheque from one of the automotive companies, or a government cheque like a social insurance cheque.

She was no more than five feet, four inches tall, with a squared body. Though she looked young enough to be my daughter, she was probably at least seven or eight years older than my daughter, around twenty-five years old, with blond hair and blue eyes, and cheeks stung red by the cold wind whipping in from Lake St. Clair to the north. You could say she had a healthy glow, like a farm girl from Saskatchewan, since her cheeks were red and she was young. She didn't have the tubercular look that you read about in nineteenth-century fiction, where skinny maidens with tuberculosis and bright red cheeks have to sell themselves to survive.

Maybe she could have been a student at the University of Windsor, since the parking lot was near the campus, but she wasn't a student, I'm sure.

"Do you want a date?" she asked, somewhat self-consciously, I thought.

Of course, I knew that she wasn't asking me if I wanted to take her to the movies, but I said yes anyway, and she told me where to go. I drove her to a cheap motel along the water front, near Sandwich. At the time, the Windsor Casino hadn't been built yet, and there was still a Holiday Inn down by the river.

The entire time that she was in my car, she never looked at me once. It was like she didn't want to acknowledge my existence any more than she had to. She merely gave me directions to the motel in short, clipped phrases.

When I asked for her name, I expected her to say something like Candy or Brandy, like one of the dancers with the Windsor Ballet— what I call a nom de la nuit. I would have laughed my ass off if she had given me the name of my ex-wife— the whore!— but she told me that her name was Karen.

I parked away from the motel on a side street, in case the police were watching the place. That way, if the place was raided, my car wouldn't be impounded, even if I was arrested. Once I was in a hotel room with her, she gave me the price of a blow job (which was something like ten dollars), and the price of actually fucking her: about twenty or twenty five dollars. For about thirty dollars, I got both.

After the blow job, Karen turned around, pulled her pants and her underpants down, and I took her from behind. The whole thing lasted maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, about the time it took for me write this paragraph. I doubt that I took her to the heights of ecstasy.

Of course, I used a condom— you never know what you might catch from a woman of the night.

After I was done, we settled up. During the transaction, when I paid my thirty dollars, Karen never made eye contact one time. Maybe I could have made her eyes light up by tipping her with a hundred-dollar bill, but this was a low-budget encounter. I didn't have a hundred dollars on me. Besides, if she had a pimp, he would have wanted all of her money, including the hundred, anyway. Pimps are like that, you know.

For some reason, I thought of asking her why she did it, but I didn't want to come across like a missionary in some place like Papua New Guinea, who had forgotten that the original idea was to save souls rather than succumb to the natives. I didn't want to sound like a hypocrite, or make her think that I somehow disapproved. Besides, I'm sure she had been asked that before.

After the encounter, I drove home to my place in Ford City, near the Ford plant, one of those two-storey bungalows built during the Dirty Thirties of what were probably the cheapest materials available at the time. I opened a Molson Canadian, sat down in front of the television, and watched the Red Wings. I didn't want to think about it, but I thought about it during the hockey game.

I felt different, like I had the first time I had had sex. I still don't know why I did it, except that maybe she was just available, and I had a little extra money.

The fact that you have paid for sex isn't something that you want to admit to just anyone. Oh, sure, people will tell you that you pay more in the long run, if you are married or in a long-term relationship, but an anonymous encounter with a prostitute isn't something that you write home about. Your mother isn't going to want to meet the prostitute.

But sometimes, we just like our women cheap.

Death Comes to Susurluk

Memet Baba was a Turkish gangster who grew up on the mean streets of Izmir on the coast of the Aegean Sea. He had to admit that he liked the sacrilegious ring of his moniker, which meant "Big Daddy Mohammed" in Turkish. He had started his career as a homeless street urchin, but he now controlled most of the drugs and prostitution along the Aegean. He was sitting on top of the world, with a wife and kids, and some investments in respectable enterprises. During the Great Earthquake about a decade ago, he had avoided prosecution because his constructions had all survived the tremblors; he had thought it prudent to follow the building code, though others had successfully bribed the building inspectors with tragic results. Thousands were killed in the earthquake.

Memet Baba also had a mistress, whose name was Tansu. Memet found it amusing that his mistress had the same first name as the Turkish prime minister at the time, Tansu Ciller, who was also a woman, and he often called her "my prime minister." He even deferred to her at times.

As they were driving in his Mercedes Benz down a narrow street along the coast of the Aegean Sea, Tansu nervously said to Memet Baba, "Please slow down, darling. It's raining and the road conditions are bad."

Memet turned to her and said, "It's all right, my prime minister. But for you, I'll slow down."

Memet Baba was scheduled to meet somebody in a restaurant. Tansu didn't know that the balding, middle-aged man was a general in the Turkish army; she thought that he was just another of Memet's partners in organized crime. If Memet had bragged to her that he was about to meet an important military official, she would have thought that he was only bragging, except that Memet didn't brag about things like meeting generals.

The moment that the general saw Tansu, he glared at her. Then he said to Memet angrily, "Why did you bring the girl?"

"Relax, my general," Memet replied. "Tansu is very discrete. Besides, we have to make it look good, don't we?"

Then Memet turned to Tansu and said, "I would like you to meet Ismet Kahve. He's a general in the army."

Tansu understood then that Memet Baba and the general would not be talking about anything illegal. It's likely that some of their business dealings were nefarious, but the general was clearly in no mood to talk about anything to do with vice in front of a woman.

What prompted the meeting was a complaint of the general's in a previous meeting. Memet Baba had casually asked the general "How's it going," and the general had wearily replied, "Not good at all, Memet. The war against the Kurds seems to be without end. There's all this killing and torture, and to what purpose? I tell you, it's the politicians!"

"Maybe I can help, my general," Memet replied. "Maybe I can help..."

As it turned out, Memet Baba was also dealing with someone on the other side who could loosely be called "a freedom fighter." This man was connected with the Kurdish People's Army (PPK), but ideology probably wasn't his main consideration. Sure, he probably dreamed of a homeland for his people, but he had made a fortune smuggling arms from the Turkish military to the Kurdish separatists in Iraq, with Memet Baba as an intermediary. Memet, in turn, bought arms from Saddam Hussein and sold them to the Kurdish separatists in Turkey.

Maybe the Kurdish freedom fighter found it ironic that the Kurds in both countries couldn't unite to fight both Turkey and Iraq, but the Turks and the Iraqis were able to keep the Kurds at each other's throats, even though both countries were guilty of atrocities against the Kurds. Saddam's use of poison gas against the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan is well-documented, but the Turkish army was also torturing and murdering suspected Kurdish separatists.

What separated the Kurds was ideology: the leaders of the PPK in Turkey were Marxists while the leaders of the Ansari i-Islam in Iraq were Muslim. fundamentalists. Then there were men like the Kurdish gangster that General Kahve was meeting for he first time. He probably wasn't into politics or religion very much.

To meet the Kurdish "freedom fighter," Memet Baba, Tansu, and General Kahve had to drive to a restaurant in Antakya on the Mediterranean, just north of the Syrian border, a distance of hundreds of kilometres. The Kurd only introduced himself as "Mr. Berzani." Unlike the general, Berzani wasn't at all troubled by Tansu's presence. Rather, they kissed cheeks, and he smiled and complimented her on her appearance.

Then Berzani said to Memet, "You have always associated with elegant ladies. How do you do it?"

Memet replied, "If everybody knew, ladies like Tansu would be in short supply. But God is great."

The general and the freedom fighter exchanged pleasantries as well. "Diyarbakır is a most beautiful city," General Kahve said to Berzani. Diyarbakır was the capital of Turkish Kurdistan.

"Yes," Berzani replied, "but not as beautiful as your Istanbul."

That night, Memet Baba, General Kahve, and Mr. Berzani avoided the subjects of politics and religion. Instead, they ate a fine meal of lamb with Tansu, and then were entertained by a belly dancer from Lebanon and a female folk singer from the eastern highlands near Armenia. Everybody had a good time, as both the general and the freedom fighter got more than a little soused on Turkish rakı. Rakı is distilled from anise like Greek ouzo, except that the Turks dilute rakı with water and let the dregs sink to the bottom.

"They seem to be hitting if off," Tansu whispered to Memet Baba. "Maybe you should be a diplomat."

However, Memet Baba was fatalistic. "You never know about these things, my dear," he replied. "The Kurds are no better or no worse than the Turks, but they have had centuries to misunderstand each other. Either the general or Berzani could say something wrong, and my efforts could come to nothing."

At the end of the night, Memet Baba and Tansu retired to their hotel, while General Kahve and Mr. Berzani retired also. The general and the Kurd still seemed to be hitting it off.

The next morning, it was raining hard, and Memet Baba and Tansu were supposed to pick up General Kahve and Mr. Berzani at their hotels. "Maybe we should wait until the weather lets up a little," Tansu suggested. "Maybe we should even wait until tomorrow."

Memet Baba shook his head. "The general has to be back in Ankara tomorrow," he said. "Berzani has other business as well. They have to meet this afternoon, or we might have to forget about it indefinitely."

Then Tansu, who was still in bed under the covers, smiled slyly at Memet Baba and murmured, "Come back to bed, darling. There's still time, and it's raining..."

Had it rained the morning after the first night that he slept with Tansu? Memet Baba couldn't remember. He only knew that underneath that hard exterior of hers was a sentimentalist who still remembered things like making love during a morning shower. It was easy to dismiss Tansu as just a gangster's moll, since she had been an escort before he made her his mistress, but he dressed her up in the finest clothes and treated her like a lady in public— and he expected her to behave like one.

Tansu was in her thirties now, tall and blonde, still attractive. The way he treated her, the way he surrounded her with nice things, she couldn't complain if he picked up a young woman in her twenties from time to time. Of course, he had to be discrete about it; it was a question of respect. Memet Baba's mistress, on the other hand, had to be beyond reproach, except maybe in bed.

Memet's wife wasn't even in the picture. He kept her and the kids in a villa on the Aegean Sea and rarely saw them. It was safer that way, because he had enemies.

After they were done, Tansu turned around to go back to sleep, but Memet Baba gently said to her, "Get up, my slothful one. Destiny awaits. We can't keep Berzani and Kahve waiting."

When they picked up the general and Berzani at their hotels, Memet had Tansu searched both of them for cell phones and pagers, as well as tape recorders, because he knew that they could be traced by a satellite. Then Memet Baba drove everybody to an undisclosed location that only he knew about for their next meeting.

As the rain is falling hard among the hills of western Anatolia, Memet Baba takes the curves of the narrow, twisting roads in his Mercedes Benz maybe a little too fast to suit Tansu. Sometimes Tansu wants to shout, "Please slow down— you'll kill us!" But she doesn't want to embarrass him in front of General Kahve and Mr. Berzani. Instead, she murmurs a few times, "You are doing eighty kilometres, my dear, and it's raining. Maybe you should slow down."

However, Memet Baba slows down as he approaches the town of Susurluk, and Tansu breathes a sigh of relief, thinking that maybe the danger of being killed in an automobile accident has passed, or at least lessened.

Then, because visibility is still bad, a car pulls out of the only service station in Susurluk, and Memet Baba has no room to brake. To avoid the other car, he swerves into an oncoming delivery truck from the opposite direction and enters into a collision with it.

Because of the weather, there is some delay before a constable and an ambulance are at the scene of the accident. Memet Baba and Tansu are killed instantly. General Kahve lingers in hospital for a few days before he also expires of his injuries. The only survivor is the Kurdish freedom fighter, Mustafa Berzani, but unfortunately, Berzani suffers amnesia because of the accident, and he can't even remember why he was in Susurluk. Only Memet Baba— and God— knew where they were supposed to meet that day.

God is great.

Devlet Baba

Devlet Baba means "daddy state," or "welfare state" in Turkish. It denotes a parternalistic society, where children are encouraged to be dependent on their parents.

Konya was twenty-five years old and still living at home, but she didn't mind because her father paid her credit card bills and paid the installments on the loan for the car that she had bought two years before. But she was helping out too: her salary from her full-time job as an accountant at a department store on Istaklal Boulevard in Istanbul helped pay the bills.

Konya's parents believed that they were protecting their daughter's virtue by allowing her to stay with them, but they didn't know that she was sleeping with her boyfriend. They also didn't know that she had slept with her boyfriends since she had graduated from secondary school, and that all of her friends did it.

Konya and her family were Muslims, but the Turks have lived under secularism for nearly a century, since Kemal Atatürk. What's more, Turks consider themselves to be Europeans, not Asians. They consider the Arabs to be a race of barbarians.

One day, during the summer, Konya told her family that she was going to a resort on the Black Sea with some friends. She was gone for eight days. She came back tanned and looking happy. Her mother noticed that there were no tan lines on her body.

Then, about a week later, her mother found some photos in the top drawer of her dresser while putting away some clothes. In one of them, Konya was posing in a photo booth with a young man who had his arm around her shoulders; they were both smiling brightly.

The rest of the photos verified that were taken while Konya was on vacation on the Black Sea, supposedly with some friends. She had photos of the Black Sea at sunrise, and the sandy beaches.

When Konya's father saw the photo with the young man, he few into a rage— at his daughter's deception, at the fact that she was obviously sleeping with a man.

When her parents confronted her with the evidence, she didn't try to deny it. She apologized, but her father slapped her in the face— the only time that he had ever struck Konya.

When Konya told her boyfriend, Mehmet, what had happened, he did the only honourable thing he could do: he approached Konya's father and asked for his daughter's hand in marriage.


Devlet baba signifie « l'état de papa » ou « l'état de providence » en turc. Ces mots dénotent la société patérnaliste où on encourage un état de dépendance d'enfants sur leurs parents.

Konya avait vingt-cinq ans, restant chez ses parents encore, mais elle n'avait pas d'objections parce que son père payait les notes de sa carte credit et payait les versements mensuels de l'emprunte pour la voiture qu'elle eut achetée il y a deux ans. Mais elle donnait un coup de main aussi : la salaire de son ouvrage à plein temps comme une comptable d'un magasin dans le boulevard Istaklal à Istanbul aidait payer les notes.

Les parents de Konya se croyaient à défendre la vertu de leur fille en la permettant à rester chez eux, mais ils n'avaient pas connaissance d'elle coucher avec son petit ami. Aussi, ils n'avaient pas connaissance d'elle avoir couché avec ses petits amis après qu'elle eut reçu son diplôme de lycée. Ils n'avait pas connaissance de toutes ses amies l'avoir fait.

Konya et sa famille étaient musulmanes, mais les Turcs sont vécu sous le laïcisme depuis presque un siècle, depuis Kemal Atatürk. En plus, les Turcs se considèrent à être Européens, pas Asiens. Ils considèrent les Arabes à être une race barbare.

Un jour, pendant l'été, Konya dit à sa famille d'elle aller en vacanses à un lieu de villégiature sur la mer Noir avec quelques amies. Elle y était huit jours. Elle revint bronzée, semblant être contente. Sa mère remarqua qu'il n'y avait pas de lignes de bronzage sur son corps.

Alors, environ une semaine plus tard, sa mère trouva quelques photos en mettant des vêtiments dans le tiroir en haut de sa commode-coiffeuse. Dans l'une d'elles, Konya posait dans un photomaton® avec un jeune homme, qui avait un bras autour de son épaule. Tous les deux souriaent largement.

Le reste des photos vérifièrent qu'elles furent prises pendant que Konya était en vacanses sur la mer Noire, elle, censée d'être avec quelques amies.

En voyant la photo du jeune homme, le père de Konya entra dans une colère noire — à cause de la duplicité de sa fille, à cause du fait d'elle coucher avec un homme évidamment.

Quand ses parents l'affrontèrent avec l'évidence, elle ne tenta pas de mentir. Elle demanda pardons, mais son père la gifla, la seule fois qu'il eut jamais coupé Konya.

Quand Konya dit à son petit ami de ce qui fut passé, il fît la seule chose honorable qu'il pouvait faire : il approcha le père de Konya pour faire une demande en mariage avec sa fille.

Trouble in Paradise

Elisabeth was from Canada, twenty-two years old. She was the girlfriend of a businessman, also from Canada, who was building condominiums in Kingston, Jamaica, and she was just gorgeous. And she had a very sexy, come-on voice.

Her boyfriend's foreman was a Jamaican named Rodney, who was much older than her, over fifty. But there was something about this man: he was nice and charming, and he knew how to treat a woman.

At first, Rodney was her confidant, but then he became her friend. Then, one night while her boyfriend worked late, they went out for a night on the town. They got drunk and ended up in a hotel room together.

Rodney felt bad about it, because he had a woman and several children with her, and Elisabeth was his boss's girlfriend. Though Elisabeth had flirted with him, he had never taken her flirtations very seriously; she was much younger than he was, and her boyfriend was a rich man.

However, he wanted her very much, because she was beautiful, and it was obvious that she wanted him. Therefore, they had a series of liaisons over a six-week period. They couldn't wait to see each other.

Rodney was even aware of her past: Elisabeth had confessed that she was a topless dancer— something she hadn't told her boyfriend. "I've done it all," she said, while drunk. "I've even had sex with other women."

However, he didn't care about her past, because he was in love with her. If he wasn't so much older than her, if he didn't have a woman and children, and she wasn't the mistress of a rich man, he would have run of with her, if that was what she wanted.

But that was what she wanted. After six weeks, she wanted to run off with him. It could have been anywhere, for all she cared. It could have been the Sahara Desert.

"But where would we live, miss?" he asked.

"I don't care. I only want to be with you."

"But we are of different races. I'm black and you're white."

"I don't care. I would love you even if you were green."

The truth was that Elisabeth wasn't really white; she was créole, a mélange of several races: white, black, and even Native-American. Elisabeth only looked white to Rodney in comparison to the other Jamaican women, but part of her mother's family was from New Orleans.

"And we will be poor," he pointed out. "I have nothing to offer but my soul."

"I don't care," she said again. "All I want is your beautiful soul."

In the end, Rodney was so in love with Elisabeth that he was willing to leave his woman and their children and run off with her anywhere. It could have been the Sahara Desert, for all he cared.

It could be, he was charmed by the way she repeated "I love you" over and again as they made love. Nobody had done that with him before, and he was sure that nobody would ever do that again, at his age.

So they ran off together and they lived in a miserable little shanty in a miserable little shantytown near Kingston, despite his misgivings.

The truth was that they weren't thinking very rationally. It was difficult. During the hurricane season, the roof usually had a leak, and Elisabeth had to fix it, though Rodney was a carpenter. Elisabeth had to learn to cook over a fire without gas or electricity, and she had to drag water over a long distance from a pump to wash clothes. What's more, she had to slaughter chickens, and a neighbour had to show her how to do it.

Sometimes, she even had to call her parents in Canada and ask for money— that was the worst part of it. She always had to call collect from a pay phone.

They had several children together, some of whom died early in childhood. By the time she was thirty-five, she was large, with enormous breasts that hung down over her belly, like the other women of the shantytown. What's more, she dressed like a woman of the shantytown, with a long skirt and a turban on her head, and you'd have never thought, from a distance of a hundred yards, that she was white.

However, that only made Rodney want her more, though he remembered her in a bikini from when she was young. He didn't care about her size, because nearly all the women in his life had ended up plus-sized anyway.

Of course, they quarrelled— she even threatened him with a knife a few times. His friends said that he should beat her just to show who was boss, but Rodney didn't believe in hitting a woman. He had hit his first woman several times, usually when he was drunk, but he was resolved never to repeat that mistake with Elisabeth, no matter how much his friends might have thought that she deserved it.

In their poverty, only two things kept Elisabeth going: love and religion. What kept Rodney going was sex and the herb that made Jamaica famous.

When they made love at night, after the children were supposed to be asleep, she still cried out, over and over again, "I love you!"

That was because she meant it, at least at the time. But love wasn't always enough: she started going to church and got baptized. However, she never doubted that she would be in heaven with Rodney after they died, because she believed that he was a deeply spiritual man, despite all his faults. He had a beautiful soul, she thought.

The preacher thought that she had a beautiful body. He liked her body (as well as the bodies of about eleven other middle-aged women in his congregation), but Elisabeth could say with confidence that Rodney was the father of all of her children.

Then, when he was about seventy years old, Rodney died after a brief illness. When her mother pleaded with her to come back to Canada, Elisabeth reluctantly returned to Canada, tired, with her six children in tow.

However, her parents didn't know what to make of her when she arrived at Pearson International Airport with six grandchildren that they had never seen before.

Their daughter wasn't the same. Their baby was no longer young.

Décrouvir le pot aux roses

Houari Boumédienne was born in Algeria and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. While he was at university, he met a foreign tourist along the Champs Elysée, a Canadian woman named Monique, who, he thought, was very beautiful.

They fell in love, had a whirlwind romance, and got married. Then, after he was able to get a student visa, he moved with her to Montréal, where they both were medical students at the University of Montréal.

After they graduated from medical school, they opened a clinic in Hochelage-Maisonneuve, one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Montréal. They had to struggle, but they were able to make it work. Then they had children.

Generally, their quarrels were not violent, and they always seemed to patch up their differences. There was a problem of religion, because Houari wanted the children to be raised as Muslims; but Monique gave in on this matter, though Houari allowed her to bring the children to church and even went on occasion himself, on Palm Sunday and Easter.

There was a problem with Houari’s infidelities: Monique was aware that he had cheated on her a couple times with the Brazilian receptionist while she was pregnant; but she believed that he loved her, and only did it because he was weak. Monique didn’t think that Houari was a chauvinist like other Muslim men; he was mild-mannered and treated her with respect, and she loved him.

Then, they bought a house together in Laval, north of Montréal, a two-storey brick Canadian bungalow. While he was carrying a box of her stuff upstairs to the attic, a little black book fell from the top of the box.

He put down the box to read it, and he was shocked by what he read. It was his wife’s diary, and in it was a lurid description of a brief but very passionate affair with another man. It was very explicit; his wife described in minute detail some of the things that she had done with her lover. He couldn’t believe it! He was sure that his wife was cheating on him.

That night, after the children were in bed, Houari confronted Monique with the diary. She was angry that he had read it; she felt violated because she felt that he shouldn’t have been reading it. She assured him that the affair had taken place before they met in Europe, when she was young, but she pointed out that he had no right to be angry, since he had cheated on her while she was pregnant.

In an effort to make amends, she said, "I'm sorry that you had to see it, I didn't know that I still had it. I should have burned it."

In a rage, he slapped her. She tried to stab him with some scissors that she saw on the vanity, but he grabbed her hand, bent it back, and sprained her wrist.

While she sat on the bed, painfully holding her wrist, he said calmly, still panting, “I never knew that you were such a whore.”

Then he picked up the scissors from the floor and stabbed her to death, puncturing the carotid artery of her throat.