TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story timeworn streets of Lisbon, he’ d felt the pangs of an otherworldly story making itself felt inside him. The story of a waiter dying an extremely prolonged death between a shoddy bed-and-board and a coffeehouse, he said to himself. He was absolutely sure that someday he’ d tell his author about this reverie.

14 Your Face, Left to Me

Because my entire consciousness then seems to be gripped by heat, a bizarre kind of heat. I promptly light up a cigarette, and despite feeling somewhat wearied and somewhat embarrassed, I say: at least we’re in an antechamber of love with no one able to see us; we belong to one another. Then I sense that you can’t hear me, cannot even see me. I shake myself out of inertia. I think of your face left to me, your body I couldn’t indulge in, your door I could not knock on. For every detail I’m forced to live out, am practically obliged to live out, lives on in you, proliferates in you, breathes with you. Out of the blue I think of a placid, supremely quiet island shore, its sea urchins, mussels you can fry in a tin, the rum taverns I never had the chance to really enjoy, the fatigued lurchingof adarklywell-dressedandancientwomandownawide, noisy avenue, the reek of mackerel, Jewish homes preparing for Passover, the story of leek dumplings, the night buses along the Bosphorus, the days dawning with the horns of ferries, Efrahim and Selami, Agia Paraskevi Day, the sounds of the lute, the piano, and the qanun, September in a waterfront mansion on the

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