Mustafa's Letters

I extracted the first letter and opened it and started to read:

When you receive this, you will know that I am gone. I took the morning ferry to the mainland. I can understand your dilemma, your inability to come to me and only to me, and were I in your place I might be frozen in incapability to decide and to commit to one or the other as well. Family is everything to we Turks as much—no, maybe more—than it is to your kind. And that is why I must leave. I still love you with all I have to give, but I cannot live with lies. I cannot live with your lies. You told me you had made a choice and I closed my life in commitment to you. But you have done nothing. You still want me inside you, but you cannot bring yourself to come to me forever. I am dead to my family now. And yet you continue to vacillate. I cannot live without you. And I have lost you. But I have no one here anymore except you. And if I do not have you either, I cannot be here.

I laid that letter aside and rose and walked over to the wall and gazed down into the Mediterranean. The choice. I could blame my father for his vacillation, just as this Mustafa did. But I now knew that the choice had been one that was not easily made. And that thought alone lifted a burden of hurt from my shoulders. I knew what it was to love a man and the sacrifices and forced choices that raised in the world—and my world was a much more sophisticated and forgiving world than the traditional Turkish world of the Mediterranean was. I ached for what this must have done to Mustafa. It wasn't just my own family that had suffered.

It was no longer as easy to condemn my father either and to resent what he had done to his family. But that didn't explain why he had done it. Mustafa had left, and yet my father had still sent us away.

I went back and pulled out the second letter, dated only two weeks after the first.

I cursed the fates to learn that you were carrying out your decision even as the ferry was taking me away from the land—and the man—I loved. It will take me a month or a bit more to come to you—as soon as I arrived here I was taken on as a journalist in a liberal activist paper and I have promised to cover a series of rallies in the capital. But I feel so free. And you are free now. I know that you love me because I know it was not easy; I know you worship your children. We can make it work somehow, though. I know we can. Save yourself for me and only me. I come.

So, it worked out after all, I thought. But then, no. There were two more letters. The same handwriting. Both from Turkey.

I never knew why you would not answer my letters from prison. That is I did not know until someone brought me copies of your two recent books. I see that you answered the call of the Bellapais square. That you could not resist the young men there. I told you the villa would do that to you. The villa's song is well known in the village. But was I so easy to forget—and to ignore when I was arrested and could not come to you? But perhaps that is best not pursued. I love you still, but I cannot compete with the call of the men in the Bellapais square. And perhaps it is for the best. I have a position with the government television now—as a national commentator. The new government has tried to compensate for the years in prison before the changes came. And there is a man at the station—Amil. He is older and he says he needs me. And he is a gentle lover. And I have learned that one cannot have all one wants in life and must live with reality. I hope that you . . .

I felt no need to read further into that letter. Fate indeed was fickle. I could understand the underlying sadness and feeling of incompleteness of my father's later novels now. But I hoped that was not the end. I hoped that before he died my father had, by some miracle, found the happiness that had eluded him for the initial years after we were sent away.

And for this, my hope rested in the fourth letter in the packet.

The handwriting was the same, but not nearly as bold and strong as on the earlier letters and it was postmarked not more than two months ago—from Istanbul. With trembling hands I pulled it out of the envelope and unfolded it and read.

I am mortified. I had not considered that the letters I had written from prison might be held back. As you always said, I was too trusting, always the idealist. I had no concept that anyone could be that cruel. That we could become lost, nonpersons, told we could write loved ones but the letters never delivered. And if you had not sent your condolences, if you had not seen the obituary in the Istanbul paper and known that it was my Amil, I would have never known. Thank you for your kind words about the loss of Amil. It was a loss, certainly—but nothing compared to my loss of you.

Oh the life we have missed. Or have we missed it completely? Is there yet a chance for us? I loved Amil—but never as I have always loved you. And now, what about you? You sound so sad. Are you not well? Is there something you are not telling me that prompted you to write after all of this time?

I must know. I will come. A month. No more. I have responsibilities to the media, but a month, no more than six weeks. I come. I cannot expect you still to want me. But I come nonetheless. I can do no less. My love. Always.

I had the sudden urge to rise and go down to the square. It was not that I felt the square—or the villa—calling me to go to the square as it had done last evening—and as my father's books said the call had come to him. I felt that there was some other reason, something else calling me to the square. And somehow I knew what that was.

He was sitting at the table I had occupied the previous night—the stranger in the graveyard. But, of course, no longer a stranger to me.

"Mustafa?" I asked in a gentle voice as I approached the table.

"Richard? Malcolm's son, Richard?" He answered.

I sat and he reached out and almost touched me. But he withdrew his hand. He was achingly beautiful to me. I could see why my father had fallen in love with him—and had pined for him for a decade of frustrated crossings.

"I saw you at the grave," I said. "You came. You returned."

"Yes. But I thought I was coming for the living, not to mourn the dead." he murmured. His voice was so sad. I didn't want to see him sad. I wanted to see him as my father had seen him. And, I blush, I wanted to see him as my father did when they were making love.

"You look so much like him," he said, and he lifted his hand again and it just hovered there above the table, unable to come forward, unwilling to drop away.

"You can touch me," I said. "I am real. I am here."

He slowly brought his fingertips to my forehead and let the tips move down my cheek to my chin, and then his hand dropped to the tabletop again.

I picked his hand up in both of mine and brought his fingertips to my lips.

"Shall we go somewhere . . . private?" I asked. "Do you wish to come up to the villa?" I held my breath, not knowing where this might lead. Being presumptuous but not daring to hope.

"Not the villa," he answered. "Oh, god, not the villa. But . . . but . . . I have a hotel room down in Kyrenia."

"Yes, I'd like that," I whispered. I opened my mouth and sucked his fingers in—and Mustafa shuddered.