13- Love is Over

 

On Saturday morning, Derya woke up to Serap’s call. "Sweetie, I haven’t been able to sleep for two days. Tunç is coming next week to pick up his stuff. He asked me to tell you," she said. Derya’s heart started beating fast. With the phone pressed between her right shoulder and ear, she put on her bathrobe and ran downstairs. She pressed the button on the coffee machine, opened the garden door, and inhaled the cool morning air.

Serap kept talking: "The other day, you called him, and he got really mad. ‘I was finally at peace for the last two or three weeks, but now she’s started texting again. I delete the messages without reading them. It makes me so angry,’ he said." Serap paused for a moment, waiting for her friend’s reaction. When she heard nothing from the other side, she continued: "Girl, why did you send him a message? Didn’t I tell you not to?" Derya sat on the garden swing with her coffee in hand. "Why shouldn’t I? I felt like it, so I did," she mumbled. Serap said, "Then don’t involve me. I don’t want to be in the middle of this, Derya."

Derya resented her ten-year friend Serap for wanting to stay neutral, but she didn’t say anything. After a short silence, Serap said: "I asked him how he’s going to get his stuff. He said he’d call Franck." Derya replied, "Oh come on! That’s ridiculous. He doesn’t even know Franck. Am I supposed to leave his stuff with Franck?" Serap said, "I think he’s bringing Franck with him because he’s afraid you might pull a knife or something when he comes. So I guess Franck will come with him to the door…"

Derya felt like she was in a surreal world. She put her coffee cup down on the swing and walked to the other side of the garden. While picking the dried flowers, she tried to make sense of what her friend had said. She felt stuck in a space between laughing and crying.

What hurt her wasn’t only Tunç’s absurd thoughts about her, but also the fact that Serap conveyed these words to her without questioning them. She hadn’t even said, "Are you crazy, my friend? What knife?" Tunç had been ignoring her for two months now, obviously because he didn’t have the courage to face her.

Then she told Serap, "No way, Franck wouldn’t get involved in this," and thanked her for the information before hanging up.

She stayed in the garden for a while longer and started doing the one thing that always calmed her down. She pulled out large weeds that looked like salad leaves from between the grass and sprinkled grass seeds into the gaps. The little apple tree now had apples the size of plums. She picked one of the unripe apples. While biting into the sour fruit, she called Franck and warned him: "Don’t get involved." Franck replied, "Sweetheart, why would I? Of course I won’t." "My dear Franck, a true friend," Derya thought emotionally. She wiped her teary eyes on the hem of her linen dress and continued pulling weeds.

She felt better, as if she had pulled out her inner anxiety along with the weeds. She put on her sneakers and sunglasses and went for a walk toward the vineyards. She had decided she wouldn’t behave the way Tunç expected her to. Even if situations tested her nerves, she silently promised herself she would maintain her dignity and calm.

All this had exploded during the summer holiday in Kuşadası, while chatting with Tunç’s sister. They had been drinking wine on the balcony when the topic of children came up, and Derya had said, "Well, Tunç can’t have children anyway." His sister hadn’t said anything at the time, but later she told Tunç about it. The next day, he ended the relationship over the phone.

Derya had called him countless times to apologize. "We were drinking, confiding in each other, and your sister brought it up," she had tried to explain. She had suggested they talk face to face, but Tunç never responded. He ignored two beautiful years and cut the relationship off like a knife.

Of course, Derya would have liked to have a child with him too, but while she was still trying to come to terms with it, she couldn’t understand why Tunç had made this topic such a taboo. His sister was already a little crazy; she believed that the sins of the ancestors passed down as diseases to the next generations. Who knew what she had made of the infertility issue?

That evening, she consoled herself with Korean dramas and two glasses of Chardonnay. She had always parted ways with her previous boyfriends in a civilized manner. This was the first time someone had just vanished. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she wrote her feelings in her diary.

On Sunday, she rearranged the house. She thought that erasing Tunç’s traces would be good for her mental health. She remembered what her therapist had said: "Box up his stuff and put it in the garage. If he comes to get his things, if possible, don’t let him into the house. If you want to talk, never talk inside the house. Talk in a neutral place, like a restaurant. If he comes without warning, tell him you’re not available and ask him to come back in a few hours. That way you gain time to prepare yourself."

While trying to do what her therapist had advised, she was also struggling to extinguish the fire inside her. She texted her girls’ group: "If you have anything to throw away and don’t know where to dump it, you can donate it to my ex-boyfriend." They all laughed at this. To cheer Derya up, they started listing the things they would donate.

On Monday evening, when she came back from work, Derya packed all of Tunç’s belongings. She carefully placed his suits and shirts into a large suitcase, his sweaters and t-shirts into a smaller one. She put his coats into a big sports bag, placing thin papers between them. His shoes and a few of his work files went into a fourth bag. There was also a printer, which she put into a cardboard box. She neatly arranged everything in the garage, next to her car.

She guessed that if Tunç was in Istanbul, he would fly to Paris, pick up his sister’s old wreck of a car, and drive here. Taking into account that his sister would probably keep him busy for a few days with errands once he arrived in Paris, she figured he wouldn’t get to Annecy before next Friday.

By Wednesday, there was still no news. Derya was so stressed from waiting that she bought a three-day ticket to Bodrum for Thursday evening. Before leaving, she warned Serap: "If Tunç calls, don’t you dare tell him I went to Turkey!"

While packing her suitcase, she also genuinely felt sorry for Tunç. "A whole life doesn’t fit into three or four suitcases, my love," she had cried. She truly pitied this poor man drifting from place to place like a Bedouin. Soon he would be forty years old, a grown man, yet still living in a small studio apartment, never defying his single sister’s word. He had studied in Turkey, then lived like a nomad in various European countries. For the past four years, he had stayed in Paris because he wanted to be close to his sister. "I wish he had found peace here with me, so he could end this endless migration," she thought, as her tears dropped onto the shirts she had carefully folded into the suitcase.

Actually, Tunç had often said, "I really want this. I want to finally put down roots somewhere." But he just couldn’t do it. As long as he stayed this harsh and merciless toward himself and others, he would never find peace with any woman, in any place. He would always be like feathers drifting in the wind—one day here, another day somewhere else. It wasn’t something he could control. Something deep in his subconscious was pushing him to live like this.

Even though she had decided not to say anything to Tunç, in the following days she didn’t act as planned. She sent him a message herself, telling him that she was in Bodrum but had packed his things and left them in the garage. Tunç knew the garage code. He could go in and take them.

During the three days she spent in Bodrum, she knew he didn’t want to see her, but still, she kept imagining going to Istanbul to see him. On the last day, before noon, she made one last attempt and called his mobile. For the first time in months, Tunç answered. He said he had landed in Geneva, rented a car, and was on his way to Annecy to pick up his things.

Derya’s flight was in the evening, but that morning she was lying on a sunbed at the hotel beach in Bodrum, staring at the sea. She pictured Tunç renting a car at Geneva Airport. She wished she had arrived with the morning flight and bumped into him by chance at the airport.

She checked her watch. It was only noon. She ordered a glass of champagne. Then, as if she were in a rush, she quickly drank it and went to her room to pack her suitcase. She wanted to be in Geneva right now. Even though her flight wasn’t until 7 p.m., even though she knew she wouldn’t make it in time to catch him, she went early to the airport, skipping the shopping she had planned to do.

While waiting at the airport, still five hours before her flight, she received a message from Tunç’s French number. "Derya, thank you. You packed the bags perfectly. I couldn’t have done it this well myself." So, he had already gone to Annecy, picked up his things, and left.

She didn’t reply, but if she had, she would have told him she had kissed and smelled all his belongings while packing them, and that there was nothing else she could do. Now that the bags were gone, the last bond between them was also broken. Wiping her tears, she sat at the airport bar and ordered another glass of champagne. While sipping it, she scrolled through their old messages and deleted them one by one. She knew she would regret this later that night in bed, but she still did it. Then she wrote in her diary: "What difference does it make to a blind man if it’s glass or diamond? If the one looking at you is blind, don’t think you’re made of glass! / Mevlana." Then she crossed out the word "diamond" and wrote "Derya" instead. Because even though love was over, life went on.