217 Babel Street | Apartment 11
Fehmi chopped tomatoes, sweet onions, cucumber. It made him laugh that in this country you could buy half a cucumber all wrapped up in clingfilm. The price wasn't funny though. At home he bought cucumbers by the kilo and they cost almost nothing. He tipped the salad into a glass bowl, added oil and a little salt. He took a swig from a can of lager.
Behind him Mustafa placed whole aubergines on the gas rings, let them blacken and soften. Then he cut them open, scraped the soft flesh onto a plate. He stood beside Fehmi at the table and began to mash the aubergine with a fork.
"What time are the girls coming?" asked Mustafa.
"About eight. Put plenty of garlic in there. I'm catching a cold." He coughed to prove it.
"I told you not to drink cold beer. You should have had tea."
"You can't catch a cold from drinking cold liquid. I don't care what your mother told you."
"You can, because I always catch a cold when I drink something cold." He bashed a garlic clove with a knife, smugly, Fehmi thought.
"Okay, if you say so. You're always right."
And Mustafa laughed.
Fehmi knew that if he'd met Mustafa in Istanbul, they would never have become friends. Mustafa's Turkish came through a thick Kurdish accent and Fehmi would have resisted it, he knew. Here they spoke English and it made them the same. The big international language was, for them, a private one.