Istanbul Symbol Analysis

There was so much she wanted to know. In her mind she kept replaying the last moments of her life, asking herself where things had gone wrong—a futile exercise since time could not be unraveled as though it were a ball of yarn.

In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore.

Her gut said, Oh, I like it here; I’m not going up there again.

Her heart protested, Don’t be silly. Why stay in a place where nothing ever happens? It’s boring.

Why leave a place where nothing ever happens? It’s safe, her gut said.

[...]

Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.

“Look, I’ll write to you every week,” Leila promised. “We’ll see each other again.”

“Won’t you be safer here?”

Although Leila did not say this aloud, somewhere in her soul echoed the words she had a feeling she had heard before: Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you.

“My shiekh says Allah will curse you and I will live to see the day. That will be my compensation.”

There were drops of condensation on the window. She touched one gently with her fingertip, held it for a second, and then let go, watching it roll down. A pain throbbed somewhere inside her body, in a place she was unable to locate.

“Don’t phone us again,” he said. “If you do, we’ll tell the operator we are not accepting the call. We don’t have a daughter called Leyla. Leyla Afife Kamile: you don’t deserve those names.”

You said cows recognize people who have hurt them in the past. Sheep can identify faces as well. But I ask myself, what good does it do them to remember so much when they can’t change a thing?

Her gut warned her that there was more to him than the considerate, gentle young man she saw and she had to be very careful. But her heart pushed her forward—just like it had done when, as a newborn baby, she had lain motionless under a blanket of salt.

But it wasn’t out of sheer kindness or an admission of some unconfessed guilt that Bitter Ma had given her much-needed blessing. D/Ali had paid her a hefty sum—an amount unheard of on the street of brothels. Later on, when Leila would pressure him about where he had got the money from, he would say his comrades had chipped in. The revolution, he claimed, was all for love and for lovers.

Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong.

Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul. There were multiple Istanbuls—struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive.

Not once had he touched any of the women. He took pride in that — being beyond the needs of the flesh. Cold as steel, each time he had watched from the side, until the very end.

[...] it didn’t matter anymore, the question of why they were not meeting his comrades and of what the revolution was going to be like in that bright future that might or might not come. Perhaps nothing was worth worrying about in a city where everything was constantly shifting and dissolving, and the only thing they could ever rely on was this moment in time, which was already half gone.

“Nice to see you, finally,” said the fish. “What took you so long?”

[...]

Smiling at her confusion, the blue betta fish said, “Follow me.”

Now finding her voice, Leila said, with a shyness she could not conceal, “I don’t know how to swim. I never learned.”

“Don’t worry about that. You know everything you need to know.”