At Birlik, Melinda has made a host of friends she never could have expected to make. Among those who passed through the store one evening were a pair of Latina Muslims, their heads wrapped in hijabs; a troupe of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were visiting a friend living around the corner; and the older Turkish man living in the mosque upstairs whom they call “Umja,” or uncle. They came, like many others, for halal meats or sometimes just to peruse the range of Turkish sweets displayed in the clear glass jars on top of the register. Melinda isn’t as adventurous as some of the customers—she looks at a pile of Turkish Delights, or Lukun, on the register in front of her and says, “I still haven’t tried those Lukun, ‘cause I know I just won’t like them.”
Umja is here to clean and help maintain the store. “He doesn’t accept money,” Melinda explains as Umja silently wipes down the fridges in the back, a bottle of Windex in hand. “We usually feed him. Or just give him cigarettes.” Umja rarely talks, but when he does, “He always returns to communism. That’s his big thing, he’s always angry about communism.” Sometimes on his way out, Umja will make a barely visible gesture, perhaps a goodbye or an encouragement to follow him out to the mosque upstairs. Ahmet might decide to follow behind and then return carrying a plate of steaming rice and lentils. Meal in hand, he makes his way past Osman and the cash register to the area behind the meat displays, where he uses the chopping board as a dinner table. Without a word, he begins to eat. Osman, following Ahmet with his eyes, shrugs and says, “I don’t know where he got it. Maybe the restaurant next door, the mosque upstairs, maybe from friends.”
Ahmet has gotten used to not speaking often when he’s around Osman and Melinda. He doesn’t understand a word of English, compensating by watching and listening, piecing together meanings or events based more on what he sees than on what he hears. Despite the silence, he has managed to occupy a central position in their lives—and he certainly has been a constant part of it, staying with Melinda and Osman in the Bronx apartment passed down from Melinda’s mother. “He’s very curious.” Melinda says of Ahmet. “Always wants to know what we’re talking about.” Whenever she speaks of him, her voice fills with humor and affection. “We, Osman and I, always make fun of him.” She playfully imitates his voice, forming his oft-scrunched face before asking in her best Turkish accent, “Nada? Nada?” That’s what Ahmet asks when Melinda and Osman are in mid-conversation, when he needs a translation from Osman, hopelessly lost in their foreign words.
It may have been the religious Imam in Ahmet who encouraged Osman to pass on his concern to Melinda about converting to Islam. When Osman confronted her with the question, she pointed a finger sternly at his face and interjected mid-sentence with, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you right there. That is never happening.” Osman dropped the subject. So did Ahmet.
Melinda knows these confrontations all too well and maintains that even though she was raised Catholic, she was never really a spiritual person at all. Ask her about conflicts that may arise under the pressure to convert and she’ll shoot the question down with a well-rehearsed response. “You shouldn’t be asking that, because that’s not even an issue.” Her answer, so quick and sharply spoken, would make you forget the question was ever there in the first place. But for Osman, the question lingers. “I want her to be Muslim,” he admits later, when Melinda has moved on to other duties, reorganizing the products on the aisles of cherry wood shelves in the back of the store. His voice is soft and low, almost a whisper beside Melinda’s. He usually speaks with direct eye contact, but at this moment his eyes are watching out for Melinda, perhaps making sure she doesn’t hear what he is saying. He begins to discuss the first historic battle in Islam, the battle at Al-Badr, where the Prophet Muhammad’s handful of troops triumphed for the first time against the Meccan pagan rulers who had forced them out of Mecca a year earlier. With a victory under his belt, the Prophet Muhammad began deliberating over what to do with the prisoners of war.
“The prophet didn’t force them,” Osman says. “He just said to each one fighting, ‘teach them to read and write.’ That’s all. You can’t expect to change peoples’ beliefs.” Ahmet looked at Osman from the other side of the register, displaying a proud smirk and an agreeing nod, his hands firmly clasped in their usual position behind his back. He needed only hear the words “Badr” and “Muhammed” to realize that his son was retelling the same stories he had told in his days as an imam.
With a chance for a break in an empty store, Ahmet makes his way over to face Osman, lower his chin to his chest and his already hunched back further over. Osman quickly picks up on the cue and begins to massage the back of his father’s neck with his left hand, before moving his right hand to finish the work. “He works physically hard,” Osman explains. “We have a farm at home, cherries, all the fruits. There are no machines there to do your job.” Ahmet’s calloused fingertips, unkempt gray scruff and sun-wrinkled face show age well beyond his years. Osman explains, “My father, he’s retired. He has extra income from the government, farms, a hundred acres. Twelve apartments he rents to people in Giresun. That’s fatherhood, do you understand? He doesn’t have to do any work, but he still does it.”
The same conversation had cropped up weeks earlier, perhaps prompted by Ahmet’s presence as a helping hand. “Our families are very similar in those ways,” Melinda said, before looking down at the counter and remembering. “My mother always told us to sacrifice every last penny for each other. We have to look out for each other.”
