THE VIEW.(Travel narrative)

THE VIEW

It was a hot day. My five-year-old daughter, Ruya, and I were out on the island of Buyukada, going for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. I sat facing backward and my daughter sat facing me. She was looking at the road ahead. We went past gardens full of trees and flowers, past low walls, wooden houses, and vegetable patches. As the carriage lurched this way and that, I watched my daughter's face, seeking in her expressions some sense of what she saw in the world around her.

Things, objects, trees, and walls; posters, notices, streets, and cats. Asphalt. Hot. Had it ever been this hot?

Then we started up the hill; the horses were straining, and the driver cracked his whip. The carriage slowed down. I looked at a house. As the world flowed past us, it was as if my daughter and I were looking at exactly the same things. We looked at them one by one: a leaf, a trash can, a ball, a horse, a child, a house, a bicycle. But also the greenness of the leaf, the redness of the trash can, the way the ball bounced, the horse's expression, the child's face. Then each of these things slipped away; we weren't really looking at them, anyway--our eyes kept moving. We weren't really looking at any part of this hot, afternoon world. It was slipping past us in the heat, a flimsy world that seemed to evaporate before our eyes. It was almost as if we were drifting off ourselves! We see things and we don't. The world is bathed in the color of heat, and, in our minds, we can see this, too.

We passed a forest, but even there it wasn't cool. The trees seemed to be radiating heat. When the road grew steeper, the horses slowed even more. We listened to the cicadas. Then, just as the road seemed about to disappear into the trees, we saw the view.

"Br-r-rs," the driver said, to stop the horses. "Let them rest," he said.

We were at the edge of a cliff. Beneath us were rocks, the sea, and, rising out of the mist, the other islands. What a beautiful blue the sea was, with the sun sparkling on its surface: everything was where it should be, gleaming and immaculate. Before us was a perfectly formed world. Ruya and I admired it in silence.