In the morning a drizzly, grey sky followed our bus all the way from Istanbul. At the ferry crossing to Yalova, the sea was choppy, and white sea birds rose up and down on the heavy wind. Yuliya shared her iPod, so we listened to her music and napped while the misty Anatolian countryside rolled by.

I was in kind of a fog too. Not three hours ago, I had decided to leave behind my job in Istanbul, and go with Yuliya to Bursa. The school didn’t know this yet. It was Wednesday, the eve of the kurban bayram, or festival of sacrifice,  so the school wouldn’t know about it until the following week. I tried not to think about it.

It was early afternoon when we arrived in Bursa. Uludağ, the ancient Mysian Olympos, stood unseen behind of heavy curtain of mist. All the buildings and houses around the base of the mountain looked huddled together against the cold. We got a bus to Altiparmak Street and had lunch at one of the fish cafes we liked. We ate levrek (sea bass) with lettuce and raw onions and drank glasses of raki. While we were eating Ferhiye called. She and some other people were having drinks at Limon Kultur, and they wanted us to join them.

So we paid for the lunch and walked up the street. Limon Kultur was about a twenty-minute walk. We arrived shivering and ready for a drink. The barman knew us – he expressed surprise at seeing me again. “Are you not in Istanbul?” he asked, shaking hands. He greeted Yuliya warmly with kisses.

The others were upstairs. Everyone was off work for the next few days and were getting an early start. Ferhiye greeted us wildly, rising from her chair and coming around the table, throwing her arms around Yuliya and me. I liked Ferhiye, she was a sculptor, and had a wild, mad beauty about her. She was also very affectionate and easy to get along with once you got past her endless manias, neuroses, obsessions. Others at the table were introduced, all old school friends.We sat and drank glasses of Tuborg and talked for most of the afternoon. One of the friends, Baris, said he had an extra room in his flat where I could stay for a few days, and even longer if I needed. We got a taxi and took my bags to the flat. The room was very small, but it was furnished with a bed and wardrobe, and from the window there was a nice view of the street.

Yuliya had told her parents she was arriving at the weekend, so we could spend a few days by ourselves. That evening we had drinks with Baris at a Brothers’ Bar near the flat, and turned in early.     

In the morning it was sunny and mild. Yuliya wanted to go somewhere, so we got a bus to Mudanya, a little town on the sea of Marmara. It was quiet in the town, so late in the year. Only a few fishermen were about, casting their lines listlessly into a cream-and-purple colored sea. Most of the cafes and restaurants had a wanton, desultory look. So we settled for chestnuts from a street vendor, and walked along the quiet streets eating the roasted chestnuts.

“Look!” Yuliya exclaimed. “Les maisones!” She liked speaking in French sometimes. She pointed at a charming row of houses. A sign nearby said they were built by the local municipality sometime in the 1930s. They did look like handsome French houses, sitting idly, gracefully by the sea. Out of season, the houses had a lonely, haunted look. I imagined it was summer, and Yuliya and I lived in one of les maisones together. We could write in one of the big upstairs rooms overlooking the sea on long, quiet summer afternoons. Yuliya wrote children’s stories. One of her stories was about Jan and Natalie. Jan was a poor boy who was always dreaming about Natalie, a beautiful princess in a blue dress, and at night, while he was asleep, she would visit him in his dreams.

Yuliya, her hazel eyes shifting restlessly, dismissed my sea idyll. “It’s too expensive,” she said. “In summer, it’s too noisy. Too many tourists. I think you will get bored.”

Still, the image lingered. There would be a fine breeze coming in through the windows, which we would keep open all summer long, and the winds would flutter the summer dresses Yuliya liked to wear. She could work on her stories about Jan and Natalie and I could work on my stories, and in the evenings, we could sit over a bottle of wine on the porch and discuss them together, while music played from inside. Then we could just drink the wine, sit and look out at the sea together before going to bed.

But perhaps she was right. Summers dreamed of cold November afternoons are best left there. Anyway, the sun was already beginning to set, so we hurried back along the waterfront, waving good-bye to our tendres maisones, letting their idyll pass on the winds out to sea.

*****

The following day was Friday and Yuliya wanted to take me up to Uludağ, the ancient Olympos. We got the teleferik, or cable lift, that went up the slope of the mountain at a sharp angle. There weren’t many people out, just a handful of Turks, and a Chinese couple, who snapped photos on their mobile phones as we traveled up the slope.

As the teleferik rose higher and higher, the city of Bursa below receded, became very small and far away. Below us the tops of pine trees swept by. You couldn’t see any snow from there. Yuliya pointed up the slope and you could see it there, way up near the summit. “Where we are going there will be snow,” she said. I was a bit nervous about the height, so we sat on a bench and Yuliya distracted me with a lot of chatter about the mountain. There was a summer camp with horses, where she used to go with her brother when she was a child. If I stayed in Bursa we could go horseback riding. We could go to many places.

“We could go to Mudanya again,” I said. “I liked les maisones.”

“No, not Mudanya,” Yuliya insisted. “Other places. We can go to Bodrum.”

“And Marmaris,” I said.

“And Cappadocia.”

“And Istanbul.” Yuliya looked at me carefully as she said it.

“Sure,” I said. “We can go to Istanbul – why not?” I passed over it quickly.

“Seni seviyorum,” she said, looking at me tenderly. “Are you sure it is OK? You don’t want to go back?”

“I’m fine. Ben de. Seni seviyorum.”

“Yaz. Yaz. Yaz.” Yuliya waved me off. “Write it down. Send it to me in a letter.”

“I do though.”

“I think it is Istanbul you love. No, wait. We will see. Look, we are almost up the mountain.”

****

We reached the second station and got off. It was very high up and there was snow everywhere and it was very cold. You could see through the branches of the trees that the summit of the mountain was still a long way off. But we were high up enough; the city felt very far away and at the edge of the alpine forest it was very quiet. We walked down the road to a hotel, a rustic, sprawling place.

It was big and cozy inside, with fires burning from two huge barbecue grills. A cook was busy laying strips of raw lamb and chicken onto the grills in preparation for the evening. The sizzle of the meat on the grill, and the smell of the lamb, were inviting, delicious. Most of the guests were out skiing further up the mountain, but they would be back in a couple of hours, before it got dark. We had to start watching our money, it had to tide over the bayram and until we figured out what I was going to do. If all else failed, we figured we could get some help from our families, and that at any rate there were teaching jobs in Bursa. Some of her friends had Limon Kultur had offered to help out.

We ordered home fries and pints of Efes. The home fries were freshly cut, steaming hot, and the Efes was served in frosty pint glasses. It was a simple meal, and on impulse, we decided to order a small plate of köfte, Turkish meatballs. While we were eating, a large group of people came in, all speaking in Arabic. The women were all covered head to toe in the long, black dresses called çarşaf. Yuliya said they appeared to be from Syria. We wondered about them, since the civil war was still very much ongoing, and many Syrian refugees were still camped out at the Turkish border, with winter on the way. We supposed that this family was staying in Turkey indefinitely, but we had no way of knowing. Perhaps they weren’t even Syrians, but rather tourists on holiday from Iran or Qatar. Anyway, they ordered a big meal. One of the little children, a boy, went up to the grill and watched the lamb being cooked with wide, longing eyes.

“Why don’t we get married?” I asked. The Syrian family had set off a train of thought, and I was feeling gloomy, and yet fortunate at the same time. I wanted to do something brave, I guess.

We’d just finished eating. The waiter had taken our plates and brought fresh pints.

Yuliya was wiping her hands with a napkin. When I said this, she blushed.

“I think we should maybe wait,” she said. “Wait until you are settled.”

She smiled though and we touched glasses. Outside on the mountain it was still light out, and the snow was bright. Everything seemed very far away, and it seemed we at the hotel were the only people in the world, and what I had asked her had felt very natural.

“Yaz, yaz,yaz.” Yuliya rose to go to the toilet. She stopped to kiss me. “First, you decide where you are going, then we can talk about it.”

While she was gone I finished my beer. The large Arabic family at the next table was getting ready for the main course. The waiter was serving up big plates of steaming lamb and vegetables, and the children were all talking excitedly.

Yuliya came back and we got the bill. She decided we should put it on her credit card, so I could save money, and we thanked the waiter and headed out.

“It was funny,” Yuliya said. We were outside again. “I went to the toilet and there was an old man who was using the toilet water to wash himself! He was preparing for his prayers. I mean, it was just funny.”

We followed the road until it ended, giving way to a trail that led into the alpine forest. Here it seemed even colder, surrounded by the pine trees and deep snow. We kept walking until we reached a creek. It was all frozen over, and we had to step carefully over the rocks, with their icy moss. Eventually we stopped at a remote place where you could see the summit of Olympos through the trees.

Yuliya reached into her a bag a produced a camera. It was a beat-up, old analogue camera. She had to shake it and hold it to her ear to make sure the battery was working. When she was sure the camera was working she handed it to me and had me take her picture. She stood proudly, her hands balled in defiant fists at her waist, the summit at her back, her  red-blonde hair waving in the anemic sun.

 She looked beautiful, and in the fading sunlight I said a silent prayer, hoping to God that if ever fate had to strike one of us down, that it should strike me first. We were all alone in the forest, all alone in the world, and all of  it, even the ancient summit of Olympus – in fact, all the high places – seemed to belong to us.  

****

Yuliya wanted to make snowballs, but her hands got so cold they stung. It was getting dark, and the weather was changing quickly, so we hurried back. The wind had picked up. We passed the hotel, and could see inside that the skiers were back and it was very crowded inside.

Yuliya’s phone rang. It was her mother. “She asked when I am coming,” Yuliya explained. “I told her tonight. We have to hurry, she will be worried.”

“If she asks you, we went to the cinema,” she went on. We were almost at the teleferik station.

“Yes, we were at the cinema,” I said. “What did we see?”

“We saw the new James Bond film.”

“OK. Did we like it?”

“Oh, we loved it.”

The next cable car was not due to arrive for another half hour. We went into a little adjoining café and had tea to warm up. We were the only people inside the café. The proprietor served us, then went back to reading a newspaper. Inside the café there was also a gift shop. Yuliya got up to have a look. There were some miniature animals and soldiers that she liked. She always liked small things, tiny objects, and to build up miniature worlds around them.

We talked about her new job. She was going to start in a couple of weeks. It was at a children’s theater,  and she was really excited about it. We were both excited about it, and we talked about how much better it would be than the accounting job she had in Istanbul. After I settled in Bursa, found a job, then we could get married and live together.

I went out to have a cigarette, and to look for the next teleferik. I looked out at the darkness settling over the horizon. You could see the city far below, a scattering of lights bathed in fog beyond the trees. The teleferik would be arriving soon. Still smoking the cigarette, I looked back inside the café. Yuliya was sitting at the table, looking at a newspaper and drinking her tea. She looked up and saw me looking at her and winked.

The teleferik arrived. By then, more people had come. We saw the Chinese couple again, as well as the Syrian family we had seen earlier that afternoon. The children were all standing at the windows, looking out and chatting noisily with each other, while their parents sat on the benches, the mothers looking tired, resigned in their long, flowing robes.

They made room for Yuliya and I, and we sat down. One of the children came over and looked at us and began asking questions. Yuliya could understand a little bit of Arabic, and she was laughing.

“He asked, ‘Where are you from?’” Yuliya said. “I told him I am from Turkey and you are from America. ‘America?’ he asked. ‘Which village in America?’ He was very sweet.”

The teleferik headed down the mountain. Presently the tops of the pine trees, dark now, gave way to the lighted houses and buildings. I was still nervous about looking out. Yuliya teased and distracted me. She pointed to the children who were standing up on their mothers’ laps, looking out the windows. “Look,” she said. “A child is not afraid.”

*****

That evening we had dinner with her family. At Yuliya’s insistence, we stopped along the way and bought fresh daisies and baklava to bring to her mother. When we arrived, her mother Ayşe answered the door and let us in. She was a florid, anxious woman with sturdy, peasant features. The house itself was handsome, immaculate and brightly lit.

Since the mother was still preparing dinner, Yuliya took me into the living room. Chirping sounds greeted us, her pet bird. His name was Musim and he was a little yellow bird. “He’s a gentleman,” Yuliya explained. “Whenever I am sleeping he never speaks. A very polite gentleman.”

We sat on the sofa and watched TV, listening to Musim the Gentleman Bird, until Yuliya’s father Vlady arrived. He lived downstairs in the basement, which he had refurbished into a small apartment. He took us downstairs and showed us around. It was a man’s quarters, with little construction and carpentry projects here and there, and sturdy oak furniture. He spoke a little bit of English, and when he found out I’d lived in Prague and had been to Slovakia and Serbia, he became very familiar, since he was from Bosnia. He had come to Turkey as a very young man in the 1960s. Vlady motioned for us to sit on the sofa while he went to a cabinet and produced a bottle of slivovice.

“You know slivovice?” Vlady asked. I knew slivovice very well, and he liked this and poured three shots. “Na zdrovie,” he said, in the Russian style. We threw the shots back, the warm glow of the slivovice, the taste of the plums burning going down, reminding me of Prague, of Bratislava, and we sat and talked comfortably on the sofa until Ayşecalled down from the stairs to announce dinner was ready.

It was a wonderful, home-cooked dinner, tender roasted chicken served with sarma, which is rice rolled in grape leaves, and homemade lentil soup. The brother arrived just in time for the baklava. He had been out drinking with friends, celebrating the bayram. We all sat in the living watching TV and drinking tea. I stayed until about eleven. Yuliya said she would walk me down to the bus stop, so we said good-night to her parents, I shook hands with the brother, and we left.

****

The rest of the weekend passed quickly. Saturday evening we went out with Ferhiye, Serap, Bariş, Çağdaş, and a few of Yuliya’s other friends. We hit several bars off Heykel, and ended up back at Limon Kultur, and by midnight everyone was drunk. Outside all the tables in the garden were shut up, the chairs stacked on the tables, and inside it was warm and intimate. A local band was playing popular and traditional Turkish songs, with their melancholy, melismatic melodies. Most of the people in the bar sang along, filling the night air with sad, longing voices.

Later, Yuliya and I went for a walk. We stopped in the park just off Henkel and sat in the bleacher seats. In the evenings it was usually full of young people drinking tea, university students strumming guitars and singing in strident voices. But it was late now and the park was silent. Yuliya had told her parents she was staying with Ferhiye. We sat looking at the Ataturk statue in the park. Ataturk was her hero, as the Great Liberator is to most Turks. Sitting there in the cold night, Yuliye grew quiet and reflective. She told me a few things about Ataturk, explaining how if it wasn’t for Ataturk we couldn’t be together, and how she worried the country’s current leadership was trying to turn the country back to an Islamic state. Usually we didn’t talk much about such things, and now it was late and time to get home. We got a taxi to Bariş’s flat (he had given me a key) and went to bed.

… Somewhere deep in the night. We were together under the blankets and it was snowing outside.

“What will you do tomorrow?” Yuliya’s voice was faint, whispered.

“What do you want?”

“I think you must go back to Istanbul.”

“Why?”

“You have to take care of yourself. Must not leave job. It’s hard to find good jobs here.”

“But what about you?”

She sighed sleepily. “I will be here. But you – you are not a child  … must think about things seriously, not just in a romantic way. Go back to Istanbul and then look for work here. I think that way is better.”

“Are you sure?” I already had been giving it some thought, so it was easy to go along.

“I’m sure.”

“Actually, I don’t have to be back to work until Tuesday. So we could spend one more day together, and I could leave Monday.”

“Yes, but with the bayram ending, the buses will be full on Monday. You might not be able to get a ticket. Tomorrow is better. To be sure, darling. I don’t want you to have problems.” Yuliya rolled over and kissed me, held me. “Let’s make love, cenim. Morning is coming soon.”

****

The next morning we were up early. Bariş had been out very late and he was still asleep. We left him a note. The snowfall overnight was still very fresh, and the streets were bleak and white, although here and there shop keepers were already up sweeping off the sidewalks in front of their stores. We walked past the bazaars that were already open and over to a travel agent’s and booked a ticket for Istanbul, leaving at noon.

We had about two hours, so we went and had breakfast at a cafe. We talked about our plans. I would get back to Istanbul, work, save money for a couple months and try to line up something in Bursa. It was a sensible plan, and it seemed the cool and mature thing to do.

Later we got a taxi that took us out to the bus station on the outskirts of town. We had tea and waited until it was time for the bus to leave. It was then that Yuliya grew quiet and sad.

“Istanbul,” she said, her hazel eyes clouding over, as if she was picturing the Bosphorous and Galata Tower, the whole great city spread out, in her head. Her voice was slightly tinged with resentment.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said, taking her hand.

“No, you won’t,” she said.

“I will.”

“No, I know Istanbul. You know, we say Istanbul is like a woman.”

“Not mine.”

“Yaz, yaz, yaz.” She smiled. “Write me. Your bus is coming.”

The bus had just pulled in and people were all crowded around it, waiting to get on. The driver got out and checked tickets and then put labels on the baggage, chucking them all into a compartment under the bus. I checked one bag and kept the other one, with my notebooks and books, to have on the busride.

Yuliya got on the bus with me to make sure there was no problem with the seating, and just to say good-bye that way.

“See you soon,” I said.

“We’ll see,” she said. “Be careful in Istanbul. Write me.”

She was gone, and soon the bus rolled out. As it started moving, I looked out the window and saw Yuliya. She was standing on the platform, her green scarf fluttering in the wind, and she  saw me and waved. The air was full of snow flurries, and the sky was a dull grey. The bus kept going and she grew smaller and smaller until finally the flurries grew so thick I couldn’t see her anymore.

James Tressler, a former Times-Standard reporter, is the author of “Conversations in Prague” and “The Trumpet Fisherman and Other Istanbul Sketches.” He lives in Istanbul.