*
On a February Saturday, just before Daphne left to teach an afternoon of private lessons, she opened her mailbox, grabbed the contents, and shuffled through them at the kitchen table. She tossed a dentist advertisement in the trash, set her bank statement and electric bill aside for later, and arrived at an envelope from the Turkish Consulate General in New York. Inside was a letter saying that her application for citizenship had been approved.
On Monday she called the consulate, hoping to arrange to have her passport sent, but a polite female employee informed her that she would have to come to New York in person to complete the process.
“There isn’t any way for me to do it from here?” said Daphne.
“I’m sorry,” said the employee. “There’s been talk of a consulate opening in Miami, but it probably won’t happen for a year or two.”
Daphne called her father and asked if he knew someone who could pull a few strings. He laughed. “Welcome to Turkey, my girl. If you don’t like bureaucracy, you ought to stay here.”
This only made Daphne more stubborn about her decision. She took two personal days to go to New York. As soon as she stepped into the warm consulate from the cold, dirty, slush-covered street, her anxiety eased: the consulate smelled of lemon cologne, bleach, and naphthalene—the scents of home.
A guard accompanied Daphne to the desk of Arzu Çetinkaya, the officer with whom she had spoken on the phone. Mrs. Çetinkaya took a pile of yellow, plastic-wrapped packages from her desk drawer and flipped through them. “Strange,” she said. “I could have sworn it was here.”
“Is something wrong?” Daphne asked.
Without reply, Mrs. Çetinkaya went to a cabinet on the other side of the room, pulled out a plastic crate, scooped up half of its plastic packs, and gave them to Daphne. Taking the rest for herself, she said, “You do those, I’ll do these.”
Daphne stared down at the pile: they resembled thin packets of Kraft singles. “And I’m looking for . . . ?”
“Your passport, dear!”
Hardly able to believe that a consulate employee was engaging her help in sorting through other people’s passports, Daphne mechanically flipped through the packets. But she didn’t find her own. Neither did Mrs. Çetinkaya. Could a previous new citizen have been ordered to look for his passport in this mess and taken hers by mistake?
“It has to be here somewhere,” said Mrs. Çetinkaya, but her pinched mouth betrayed her worry. She swept the passports back into the crate, replaced them in the cabinet, took another crate, and again divided the packets between herself and Daphne. The anxiety that Daphne had experienced on the early-morning flight returned. She didn’t have any more personal days to spend on this passport business.
“Here it is!” said Mrs. Çetinkaya, holding up the passport as if it were a Cracker Jack prize.
Daphne took a deep breath and released. “Allah’a şükür.” Thank God.
She peeled back the plastic, revealing a burgundy Turkish passport with its gold crescent moon and single star. As an American, Daphne had a birthright to fifty stars, but she suddenly felt that the only one that truly mattered was now beneath her fingers. She opened the passport, stuck her nose into it, and breathed in its aroma of fresh ink. It smelled just like new money, like promise. Memories of oriel windows and Bosporus views flashed through her mind.
“Ahem!” Mrs. Çetinkaya cleared her voice, folded her hands on top of Daphne’s file, and said, “For the identity card, you’ll find an application in the corridor. Kindly fill it out and take it to the Citizen Services Hall.”
“Thank you,” said Daphne.
The lady smiled and scrunched her eyes. Daphne proceeded into the hallway and called her father: “Already did my passport, Baba. Couldn’t have been easier. In a few minutes I’ll be done with everything.”
Ilyas chuckled.
“Fine,” said Daphne. “I’ll call back in ten minutes and laugh at you.”
She took the identity-card application from a wall file and took a seat on one of the plastic student chairs in the Citizen Services Hall. Leaning over the uncomfortably small tablet arm, she filled in and ticked away, her sense of victory increasing with each completed section. And then she came to the religion choice. On an identity card? It seemed so backward, so 1940s. She couldn’t remember ever officially disclosing her religion in the US. She completed the rest of the form, signed, and waited another thirty minutes for her number to be called. Were they really going to mark her, officially, on her ID, as one thing or the other? But hopefully she wouldn’t have to choose. Hopefully she could just leave it blank without taking sides.
When her number appeared in red on the display, Daphne proceeded to her assigned window. A fit, middle-aged clerk with a military-style buzz-cut stood flagpole straight behind it.
“Good day, sir,” she said. “Kolay gelsin.” May it come easily. She hoped this standard Turkish wish for a good workday might soften the clerk from the start.
“At your service,” he said.
“If I may make a request”—another courtesy formula—“might I leave this box blank?”
The clerk took off his glasses and wiped them with a microfiber cloth. “You used to be able to. But not anymore.”
“Please. I don’t want to choose.”
He put his glasses back on and made a jumpy move. It seemed to Daphne that he might actually have heel-clicked. “I’m afraid the current government considers it obligatory.”
Daphne set the form on the mahogany counter. Which was more important: interest or identity? An easier life or a man who might not be willing to displease his mother in order to be with her? If she wrote Muslim, she’d be accepted as a full Turk rather than an infidel foreigner. But if there was any hope that things would work with Kosmas, she had to write Christian. Daphne hastily scrawled the second and slid the form beneath the glass partition. The clerk read
