Cingene Kiz(Gypsy Girl)

4. Piercing Eyes Meet 'Jardin du Poete'

Yaman looked around the courtyard and the restaurant, restlessly looking for a sign of her or his nephew. It was early yet and there was just an older gentleman at one of the tables who seemed to be muttering something under his breath and had a grumpy air about him.

He walked deeper into the restaurant's kitchen and heard laughter so infectious that his feet drew him there unconsciously. He exited through the kitchen and found himself in the courtyard again. He saw the pair rolling around in the grass tickling each other and screaming with laughter. He knew instinctively who they were. Anticipation sent the pulse in his temple throbbing as he approached them carefully and stopped at the edge of the grass unwilling to step in and interrupt their moment of fun.

Before he could register anything, he was yanked off his feet and he went down like a ton of bricks. His head hit the walkway hard and then there was only darkness.

When he came around, his world was a cocoon of soft, dark fragrance. Hair the color of his favorite beverage, a cup of perfectly brewed Turkish coffee and airy curls just like the bubbly foam on top, brushed his face in a scented caress as she peered into his face closely.

And he was a man obsessed...about his coffee, the feel, the taste, the texture.

She saw the slight lift of his eyelids and reared back, while simultaneously pushing her hair back and out of his face. Sunlight illuminated her face throwing every angle into sharp relief.

For so long she had been almost an abstract idea, a talisman he had hung on to during his toughest times.

He had seen her in every woman he came across and discarded the image coz it just never fit the image his mind had conjured up for her.

But now the reality of her shattered every imagined possibility.

Those curls that had held him ensnared for so many years framed a face of such exquisite perfection, his breath caught in his throat and the whole world around him was reduced to the woman before him.

As he looked into her eyes, he felt he had stepped into a Van Gogh painting. He had seen a picture of Van Gogh's, "Jardin du Poete" in an art book Arif baba had gifted him couple of years ago. He had looked at the book skeptically and then at Arif baba with a raised eyebrow. The brutality of his reality did not exactly go hand in hand with fine arts.

"Look at the pictures in it. Let the child in you rejoice in all the colors that are splashed across the pages. Let the man understand and appreciate the fact that there are more colors to life than shades of darkness and the red of blood." He recalled Arif Baba's words now as he looked into her eyes. Swirls of gold danced behind the emerald-green canvas of her eyes. Every time she moved her head and the light hit them; the color of those orbs changed.

He was spellbound.

He closed his eyes once again not wanting to lose this moment even if it was just a figment of his imagination. It couldn't possibly be real, this moment...her. For such perfection could not be a part of his harsh reality.

Then she spoke and her voice and the concern in it washed over him like a soothing balm. He had heard that voice singing that lullaby to the unborn baby in his mind a thousand times. He had replayed it in his mind over and over again as he tried to sleep through the pain of busted bones and battered body in that prison cell.

"Iyi misin?" (Are you okay?) She asked him again.

He opened his eyes and looked at her hoping she would say something more, anything at all.

Piercing gaze. That was the only term her brain could call forth in that moment as his intense gaze trapped hers relentlessly.

There had been many a book she had read and wanted to throw it against the wall every time she read the cliched term piercing eyes to describe the hero's gaze. It had made her feel like the heroine was a butterfly pinned painfully by the supposed piercer's gaze.