A Puncture in Beypazarı

It was the sound that Anouk noticed first, a soft hissing like a disappointed sigh, and then the unmistakable lurch of a rear wheel giving up. She had been cycling for six weeks, from Rotterdam towards the Black Sea, and had so far prided herself on having avoided every mechanical misfortune. That the first real puncture should occur on a hot afternoon, in a town whose name she could not yet pronounce with confidence, struck her as a form of cosmic humour. She wheeled the bicycle down a cobbled street lined with wooden houses and, on the corner, found a small repair shop. Outside it, a boy of about nineteen was bent over a motorbike engine. He looked up, took in the flat tyre, the dusty luggage and the red face, and said in careful English, "Good afternoon. You have a problem. I think it is a small problem." "It's a very small problem," Anouk agreed, "which I am unable to solve with the tools I have." His name was Hasan, and he was studying mechanical engineering in Ankara but spending the summer helping his uncle. Within a minute he had removed the wheel, and within ten he had found the culprit, a tiny shard of glass, almost invisible against the rubber. What fascinated Anouk was not the speed of the repair but the way he narrated it, pausing every few sentences to check a word. "This is called… how do you say… the inner tube?" "The inner tube. Yes." "I learn English from videos," he admitted. "Nobody to speak with. If you have time, maybe I practise a little?" It was an offer too appealing to refuse. When the tyre was mended, his uncle appeared with tea in small tulip-shaped glasses, and the afternoon drifted into a long and agreeably muddled conversation. Hasan corrected her pronunciation of the town's name; she corrected his habit of saying "I am agree". He asked whether it was true that everybody in the Netherlands owned a bicycle, and she explained, with some embarrassment, that the number of bicycles in her country did indeed exceed the number of people. By the time she stood to leave, the shadows had lengthened across the street. She reached for her wallet, but Hasan shook his head. "No. The English lesson was enough payment." "Then it was the cheapest repair of my life," she said, "and the most useful." Pedalling out of town, she realised that she had forgotten to be annoyed. It was no longer the puncture she would remember from this journey, but the quiet pleasure of an afternoon that had gone entirely against her plans, and which she would not have exchanged for any smooth road in Europe.