In 2017, I visited Ali in his home town of İzmir. Reluctantly – it was December and really he just wanted to stay at home, out of the cold – Ali agreed to accompany me on an impromptu tour of some ancient sites. Without booking anything in advance, we got a coach to Ephesus, where, much to my disbelief, we were able to explore the expansive ruins alone, entirely undisturbed by other tourists. The lettering carved into the walls of the Library of Celsus was, I discovered, painted a magenta similar to that of the tattoos on my left hand. I put this hand over the lettering to compare. Ali, after scanning around to check no one was coming, put his hand over mine, the first time he had permitted himself to touch me in public, and I took a photograph.

The next day at Pergamon it was the same: we had the place completely to ourselves, allowing us to walk hand in hand under the columns and atop the crumbling walls of the acropolis, and to take photographs cheek to cheek, and, when the call to prayer sounded from the valley below, to put our arms around each other’s waist, and approach the edge of the precipice – the amphitheatre plunging down the slope below us – and peer out at the neighbouring hills and the villages dotted about, and to wonder, ‘What do people see, from down there?’

By the time we got to Pamukkale on day three, we had got used to the solitude, and, as a consequence of it, had become closer than we had ever been before. I was behaving more or less as I would on a city street in western Europe, while Ali – I could sense – was getting quite a thrill from contravening the unwritten restrictions he had been abiding by, more or less, for his whole life. A local bus carried us from the town up the steep hill to the Roman ruins, at whose entrance we were the only ones to get off. Because of the biting wind – here it really was cold and Ali was underdressed – we kept close, our elbows locked, on the two-kilometre walk through the necropolis. But then, precisely as we came through the Frontinus Gate, the sun broke through the clouds, and the air immediately warmed up, and we took this, too, as our due.

Sitting on an upper tier of the amphitheatre, we ate apples and sweet bread, and I kissed Ali on his red nose. He had previously shown me photos of his face before the cosmetic surgery, and I had thought his original nose more beautiful. ‘The bigger, the better, as far as I’m concerned,’ I had said.

On my insistence – Ali did not like the sound of it – we got tickets for the natural outdoor thermal pool located at the centre of the archaeological site. Together in a tiny cabin we stripped to our underwear, then emerged into the air, giggling. At the steps leading down to the pool, we paused, hopping from one foot to the other, counting down from ten, and then again, and again, until we were shivering, before plunging into the hot water. Ali laughed loudly and called out – ‘Ah!’ – surprised, I think, by how pleasurable it felt. We swam shoulder to shoulder, and put our heads under the gushing streams, and climbed onto the broken Roman columns to get cold again, then dived back in, pinching and fondling underwater, and I thought life could not get much better than this: without my having to push or plead, and in the unlikeliest of places, I had hit upon a happiness. One that seemed more real because it went unwitnessed by anyone. Because it was, by force of circumstance – off-season in an oppressive political and social climate – secretly and absolutely ours.

‘Just don’t take your pants off,’ Ali said.

I locked my legs around his belly, and he grasped my buttocks, and we found then – a joint discovery – that we could sustain this pose without having to move our limbs very much. Out of this, quite spontaneously, was born a series of floating games, whereby we used the sulphur-rich water to hold us in various improbable positions. I found, for instance, that by holding my arms out to the side and keeping my body vertical, my toes pointing towards the bottom, I could maintain a static crucifix form. I was much amused by this, and, under Ali’s guidance, spent some minutes perfecting my entry and correcting my posture in an effort to get the arrangement just right. ‘How does it look?’ I asked Ali after every turn. ‘It looks cool,’ he said. A judgement that was confirmed, suddenly, when, on my tenth or twentieth try (who was counting? what was time?), I came up and was greeted by a woman’s scream – ‘Yes, hello, yes, hello, hello, yes!’ – and the sight, shocking after such an extended period spent in amorous isolation, of a line of Chinese women standing on the old stone bridge that spanned this section of the pool, each of them wielding a mobile phone, excited about the visual effect I was creating, which, I gathered from their gestures and their calls in English – ‘Yes! Yes!’ – they wanted me to repeat, one more time, so that they could get their photographic compositions just right. Anxious to be obliging, I obliged. Went underwater a final time – final, I knew, because the magic had died, and now I just wanted to get out and get dressed. When I emerged, spitting a jet of liquid through my pursed lips as a sort of culmination, they applauded and stuck their thumbs in the air, and really they were rather sweet, but, for me, the experience – everything that had come before – had been wiped away. I swam to the steps, followed by Ali, and together we climbed out, fixing our sagging underpants as we traversed the border of pines and cypresses to the clearing, and what we saw, then, was a world utterly altered. Where before there had been the bare minimum of human life required to mount our private little production – a man selling tickets, a man tearing tickets, a man in a kiosk selling pomegranate juice – there were now hundreds of Chinese tourists.

Our arms crossed over our chests, our hands slotted into our armpits, we dashed through the milling bodies to the cabins and got dressed. Fully clothed, and walking separately now, we made our way towards where we had been told there was a path leading back down to the village. Here, on this side of the hill, a sedimentary rock deposited by the mineral water, called travertine, had over the millennia created a vast cascade of snow-white terraces, with pools filled to the brim with hot spring water, all the way down to the bottom of the slope. It was breathtaking. Otherworldly. Deserving, I immediately judged, of the utmost respect. Respect which, I also judged, the newly arrived tourists were not giving it.

‘What do you think?’ I said to Ali, referring to the tourists, not the terraces, for it was the former now that gripped my attention.

‘They’re all dressed the same,’ Ali replied.

And it was true: a waist-length polyester puffer jacket, pink or purple or yellow for the women, navy or black or red for the men. But, for me, the uniforms were not the most striking thing. What I was fixated on, rather, was the uproar. The uninhibited expressions of surprise and excitement. The obnoxious swinging about of selfie sticks. The jettisoning of the chance to appreciate, ordinarily, for oneself, the sublime spectacle, in favour of a hunt for an impressive photograph to show the folks back home. Which is to say, I was bothered. These people’s unselfconscious assumption of the stereotype of coach tourists – as though such a stereotype was something they had aspired to for a long time and were now thrilled to have achieved – really bothered me.

‘Look at what they’re all doing,’ I said, pointing at a representative group seated on the edge of a nearby travertine pool. This group, who had just been paddling, were drying their feet with pocket tissues and, following the precedent of their peers, were throwing the used tissues, plastic packets and all, onto the ground and into the water. Whipped up by the breeze, like blossoms blown from branches, these tissues, hundreds of them, were dispersing across the surface of the pristine landscape.

We weaved through the bodies, searching for the path that would take us down. A low winter sun was cutting through the clouds, creating great sheets of light that reflected off the white rock and made it hard to see. Using our hands to shield our eyes, we peered out over the terraces: ‘Is that the waa—?’

Without warning, Ali, to my right, lurched and then stumbled forward as though he had been pushed.

I reached out to steady him. It was only when I saw the look of disgust on his face, and followed the direction of his glare, that I understood that in fact he had been pushed. Behind us, a Chinese man had been trying to take a photograph of his friends; when, through his viewfinder, this man had noticed Ali in the frame, he had come over and physically pushed him out.

‘Photo! Photo!’ he shouted at us now, in a tone of exasperation.

Nauseated, I turned back to Ali, widening my eyes provocatively, hankering for an altercation. But Ali just shook his head: this idiot was not worth getting worked up about.

‘I can’t see any path,’ he said. ‘Let’s just make our way down through the terraces.’

As we climbed down in our bare feet – hot in the water, cold on the rock – I tried to let it go, and return to the happiness, but I could not. As it happened, I was at that time writing a novel set in China during the Cultural Revolution. Even before the arrival of these tourists, China had been on my mind. Or more precisely the ‘China’ described by Westerners, especially leftist intellectuals, who had made the trip there with a view to explaining Mao’s revolution to their curious readers at home. People like Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, who, in their written accounts, tied themselves into knots in their endeavour to make sense of, to justify, the massive system of repression that made possible the revolution that they so admired.

‘What did you make of them?’ I said now, meaning the Chinese tourists on the hill.

‘They’re annoying you, aren’t they?’

‘Maybe.’

Ali laughed: ‘Relax! We used to complain about Americans, right? Well, these are just the new Americans. In the world, someone has to be.’

Halfway down, we sat at the edge of a pool for a rest and to warm our feet in the water. We looked back up the hill, to see how much ground we had covered. At the top, the Chinese were still milling about, generating noise, radiating joy. A handful of them were old enough to have been given a Maoist education, to have witnessed the Cultural Revolution. Most of them, though, were the children of that radical generation. Harbingers of the free market’s global triumph, capitalism’s latest subscribers, eagerly making up for their lateness. Wealthy and outwardly content – capable of expressing enthusiasm in a straightforward, uncynical manner probably no longer accessible to the average European – without ever having had a say, one way or another, in their own political futures.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ali said.

‘You know they’re rounding up Muslims?’ I said. ‘Putting them into camps?’

‘Yes, I heard,’ Ali said. ‘The Uighurs. Many that escape come here.’

That was news to me, but it made sense. The Uighurs speak a Turkic language and share a common heritage with the Turks. Turkey was one of the few Muslim-majority nations that had spoken up for Uighurs despite China’s objections.

‘I wonder how long the solidarity will last,’ Ali said. ‘Turkey is taking Chinese money now, like everyone else.’

By the time we had reached the bottom of the hill, our feet were numb with heat and cold. We sat on a rock and rubbed feeling back into them, then gave them to the sun to dry. I turned to Ali to admire him: how beautiful he was but also how sensible, how unruffled. We put our socks and shoes back on and started to walk towards the village. Because the street was empty, I took his arm and squeezed it, lustfully, though in truth it was largely remorse I was feeling. Maybe the Chinese tourists on the hill had not been that loud. Maybe the man had not pushed Ali so much as nudged him.

But I was unable to let the subject drop. In bed later that night, between embraces, I gave Ali a briefing on the research I had done. For China, I propounded, the Uighur minority was an example of the unchecked regional nationalism that had, in the official Chinese view, brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union; more than anything else, the Chinese government feared such a collapse, which was why they felt the need to repress the Uighurs. Ali listened tolerantly: for me, it was all just theory; for him, it was real life. For, at that moment, Turkey’s leaders were gripped by a similar dread of national disintegration. The government’s rule was becoming increasingly authoritarian. Media critics, political opponents, human-rights defenders and anti-government demonstrators – that is, anyone perceived as a threat to the approved picture of political and cultural cohesion – were being subject to bogus investigations, put on trial for terrorism, and jailed arbitrarily.

‘We’ll be next,’ he said.

He meant gay people. Lesbians. Trans. Queers.

‘They’ll come and round us up.’

I lifted my head from his chest and, leaning on an elbow, rested my cheek in my hand. I wanted him to see the seriousness in my face.

‘Listen to me,’ I said, ‘if that ever happens, you must call me. Don’t leave it too late. As soon as you sense danger, you must get in touch. Then you must get on a flight and come to me. Life is too short and too precious. You mustn’t let them destroy you.’

Ali looked at me suspiciously. He did not like that I was presenting myself as a representative of the enlightened West. He had witnessed my reaction to the Chinese tourists: in fact I was – and could only ever be, down in the pit of my psyche – a racist.

‘You understand, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that by Turkish standards I’m very open?’

‘I do understand that.’

‘No, you don’t. I see your face, how you react to things. You come from the West, you can’t possibly comprehend what it’s like.’

When, in his mid-twenties, he had come out to his mother – something he said most gay men in Turkey would rather die than do – she had gone into her bedroom, locked the door behind her, and cried for three days straight.

‘And your father?’

‘My father didn’t cry. All he said was, “Do we have to leave Turkey now? Is that what you are asking us to do?”’

‘Was he serious?’ I asked. ‘Would he have moved?’

‘I don’t know. But of course I didn’t want to be the cause of such a thing. So we came to an arrangement.’

His father, a wealthy industrialist, would pay Ali a monthly stipend, enough for him to live modestly but comfortably. In return, Ali would leave his job at the bank, where his ongoing bachelorhood would eventually become the subject of gossip, and agree not to cause any scandal for the family. He was free to live wherever and with whomever he wanted, but he had to promise to keep his relationships private. No one in the family was to be told anything directly, or to learn anything from rumours. The deal was: he had to put a permanent lid on it.

‘And you agreed? This was the price of your freedom? The camp in which your love has to be kept?’

I held my breath out of fear that I had, with my tone, offended him again, but his response, mysteriously, was to kiss me hard, and we began to make love, me on top of him, as he preferred it. During sex, he was comfortable only in the receiving position; he would not even entertain the idea of penetrating me. ‘I don’t like macho guys,’ he had said once, ‘but during sex a little machismo works well.’ Without warning, now, he reached up and tried to slap my face as a means of angering me and making me want to punish him physically – something I do not oppose in principle, but on this occasion I was not prepared for it. I winced and raised an arm to defend myself, and suddenly my erotic energies were transformed into political ones as my mind was assaulted by images of the macho men I had seen on the streets of İzmir, and by the thought that Ali’s sexuality had been forged by a regime that venerated such men, and that his understanding of love had been distilled into a desire for punishment by them, and that his will to protest against his own oppression had been dulled as a consequence. With all of this swirling around my head, I did not want to have sex any more.

I dropped onto my back, and we lay side-by-side. Him in his camp, me in mine, imprisoned in our separate longings.

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