After James (28 page)

“She says hello,” he said. He was slight, another young man, with a black stubble beard. “She eats too much. Soon she can't walk.”

“Does she belong to anyone?”

“We all give food and water. She's the passage dog. The police shoot her in the spring but a doctor fixes her for free.” He extended his hand. “I'm Burhan.”

“Oh.” I stood and shook his hand. He had soft, generous eyes. My father had known this face, looked into it in the days before he was killed. “I'm sorry, I'm James, I thought you were the waiter.”

“I am. Would you like coffee, maybe tea?”

Our conversation progressed in one-minute spurts as he took and delivered orders at a dozen or more tables. That he'd arranged to meet me here suggested some slyness or uneasiness. He didn't know what I wanted. I'd said only who I was, my father's son, and that I'd like to meet him. If he knew anything about my parents' deaths, he would have been keeping it to himself all this time. And in any case it made sense for Syrians to be wary, even in Turkey.

“I'm sorry we meet here. I use my friend's computer. I read your email yesterday.”

“This is fine, Burhan.”

“I work very late.”

He and the other waiters fetched the tea from a little shop down the passage, where it narrowed and there was barely enough room for the two-way pedestrian traffic as people stopped to look at jewellery, clothes, ceramics. It developed that he'd been working these tables since he and his family arrived from the camp. In Al-Hasakah he'd worked in a hotel and learned enough English and Turkish to get this job. Now he worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. He never elaborated on his answers unless I kept asking questions, but he answered every one of them. He said he knew that leaving Syria wasn't temporary, though that was what other refugees told themselves. A number I remembered, nine million displaced.

“Before the fighting we live with our neighbours no problem.”

“How did you meet my father?”

“I help at the camp.”

He went off to clear a table. His movements were efficient and precise, he'd done them many times. He returned and stood holding a tray of empty cups. He told me he'd never met my mother, that she worked outside the camp.

“You are a son,” he said.

“Yes. I am.” He seemed to be trying to see my father in me. I had the sense it wasn't obvious. “Why did this man in Urfa give me your name and email address?”

“I have friends there. We all feel the same.”

“What do you feel?”

“Your father help me. I help you.”

“How did he help you?” He looked at me directly, gauging something. “I'm sorry to ask, Burhan, but did you know they died?”

He set the tray down.

“Yes.” He sat across from me. “Yes. He told me to send him my place number, where we live here, and he would send back.”

With his hand he made a motion of writing in air.

“You mean a letter.”

“Yes. I write him letter but no letter come back. My friend wrote they died.”

I outlined the circumstances of the deaths and said they seemed not quite to make sense.

“I'm worried they were killed by someone. Murdered.” His expression was already sorrowful and the word had no outward effect on him. He knew it from the inside and heard it every day. “Can you guess why they would have been killed?”

He lowered his head, alone with something that I felt should belong only to me, though his feeling of loss would attach to other sufferings much greater than my own. Resignation to fate, the bow of its spine. He took out a cellphone, tapped it a few times, and handed it to me. On-screen was a photo of shells with Cyrillic writing, one of the very photos attached to my father's email. He tapped to another picture. Suicide vests.

“I help at inspection station, outside camp.” He said the food trucks arrived at the inspection station full but left half-empty. He took pictures of what was off-loaded and, at the camp, showed the photos to my father.

“He want to know if I was secret, did anyone saw me. Yes, they saw me. I show the pictures to many. He said send to him the photos and take my family on the bus to Gaziantep, next day.” My father staked them to a new life. He gave them money, a lot of it, to continue their journey and find an apartment and work in Istanbul. “I never see him again.” His face was muted now, as if obscured by a haze of pipe smoke or as if I were remembering it years into the future. “I'm sorry to you, James. Your father save my family.”

He knew to leave me alone. He took the tray and left and I watched him catch up to his work. Now and then he glanced at me from one table or another. He was an innocent. His innocence had orphaned me.

Someone had been bought off by jihadists, maybe the same someone who'd murdered my parents, someone who needed the truth to stay hidden. Then what? Had the someone himself been killed? Whom had he betrayed?

Though I hadn't ordered one, Burhan brought me a
pide
, a flatbread with cheese and some kind of ground meat inside. I looked at it. Who deserved such an offering? I resumed watching him work. To settle myself I tried calculating his wages. He must have made nearly nothing on tips from students nursing tea. He worked seventy-two hours a week. He would barely see his family. This place was his life.

He sat with me again. Were his eyes really generous or did I need them to be? Other than a hardworking victim of history, who was he? I wanted no unearned sentiment, no easy affection. Even more than I wanted to know him well, a man like any full of contradictions, I wanted to know he was, like us all, guilty.

“I think of seeing your father,” he said. “I think of my children and they should meet him. Now is not possible. But I will tell them someday.”

He showed me another picture on his phone. His wife, Maira, wore a sweater and simple cotton pants, no headscarf. She looked twice Burhan's age, though more likely she was our age or younger. She stood with either hand on her two children, a boy and a girl, maybe five and six years old. He said their names were Amal and Samir. It seemed impossible that I could be connected to this family in any way that mattered, but in fact I was connected only in ways that mattered.

He asked for my mailing address. That I didn't have one was an irony I chose not to voice. I wrote out Dominic's address in Montreal, though he was selling the house, and he wrote out his and we made a show of folding the papers and putting them safely away. I promised myself to do as my parents would wish and send them all gifts when I got back to Canada. We'd begin a simple letter exchange, Burhan and I, and we wouldn't let it falter, just a note twice a year, and when the children were teenagers maybe I'd return and meet them. I'd be in another life and maybe they would not be, and maybe that was as they'd want it. Or maybe I'd leave in a minute and never have contact again.

We said our goodbyes and I started away toward the narrow end of the passage. There, watching me, the only other white Westerner in sight, was the Poet.

I followed him out onto Istiklal, into the stream, the thronging tens of thousands. He was half a block distant, a head above most of the rest. He glanced left and right, the face at angles, expressionless. The forehead was not so large as it had seemed in the photo and I couldn't make out the notches at his eyes, but it had to be him. I'd flushed him into the open by moving out of the squat and giving away my cellphone, moves that forced him to watch and track me in person. At Davide's apartment I'd laid out my evening not for Anna but for him. I was sure that he or someone in contact with him would be listening, surveilling from hidden devices, from the appliances and lighting fixtures, the art on the walls, or by whatever means the dated, clumsy, Cold War comical spying tropes had been accelerated into the new reality.

We were headed toward Taksim. The moving crowd had weight and through-force. On the street's south side the flow moved east, north side west, though in any location were crosscurrents and tributaries coming from side streets, or wider openings where people massed and eddied. A multitude, face to face both highly particular and undifferentiated. A man with a monkey on his shoulder stepped from the doorway of a tobacco shop and disappeared. Women in jeans or chadors or floral cottons, yoga pants, Saudis in black abayas. Eating baklava, hoisting kids, drinking from plastic cups, carrying shopping bags. Through the din came the bell of the funicular. The tram moved by on the rails midstreet, kids hanging off the back. I passed smiling young men in groups of three and five, a tourist couple struggling for direction with their laminated map. Buskers at intervals, playing jazz or
Turkish songs, two African men on instruments I couldn't name, a family of peasant musicians with a small boy bongo prodigy. The flow diverted around a thick ring of onlookers surrounding a large group of chanting protesters. The chant was loud, stadium ready, and at one point a cheer burst forth and the watchers raised cellphones and cameras like chalices and the hundred or more of them joined the chant as others in doorways filmed it all, and filmed the police filming them. From a large white truck, a water cannon sat at the ready, trained on the protesters. The riot squad stood only feet away and extended in rows along the next full block, down the ranked side streets into staging areas, their shields before them, the white helmets with blue stencilled numbers all lined at nearly the same level. I looked into their dangerously bored faces. They looked back and saw nothing. They were young like me and Amanda, like the Londoner, like Davide and his friends, like Burhan and Maira.

Was I chasing, following, being led? I tried to make up ground, skipping into each brief clearing, but the crowd was thicker now and I had to keep my focus level on him. Other Westerners and tall men appeared up ahead and marking him became harder. I focused on his brown hair, cropped and unshaped, as if he'd shorn it himself, his skull—yes, I saw it now—slightly offset at the brow. When I glimpsed him whole I saw he wore brown pants and a rust-coloured shirt that was stained or textured or frayed through in places. But the hair and the colours of the clothes repeated with slight variations in the crowd. With Taksim in view the tall man who seemed most likely to be mine drifted left and entered a one-storey
building, stone, vaguely, dumbly Spanish colonial to my unschooled eye. A tasteful plaque at the door designated it as the French Consulate. I stepped into the small entrance. He'd passed through the security station and was walking out into an enclosed courtyard. I nodded at a security guard and moved through a metal detector. In the courtyard people sat at candlelit tables. Whoever they were—consulate staff? diners?—none looked my way. The Poet was nowhere but I saw a door closing in another wing of the building. I trotted to catch up and stepped through the doorway to find a small gallery. A placard fronting the exhibit announced a forty-year retrospective of some photojournalist agency. He wasn't in the first room—no one was—but other rooms extended off this one. I walked into the space, surrounded by images, shots from El Salvador, the West Bank, the Philippines, New York, Cairo, wondering at my trust.

Suppositions present themselves to be tested. Suppose there exists a mind. Suppose it can know your heart, your great loves and losses. Suppose that it watches and listens, not just watching but leading the eye, seeing the eye being led. Suppose it flags people of interest and has the means to prompt these people into each other's lives, to control them through their secrets and unexpendable pains.

Suppose you'd never claimed your grief.

I crossed the first room, entered a second. There was no one. An opening to a third gallery was across from me, and two openings opposite each other at the far end of the room. If he wanted to and was quiet, he could stay out of sight. I moved quickly into the last room, saw no one, came back into
the second space and walked its length. At the far end I saw a possibility. A hallway ran off the last room. I came across and turned the corner to find a short dead end. He stood with his back to me. He faced a narrow wall with a picture collage mounted next to a window that looked out at the crowds moving by on Istiklal only metres away. I stepped forward and came up beside him. The images were anonymous cellphone shots from the Istanbul riots. Water cannons firing, clouds of gas, improvised masks, fists, bleeding, phones upon phones.

The faint scent of wet soil, a barnyard note.

“So many cameras,” he said. The voice was deep, the speech not native English, I guessed, though I couldn't quite place it. I had a sense I shouldn't look at him or press him so I bent closer to the collage. Some shots were stills from security cameras. I pictured walls of screens, silhouetted heads in dim rooms. So many cameras, so many cities, I thought. The streets thrashing like they're trying to wake from a dream. The world as one big sleep lab.

Against my will, the words “big sleep” opened a cha-cha. I thought of Raymond Chandler and his best-known detective novel. I remembered that Chandler began as a poet but discovered he lacked talent. He enlisted in the First World War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, at the onset of the Depression lost his job as a California oil executive because of drinking and womanizing, and published his first novel,
The Big Sleep
, when he was fifty. His detective, Philip Marlowe, is thought to be named after Marlowe House, which Chandler belonged to while in school in England, and which itself is named after Christopher Marlowe, murdered
Elizabethan dramatist and, allegedly, spy for or victim of a shadowy government agency. Chandler advanced the detective novel for being less interested in plots and resolutions than in everything else. I couldn't recall a single snappy line from his fiction, only that he once wrote that the ideal mystery was one you would read even if the end was missing.

I waited for the Poet to say something, maybe about Durant's daughter, Amanda's brother, my parents, whistleblowers all, it seemed, the real missing and the real dead in their real big sleeps. I waited for him to tell me that history now stole from the cheapest commercial fantasies. They kept each other running, events and their mockeries. Fantasies kill.