Deep Waters (2 page)

‘Well, that’s something to cling on to and to use as a starting point for your thoughts on this too, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ Perhaps it was because it was so late and she was tired, but Zelfa could not, for the moment, quite catch her uncle’s drift.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that maybe you shouldn’t look at the money or the age difference or any of that just now. Maybe you should just concentrate on the love.’

‘Yeah, but—’

‘No, Bridget, no “buts”.’

She could see him, in her mind, his right index finger raised, as she so clearly remembered it, to silence dissenters in her long ago Holy Communion classes. Zelfa, in spite of her current mood of confusion, smiled.

‘If you love him and he loves you then that is, if my understanding of such things is correct, enough,’ said Frank Collins with some vigour. ‘And anyway,’ he added, with a large helping of that rare cynicism Zelfa knew and loved him for, ‘your father’s property must be worth bugger all since that earthquake and so I wouldn’t worry about gold digging.’

‘If we have another one like that I’ll be lucky to have a head to worry with,’ she said with the type of graveyard humour those who have experienced great trauma frequently indulge in.

‘Yes, a man can quickly meet with his maker.’

‘I know. Mehmet’s sister-in-law died and his best friend had to have his legs amputated during . . .’ Suddenly she could not bring herself to use the word ‘earthquake’ for fear of losing control of her emotions. Everyone had lost someone during that cataclysmic event. Everyone. ‘During the events of last year. He’s still, at times, very sad.’

‘Oh, well then,’ the priest said briskly, ‘you’d better go about cheering him up one way or the other. I’m not saying I wouldn’t rather you marry a Padraig or a Declan, but . . .’

‘But what if he’s just marrying me in order to provide some measure of security in his world? I mean, there are problems with his mother and I have thought that perhaps I could be some sort of substitute figure.’

‘Or you could just be analysing the ins and outs of a duck’s arse,’ the old man said with a smile in his voice. ‘You people do tend to do that. But at the end of the day, Bridget, it’s all down to strength of feeling and risk. If you love him then you’ll take a risk with him and if you do not, you won’t.’

Dr Zelfa Halman frowned. What her uncle had said was undoubtedly true and that she did love Mehmet Suleyman was undeniable. But whether she could ignore her professional training and just sink into this desire was another matter.

He knew that really he shouldn’t be here. Even though martial law was now a thing of the past, any passing cop could, if the mood took him, question him, move him on or just generally give him a hard time. But only, Enver thought with a smile, if they could see him through the thick fog. And given that he wasn’t moving, coupled with the fact that they, the police, didn’t seem to be about at the present time, that eventuality appeared to be unlikely. More relaxed now that he’d explored the probability of police appearance in detail, Enver leaned on the rail and sighed. Usually at this time of the morning – it was now 4 a.m. – one could see the lights coming on over in Karaköy as people there either rose to go to work or, in some cases, expelled paying guests from their beds. But not this morning. This morning the close bulk of the Galata Bridge disappeared completely in the middle of the Golden Horn, obscured by both the darkness and the lung-wrenching fog. Not that the lack of Karaköy made Enver stop looking towards it. It was the only place he had ever been happy.

Both the Refah Party and the unruly earth itself could do what they liked, but certain parts of Karaköy would always cater to those twin obsessions of men: drink and sex. And in his younger days, Enver had known all about both. In fact, his now deceased wife had been helping her mother to run a certain ‘establishment’ when Enver first met her. His children, although to this day they still didn’t know it, had frequently visited their grandmother at her brothel when they were small. But now that his eldest son, with whom Enver had lived for several years, ran a very respectable coffee shop just five minutes from where he was standing, there could be no allusion to anything even slightly ‘unseemly’. Eminönü was, although so often thronged with tourists, the ‘Old City’, quite opposed to the louche ‘European-ness’ of naughty Karaköy. But Enver’s heart was full of nostalgia. And it was this, combined with an increasing insomnia problem, that so often, like now, found him out of his bed either looking across at or going to Karaköy. Not that the latter option was very realistic at the present time. As well as concealing him, Enver knew that the fog could also conceal other more malignant individuals who might wish, for the price of a few cigarettes, to do him harm. There had always been an element like this, the truly desperate, in the old days, usually poor migrants from the country. Now, however, what with all the Russians, Albanians and other, Allah alone knew who, folk entering the city, it was rather more problematic working out just who had stolen your watch, your wallet or whatever.

So, on balance, best stay put. With Reşadiye Caddesi just behind him, Enver was within striking distance, even with his elderly gait, of Hasırcılar Caddesi and home. And if something were to go wrong between here and there, well, that was the will of Allah and therefore unavoidable. When a car pulled up somewhere behind Enver, just beyond the Eminönü tram stop, the old man did nevertheless briefly hold his breath. Who, apart from the police or the military, might be stopping beside an impenetrably foggy waterway at this time in the morning, he couldn’t imagine. Indeed, the thought that it
must
be a police car was so hard to shift that he sought confirmation by peering in the direction of the sound of the vehicle’s powerful engine. But whatever type of vehicle it was remained shrouded from him by the combined forces of the fog and his own failing eyesight.

When, after what seemed like a considerable number of minutes, one of the car’s doors opened, Enver took evasive action and, with remarkable agility, skipped lightly into the underpass beneath the Galata Bridge. There, his breath now coming in short rasps, he waited for the sound of ‘official’ voices, his ears almost reaching out from the side of his head in order to catch them.

But they never came. Only a dull thud, like the sound of something heavy being flung to the ground, registered on Enver’s straining ears. No voices, no guns, just a thick and, to him, quite muffled thump. Without voices, it signified nothing, and when he heard the car door shut once again and the engine roar off first towards him and then over the bridge, he assumed that whoever had been in the car had now done what they wanted to in Eminönü. He was just glad that whatever it was had not involved him.

Still, he did leave it quite some minutes before he dared to step out of the underpass and back onto the street. Rather than go back to his musings by the water, Enver decided to make his way home again. There was little to see in all this fog, which was now really spooking him. And so with half an eye out for policemen, soldiers or thieves, Enver made his way warily back across Reşadiye Caddesi. As he went, he observed that whatever had thumped out of that mysterious vehicle was no longer around. At least not in his immediate vicinity. For Enver, that was quite good enough.

For the last hundred metres of his journey, Enver closed his eyes and imagined the smell of his son’s delicious coffee guiding him home.

When Fatma İkmen woke to yet another bone-chilling dawn, she found her husband not beside her in their bed but over by the window. Already dressed and smoking heavily, Inspector Çetin İkmen turned to his wife as she sat up and levelled an accusatory cigarette in the direction of a small cage that sat on the floor beside the bed.

‘I’m going to end up dying from lack of sleep because of that animal,’ he said sternly. ‘I want it gone.’

Fatma pushed her long black and grey hair back over her shoulders before calmly replying, ‘Hamsters can tell when the earth is going to move before we can. My little friend is simply an early warning system, as I have told you many times before.’

‘Yes, and as I have told you many times before,’ Çetin said, his voice rising with his increasing anger, ‘these buggers are nocturnal. They move around at night, Fatma! Earthquake or no earthquake, the bastards get up when the sun goes down and go to sleep when it rises!’

‘I don’t care. I would rather be awake for the rest of my life than have my children die underneath the ruins of this building. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course I would,’ he said as he braced himself via one thin hand against the damp window frame. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Fatma, but I thought that our early warning pet was supposed to be the cat, not that—’

‘Oh, the cat that sleeps both day and night, much use he is!’ Fatma said as she swung her short plump legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

Her husband rubbed the deepening lines in his face with his hands in an attempt to wake himself up. ‘Marlboro can make enough noise when he wants to.’

‘Oh, yes, when he’s courting!’ Fatma replied tartly. ‘Out amongst the rubbish he’s quite the hero, but in here? In here we need something we can rely on to wake us up, and that thing is my friend Squeaky and his little metal wheel.’

Gently, due to the rheumatism this damp weather encouraged into the bones in her back these days, Fatma bent down across the cage and whistled softly at the sleeping form of the hamster inside.

Seeing this made her husband rage yet again. ‘Oh, for the love of Allah,’ he said angrily. ‘If we have this monstrous earthquake some seismologists are predicting could happen, the whole city will fall into a massive fault and we’ll all be dead within seconds. And that will include little Squeaky and his fucking little wheel!’

‘Oh?’ His wife, rising slowly from her crouched position, put her hands on her hips and looked Çetin İkmen straight in the eye. ‘If it’s that bad, why won’t you let us move to another city? Well?’

İkmen, his usually thin patience stretched to its limit, exploded. ‘We’ve discussed this! The whole country’s on a fucking fault line, where in the—’

‘Konya isn’t. I’ve looked at where the faults are on a map. It’s a very safe place. They need good policemen there. You could apply.’

‘Oh, I could, Fatma, yes.’ He moved his thin body forward to meet her more voluptuous form. ‘But,’ he suddenly and violently flung his arms high above his head, ‘for an atheist drinker like me, life in our most religious city would be like a living death. I would far rather face the earthquake and die quickly than endure so much as a day in that place!’

‘But the children, Çetin,’ his wife pleaded, her hands held in what appeared to be a gesture of supplication against his chest. ‘What of the children?’

Just for a moment, it seemed to Fatma that her husband was, unusually, lost for words. His breath came in gulps, his face visibly changed from white to grey before Fatma’s eyes; a change that caused her to place a concerned hand upon his cheek. He’d been this colour the day after the big earthquake, the day when his friend Dr Arto Sarkissian had ‘joked’ that if all the cardiograph machines in the city had not been either destroyed or in use, he’d really like to hook Çetin up to one for a while. And that was before they’d received the news about one of Çetin’s colleagues’ horrific injuries. After that, Fatma clearly recalled, her husband had cried in his sleep.

‘Çetin . . .’ she began.

‘I just don’t think that the children will get what they need in a place like Konya,’ he said, slightly mollified by his wife’s soothing touch. ‘I haven’t worked like a slave all these years to see my younger children waste themselves in the country. All the older ones want to stay here anyway and,’ he sighed deeply and with tremendous weariness, ‘oh, I just feel that I’d rather we were all together somehow. I mean, how would you feel if we left here with the little ones and then the quake came and Sınan, Orhan, Çiçek and Bülent all died? I mean—’

‘Don’t!’ As if blocking out these hypothetical events, Fatma put her hand up to what was on the point of becoming a tear-stained face. ‘Don’t talk of such things, Çetin! Allah was so merciful to this family last time. It must have been written that we should all be spared.’

‘And anyway, how we would afford to move to another city, I don’t know.’ Çetin placed a loving hand on Fatma’s shoulder. ‘My brother has paid for so much that this family has needed, I can’t ask him for anything more.’

With tears still standing in her eyes, Fatma wrapped her arms round her husband’s neck. She squeezed him as tightly as her plump stomach would allow, and received a comfortingly familiar kiss on the back of the neck.

‘Oh, Çetin,’ she whispered softly just in case one of the children might be passing the door of their room and hear what she was about to say. ‘I’m so scared all the time! Every time one of the children bounces on the floor, my heart flies into my throat thinking it might be the earthquake again. Sometimes my heart can take hours to settle down and,’ she pulled his head out of her hair so that she could see into his eyes, ‘sometimes I think I’m going to have a heart attack because of all this – that or go mad!’

Çetin smiled and then kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘You know, I think that for once I must advise you to take refuge in your religion, my darling. If you leave things like earthquakes in the hands of Allah, it means you can kind of hand the worry about that over to Him. I must confess, I thought that was what all you religious types did anyway.’

‘The earthquake has tested us all, Çetin.’ Breaking free from her husband’s arms, Fatma sat down on the edge of the bed, her head bowed. ‘Even Auntie Arın, who is the most pious person I know, slept out in the street for weeks after the soldiers told her she could go back into her house.’ She looked up sharply into her husband’s face. ‘She said it wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in Allah, it was that the earth had let her down. And that is how I feel. I feel let down and scared and even when my mind is no longer panicking, my heart keeps on pounding. I want to be safe, Çetin! I want my children to be safe!’