Gardens of Water (12 page)

Then there was another sound, an odd low rumbling like the shuddering of a tank coming down the street. And at first that’s what he thought it was, one of the police tanks on patrol, but the rumbling grew louder and it seemed to be rolling across the water toward him, toward the town.

He sat up, looked for a ship leaving the docks, searched the sky for a plane, but the sound wasn’t right for anything man-made. Then, in the distance, out of the black water, flashed a brilliant spark of green. The flash was so bright that when he blinked there were little bursts of green blindness in his vision. The rumble had separated itself from the sound of the boat and had become something wholly distinct, a horrible growl. He looked at the party boat, hoping the sound was some new type of music. The shining hull bobbed out there silently, reflecting itself back on the water, but all the dancing people had turned their faces toward the growing sound.

Sinan had an instinct to get back to his family, he tried to run for the stairs, tried to get back to them, but his feet skipped out from beneath him and he found himself facedown on the cement rooftop. He rolled onto his back and lifted himself up, but above him the sky shifted, sending the stars falling across the sky, their pinpoints streaking in his vision.

He got to his feet and wrapped a fist around a piece of rebar, and when he did he looked toward the bay where the boat lifted on a wave of water, rose into the air like a toy ship, tipped sideways, listed, and spilled its passengers into the surging sea. There was nothing to think about it because it was something unbelievable, something in a terrible dream, and as soon as he did think, They won’t make it, the building directly next to his own dropped from his vision. The crash was so loud that it was like the silence of blood in his ears.

He heard screams, explosions of gas lines rupturing, the bursting of water pipes thrusting up pieces of road, even the sirens of car alarms, but none of these sounds could be isolated; they were simply the cacophonous rush of destruction. Then Sinan’s stomach lifted into his throat and he was dropped through the air. For a moment he felt as though he were flying; he looked beneath his feet to find the rooftop falling. It dropped ten feet and tilted sideways as if the whole building was tumbling into the street. Then his body was thrown over the side of the rooftop. He closed his eyes, sure that this was the end, and fell for what seemed like minutes until he slammed into the tiled floor of the terrace beneath. He was rolled to his left, and got wedged against the railings of the terrace, his arms tangled in the wrought iron and his head dangling over the edge.

As he opened his eyes he saw the white circumcision bed come through the open window below, and on that white bed was his son.
smail lay on his back with his arms thrown behind him like he was doing the backstroke. Their eyes briefly met.
smail had a questioning look on his face—he didn’t seem scared at all—just a question mark in his eyes, as if to say, “Look, what a strange thing to happen, Baba.”

In his white circumcision dress,
smail floated out above the crumbling building, as if on a pillow of air. Sinan reached a hand out toward his son, stretching his fingers as far as he could. Cement blocks tumbled beneath the boy, crashed together, crushed and disintegrated, and the bed, too, spun around in the air.
smail did a somersault, his tiny feet rolling above his head, his back coming briefly into view, his whole body flipping gracefully through the sky, before it disappeared in the dust and crumble below.

Chapter 8

S
INAN HEARD SCREAMING, A SHRILL SOUND IN THE DISTANCE,
like a throng of women standing outside and beating themselves. The screaming pierced his ears, slicing a sharp pain into his temple, and light grew at the corners of his vision. “Sinan,” a voice cried. “Sinan!” The sound seemed to move through his body, out into a world that surrounded him with heavier sounds—crashing cement, car alarms, screams, and moans—and when he heard the voice a third time, he knew it was his wife’s.

He came to finally and found himself wrapped around the twisted mess of wrought iron. His shirt had caught on the metal, and it was pulled up over his head so that when he opened his eyes he faced the darkness of the material. For a moment he thought he was dead, then the pain at his temple shocked him into consciousness. His legs dangled over the edge of the rooftop. He should have fallen, but the shoulder of his shirt, hooked on the rebar, had saved him. When he touched his head his fingers smeared with blood.

“Sinan!” he heard Nilüfer scream.

He kicked his feet and wrenched himself back onto the terrace. Everything that had happened came back to him, and in the darkness he scrambled across the collapsed rooftop and stumbled in the direction of the stairs. The stairwell was intact. He climbed down into the passageway where the early-morning darkness grew darker. He groped his way down the circling staircase until he heard his daughter crying. He tried shoving open the door, but it was stuck and he had to smash his shoulder against the wood. Inside, the floor slanted steeply and he slipped on the cheap marble tiles where they had become wet from a severed kitchen pipe. He already knew the answer, but he ran into the front room to check the window anyway, hoping that the vision of
smail falling had been a dream. The bed, the window, his son, the whole front wall of his apartment were gone. The couch and coffee table dangled off the edge of the room, the back feet of the couch suspended in air, balanced delicately against falling. Beyond the missing front wall a cloud of dust hovered in the air like coal smoke. What had once been geometric planes of square walls and straight streets and a traffic circle, was now a jumble of broken buildings.

Sinan, then, began to shake uncontrollably;
smail was buried out there.

From one of the bedrooms he heard
rem sobbing. He found her and his wife crouching on the floor, the rest of the bedroom stripped empty. Nilüfer clutched
rem to her chest and rocked her like she was a child.

“
smail?” Nilüfer cried, panicked, her eyes pleading.

“He’s safe,” he said.

“Where, Sinan?”

“He’s safe,” he repeated.

“Where? Where is he?”

“We have to get out of here.”

Sinan took Nilüfer by the shoulders and helped her stand. She wouldn’t let go of
rem’s hand, and he had to gently prize his wife’s fingers loose before lifting his shaking daughter to his chest.
rem was too heavy for him, but it didn’t matter. She clung to his neck and cried huge sobs that convulsed her body and made her harder to carry.

“
rem,
can
m,
” he said, whispering in her ear. “You’re okay. Calm down. You’re okay.” He repeated this through the leaning hallway, into the stairwell, and down the cracked steps until the passageway came to a dead end of fallen concrete slabs. He set
rem down and in the darkness ran his hands over the rough cement, trying to find a way out, but there was none. They should have been on the second floor, but the second floor was gone.

“Ahmet?” Nilüfer said. “My brother!”

“I know,” he said, and he reached behind to touch her on the wrist.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Gülfem, Ahmet, Zeynep.” She yelled into the wall, but the sound was stifled. “Oh, God!”

Sinan took her in his arms and held her.

“Nilüfer,” he said, “you have to be calm now.”

She stopped yelling and breathed deeply, and when she grew calmer he began to panic. He didn’t know what to do. His chest constricted and his mind wouldn’t work. His head pounded as though his brain were bashing up against his skull.

“Upstairs,” Nilüfer said. “The Türko
lu s’.”