Gardens of Water (18 page)

Now, on the fourth day, she and her mother sat on a square of cement beneath the leaning sign of a BP gas station, the fetor of gasoline burning her nostrils. The metal pole that held the BP sign was bent and the metal squeaked loose in the wind, but it was too hot to sit in the sun and there was no water to drink and she didn’t know what else to do. Earlier that day, she had picked up a shard of blue glass from the ground, a shattered piece of an “evil eye” pendant, and she had placed it in the pocket of her skirt in hopes it still held some power. Now she pressed her thumb against the sharp edge of the glass, and she found that this little prick of pain helped her to stay calm.

“My son,” Nilüfer kept saying under her breath, followed by intervals of deathly silence.

“He’s okay,
Anne,
”
rem said, patting her mother’s rounded shoulders. She tried to sound like she believed it, but she heard the lie in her voice.

She wanted to cry for her brother, even though she was, strangely, jealous of him. If he were dead, she wondered if he was looking down now and smiling, satisfied that his parents were sufficiently devastated.

She didn’t know if Dylan had survived, or her friend Dilek. She watched every man that passed, hoping to recognize Dylan’s gait or the funny way he dropped his hand after puffing on a cigarette. She thought she saw Dilek once, a figure picking rotten tomatoes from a spilled refrigerator. From behind the girl had the same dark hair, the slight, sloping shoulders. She left her mother and started to run to her friend, but the woman turned around and the weight of dashed hope dropped into
rem’s stomach. She wanted someone to hold her and tell her it would be okay, but now she knew the limits of her parents’ strength, and she was terrified to realize that her strength surpassed theirs.

When she saw her father coming down the hill from the highway she wanted to run to him, but she couldn’t. Instead, she waited.

“Here he comes,”
rem said.

The tall buildings in the distance, though fallen, towered over him. He looked tiny to her and weak as he limped on his twisted leg, and for the first time in her life he seemed more an ordinary man than her father.

“
smail?” Nilüfer said, running toward Sinan. “
smail?”

rem stayed sitting on the cement, thankful to let her mother stumble away from her, and watched as they held each other. They seemed completely separate from her, their arms like a little fortress.

“He’s okay,” her father whispered in her mother’s ear. “He’s all right, thank God, His mercifulness.”

Sinan looked at her over her mother’s shoulder. His eyes were red-rimmed and sunken and she wished she hadn’t noticed because she felt a pang of sorrow for him. He looked more exhausted than she had ever seen him, and this was a man who was always tired.

“He’s alive?” Nilüfer said, pushing his shoulders away from her to look into his eyes.

“Yes. Yes, Nilüfer.”

Her mother shook uncontrollably and let out a half cry, half laugh. It sounded to
rem as though she had finally broken apart and she wouldn’t have been surprised if her mother had fallen to the ground in pieces.

“He’s at the German hospital,” Sinan said. “A miracle of God’s graciousness.”

rem started to cry then, too, but mixed with the relief she felt something ugly rise inside of her, something that made her want to bite off her tongue. Her father took her in his arms. He reeked of sweat and blood and antiseptic and she struggled in his arms, as though her body was trying to shake loose everything she’d had to bear in the last four days. She hit him once in the stomach, and a pop of air escaped from his mouth. And then she let herself be held, just fell into his arms, and he held her up, even after her legs gave out.

Chapter 12

I
T WAS THE NINTH MORNING AFTER THE QUAKE, AND ONCE
again Sinan had not slept. The sun had not yet struck the sea and the water lay in the distance like a pool of oil. In the early morning blue light, he could see the police boats, assisted by fishermen, working the shoreline, pulling the remaining bodies from the water. After leaving the hospital, he had been told to keep his family away from the water for fear of disease. Ruptured gas lines spewed invisible clouds and it smelled as if the sky would explode. The buildings that remained in town teetered on the edges of their broken foundations, and a scientist from Bosporus University kept speaking on the radio, warning about another quake coming, one larger than the aftershocks that kept splintering the ground. So the safest place was here, up the hill from the sea, in the small grassy center of the highway on-ramp. The buildings up here—the huge Carrefour store, a Fiat car dealership, a couple of gas stations—had not collapsed, and nothing but empty sky towered above them.

He sat beneath the makeshift tent he had constructed three nights before, his hand wrapped in gauze, and watched with amazement—because he wouldn’t have been shocked if the sun never rose again—as blue spilled across the sky until, like a hole punched through a screen, the sun struck the world. The peaks of the hills sparked like matchsticks set aflame and soon the whole coastal range was saturated with color, etching ridges and valleys out of shadow. Deer grazed in those hills, wild cats hunted alone, and endangered African birds roosted in the trees until the end of summer. Lakes lay hidden behind the ridges, and meadows of grass fed grazing sheep. There was a whole wilderness just meters away, and the beauty of it this morning felt like a mocking.

Three other families were camped at this spot, along with a man who sat in the burned grass drinking bottles of beer he had looted from a destroyed liquor store. They were camped embarrassingly close to one another, and it was difficult not to notice the intimate routines of life—a woman brushing her teeth, a man relieving himself behind a tree trunk, a husband’s arm wrapped around his wife’s waist in sleep. He tried to shield Nilüfer and
rem from the others, tried to help them retain their modesty, but the cardboard he had tied together flapped in the wind and in the afternoon light it was easy to see through the white bedsheets he had hung as walls. Last night,
rem had tried to use a washcloth to clean herself, exposing her arms for a few moments, revealing the calves of her legs, and the man with the beer had stared at her skin—sleepy, drunken eyes enjoying the opportunity. Sinan lost his temper and knocked the beer out of the man’s hands. The other families watched the scene and he could only hope they understood what he was trying to protect.

He was so exhausted last night that he thought he might sleep, but then the drunken man returned with another bottle of Efes, ensconcing himself in the place he had been before. A car exited the freeway, apparently arriving from a place not destroyed in the quake. Its headlights swept across Sinan’s face, and he felt as though he had been caught in some illegal act, and then, when it got quiet and his family and the others were asleep, the questions about what to do assailed him. They had not eaten more than a few pieces of bread and some rotten apples in three days. He had five million lira in his back pocket and that wouldn’t even get them to
stanbul. Since returning from the German hospital, he had watched for ambulances or military trucks bringing supplies, but none came. Yesterday when he returned to the apartment to scavenge whatever possessions he could, he stopped with others to listen to a man’s battery-powered radio. The government report said the roads between Gölcük and
stanbul had collapsed. Cars still passed on the freeway, though, admittedly, there were far fewer than on a normal morning. People in town said the government would take care of them and when the government didn’t they said the military would and now that the military hadn’t arrived no one spoke anymore about being cared for.

In the distance now, in some other town where the mosque had not been destroyed, he heard the remaining notes of the call to prayer echo across the water like a forgotten memory. He still prayed—even though he could not wash—on the hillside, prostrating himself. Nilüfer coughed in her sleep and he stopped praying to watch her. She lay with her arms wrapped around
smail’s chest. Her right hand grasped
rem’s blouse, the girl having pulled away from her mother’s embrace sometime in the night.

Theirs was an arranged marriage. Nilüfer was practically a sister to him. Having been raised just two homes away in Ye
illi, she and Sinan played together as children. He knew from the day he was eleven years old that he would marry her, and she did, too. It could have been resignation to a fate out of your control or the comfort that comes with the securing of your future, but he was prepared to love her years before they were married at sixteen. Even so, this is not what he had promised her. Nothing in their life together was what he’d promised her—the escape from the only home they’d known, the stuffy apartment surrounded by cement, two children instead of the half-dozen they talked about when they were young, and he couldn’t help feeling responsible in some way for the earthquake, for the fact that they were homeless.

He watched the sun glance across his wife’s face—the wrinkles around her eyes, the wisps of black hair showing at her temples, the mole caught in the fold of her bottom lip. He softly pulled her head scarf back to see splotches of scalp where she had ripped her hair out, and he replaced the scarf to cover up that pain. He could still see the child in her face, lost there behind a layer of concern that remained even in sleep. He wanted to lie in her arms, feel the softness of her chest pushing against his back, feel her breath along the ridge of his neck. He was tired and he wanted to give up, and he thought Nilüfer would understand; he thought she would allow him that weakness if he would allow it himself.

He glanced around the circle of grass. The man who had been drinking beer was splayed out on his back. Two other families had not stirred, and the loose fabric of their tents flapped lonely in the morning breeze. A woman poked at a fire in the third camp, and he smelled boiling tea, but her back was turned to him. Satisfied that there were no prying eyes, he laid his hand on his wife’s cheek and kissed her lips.

But a man yelling in the distance interrupted the kiss. When Sinan stood he saw a flock of sheep coming across the highway. A few cars stopped to let the animals pass, something that would never have happened in the normal morning rush. The animals huddled together, a mass of dirty woolen shoulders pushing against one another, their black hooves clicking against the pavement, the tin bell on the leading sheep flatly tinkling. Some of the sheep balked at crossing the road, others bent their heads to the pavement in hopes of finding grass, but the shepherd quickly tapped these animals on the rear end with his staff and herded them back into the flock. Sinan thought he recognized the man, but couldn’t remember his name. A wool cap hung low over his eyes and he wore a dark vest over a white long-sleeve shirt. Each Kurban Bayram, the man brought his sheep out of the hills and into town to be sold into slaughter for the holiday feasts, but Sinan had never seen him at any other time of the year. The sheep should be high in the hills now, pasturing the summer away to fatness.