Gardens of Water (22 page)

“I thought it was happening again,”
rem said.

“A professor on the radio keeps saying a bigger quake is coming,” Dilek said.

rem couldn’t imagine a bigger quake.

There were five produce trucks at first, and then a line of white buses, like those used to bus rich students to their rich private schools. The first bus passed, and
rem and Dilek could see they were not Turks. The fourth bus passed, and through the window
rem caught a glimpse of Dylan, his head bowed, his earphones stuck in his ears. She waved, but he didn’t look out the window.

rem grabbed Dilek’s shoulder. “It’s him!” she said.

Dilek hugged
rem and whispered into her ear. “Just remember,” she said. “You both might be dead before morning comes.”

Chapter 14

T
HE TRUCKS DROVE OUT OF SIGHT AND SINAN FOLLOWED
the sound of their engines until they turned the corner, toward an empty field that used to be the recreation grounds to the old Ottoman prison. Watching the back of the buses throwing up dust from the road, Sinan was reminded of the jeeps the Turkish paramilitaries had driven through the center of Ye
illi. Once he watched a driver speed up to run over a chicken, Emre Bey’s family’s only rooster, the breast of the bird popping open like a crushed melon. Another time, three jeeps parked in the center of the village on market day, keeping the produce sellers from setting up their tables.

The jeeps were built in America, his father had said.

In the South everyone knew America supported the Turkish paramilitary, the Special Teams, as they were called, giving them training and weapons and shelter from the U.N. while they destroyed whole villages in search of Öcalan and the PKK. All the Turks knew this, all the U.N. knew this, but it was kept quiet as if it didn’t happen. “Because America wants to spy on Russia,” his father told him once, “we get murdered.” Now the Americans were here to help. It was confusing, what to believe about America.

Using twine from the tomato vines, Sinan hung the ewe from a nearby tree, gutted it, and let it bleed. He sat on his haunches and watched the blood drip and soak into the ground.

He was so sick of death. There were people in the world that never had to face death, except in old age, when death is almost comforting. But they never had to face the violence of a young death. They never had to bury their father with tissue paper stuffed and sewn into his collapsed skull. They were mean, stupid people, he imagined, sitting in their homes in America or England, staring vacantly at their televisions, falling asleep in a bored stupor on their couches. He hated and wanted to be one of those vacant people.

Yesterday, at the ice-skating rink, he had identified the bodies of Ahmet and his family. Their faces had been calm, their bodies bloodless, but he could see where their ribs had been broken, where their chests lay as flat as their stomachs. Overwhelmed, he had embraced Ahmet before they wrapped his brother-in-law’s body in a bag, tied it together at his ankles and shoulders, and carried him away.

Because officials were afraid of the spread of disease, all the dead, including Ahmet and his family, were tossed into a common grave. The mayor was there, standing at the edge of the open pit, alternately trying to comfort family members who were praying over the burlap bags and loudly criticizing the government.

“I’m sorry,” he said, pressing a handkerchief to his nose. “I’m sorry, but we must bury them now.” He poured lemon
kolonya
over his already soaked handkerchief and pressed it again to his nose. “Where’s the government? Where’s the Red Crescent?” Touching a mourner’s shoulder, he said, “I’m so sorry, but we must do this.”

Before the mourners’ prayers were finished, bulldozers covered the bags with earth, and still people remained, speaking to the bumps and curves of the torn-up ground.

For a moment now, staring at the swollen flap of the sheep’s distended tongue, Sinan imagined death as a one-way mirror, like the glass it was said the Special Teams unit sat behind while watching the interrogations and torture of suspected PKK rebels. Some men—the ones who survived and came back to Ye
illi to tell their story—said it was the being watched, the knowledge that men drank tea just on the other side of the glass while they were being beaten, that made the torture so unbearable. Most of the men who were tortured didn’t even care about a “Kurdistan” they simply wanted to live their lives—speak
their
language instead of Turkish, farm their fields, tend to their sheep, feed their families. Once you were behind that glass, though, Kurdistan Workers’ Party or not, separatist or Turkish nationalist, you might as well have been dead, because your body no longer belonged to you; it belonged to the brutality or mercy of a man and that man belonged to the Turkish state and his fists were the fists of the Turkish Republic and his boot was the boot of the Turkish Republic and the electricity that convulsed your body was provided by the Turkish Republic and the blood that was spilled, even if it was Kurdish blood, was the color of the Turkish Republic’s flag.

It seemed to Sinan that the living and the dead were separated by a thin membrane through which the living could not see, a membrane punctured only briefly at the moment of death, and he wondered if Ahmet, Gülfem, and Zeynep stood just on the other side now, so close but out of sight and out of reach. He wondered if Sarah Han
m stood there, too—looking in and regretting her sacrifice. His father, even, although he had been dead all these years. He imagined that if he looked closely enough at the dead sheep he would see some reflection of death, some living element in it, but all he saw was an eye, black and empty, and pooled blood as useless as spilled water.

By the time the animal was ready, the shepherd and his flock were gone—where to, Sinan did not know. It struck Sinan that God had sent the shepherd, and if he sent the shepherd then perhaps he had sent the Americans as well. He felt a sudden jolt of hope that this was part of some plan, some reminder from Him not to get too attached to his brief time on earth, because to be with your Father is the greatest—the only real existence. And that’s how the dead finally won over all living people, torturer or loving family member. No matter who you were, no matter how weak and helpless, once you were dead you knew what it meant to be with God and the living did not know and the not knowing haunted the living and the haunting was the doubt that God existed at all.

He skinned the animal, untied the twine, and slung the carcass over his shoulders. There was still a little blood coming from the gash and it trickled warm across his shoulders and chest. It was an unclean thing to carry an animal in such a way, and the burden of it made him a little sick to his stomach—he had never liked killing; it always made him brood with guilt. Two of the other men waited near their animals and smoked. Sinan nodded to them as he passed and they nodded back.

“May it go easily,” Sinan said.

“For you, too,” the older of the two men replied.

CARRYING THE SHEEP ON
his shoulders now, he remembered lifting the American’s wife from the rubble.

Just like her, the ewe’s body felt light and insubstantial.

Just like the American’s wife, the animal’s skin was still warm, though stiff and lifeless.

It embarrassed Sinan to carry the sheep through the streets where people were forced to watch, their eyes hungry, their memories filled with dead bodies, but he needed something in which to place the meat so it would not spoil. He checked what remained of the grocery, walked two blocks to where the hardware store had once stood, and then down near the ruined port where the men used to sell their fish, but he couldn’t find anything, nothing was as it had been. He discovered a blanket, hanging from the edge of a leaning wall, and he pulled it loose with one hand and laid the sheep’s body in it.

He carried the carcass up the road through the rubble of town, past the old
k
raathane
where thirty men had been crushed while playing the men’s club’s late-night card game. He kicked unbroken tea glasses out of his path, and saw the terrible pictures on a loose front page of the newspaper
Milliyet.
Four men were hauling a couch down the street, hurrying their feet as if they were being chased. Coming through the broken front window of an electronics store, a woman carried an intact color television. Where she would watch it, Sinan couldn’t imagine.

“Much shame on you,” Sinan said to her through his teeth.

She stared back, her eyes flashing with anger, but she said nothing.

He stopped at the spot where
smail had been buried nine days before. He remembered Sarah Han
m’s arms wrapped around his son, the beams of wood and chunks of cement that crushed her ribs instead of
smail’s.