Gardens of Water (36 page)

The boy did and sat down next to him on his sleeping bag. He drew the boy to his side and placed the letter in his hands.

“You don’t remember the woman who wrote this,” he said. “But you’ll meet her soon, God willing.”

“Who is it, Baba?”

“It’s your
dede
’s sister, my aunt. Someone who loves you very much.”

“How can she love me, if she doesn’t know me?”

“She knew you when you were very young.” He kissed
smail on the cheek. “You used to bring her handfuls of pebbles. She washed them and kept every single one of them on the windowsill.” He laughed. “Once you brought her a dried-out goat turd.”

smail wrinkled his nose in disgust. “She washed your hands and put that one on the windowsill, too!”

smail ran his fingers over the words on the paper. “What does it say?” The boy could not read the Kurdish, a fact that saddened him. When they got back to Yesilli he would teach the boy his language, even if the government still forbade it.

“It says ‘Come home and tell
smail to bring me gold nuggets this time.’”

HE FOUND NILÜFER AND
rem at the washing bins, hanging clothes on the line.

“Take a walk with me,” he said.

“Leave me alone.” Nilüfer hid behind a freshly laundered shirt, but through the white fabric he could see her angry face.

“Take a walk with me.” He pulled the shirt off the line and was presented with her olive-black eyes. “I have something to tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

“No,” he said. “Take a walk with me.”

He grabbed her by the waist and dragged her away from the clothes.

“They’re wet, Sinan. I can’t leave them like that.”

“Leave them.”

“Finish hanging the laundry,
rem,” Nilüfer said. “Hide the underclothes behind the blouses. I’ll be back.”

They walked beneath the old guard tower, where a man aimed a long camera lens toward the rows of tents. A man next to him scribbled notes on a small notepad and then spoke into a tiny microphone he held in the palm of his hand.

“I received a letter today,” he said.

“A letter?” she said. “The government can’t bring us food, but they can find us to deliver letters?”

They passed the soup kitchen and the wooden benches set out for eating. Beyond the benches, a crowd had gathered to listen to a Gypsy family playing music in the open field. Sitting on the tailgate of his dented Lada station wagon, the Gypsy father ran his fingers across an electronic keyboard powered by a gas generator.

“Who sent it?” She tugged on his arm now. “Stop playing these games.”

But he wasn’t playing a game. He was afraid it wasn’t true. He didn’t want to say it, for fear he’d wake up and have it all be a dream.

He handed Nilüfer the letter.

The blind daughter of the Gypsy family sang Roma songs with a twirling voice as though her tongue were a spindle, her white eyes staring blankly at the crowd. A single finger tapped against the microphone.

“Aunt Melike?!” Nilüfer said.

“Yes.”

The Gypsy mother stood holding a tin cup in her hand, tipped just so to reveal nothing inside. On another day, in the old life before the earthquake, that cup would have been filled with coins before the song was finished.

“The soldiers have left Yesilli?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what her letter says.”

It was true then. He hadn’t imagined it.

The Gypsy woman’s skirt was filthy, her feet covered only in blackened socks. They had nowhere to go. Being a Gypsy was worse than being a Kurd.

“We can go home!” Nilüfer said.

THE MOSQUE THE AMERICANS
had built was a sturdy A-frame with no walls; it looked nothing like a mosque, but it managed to keep the men sheltered from the weather. The Americans had placed a water truck near the entrance and it was here that Sinan washed himself before prayer, trying to keep the mud from splashing on the cuffs of his pants. Inside, the open floor was covered in worn prayer rugs and frayed blankets. A framed tile of God’s name glazed in Arabic sat propped on a metal chair and acted as the prayer niche. Facing this, a couple of dozen men, mostly elderly, prostrated themselves in submission.

He decided to attend evening prayers, ashamed by his anger with God. God had a reason for everything, and a man who doubted His wisdom was arrogant, selfish, and sure to be damned. With each prostration, each recitation, he tried to become nothing, but his humbleness was clouded by the clear vision of his old home in Yesilli: the jagged white teeth of the mountains, the crystalline blue sky, the snow-white steppes like blankets of bleached wool. His chest vibrated with the possibility of return, and while he bowed his head before the mihrab he remembered a day when he was eleven and his father took him to Ensar Bey’s field on the edge of town.

His father didn’t allow him to come here, and for that exact reason Sinan had been to this field before with the other boys of Yesilli. He had seen the Turkish soldiers behind the cement barricades and knew not to pass them. He knew, also, that occasionally they came into town and took someone away and that that someone, whoever it might be, never came back.

The sun was low on the horizon. Two soldiers sitting in a car without a roof on the rise above the field were silhouetted against the sky.

“Here,” his father said and turned his back to the men. “Face me.”

Sinan did and they bent together among the tomato vines and removed the red fruit from the stem.

“See that car?” he said.

“Yes, Baba.”

“That’s a jeep.” He carefully dropped the tomato in his bag and removed another from the stem. “They make them in America.”

Sinan didn’t understand, but he could tell it was a bad thing.

“See the soldier leaning against the fender and smoking?”

“Yes, Baba.”

“See the rifle hanging from his shoulder?”

He did, but the rifle was no longer dangling from his shoulder. He held it now in both hands.

“Yes.”

“That’s an M-16,” he said, carefully removing a worm from the center of the fruit with a penknife. The worm wrapped around his father’s finger, and he gently rolled it off his thumbnail into the mud. “They make those in America, too, and the Turkish soldiers use them against us.”

The next morning, instead of going off to the fields and leaving Sinan to sleep, his father woke him as the sun was just sprinkling the sky with light and piled him into an old Chevy that Celal Bey had bought cheap from a taxi driver in Diyarbak
r. It was the only regularly working car in town and Sinan knew it was a Chevy because when all the men saw it pass in the street they nodded their heads approvingly and said, “Hmm, a Chevy.” The one good thing Americans make, his father had once said.

As the sky turned the color of a bruise, his father piloted the car along a row of trees that shaded Haluk Bey’s strawberry fields, down a dirt path through Emre Bey’s olive orchards, and then into a dry riverbed scarred with so many tire tracks it created a sort of rail line for cars. His father didn’t say anything, but he leaned over the steering wheel and turned his head left and right, watching the embankments.