Gardens of Water (37 page)

They drove like that for a while until the riverbed came to a bridge and he followed a track up the embankment that led to the pavement above. When they were on the road, his father leaned back in the seat and lit a cigarette and then Sinan relaxed and nodded off to sleep.

His father tapped him on the shoulder and when he opened his eyes, the land stretched beneath him in a series of ridges and river washes and parched desert. They were parked on the edge of a mountain, the nose of the huge Chevy pointed into oblivion.

“See all this land?” his father said. “It’s ours. It’s been the Kurds’ since before the Arabs, since before the Turks even came here from Central Asia.” He pointed into the deep distance, to a triangular shadow capped with a cloud shaped like a winter hat. “From Ararat, where Noah set foot on ground again,” he ran his hand across the panorama before them, “to Van to Babylonia. Ours.”

The land was immense, pocked with mountain faces and dry steppes that looked purple in the shadows of morning.

“See that mountain there?” he said.

“Yes, Baba.”

“The other side is ours too, but it’s called Iraq. A man named Hussein gasses our people and America gives him money because they don’t like Iran.”

He was silent a moment and they watched together this land that was theirs but not theirs.

“Do you remember Rifat Bey?”

“The
yufka
maker?” Sinan said. “He died, didn’t he?”

“No. He was killed,” his father said. “Because he let his cousin, a PKK soldier being chased by the Turks, sleep in his home one night. His body is somewhere out there.”

He pointed to the part of the panorama that was Turkey.

“Do you remember Altan Bey?”

“The saddle maker?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve got a good memory. Him, too.”

“Why?”

“There are many reasons, Sinan
can
m,
” his father said. “Many complicated reasons that make no sense. People are afraid to lose things—power, land, oil, money—and all these people—the Turks, the Iraqis, the Iranians—think we’ll take those things away from them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” he said. “But for now, before it becomes confusing, remember one thing. None of these people are your friends—not the Arabs, not the Turks, and not the Americans.”

“I don’t understand. The Americans are far away, across the ocean.”

“No, they’re not. They’re in the guns the Turkish paramilitaries fire, they’re in the money they give to dictators like Saddam Hussein, they’re even in the ground, pumping out the oil.”

A jet screeched overhead. They both looked up and saw a white stream split the sky.

His father smiled, but not a happy one. “The Americans are never far away.”

He wondered what his father would say if he knew the war was finished now. No, he would say. Not until our land is ours again. Not until we can speak our language and fly our own flag.

The war is over, Baba, Sinan imagined saying to him. They will leave us alone now.

And suddenly he felt God’s presence and he understood His plan for his life. Without the earthquake he would not have returned to his village in the mountains. Without God he would not have honored his father’s sacrifice.

“God is great,” he said, cupping his palms around his ears to concentrate on Him and only Him.

Chapter 28

“
N
O, DYLAN,”
REM SAID. HER PARENTS HAD WALKED AWAY
together just a minute before. The other women at the laundry were watching them. They were folding men’s shirts and hanging wet pants on the line but their eyes were fixed on the two of them. “I have to take care of these clothes.”

“Where’ve you been?”

He pushed a hanging sheet out of the way, and it fell behind him like a screen to a puppet show. She wondered what their shadows would look like to the women, how their movements could be misconstrued.

He took her by the shoulder.

“Stop.”

He let go and angrily fixed his jaw.

“Those women are watching.”

“So what,” he said.

“Something happened the other night,” she said. “It scared me.”

She told him what she hadn’t told anyone, and her body shuddered again when she remembered the taste of that man’s mouth.

“I’ll kill him,” Dylan said.

She was glad he said it, but Kemal Bey was a man with many friends, a man who ran a store before the quake and kept a loaded gun behind the counter, a man with a wife and ruthless eyes that seemed more powerful than any boyish strength.

He grabbed her hand and walked her through the center of the camp, and her body buzzed with electricity—an unsettling combination of fear and excitement. She saw Kemal Bey halfway down the row, his back turned, smoking with two other men. Before they reached him, one of the men nodded his head in their direction and Kemal turned around, threw his cigarette to the ground, and put both hands in his pockets, very deliberately, she thought, as though he clasped something in his fists.

Dylan must have thought the same thing, because his pace slowed and his body became rigid. He pulled her behind him with one hand, and as he did the other two men stood next to Kemal, their shoulders thrown back, their feet planted.

“Foreigner,” one man spat.

The hand Dylan held her with shook, but he stared at them as they passed.
rem shielded herself behind his shoulders, one eye watching the black eyes of Kemal Bey watching Dylan’s.

Chapter 29

O
UTSIDE THE MOSQUE, HE PLACED HIS SHOES ON THE CARDBOARD
that was laid across the mud and slipped them on his feet. A group of men stood smoking beneath a withered plane tree. He hadn’t seen any of them in the mosque praying.

“Sinan Bey,” Kemal said. He was leaning against the tree, but came to meet Sinan as he came down the path.

Sinan leaned in to kiss his cheek, but Kemal cringed and turned his face away.

“I’m sorry to be rude, Sinan, my brother.”

“What happened to your lip?” Sinan asked. The cut looked painful.

“Playing soccer with the boys,” he said. “It’s nothing, but it hurts a little.”

They left the mosque and Kemal guided Sinan by the elbow, through the rows of tents and toward the beach. In the distance, a line of oil tankers sat moored in the water, their shapes like jutting rocks in the evening sky.

“My friend,” Kemal said. “How’s the job?”

How could he tell him what had happened? He had cheated the man’s cousin.

“Fine,” Sinan said.

Kemal stared at him a second before smiling. “That’s what I hear,” Kemal said. “My cousin says you’re a good worker. The foot doesn’t bother you, then?” He fingered a bracelet of brown prayer beads in his left hand, his thumb working one bead nervously before his fingers threaded the next one into his grasp. Kemal was never without his beads, but Sinan had not once seen him praying at mosque. Before the quake, Sinan assumed he attended
Çicek Camii,
the mosque in the next neighborhood over from his.

“No.”

Kemal asked after his family and Sinan did the same. Kemal asked about Sinan’s health and Sinan returned the platitude. But Kemal had something else on his mind; Sinan could tell by the absent nods, the vacant way in which he said, “That’s good” and “God willing.” And it wasn’t until they descended the hill that separated the beach from the tent city that Kemal said what he was thinking.

“Watch your daughter, Sinan.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That boy,” Kemal said, “they say he’s a Satanist. People have seen him in Kadiköy, down in the basement music shops, drinking beer and smoking.” He leaned in to whisper. “Some dead cats were found by the water. Their necks had been cut.”

“Dead cats? I haven’t heard anything about that.” Before the earthquake, a child had been killed in
stanbul by two teenage boys. The police said it was a ritualistic killing, and the rumor spread that the boys were Satanists. They wore black, it was said, and colored their nails black and listened to certain American rock bands who hid dark messages in their music.

Kemal licked his lip and the scab glistened.

“You haven’t been out in the camp,
abi.
People are talking.”

“My daughter’s a good girl.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you about it. They say they’ve seen her with that American boy, and you know, Sinan, what happens to some men when they think a young girl is doing things. Men get ideas they shouldn’t get. I’m only telling you because she’s a good girl and you’re a good man. But some of these people don’t know her so well.”

“What are they saying?”

“Nothing, Sinan. I’m telling you so that it stays that way, so that your name remains honorable.”

Chapter 30

S
HE FORGOT ABOUT THE LAUNDRY, FORGOT SHE HAD LEFT
it sitting in a wet pile. She forgot that people could look up on the hill and see them, and she ignored the fact that a girl like her, a village girl, didn’t allow a boy—especially a
yabanci
!—to touch her in public. She felt powerful. She had seen the cut on Kemal Bey’s lip. She had felt the strength of Dylan’s hand and the safety behind his shoulders. He had defended her and her head spun with an amazing euphoria.

So she let Dylan hold her waist as they passed the soup kitchen. She let him whisper into her ear as they strolled down a row of tents. She said something, something funny that made him laugh, but forgot it as soon as it left her lips because she saw the rock coming—a black disc no bigger than a small bird—a second before it struck her above her left eye.

And as she fell, her mind flashed with the image of the old covered woman who threw it.

Chapter 31

F
OR A MOMENT SINAN THOUGHT
REM HAD BEEN SHOT.

He had been sitting outside, sipping a cup of tea, trying to think what to say to her about the rumors when he saw her leaning against the American boy. From a distance, they seemed to be sharing a romantic moment and, at first, much to his surprise, he thought there was something beautiful about it—the way his daughter’s cheek rested against his shoulder, the way he held her head as though it were his most important possession; it was exactly how he’d want a husband to hold his daughter’s head.

But as they got closer he could see that she wasn’t resting, but leaning on him heavily. Suddenly there was something grotesque about the scene, the way her left foot dragged, the way he struggled a bit to hold her up, and then the blood: running bright from a bulletsized wound above her eye.

“Oh, God,” he thought. “They’ve killed my daughter. Stupid girl.”

He ran to her and placed her arm over his shoulder and he and the boy laid her down inside the tent.

“Oh,
can
m,
” Nilüfer said. “My daughter, you’re bleeding.”

“
smail,” Sinan said. “Go get Marcus Bey and tell him to bring a doctor.”

smail burst out of the tent, and Sinan could hear his footsteps slapping against the dirt as he ran.

He touched the wound, pressed his fingers around it, trying to discern its depth, trying to find the shard of bullet.

“Is she okay?” the American boy said.

Nilüfer brought Sinan a wet towel and he dabbed the blood away.

“Jesus, is she all right?” Dylan said.

And Sinan realized it was just a scratch, a nick of skin shaved off above her eyebrow.

“She’s all right,” Sinan said.

“Jesus.”

“Thank God, His mercifulness,” Nilüfer said.

“That stings, Baba,”
rem said, pushing his hand away. Nilüfer placed a pillow beneath
rem’s head. “I’m all right,” she said, and sat up, but her eyes looked glassy and unfocused.

“What happened?”

“That bastard,” the boy said.

“A woman threw a rock,”
rem said, glancing at the American boy before looking at Sinan. She looked down at the ground. “We were talking and she threw a rock.”

Sinan looked at Nilüfer and he could see her concern turning to anger—she was grinding her teeth, her eyes were growing blacker.

“Please leave,” Sinan said, standing to face the boy.

The boy’s eyes darted around the room and settled on
rem’s.

Sinan saw the muscles in his jaw working and he thought that if that muscle flexed a third time he would have to push the boy out of the tent, but the boy dropped his eyes and ducked outside.

“What were you doing with that boy?” Nilüfer said after Dylan was gone.

rem didn’t answer.

“Answer your mother.”

“Talking.”

“And what else?” Nilüfer said.

“Walking.”

“Don’t play games with me,” Nilüfer said.

rem hadn’t been crying, but now the tears began to run down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the heel of her hand as though she were embarrassed to have them be seen.

“We were walking and talking,”
rem said, her voice growing frustrated. “What don’t you understand, Anne?” She turned her back and faced the fabric of the tent. “Allah, Allah, I have a conversation in broad daylight and you two act like I’ve killed someone.”