Gardens of Water (39 page)

“It’s just a cut.”

“Jesus, she like passed out. She was bleeding all over and I thought—”

Sinan placed his palm on the boy’s hand and looked him in the eye. This was no Satanist. “She’s okay.”

The doctor said he should see her. Sinan gave him permission to enter the tent, and
smail showed him in. Marcus told Dylan to leave and the boy did, occasionally turning around, though, to glance back at the tent as he walked away.

“It was a rock,” Sinan said.

“Who?” Marcus said. “Do you know?”

“It doesn’t matter. You must keep your son away from my daughter.”

“It’s innocent.”

So he knew about them.

“You know what happened here,” Sinan said.

“That’s the village, Sinan. Not
stanbul.”

“The village has moved here. You’ve been in this country long enough to know that.”

“It’s wrong.”

“Your son has to leave my daughter alone.”

“She makes him happy.” Marcus looked at him, pleading with him, but also reminding Sinan of the boy’s loss. Did the man really think he’d give up his daughter? But Sinan remembered the way the boy held her head, the way she fell so completely against him. Happiness in this world was no small thing to give up.
rem must have felt something, too, to risk what she had.

“We must live in the world we live in,” Sinan said.

IF HE HAD BEEN
a good father, the rock would never have been thrown.

This was the thought that kept him up all night.

The doctor thought
rem had a minor concussion, and they were to wake her every two hours. Early in the evening, he and Nilüfer traded shifts but Sinan couldn’t calm his mind, and he finally told Nilüfer to go to sleep. He stayed up all night, listening to the sound of his daughter’s breath, touching her forehead briefly when he thought two hours had passed, just long enough to see her eyes flash with accusation.

Yet by morning he wanted to find this woman who struck his daughter and slap her. He left early for prayer, seething with anger. He almost asked people if they had seen the woman who threw the rock, but asking would be an admission of his daughter’s improper behavior and he was too embarrassed to acknowledge it in public. Instead, he stared at every woman he saw in hijab, his anger flaring when he saw a fundamentalist, dressed in black from head to toe, as if she were already dead. It was one thing to be humble and modest, but it seemed to Sinan that the
abaya
revealed men’s disgust with women, as though men thought God had made a mistake and they needed to hide it. Sinan would never make his wife and daughter wear such a thing; he would never allow them to be so blotted out of existence.

When he was a child in the village, a beautiful teenage girl all the boys had crushes on disappeared one day. Her father and her brother disappeared, too, and the town became unusually silent, as though everyone knew something they were trying to ignore. Before this, people had been gossiping about the girl, saying she and a young married man were having an affair, saying finally that she was pregnant with his child. But during these three days, quiet pressed down on the village like an oppressive pall. The girl’s mother was silent and she could be seen going nervously about her business in town—buying eggs at the egg seller’s, stopping by the
yufka
maker, getting lamb legs at the butcher’s. Even Sinan had trouble sleeping at night, not because he understood what was happening, but because the village felt different, as though some dangerous stranger had wandered into town and taken up residence.

On the third day, the girl’s brother and father returned to town without the daughter. No one ever saw her again. When the government police came asking questions, no one told them what they all knew: that the brother and the father had taken her out into the mountains and killed her. They were justified in their actions to protect the family name from shame, but Sinan never looked at them the same again. Even as an adult, he never set foot in their electrical light shop—the only one in town.

The problem was that he was not the man he had been in Ye
illi. In Ye
illi he never would have ignored
rem’s comings and goings. He would have stopped it the moment he saw her hugging the boy in the makeshift camp. But he’d yielded to his sympathy and despair and exhaustion and the guilt he harbored over the boy’s loss. He was ashamed now of his weakness, of himself—no job, no way to take care of his family, no control over his daughter—and he was angry that
rem had exposed it publicly.

After morning prayer, he returned to the tent and looked at
rem’s forehead. “It’s looking better,” he said, holding her by the chin. He couldn’t look in her eyes, but he saw them anyway—big, black, angry: her mother’s eyes.

“Does it hurt?”

“People are trying to teach you what’s right,” Nilüfer said before
rem could answer. “Sometimes what’s right is painful.”