Gardens of Water (42 page)

In the afternoon, as his back began to ache and his foot burned, he let his mind grow numb with the monotonous work. He was lulled by the rush of air-conditioner vents and the soft strains of pop music echoing in the metal rafters. He was grateful for the thoughtlessness of it, thankful for the relief, however brief, from the responsibilities of fatherhood. The customers in the store looked like foreigners; he was dressed like a foreigner—his khaki pleated pants, the brown belt, the polo-style shirt with the Carrefour logo on the chest—and for a few hours he was able to pretend that he was someone else, someone with money, a man living in one of the big
yal
perched above the Bosporus, a man who could hop on a plane and go wherever he pleased. Pouring black olives into a silver bin, he was an olive farmer with rows of green trees rising above the sparkling Mediterranean. Stacking boxes of frozen seafood in the walk-in freezer, he was a Black Sea fisherman setting out with the tide to haul lines full of sea bass; he was a famous soccer star, an author of romance novels, a bank teller. He was a farmer in a small eastern village, his family growing with the years—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

Toward the end of his shift, he was hanging a T-shirt on a rack in the clothing aisle, imagining himself a tailor of fine suits like Serdar Bey in the Ye
illi of his childhood, when he watched a man press a dress against his young wife’s chest. One hand held the dress to the woman’s shoulder and the other one draped it across her hip. The woman smiled, her red lips shining in the fluorescent lights, her hand posed on her hip. “Beautiful,” the man said.
“Çok güzel.”
Then he pressed his body against hers, crushed the dress between them, and kissed her right there in the aisle. Sinan looked away, but looked again, and when he looked a third time, he was thinking of
rem and the American boy.

Chapter 33

I
T WASN’T SAFE FOR THEM IN THE CAMP ANYMORE, SO AFTER
five days, when her father left for his new job and her mother went to smoke cigarettes with the women at the laundry bins,
rem and Dylan took the bus into
stanbul.

She wanted to go to Beyo
lu district, where on television she had seen crowds of beautiful-looking people jamming
stiklal Avenue.

She wanted to cross the bridge into Europe, and hold Dylan’s hand in the alleyways of the old Jewish and Greek business district. She wanted to go to the fancy restaurants and clubs she had seen on the television gossip shows—the places where Tarkan drank beer, the clubs where women shone in camera flashbulbs, where the most exciting things happened at night, well after her parents had gone to bed.

But instead he took her to Kadiköy, still on the Asian side and full of more college students than stars. They stopped at a café in the bottom floor of an old house, and Dylan drank whiskey out of a small glass while she sipped tea. She watched the gold liquid slide like cooking oil down the glass, his Adam’s apple jumping up and down as he swallowed. His fingers stroked the lip of the glass as though he were playing a silent instrument. He ordered a second whiskey while she picked at the fennel seeds and candied hazelnuts, and watched his eyes get glassy and distant.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” he said, taking
rem’s chin in his hand and turning it toward the morning sunlight.
rem brushed his hand away, and pulled her head scarf a little lower to hide it.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“A little.”

“People are crazy,” he said. “My father always said that some people would spit in Atatürk’s face if they could. He thinks if he talks to them about God that’ll change things. I’d just like to kill them.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

He looked hurt.

“Let’s go away,” he said.

“We can’t.”

He took her hand.

“Germany,” he said, looking past her now at a couple coming through the patio door into the courtyard. “You’ll fit in there and I speak a little German.”

“No. We can’t.”

He rolled the glass in his hand and drank the rest of the whiskey. He squinched up his face as though it tasted terrible.

“Just imagine it for a minute,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Just forget about everything else for sixty seconds, would you?”

She felt stupid for ruining it.

“If my mom was still here,” he said, “she wouldn’t have a problem with this. But my dad—”

“And my father,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. He lit a cigarette and stared at the couple who were now sipping coffee with foam and sprinkles on top. The woman wore big, black-rimmed glasses and red jeans and her black-booted toes kept creeping up the opening of her boyfriend’s pant leg.

Dylan laughed and rubbed his palm across his forehead.

“What?” she said.

“Our parents don’t love us,” he said. “And you still want to make them happy.” He threw a few bills on the table and stubbed out his cigarette. “Let’s go.”

He walked her through the book bazaar and showed her the tattoo rooms underground where the passageway was warm and muggy and smelled like sweat and where some of the corners glistened wet. He took her to a record shop full of posters of men with guitars and eyes like lizards. The man behind the counter had spiked hair and a nose ring and he stared at her the whole time. The passage scared her a little. Last year two boys killed a child, and all the papers said the boys were Satanists who hung out in underground passages just like this one. Outside the shop, the passageway was filled with slouching kids, their clothes hanging off their bodies as though the fabric concealed nothing but skeletons. Girls leaned on boys and shared cigarettes. She even saw one blowing smoke rings above her head so that she seemed ringed with halos. She wondered if any of these kids knew those boys.

He led her back into the light, between the stands of men selling DVDs in wooden cases, past the kebab restaurants and
gözleme
shops where, behind steaming windows, Kurdish women kneaded dough into pancakes, their hands white with flour, and spread the pancakes on the circular pan. The smell of brine and guts announced the fish sellers’ street. Many of the men here wore beards and she noticed one man fingering prayer beads while taking a break with a
simit
and tea. Dylan wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her tight. His fingers rested on her hip, right where her stomach met her pelvis. A rush of heat flooded her skin. The open lightbulbs dangling above the baskets of fish reflected light against the wet cement and the men stared at them. Their hands slit open bellies of fish, they called out prices, they wrapped fillets in white oil paper and smiled as they took customers’ money, but they were watching, excitement and anger in their eyes, as though a fantasy about her had bled into hatred.

“Please, Dylan,” she said. “Stop.”

“Jesus,” he said, and let go. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground and they walked like that until they reached Tibbiye Road and the roar of buses and taxis.

“You can’t do that in public,” she said.

“Your father isn’t here,
rem.”

“We have to be married,” she said. “How can you live here for so long and not know that?”

“I know it,” he said. “It’s just stupid. The other girls don’t have to be married.”

“I’m not those other girls,” she said. “And it’s not stupid!”

He spun around once with frustration. “You thought it was stupid until the other day.”

People were watching them, but they were near the shoe and clothing stores now and it was a different kind of crowd, a crowd that would agree with Dylan about how stupid it all was. A crowd that would wonder what such a boy was doing with a stupid covered girl.

“I just want to touch you,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re all I’ve got.”

They stood there for a moment in the middle of the street, saying nothing. Women with shopping bags rustled past. Children kicked bare feet in the fountain. With stained fingers, a shoeshine boy picked up the pieces of a broken shine jar. The boy reminded her of
smail.