Gardens of Water (43 page)

“Come with me,” Dylan said. He was smiling now. He had this way of being upset then suddenly fine. It confused her.

“Where?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, turning now to walk back through the fish bazaar. “I won’t lay a finger on you.”

Chapter 34

T
HAT AFTERNOON THE MANAGER SAID HE DIDN’T NEED SINAN
for the evening shift. Yilmaz Bey had just arrived at the store, and Sinan followed him to his office, where he watched him hang his coat on the hook behind his desk, take his wallet from his pants pocket, and slip it into the pocket of his hanging coat.

“Please Yilmaz Bey, I need to work.”

“Sinan,” the manager said, sprinkling lemon cologne on his hands and slapping his palms together. “There are no trucks coming in today. It would be a waste of your time.”

“It wouldn’t be a waste of my time.”

“It’d be a waste of company time.” The man combed his clean fingers through his hair and pressed his eyebrows in place. “I’m sorry, Sinan. They check on these things.”

“Oh,” Yilmaz Bey said, reaching into his desk drawer. “This should help. Payday.” He handed Sinan an envelope. “It’s only for the few days you worked last pay period. Next one will be better.” The manager smiled and then started moving papers around on his desk and ignored him and Sinan knew it was time to leave.

36,732,045TL. He read the printed numbers again and rubbed his finger over their raised shape. It was the most money he had seen since his grocery. Nilüfer and the children wouldn’t expect him for another eight hours, so he took the ferries to Kadiköy, cashed the check, and went to see about train-ticket prices to Diyarbak
r.

Haydarpa
a train station echoed with the voices of passengers, merchants, and men loitering in corners. Well-dressed businessmen sat on a row of leather stools along one wall of the station, their feet pressed against wooden horns of copper shoeshine boxes. These men read papers or absentmindedly smoked cigarettes while snapping rags made their shoes sparkle. When the old shoeshine men bent to apply black to the shoe heels, it looked as though they were kissing their customers’ feet. A group of boys, unable to compete with the old-timers and their fancy punched-copper boxes, squatted in the dirty corner near the washrooms next to their wooden boxes, their hands permanently stained black, their skin as dirty and rough as the cement floor. They were Kurdish boys, their eyes a reflective black, their faces etched with anger.

As he crossed the huge open floor, incandescent fans of sunlight streamed through the high windows and cast light across the steel tracks. The railings shone like strings of gold necklaces through the darkness of the station, out past the rusting freight trains, and on into the heart of Anatolia. Sinan felt the possibility of that distant horizon, then, and he imagined the mountains his train would climb, the valleys it would descend through, and finally the gray cement station in Diyarbak
r where it would squeal to a stop.

A poster listing destination and price hung next to the ticket counter window. There were hundreds of destinations and their times, and Sinan had difficulty finding the listing because the words were so small and crammed together. He found it and ran his finger along the box until he discovered the price: thirty-five million lira per ticket. He had five million plus the check money in his pocket and four million more tucked away in a pillow back in the camp.

One hundred and forty million lira! The number seemed impossibly huge. He knew about inflation the last few years, but ticket prices seemed to be inflated above even that ridiculous number. He would be paid in two weeks, but who knew if the check would be enough to cover such a price.

He stopped and rested on a bench near a café and tried to decide whether he could afford to spend the two hundred and fifty thousand for a glass of tea. He finally decided he couldn’t, although he was tired and his throat was dry and the taste of something sweet would have given him at least a moment’s pleasure. He changed his mind—his life was too short on pleasures—ordered a tea, and sat and watched passengers board the trains. The doors to the cabins were just a few feet away and he smelled the pungent burn of smoke and leather and oiled steel. Nothing stopped him from boarding the train—no gates, no chains, no conductors or policemen, just a few steps of empty space, an open door, and then the tracks shining out ahead of him into the land, into the heart of another life.

In a sleeper car, a beautiful woman dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt reached to place her luggage above her seat. Usually he would have looked away, but now, here in this station where no one knew him, he watched her. Her thin exposed arms poked out of a shirt that clung to her torso. He admired the shape of her body—the curve of her breasts, the arc of each individual rib. He imagined kissing her in the compartment, pulling her tightly to him while the wheels of the train clicked beneath them. He imagined traveling with her to Sofia, Bucharest, maybe even Vienna, holding her tight in the middle of the European streets, caressing the knuckles of her thin fingers in smoke-filled cafés without anyone paying attention. He imagined sharing a room, watching her undress before bed. But in his imagination he didn’t see her body; he simply saw the blurry impression of nakedness, a light in her brown eyes, and her hair brushing against her neck.

Then the train lurched forward and the woman dropped into her seat. A whistle sounded, the engine spat a dash of black smoke into the sky, and the train pulled away. He watched her face through the window, its reflection pressed against the glass, until, as the train snaked out of the station, her face was nothing but a memory.

Once the train was gone, Sinan found himself facing a wall papered with advertisements. A beautiful woman laughed into a cell phone. He hated the woman—her white teeth, her perfect clothes, her skin like the finest silk. No one was that happy. People were only happy on television or commercials, but not in real life. He finished his tea and fought off the guilt of his fantasy. By the time he left the station and stumbled out into the sharp morning light, he was arguing with himself in his head, explaining why his fantasy was not a sin and then explaining again why it was.

“Malatya,” an elderly man called out. The man stood in the flow of foot traffic, travelers swerving around him as though he were a rock in a stream. “One ticket to Malatya just ten million.”

Malatya was not Diyarbak
r but it was close. So close that if he got there and didn’t have the money for another ticket, someone would give him a ride.

“One ticket leaving tonight, third class.”

By tomorrow morning he could be there, standing beneath that desert blue sky, sucking in the sumac dry air.

“This ticket is good?” Sinan said.

“Yes,” the man said. One eye was clouded white but the other shone with sight. “My wife and I were to go together, but she was killed.”

He could go tonight and bring his family later.

“I’ll take it,” Sinan said.

Sinan gave him the ten-million note and the man handed him the ticket. Holding the ticket, his hands shook with excitement. By tomorrow morning—just one more sunset and sunrise—he would be gone from this city. It would be like going back in time, as though he never got on the train at all, had never come to this place.

The old man hobbled toward the station, heaving a trash bag of belongings onto his shoulder. He looked like a hunchback, his thin body a cracking of bones, and Sinan felt an extreme loneliness that broke him out of his passion. His heart sank because he knew he could not take that train.

“
Efendim?
” Sinan called after the old man. “Sir?” The man turned around, his back bent into a hook by the bag of possessions, his good eye sharp and distrustful.

“I’m sorry, I can’t take this ticket.”

“Try selling it yourself then,” the man said.

“No, no, you don’t understand. I have a family. It was a mistake.”

“Be glad you have a family. We all need the money.”

The man turned and crossed the street between two speeding buses.

Sinan stood there and watched him go, a ticket he would not use pressed into his hand. God punishes us for our sins. Somehow this fact comforted him. A small sin, a small price. What he almost did was much, much worse. What price God would have exacted for that sin he did not know.

Chapter 35

S
HE TRIED TO CATCH UP TO HIM, BUT HE PURPOSELY SKIPPED
two steps ahead of her. The men watched them again, this time, she thought, with approving eyes: a woman should always walk behind her man.

It was easy to miss the church; a whitewashed wall, twelve feet high, surrounded it, and from the street you wouldn’t notice the bell tower unless you craned your neck to see it. He led her down an alleyway, past an arbor hung with wisteria, to a small metal door cracked enough to let a single person through.

They squeezed inside and suddenly all the street sounds were muffled. The city, just beyond the walls, seemed very far away. Three cats lay stretched in the sun on the steps to the church and a fountain dribbled water into a marble basin slimed with algae. Three orange trees stood in the courtyard, their branches dotted with overripe fruit.

She had never been in a church before and its beauty surprised her. It was a small building, crowded with rows of benches that made it feel populated even though no one was inside. The dome was painted with pink clouds, and a man, the prophet Jesus, she guessed, was frescoed on the wall above the front of the church. He held a black book in one hand. His other hand was held aloft, almost as though he were gesturing to touch her. One finger touched his thumb, while the others—three long, white, elegant fingers—dangled in the air in a sign she didn’t recognize. Jesus’ face was very calm-looking, very kind and thoughtful, almost sleepy-eyed, and she remembered the stories her father had told her about him—the miracles he performed, his admonishments of the Jews, the way the Jews betrayed him and the Romans nailed him to a cross. Hanging there in dazzling gold on the wall in front of her, he did look like a prophet.

She followed Dylan to the front of the church, where tea candles flickered in a metal box. He climbed the steps, and she stopped to watch him, feeling like an intruder on some sacred quiet.

“Come here,” he said, looking down at her.

“Are we supposed to be here?” She glanced toward the rear of the church, looking for the screens that hid the women’s prayer section, looking for anything that would tell her what to do. “The door was almost closed. Maybe they don’t want people inside.”

“Nah,” he said. “Some Greeks were killed here, like back in 1922 or something. Right before the exchange of populations. They don’t want everyone to know how to get in.”

“Come on,” he said again. “I want to show you something.”

He lifted a candle from the metal box and took her hand. They passed beneath Jesus and his outstretched hands, his eyes following them across the marble floor. Dylan’s candle flickered against the wall like light undulating through water. Then, in a darkened corner of the church, the light caught the slender body of a woman in full hijab. It was a strange
abaya,
though, one that wasn’t black but a beautiful sky blue that matched Jesus’ eyes. The candlelight exposed her feet first and then the curve of her hips beneath the fabric and the shape of her breasts and then her face. Her eyes were cast downward, her long eyelashes touching her cheeks. Her face was absolutely white, like snow freshly fallen on the street before the cars turn it black. A tear hung on her left cheek, suspended there as though it would never fall, and it wouldn’t—it would rest there forever in this darkened corner of a church. The woman was beautiful, sad like all women, but beautiful in her sadness.

“My mom used to take me here when I was little,” Dylan said.

She was covered, but she was different.
rem couldn’t say in what way she was different—strands of her hair showed, the
abaya
was blue—but that wasn’t it.

“You know the story of the Virgin Mary, right?”

For a moment she thought he was going to make a crude joke, but the candlelight illuminated the seriousness of his face.

“Yes,” she said. “A little.”

“Mom always said that Mary was the strong one. It was easy for Jesus, she said, because he knew he was God’s son, he knew the pain would end. But Mary had to watch her son die, had to be left behind. I think that’s why she couldn’t buy the story the way my father can.”

Then suddenly, as if that was all he wanted to say, he snatched the candle away and left the woman in darkness again.

“Stop,”
rem said. She grabbed Dylan’s hand and moved the candle beneath her again, a ghost rising from the mortar of the wall.

She watched the form flicker in the light. Her body seemed to move, just barely, under the spell of the single flame, as though the woman took shallow breaths to remain still.

“She’s always been my favorite,” Dylan said. “Out of all of them.”

She looked proud,
rem decided. That’s what was different about her. She was sad, but proud, as though she kept her sadness like a prize.

Dylan walked her to a podium now and took her hands and Jesus Bey still stared down at them.

“Marry me,” he said.

“Marry you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re in a church.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Do you, oh-so-beautiful
rem Ba
io
lu”—and here he smiled his best smile, the crooked one that was devious and innocent at the same time—“take Dylan Roberts to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“You know this doesn’t count,” she said.

“For better or for worse, in sickness and in health…”

“You’re crazy.”

“If we want this,” he said, “we’ve got to make up our own rules.”

He untied a black leather bracelet from his wrist, took her left arm and pulled her close to him so he could tie it around her wrist. His shoulder was against hers and she watched his face, his downcast eyes, their long eyelashes, as he tied the knot in the bracelet.

“My mother gave this to me,” he said.

“No. I can’t,” she said, but she wanted it and she wanted him to protest her protest.

“Yes,” he said and turned the bracelet around on her pale wrist so the knot wouldn’t show. He ran his fingers across the blue veins that showed just beneath her skin. Electricity shot up her arm and tickled her side.

“Until death do you part?”

She laughed.

“I do,” he said. “Say, ‘I do.’”

“No.”

“C’mon.”

“All right,” she said. “Now leave me alone.”

“You may kiss the bride.”

“Not in a church,” she said.

When they were outside again, thunderclouds blackened the sky, and the bricks were slick with smatterings of raindrops. It was getting late and the express ferry had already blown its horn, but she couldn’t make herself care too much. She slipped and nearly fell and he grabbed her by the waist and held her close and she let him. They weren’t married and maybe they never would be, but it was fun to pretend, so fun it almost seemed real.