Gardens of Water (49 page)

She dabbed away the blood with toilet paper and buttoned up the cuffs of her blouse. She thought, now, she could endure another three days of her mother’s brutality.

Chapter 39

M
ARCUS BEY SHOWED UP AT CARREFOUR TEN MINUTES
before Sinan’s break.

“Can I buy you tea?”

The American’s shoulders stooped as though something had been broken in him. The bags beneath his eyes were coal black.

“I won’t change my mind,” Sinan said. “My daughter won’t see your son.”

Marcus smiled wearily and rubbed his forehead. “I’ve kept my word on that,” Marcus said. “But it seems we hold similar sway over our children. There’s something else I want to talk with you about.”

Marcus read a magazine off the racks while Sinan finished his shift, and afterward they sat at a patio table at Divan, the expensive
pastanesi
Sinan had never thought of drinking at. Marcus sat down, but his shoulders still sloped and he stared at the ground.

“A boy died,” Marcus said. “Yesterday, in Row B. Although we didn’t find out until this morning.”

“Who?”

Marcus took a very small sip and then held the cup in the palm of his hand. The cup shook and a little tea spilled out.

“Derin Anbar.”

A Kurdish name, though Sinan didn’t know the child or his family.

“He was a friend of
smail’s,” Marcus said. “One of the boys he played soccer with. Did
smail say anything to you?”

“No,” Sinan said.
smail was quiet last night, he remembered, but nothing out of the ordinary. “He cried in his sleep.”

“I thought you should know. I think he’s upset, but he won’t talk about it.”

Sinan was again moved by this American’s care for his child.

“The boy was sick, but they wouldn’t let us see him,” Marcus continued. “Diarrhea. He was one of those kids who jumped in the puddle after the storm.” He took another sip and grimaced as though the tea tasted terrible.

“Are you all right?” Sinan asked.

“My stomach is bothering me.” He shook his head with frustration. “We should have pushed into that tent anyway.”

“God’s will,” Sinan said. “It was
his
time.”

Marcus looked at him for the first time, recognizing, Sinan thought, his own logic about the loss of his wife being used against him. It didn’t seem to comfort him.

“I knew a boy,” Marcus said. “Not much older than
smail. In the camp near Güzelsu.” He stopped and sipped his tea again. He made a face as he swallowed.

“In ’ninety-one?”

“Yes,” he said. “I used to buy these soccer jerseys to give to the boys. They loved them. Such a silly thing as an Arsenal jersey but they made them happy.” He paused as though he had not told this story before, as though it was very painful. “This boy, Haluk, and I became friends. His parents were still in Iraq and his uncle had gotten him across the border. Someone brought a beach ball to the camp, so we’d kick it around between the tents. He always wanted to know about America, wanted to know if I knew Michael Jordan.” He smiled as though remembering. “You know who Michael Jordan is?”

“Everyone knows Michael Jordan.”

“I left for
stanbul to take care of school business and when I was there I bought a bunch of jerseys in a store in Beyo
lu. I don’t know why I didn’t think to buy a Bulls jersey, but I didn’t. When I got back to the camp, I gave Haluk an FC Barcelona jersey. Red and blue with yellow trim.”

“Blue?”

“Blue,” Marcus said, nodding his head. “I know the Kurdish colors, Sinan, it wasn’t green. I swear it wasn’t green.” He sipped his tea and then added more sugar. “Haluk put that jersey on and paraded around the camp like he had won the lottery.” He laughed. “I’d never seen him smile like that. The other boys came around and touched the fabric and pulled on the numbers. They asked me if I had any more. I did, but I lied because I wanted Haluk to feel special, at least for one day.

“The next morning his uncle found me at my tent, and asked if Haluk was with me. He wasn’t and we searched the camp all morning. We asked the U.N. workers if they’d seen him but they hadn’t. We asked everyone, I think, on every single row of that camp—and it was huge at that point, a small city of war refugees—and no one had seen him. He just disappeared.”

“The paramilitary?” Sinan asked, although he knew the answer already.

“How do they do that? Right under the U.N.’s nose and no one sees them?”

Sinan thought about telling Marcus who trained the Special Teams, but this story was not what he expected from the American.

“The next day, when we knew Haluk was gone, his uncle screamed at me. How could you let him wear that shirt? he yelled. Didn’t I know? he said. Didn’t I know those colors were illegal I did, I told him, but the shirt was blue, not the forbidden green.”

“It was blue,” Marcus said, looking at Sinan now. “I swear it. FC Barcelona’s colors are red, yellow, and blue. Not green.”

“It’s too close,” Sinan said. “It’s close enough.”

“He was a boy, Sinan. A twelve-year-old boy, not a terrorist.”

“He knew he shouldn’t wear those colors, Marcus Bey. Every twelve-year-old boy in Kurdistan knows not to wear the Kurdish colors. Or anything close to them.”

“It was blue, Sinan,” Marcus said. “Not green.”

“I know, but it doesn’t matter.”

They were silent again and Sinan watched Marcus stare out the opening of the tent where the sun cast shadows across the dirt.

“The war is over now,” Sinan said. “Öcalan is rotting on Dog Island, the PKK is dead, and the Kurds are sick of fighting.”

In the evening light Marcus’s face looked drawn, the bags under his eyes heavy and resting on the bone beneath.

“The boy who just died—Derin—was ten,” Marcus said. “You can’t tell me it was his time. We had medicine. It was treatable. Those people—”

“They don’t trust you Americans.”

Marcus slumped back into his chair as though he had run into this problem before, as though he thought his time spent in Turkey should earn him absolute trust. He raked his fingers through his hair.

“When I was twelve,” Sinan said, trying to explain, “I buried my father. But seven others, some of them my friends, buried empty caskets. The village men said those seven had been bound and dragged behind jeeps out into the desert, but no one ever found the bodies. A few days later a goatherd found three ears, but no bodies. One of the nice things the paramilitaries liked to do to suspected PKK men—cut off their ears, among other things.”

“Sinan—”

“Where do they make those jeeps, Marcus Bey? Detroit, is it Is that the name?”

Marcus shifted his weight, and let out a frustrated breath.

“The army waited outside the cemetery,” Sinan continued, “in American-made M-60 tanks and when a son of one of the dead men tried to drape a Kurdish flag over the casket—a flag with those three stupid colors that was to be buried in the ground—they ripped it out of his hands.”

He paused a moment, remembering the scene—the little cemetery on the edge of town, the dry, frozen ground, the treeless hill above the village where the government had written out the slogan
HAPPY IS HE WHO CALLS HIMSELF A TURK
in huge painted rocks.

“The mountains were covered in fresh snow,” he continued, “and the sun was so bright it hurt your eyes. I couldn’t watch when they shoveled the dirt, so I looked out at the peaks of Hakkâri and every rock looked like a body to me and all I could think was that somewhere out there were my father’s killers and those killers had my friends’ fathers’ bodies.”

“I’m not responsible for every tank and gun that makes it into the hands of terrible governments,” Marcus said.

“That gets
sold
to those terrible governments.”

Marcus leaned back in his chair and pushed his fingers against his stomach.

“
Those
people that wouldn’t let you see their son,” Sinan said, pointedly, “are Kurdish. Mine is not an uncommon experience.”

“You don’t trust me, either.”

“I’m indebted to you,” he said. “I don’t trust your son.”

“Or your daughter.”

Sinan said nothing.

“A pill, Sinan. The boy that just died, just hours before this, simply needed a pill.”

“They were protesting the closing of a school, my father and those men,” Sinan said, leaning across the table. “That’s why they were killed. They wanted their children to go to school.”