Gardens of Water (52 page)

“Don’t start with me, daughter. Your brother’s not well. You better not have seen that boy.”

“Ask the women at the laundry.”

Nilüfer stared at her a moment and then rushed off to the restroom.

Inside the tent,
smail sat working on another drawing. The rice she had made earlier for him was untouched. Now
she
was getting worried.

“You have to eat something,” she said.

He glanced at her and then began drawing again.

From the first-aid kit Marcus Bey had brought for her father’s foot, she pulled out a length of gauze and some tape. She turned her back on her brother and began to cover her wound.

“Why is mother so mean to you?”
smail asked.

She knew exactly why. She was jealous, jealous
rem might have freedoms she did not. The tape got folded up and she had to cut another length while holding the gauze in place with one hand.

“Maybe you should stop doing the bad things that make her mad,”
smail said.

“How can I do anything bad,
smail!” She turned toward him more than she would have liked and she saw him look at her wrist. She turned her back again. “How can I?” she said, calm this time. “I’m locked in this tent.”

“I don’t like it when she’s mean to you.”

She finished with the wrist and pulled down the blouse cuff.

“I don’t like it, either.”

The rice was sticky and cold, but she carried it over to him anyway and sat down on the sleeping bag next to him.

“Eat this,” she said, holding a spoonful up to his mouth. “For me.”

He opened his mouth and she placed the spoonful on his tongue.

“If it was me,” she said, “they’d let me starve.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She ran her hand through his hair. It wasn’t his fault, even though she sometimes wanted it to be. She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. He laughed.

“Eat some more.” He did and it was just like it was when he was a toddler and he wouldn’t eat for her mother. He would always eat for her, though. Back then he might scream and cry with her mother, throw the food on the floor, but
rem would make a face and he would eat anything she put in his mouth.

“What are you drawing over here?”

He turned the page to show her. A boy with wings hovered above the soccer field. His wings were yellow and he flew toward a big yellow sun.

“It’s pretty,” she said. “That’s your friend?”

He nodded, closed the book, and put it underneath his sleeping bag.

“Why do people die?”
smail said.

“They just do,” she said, looking up at the ceiling of the tent, surprised by the question. “Sometimes they’re old, accidents happen.”

“The earthquake?”

“The earthquake,” she said, but she wondered how such a thing could be an accident. She shrugged. “Sometimes they’re sad.”

“And they get sick?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

smail played with his shoelaces, and she watched him, hoping he was okay and that he wouldn’t ask her any more questions, because she didn’t really know how to answer them. She could make it worse when she wanted to make it better.

“Or they stop eating.”

He laughed again and opened his mouth for the spoon. When she laid her hand in her lap, he touched the wrist where the gauze was. She pulled her hand away, stood and dropped the rice in the makeshift sink.

“Don’t you tell anyone,” she said, pointing the dirty spoon at him.

He shook his head. “I won’t.”

She dropped the spoon in the saucepan and began boiling water for the evening tea.

“You’re scaring me,”
smail said.

Striking the match against the edge of the propane stove, she lit the broiler and a blue flame flared up before settling to orange. She blew out a frustrated breath; she was scared, too.

“Everything will be all right,
smail. Don’t worry.”

Chapter 41

A
COUPLE OF DAYS LATER THE SUMMER HEAT HAD BROKEN.
The brown haze lifted, the hills across the water returned, and Sinan could feel the cool October air brush across his neck as he prayed. Behind the prayer niche, beyond the two-by-fours that supported the flimsy roof of the mosque, the sky shone like polished glass, the kind of Anatolian sky that blinded you, bleached color out of carpets, and sucked the water out of the ground.

He had stopped to pray before going to the tent, stopped to gather his head before being confronted with an angry daughter, a frightened son, and a panicked wife. He needed a break: the double shifts at work, the upheaval in a home that wasn’t a home, and the fear that he would be stuck here in this city was more than he could bear. A resentment was growing inside of him like a thorn bush, and he found himself acting out a fantasy in his head in which he broke down and screamed at his family. He would imagine Nilüfer pleading with him to do something and, in his mind, he would turn on her, saying, “I’m only a man, Nilüfer. I cannot do everything.” And suddenly she would understand and embrace him and he would be relieved of responsibility. He imagined such scenes with his daughter while unloading boxes of cleaning supplies. He imagined them with his son, though he never yelled at the boy, and
smail would suddenly eat, he would again be the happy child he’d been before the earthquake and Sinan could then sleep. He could then stop working sixteen hours a day. He could eat a meal of lamb kebabs in peace and know his family was safe.

Closing his eyes, he sucked in the air and the dryness chapped his lungs. He recited the prayers and his heart quit thumping in his ears; he bent his head to the prayer rug and the static in his brain receded to a quiet hum. He could breathe again, and when he sat up he could feel the sore muscles in his stomach, and he noticed the stiffness in his jaw where, for weeks it seemed, he had been clenching his teeth. And it was at times like this—these infrequent calm moments that washed over him like warm spring water—that he almost wished for death, that even though it was a sin to desire such a thing, he wished God would deliver him to Paradise this moment, because this temporary peace would break too soon. He said the prayers twice to extend the moment and allow the world to recede even further along his conscience horizon.

It was nearly sunset when he left the tent and it only took until he maneuvered his left foot into his shoe for the world to crowd in on him again.

“Sinan Bey,” Dylan said, standing above him in the growing dark, smoking a cigarette. “Can I please speak with you?”

Sinan said nothing and felt the blood rush to the surface of his skin as he tied the shoelace.

“Please, sir.”

“I know what you want,” Sinan said. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You don’t know everything I want.”

Sinan stared up at the boy. He was dressed in black pants and a gray shirt. His arms were covered and he seemed to be growing a faint beard, one with patches of baldness where the hair wouldn’t sprout yet.

“I’m tired,” Sinan said.

“I know,” Dylan said. “You work like crazy.”

“And you know all the hours to my shifts, don’t you?”

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” the boy said. “You just make it hard.”

“You may not mean it.” Sinan stood and started to walk away. “But you’re selfish enough to cause it anyway.”

Other men who had arrived early to prayer filed out of the mosque and some of them passed in a hurry to get to dinner. Fires were beginning to fill the tent aisles with orange smoke and the smell of barbecued mutton wafted in the air.

“Please, Sinan Bey. I’m trying to do the right thing, but maybe the right thing doesn’t matter to you.”

Sinan spun around, pressed his fist into the boy’s chest. A few men stopped to watch what was happening.

“In your case, you might be right.”

The boy’s eyes filled with water, and he suddenly seemed younger than his seventeen years, as though his manhood were still some distant, unrealized possibility.

Sinan removed his fist from the boy’s chest. “You’re still a child and you don’t understand.” He looked the boy in the eyes. “Stay away from my daughter…please.”

“I love her,” he said.

“I know what boys think,” Sinan said. “My daughter’s thinking about love, but you’re thinking about something else.”

“No, you’re wrong.”

“I’m not wrong. Boys think you feel love with the lips. You think you feel it with your hands.”

“Sinan Bey,” Dylan said. “Would it be different if I was Muslim?”

Sinan looked at the boy, taken aback by the suggestion.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about,” the boy said.

At that moment Kemal came up behind Sinan.

“Good evening, Sinan Bey.” He laid his hand on Sinan’s shoulder. “Is everything all right?”

The boy glared at Kemal.

“Yes, Kemal Bey. We’re just having a discussion.”

“Okay,” Kemal said, lighting a cigarette now. “Okay, my brother. I’m having dinner with friends over here. If you need anything, just let me know.”

“He’s your friend?” Dylan said. The boy’s eyes were furious.

“Yes.”

Dylan watched Kemal walk away, the muscles in his jaw working.

“Why?” asked Sinan.

The boy looked him in the face, his eyes full of anger, his teeth grinding now. “Nothing,” he said. He looked away. “No reason. Forget it.”

Creeping out from the cuffs of the boy’s shirt were tattoos that blossomed across the tops of his hands—a dragon’s tail, two points of a star, an ornamented leaf. He wore necklaces that fell beneath his buttoned collar. His eyes were blue, as foreign to Sinan as icebergs and freezing northern seas. His lips, those lips—red and chapped now—had kissed his daughter. Who knew what his hands had done.

“You don’t become Muslim just by buttoning up your shirt,” Sinan said. “Or by growing a beard.” He tugged lightly on the scraggly hair of the boy’s chin and Dylan pulled away, his eyes once again filling with water.

“Five prayers a day,” the boy said. “Fasting during Ramadan. The pilgrimage to Mecca. Alms.” Dylan shot him a self-satisfied look.

“Profession of faith.”

The boy rolled his eyes, and Sinan knew he was cursing himself for his silly mistake. Sinan, though, was glad he had forgotten that one pillar of faith. It was too fundamental to be a nervous oversight, and the boy had lived in the country long enough to understand that.

“And modesty,” Sinan added. “You must have modesty.”

The boy was looking at the ground now.

“No,” Sinan said, flatly. “It wouldn’t matter.”

Dylan looked up and Sinan saw the switch in his eyes. One moment he was pleading, his eyes soft and watering with what looked like desperate love, and then in the next second darkness flooded them.

“You just hate me,” the boy said.

Sinan turned his back and walked away.

“Nothing I do is right.”

Sinan didn’t look over his shoulder, but he could tell Dylan was following him.

“You can’t stop us.”

“Yabanci.”
Sinan heard Kemal’s voice. “Foreigner, leave the man alone.”

“My mom saved your son.”

There was a scuffling of feet and then Kemal and Dylan were yelling, but Sinan didn’t turn around; he just kept walking and let someone else take care of the boy.

AND THEN, AS IF
God were angry with him, as though he was to be tested further, he found Nilüfer walking toward him through the row of tents.

“Can you not come home first, Sinan?” She held
smail’s pad of paper in her left hand, panic gathering in her face. “Even the muezzin is still finishing his tea.”

“What’s wrong?”

She grabbed his hand without stopping and tugged him in the direction he had just come.

“What’s wrong, Nilüfer?”

She shook her head and squeezed his hand and they rushed together back toward their tent, Sinan trying to read her face. An image of his dead son flashed in his head, and he was angry with her for keeping this from him, for even a minute. No, he wasn’t dead. She’d be on the ground weeping if he was. He was sick. He had caught the sickness from that boy.

At the tent, she shut the canvas flap and threw the pad on the sleeping bags.

“Look at this, Sinan,” she said, flipping the pages.

Nilüfer stood back and bit her nails as he sat on his knees, bent over the paper.

In the bottom half of the picture, a boy stood among broken buildings and bodies drawn in red. He gazed into the sky at the floating body of another boy, his skin a bright yellow, his eyes two black holes in his head. The boy in the sky had something that looked like wings attached to his back.

“Look at this one.” She flipped the pages to a sheet covered in black crayon. “This was before the boy died.”

The crayon marks were violently stitched together as if
smail had been trying to rip the paper. But in the left-hand corner, surrounded by a sickly yellow light, he had drawn the body of a boy, his legs curled up to his head in an unnatural fashion, his hands twisted behind his back, the elbows breaking at odd angles. But what was most disturbing was the boy’s face—the eyes were drawn with
X
’s and the mouth was a gaping red hole. Next to the boy,
smail had written “Me.”

“I think he’s sick,” Nilüfer said, whispering. “But not sick like bleeding inside, but sick here.” She pointed to her head.

“He’s not crazy, Nilüfer.” Although he thought the same thing when he saw the picture. “He’s just scared.”

The boy used to draw pictures of birds he saw down at the waterfront. Beautiful, if childish, renderings of storks with their long, black plumes, terns with the bright orange arrows on their beaks, and wild flamingos, sketched in bright streaks of pink, that he spied last spring crossing the sea on their way to the southern coast.

“Oh, Sinan,” she said. “What was it like? Our baby! He shouldn’t have to go through such a thing.”

“I know,
can
m,
” Sinan said. He held her hand. “I know.”