Gardens of Water (60 page)

He stabbed the knife into another box so that the handle stood straight in the air before pointing his finger at his wife.

“You didn’t have a choice,” he said.

She stood completely still, her mouth hanging open so that he saw her rotten teeth, nubs as black as spoiled grape stems.

She stepped up to him and grabbed his arm.

“I found bloodstains in her sleeping bag,” she whispered loudly.

Her eyes filled with water, and she waited until he felt the words lodge in his gut before she turned and dragged
smail by the hand through the aisles of the store. Even as she strode through the sliding glass doors, he could hear
smail’s cries echoing off the linoleum floor and rattling around in the aluminum roof.

AFTER WORK, HE STOOD
at the bus stop along the edge of the highway and watched six buses unload and load up again. He searched the destroyed town, in the empty façades of buildings where men crouched in corners, hidden from the midday sun to drink cans of beer and smoke cigarettes; he checked the waterfront where the old men squatted on chunks of cement, their fishing poles dangling above the water like wilted antennas; he even climbed the hilltop where he and
rem had talked the other night, where the earth seemed to fall away into the sea, where she had told him that she had kissed the boy. And the whole time he tried to come to some conclusion in his mind about what he would do when he found her.

That night he attended mosque and prayed, but the words meant nothing to him. He didn’t even hear his voice, they were empty recitations, ritualized motion, full of as much meaning as the loudspeaker announcements of product specials at Carrefour. Maybe she would never come back. If she did, was he to be understanding and welcome her? He couldn’t bear losing her, but he couldn’t bear her rejections anymore, either. Her willingness to disobey him pierced him with an impotence he had never felt. The ease with which she gave up her family tore him with betrayal, but mostly—more than all of this—he was desperately hurt that his daughter didn’t love him as much as she loved this boy.

When he left mosque, men were gathered outside, smoking cigarettes and listening to the mayor.

“The government has forgotten about you,” the mayor was saying, “because they only care about the rich Kemalists, the liberals who want to destroy religion, turn themselves into little Frenchmen.”

“And what have you done?” It was Malik, and he spat on the ground in front of the mayor. “You weren’t here when my son was ill. Talk, talk, talk. That’s all it is.”

“Malik Bey,” the mayor said. “I’m very grieved over the loss of your son. Had I been here and not in Ankara pushing the Kemalists to send supplies I would’ve done everything in my power to save him.”

“Talk, promises, but you do nothing.” Malik left the crowd and the men watched after him.

“Where’s the military, where’s the Red Crescent I’m here, but where are they?”

A few men started a backgammon game, but they were still listening.

“The Kemalist generals are free with their tanks,” the mayor continued, “when an Islamist party gets elected into parliament, but when you’re suffering…” He threw his hand over his shoulder, as though casting seed into the wind. “Paah.” He spoke more loudly and turned his face toward the soup kitchen. “They leave you to have Jesus shoved down your throat.”

Kemal Aras, squeezing through the crowd, approached Sinan in the gathering darkness. At first Sinan didn’t recognize him, but as his eyes adjusted he saw the newly grown beard and the white skullcap pressed on top of his head.

“Good evening Sinan Bey. Peace.”

“Peace to you,” Sinan said, feeling tired and unwilling to talk.

But Kemal took his arm and they walked toward the rows of tents, through the rank-smelling clouds of propane stove smoke and the groups of children playing in the street.

“I’m sorry about your daughter, my friend.”

“Why are you sorry?” Sinan said. How did this man know, after only half a day, that his daughter was gone?

“You’re a good man, Sinan,” Kemal said. “It’s not your fault. Our women are going bad. It follows that our daughters would, too.”

“My daughter is just sad. This earthquake has made her act strange.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Kemal said. “It’s been hard on all of us, but people forget the cause, Sinan, and only see the effect. They’re afraid if you let loose of your daughter, theirs will try to follow. And when our women go bad, the men will be next. Believe me, I hear this every day from people.”

The men drinking tea and smoking at the card table watched them come, only to turn and resume their conversation as they passed, as if they hadn’t been watching them at all.

“I’ve been thinking that this earthquake is punishment from God,” Kemal said. “We’ve forgotten the straight path.”

He stopped and lit a cigarette before taking Sinan’s arm again.

“I’ve been an immoral man,” he continued. “I’ve cheated people, as you know. I’ve been tempted and succumbed to it.” He turned his lips up as though disgusted with himself. Sinan noticed that the scab was gone and only a faint pink mark remained. “There’s something evil in us all, and God is reminding us that he sees it.”

They passed a group of women who were beating rugs with sticks. One woman shook her head and clicked her tongue as though something horrible had happened right in front of her.

Kemal waved his hand at her. “Bite your tongue, woman.”

She turned away and slapped the rug. A cloud of dust burst from the pile.

“People are speaking ill of you,” Kemal said. “It’s the first time I’ve heard such comments. Before, people respected you. A bit quiet, yes, too quiet perhaps, but they didn’t doubt your good name.”

Sinan’s chest tightened.

“This is important, Sinan. People say she’s pregnant.”

Sinan untangled his arm from Kemal’s and faced him in the street.

“What people say and what’s the truth are often two different things.”

“Does it matter, Sinan?” A few young men gathered to watch now that he and Kemal were face-to-face; theirs was no longer a quiet evening stroll between acquaintances. “She’s running around with the American boy. He worships Satan, pierces his skin, carves up his arms with symbols. Do you want to give over your daughter, your only daughter to that?”

Sinan thought about hitting him, but you didn’t attack a man for offering you the truth.

“These Americans,” Kemal said, looking toward the relief workers’ campfire, “they want to take everything from us.” He touched Sinan on the shoulder. “Well, you, far more than I, know what Americans are like.” He let go of Sinan’s shoulder and fingered the prayer beads in his palm. “Your daughter is forgetting about God. As soon as she turned away from you, she turned away from God. You need to bring her back.”

“No man should suggest to a father what you’re suggesting,” Sinan said. “No man outside the family.”

“It’s your name, Sinan. Your son’s name. Your father’s honor as well as yours.”

Sinan began to speak and then stopped as Kemal’s words cut through skin and muscle tissue and lodged, like a shard of broken glass, beneath his rib cage.

“Sometimes you need to slice away the cancer to preserve the body.” Kemal rested his hand on Sinan’s shoulder.

rem was the cancer; his own daughter was what needed to be cut away and discarded.

“These people would understand, Sinan. We would understand.”

Chapter 46

T
HAT AFTERNOON DYLAN’S ARM LAY DRAPED OVER
REM’S
shoulder as they rode the
belediyesi
bus into
stanbul. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it, exactly, but people stared. A neatly dressed man with a little boy scolded the child for watching them and lifted him over his lap so that he faced the window instead of the aisle. The boy turned around in the seat, his brown eyes hovering above the backrest, until his father tapped him on the head and turned him around. She watched the backs of their heads, the child’s cantaloupe-shaped, like his father’s, each with a swirl of black hair spinning out of their scalps. She imagined the feel of
smail’s hair in her hands, so thick, so coarse like the clipped hair of a horse’s mane, and everything she was leaving behind overwhelmed her and she had to look away.

Now, out the window, the sun was high in the sky and it shone down on the broken industrial buildings of
zmit and made them look horribly small, like the whole city was cast in miniature. Sunlight glanced off the water in blinding sparkles and the horizon stretched on into the sky until the two met and seemed to become one. It seemed to her that the sun was terribly large, as though it grew in force and size by the moment and would eventually burn everything to the ground. And riding high up on the freeway she couldn’t escape it. Its heat beat onto her arms and shoulders no matter how many towns they passed, no matter how many kilometers they rolled away from Gölcük. Already she was farther away from her home and her family than she had ever been, and she suddenly felt hopeless. She wanted to go back, she wanted to turn the bus around, and when she heard the brakes squeal she thought, for a moment, the bus driver had read her mind.

But the bus stopped on the side of the highway and a
i
man teyze
climbed on, waddling like a flightless bird, pulling a cart full of rotten eggplant behind her. She sat in the empty seat in front of them and turned her head just enough to be heard as she tsk-tsked her tongue at them.

“She’s my sister,
teyze,
” Dylan said. “That man over there kept staring at her.” He pointed his thumb toward the father. “I thought he might be dangerous.”

rem laughed into her hand. No one believed it, of course, but it shut the woman up. She calmed down immediately. She wasn’t alone; Dylan would take care of her. His weight pressed on her shoulders, the heat of his body radiated through her skirt to tingle her skin. She imagined her father here on the bus, staring at them, and in her mind she said to him, “Look, Baba, this boy loves me! A boy—a man!—loves me.” She imagined the look on his face, the hopeless pain in his eyes, the water pooling there as he realized he was losing her forever. “You didn’t love me,” she imagined saying to him. “But I do,
can
m,
” he said back. “I love you best, more than you can know, more than anything.” She felt a brief imagined joy and realized, coming back to the world, that she was staring at the side of the father’s face across the aisle. He had a hooked nose and a flap of skin that sagged from his jaw like a chicken’s and he looked nothing like her father.

“Here,” Dylan said. “You look nervous.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Listen to this.”

He took his headphones, severed the wire down the middle, and pulled the earpieces apart.

“I understand,” he said. “It’s shitty the way your parents treated you.”

But he didn’t understand. It was her parents’ right. She had defied them.

He placed one earphone in her right ear and the other in his left.

“Lean back,” he said. “It’ll be all right. Everything’ll be just fine.”

He pushed the button that started the music. It was Radiohead again—the music that was like floating, like dying, but dying beautifully. Dylan had told her the lyrics and she sang them in Turkish in her mind while the singer sang them in English in her head.

I’m not here. This isn’t happening. I’m not here.

Below the raised highway, an apartment building lay accordioned in the street. A chair hung from a telephone pole.

In a little while, I’ll be gone.

She wondered why he would play such sad music for her now. Why couldn’t they listen to Tarkan or Cher? But she loved the music. She loved the sadness. It hurt so wonderfully, hurt in a way that made her realize she had never really felt anything before.

The bus turned inland and the sea receded into the sky so that soon it was just a distant streak of silver. The city replaced the sea on the horizon, all jumbled honeycomb blocks of apartment buildings. She had never in her life seen so many buildings in one place and it was difficult to imagine all the people squished together here. As far as she could see, red-tiled rooftops and satellite dishes spread before her like a sea of cement.

“Here it comes,” Dylan said, his voice full of excitement. He jiggled his knees up and down. “These are just the suburbs.”

They drove on for another twenty minutes and the traffic got heavier and the sun began to drop in the sky and an orange haze settled over the city.
Dolmu
es stopped to pick up passengers on the side of the highway and then swung back out into traffic. Men sold fruit from wooden stands propped up by the highway guardrails, and dust smattered their faces as the buses passed. She saw a man carrying three silver birdcages, the beaks of doves poking between the bars like living thorns. She saw a turned-over donkey cart and a dented taxi. A Gypsy woman screamed at the taxi driver, her open palm gesturing toward the dead animal, his hooves resting in a puddle of his own blood. And behind the accident, the cars piled up like a river had been dammed. They went on forever, their headlights glowing a trail into the city.