Gardens of Water (72 page)

The boy pushed back the sleeping bag, revealing his head. He lay there looking up at Sinan, his eyes glassy and tired.

“Sit up,” Sinan said.

smail did, but he let his head droop.

Sinan ran his hands through the boy’s hair, but
smail jerked his head away.

“Son,” he said. “I miss
rem, too. She’s gone, though, and nothing we can do will bring her back.”

smail said nothing. He bit his bottom lip and looked at the floor. “You loved her, I know. I loved her, too.”

smail looked at him, his eyes full of a question, his lips parted as though ready to ask it. Please don’t ask where she’s gone, Sinan thought. Please don’t ask that question.

smail knitted his brow as though something sharp had sliced at his stomach. The boy looked closely at Sinan’s eyes—too close—and seemed to analyze his whole face before falling back into the bag and covering his head.

“It’s okay to be sad,” Sinan said. “But it will get better.” But he felt like he was lying.

Later that night, after they had turned out the light, Sinan heard the rustling of
smail’s sleeping bag. It became quiet again, but he had the feeling he was being watched. He looked in his son’s direction and found
smail sitting up in the dark, the boy staring directly at him.

“What’s wrong,
smail?”

The boy didn’t say anything but kept staring.

“
smail?”

“Nothing, Baba,” he said, and lay back down.

AT FAJR PRAYER THE
next morning, Sinan found the ritual comforting, found that the prayers, spoken as easily as his own name, calmed him. There was nothing but God. God had a plan for everything. Nothing, no matter how horrible, was accidental—it just seemed so to us.

It was payday at Carrefour, but the check only came to fifty-six million. No one paid you to mourn your daughter. He needed nineteen million more, just nineteen, but he would have to wait another two weeks.

He went through the motions at evening prayer—the washings, the recitations, the prostrations—and he noticed how his back hurt, the way the muscles in the palms of his hands ached. He felt each tensed tendon, every tender strand in his body. The worst of it, though, was that while he recited the suras, when he was supposed to be focused on God, he kept seeing the American boy’s face. He was out there somewhere, in some snowy American landscape, his face smug with the knowledge that he had taken
rem.

The men were gathered again in front of the mosque, and whatever quiet he was able to manage during prayer was ruined immediately. The crowd was larger this time, and Sinan sat and listened even after he had pulled on his shoes.

“The government lets these people stay here and preach to you,” the mayor was saying, “because Ecevit and the others in Ankara don’t want you thinking about how they’ve failed you. They want you mad at these Americans and not them.”

The crowd grew louder, the men playing backgammon suspending their game, the ones quietly smoking under the plane tree standing up to hear.

“In Yalova—Do you know this?” the mayor continued. “Have you heard? The military is building houses for the people while you sit here in tents. I don’t have to tell you that it’s because the politicians have summer homes there.”