Gardens of Water (82 page)

Over the boy’s shoulder, Sinan watched him draw. Every other picture his son had drawn was dark and full of nightmarish images, but this picture was bright with a shining yellow sun that sent bursts of color across the page. The sky was blue, and pink flowers sprouted from the green grass. There was a rock tomb, but it wasn’t a scary place. The rock covering the tomb had been pushed aside, and a man dressed in white cloth stood in front of the tomb as though he had just emerged. People stood to the side of the tomb, their faces drawn with smiles, their hands held up to the sky. And near these people, drawn in glowing yellow light, was another man, a circle of gold floating around his head, a beard clinging to his face, his eyes as blue as water. He held his hands out to the man covered in cloth as though commanding him to rise. It was—though a child’s drawing—a beautiful picture.

“What is this?” Sinan said.

“Prophet Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life.”

Sinan sat up then and saw, for the first time, the small book from which
smail was copying the picture. He reached over the boy’s shoulder and grabbed it. Sinan turned the pages of the book—a flimsy pamphlet stapled together at the center—and his heart beat in his ears, the blood rushed to his face. He couldn’t read the other words in the title, but he understood “
sa Bey.” Jesus was a prophet, although not the son of God as the Christians told the story, and he recognized all the prophets’ names. Inside were drawings of Jesus’ life. Jesus walking on the surface of the sea. Jesus turning water into wine. Jesus fixing a blind man’s eyes.

“He had been dead for four days, Baba!”

Turkish words were written in white squares in the style of comic strips. Sinan couldn’t read the story, but the pictures told it all. They were beautiful pictures—the sky blue, Jesus’ robe a clean white, the grass green with bright flowers growing in places, waterfalls in the background.

“Do we have miracles, too?”

Sinan didn’t answer because he was so enthralled with the pictures; they were like stepping into the innocent world of a child, where everything was clean, all people were kind, and the most amazing things could happen simply because they could be imagined.

“Marcus Bey said it was Jesus who saved me. If Jesus was here, Baba, think of all the people he could have saved. Maybe he could’ve brought
rem back, too, even though she did a bad thing.”

Sinan’s head was spinning. Jesus—the Jesus in this little book—was so kind-looking, so unlike men he had known.

“To be a Christian all you have to do is let them pour water over your head. It’s easy and it doesn’t hurt.”

But the pictures were lies, lies told to children to make them believe.

“Who gave this to you?” Sinan said. He controlled his voice this time, made it sound as though he were not angry.

“Marcus Bey.” The boy kept coloring. “I told you he was nice.”

HIS HEAD SPINNING, SINAN
ran down the street, shouldering past the men returning from mosque. The late-night bonfires of the camps blew heat in the wind that burned his cheeks. He loosened the leather on the knife and pressed the blade to his thumb, the edge biting into his skin. When he reached the tent, the light was on inside and what he was about to do crowded in on him. But then he remembered the look on his daughter’s face when she told him about Dylan; he remembered her white, dead face and the starker whiteness of her naked hips, and he felt free again to use the knife, felt an expansive rage surging in his muscles; it had been thrashing around inside him for too long now, ripping his insides apart.

He pulled the knife from his pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. He threw open the flap to the tent and pushed inside and he didn’t stop when he saw Marcus throw up his hands to shove him away. The American slapped at his face and tried to knock away the knife, but the blade cut through the skin of his palms, stabbed into the tips of his fingers. Marcus yelled but Sinan couldn’t understand what he said; the sound mixed with the rush of blood in his head. Then he was hit across the temple and sent tumbling sideways. It took a few seconds to get his vision back and when he did he was rolling across the tent floor, Marcus on top of him and then beneath him, a knee in his chest, a bloody hand in his eye, a rushing of breath in his ear, a slash of his own knife across his arm.

Then the labored breath of Marcus filled his left ear, and he realized that the American lay beneath him now. When the dizziness in his head cleared, he discovered his hand pressing his knife against the lump in Marcus’s throat. He had planned this, but, still, he was surprised to find himself so close to murder. He had thought of murderers as monsters, as profoundly debased human creatures, but now he realized that he was as capable of murder as he was of love.

Marcus’s fingers strangled Sinan’s wrist, trying to push the knife away, but Sinan was stronger, and he was filled with the excitement of being stronger. Sinan lay across the man’s body, his weight bearing down on the American, his own face so close to the man he could see specks of brown in the American’s blue eyes. He pressed more of his weight against the knife. The American breathed hard and the lump rose and fell against the edge.

Then, without warning, Marcus’s hands let go of Sinan’s wrist, and before he knew what was happening, the knife blade sliced open the surface of the American’s skin. The sudden blood shocked Sinan and he quickly jerked the knife away and held it just above the American’s throat.

“You must understand, Sinan.” The man was crying. “
smail needed hope,” he said through labored breath. “I had to give it to him.”

Marcus’s whole body went slack, his arms now loosely wrapped around Sinan’s back, leaving his throat exposed there, just an inch away from the edge of the knife. There was no fight left in the man and Sinan was so shocked by this fact that all he could do was lie there, holding on to the American as though caught in an embrace. He felt the soft weight of Marcus’s palms resting on his shoulder blades and the pressing of the man’s rib cage against his with each labored breath. The windpipe was right in front of him, right there, and all it would take was one cut and all of this would be over. The knife shook in his hand and it bit into the skin at Marcus’s throat, streaking blood down the edge of his neck and into the collar of his shirt.

“She died to save your son, Sinan. She gave her life. Do you understand?” His eyes worked back and forth in a kind of impassioned pleading. “There must be a reason for it. I need there to be a reason.”

smail was the reason, Sinan understood now, and as a Muslim he wasn’t worth the American’s wife’s death. Sinan realized that if he, too, could have a reason for
rem’s death, something tangible, something he was sure was true, he would take it. He would do anything for it. He would even steal it from another man.

He pulled the knife from Marcus’s throat, and unwrapped himself from the man’s limp arms. God, he wanted to kill him! He still wanted to slice open his neck. He wanted to shove that knife into his chest, stab all his anger into this man and leave it there, but he couldn’t do it, and he was too weak to force his betraying hand.

Chapter 60

H
E FOUND THE WATER TRUCK IN FRONT OF THE MOSQUE.
Prayers were done until morning and the darkened building stood empty and silent as though it had been bombed. His bloody hand slipped on the faucet handle before he was able to turn on the spigot. The water, still heated inside the drum by the afternoon sun, felt like blood rushing across his already bloody fingers. But he could see the color come back to his hands as he scrubbed and after a few minutes they seemed to be a part of his body again. He thought about throwing the knife into the sea, but God knew what he had done and He would punish him if he were to be punished. So he wrapped the blade back into the leather and placed it in the chest pocket of his coat.

When he returned to the tent, he sat outside on the plastic chair and waited for the military police. They would arrest him for trying to kill a humanitarian worker, a friend of the Turkish state in its time of need. They would lock him in a freezing cell until they discovered he was Kurdish. Then the real policemen would show up, the ones dressed in business suits. They would accuse him of terrorism, beat him, ask him for PKK members’ names. He almost felt ready for it, proud, in a way, that it would happen to him, too.

But the soldiers never came. He sat all night, watching the cats, listening to the snores of men, and thinking of his father. The stars slid toward morning, a band of yellow appeared on the horizon, and the call to prayer announced the sun.

SINAN WOKE NILÜFER.

“Pack only what you need,” he said. “We’re leaving tonight.”

She fingered the lapel of his jacket as though trying to rub something away, and Sinan saw the stain.

“Throw the jacket away,” he said. “But keep the knife.”

She watched him change into his Carrefour shirt, fear blazing in her eyes.

“I can’t talk now,” he said. “Just be ready.”

She nodded and rolled the jacket into a ball.

He leaned over the sleeping
smail, opened his coloring pad, and found the pamphlet. He slipped it into the pocket of his pants.

“Keep him here today.”

HE SKIPPED MORNING PRAYER,
but found Malik Bey and another man playing backgammon on a card table near the mosque. Three other men, including his neighbor Ziya Bey, sat on a rug in the dirt, smoking cigarettes and talking with one another through their smoke. A few men exited the mosque and slipped into their shoes, but they were elderly and waiting to die and they shuffled back to their tents to lie there until the next call.

Sinan dropped the Jesus book in the middle of the board, just as Malik rolled the dice.

“First my daughter,” Sinan said. “Now my son.”

“Sit down, brother,” Malik said.

Malik set aside his cigarette, hanging the burning end over the edge of the card table. He flipped the pages of the book, shaking his head as the pictures passed before his face. He closed the cover and set his hands on top of it.

“Every night after the quake,” Malik said, “I’d come home from the field, shoveling shit all day, to find my son eating candy. It made him happy, so I was happy.” He picked up the cigarette and smoked it. “So one night I came back to the tent and Derin starts asking me about the end of the world. I tell my son the world’s not ending. He tells me that the earthquake is a sign that everything’s ending.” He blew smoke. “I just looked at him and told him about the plates underneath the water, that it was nothing but the earth moving. But the next night he’s asking again, and I tell him again about the plates, but this time I notice his eyes—they’re scared in a way I’ve never seen, even after the quake, and I know he doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t sleep that night or the next and then he gets sick and then my wife tells me that the American kid with the Bible keeps coming around and telling my son things, asking him to accept this and to take that into his heart.”

He finished the cigarette and lit another with the tip of the first. His hands were shaking. He blew the smoke out and watched the cloud fly away from his face.

“When he died, he was looking at me,” Malik said, glancing away as though ashamed.

He turned back to Sinan. “I couldn’t let that doctor in the tent.”

Sinan took Malik’s hand, but he couldn’t stop thinking that Malik should have let him in.

“When we came here, I thought Derin would go to a good school, get rich with a good job. He’d never have to see all of that mess.” He threw his hand in the general direction of Diyarbak
r and the dry, empty South. “I never gave a damn about independence, anyway. All I really wanted to do was farm. Didn’t care if the land was called Kurdistan or Turkey or Iraq. But the stupid PKK and the military won’t leave you alone; you’re everyone’s enemy if you just want to be left alone. You’ve got to pick a side.” He tossed his cigarette down in disgust. “Is there anywhere in the world you can just be left alone?”

“I don’t know, my brother,” Sinan said.

What Sinan was about to say was shameful and the shame would follow his name forever, but he knew what such a man as Malik would do when he heard it.

“That American boy raped my daughter,” Sinan said. “That’s why she jumped.”

Malik stared at Sinan, his brows narrowing, his eyes welling with water.

“Now this boy’s father is trying to take my son, too,” Sinan said. “Just like they tried to take yours.”

Malik slammed the table with the palm of his hand, the backgammon pieces jumping off the board.

“The fight’s inside myself!” he said. “What does this
mam know?”

HE WORKED A DOUBLE
shift, polishing the wine bottles, stacking pyramids of beer, lining up the boxes on the shelves perfectly so that no edge hung over another. He waxed the floors and swept beneath the metal racks. He wanted everything to be perfect, wanted to be a model employee so that no one would suspect him later.

After he had punched out, he said goodnight to the manager.

“I wanted to thank you for your kind offer of dinner.”

“Yes, yes, it’s nothing,” Yilmaz Bey said. “Join us one day, please. No one should suffer what you’ve suffered.” The manager placed his hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Sinan. My best employee.”

“Thank you.”

“May your pain pass quickly.”

Then Yilmaz Bey was off to the bathroom, leaving the door wide open and his coat with the wallet in the chest pocket hanging on the wall just a few feet away. Sinan waited a couple of minutes, just long enough to make sure the manager had not forgotten his toothpaste or the comb he brushed his hair and mustache with, and stepped into the office.

When he opened the wallet there were at least a dozen ten-million-lira bills folded neatly inside. The manager wouldn’t miss two of them until later, if he missed them at all. He hung the coat back on the wall, pulled the creases exactly as he remembered them being before, and pocketed the money inside his own coat, right next to the knife wrapped in leather.

It was almost dark when he reached the camp and fires were already burning. Orange smoke rose into the sky and sparks flickered and died like extinguishing stars. A produce truck was parked next to the soup kitchen and a mob of people gathered and pushed against one another to get to the open bed. Sinan was shoved forward by a group of women, and he saw the mayor and another man standing in the bed of the truck, dropping goat meat wrapped in bloody butcher paper into the hands of the people. On the platform where the Americans’ stoves stood, Kemal and Malik pushed over steaming pots, sending scalding soup splashing into the street. Already three silver pots lay glowing in the bonfire, and when Kemal tried to toss this one in, a soldier hit him across the face with a club.

“You’re Turkish soldiers,” Malik screamed, pointing his hand at the man. “Attacking your own people! Your mother must be ashamed.”

Sinan struggled through the crowd, looking for Marcus, wondering if he had been attacked in all of this, wondering if he had already left, and wondering which he wanted more. Behind two soldiers, a few of the Americans stood and watched with their hands hanging at their sides. One woman sat in the dirt, her hand on her forehead, resigned, it seemed, to the chaos. Marcus wasn’t among them.

The camp was nearly deserted and the few people left on the street headed toward the commotion of the bonfire, their sad faces lit up with the orange light. He passed
mam Ali as he rushed out of the mosque, his face lined with worry, and Sinan wanted to say to him, “You cannot stop it,” but there was no point.

He found Nilüfer and
smail huddled together in the corner of the tent. “We’re leaving,” Sinan said. “Come now.”

But they didn’t move. The fire was high enough now that the walls of the tent glowed orange and
smail’s eyes were brilliant with fear.