Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  This morning, like every morning, has come cloudless and clear and scorching, and the sun burns through the curtains, so you can’t sleep. Your watch shows just gone five-thirty, but the room is as bright as the long afternoons when the boys from the village sit smoking and talking under the acacias lining the road. Back home, you worship the sun, but here it is Satan, especially when, like now, you’re hungover.

  The twelve-year-old houseboy brings you breakfast, and you pay him with a hundred-lire note, telling him to keep the change. Eggs and bread and honey and goat’s cheese and strong, sweet black tea and tomatoes – straight from the vine, so that the flavour explodes in your mouth. The meal would have cost ten times that back home. You sit on the veranda under the grapevines, listening to the doves in the trees and staring at the refinery. Gleaming distillation towers, storage tanks, miles of cable and pipe, and the two big orange flares that burn night and day. Beyond, the rooftops and minarets of the town, the occasional splash of green. You hardly notice the smell of sulphur and crude oil anymore. You carry it with you now, in your clothes and hair and skin, spliced into your DNA.

  Veysil, your Kurdish driver, brings the car and you start the hundred-and-fifty mile drive out towards Şirnak, close to the border with Iraq. The war between Iran and Iraq has been going on for five years now, and millions are dead. You read stories in the Turkish newspapers about Iranian boys from poor families being chained together and forced to advance towards the Iraqi trenches. They walk ahead of the tanks to detonate the mines.

  An hour later you come to a small village. It is market day and the main street is clogged with food stalls and people and animals and vehicles of every kind. Boys riding large tricycles weave through the confusion, their oversized baskets piled high with watermelons, plastic sandals, Sony cassette players. Veysil pushes the car into the traffic, blasting his horn, shouting out the window.

  ‘Slow down,’ you tell him. ‘You’re going to hit somebody.’

  Veysil keeps going. He is a good driver, but impatient.

  ‘No problem,’ he says in Turkish. Like most Kurds, he speaks Turkish, too. ‘These are my people.’

  You are deep in the traditional heart of Kurdistan. Over the weeks, Veysil has told you much about his people and their struggle for their own homeland, for the right to educate their children in their own language. You suspect he is PKK.

  Veysil accelerates, narrowly missing an old man.

  You grab his arm. He glances over at you. ‘Slow down,’ you say again. As you do, the car’s side mirror clips one of the tricycles. The contraption tips on to two wheels, balances there for a moment, then rights itself. A watermelon tumbles into the road. You watch the head-sized fruit bounce once, then smash into pieces on the kerbside. Bright-red flesh spills across the melting tarmac.

  ‘No problem,’ says Veysil.

  After Hasankeyf, the roads are slick and black with oil from the tanker trucks pouring in from across the border. Because of the war, the Gulf Sea shipping terminals are closed and Iraq must export its oil overland through Turkey. The car fishtails along the narrow road. Veysil seems to enjoy it. Yet again, you tell him to slow down. He bleeds ten kilometres an hour off the speed, keeps going.

  By now, you are engaged to be married to a woman you do not love and who you suspect does not love you. The old dreams are nothing but distant echoes. You haven’t thought about it for a long time, that other once-impossible life. As the blowtorch landscape speeds by, you remember Shelly and the things you told her you were going to do, the things you never told anyone else. You think of Julia McIntyre, about the fire not going out.

  By the time you arrive in Şirnak, the car is black with oil. Everything reeks of Iraqi crude.

  Later that evening, you are on the way back to the refinery. You are approaching Hasankeyf when a woman appears at the side of the road. She steps out from the verge in front of you and raises one arm in the air. Veysil slows the car. The woman is holding a little boy in her arms. His head hangs back limp, his mouth open, so that you can see the top row of little white teeth.

  Veysil draws the car alongside. The woman speaks to him in excited Kurdish, raising her chin to point to a place on the road. The boy’s head jerks loosely as she speaks. He is covered in oil and there is a big red gash near his temple. Blood drips from his head to the oil-soaked tarmac.

  ‘What happened?’ you ask Veysil.

  ‘This boy was hit by an oil truck,’ he says, then speaks to the woman. She answers.

  ‘The truck did not stop, she says. It just kept going.’

  ‘Tell her to get in,’ you say. You recognise this as a time when you might be able to do something good, maybe change the direction of things in some small way. ‘Where is the nearest hospital?’

  Veysil gets out of the car and opens the door for the woman. ‘Mardin,’ he says. ‘An hour from here.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ you say.

  The woman gets into the back seat and Veysil starts driving. He goes fast. The car swerves and slides on the oily surface. Veysil is enjoying this, you can tell. You think, sitting there in the passenger seat holding on to the door handle, as the dry sun-blasted landscape blurs past, that you are all going to die.

  The woman holds the boy in her arms, rocking him gently, whispering to him, stroking his matted hair. Her hands are big and worn, her fingers long and brown with thick, cracked nails. The boy’s face is so pale next to her hands. He doesn’t move. You think he might be dead already, that the car will go off the road and you’ll all be killed, and it will be for nothing.

  ‘What was he doing so close to the road?’ you say.

  Veysil speaks to the woman. She answers. Her voice is thin, far away.

  ‘One of his goats strayed,’ says Veysil. ‘They are Yuruk. Nomads. Kurds. They move across the borders between Iraq, Syria and Turkey with their animals. These kids don’t understand cars and trucks. They don’t go to school. They spend their lives in the mountains.’

  They reach the hospital in a little under three-quarters of an hour. You go into the building with the woman and the boy. You’re not sure why. Maybe it’s because you want to feel like you are doing something, like you may be part of something good, that it may bring some solace, a measure of absolution. But the bastard at admissions doesn’t speak Kurdish and can’t understand the woman. Veysil translates. They piss around for half an hour taking down names and information. The hospital clerk asks for papers, but of course, they have none. No address, no identity cards. These people don’t exist, as far as the government is concerned, says Veysil.

  The woman becomes more and more hysterical. She is sobbing, rocking her son in her arms. The asshole behind the desk, you swear he starts to smile. Something goes critical inside you and you walk around the desk, and in your fury and frustration, you grab the prick by the collar and tell him in your best Turkish that he better get the hell moving or you’ll go to his superiors. You cram a US one-hundred-dollar bill in the guy’s face.

  The doctor comes pretty quickly after that. They put the kid in a ward, run him an IV. Clean him up a bit. You hover, watch the staff work. You want your money’s worth, goddamn it. The hospital is a mess. Dirt on the floors, flies everywhere. After a while, you walk outside with Veysil and wait in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes. It’s about forty-five degrees in the shade.

  A while later, the woman emerges from the hospital and walks to where you are standing. She says something to Veysil. She seems composed, has stopped crying. You congratulate yourself. It feels good. Some fraction of balance has been restored.

  Veysil says a few words to the woman, and then turns to you and says: ‘The boy died of internal bleeding. She asks if we can give her a ride back to her camp.’

  Something closes up inside you. Some sense of hope, or justice.

  March 8th. Geneva

  I’m back in the hotel room after a long day over at Borschmann’s offices. Went pretty well. I think I can pull this one off. They want to inclu
de a couple of other big assets and lower the deductible threshold, but I think we can accommodate them. I’ll run some numbers after dinner. If I can nail this, they’ll have to make me a partner. No one in the firm has ever brought in a deal this big.

  I pour myself a whisky from the minibar, swirl the contents around the tumbler. The liquid barely covers the bottom of the glass. I open the minibar again and look for another whisky, but all I can find is vodka. I open one and pour it in. Outside, it’s as dark as when I left this morning, another sunrise missed, another sunset ignored. I treat them as if there will always be more, rather than the moments of beauty and significance I realise they surely are whenever I actually watch one. I can’t remember the last time I did.

  I sit in the single armchair that faces the window and grab Dad’s manuscript from the side table. I leaf through to the story I read last night in bed – the one about the nomad boy killed by the speeding oil truck in Turkey. When I run my fingers over the page, I can feel the depressions where the hammers of Dad’s old typewriter pushed into the heavy paper. It seems fitting that each letter is the product of a physical effort, of metal striking ribbon, of ink smashed into fibre. The whole thing feels like an act of aggression, of repressed combat.

  According to the date at the bottom of the page, hand-scrawled, I was three years old when he finished it. I know he worked in Turkey before he met Mum. He would have been in his early twenties then, just graduated from engineering school. Not a pilot, not a soldier, close to a war, but not in one. Playing at being a writer. Playing at life.

  And yet, there is that ‘you’, writing in the second person. Perhaps it is an experiment. But I know it is not. I read it all again. The things you never told anyone else. Something closing up inside you. And then I know. I am the you. He is writing to me.

  Helena

  The second time he met her, he put a co-worker in hospital.

  It wasn’t that bad, really. Just a broken nose and a chipped tooth where the guy hit his mouth on the door handle when he fell. But as a result, the young engineer was called to the Vice President’s corner office.

  ‘What happened, son?’ said the VP, who was youngish and well liked in the company.

  ‘It happened after hours, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And so, it’s none of the company’s business what happened, sir.’

  He’d been talking to her properly, sober, for the first time. They’d all met in the bar across the street and she’d joined them – a girlfriend of hers worked at the company and had invited her along. He introduced himself and she remembered him from before, said she was happy to talk to him now. She was working as an assistant veterinarian in a local animal shelter and was saving money to get her master’s in animal science. They spoke a while and then he went to the bar to order drinks. When he came back, this guy from work was sitting with her, talking to her. She was laughing at something he’d said. The young engineer stood a moment, beers in hand, and watched her. He liked the way she looked. Liked it a lot. The high cheekbones, the girlish blush on her fair cheeks, the pouty lower lip, the big blue-grey eyes like a cloud-strewn sky, the honey and strawberry shoulder-length hair. Such great skin. She was tall and had long legs. She was dressed for work in a demure almost old-fashioned skirt and jacket that hid her figure.

  He’d put the beers on the table and asked the guy, who worked in the same department as him at the oil company, to come outside for a minute. ‘Got something I want to tell you,’ he said. The guy had got up and followed him to the door. He was heavy-set, and had the pale, soft look of someone who watches too much TV. As soon as the door closed, he’d grabbed the guy by the collar and slammed him up against the wall. ‘Back off,’ he said. ‘Just stay away from her.’ When the guy told him to piss off, the young engineer had punched him in the face.

  The VP’s lip started to curl into a smile and then straightened. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘But when it affects the productivity of my staff, then it becomes my business.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And I understand you were drinking pretty heavily at the time.’

  The young engineer said nothing.

  The VP looked down at his papers. ‘You’re doing good work, son. You’ve just got to dial it down a notch.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I want you to go and see the company doctor, OK? Get yourself checked out.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘I can’t force you, son.’

  The young engineer, who liked the VP, admired him for how he carried himself around the staff and the way he kept his cool, nodded. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  The first time he’d seen her, three days earlier, during Calgary Stampede, he told his best friend at the time, who was standing next to him at the bar: ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’ He was engaged to be married at the time. And so, he found out later, was she.

  Much later, in the darker moments of his life, the young engineer would contemplate the nature of this first meeting. He would think back to that first image of her that he was destined to carry in his mind until his final breath, and wonder if this was what people sometimes referred to as love at first sight. Certainly, the effect was immediate, highly visual (at first) and strong. He’d approached her, tried to talk to her, but she’d sent him away.

  ‘Come talk to me when you’re not drunk,’ she’d said with a smile.

  For weeks after that first meeting he was physically ill, and no matter how much he drank, miserable.

  The young engineer did see the company doctor. He sat on the examination table and the doctor asked him questions about himself and about his parents and poked his back and listened to his chest.

  ‘Were you drinking before you came here today, son?’

  The young engineer nodded.

  ‘And yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Not that much.’

  ‘Tell me, son. How many drinks?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  ‘Ten, maybe twelve. I wasn’t counting.’

  ‘And the day before?’

  ‘More. Fifteen, twenty maybe.’

  The doctor held back a sigh. ‘And before that?’

  ‘Same, doctor. Every day, the same.’

  ‘How old are you, son?’

  The young engineer told him.

  ‘You are killing yourself, son,’ said the doctor. ‘Literally. You have the body of a forty-year-old. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

  The young engineer nodded.

  ‘You need to change your life. And the sooner the better.’

  The young engineer looked at a poster on the wall that showed the male and female reproductive systems.

  ‘I’m recommending that you spend a week at a dry-out clinic. There is one in Clairsholm, not far from here.’ The doctor produced a brochure and wrote out a referral. ‘The company will pay.’

  The young engineer looked at the brochure, not quite believing what he was hearing.

  It wasn’t until a few weeks later, after he’d started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – Hi, I’m Warren and I’ve been told I’m an alcoholic and my father is one, but I’m not sure I am really one – that he saw her again. She was standing in the office lobby, near one of the big marble pillars, when he stepped out of the elevator, one day after work. She was wearing the same outfit he’d seen her in before, but she’d done her hair differently, pulled it back in some kind of braid. She waved, walked towards him.

  The young engineer smiled.

  ‘I’d like to have a chance to talk,’ she said. ‘Without the crowds. Not in a bar.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘How about now?’

  ‘That would be good,’ she said. ‘But this isn’t a date.’

  ‘OK.’ He didn’t care what it was. ‘It’s just good to see you.’

  She smiled. ‘It’s nice outside. Let’s go for a walk.’<
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  They went down to the river pathway and walked under the cottonwoods. It had been a dry summer and the river was running low in its banks. They reached Fort Calgary, walked out on to the footbridge and looked down into the clear river water.

  ‘I heard about what you did at the bar,’ she said.

  He looked out along the river. It was a clear day, and from here the mountains looked big and close.

  ‘I wondered why he didn’t come back,’ she said.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’d like to know what you want.’

  ‘You,’ he said.

  She gazed into his eyes, shook her head. ‘No, I mean what do you want from life?’

  ‘No one’s ever asked me that before.’

  ‘Well, I’m asking you.’

  ‘You mean dreams?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got dreams.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  She nodded, looked towards the mountains.

  ‘Go places, I guess. I’d like to go to Africa one day, maybe for work.’ There were so many other dreams, of course – fabulous and unattainable and risible, dreams he did not deserve, some already dead or lost, others he could see no pathway towards, many the mere contemplation of which brought embarrassment, and in some cases, shame. Things he would never tell anyone. ‘What about you?’

  She told him that she wanted to be married by twenty-five, have her first child before thirty, and be independently wealthy by forty. ‘And I want to save the planet.’

  ‘What, the whole thing?’

  She smiled. ‘No. The animals and the good, wild places.’

  Her words unsettled him. He could feel it, deep within himself, a cold current eddying with dark viscosity, but he could not tell if it was fear, or admiration, or the grip of something deeper that could only be described as realisation. The sudden understanding that he had been preconditioned to avoid commitment to anything greater than himself. He gripped the railing.