The Gendarme

by Mark T. Mustian

  Voices resound in the hall. I stretch and stand. Sasha’s oblong head pokes through the adjacent doorway.

  “Isis! Are you delaying our employee from his duties? We girls are hungry.”

  “I am only telling him the ways of the world,” Isis counters. “Stories of the harîm.” She stands and exits, offering a final waggle.

  “You are quite the popular one, Ahmet,” Sasha says. She spreads her robes, seats herself on the end of the bed. “The girls talk about you constantly. Who is this young woman you meet in the bazaar?”

  I hesitate, studying Sasha’s face, trying to guess her age. Thirty-five? Forty? Traces of mustache are visible in the dim light. I sit down beside her. “She is an arkadaş,” I say, using the Turkish word. A friend.

  “She is Armenian, yes?”

  I nod. Are my movements so well known, so obvious?

  “And you are a Turk.”

  I nod again. “What are you?”

  Sasha laughs, a low, guttural sound that rises from deep in her chest. “Oh, I am many things, my dear. I am a Syrian, and I am an Ottoman. I am a Muslim, and I am a Christian. I am a believer, and I am a skeptic. I am a woman, and”—she lifts her robe, exposing a miniature, fully formed penis—“I am a man.”

  “H-h-h . . . how?”

  “An accident of nature.” She (or he) waves a bejeweled hand. “Sometimes Allah overwhelms with his gifts. There are similar examples throughout the world; I have met five like myself. One, who considered himself a man, was for a time my husband. I decided some time ago I was more comfortable as a woman.” She reaches over to touch my leg, bracelets jangling. I recoil in response, but her hand stays on my knee. “I am more concerned about you.”

  I do not respond, caught between discomfort and a desire to unburden myself, to share secrets, seek guidance. My lips move but only air emerges. Tendons twitch in my thigh.

  “I always ask the girls what they’re looking for,” she continues, “where they want to go. Some have unrealistic dreams of becoming princesses, of employing many servants. Others have no dreams at all—they want only to eat. I try to help each of them, to fashion their goals into those that are achievable, to make them think about what will come next. For no one can do this forever.” She sits straighter, releasing my leg. “I would like to help you as well. I like you. I like the way you work, the interaction you have with the girls. I like your devotion to your Armenian friend.” She pauses again. “How can I help you?”

  “I . . . I want to go to America.”

  She smiles and leans back. “As do we all. Do you want to take your friend with you?”

  “Yes.”

  She nods. A bead of light catches her face, making her look older, almost haggard. Wisps of gray cling at her temples.

  “Do you know anyone in America? You need a job to get in. It is expensive.” She turns to me, her square jaw thrust forward. I can picture her now as a man, the rounded shoulders, the light beard. “Do you have any money?”

  I shake my head.

  She nods again. “It is a difficult dream, my son. How long do you think you have?”

  I place my face in my hands. “Not long.”

  She stands, her fingers brushing the top of my head. “We shall work on it, then. But I can promise you nothing. It is, as I said, a most difficult thing.”

  I nod, grateful but fearful, of unstated quid pro quos, of the mutations seen lurking beneath Sasha’s robes. Are the girls somehow indebted? I look at things in a new light.

  My day proceeds in the usual fashion, cooking, refurbishing mattresses, replacing spent candles. I accompany Sasha to the bazaar to buy food, I accompany Bibi and Isis to the hammam. I unload casks of wine from the cart of a man with no teeth. I bring candies to Avi, who is not feeling well. At dusk I sneak away to see Araxie at the citadel, concerned that so many are aware of our meeting, a concern only heightened when I cannot find her there. I pace about, staring with disinterest at peddlers picking up their wares, at camel drivers and rope makers, at the loading of donkeys and carts. I examine the iron-plated citadel doors, decorated with carvings of intertwined serpents. I waste money on a Turkish cigarette, filling my lungs with the harsh, tarry smoke that chafes my throat and makes my eyes tear. I search faces and profiles. I recognize no one.

  I interrupt my pacing to examine a bed of flowers growing in a courtyard nearby—roses, in different shades, buttery yellow and sunset orange. I stoop close to one, a red so deep as to be almost lavender, sniff and think of picking it for Araxie as I look about, trying to remember why I have not seen these before. Has this courtyard been open? I imagine my future, sniffing a rose some decades hence, setting sail, weathering, nailing crossbeams, growing old, being reborn. And yet the past crouches, the clink as men march roped together, the blood of the woman’s sliced breasts. I think about the start of this journey, the knifing of the men, the forcing of the women into sick-smelling flames. How my arm ached from the thrusting, the blood bathing my face! The sound of air gushing from punctured lungs, the stench of perforated bowels, the final expulsions of the dead and the dying. The wails and sorrow, like song, feeding my energy. The camaraderie. The ecstasy. I must push it all back.

  “Ahmet!”

  I rise, squinting. It is almost dark. Ani is difficult to recognize in the shadows.

  “I have been looking for you everywhere! Araxie is sick. She has the stomach illness. She sent me to tell you.”

  I stiffen at the sound of her name. “She is sick?”

  “Yes. I am hoping it is not the sickness from before, a relapse. She will try to meet you tomorrow, but at a different place—in front of the Khan al-Wazir. Do you know it?”

  I do. The so-called minister’s khan, with its black-and-white marble façade. I have grown to know Aleppo well, to learn the distinctions between the labyrinthine streets and the various covered bazaars, to differentiate the spice suq from the one selling women’s clothes, the Khan al-Gumruk from the Khan al-Sabun. I stare up at the citadel above us, caught like a fist in the dying residue of the sun.

  “I will be there.” I return my gaze to Ani, who has partly turned to go. Candles flicker in yellowing windows, the streets and passageways now shrouded in darkness.

  “Ani,” I say. I want to say more, to address what has happened, to explain—how to explain things? I can see now through her dulled, gloomy eyes. I should ask . . .

  “Yes?”

  I pause, the apology I intended suddenly caught and contained. “Tell her I will be there.”

  She nods, her quizzical expression turned solemn. “I will do so.”

  I wander back to the klimbim, down sweet-smelling corridors with blurred faces and murmuring voices, through the smoke of cook fires, the drifts of spice and incense, the odor of burning hashish. A woman calls out to me, reaching from the shadows to pull at my arm as I pass, dancing, evading. Laughter and chanting merge and fade, replaced by a strange, atonal music, a shuffling of drumbeats, a patter of wind or of rain. From somewhere a bell rings clear like a knife. I experience all of this and none of it, my mind locked into sickening remembrance, this searing time past I cannot now seem to shake. It is done, I say. Done. I walk for miles, maybe for hours, for it is late by the time I return to the klimbim, the first show having started, the mats already filled with squatting male forms.

  Thus begins a strange night, even by klimbim standards. One of the first customers backstage is an elderly man I have seen before, a man named al-Wati, whose unsteadiness requires support on either side from sheepish sons or associates, until he nears his destination and gains a new life. He parts the swinging door at almost a trot, paired with his consort, Avi, at which point I pay them no further notice, busy as I am with other customers and the orders of a petulant Sasha, still unhappy with my tardiness. Moments later, however, a low scream pierces the thin walls, different in tenor from Avi’s usual eruptions. I rise up in the darkness of an adjacent room. Sasha hurries forth in the corridor outside. Avi emerges, going the ot
her way, precipitating a near collision in the narrow, dim hallway. Edging along the damp wall, I sidestep the still-muttering Avi and follow Sasha into the vacated room.

  Al-Wati lies prostrate on the bed, naked, his body even thinner than I might have imagined, his ribs exposed and brittle-looking, his silver-enshrouded tool still semi-erect. His chest does not rise and fall. He makes no movement. I listen to the sounds of the klimbim—the muted applause, the rise and fall of the old man Omar’s lute, the sniffles and moans and sighs—as Sasha brings the candle over to examine al-Wati’s head.

  “He is dead,” she says, after the briefest of looks. She turns to me. “Go find the young men who assisted him in.”

  I stare for a moment, at her, at the shuttered, smelly room, then do as she orders, easing back through the darkened hallway out into the more lighted expanse of the big room. I do not see the men she has referred to, or if I do, I fail to recognize them. I linger a moment, trying not to appear obtrusive, averting my gaze against those heading my way. I scan the crowd once, again, then return to the back hallway, to a scene of renewed commotion.

  Now it is Bibi who streams past, her voice in high-pitched alarm, her head thrust away from Sasha’s entreating, accompanying form. Heads poke from other rooms, the sounds of activity slowing, diminishing.

  “What is it?” Isis whispers in the darkness.

  I shrug my shoulders, return to al-Wati’s room. He has fallen from the straw bed to the floor, his one arm now forward as if caressing the ground, his rigidity further reduced to only a hint beyond normal torpor.

  “Did you find them?” Sasha returns, breathing hard at my shoulder.

  I shake my head. “What happened?”

  She groans. “Bibi entered this room by mistake. I think she mounted him, without realizing he was dead.” She bends double to the floor and places her hands beneath al-Wati’s armpits. “Help me lift him.”

  He is heavier than I expect, and difficult to maneuver, his bent body sagging like a bushel of flour. We bang him into the door frame as we exit the room, into the wall in the hallway, and into the door providing passage to the alleyway outside. Isis and a customer pass us in the corridor, flattening themselves against the wall to allow us space, eyes wide in the dim light. We prop al-Wati into a sitting position by the outside door. I drape a sheet over his naked body.

  “Get back to work,” Sasha orders. I resume my duties, shuffling sheets, wielding the wineskin. I keep a lookout for the young men who were with al-Wati, but do not see them. More customers arrive, more wine fills thin glasses, water bubbles in the long-stemmed narghiles, smoke and chatter hang in the air—the usual course of another full night. Currency shifts from pouch to pouch, dancers emerge and retreat, patrons rotate from front to back. Only a few minutes later, the next disturbance begins.

  An enormously fat man, his skin stretched to great lengths, appears in the doorway. Only with considerable assistance, a twisting to one side, and a certain amount of intense grunting does he make it through the entrance. When he rights himself it is clear he is as large as three men, his girth cascading down the sides of his body, his neck so large as to have melted into the rest of him, such that his head seems to sit directly atop his torso. Two young men appear beside him (the same that assisted al-Wati? Some kind of social service?), offering hands to push him forward. He totters at the back of the room, scattering those seated beneath him. The young men bring him forward, to plop on the ground, which he does with a resounding oof that causes Omar to stop his lute playing, and Rasha to quit gyrating onstage. For an instant all eyes are focused, as if a bomb has exploded in the back of the room. Then things return, smoke rising, cups tilting, music winding, hips circling. Eyes retrain. Lips are licked, opened.

  The fat man, whom Sasha calls Ebbe, is evidently quite wealthy, for he immediately sets about consuming rakı in large quantities. After four trips I begin pouring him two cups at a time, which he picks up with miniature, hooflike hands and drinks in almost single gulps, to no apparent effect. During my trips backstage I become aware of a certain discord among the girls—first Sala and Sasha, whispering in bursts that sound like train pistons, then Bibi (recovered now, and back in action), shaking her head so emphatically it appears her neck might snap off. Heads peek from behind curtains, eyeing the immense form in the back of the room. Sasha makes another trip back to Ebbe, offering information that clearly does not satisfy him, for he scowls monstrously before slipping Sasha more cash from a cupped, almost fingerless hand. Sasha disappears backstage, to the muffled sounds of continued disagreement; I watch with incredulity as Rasha, barely clothed, her big breasts swirling, stomps the length of the big room and out the front door, to the accompanying cheers of the crowd. Sasha reappears, sweating and flustered, providing much-gesticulated explanations to the still-scowling Ebbe. Those seated nearby look on in amusement. Finally, after much back-and-forth, in which an animated Sasha cajoles and grovels, Ebbe is hoisted to his feet. The two young men who had helped him earlier materialize from somewhere, and like merchants directing a load, maneuver his bulk the length of the room and through the tiny back door. The crowd cheers again.

  A sense of normalcy returns, at least for a moment. Omar plays, the wine flows, Isis dances onstage. My mind, left undisturbed, races back to my memories, fueling guilt that still sways and burns through me. I pour wine and spread sheets. I think about the night at the ziggurat. I look at these men who are no worse than I am. I think, Should I . . .? What could . . .? But events soon intervene. Sala rushes through the back door and grabs at my arm.

  “Hurry, you must come quick!”

  “What is it?”

  “Sasha needs your help.”

  I put down the wineskin and make my way to the back. It takes several seconds to adjust to the darkness. I hear the rustle of bodies, muted whisperings, shouted threats. I edge past Sala and Avi to the last room off the hall, where Ebbe’s corpulent frame is caught in the doorway. Sasha’s deep voice echoes from inside, all but drowned out by Ebbe’s shrill swearing.

  “Ahmet! Is Ahmet here yet?”

  “I am here.”

  “Ahmet, crawl under him and come inside. Then you can help me push.”

  I duck below the trembling mass and emerge with some difficulty into the near darkness of the small room. Sasha’s robe hangs open, exposing her squarish breasts; she closes it with a diffident wave. Ebbe’s bulk is squirming, like a gargantuan fish on a hook, his voice raised an octave, threatening now to shut the place down. At Sasha’s direction, I place my shoulder against Ebbe’s side, which collapses in a good way, but then goes no farther. The door frame trembles, as does the building itself. We push again, without result. Sasha shouts for more help. Other voices echo. Finally, with a great creaking of lumber and a dust-scattering vibration, Ebbe squeezes through the door frame into the dimly lit corridor. Sasha and I pause, panting. Others in the hallway give way. Ebbe shouts some more. The young assistants materialize again, lifting his arms, prodding his huge buttocks with the studied movements of animal handlers. The maneuvering continues, along with calls back and forth, the bumping and shuddering of door frames, the high-pitched, tremulous cursing. As the movers and their freight clear the last doorway, as Sasha, Bibi, and I stand watching, a swaddled form shuffles past, his arms outstretched like a man expecting a gift—al-Wati, either risen or never quite dead. He wanders into the main room, sits, glances around, motions for wine. Sasha mutters something, Bibi looks as if she might faint, but at my instigation we are consumed with a breath-throttling laughter, a convulsion that recurs periodically over the course of the night.

  The evening wears down. The crowd in the antechamber thins. At perhaps two in the morning, just as the last song is launched, Hussein strides through the doorway. Our gazes meet as I serve wine to a pair of Bedouins near the back of the room, long enough for there to be a flicker of recognition in his dark eyes, a narrowing of his brows. I look away, edging into the shadows to observe without being observed, m
y heart thrashing, the blood driving fast through my limbs and my chest. He does not look for me, as he might have done if he had truly recognized me, nor does he dawdle in his intentions. He flashes money to Sasha, engages in muted discourse, tilts his head, accepts a cup of wine. At Sasha’s departure his focus returns to the stage, to Rasha (evidently returned, in good graces), to bouncing tissue and smiles. At the end of the song he is up, following Sasha into the back, his narrow hips swinging, his neck thrust back in the proud, familiar posture. The fear I felt at his entrance dissipates, replaced by the anger I had known from before. Again I think of how easy it would be to break his thin neck. Again I feel resentment at the object of his manipulations (this time, Avi). The thought of him with Araxie drives me to new levels of fury, pulsing blood in my fingers as spots break in my eyes. I keep away from him, away from the room he occupies with Avi, busying myself in a frenzy of cleanup, wrapping mats, removing sheets, fiercely sweeping the hard, sandy floors. Even after he has gone, after Avi has retired to the house to giggle with the other girls, after the rooms and the stage have gone dark and quiet, I smolder, working with an energy that leaves me soaking with sweat. Only at the end of the night, as the first pink of dawn enters the sky, do I achieve some measure of peace, a tranquillity brought on by a resolution for change. I have no plan, no definite idea of what I will do next, but I know I cannot continue this way. I climb into one of the newly changed beds, and sleep a restless sleep.

  13

  The entrance to South Georgia Psychiatric Center is a well-worn state park, with groves of mature trees, redbrick posts with pyramid-shaped tops, a guardhouse, a ranger. An abandoned community pool sits in blue across the street. On closer inspection, however, the grounds start to look sinister, with sentrylike entrance posts, guards packing guns, and trees like the hair on a giant’s large head. The car motors to the circle next to the guard post, to the right of the flagpole and its limp printed cotton. I stare out, the image shifting from park to reform school, from summer camp to work camp. Detention area, hospital, cell block. Prison.