by Michael Helm
You won’t be forgiven your sanctioned
mercies, your memories of the open wild.
There’s no place for them now. You feed them
en masse. Bring yourself close. But the sun warms
all and it’s a good day, inspired habit of saying,
knowing on the backs of your hands what
all others, all the lost in all times have known.
This is today. The trucks are coming. This is today.
It wasn’t much of a poem, and I couldn’t say who’d authored it, but in the sense that I’d discovered it, or the makings of it, it was mine. I would likely never show it to anyone. I looked at the words on the page, the letters in the words. I tore out the page and in the light of my cellphone app held it up flat, near my eyes, and looked at the impressions of the ink in the fibres, little sculpted shivers of the human need to say. The letters, not the poem, seemed evidence of One Great Meaning. Call it God or Poet, Designer or Intender, many believed it was a fiction from the outset. Others believed that, even if long ago a sure, final meaning had departed the world, the world still vibrated from the departure. Did I believe this or just need to believe it? There, in that night, I believed it.
—
I stayed three nights in the squat. The Poet did not return.
I had to tell Amanda that I’d failed. Because of “Çodhir,” the failure was enormous and I felt it personally now. He must have found the poem’s details in my correspondences—though I couldn’t recall ever having written to anyone about the potatoes my father grew or the deer he liked to call his “foreigners” that he fed in his backyard in Nova Scotia—and in leaving the lines for me, he’d let me know there was a poem to be imagined and answers to be found. In his signs and wonders and failure to appear he should have seemed an absconded god, but instead I thought of him as someone like me, flawed, by turns inspired and confused, needing to make contact. Or he might not have been the Poet at all.
“If he’d gone there to find you, he would have by now.” I pictured her standing at her bedroom window, listened for the sound of her drawing on a cigarette, her way of being alone in the intimate presence of another. Then I heard others laughing. She was at work. “We should have told the Paris hacktivists to grab him. Now even Three Sheets has gone dark.”
“He must know that Pierluigi’s guys tracked him.”
“I think it’s over, James. I think he’s gone for good.”
Durant called with the same conclusion. In the late afternoon, from the rooftop bar of the Goethe-Institut, I looked out at the amazing city, as if to find perspective.
“We’ll never know what we nearly discovered. Amanda says you found a poem about your parents.”
“More like the makings of a poem. I think he left it for me.”
“Did it feel like a kindness or a cruelty?”
“Both.”
“Yes,” he said, then “Yes” again. “It’s time for you to leave. I’ll send the ticket. Amanda tells me you’ve been into some strange drug. Make sure you don’t try to cross borders with it.”
He asked me to read him the poem. In my own voice it struck me differently and I formed an intuition and had to stop midway and tell him I’d get back to him. At Davide’s place, on his laptop, I plugged in the hard drive Gail had given me, from the office computer of Believer Missions (Global). At the password prompt I typed “thesuniswarm” and there it was, my mother and father’s shared email account, open before me. I’d been given the password so indirectly that I had to assume someone was in danger, me or whoever had left the notebook.
Mixed in with NGO correspondence were personal messages, some to me, from me, that I barely remembered and hadn’t been able to reread since the deaths. All outgoing messages featured the Believer Missions (Global) electronic letterhead. Only in the last email my father sent did I find anything unusual. The message had no salutation. Unlike his other messages, signed with his name and military rank, this one was unsigned. It read: “Discovered. Who can I trust?”
Attached were four photos. Open wooden crates containing artillery shells and, given the wiring, what seemed to be suicide vests. The writing on the shells was in Cyrillic.
I crossed Tarlabaşi and entered a large hotel, the Marmara Pera, and took a room. In the lobby I found a telephone for guests. I called Gail in Gaziantep and asked her to phone the number from a public landline. The call came through in forty-five minutes. She recognized the email address where my father had sent the pictures as that of Oliver Mantz, an elderly man in Leeds who’d lived for years in Turkey and helped NGOs and Western companies with “back-channel communications.”
“Oliver knew who could be trusted with information and who couldn’t.”
“He sounds like a spy.”
“I don’t think he was but he knew them all. He retired back to England after we all arrived. He may never have read the message. What did it say?”
“It’s better if you don’t know. I’m sorry I involved you in any of this.”
In the hotel’s “Connection Room,” near the steady industry at the front desk, next to a broken coke machine, I sat at the common terminal and did internet searches with promising word combinations made of “artillery shells” “Cyrillic” “suicide vests” “southern Turkey.” I surmised that the arms were Russian-made or Ukrainian. I learned that everyone imaginable was running weapons through Şanliurfa Province. Arms dealers, local officials, Turkish gangsters, Russians to Assad, Americans to the Kurds, Turks to the rebels. Profiteers shipping to the Islamic State. Those quoted invoked God’s name. And I learned that two months after my parents died, police discovered an apartment in Gaziantep being used by ISIS, packed with suicide vests and weapons artillery with Cyrillic lettering. These details sat at the bottom of a story only one day old about a suicide bombing in the Şanliurfa town of Suruç. It had killed thirty-two students who were about to cross the border to help rebuild the Syrian town of Kobanî. The police were already claiming that the attacker was a Turkish member of ISIS. The government had blocked social media sites containing photos from the scene. Already happening in different parts of the country and all over Istanbul were antigovernment protests against, variously, control of the internet and the flow of information, and a perceived alliance between the Turkish government and ISIS formed to weaken Kurdish forces. A side note to the coverage was that in retaliation for the bombing two policemen suspected of helping ISIS had been killed by Kurdish gunmen outside the camp of Çodhir.
—
The hard drive itself felt like a bomb. I could tell no one about the arms photos without risk of endangering them.
I found Davide at the building, finishing up. I thanked him for letting me stay with him and for his good company. We talked about our futures, which seemed featureless.
“You should be careful about selling One Two. You don’t seem the criminal type.”
“Neither does my father.” He was polishing the banister with a blue-and-white rag that looked much like the bandana he wore to keep his hair from his eyes. “If I get in trouble he’ll pull his dirty strings. Every country, he buys off men in suits and uniforms.”
“Then you’re not really free of him.”
“I’m not so young, maybe. I know it’s not so easy to be free.”
I climbed to the top floor, gathered up the Poet’s notebook and sleeping bag, and carried them down to the foyer. Davide asked if he could have the sleeping bag. We stepped outside. In the full light I checked for new voice messages, there were none. Then I erased the saved messages, including one from Amanda, and the address book and the photos and clips, including the film taken on the road where my parents died. I called the cell provider and cancelled my service and asked Davide to give the phone to the junkman. I kept the notebook for myself.
“Have you solved your mystery?” he asked. He looked painterly in his bandana. Out of nowhere I felt an affection for my generation. A gravity could form around the right Davides in many
countries, in the spirit of wanting to piss off fathers. He was a flag.
“I don’t even know if there’s one mystery or more. I don’t think they’ll ever be solved. And I’d like to think nothing at all for a while.”
He said his group would be playing on Istiklal that night if I wanted to come by.
“I’d like that. But in case I can’t, I’ll say goodbye now.”
“Come find us. We’re going to a protest when we’re done playing.”
We shook hands and I wished him well.
I lasted less than an hour free and unplugged. At the hotel computer terminal I discovered three emails. Durant had sent my ticket and I had it printed off. Amanda wrote that she’d pick me up at the airport in Rome. She said Durant had become a little distant, detached. “Something’s going on in him and I bet even he couldn’t tell us what.” She said she’d be leaving Rome in a few weeks. A friend had offered her a place in Amsterdam. “And after that,” she wrote, “I don’t know any little bit of the future.”
—
The third message was from Burhan Rihawi: “Meet past Akşam tenty minute tonight tea in Passage Hazzopulo?” In a few clicks I learned that Akşam is the evening call to prayer. I replied that I understood and looked forward to meeting him. I said I would wear a blue scarf. Never had I felt less prepared for anything. I’d even lost my blue Urfa scarf.
Half an hour later at the common terminal I sat trying to grasp the numbers. Number of millions displaced. Number of dead. Number of tens of thousands of photos of tortured corpses from the prisons. The numbers were obscene. How many raped, suspected number unreported. Number dead by sarin gas. Trying to memorize the numbers was obscene. Trying to imagine any of it was an absolutely necessary impossible presumption, a morally responsible prayer for and reprehensible insult to the dead. To be defeated by the numbers was pathetic. Failing to be defeated was unconscionable. The number of Syrians arrived in Istanbul since the conflict began was estimated at two hundred thousand. Many were housed in communal apartments and cemevi, gathering houses, and some lived under cardboard in the public parks. Most didn’t speak Turkish. Maybe half had come across mountain passes and were not counted in the numbers. The sum of their prospects was zero.
The world and its collapsed distances held comic farce one minute, suffering the next, the new tonal discord of living. Inconsonant ironies, asymmetries, mass crushing need.
I considered bringing a gift but I’d never before been faced with meeting so unknown a stranger. As gifts I liked to give books, but I didn’t know if he read, or what, or in which of his three languages, though I presumed Arabic, or if he read outside his religion, Christians or Alawites or authors of no faith at all. And what were his politics?
To stop my thoughts I left the hotel and walked down to Galata Tower and sat in the square taking in the people taking in one another. Human wiring isn’t built for these disjunctures, meeting or even just seeing so many people in so many places in so short a time. The countless foreign territories, lost clans, glancing moments at different latitudes make the idea of home provisional or reduce it to a jagged atavism. I walked to the base of the bridge and caught a tram across to the old city. Near the Grand Bazaar on a small market street I bought scarves for Dominic, Amanda, and Durant, a blue one for myself. For a full minute I stood before an intricate carpet hung outside a shop. The owner appeared, a short man of about forty, wearing an inexpensive sports jacket over a striped sweater, a choice that seemed neither fashionable nor practical. In English, he asked me inside but I told him I had no money and couldn’t buy anything more, holding up the scarves. He shrugged, went back into the shop, and came out with two cups of tea. We stood sipping and he told me about the carpet. It was from Kurdish Iran, made in 1944. It cost nine thousand two hundred American dollars. If I examined the patterns, he said, I would find them symmetrical in shape but not colour. He pointed out a motif along one of the inner borders, taken up with variation on the side opposite. He said he lived half the year in Paris, and was in fact Turkish French. Making a frame with his hands he identified an area of the carpet containing the maximum number of subsymmetries. He remarked on the unknown maker’s use of scale and interposed spaces. He spoke four languages, English his least favourite. Of greatest effect, he thought, was the random ordering of colours and design elements in the outer border to slightly disrupt the visual field and create accidental echoes and hierarchies. He said, “The carpet brings God into the room.”
The word was decor. While still understanding nothing, all at once I understood everything. The poems, the cities, the painted tiles. The murder upon murder upon murder.
It all came on the sound of his voice, almost imploring me to see, and the balanced complexity of the carpet as he portioned it out for my understanding. Feeling on the verge of levitation, I handed him my cup and thanked him. I said he’d been a great help to me in ways I couldn’t explain and he laughed and even the laughter felt corrective and clarifying.
In forty minutes I was at Davide’s apartment. Anna answered the door. She was holding a bottle of lemon water and she wore a red sweater with a lemon motif. Amid the echoing lemons I realized I knew almost nothing about her. She invited me to the balcony but I stopped and stood in the living room.
“I’ve just come for a minute. At sundown I’m meeting someone in Passage Hazzopulo. Do you know where it is?”
“It’s across the boulevard.”
“And it empties onto Istiklal, where Davide’s group is playing tonight.”
“You have mastered the facts, James. I’ll go watch them for a while. They’re good but they’re as good as they’re going to get.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Tonight I’m staying at the Marmara Hotel.”
“Why are you telling me this? Is something wrong? Have you taken a One Two?”
“No, I’m fine. I gave away my phone but I have email access at the hotel. And a phone in my room.”
“Is Davide looking for you?”
“I just saw him earlier. We’ve said our goodbyes. And now I’ll say goodbye to you, Anna. Be happy and remember yourself.”
She and her lemons laughed.
“Is that a Canadian saying?” She kissed me on each cheek. “You’re strange. I didn’t notice it before. But strange in a nice way.”
I hesitated, leaned in, whispered.
“Remember what you said about that actress, Jean Seberg. It’s still happening. There’s someone with us, someone we can’t see. Someone’s listening to us right now. Maybe watching. In these buildings. Carlo’s buildings.”
I stepped back. Her look was of shock. She was processing, a little lost, her mouth slightly open. If she thought I was paranoid, it didn’t show. She nodded and gave my forearm a squeeze.
—
Wearing the blue scarf I entered the Passage Hazzopulo twenty minutes after the evening call to prayer. A young wrangler ushered me to a wicker stool at one of the many low tables and I sat there under a spindling tree, trying to look Canadian. I saw no other white Westerners, no obvious tourists. Most were young, under thirty. The overhead lights had come on and lifted high colours from the blue bowls and green cups people drank from. I felt a quickening. I was thinking both forward, in anticipation of meeting Burhan Rihawi, and backward, about the carpet salesman, regrettably nameless to me, wondering what neighbourhood he lived in, if he had a family. Did he walk home alone after closing the shop? Did he like to stop somewhere? Did he look around in a place like this and see design and intricacy even in the randomness of so many small shops crammed together in the senseless desperation of small commerce? Did he see more shape in things simply for knowing more about carpets? It had value beyond itself, the deep knowledge of a made thing.
I thought about surveillance. The tapped internet, smart-bugged buildings. Even there in the open air I felt anonymous one moment, watched the next. And I was being watched. I’d been looking back the way I’d come when I turned to find a fat black dog standing
at my table, as if to take my order. It looked me in the eye without real interest and limped away down the passage just as the waiter approached.
“She says hello,” he said. He was slight, another young man, with a black stubble beard. “She eats too much. Soon she can’t walk.”
“Does she belong to anyone?”
“We all give food and water. She’s the passage dog. The police shoot her in the spring but a doctor fixes her for free.” He extended his hand. “I’m Burhan.”
“Oh.” I stood and shook his hand. He had soft, generous eyes. My father had known this face, looked into it in the days before he was killed. “I’m sorry, I’m James, I thought you were the waiter.”
“I am. Would you like coffee, maybe tea?”
Our conversation progressed in one-minute spurts as he took and delivered orders at a dozen or more tables. That he’d arranged to meet me here suggested some slyness or uneasiness. He didn’t know what I wanted. I’d said only who I was, my father’s son, and that I’d like to meet him. If he knew anything about my parents’ deaths, he would have been keeping it to himself all this time. And in any case it made sense for Syrians to be wary, even in Turkey.
“I’m sorry we meet here. I use my friend’s computer. I read your email yesterday.”
“This is fine, Burhan.”
“I work very late.”
He and the other waiters fetched the tea from a little shop down the passage, where it narrowed and there was barely enough room for the two-way pedestrian traffic as people stopped to look at jewellery, clothes, ceramics. It developed that he’d been working these tables since he and his family arrived from the camp. In Al-Hasakah he’d worked in a hotel and learned enough English and Turkish to get this job. Now he worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. He never elaborated on his answers unless I kept asking questions, but he answered every one of them. He said he knew that leaving Syria wasn’t temporary, though that was what other refugees told themselves. A number I remembered, nine million displaced.
“Before the fighting we live with our neighbours no problem.”