After James

by Michael Helm

  “How did you meet my father?”

  “I help at the camp.”

  He went off to clear a table. His movements were efficient and precise, he’d done them many times. He returned and stood holding a tray of empty cups. He told me he’d never met my mother, that she worked outside the camp.

  “You are a son,” he said.

  “Yes. I am.” He seemed to be trying to see my father in me. I had the sense it wasn’t obvious. “Why did this man in Urfa give me your name and email address?”

  “I have friends there. We all feel the same.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “Your father help me. I help you.”

  “How did he help you?” He looked at me directly, gauging something. “I’m sorry to ask, Burhan, but did you know they died?”

  He set the tray down.

  “Yes.” He sat across from me. “Yes. He told me to send him my place number, where we live here, and he would send back.”

  With his hand he made a motion of writing in air.

  “You mean a letter.”

  “Yes. I write him letter but no letter come back. My friend wrote they died.”

  I outlined the circumstances of the deaths and said they seemed not quite to make sense.

  “I’m worried they were killed by someone. Murdered.” His expression was already sorrowful and the word had no outward effect on him. He knew it from the inside and heard it every day. “Can you guess why they would have been killed?”

  He lowered his head, alone with something that I felt should belong only to me, though his feeling of loss would attach to other sufferings much greater than my own. Resignation to fate, the bow of its spine. He took out a cellphone, tapped it a few times, and handed it to me. On-screen was a photo of shells with Cyrillic writing, one of the very photos attached to my father’s email. He tapped to another picture. Suicide vests.

  “I help at inspection station, outside camp.” He said the food trucks arrived at the inspection station full but left half-empty. He took pictures of what was off-loaded and, at the camp, showed the photos to my father.

  “He want to know if I was secret, did anyone saw me. Yes, they saw me. I show the pictures to many. He said send to him the photos and take my family on the bus to Gaziantep, next day.” My father staked them to a new life. He gave them money, a lot of it, to continue their journey and find an apartment and work in Istanbul. “I never see him again.” His face was muted now, as if obscured by a haze of pipe smoke or as if I were remembering it years into the future. “I’m sorry to you, James. Your father save my family.”

  He knew to leave me alone. He took the tray and left and I watched him catch up to his work. Now and then he glanced at me from one table or another. He was an innocent. His innocence had orphaned me.

  Someone had been bought off by jihadists, maybe the same someone who’d murdered my parents, someone who needed the truth to stay hidden. Then what? Had the someone himself been killed? Whom had he betrayed?

  Though I hadn’t ordered one, Burhan brought me a pide, a flatbread with cheese and some kind of ground meat inside. I looked at it. Who deserved such an offering? I resumed watching him work. To settle myself I tried calculating his wages. He must have made nearly nothing on tips from students nursing tea. He worked seventy-two hours a week. He would barely see his family. This place was his life.

  He sat with me again. Were his eyes really generous or did I need them to be? Other than a hardworking victim of history, who was he? I wanted no unearned sentiment, no easy affection. Even more than I wanted to know him well, a man like any full of contradictions, I wanted to know he was, like us all, guilty.

  “I think of seeing your father,” he said. “I think of my children and they should meet him. Now is not possible. But I will tell them someday.”

  He showed me another picture on his phone. His wife, Maira, wore a sweater and simple cotton pants, no headscarf. She looked twice Burhan’s age, though more likely she was our age or younger. She stood with either hand on her two children, a boy and a girl, maybe five and six years old. He said their names were Amal and Samir. It seemed impossible that I could be connected to this family in any way that mattered, but in fact I was connected only in ways that mattered.

  He asked for my mailing address. That I didn’t have one was an irony I chose not to voice. I wrote out Dominic’s address in Montreal, though he was selling the house, and he wrote out his and we made a show of folding the papers and putting them safely away. I promised myself to do as my parents would wish and send them all gifts when I got back to Canada. We’d begin a simple letter exchange, Burhan and I, and we wouldn’t let it falter, just a note twice a year, and when the children were teenagers maybe I’d return and meet them. I’d be in another life and maybe they would not be, and maybe that was as they’d want it. Or maybe I’d leave in a minute and never have contact again.

  We said our goodbyes and I started away toward the narrow end of the passage. There, watching me, the only other white Westerner in sight, was the Poet.

  —

  I followed him out onto Istiklal, into the stream, the thronging tens of thousands. He was half a block distant, a head above most of the rest. He glanced left and right, the face at angles, expressionless. The forehead was not so large as it had seemed in the photo and I couldn’t make out the notches at his eyes, but it had to be him. I’d flushed him into the open by moving out of the squat and giving away my cellphone, moves that forced him to watch and track me in person. At Davide’s apartment I’d laid out my evening not for Anna but for him. I was sure that he or someone in contact with him would be listening, surveilling from hidden devices, from the appliances and lighting fixtures, the art on the walls, or by whatever means the dated, clumsy, Cold War comical spying tropes had been accelerated into the new reality.

  We were headed toward Taksim. The moving crowd had weight and through-force. On the street’s south side the flow moved east, north side west, though in any location were crosscurrents and tributaries coming from side streets, or wider openings where people massed and eddied. A multitude, face to face both highly particular and undifferentiated. A man with a monkey on his shoulder stepped from the doorway of a tobacco shop and disappeared. Women in jeans or chadors or floral cottons, yoga pants, Saudis in black abayas. Eating baklava, hoisting kids, drinking from plastic cups, carrying shopping bags. Through the din came the bell of the funicular. The tram moved by on the rails midstreet, kids hanging off the back. I passed smiling young men in groups of three and five, a tourist couple struggling for direction with their laminated map. Buskers at intervals, playing jazz or Turkish songs, two African men on instruments I couldn’t name, a family of peasant musicians with a small boy bongo prodigy. The flow diverted around a thick ring of onlookers surrounding a large group of chanting protesters. The chant was loud, stadium ready, and at one point a cheer burst forth and the watchers raised cellphones and cameras like chalices and the hundred or more of them joined the chant as others in doorways filmed it all, and filmed the police filming them. From a large white truck, a water cannon sat at the ready, trained on the protesters. The riot squad stood only feet away and extended in rows along the next full block, down the ranked side streets into staging areas, their shields before them, the white helmets with blue stencilled numbers all lined at nearly the same level. I looked into their dangerously bored faces. They looked back and saw nothing. They were young like me and Amanda, like the Londoner, like Davide and his friends, like Burhan and Maira.

  Was I chasing, following, being led? I tried to make up ground, skipping into each brief clearing, but the crowd was thicker now and I had to keep my focus level on him. Other Westerners and tall men appeared up ahead and marking him became harder. I focused on his brown hair, cropped and unshaped, as if he’d shorn it himself, his skull—yes, I saw it now—slightly offset at the brow. When I glimpsed him whole I saw he wore brown pants and a rust-coloured shirt that was stained or textured or f
rayed through in places. But the hair and the colours of the clothes repeated with slight variations in the crowd. With Taksim in view the tall man who seemed most likely to be mine drifted left and entered a one-storey building, stone, vaguely, dumbly Spanish colonial to my unschooled eye. A tasteful plaque at the door designated it as the French Consulate. I stepped into the small entrance. He’d passed through the security station and was walking out into an enclosed courtyard. I nodded at a security guard and moved through a metal detector. In the courtyard people sat at candlelit tables. Whoever they were—consulate staff? diners?—none looked my way. The Poet was nowhere but I saw a door closing in another wing of the building. I trotted to catch up and stepped through the doorway to find a small gallery. A placard fronting the exhibit announced a forty-year retrospective of some photojournalist agency. He wasn’t in the first room—no one was—but other rooms extended off this one. I walked into the space, surrounded by images, shots from El Salvador, the West Bank, the Philippines, New York, Cairo, wondering at my trust.

  Suppositions present themselves to be tested. Suppose there exists a mind. Suppose it can know your heart, your great loves and losses. Suppose that it watches and listens, not just watching but leading the eye, seeing the eye being led. Suppose it flags people of interest and has the means to prompt these people into each other’s lives, to control them through their secrets and unexpendable pains.

  Suppose you’d never claimed your grief.

  I crossed the first room, entered a second. There was no one. An opening to a third gallery was across from me, and two openings opposite each other at the far end of the room. If he wanted to and was quiet, he could stay out of sight. I moved quickly into the last room, saw no one, came back into the second space and walked its length. At the far end I saw a possibility. A hallway ran off the last room. I came across and turned the corner to find a short dead end. He stood with his back to me. He faced a narrow wall with a picture collage mounted next to a window that looked out at the crowds moving by on Istiklal only metres away. I stepped forward and came up beside him. The images were anonymous cellphone shots from the Istanbul riots. Water cannons firing, clouds of gas, improvised masks, fists, bleeding, phones upon phones.

  The faint scent of wet soil, a barnyard note.

  “So many cameras,” he said. The voice was deep, the speech not native English, I guessed, though I couldn’t quite place it. I had a sense I shouldn’t look at him or press him so I bent closer to the collage. Some shots were stills from security cameras. I pictured walls of screens, silhouetted heads in dim rooms. So many cameras, so many cities, I thought. The streets thrashing like they’re trying to wake from a dream. The world as one big sleep lab.

  Against my will, the words “big sleep” opened a cha-cha. I thought of Raymond Chandler and his best-known detective novel. I remembered that Chandler began as a poet but discovered he lacked talent. He enlisted in the First World War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, at the onset of the Depression lost his job as a California oil executive because of drinking and womanizing, and published his first novel, The Big Sleep, when he was fifty. His detective, Philip Marlowe, is thought to be named after Marlowe House, which Chandler belonged to while in school in England, and which itself is named after Christopher Marlowe, murdered Elizabethan dramatist and, allegedly, spy for or victim of a shadowy government agency. Chandler advanced the detective novel for being less interested in plots and resolutions than in everything else. I couldn’t recall a single snappy line from his fiction, only that he once wrote that the ideal mystery was one you would read even if the end was missing.

  I waited for the Poet to say something, maybe about Durant’s daughter, Amanda’s brother, my parents, whistleblowers all, it seemed, the real missing and the real dead in their real big sleeps. I waited for him to tell me that history now stole from the cheapest commercial fantasies. They kept each other running, events and their mockeries. Fantasies kill.

  From the street came a dull roar, what might have been a low cheer a few blocks away. A shuddering energy moved through the windowpane. Outside, the crowds moved as before.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “I mean, exactly what?”

  Now he looked at me as if he’d just realized I was standing there. His eyes were dark mouths.

  He said, “This is the new weather.” I thought again of human systems grown so large no one can know their nature. He bent forward and examined one of the pictures. A protester with a bandana over his face sat against a concrete wall. There were burn marks or bloodstains on his arms. “I know this one,” he said. Did he mean the picture or the protester in the picture? “Two days after this was taken…This boy’s dead.”

  Of course he was. All was murder without end. For some reason I thought of the two versions of “Çodhir,” the one in the Poet’s hand and the one I’d made from his words. And now I preferred his. What did I mean? I meant that knowing there was an order to put the lines into, I wanted the disorder after all. Not chaos, but order-into-chaos. I wanted to bust up the decor. If you trust the decor you’re a fool.

  I turned to him but he stayed facing the collage. I reached across and grabbed the front of his shirt—when I touched him I felt a kind of spark in my skull—and pivoted him toward me. He had weight, substance. He was bigger, stronger, but he allowed this. I felt that if I pushed him through the window, he’d allow that too, and the allowances were infuriating, but he took my hands, turned them open, pushed me back one step. He pressed down on my shoulders, as if telling me to stay put.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Are we in danger?”

  Nothing in his face seemed expressly unkind, I thought, and at that moment an explosion sounded and the window shivered in its frame. The glass misted over and then it blew open and I was thrown against the wall. The back of my head hit something hard. I didn’t lose consciousness but it was several seconds before I put together what had happened. The jet of water had struck me in the chest and was gone again within moments. As I looked around I saw the Poet was gone too. My hands were bloody, glass in the palms. I got to my feet and looked out just as he ran into the thick braid of turmoil where the police and citizens fought. When he reached midstreet, as if they’d been waiting for him, the police line surged forward. There was another loud crack and more shouting, people running, falling, being run over, dragged off. A cannon stream knocked them down and then it was all short bursts, the way the cops ran, sudden percussives, the way they fired, shooting gas at angles from antlered guns. At close quarters the weapon of choice was their boots. They stomped and kicked like common thugs. Through it all a tall man fell—was it him? I thought so—and was circled and claimed by cops and I couldn’t see a thing.

  I ran around to the entrance and passed beside the metal detector. The guard was at the door holding back people wanting shelter inside. He looked at me gravely and held up a hand. When the cannon swept by again and cleared petitioners from the steps he unlocked the door and opened it fast and shoved me outside. My eyes and throat closed immediately. I tried to look across to where I’d seen the Poet on the ground but the space now belonged to the police, in helmets and gas masks, advancing in ragged phalanx, gathering the citizens they could, dragging them behind the line. I fell into a thin, broken file, people crouched and clutching blindly, fetal, crawling. One of them poured water into her eyes and then handed me the plastic bottle and I did the same and passed it on. All of us were coughing. Out of the gas and water the masked cops were coming at us in twos and threes like figures in a dream, selecting at random, pulling us away. One of them pointed at me and came running, another cop behind him, passing other protesters. They were after me and I turned to run too late. The lead cop had me by the hair and kicked at my knees until I fell, and the two of them grabbed my arms and started dragging me just as three men with T-shirts wrapped over their faces ran at them. Someone took up my legs. I couldn’t breathe and tried to say so but nothing came out, the experience was beyond words
in that moment. Then all in an instant my feet were on the ground again and the young men hurled themselves at the cops and knocked one of them down as the other retreated and signalled something to the troops behind him. I was free and the masked young men were beating the cop when the water hit us.

  I shot backward along the brick street and the pain seemed both general and multiply located, both sudden and timeless, and in the tumble I was there and in the future something like the one that came to be as the water advanced upon me and spun me, wouldn’t let me go, and I passed by people running, catching discontinued scenes, reeling past people carrying others by the legs and arms, people tending others down the side streets, a column of smoke shunting into view and away, past barriers, shouting, and came to a stop. I looked up at apartment windows above the chaos, people standing behind them, closed away, and the figures were shadows, the shadows various, observing the spectacle.

  The world continued to act upon me. I influenced events very little. Unlike in literature, character was not fate. Fate was unbelievably itself. Staring out from the unlikely present I found each possible future equally implausible, though one of them began to take shape along the Canada-U.S. border where, under a concealing canopy of maples, I rented a house in a woods. I lived off a small sum Dominic advanced to me from his will. In early November came the days of first snow. The place had a busted furnace and a woodstove. I burned firewood and sawed and chopped to replenish the pile, a daily routine in my unpeopled life. In the mornings and late afternoons I handwrote stories I found hard to believe, including the one you’re now reading. To protect the vulnerable, I changed details and names, including my own. Amanda is not Amanda, Durant not Durant, the poem “August” not “August,” and so on. These measures are acts of delusion or faith in the idea that an audience awaits and some reader somewhere will see what’s true.

  Amanda and I didn’t get our Italian reunion. From Istanbul I flew to Rome but never left the airport. A man with aviator glasses peeking out of his shirt pocket seemed to be following me through the Fiumicino terminal, or at least he was always behind me as I detoured, ducked into a washroom, stood a distance from the screens listing baggage carousels. I left my bag unclaimed for several minutes, waiting for him to claim his and leave, until finally we were the last two waiting, pretending the two last bags weren’t ours. I claimed mine, went through security, headed straight for an Air Canada desk, and booked a flight to Montreal.