River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Allah, what have you got there!’ Fatma said as she looked at the syringe in her son’s hand.

  Bülent just touched his tongue with the powder and said, ‘Coke.’

  ‘Coke?’ Fatma frowned and then looked down at Kemal, still crying on the floor. ‘Coke?’

  ‘Cocaine,’ Bülent said bluntly. And then, holding the bloodied syringe up to the light, he added, ‘Not this, I don’t suppose, however.’

  ‘What . . .’

  ‘He couldn’t even be bothered to dispose of his syringe!’ Bülent said angrily. ‘I could have stabbed myself on it! Allah alone knows what he’s got floating around in his blood!’ Seeing that his mother either wouldn’t or couldn’t understand, he said, ‘Mum, Bekir has been shooting up heroin.’

  ‘But you said coke . . .’

  ‘I don’t know why he’s got cocaine too,’ Bülent replied. ‘Maybe he just deals that, or takes it as well as heroin. Who knows?’ He picked up the sprig of greenery he had taken out of the bag first and said, ‘And as to what this is . . .’

  ‘You mean he’s on drugs? He said he’d done with all that,’ Fatma said. ‘He said he was clean!’ Her attention was caught by her weeping youngest son on the floor and she frowned. ‘Kemal?’

  ‘Kemal here was rather more worried about getting hold of this bag than he was about finding Bekir,’ Bülent said. He leaned down towards his brother. ‘Kemal, have you been taking drugs with Bekir?’ he said in what to the teenager was a very menacing fashion. ‘Has he been giving them to you? Tell me the truth, boy!’

  Seraphim Yunun had never had a moment’s doubt about his vocation. Even when in the past it had seemed sometimes as if St Sobo’s could not possibly survive another year, he had always known that it would. As he had lived, so, he knew, he would die under holy orders. If only Brother Gabriel would return, then all would be well whatever might or might not be going on outside the monstery walls. Although he hadn’t seen the miracle for himself, Brother Seraphim knew many who had been there when Gabriel Saatçi had walked back into Mardin covered in snake bites. He’d seen the report the doctor had written on Gabriel’s injuries at the time. No one could survive such an onslaught! Only a saint with God at his right hand. Easter Sunday would arrive in the morning and Seraphim would pray even more fervently for Gabriel’s return. Maybe the saint would, like the Christ himself, rise again triumphant on the third day.

  ‘Brother Seraphim!’

  It was the policeman from İstanbul, Arto Sarkissian’s friend. Brother Seraphim smiled. ‘Inspector?’

  Mehmet Süleyman had spotted the monk as he was about to go back to his room. Now he jogged across the central courtyard of the monstery to speak to him.

  ‘Brother, if I may have a moment of your time . . .’

  ‘Of course.’ Brother Seraphim opened his hands in a gesture of acceptance. ‘Would you like to come and sit up on the roof? It’s a lovely afternoon and the view from up there is definitely something you should see before you leave St Sobo’s.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The monk led Süleyman up a steep flight of outdoor steps cut into the side of the building, which led from the courtyard up to a large flat roof. At one corner was the ornate, fluted bell tower while at another, beside a smooth white dome, was a stone bench that Brother Seraphim took Süleyman over to now. As they sat down the policeman looked around at the rolling vineyards in front of the monastery and the jagged and forbidding-looking mountains behind. Near the tops of the peaks were what looked like very rudimentary buildings. Although how anyone would or could get up to such a place and then build, Süleyman could not imagine.

  As if reading his mind, Brother Seraphim pointed to the structures and said, ‘Those are very ancient. I don’t know when they were built or by whom, except that brothers most certainly made them.’

  ‘Monks?’ Süleyman sat down on the bench, still looking at the mountains beyond.

  ‘They are hermitages,’ Brother Seraphim said. ‘Constructed by brothers whose road to God was to be of a solitary nature. It is an ancient and honourable Christian tradition, although few choose the life of the hermit these days. The last of that kind here in these mountains died back in the 1960s.’ He smiled. ‘But when Brother Gabriel went missing we, or rather some of the younger brothers, did risk venturing up into the old dwellings to look for him. It has been feared for some time that terrorists might haunt some of the old hermitages. But our brothers didn’t find them, thank God, or sadly Brother Gabriel either.’

  ‘Some people think he’s with the Sharmeran,’ Süleyman said. It came out, he thought, with a tinge of irony. The reply however was totally and utterly straight.

  ‘Maybe he is.’

  And then they both just looked. Down in front of the building men in wide salvar trousers were raking the ground between the neat rows of grapevines. Above, in a sky that, though cold, was a deep and almost sea-like blue, an eagle hovered silently on invisible thermals. Without noise or great movement the world of the Tur Abdin outside the cities and settlements was one of timeless and eerie beauty.

  ‘What you have to understand, Inspector,’ Brother Seraphim said in a low, slow voice, breaking the silence, ‘is that many people of religion here accept a certain blurring of the edges of doctrine.’

  Süleyman frowned.

  ‘Tomorrow, I understand, you will attend the Easter service in Mar Behnam church. There you will see a lot of things that at first sight might appear contradictory. For instance, as well as cloth pictures depicting the lives of our saints, Mar Behnam has a representation of the Sharmeran on its walls. In addition to Christians, both Suriani and Armenian, there will be Muslims also – Turks and Kurds. They will take the service as seriously as their Christian brothers and sisters, and many people whatever their religion will pay homage to the Sharmeran.’

  ‘Inspector Taner said that her father would be attending,’ Süleyman said.

  The monk shrugged. ‘Seçkin Taner, like you a Muslim, is a man of enormous faith. Seçkin Taner is a prime example of the blurring of the lines of belief.’

  ‘But, Brother,’ Süleyman began, ‘you must see how this is a struggle for someone like me to take in.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Again a moment of silence passed while the eagle swooped down upon something beyond the vineyards.

  ‘I don’t know and often don’t understand where allegiances lie here,’ Süleyman continued. ‘I am obliged, because of my ignorance, to take much on trust. Part of the time I don’t even know what people are saying because I don’t speak any languages apart from my own, English and French. I’ve come here to apprehend Yusuf Kaya and yet . . .’

  ‘And yet you feel no closer to him now than you did back in İstanbul?’ Brother Seraphim smiled. ‘If Yusuf Kaya is in the Tur Abdin then he will be so well hidden that only a lapse of concentration on the part of his guards or the man himself will give him away. It will come about by accident. Edibe Taner knows this.’

  ‘And yet,’ Süleyman said, ‘people were sometimes willing to tell Inspector Taner things. Where certain people might be, and—’

  ‘Gypsies,’ the monk said simply. ‘They’re poorer than most folk. Sometimes they sell information to the police, sometimes they work to help the clans with their guns and their drugs. There are other informants too, I believe.’

  ‘Lütfü Güneş, who came here to see me just after I arrived,’ Süleyman said. ‘He told us some—’

  ‘You went off to Dara the following day,’ Brother Seraphim cut in. ‘I, of course, do not know what it was you did there.’

  Exasperated, Süleyman said, ‘Yes, but by saying that, by implying you do, you—’

  ‘Inspector, the Tur Abdin is a very beautiful and very dangerous place. A man, or a woman, must wear many faces in order to survive.’

  ‘And so anyone may or may not know anything . . .’ He paused, started to rake his fingers frustratedly through his hair but then lit up a cigarette instead. ‘Brother Seraph
im, what do you know about Lütfü Güneş? I haven’t seen him since he came to see me. Do you think that he might have led us in the direction he did for reasons associated with an agenda of his own?’

  The monk sniffed the cigarette smoke with obvious pleasure. He had only given the habit up six months earlier. ‘What I know of Lütfü Güneş is that he is a Kurd who loves only others of his own kind,’ he said. ‘His family is not a great clan even though I know his people have ambitions. It is one of those groups who have been known to assist those more important than themselves in the past. My understanding is that some of Lütfü’s people have had some involvement with drugs. A couple of the clans, as you know, involve themselves in peddling that misery; the Kayas are only one of them. I don’t know whether the Güneş family have ever helped the mainly Turkish Kayas, but they have been involved with some of the other, Kurdish clans. Therein may lie his motive for informing. I’m not saying that is so, but . . .’

  ‘But I may have to return to İstanbul without Yusuf Kaya,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘If God wills.’

  Süleyman took in a deep breath and let it out again slowly. ‘Brother Seraphim, have you ever heard of something called the Cobweb World?’

  There was a pause during which Süleyman turned to look at the monk, who was frowning.

  ‘Where did you hear that expression, Inspector?’

  ‘An old woman used it to me in Gaziantep. She said that I was part of the Cobweb World on account of my coming from an Ottoman family.’

  ‘An Ottoman family? You are from an Ottoman family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Brother Seraphim shook his head and said, ‘And the woman, she was . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Süleyman replied. ‘I was met in Gaziantep by Inspector Taner and her cousin and they took me to this house, an old Armenian place, where the woman was a sort of cook.’

  ‘Mm.’ Brother Seraphim put a hand up to his heavily bearded chin. ‘The cousin, was it a man called Rafik?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded gravely now. ‘Yes, well, that would explain it.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘The woman you met was Lucine Rezian. She is Rafik’s mother and although once married to Seçkin Taner’s brother, she is an Armenian.’

  ‘But I thought . . .’

  ‘Armenians remain here. A few,’ Brother Seraphim said. ‘Like the Suriani, the Yezidi Kurds and Ottomans like you, they are part of the Cobweb World. What do I mean by that? Inspector, the Cobweb World is what just about remains from the past. The modern world of the Tur Abdin is about the PKK, Hezbollah, the military and the divisions that some want to drive between religions and clans. Things that in the old days would have been ignored. Our reality, the Cobweb World, is delicate and fragile and it clings precariously to the old buildings here just as surely as it clings to old men like me.’ He smiled. ‘You are young. But if you are an Ottoman then you must know that world too. For you, I think, it must be one of diminished status, of the sadness you must sometimes feel when your fine manners are ignored. And I expect that you probably speak French with a very fine Parisian accent.’

  Süleyman too began to smile. What the monk was saying was very familiar, as was his assessment of Süleyman’s own place in this abode of the past, the dead and the dying out. His father, the prince, he knew would be the last of his family to be referred to by that title.

  ‘But the Taner family are good people,’ Brother Seraphim said. ‘Inspector Taner’s grandfather, Şeymus Taner, was not entirely happy for his second son to marry an Armenian Christian, but he allowed the match. He was genuinely sad when his son, Lucine and young Rafik moved to Gaziantep for work. Lucine is a slightly guilty secret in that family. Even now, even in private, how does one speak about Armenians and what might or might not have happened long ago? I lay no blame anywhere but . . . Edibe Taner, you know, speaks Armenian, but she would never use the language in your earshot. She has difficulty with Lucine, with her place in the past. But she loves her. Edibe recognises things of herself in the old woman. The Kayas, on the other hand . . . They were furious when Yusuf’s aunt Bulbul decided to go off with a man from the town of Birecik.’

  Süleyman told him he knew something about this story and had indeed met Bulbul Kaplan in person.

  ‘The husband was upstairs when we visited,’ Süleyman said. ‘We were told he is blind . . .’

  ‘Gazi Kaplan is blind,’ Brother Seraphim said. ‘It is said that Yusuf Kaya’s father put his eyes out with his own hands. His punishment, apparently, for marrying his sister in secret.’

  When a child is at risk, all thoughts of other things fly from the mind of a parent. For once Çetin İkmen’s mobile telephone was off.

  ‘What did you take?’ he said to the cowering figure of Kemal as the boy stood in front of his father’s chair in the İkmen living room. Over by the door out to the balcony, Fatma İkmen was being hugged and comforted by her son Bülent. ‘Kemal!’

  The teenager tried to stop himself from shaking but without success.

  ‘What has that no-good brother of yours been giving you, Kemal?’ İkmen said in a way that everyone else in the room knew was terrifyingly controlled.

  ‘Çetin, we don’t know that Bekir—’ Fatma began.

  ‘He was a lying, drugged-up thug at fifteen, why should he be any different now?’ İkmen said.

  ‘Çetin!’

  İkmen threw his arms in the air, finally giving way to the fury inside. ‘I only let him stay to please you, Fatma! I would have thrown him on to the street without a thought!’ And then he leaned forward and glared up at Kemal yet again. ‘What did he give you, Kemal? What did you take from that snake of a brother of yours?’

  But Kemal could only cry. Hot, fat tears sliding down his hot, red face.

  ‘Kemal!’

  ‘Dad, as I told you, there was coke loose in the bag,’ Bülent said. ‘The syringe . . .’

  ‘The syringe I will send off to the forensic institute for analysis,’ İkmen said. He looked up pointedly at Bülent and continued, ‘In the meantime, I want Kemal to tell me what—’

  ‘C-coke,’ the teenager stuttered out between sobs. ‘I – he – he let me sniff it. It was—’

  ‘Got you as high as a Boeing 747 no doubt!’ İkmen yelled. He stubbed the cigarette in his hand right out and instantly lit up another. ‘Did you like it? Coke?’

  The youngster hung his head and whispered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he give you anything else? Anything in a syringe?’

  ‘What, heroin? No,’ Kemal said. ‘No, he kept that for himself.’

  The room became very quiet then. It went on for some time. The silence was finally broken by Çetin İkmen rising sharply to his feet. He looked at his watch.

  ‘It’s six o’clock now,’ he said. ‘When was Bekir last seen?’

  ‘I saw him go into his room just after two,’ Bülent replied. And then, holding on tightly to his mother, he said, ‘What are you going to do, Dad?’

  There was another, this time very short silence. Çetin İkmen swallowed hard and said, ‘I’m going to report the fact that a thirty-four-year-old man was giving my child drugs. I’m going to circulate Bekir’s details and description and have him arrested.’

  No one either moved or spoke again until Fatma said softly, ‘I took a photograph of Bekir the other day, Çetin. Çiçek put it on the computer for me. You can have that if you think it will do any good.’

  And then she went over to her youngest son, took him in her arms and kissed him. ‘Allah forgive me,’ she said softly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Edibe Taner said to the veiled woman who stood in front of her. The light over the plains was fading now and soon Dara would be in darkness.

  Underneath her veil, Elizabeth Smith smiled. ‘What don’t you understand? Why I dress like this outside the house? My marriage? Yusuf? What?’

  ‘Any of it,’ the policewoman said.

  She had int
ended to go home after she left Mehmet Süleyman at St Sobo’s. But then, as she had done periodically ever since Gabriel’s disappearance, she had gone out looking for him. She had not, however, ended up in Dara purely by chance. She had an officer watching the place and she wanted to check up on him too. Elizabeth Smith was such an oddity in that setting that when she had seen her strolling in her garden, fully covered, the temptation to go and talk to her had been overwhelming.

  ‘I cover myself when I’m outside the house out of respect,’ the American said.

  ‘Women in the Tur Abdin do not generally cover their faces, just their heads,’ Taner replied.

  The heavily made-up eyes above the veil closed and then opened again. ‘You know, Inspector,’ Elizabeth Smith said, ‘I may have been born and raised in Boston, but my people were Southern Baptists.’

  ‘What does that mean? Is it a religion?’

  ‘Southern Baptists are very strict and austere Christians,’ the American said. ‘They go the extra kilometre, as you would say. No drinking, no cussing, no sex outside marriage. I lost contact with all that years ago. I wanted to travel and my folks didn’t approve of that and so I left. But I still have some of the old values. The respect, at least.’

  ‘So now you go to the Suriani church . . .’

  ‘It’s a fine spectacle, yes.’

  ‘Miss Smith, I . . .’

  ‘What’s a nice American girl doing marrying a gangster, covering her face and living in a house without running water?’

  ‘Miss Smith, you live in a house surrounded by armed men! You are a prisoner. Willing, but . . .’

  The clanking sounds of the bells that some people put round the necks of their goats drifted over from the vastness of the Ocean’s fields. The veiled woman looked up into the darkening sky.

  ‘When a person finds herself alone in the world, different priorities can take over,’ she said. ‘My respect for this place and its people, its purity, is paramount.’