Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  For Mary Frances and Charles, but most of all, for Gary: friend, great love, D.D.E.

  Contents

  Ankara, Turkey

  1

  June 1975

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  July 1975

  Chapter 3

  August 1975

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  2

  September 1975

  Chapter 7

  October 1975

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  November 1975

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  December 1975

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  3

  January 1976

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  February 1976

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  Ankara, Turkey

  THE TELEPHONE CHIMED AS IT ALWAYS DID, IN THE DEEP, DEAD middle of the night. The jangling noise reached the farthest corners of the apartment, calling out to us from the table in the hallway—the table with the pencil and the notepaper, beside the coatrack, the wood-edged mirror, the prayer rug. Drugged with sleep, we climbed up to the sound in our separate, darkened rooms, each of us hoping someone else would make it stop.

  I heard the phone replaced and then his footsteps; a narrow angle of light woke beneath my door. My father moved heavily down the hall, collecting his necessities. He passed my room, and then he was in the closet, taking out his suitcase. At the time, I thought all fathers kept a small, heavy suitcase packed in the hall closet, with another pair of shoes, perpetually shined, and several changes of clothes. From time to time, he checked it, inventorying the contents, replacing one thing, removing another. It was not uncommon to see him crouched in front of the closet, his knees splayed and his face in worried profile, his hair thinning at the temples. Each time he opened the suitcase he buffed those shoes, fitting them onto his hands like ungainly gloves, studying them up against the light.

  For a while—in other apartments, other houses, other countries—I’d checked the suitcase closet every morning as a matter of habit, even if I’d seen my father only moments before over breakfast. The sight of it, safe amid boots and the finishes of coats, was more reassuring to me somehow than his smell of hair tonic and drugstore aftershave, the sound of the ancient coins he jingled in his pockets, or the Russian folk music he liked to play on the hi-fi. (My mother, stopping in the doorway, would say: Will you please, I beg of you, turn that racket off?)

  The wind that morning was already busy—I heard it through the open window of my room—fretting leaves in the street, harassing tendrils of vine in the vineyard across the road. The air was full of the smell of changing seasons, stained faintly with smoke and dying leaves, the odor of tar from the construction site next door. Autumn was quickly turning to winter.

  In those days my father traveled often and we rarely saw him go, dispatched as he was in secret by the government agency he worked for. Anytime he walked out the front door he might as well have been vanishing off the face of the earth.

  I was lying in my brass bed—French, my mother liked to remind me—and the apartment was still thick and smoky from a party the night before. There was the lingering smell of liquor and fried foods, the echoes of pleasant, politic chatter. Our maid Firdis was gone, having left bags by the front door, filled with bottles and the detritus of cooking and cocktails: the emptied-out ashtrays, the lipstick-smeared napkins. I closed my eyes and opened them, over and over, faster and faster, keeping myself awake, trying to make the spots come. Would he remember to say goodbye? Would she remind him?

  My father had left many times, and since we never knew where he went, we certainly couldn’t predict when he’d be back. We must have trusted the government to return him to us when they were finished with him. To us, his leaving reinforced how indispensable he was, how direly needed elsewhere, and in that way we were taught, tricked, into making a prize of our sacrifice.

  I heard my mother get up from the couch in the den, where she had been sleeping—I pretended not to know about these arrangements—and pad down the hall. I heard whispering, the familiar edge to their voices. I couldn’t make out the words.

  He did not come to my room. The front door closed and he was gone. His footsteps sounded on the marble stairs, three flights down to the lobby. The sun was not yet up, and his steps were all I heard: clear, measured, strong.

  Moments later my mother moved down the hallway past my room, headed for the master bedroom, the warm, rumpled sheets he’d just abandoned. In his absence she reclaimed many territories: chairs and beds, the best coffee cup, the moral high ground. She spread out like a great moth, laying dusty, ashy wings across everything in sight.

  How does a woman hear her husband leave the house one morning—listen, as I did, to the sound of his steps receding, his ring hand scraping the railing, the hushing our lobby door made, closing softly, as if the air itself were being squeezed—and think so little of it? Didn’t she feel, as I did, the sudden loneliness of the rooms, the sighing of the bedclothes as we readjusted in the dark, the changes, when he had gone, in the very texture of the atmosphere around us, in the molecules and the spaces between them, in even the temperature of the air?

  My father’s driver would be waiting downstairs; he often stood on the sidewalk holding open the door of the blue station wagon, his peaked hat in his hand at his side. His name was Kadir: a big, kind man with a million children, a great black mustache, fraying cuffs, a stiff, endearing pride in his job. Sometimes, especially when my father was gone, Kadir drove me to school—the Ankara streets slid by, curving down the hill into the city’s teeming center and then up again, into affluent Çankaya, where the apartment buildings were taller and clean faced, where windows gleamed and the oasis of the city’s botanical garden stretched west, a glittering emerald in an otherwise unbroken line of concrete-colored streets and buildings.

  The apartment grew quiet; I felt the hallways and corners fill up with our breathing, my mother’s and mine—we were alone together again—and I imagined my father’s other life, his life away from us, beginning.

  It was a December morning; I was nearly thirteen years old. Later that day it snowed, the first of the season, and that night shadows flickered on the snow and the hill below our apartment became a mass of dark and milling bodies, bundled in coats and scarves and balaclavas. Screaming children hurtled down the darkened slope, riding the metal lids of trash cans, scraps of plastic and even garden chairs, affixed somehow to makeshift runners.

  That was the last time I heard or smelled or saw my father: his heavy steps and the drifting breath of his aftershave, the gray suitcase thudding on the stairs, the hushed strains of an argument, loving or bitter—how was I to say?—between them. What did I know then? I knew everything; I knew nothing.

  1

  June 1975

  1

  MY FRIEND CATHERINE AND I WERE PLAYING A GAME OF can’t-touch-the-ground in the alleys behind my apartment at the crest of the hill. The buildings were set against the hillside in terraces, a descending series of walls, separated by concrete ledges, iron railings and great spiked fences. Sometimes I would stand on our own balcony, look down and map the walls we had climbed so far; the ledges we had traversed, teetering, our arms spread wide, breath held—the entire perilous terrain of our makeshift playground. Catherine stood on the ground with her pale hands stretched up, waiting for me to pull her onto the ledge. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright as a bird’s. I grabbed her wrist
and hauled her up beside me. Her shoes scrabbled against the stones; bits of cement kicked away under her feet. We stood at the top and looked around. Below us was the garden of another apartment building; in the middle, an enormous woman was hanging enormous sheets. All around, the neighboring gardens were bare brown rectangles littered with cheap plastic toys, abandoned kites, their stillness occasionally interrupted by the darting motion of a stringy cat, moving hungrily, slinking up a wall in a gravity-defying way, pausing, then leaping into another garden, to begin again. Crisscrossed above these walled spaces was a web of clotheslines that on predetermined days streamed and billowed with washing: vast white sheets, enormous underthings, men’s shirtsleeves and pant legs that animated with Ankara’s polluted air; all day they bobbed and flapped, ducked and waved.

  Catherine and I clung with our toes scrunched in our shoes to the edge of the cement wall. Laundry moved in the hot wind; our arms strained against the iron rail for balance. I pointed up, at the ledge several feet above us—we’d need to be cats almost, to get to that one.

  “But it’s too narrow,” Catherine said. “Too high.” The woman in the garden looked up at us, shook out her sheets, spat onto the dirt. She made the kind of hissing noise people use to shoo cats, waved her arms and stepped a little nearer. She spoke angrily in Turkish; I ignored her.

  “It’s not,” I said. “Martin and I did it all the time. Besides, you say you’re a ballerina. Act like one.”

  I inched away from Catherine, away from the woman’s voice, her miserable garden and depressing laundry, along the edge, and scrambled up onto the next wall. Catherine followed, her face unhappy, her steps reluctant (she had wanted to go to the pool today, but no one would drive us).

  At her back now was my apartment building: my window, our balcony, and on it, watching us, our huge white cat. I had found him under a car on our street only three months earlier, just days after we’d arrived in Ankara; he’d not been even half his current size then, bedraggled, filthy, spitting with fury.

  ALREADY, IT seemed like we’d followed my father halfway around the world. The Middle East, and Germany, and just before Turkey we’d waited Stateside, on a baking street on a military base, while my father went off to work as other fathers did, in a business suit and polished shoes, carrying his briefcase. Six months passed there and my mother and I grew docile and stupefied, as blunted as pack animals. We were killing time on a street called Olson Loop, drained almost entirely of hope and sick to death of each other’s company. We waited side by side with other families just like ours, in temporary quarters, with derelict furniture and hand-me-down decor and the accumulated scents of other people and their own waiting, and all of it made my mother quite pale with unhappiness. She’d always liked the traveling better than the waiting, the knowing rather than the wondering—and she liked almost anything better than being stuck all day alone with me, obligated to provide regular meals and her own lackadaisical brand of maternal interest. When they came, the papers said Turkey, and my mother faced it with regulation stoicism, with the relief of having something—anything—to do. She set about packing and organizing, filling out shipping forms, rolling up her sleeves for inoculations.

  Here in Ankara, my parents had been in a rush—school was in session, we were living in a hotel—and they’d taken this apartment across from an abandoned vineyard and a mountainous coal heap, next to a new building under construction (perpetually, it would turn out) in a section of the city called Gasi Osman Paşa. The apartment building, ten squat stories, sat at the top of a perfectly arcing hill, with a long, wide flight of steps leading down one side onto a boulevard lined with hotels and ice cream vendors, corner groceries and bakeries. Catherine lived with her parents on the other side of the hill, where it flattened out again, on a street more residential than ours—there were no construction sites, no desolate vineyards—a road lined prettily with shade trees and tiny, fenced gardens, where even the apartment buildings seemed friendlier, smaller and more congenially arranged, their balconies painted in creamy pastels.

  In the alleys, our rules were simple. The staggered walls were the highways of the game, the tall black fences obstacles to be skirted post by post, feet clinging to the lower rail, hands curling around iron spikes. Once we were up, once we had hoisted ourselves onto the first wall, the ground was off-limits. The walls ran mazelike between the colorless apartment houses, past dirty windows and gardens—we could, if we wanted, make it all the way down to the broad, busy street at the bottom of the hill without ever touching a foot to the earth.

  Martin, the English boy I’d invented the game with, had once impaled his knee on one of the ugly rusted spikes that intersected the railings. My mother still told the story as a caution, in grisly, manufactured detail. But Martin and his family were gone, their tour of duty in Ankara finished. They’d returned to England with their scarred son and numerous, wriggling pet ferrets, which the mother had cooed to as though they were kittens. Personally, I’d been glad to see Martin go; I had grown to hate his mother, her doughy face, her smell of black-currant syrup, her coy references to a romance between us. They had taken Martin to the hospital with a piece of spike still through his knee—absolutely skewered, my mother said, like a shish kebab.

  But Martin’s mishap in no way discouraged me. Ankara was hellish in the summer; in the morning the heat came on like a sudden fever, and when it did, the electricity snapped off almost immediately. Energy rationing began in June; the power was cut at midday and the city simmered until evening, when lights finally splashed onto the darkness from the windows and appliances started up again. The cycle was utterly reliable, marked by the strange, expansive silence of the daylight hours and the sudden, audible sound of electricity coursing again, whirring, speeding across the city, buzzing toward outlets and the spoiling contents of iceboxes, neon advertisements over kebab restaurants, baking ovens, bedside lamps. Cooking chores, left off in the morning, were resumed; televisions snapped on (Starsky and Hutch dubbed in Turkish; incomprehensible, but oddly riveting); lights reached for and clicked on, satisfyingly, at last.

  It was hotter, my mother liked to say, than the very sizzling hinges of hell. Letters she wrote to her friend Edie often contained clever lines like: What do Turkish women do when it’s 110 in the shade? Go to the hamam, of course! So, left to our own devices—our mothers were usually busy playing cards and shopping, socializing or planning to—Catherine and I waited, entertaining ourselves as best we could, hoping for a ride to the pool, for school to start, for a spike through a soft, tender place. Really, we welcomed almost any distraction. Catherine and I had met in school at the British Embassy. I had been drawn to her quiet, her pretty clothes and manners and her dancer’s grace. I’d talked to her and bothered her and followed her down the street from the bus stop until she finally relented and became my friend. By summer, we were inseparable.

  We went to the alleys to escape the noisy silences of our own rooms and the suffocating heat that seemed to consume all the breathable air inside by noon. We avoided Catherine’s, where even when her mother was gone the apartment was dominated by John, the houseboy. He was a young man with skin like toffee and beautiful hands, but his eyes, behind thick, girlish lashes, were hostile and cold. John both fascinated and repelled us—his effete mannerisms, his slender waist, his disregard: for people, for animals, and most of all, it seemed, for us. Also, he seemed to belong, in every way imaginable, to Simone, Catherine’s icy mother. Simone had been a minor kind of ballerina herself once, at home in Montreal, and now she directed those dreams and a coiled, manic energy into socializing and endless games of one-upmanship.

  AT THE end of the alley, the finish of our game, were a house and garden we always assumed to be abandoned. If we got there without touching the ground, we’d won—the prize was nothing, of course, but the satisfaction of having arrived in the chosen manner, shunning the earth, leaping wall to wall, jumping down the stepped cement. That it was a real house—not a massive conc
rete cube housing hundreds—made the place valuable. That it had an actual garden, with a stone bench, fruiting trees, dark cool spaces and an iron gate with a catch, thrilled us almost as much.

  On summer afternoons like this one, when we were not taken to the pool, Catherine and I picked our way along the walls to the end of the alley, clambered down, and sat on the stone bench in the relative cool of the garden. Our pockets bulged with sweets, our hands were sticky with sugar and dirt, the toes of our shoes scuffed in the dry earth. The house was shuttered and quiet. Early on, we lost the need to creep around it like thieves, having grown quite certain that no one lived there, that no one had for years. We felt proprietary. We would have been offended had a face appeared in the window, or a hand unlatched the gate. A grimy, blackened trellis climbed one corner of the house, and the stone walls were greening with moss. From the street front, where we walked during the school year to meet the bus, this house was invisible, obscured by another square-faced apartment building with stacked balconies and an etched-glass door. So the house was a doubly secret place, likely belonging at one time to the vineyard across the street, but finally abandoned in the same thoughtless way.

  It never occurred to us to enter the house itself. We were happy enough with the small garden, the overgrown bushes, fruit trees that dropped their rotting yields—overripe apricots, bitter little oranges, bursting figs—onto the ground for us to find. Before leaving, we carefully gathered up our wrappings and discarded cellophanes; we latched the gate behind us and strolled back up the alley with our feet firmly on the ground, the day’s game concluded.