Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  Lying huge under the white sheets, my father dwarfed the bed, his belly rising and falling with his inhalations. They seemed steady enough while I stood there, one hand on the pineapple shape of the bedstead finial, toes curling against the prayer rug under my feet. The bandages on his head were getting smaller: at first he’d looked mummified, his entire head enveloped in muslin. Now there was just a small white patch on the side of his head, above his right ear, though a terrible yellow bruise remained along his cheek, and I knew his ribs were taped beneath the bedclothes. He lay with his mouth open and his breath was strong and stale. On the bedside table were a glass of water, a small brigade of pill bottles, extra bandages. Every afternoon Ali came by to change them, to prod around with his delicate fingers and announce progress. Ali was a kind, cheerful man, ever an optimist, an accomplished smoother-over of uncomfortable situations. He patted my head reassuringly; he slipped forbidden pieces of gum into my pockets.

  During these examinations my mother sat in the living room, wan, quiet and angry. I sensed this—it did not take a genius—and gave her a wide berth. She smoked relentlessly, sitting in a brocade chair with her arms stiff and her legs crossed. Sometimes Bahar was there as well, doubling the smoke and thickening the general air of tension. The two sat mostly in silence, though from time to time there was a harsh laugh or a flurry of whispering.

  Lately even Firdis had been working with exaggerated caution, taking baby steps down the hallway, moving in such a falsely solicitous way that it made me want to scream. She’d developed a habit of standing too close, cornering me, her broad dark face at a level with my own as she shook her head back and forth, making tsking noises. “Poor Baba,” she would say, with a very grave expression. “Poor, poor Baba.”

  I extricated myself ungraciously, my stomach turning over, face afire. I couldn’t stand Firdis; her dank smell, her oily hands. She liked to grab my cheeks and tug at them, saying, “Çok güzel, çok güzel.” I was not çok güzel—very beautiful—anyone could see that. I stayed shut inside my room, rereading books, memorizing epic poems.

  At night, standing in the dark, I watched my father for what seemed like hours. The room was full of his breathing and his intermittent snores. The furniture seemed close and vaguely alive. The shapes grew as familiar in the dark as they were in daylight, a low silhouette of jutting corners and angles, of bedposts and window edges, the glowing trinkets on my mother’s vanity, a white smile of doily edging the bedside lamp.

  But during the daylight hours Catherine and I had taken to harassing John, to being underfoot in the kitchen and following him around making nuisances of ourselves. Since my father’s accident, something imperceptible had shifted in our triad. Now John brushed against Catherine more than ever, his hand touched her waist and when she stepped away from him her face was flushed pink and her eyes avoided mine.

  “‘Suggested Luncheon Menus,’” I read. “Fruit cup. Broiled chicken. Tomato-avocado salad. Jellied consommé. Spinach ring.”

  Catherine brushed wisps of hair from her face, which she had pulled back in a tight ponytail, the way Simone liked it. Catherine’s face was elfish and pale, but still beautiful. I should have been used to it but it was a continuing, unhappy surprise. When we stood side by side in the mirror, I concentrated on Catherine’s features instead of my own, her broad forehead and delicate nose, her wide mouth and perfect teeth. What would it be like in there—moored inside Catherine’s flawless self?

  The phone rang and John answered it in the kitchen. He spoke in Turkish into the receiver, and Catherine and I went through the refrigerator, looking for ingredients we could transform into something else.

  John had begun letting us do foolish things, probably dangerous things, in his kitchen. He let us use Simone’s food coloring to tint ice and butter and mayonnaise. He let us make hollandaise sauce and selections from The Officer’s Wife’s list of “Twenty-five Suggested Appetizers.” Seeded green grapes, split and filled with Gruyère cheese. Seasoned cream cheese wrapped in dried beef funnels. Celery stuffed with Roquefort. He let us arrange the table in the way the book advised: we manufactured Easter luncheons and festive Mexican-themed teas and we speared all sorts of things with Simone’s fancy ruffled toothpicks. We devoted an entire afternoon to the “Dresden Bouquet” salad, reputedly a luncheon favorite at the Argyle. We followed the directions to the letter:

  The cauliflower is first boiled; then the flowerets are separated and each tinted with food coloring in delicate shades of blue, pink, orchid, green and yellow. The bouquet is placed in a basket of lettuce or rose leaves and French dressing is poured over all.

  Had she known about any of this, Simone would have had a litter, so all the evidence had to be completely eradicated from the kitchen before she returned home. Into a bag it went, unceremoniously: the colored vegetables, the sparkling greenish ice, the tiny, perfect stacks of cheeses and olives. John helped us do it, fussily and with little humor, never making a noise about the waste. We carried the garbage out to the broiling alley behind the apartment building, skirting the little Turkish girls jumping rope and the kapıcı, introspective as ever, busy with his ear.

  Catherine hummed while we cleaned, a piece of disco music that was forever coming out of John’s radio. Often, in the kitchen on those long afternoons, they seemed like a very young married couple, slightly built and similarly boyish, moving around each other with ease, handing things to each other, exchanging smiles when they bumped.

  School would be starting soon and though we wouldn’t have admitted it, we were looking forward to it. We missed the regimentation of days, the structure of lessons, the odd comfort of queuing for everything. We were tired of being left to our own devices; perhaps we were even amazed by what we’d gotten up to.

  John ended his conversation and put the phone down. He took the things Catherine was holding and began to stack them and return them to the refrigerator. I was watching his hands touch Catherine’s as he did it—the dusk against the white, the almost indiscernible caress of his fingers on hers.

  “Your cat is finished,” he said.

  A moment passed before I realized he was talking to me. It happened so rarely. “I beg your pardon?” I said. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “The cat is gone. Firdis let him go.”

  “Let him go? What do you mean let him go? Go where?”

  John shrugged. He clearly had no interest in the cat or what had happened to it.

  “He doesn’t go out,” I said. “Never.”

  John ignored me. He put the food away; he returned to the silverware. The matter was closed as far he was concerned and my panic made no impression on him.

  It took Catherine to extract the details from him. That morning, while my father lay in bed recuperating, Firdis had let Pasha escape. Apparently, he’d slipped out while she was taking bread from the kapıcı and arguing with him about the state of the fruit he’d brought.

  Pasha, the cat we’d rescued from the street, now liked to sit on the edge of the balcony and look down disdainfully on the place he had come from. He’d grown up to be massive and imperious: a Persian cat of some kind, with snow-white fur and mismatched eyes and a terrible disposition. I was perpetually covered with claw marks, the result of trying to love him and make him love me back. Pasha had strange habits. He would snooze twenty-three hours a day on the sofa in the living room, in a patch of sun, until something stirred him and he would spring up and fly hysterically around the room, skidding on the hardwood floors, ricocheting off furniture in a blur of white angora. When he sat on the balcony, flicking his tail gently, quiet and contemptuous, his chest would puff out like the feathery breast of a great white bird.

  I made Catherine come with me to look for Pasha. He couldn’t have gone far, I thought, surely he would be somewhere on our street, a place I knew like the back of my own hand. It was her idea to bring John.

  “He can ask people,” she said. “He can help.”

  John said, “I do not care about
this stupid cat.”

  Nonetheless, he came. He walked behind us, with his hands in his pockets, and made not even the slightest pretense of looking for any cat.

  Once in a while that summer we tagged along with John on errands he was dispatched to do for Simone. We were never expressly invited, but he made no move to stop us. Striding ahead of us through the streets, we had the impression that he wanted not to be seen in our company. We always had to hustle to keep up, to maintain sight of his slim, straight back, the triangular wings of his arms jammed casually into his pockets. His cool never left him, never burned off in the heat of the day, it could not be shaken by irate crowds or crabby shopkeepers. He brushed away the goods held out to him, lifted his chin sharply and kept moving, sliding through the solid mass of bodies like a wraith.

  On this day, as we walked through Gasi Osman Paşa calling out for the cat, John hung back and studied the trees and the sidewalks. He whistled from time to time, but only to himself. He checked his wristwatch occasionally. The neighborhood sprawled across several hills and there were a thousand places to look. Catherine and I crawled under cars and opened trash cans; we looked in the glittering coal heap and walked the empty field where children sledded in the winter—we’d done it once or twice ourselves, until some Turkish boys had taken our sled from us and flung it into the street. We yelled ourselves hoarse, and by the end our feet hurt and my eyes stung with tears I could not allow myself to shed in front of John. We walked all the way to the Russians, where we stood and stared at their gates, at the stiff-legged men with guns who strode back and forth behind them.

  My mother had driven me by this compound once or twice but I had never seen it so closely. I had always imagined the Kremlin looking like this, huge and fortified and angry at the world. The whole thing was several city blocks, invisible from the street, sealed off by a huge surrounding wall. The Russians lived and worked inside; my father said they weren’t allowed out. I had a vague idea that what all of us were doing in Turkey, and what our fathers did all day, had something to do with the people who lived behind those walls.

  Catherine and I had always been fascinated by the Russian compound, by the very idea of it. Standing there in the broad daylight, glimpsing the facade through the heavy gates, gave me a shivery kind of pleasure. In light of what we’d been told—about the confinement of its inhabitants, the secrecy of their lives—we felt freer, more independent and less shut-in ourselves. In Catherine’s room, we’d even manufactured a lovely Russian girl named Vassilissa, who peered out from the window of her prison and dreamed of walking around in the streets as we did: eating apple tarts from the bakery, buying ice cream cones from the street vendors. She always went about in a fur coat, saying, da, da, da, which was the only Russian word we knew, aside from koshka, for cat, and we didn’t allow Vassilissa to have one of those. We didn’t think Russians kept cats.

  John slipped away, into a store, and Catherine and I stood near the gates, trying to get our bearings. The air smelled of ripe fruit from a vendor across the street, where flies swarmed on mounds of dark plums and apricots. Catherine leaned against a thin tree and took a stone out of her shoe. When John came back, he was eating a plum, catching the bright juice in his hand. He steadied Catherine’s elbow as she shook out her other shoe, then he held the bitten plum up to her mouth. Purple juice dripped lazily onto the sidewalk and I looked away.

  The buildings there were a little larger and set farther apart. My mother had a Turkish acquaintance who lived nearby, an unmarried woman who slept at night in an enormous hammock under a blanket of rescued cats, surrounded by flowering tropical plants. Perhaps Pasha might find his way there, to Ben Gul; her name meant a thousand roses. My mother had taken me to her one afternoon to have my ears pierced, and the woman came at me in the kitchen with a darning needle and ice cubes. The procedure did not go smoothly—I was fidgeting, Ben Gul said—and my mother fainted inconveniently in the middle, going limp against the counter that held the coffeepot and then sliding down it luxuriously, her eyes blinking like a butterfly’s wings. While Ben Gul attended to her, the darning needle remained halfway through my ear, quivering in the cartilage. I looked around the kitchen (I could see the tip of the needle out of the corner of my eye): an orange cat was sitting on top of the refrigerator; a collage of cherry pits adhered to the counter; on the floor underneath the stool they put me on was a cat turd, dried and nearly fluffy with age, which moved with the motion of the air in the room, rolling gently back and forth. Ben Gul fanned at my mother’s face with a fluted coffee filter. In the end, I had holes that didn’t match, and wearing earrings made me look asymmetrical and strange.

  We didn’t find Pasha until we’d walked almost all the way home. By then John was in front of us, annoyed at the turn the day had taken and no doubt thinking of Simone and what she’d have in store for him when he returned. I was planning to sit outside our building, on the front steps, holding a can of cat food as long as necessary. All night if I had to. It was John who spotted Pasha at the deep end of an alley several blocks from the apartment. Some Turkish boys had found him first. It was stunning what they’d done to him. He was pinned against the fence in the corner of the alley; his lovely fur had been ripped out in hunks, and a match had been taken to his tail; they had probably killed him with stones at the end, for the ground around him was littered with rocks. He was such a dignified creature, Pasha, so pompous and regal. The twisted creature we saw—claws extended, mouth frozen in a silent yowl—might have been unidentifiable were it not for the little belled collar on his neck.

  “Was this your cat?” John said, and he put out his arm to hold Catherine back. He didn’t have to—neither of us was going to go any closer.

  “Don’t look,” he said to her and then spun her around so that she faced the street. Standing there, my own legs did something strange—they both turned to rubber and wanted to run; my whole body quivered with those competing instincts—the need for speed and movement and the desire to fall screaming to the ground. I wanted to break and throw and destroy things: kill people, tear down buildings, desecrate mosques.

  We left his body there. Neither of us was brave enough to pick him up, and John would not even consider it. Then we walked home in silence, shaking, too horrified for words.

  It speaks to the state of things in our house that when I told my mother, she shook her head as if confused and went first to look for him in the living room, then under my bed and finally, out on the balcony. Then she came back and said, “Now tell me this again.”

  6

  GRACE SETS HER ELBOWS ON HER DRESSING TABLE. IT IS SEVEN o’clock but the day seems to be ceding nothing to evening, not in terms of temperature. Her evening gloves—clean, pearl buttoned—are folded on the edge of the table. Her mother’s silver dresser set sits at a neat slant in the center of the vanity—a white-bristled brush, a rattling mirror—each with similarly patterned reliefs: voluptuous Victorian women and cherubic babies, frolicking in tarnished sterling.

  The dressing mirror hangs on hinges between two carved wooden posts. It reflects in the background the double bed she used to share with Rand, a four-poster with pineapple carvings, a peaked headboard. A nubby chenille bedspread, two flat pillows, her bedside lamp, now casting pools of light on the tatted doily. Rand is bulkily asleep, the air stale with his breathing: the whole room needs a good airing out.

  Grace is forty years old today. Right now, this very minute. Forty.

  She hears stuttering flamenco notes from the other side of the wall, from the den, where she has been sleeping, where Canada sits now with her classical guitar teacher. Another elusive Turkish name. Grace shakes her head a little, attempts a laugh. She tries it for the mirror. Wrinkles. No. Parentheses. They stack up on either side of her mouth when she smiles. She runs a hand down the left side of her nose, her fingernail in the slice that runs from the edge of her nostril to her chin. Funny. She hadn’t thought she’d laughed all that much.

  Dear Edie, she
writes in her head, I’m ancient, how about you?

  Grace forces herself back to the mirror. She leans forward and examines her face. The changes are both imperceptible and obvious; she contemplates the incongruity of that, holding a powder puff in one hand.

  Among other things, Grace cannot bring herself to mention this newest disgrace of Rand’s to Edie: the details seem shameful, and it’s as if they reflect even more poorly on her than on her husband. Reputations here are built on such shifting sands; the potential for disgrace seems to lurk around every corner. Now the women’s eyes seem to study her, evaluate her and find her wanting. Still, it’s been surprisingly easy to sell the story of his trip to the embassy people; they are all so immersed in their own secrecies that it doesn’t faze them when one of their number disappears without explanation. Grace mattes her face with powder, buffs it from the tiny lines, where it gathers, cakes. She’s never felt quite as pale as she does in this country. She brushes out her hair in hard, strong strokes, then twists it behind her head in a knot. She is wearing her slip and underwear, the thin silky straps slip from her shoulders, the sheath of it hugs her belly, the wide lace hem is tight against her thighs.

  She hears the door of the den open; the lesson has ended. Now she’ll listen to Canada’s fingers picking little riffs, practicing, for the next week. Strings buzzing, the notes jarring and discordant, but once in a while she’ll hear a pretty little thing, a little Latin waterfall of strings. She gets up to write a check, shrugs her robe on. She hears Canada’s footsteps padding down the hall, the front door opening and closing. Heading for Catherine’s down the street, no doubt, which is where Grace is going too in a few hours, for a party Simone is giving. Grace sighs at the thought of it and opens the door to face the guitar teacher, a man whose fingers seem too wide and thick to produce the agile sounds she hears from his instrument: “Malaguena” and “Adagio,” other swift, familiar pieces. With Grace he is obsequious; in the den with Canada, the door closed, his voice rises, admonishing, threatening. Grace knows he takes her fingers and stretches them across the frets—so, she hears him say, and so. Canada’s fingers, when she catches a glimpse of them, are raw and calloused and each pad carries a short, deep stripe left by the cat gut.