Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  “What happened over there?” she had asked in the hours after he first returned. His eyes were squinted up with exhaustion. When he didn’t answer she went on in a happy rush; she was overflowing with saved-up stories, with the details and inconveniences she had accumulated for this occasion. She had imagined they would laugh over them together.

  “You can’t believe how terrible it was. I want to tell you about the soldiers, about what pigs they were, how they watched us go to the bathroom in the sand dunes. They were awful, like naughty little boys.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  And it did not take a deck of cards to sense he was not interested in these discomforts, that it seemed to him she was mewling, that her stories were plays for sympathy and her troubles feminine and small.

  And so she said, “Will you tell me what happened? Tell me about the war. What did you do?”

  “The bathrooms were fine,” he said. “Nothing to complain about.”

  Stung, she had left the room. And for inexplicable reasons—reasons that still bewilder her—Grace let that coldness harden between them so that by the time they left those temporary rooms and made for another city, a western one this time, to be reunited with their property, it had become something they packed and carried with them, erecting it again and again in the new quarters they would share.

  THE LAST night in Istanbul, near morning, Ahmet lies in the low, tumbled bed while Grace stands at the window, chilled and sleepless. Suddenly her eyes find a figure standing at the curve of the street, in a low doorway. The gulls, everywhere in this city, tremble like broad, ghostly moths above the spired roofs, dipping down into the street, then fluttering up to rest on a lamppost. Still, she can’t say for certain. The light is too dim, the figure too shadowed, too still and unmoving. But she feels a prickle on her arms and along her spine; the coat looks like the one, the conformation of the body is right and its stance and the familiar turn of its head in silhouette.

  She stands for several minutes, staring. Then quite suddenly the form in the doorway vanishes, and she can’t say if she turned her eyes away for a moment, or blinked, or whether it was a phantom, a chimera; that he was never really there at all.

  After a moment she leaves the apartment without her coat, slipping down the steps in her bare feet. In the covered doorway outside—colder than mere hours before, a smell coming up from the streets that is fresh only in the absence of other, more immediate, human scents—she stands shivering for a moment and then steps forward into the cobbled Istanbul night.

  But everything remains quiet and her voice saying his name is merely a hiss in the dark, empty and echoing, a breath of steam. It’s dark overhead and there’s no moon at all. She glances up at the window above; it too is dark. No life shows on the street but there are sounds—the scuffle of a rat in an alley, a scrap of paper blowing. She pulls her nightgown up around her neck and runs back up the stairs with the distinct feeling of being pursued. Inside the apartment, nothing has changed: yastiks are scattered on the floor and empty wineglasses, heels of bread and olive pits litter the table. Ahmet sleeps like the dead and clouds drift almost imperceptibly outside the windows. She crawls into the bed beside him, trembling, and tries to sleep.

  In the morning, as they are packing their small bags for the train, Paige calls on the telephone, her voice calm and conversational. “I have a favor,” she says. “There’s a package at the train station. Could you possibly retrieve it?”

  At the station, in an overheated office swarming with men and luggage and official business, Grace and Ahmet are surprised to find Simone’s daughter, Catherine. She is sitting on a chair calmly reading a book; there is a small suitcase held tightly between her feet. She is, as always, quite impossible to talk to.

  “What on earth?” Grace says to her, but receives no satisfactory reply. They leave the office with Catherine in tow—no one there seems particularly interested in what becomes of her—and Ahmet goes off to check the schedule. Waiting for the train to Ankara, the three of them stand on the grimy platform beneath the old arches of the station; Grace holds Catherine’s ticket, Ahmet stares off into space. Grace finds that she is annoyed.

  “What is she doing here?” she says to Ahmet, who simply shrugs and wanders off to buy a newspaper.

  Grace looks down at Catherine; not far, for she is very nearly Grace’s height. “I’d like an explanation,” she says. “Since I’m suddenly your chaperone. If you please.”

  “I was on a trip with a friend. Our plans changed.” The girl watches a train chug into the station on the opposite track. She lifts her suitcase and then puts it down again.

  Grace studies her smooth forehead, thinking of Canada. It seems odd that these two girls, so similar in coloring and shape and features, could somehow be so different in terms of beauty, that most abstract of qualities.

  They had taken Catherine on trips to the sea more than once, and to see the Sufi dancers during the summer months; she and Canada had once been so close. Grace remembers men’s eyes on this charge of hers, in teahouses and cafés and shops that made a certain famous pottery, the way talk would turn to joking and barter—might they not leave this girl, trade her for a lovely plate or bit of ceramic, might she not wish to marry this one’s son, another’s cousin? And Canada would smile tightly and press herself a little forward, aching for notice, longing for such a magnificent compliment—to be similarly desired and haggled over. Such a valuable friend you’ve brought along, Rand said to her once, winking. Perhaps we should keep her. Catherine, with her lowered eyes and coy smile, pretending confusion, feigning indignation; and Canada, feet moving in the dirt, a kind of death in her eyes. Grace wanted to slap her: Stop it. Buck up. Show some dignity.

  But from time to time the girls were mistaken for sisters and you could see how the comparison pleased one, and how it surprised the other. With Catherine, Grace saw clearly what beauty did for its owner; she noticed how much kinder one felt toward beautiful children, how much more giving, loving and gracious. Still, it was never long before Grace found Catherine difficult. And was the girl perhaps just a little too ethereal? Grace tried to imagine these two, only a few years from now, doing the things girls would do, wearing showy things and setting their mouths in hard lines, smoking stolen cigarettes, wandering away from parties with boys.

  “Does Canada know where you are?” Grace says at last.

  “Does she know where you are?”

  After a moment Ahmet returns. As they board the train to return to Ankara and Catherine goes swaying ahead of them into the carriage, Grace clutches his elbow: she wishes desperately that he will say something to her, something she can hold on to. Standing there, watching Catherine climb into the car, she is suddenly suffused with a terrible feeling of loss, as though this trip has been their final destination. The look Ahmet gives her, as the train wheezes away from the station and gathers speed, as the three of them trip silently toward their compartment, serves only to confirm this feeling.

  It is a long ride in close quarters and Grace tries again to engage Catherine. The girl is staring out the window at the passing landscape but finally turns cool greenish eyes on her and says, “John and I were going to Mecca but it didn’t work out. They wouldn’t let me buy a ticket on my own. So here we are.”

  “How old are you?” says Grace. Surely this girl, with this unnatural calm, is older than Canada.

  Catherine ignores her. “I’d rather not talk about this anymore,” she says. “It’s going to be bad enough at home.”

  Grace reflects on this and cannot help agree. Simone will certainly skin her alive. “John?” she says, after a moment. “Why would you go anywhere with the houseboy?”

  The girl shrugs and returns to the view.

  “Oh my goodness,” says Grace, suddenly feeling at least a hundred years old. “Tell me, are you hurt?”

  Ahmet is engrossed in his paper; he goes on reading. When they go for lunch in the dining car,
leaving Catherine behind, Grace holds him up in the rattling corridor. “I think that child was abducted by the houseboy.”

  “Or ran off,” he says. There has not been, since the moment they encountered Catherine in the station, the slightest betrayal of his feelings on this matter.

  “Ahmet,” she says, “what on earth are you thinking?”

  “That it is odd what you choose to involve yourself in, to become disturbed about.”

  “You’d think the police would be involved, wouldn’t you? You’d think Simone would be simply wild.”

  “From the looks of it,” he says, “your friend simply wants it quiet. No harm done.”

  Grace stares at him. “What an astonishing thing to say.”

  He leans down and kisses her head affectionately. It does not escape her that the gesture is utterly without romantic feeling. “You are very naïve,” he says. “It seems to me this situation is not so very unlike another I might name. Though I see it seems very different to you.”

  “The two are hardly comparable,” she says. “That’s a young girl, a child. I always knew there was something odd going on in that house.”

  “Well,” he says, “if you did, surely this Simone did as well. That seems a reasonable assumption.”

  “Surely not,” she says firmly. Surely, surely not.

  Ahmet looks at her in a way that is hard to interpret, and then makes his way ahead of her through the wild, windy platforms between the cars, with the rails racing beneath and the stubborn, sticking doors, and finally into the hazy dining car, where the smoke is a gauze and the smells—of unwashed bodies and scorched coffee and the anisette odor of raki—are almost nauseating.

  Outside the train station in Ankara, snow has been falling lightly and the skyline is wreathed in smog. It seems hours later than it is. Ahmet leans in the window of the taxi with his body and tells the driver where to take them, handing a sheaf of garish bills over the seat as if they are just an ordinary family, in some everyday situation. He thumps the taxi’s trunk as it pulls away and she sees him through the rear window when she turns, he is hailing his own cab, his bag over his shoulder—suddenly he is just any other stranger on the street.

  As the car bounces away, Grace thinks of Canada and what all this—Istanbul, Ahmet, Catherine, Edie—might mean for them later. All at once, she doesn’t like the feeling, the idea that she’s been so unforgivably absent, and that she’s often visited with the thought, without so much as a glimmer of remorse, of perpetrating her own great, romantic escape. On the seat beside her Catherine’s profile looks adult and knowing, and when she glances over at Grace, though it may be her imagination, the girl seems more contemptuous than usual.

  “I don’t suppose,” Catherine says as they drive down the hill toward her street, “that you would leave me off here and let me walk?”

  Grace doesn’t answer. The thought strikes her that in later years, though it seems improbable, she might even mourn the loss of her child as better mothers do. Canada’s absence from her household, her disappearance into the distant, labyrinthine territories of adulthood.

  And so, unhappily, Grace returns home with an icy clutch around her heart and the feeling that had she only stayed put, had she not tempted fate with her grandiose plans and schemes, things might have continued on indefinitely. But she cannot be sure if she is only borrowing trouble—for hadn’t he kissed her as he put her into the taxi, and hadn’t he said they’d speak soon?

  Stepping inside the doorway of the apartment, the contents of her home feel entirely different—both askew and strangely etched. The items she knows so well—the plates and artifacts, the dervish figurines on the sideboard, the crystal ashtray glinting in deep and thoughtful amber on the coffee table—all of it strikes her as off. Standing there, looking around, smelling the quiet, the layers of tobacco and ammonia and lemon, she catches sight of herself in the hall mirror, trembling and out of sorts. Entirely unlike herself. And then, for some reason, this stirs in her a half moment of uneasy joy. She thinks—hesitates, considers, moves in one direction for a purposeful instant and then stops. She had been thinking she might want to pour a drink, put some old record on. Her mind races—a thousand things jumble through. Skin and words, unkind phrases, clever jokes, words spoken in loving tones but tense with undercurrent, uncomfortable silences suddenly relieved, and unexpected moments of sympathy and tenderness. Does he, did he, mean any of it?

  Canada, too, is subdued and the apartment reeks of stale smoke and some small attempts at airing. Grace doesn’t really think to tell Canada of her friend’s aborted journey, of the purely accidental intervention: she is drained and the prospect seems prohibitively unpleasant. Catherine had slid swiftly from the taxi as it drew up outside her apartment building, and though she’d thanked Grace as if she’d been taken for lunch or an outing, there was disdain in her manner. Grace watched the girl go inside, carrying her suitcase, taking her time. On the ride up the hill, Grace thought her over. What had gone on under Simone’s nose, and what, indeed, would become of John?

  She remembered the party she’d given, where she’d drunk too much too quickly, and thought briefly of Rand, for she’d had the sensation of trying to drown something quite deep, something infinitely buoyant. She wondered for a moment if he felt that same unpleasant sensation, every minute of every day. Later, when they’d all gone and she was coming from the bathroom with her face shiny and washed and creamed, she found John readying to leave in the front hallway. He was making a pile of packages, things she had told him to take: leftover food, half-empty liquor bottles, the accumulated debris of the evening. It made a ragged, not insignificant little mountain by the front door. Seeing him, she had jumped and pressed her hand to her heart to convey the shock and then stumbled for a split second over the hallway carpet. He caught her and his arms lingered momentarily at her waist. His face was very close; she could make out his pores, the little filings of stubble on his cheeks. He bowed his head, a little apology or admission, but his mouth was immobile and his eyes as insolent as ever. Then he set her upright again.

  IT IS less than a week after Grace brings Catherine home from Istanbul that Simone sends her a picture through the mail. In it Rand is sitting on a lounge chair by the Canadian swimming pool, holding a nearly empty glass. Other men stand around in clumsy tableau, hands all at loose ends. Their owlish glasses reflect the light. In the background, Catherine is holding a tray with smeared tumblers and John’s disembodied hand hovers at the nape of her neck, like a cat about to grab an errant kitten. In the foreground, the pool glows with underwater lighting; the ripples on the surface look like some opulent material you could pleat with your fingers. In her pinched, precise hand, Simone has written the date on the back of the photograph. As if Grace would need the reminder—it might have been yesterday.

  Rand had been trying to catch John’s eye for several minutes for a refill. Grace, too, had noticed, but wasn’t going out of her way to assist him. In fact, she was on her way to Canada, who stood against the wall, half naked in a bathing suit. Grace was planning to say something sharp to her, something about covering up. Where on earth did she think she was?

  Meanwhile, Simone fussed with the camera, taking her time. Rand grew uncomfortable; he could never abide his own drained glass, the sorrowful noise of ice cubes meeting without liquor to buffer them. The men shuffled and adjusted; one held a towel draped around his shoulders as if it were a scarf. The man stood still for so long waiting for Simone to snap the picture that he began to look waxen and absurd. His smile petrified, his glasses fogged. The shutter clicked at last and Rand scrambled to his unsteady feet, tipping the chair, stumbling to get clear of it.

  Even now, Grace can see the glass from his hand crashing to the tiles just after that picture was snapped—and then all the rest of it unfolds, rapid-fire, slow motion, it unwinds in her memory with every cinematic trick. Why had Simone finally decided to hand it over, and what had she meant to remind her of? That she and Grace were
no different; that they each had things they would rather keep quiet?

  Simone’s face before the panic erupted: cool and superior, oddly knowing—and strangely, almost immodestly pleased.

  Now the situation with Catherine seems to require something of her. At the very least it demands moral outrage and Grace works diligently, with some small success, to dredge it up. Funny that over the next few days, as she waits for the inevitable fallout from this scandal—some official disgrace for John, some phone call from Simone that deftly skirts this indelicacy, some talk among the women in her circle—almost everything goes on quite as usual.

  But Firdis does not turn up immediately, which is alarming, for she is nothing if not punctual. Maids and children, Grace thinks more than once, picking up her own overflowing ashtrays. Everywhere when you don’t want them, nowhere when you do. Not until the third day does a shrunken Firdis materialize in the kitchen, and they pick up where they had left off.

  It is several days later and purely by accident that she discovers what has happened down the hill. She has occasion, simply, to see John on the street. As she drives past in a taxi he is walking quite routinely, even jauntily, down the hill toward Simone’s apartment, carrying packages.