by Beth Helms
“Jesus.”
“You can say that again.” Paige scrapes a load of vegetables and chicken parts into the clay pot. “Guveç,” she says, gesturing toward all this with the knife. “The lid actually bakes right onto the pot. You crack it open with a hammer at the end. It’s wonderful. Very dramatic.”
“You’re having a party?”
“Just a small one. Very small. Listen, Grace, I think Bahar feels terrible about this. I know she does.”
“So she’ll take the baby back? Give Edie her money?”
Paige laughs. “Not quite that terrible,” she says. “It isn’t that kind of business, you know. No seven-day-return policy. No store credit. That’s why it’s so important you trust who you’re doing business with. I’d say it’s really the most important thing.”
Grace looks around the room. The unapologetic film of grease across the lemon-colored counters, which has always struck her as charming and liberated, suddenly seems merely filthy. A creamy cat twines insistently through her ankles, making its terrible Siamese yowl. She gives it a small nudge with her shoe.
“I’m going to go,” she says.
“Are you sure?” Paige calls; now her head is deep inside a kitchen closet. “I know I had a hammer somewhere. One of those small ones. Ahmet is coming. Maybe Bahar as well. Just a few people. You’re welcome to stay.”
“Thank you, no.” Grace lets herself out the front door and stands in the tiny courtyard in front of the overgrown house. She turns back just once from the sidewalk to look: the kitchen windows glow with warm light, the ivy on the facade is illuminated with blinking strings of leftover Christmas bulbs, there is smoke from the chimney in the living room, that pretty, cozy room in which she has laughed and dozed and had her fortune told—inaccurately, it seems—far too many times to count.
She turns away and begins walking. It will be three blocks before she can get a taxi. She wishes she’d had Kadir bring her; she wishes she’d worn a heavier coat.
IN THE end, Catherine was sent away to boarding school. Switzerland, I think, though it may have been France. We would hear things in later years, through the usual murky channels: that she’d run off again, sometimes with more success; that longish periods of time would pass without word of her whereabouts. We heard about psychiatric hospitals, drugs and promiscuity, violence, wild behavior. Times had changed by then, and no one, least of all my mother, seemed surprised.
In short order Simone left Ankara—she refused to have her face attended to by barbarians in a backward foreign country. This was commonly known and much repeated among women in my mother’s circle.
Simone and Catherine’s father would divorce, of course, but that was later. For a time he stayed on after Simone had gone, finishing up his business, living in the bare, evacuated rooms, and sometimes I would walk down the hill in the evening and stand in front of their apartment building: a few lights still glowed inside.
On the street, hearing the dogs in the distance, and the children shrieking on the sledding hill, I stood in the black, tossing shadow of a pine and stared up at the second-story windows. Sometimes I could almost imagine Catherine was still in there, that I might climb those stairs and find that odd interior landscape entirely preserved: John in the kitchen, fussing quietly; Catherine, with her saved-up stories, surrounded by the frilly, outgrown trappings of her room, waiting for my arrival, and even Simone, out of view but still silent and knowing, everywhere and nowhere at once.
Occasionally I stood at the crest of the hill and watched the Turkish children sledding down the rough slope. I lurked, half hidden behind the eroding mound of coal, and studied their masked and bundled faces, thinking I might recognize one or another of them—the boys who stole our sled perhaps, a girl who had once smiled at us, shyly.
But in truth, once Catherine was gone, I found I did not miss her nearly as much as I had when she had lived just a steep block away, when our broken friendship had seemed like an ever-present tragedy. Suddenly, it was almost as if she’d never existed, and I could pretend I’d done nothing wrong. Nothing at all.
It was the beauty of disappearing people—surely my mother knew it—the way you could rewrite things as you preferred, recast yourself in the action; you could make yourself fresh, innocent, blameless. And you would, wouldn’t you? Would there be any other choice?
WHEN PAIGE calls at last, Grace goes. She’s been half expecting it for some time—since Edie’s letter, since the disaster with Simone, since Bahar has suddenly become so completely unavailable. Grace has not been able to reach her, not once, since she spoke with Paige that evening.
She sits with them at a table in the basement of the embassy—the windowless room is stark, crammed with particle-board furniture and stacks of boxes—and reads the paper they hand over. Official-looking, with that all-too-familiar seal.
There’s a copy, too, of an interview they’ve done with Edie. Grace glances up once at Paige. Edie’s account is quite detailed and almost entirely accurate, signed and witnessed. It might make Grace laugh, on another occasion, to see how her role has been maximized. How clever she seems in their documents, how important and manipulating. She’d be impressed with herself, really, to have been capable of stage-managing all this. She sees Greg’s scrawl at the bottom as well, next to Edie’s familiar looping signature.
Grace reads it all slowly, paying no attention to the faces watching her around the room. She looks up finally and meets their eyes.
“Simone?” she says. “Or John?”
“One or the other,” Paige says, shrugging. “It’s hard to know.”
And though Grace doesn’t believe her, not at all, it seems unimportant: both of them would certainly have had reasons to betray her.
“What happens to the baby now?”
Paige looks surprised. “I haven’t the slightest idea. Does it matter?”
“I’m not sure. So where is Rand? I’m sure he can help straighten this out. I assume you’ve been in touch with him.”
“The thing is, Grace, I can’t really say where he is. I thought perhaps you might be able to tell us.”
“Oh, you,” Grace says. “For God’s sake. Spare me.” And then she puts the papers down. Though she wants very much to tear them to bits and drop the shreds on the table in front of her. “So what about Bahar and Ali?”
Paige, in her official capacity now, suddenly looks sympathetic; she reaches a spotted, ringless hand across the table. “The thing is, they insist you leave the country immediately. The Turks. This kind of business smells very bad to them. It isn’t at all modern, if you know what I mean.” She adjusts her glasses. “Ali, as you know, is a very prominent physician in Ankara. Very well regarded. He’s told them this was all a terrible mistake, that he was badly misled.”
“Of course he did. So what about my husband? Where is he?”
“Well, frankly,” says Paige, sighing, “I’d have expected you to come to us much sooner. I thought perhaps you knew something we didn’t. We presumed some marital trouble, something private. Those pills you’ve been taking, Grace…well, maybe you haven’t been thinking clearly. And that ugly business with Simone. Everything else. Of course, I haven’t wanted to pry. But if there’s anything, now would be the time to tell us. Has he left you? It does happen.”
“No,” she says, uncertainly, “he hasn’t. Of course not. He’s away.”
Paige lifts her hands helplessly. The small movement puts Grace, for a moment, in mind of Ahmet. “You see, Grace, the thing is…we didn’t send Rand away on assignment. Not any that I know of.” She pauses and looks around the room. The men, five or so of them, with their stiff uniforms and practiced expressions, stare off into distances Grace cannot imagine. “When you said he was gone, I assumed, well…I assumed you were making it up.”
“That’s nonsense,” Grace says. “The phone rang. The phone rang and he left. You knew. You’ve known all along.”
Paige shrugs, as though Grace has defeated her with some ancient,
insoluble riddle.
“Oh, I see,” Grace says, looking around at the men. She knows every one of them, but cannot recognize a single face. “I’m crazy? Is that it? Delusional? Hopped up on drugs? How utterly perfect.”
For a long moment, Grace hears just the noise of papers moving, of fabric against fabric as someone adjusts his legs beneath the table. A man flicks a silver lighter, over and over and then stops abruptly, leaving a hole, a kind of caesura, in the strange, tuneless music of the room. There’s the smell of mildew and the noxious heat from the rattling radiators. Breathing, a subdued cough, a car backfiring in another world, somewhere outside.
“I wouldn’t blame myself if I were you, Grace,” Paige says at last.
As she stood and efficiently gathered the papers, as the men shuffled and shoved back their chairs, Paige had said, Say whatever makes you comfortable, Grace, but please understand our position, won’t you? We can’t let this go on indefinitely. Something must be said. There will have to be paperwork. Of course, we’ll keep you informed.
As one of the men opened the door for her (as if, she thought, he were ushering out a disease), Paige said quietly. “Consider seeing someone when you get home, will you, Grace? A doctor maybe? Someone to talk to?”
No one says anything more; she couldn’t have expected they would.
Their eyes were on her, all of them, as she left the room.
Driving away from the embassy, Grace thinks again and again of one small thing: the way Rand had asked her, before he’d gone, if she would be all right, and how it had every quality of a question that didn’t want an answer. Of course she’d heard that tone before, and used it herself with Canada from time to time as she hesitated at the door, on her way out for the evening. Anything Grace might have said to him in response that December morning, anything remotely truthful, would have seemed petty and contentious—and he’d always thought her too free with such childish maneuvers.
So, of course she’d said to him, yes, in an indifferent tone of her own, as people did.
I DON’T think Edie would have cooperated with them, had it not turned out the way it did; had the baby not been, in Aynur’s strangely apt parlance, broken.
My mother formed one resolution at the embassy, while she was reading their documents and their accusations, conscious of the eyes that were evaluating her, of the net drawing in so neatly around her. It came to her before she’d even looked up from the papers. Now she’d be free to choose an ending that better suited her, one she found more consoling. Who was there to disagree? Not a single soul was left.
So she travels home through the Ankara traffic, and in the backseat weaves the threads that will become, in time, the story as we choose to understand it. An accounting of our family, of my father’s disappearance, and of the impossibility of his return. After all, I knew—didn’t I?—that tragic things happened every day, in every part of the world, and he might well have been in the middle of any of these, so shrouded was his life, his undertakings, his duties. He becomes just another casualty of our year in Turkey, his death likely, but unconfirmed—in some distant place, under circumstances that could not be explained.
And in some ways I will prefer the explanation she builds for me, and even the way she is implicated within it. That morning she must have contemplated our future and the uncertain path that lay ahead of us: what would she do now, my mother, where would she take us? How would we live outside the close and sheltering world we’d always bucked against, but always known? We would be suddenly, in all ways, unmoored, ill equipped, stark naked.
She tips her head against the icy glass of the car window, thinking. And this fabrication will seem to her—on the streets of a chilled winter morning in Ankara, watching a tired human parade that she is suddenly, unwillingly, a part of—like some tepid consolation. It is a bedtime story to soothe a child, and seems like the very least she can do.
So this is the way my mother comes to rewrite the ending for both of us, and to concoct a fable about our lives, one that is, perversely, more palatable than the truth, more prettily made.
EVEN TODAY I can almost see her as she was that morning: sitting behind Kadir for the last time, upright against the vinyl seat, a clutch purse on her lap, her profile both hopeful and resigned. She is impossible to love, but lovely in her way. And there will be latitude, life being what it is. We will each think we catch sight of him from time to time, in unlikely places, in impossible cities, on certain fantastical days. The edge of a coat vanishing around a building; a dark car slowing past the house, lingering overlong at the corner; a man in the parking garage holding a dated gray suitcase, his back turned as he fumbles for keys.
For a time my mother stands on the sidewalk near the construction site—not much improved in this long, long year—holding her scarf at her neck and looking across the low wall of the vineyard. Snow is falling, coating the dormant arbors and heaping up in painstaking concentration on each gnarled vine; and on the far side, past the whitening rows, the hill drops down to the Tremblays’ old street and beyond that to Tunali Hilmi and the bakery and the gold merchants, the shabby little park and the improbably regal swans. She fingers the scripted pendant at her throat, and pulls the scarf down from her neck into her hand. Kadir waits with soldierlike bearing at the car, with his mustache and his fraying cuffs; reliable, ever patient. From the window above, I watch her shoulders whiten, as if she is being slowly covered in ashes; the crimson scarf the single flash of color in this endless gray and alabaster landscape. Suddenly, even Kadir is only an aging statue beside the car and I wonder: is this strange, familiar scene already fading in her mind?
Watch: she is walking toward the door now to face me, rehearsing this new ending, preparing to tell me her story. She disappears under the awning without glancing up. A woman who is suddenly small in this picture, in this city, this world; she is a million miles from home, walking away from one life and toward another, dragging a red scarf.
I hear the lobby door, her little heels on the marble stairs, unhurried but committed, and I know she is coming to tell me what has happened to us.
Wait, I would still call to her if I could…wait.
Also by BETH HELMS
American Wives
Acknowledgments
Much is owed to the people and animals who tolerantly share their lives with a moody, difficult, psychologically untidy writer: Gary, Lauren, Lindsay and Jessie-Cat, Gulliver, B. and C. I treasure each one of you.
All writers need readers and questioners; mine have been Karen S., Dana K., Michelle Z., Rene U. As well as teachers, touchstones and fellow writers: Diane Seessel, Nance Van Winckel, Francois Camoin, Kate Walbert, Peter Rock, Robin Hemley, Ralph Angel.
I am grateful also to my tribe of walking and riding companions; together we’ve covered untold miles: Jody, Marty-Ann, Annette, Samantha, Elizabeth S., Heather, LisaClaire, and Surrya. E. M. Traynor was also promised she would find her name here; Peter Griffin wasn’t, but he shouldn’t be surprised. Thanks also to Tracy Stone-Manning, whose reappearance in my life has been an unforeseen blessing.
My thanks also to Aybars Ortan, for gently reminding me how much Turkish I’ve forgotten—and correcting it.
Mostly, I am fortunate beyond measure to have had this book land in the care of my editor and friend, Sam Douglas, whose patience, guidance and wit have brought this story into coherence (and for whom I blame everything), and I am indebted to my agent, the always wise and kindly Chris Calhoun, who lies eloquently, consistently, on my behalf. And to the ever-gracious Frances Coady and all the good people at Picador.
DERVISHES. Copyright © 2008 by Beth Helms. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St.
Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.
For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.
E-mail: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3994-2