by Alan Drew
“Sinan,” Nilüfer said. “It’s wrong. They’re our neighbors.”
He shook his head, but she was already coming toward him with a smile on her face.
Chapter 2
REM SLAMMED THE DOOR AND THE MUSIC STOPPED. HIS ROOM was directly above hers, just a few feet away. If she stood on her bed, she could touch the ceiling and feel the beat of his music running through her fingers and down her arm. It was wrong, she knew, but she did so sometimes when smail wasn’t around, and she discovered that she only felt guilty for a few minutes afterward. Once, when she heard the muffled strains of his voice talking on the phone, she stood on her dresser and pressed her ear against the ceiling. She imagined he was talking to someone in New York City or Los Angeles. She couldn’t understand what he said, but she imagined he was whispering in her ear, and that night she had dreams about him, embarrassing dreams she would never tell anyone, not even her friend Dilek.
She heard his footsteps creaking across the ceiling, the squeaking of his window opening, and she knew he was waiting for her. She had been cleaning all day, though, and she smelled of disinfectant. Her face was smeared with flour and she didn’t want him to see her like this.
A cloud of smoke blew across her windowpane, followed by a tapping on the outside wall of the apartment.
She was wearing rags, her blouse was frayed at the cuffs, and her head scarf was the worst thing you could imagine—green-and-orange-paisley swirls with bleach spots in places. She only wore it inside, when no one but her family would see her. She pressed her nose to her armpits and was embarrassed by her own smell.
Another cloud of smoke blew across the windowpane, followed by a cluster of bubbles floating in the air like orbs of oil-swirled color.
She laughed, forgot her appearance, and scrambled across her bed toward the window.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, sticking her head out the window.
A stream of bubbles splattered in her face, stinging her eyes.
“Stop,” she said. “Allah, Allah.” She ducked back inside to rub the soap out of her eyes and remembered that she was unpresentable. She leaned against the windowsill but wouldn’t put her head outside again. “I’ve been cleaning all day. I look terrible.”
“I won’t look,” he said. “Here.”
His hand suddenly appeared at the top of the window frame, a cigarette burning between his long fingers.
When she leaned out the window to grab the cigarette, his chest hung over the ledge but his head was turned away. She laughed, took the cigarette from his fingers, and admired the tattoos etched over the veins of his forearms. She put the cigarette to her lips and tasted the wetness on the filter. She didn’t inhale—she didn’t really like to smoke, even after a month of these window-to-window visits—but she simply held it there, her tongue picking up the flavor of nicotine and boy.
More bubbles floated down, lazy, breeze-blown.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m bored,” he said. “There’s nothing to do out here. Shit, how can you stand it?”
She cringed at the curse word, but he was American, and it wasn’t as rude for them as it was for a Turk.
I can’t stand it, she wanted to say, but instead she held the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled this time.
She sometimes passed him in the stairwell or watched him walking on the street, his legs moving to the beat of a song on his headphones, but in those places she had to ignore him. There were too many neighbors watching, eyes looking through peepholes, faces behind lacy curtains.
“I miss stanbul,” he said. “Beyolu, especially. The action’s there.”
She listened to him and tried to imagine Beyolu. She had seen it on television—the three-story clubs, the women dressed in tank tops with their bra straps showing, the men with their black hair slicked back and shining. It was only three hours by ferry to stanbul, but it seemed as far away as America. “I miss my friends from school,” he said.
She stared at his hand and forearm, but the rest of him was cut off from her vision by the metal window frame and the cinder-block walls. She stared at the ceiling and imagined his feet, his legs, his whole body just on the other side of that cement and wood.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t get greedy.” His hand dangled outside the window again.
She took one last drag, leaned out to hand it to him, and was startled when she found him staring down at her.
“Gotcha,” he said.
She dove back through the window, embarrassed and shocked, but she could never get really mad at him.
“You don’t look so bad,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“No, no,” he said. “I mean it.” He laughed. “I’m sorry. It’s kind of nice seeing you, like, normal, you know? When I see you outside it’s like you’re not you.”
“Not me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like you’re too formal or something, too perfect and proper. Right now you seem like—you seem like you.” She heard him blow out a breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “Forget it. You just look nice is what I’m trying to say.”
She stuck her head out the window and tried to watch him without being seen. His hand disappeared, followed by a puff of smoke, and then it returned. There were long blue veins running up his forearms and they made the muscles look strong.
“I saw your brother this afternoon,” he said.
She looked away, up toward the square of blue sky between apartment rooftops. A flock of birds, a large gray cloud of them, flew out toward the hills.
“He gets treated like a sultan,” she said, biting her thumbnail now and looking at the floor. “Money, clothes, this dinner.”
“Guy deserves a few gifts if they’re going to do that,” he said. “That’s gotta hurt.”
She felt her face go red. She had thought about that part of a man’s body before, but it was never talked about, and her excitement suddenly mixed with a strange distaste.
“Aren’t they supposed to do that in a hospital now?” he said.
“It’s expensive.”
“Man, you can put metal rods through my ears, stab bamboo shoots under my nails, but don’t mess around with—wait.” He flicked the cigarette butt into the air and disappeared.
She jumped back from the window and sat down on her bed, her heart thumping against her ribs. She heard his footsteps above mix with other footsteps, heard a quiet voice and his louder reply. It was silent then for a few moments, and she waited, holding her breath as long as she could before becoming dizzy.
The ceiling creaked softly.
“rem,” he whispered down.
She sat still and listened to the hallway outside her own door, suddenly aware that her parents, too, could walk in and discover them.
“rem,” he said, louder this time.
“Shh,” she said, her head out the window now. “Quiet. My father would kill you if he discovered this.”
He smiled his crooked smile.
“No. I mean it.”
“We’ve been invited down to your apartment,” he said.
“What? Tonight?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Allah, Allah!” she whispered to herself.
“Hah,” he laughed sarcastically. “I can’t wait to meet you.”
Chapter 3
SINAN HEADED DOWN THE STAIRS TO COLLECT SMAIL AND to borrow more groceries from his own store’s inventory. Nilüfer needed fresh bread, not the day-old stuff he had brought this morning, bulgur wheat, and dried mint. Not only did he have the pain in his stomach, but his chest hurt now. The cost of the food would break him. It was too hot out. People wouldn’t come and the night would be a failure. Nilüfer would cry about her baby becoming a man.
He passed the Gypsy camp on the way to his bakkal, where a filthy boy and his little sister unloaded a donkey cart of cardboard they had scavenged from the trash that morning. Sinan and his family were lucky, he reminded himself. As hard as life was
for a Kurd, it was harder on a Roma. If he didn’t say anything, no one bothered him about being Kurdish. But everyone hated the Gypsies. They were rootless people—from Romania or Egypt or India; no one knew. Even Sinan, who had good reason to identify with their itinerant life, fought his disdain for people who made homes out of his garbage.
On Flower Street, a woman lowered a basket from the fifth-floor window of her kitchen, and left it dangling a few inches above the street. A boy from Sunrise Grocery, one of Sinan’s competitors, took the money out of the basket and filled it with pide, cheese, and a container of honey. The woman tugged on the rope and the container rose like a spider on a single thread. This apartment was closer to Sinan’s bakkal than it was to Sunrise, and he made a mental note to have a sale next week to keep the street’s business.
He found smail and Ahmet sitting on wooden crates in front of the grocery, both of them chewing on large chunks of sweet helva. When they saw him coming, smail and Ahmet pretended to hide the candy behind their backs. Sinan laughed, and immediately the tightness in his chest eased.
“Sweets before dinner?” Sinan said. “Your mother won’t be happy.”
“Don’t tell your mother,” Ahmet said, winking at smail.
smail laughed and took another bite of the candy.
Sinan hugged his brother-in-law and kissed him on each cheek, and he could smell the alcohol on Ahmet’s breath.
“Just a little rak,” he would say on the days Sinan reproached him for it. “If I’m going to spend my life in this grocery, I’m going to live a little doing it. God understands.”
“God is disappointed,” Sinan would say, and leave it at that because, despite himself, he loved the man.
Sinan owed Ahmet his life. When things got bad in the village, when men were being taken away by the Turkish paramilitaries and it seemed only a matter of time before he, too, disappeared, it was Ahmet who sent them the bus tickets to Gölcük, Ahmet who gave them money for the first month’s rent on the apartment. He also made Sinan a partner in the grocery, changing the bakkal’s name from Ahmet’s Grocery to Brothers’ Grocery. There was, he knew, room enough in God’s Paradise for such goodness.
“Teekkürler, Ahmet,” Sinan said.
“No problem, my brother.” Ahmet took Sinan by the arm. “You’re limping. You need ice on that foot.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ll be dancing tonight.”
Sinan just looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Ahmet put one hand in the air and rolled around on his ankles. He laughed and slapped Sinan on the back.
“Your wife says to bring bread with you.”
“I know.”
“She called earlier,” Ahmet said. “She wasn’t happy. Better do what my sister says, my brother.”
“I will,” Sinan laughed. “But the house is filled with food.”
“I’ve seen it!” Ahmet said. “Börek to the ceiling. A river of olive oil down your hallway.”
With a pat on the rear end, Sinan sent smail home to get cleaned up. “Finish that helva before you get there.”
Together he and Ahmet entered the grocery, a one-room, concrete-floor shop lined with shelves of canned tomato puree, canned fruit, canned beans, and canned soda. Ahmet reached behind the counter and held up the front page of the Milliyet.
“They locked Öcalan up on Dog Island today,” he said.
“I saw,” Sinan said. If all the buildings were gone, and they had a clear sight to the sea, they would be able to see the island on which the prison was built. In Ottoman times, the island was where they took the rabid street dogs to let them rip one another to pieces. That’s what Öcalan was to the nationalist Turks, a Kurdish separatist dog. “He’ll rot there until everyone forgets and then they’ll hang him.”
Ahmet lit a cigarette. “They say the war is over.”
“That’s what they say.”
Ahmet looked at Sinan, blew smoke to the ceiling, and picked a strand of tobacco from between his teeth. Sinan said nothing and avoided his eyes while he gathered Nilüfer’s groceries. He always said he’d return to Kurdistan if the civil war was finished, but now he didn’t know. He always thought they’d win and the Kurds would have their own country. A man can accept a life of poverty if it’s in his own country, if it’s his own doing, but not if it’s caused by others.
Ahmet folded up the newspaper and tossed it aside. “Check the receipts,” he said. “I can’t do the math. Without you I’d run this place into the ground.”
“Slow day?” Sinan asked, sorting through the strips of paper.
“You’re our best customer,” Ahmet said, taking a sip from his coffee cup. “Too hot to shop,” he said. “Tomorrow will be better.”
The motor to the cooler hummed loudly and Sinan slapped the casing to quiet it. Behind the fogged glass, the goat’s cheese and garlic sausage lay sweating in the heat.
“Inallah,” Sinan said, fingering the few bills in the drawer beneath the calculator.
“God willing, they’ll shut down the Carrefour,” Ahmet said. The French superstore had been built on the other side of the highway in what used to be an empty lot dotted with grazing goats. Their grocery had been losing business ever since. “Fatmah Hanm told me they sell Florida oranges there,” he said, turning up his lips in disgust. “They make them without seeds.”
“Must taste like piss,” Sinan said. “Fruit without seeds!”
It was as close to cursing as Sinan got, and the stunned look on Ahmet’s face gave way to laughter.
“Like a man without testicles,” Ahmet said. “Fruit without seeds! Allah, Allah.” He reached beneath the counter and took a very large drink from the coffee cup.
“You’re the kirve, Ahmet. Remember that. You have a duty tonight.”
“Yes, yes,” Ahmet said, and threw the rest of the rak into the sink.
Chapter 4
REM GRABBED A SMALL BAG HIDDEN BENEATH HER BED AND tucked it under her blouse before running down the hallway to lock herself in the washroom. There she pulled out a small vial of olive oil and colorless lip gloss.
Dilek had taught her a few tricks.
Pinch your cheeks until the red comes out, smooth the oil into your skin to make it glow, roll the lip gloss on but then dab it with toilet paper so it isn’t obvious.
She found the tweezers in the bag and yanked stray hairs from between her eyebrows and one growing in a mole on her jaw near her earlobe. She untied her head scarf, pulled the pins from her hair, and let it fall across her shoulders. Her hair was curly and thick and it twisted like vines around her neck. She loved her hair, perhaps partly because she had to hide it away each day—before she was thirteen she hadn’t really thought much about it—and she ran her fingers through it now and imagined they were his fingers. She would have to pin it back in place and coil it again beneath the scarf, but she combed all the tangles out of it anyway, and watched as each strand shone in the overhead light. She did this for ten minutes, hoping, dreaming even, that he would recognize its beauty through the cheap silk fabric and want to touch it.
And when she was done, when she had tied her hair up in her best scarf, she dabbed two fingers of rosewater on the back of her neck, right beneath the point in the fabric, just for good luck.
Chapter 5
IT WAS AFTER SEVEN WHEN THE GUESTS BEGAN TO ARRIVE, and rem was still in the washroom.
“rem!” Sinan yelled down the hallway. Silence. “rem! The guests are coming.” No response. He walked down the hallway, his feet slapping against the cheap marble flooring. “rem.” A girl who ignores her father!
Before he could knock on the door, rem opened it, and he found his daughter wearing her best head scarf, the one with the gold leaf, which he had bought her for her last birthday. He noticed the color in her face and the way her lips shone and he was glad to see her looking so beautiful for her brother’s party.
“I called you three times.”
“I’m sorry, Baba,” she said, a smile on her face. �
��I wanted to look nice.”
He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked, but he didn’t want her to start acting pretty. Beauty attracts the wrong type of attention.
“Your mother needs help.”
She walked quickly toward the kitchen, and he watched her go, her hips straining her skirt with that womanly walk that had stolen his child away.
Ahmet, Gülfem, and their daughter, Zeynep, arrived first. They lived on the bottom floor of the apartment building, and Ahmet sang a popular Tarkan song as they climbed the stairs. Sinan stood in the corner of the room, the apple in his stomach expanding into an orange, watching as the neighbors joined the party, bringing with them coins and paper money for smail, bunches of roses clipped from backyard gardens, and even plates of desserts to add to the table already filled with food. Dressed in the white sünnet gown that made him look like a girl, smail sat on a raised bed near the open window of the main room, the city behind him sparkling in the heat. The bed was padded with blankets and ribbons, and when people passed to congratulate him, they threw silver tinsel in his hair. smail tried to act like a man, tried not to smile, but when ten-year-old Zeynep, on whom smail had a boy’s crush, kissed him on the cheek, he giggled.
Ahmet and Sinan pushed the couches out of the way, and the guests danced in a circle on the soft-pile rug in the center of the living room. Ahmet turned up the music on the radio, and the hum of oud strings and the twirling notes of a lute crackled out from the old speakers. Sinan turned the music down, but Ahmet turned it up again, grabbed Sinan by the hand, and pulled him into the circle. Everyone linked pinkies, raised their arms in the air, leaned forward with the music, kicked up their feet, and then stepped to the right to begin the dance again.
Sinan’s wife and daughter, both dressed in their only silk scarves, served plates of food to the people who were not dancing. Sinan tried to help, once he escaped the dancing, but Nilüfer refused him, telling him it would not be proper. She was right, but he was nervous and he needed to do something to keep calm.