by Alan Drew
“Stop, stop,” a man yelled in accented Turkish. It was the American from upstairs and he stood in a hole just next to Sinan’s. Dried blood caked his right eye and his silver-rimmed glasses sat askew across the bridge of his nose. He was covered in white dust. Everyone stopped digging, and the American dropped to his chest, placing an ear to a television with a hole clear through the middle. Thick dust swirled in the air and in the silence Sinan could hear the grains settle on the debris, as though the sky were raining pebbles. Thrushes sang in still-standing trees, an outboard motor whined offshore—sounds of normal life that angered him now. Then an unsteady ping, ping of tapped metal rose from the rubble. A few men cheered, but the American threw his hand in the air and they quieted.
“We’re coming,” the American said. And then he yelled something in English Sinan couldn’t understand.
Sinan climbed into the hole with the man and together they scraped away disintegrated cinder blocks, piling the coarse stuff behind them. He shoved his torn knuckles into the pile, and then the American filled the space with his own bloody hands. One of the American’s fingers was snapped sideways, but he kept jabbing his hands into the debris. They pulled and twisted and threw and tugged for what seemed like hours until they finally came to something soft: a white thigh.
The leg poked through a section of broken wood, and exposed wires wrapped around the blue knee like tendrils of seaweed. For a few seconds Sinan and the American froze at the sight, unsure what to do next, and Sinan had the grotesque thought that this leg was no longer a part of a whole body, that it was just the severed meat of what had once been a person. He was sure, though, it wasn’t smail’s leg. It was a woman’s leg—the blue spider veins, the delicate kneecap, and the dark stubble of shaved hair left little doubt. The thigh was the American’s wife. You didn’t need to see her face to know that—few other women in the neighborhood would have left their legs uncovered, even to sleep at night.
The American whimpered something in English and softly ran his hands over the thigh, dug his nails between skin and debris to jostle it loose. The color of the skin and the way it moved under the man’s touch left little doubt that the woman was dead. The American repeated a phrase, air escaping from his mouth as if he were hyperventilating.
“I’m sorry,” Sinan said.
The man did not look up, but he bent the knee out of the destruction to reveal a broken foot, the ankle blue and swollen the size of a fist. He hugged the knee, pulled it to his chest, and kept repeating a single phrase in English while he rocked back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” Sinan said again, resting his hand on the man’s back. “But we’ve got to dig her out.”
The American stopped and nodded. Sinan pulled at a piece of sheet metal that shook the leg.
“Gently, gently!” the American screamed. “Gently, please.”
Together they lifted the twisted metal from her body. Then they brushed away cement dust that had buried her thigh. Her shorts were pulled high to expose her underwear and a little of what was hidden beneath. Sinan choked with pain for the man, and worked her shorts down over the smooth edge of her thighs. They removed ropes of rebar and lifted the wet cloth of a rug that clung around her stomach. They did it so softly, with such slow, deliberate care, that Sinan remembered the night he cleaned his father’s body for burial—the way he scrubbed between the cold fingers, and washed his penis and the soft skin of his testicles. He remembered squeezing the water from the wet cloth over a bullet wound where his eye should have been, the black blood turning red and trickling across the mottled skin of his cheek and down over his white lips.
A tent of wooden slats leaned above the woman’s chest, and they tried to dislodge them gently so as not to cause damage to her face. Each one they pulled revealed more of the woman—an arm with a silver bracelet looping around the wrist, the blade of a shoulder, her sunburned neck pushing through a shirt. The other side of the woman’s body and her face was covered by a wet shower curtain and one heavy block of broken cinder. The shower curtain was painted like a coral reef and colorful fish with smiles on their faces swam in the imaginary water. They removed the cinder block and suddenly the shower curtain jerked.
“She’s alive,” the American said. He spoke frantically in English, and they both reached to tug loose the waterlogged curtain.
Then a miracle! “Oh God most merciful,” Sinan said when he saw it. Beneath the woman, caught in her embrace, lay smail, his face white with cement dust, his body convulsed in a coughing fit.
“smail!”
The boy’s eyes flashed open as if he were taking in the world for the first time, his pupils filling with the angry spark of life.
Sinan didn’t wait for them to remove the American wife’s body. He tugged at his son’s shoulders and dislodged him from beneath the woman’s weight, but he couldn’t pull him free. He turned to see what was holding him still, and found the woman’s hand clamped around smail’s forearm. He had to wait for the American to uncurl each stiffened finger before he had his son in his arms, safe, and free from death.
Chapter 10
WHEN THEY REACHED THE PANDEMONIUM OF THE GERMAN hospital Sinan was told his son had been buried alive for nearly three days.
“Unbelievable,” the doctor said when he checked the boy in an examination room filled with dead bodies. Each body was laid out on a gurney, covered in a blue sheet, only the feet sticking out—men’s polished black shoes shining like mirrors, pink shaggy house slippers, bare toes red with enamel. “We haven’t gotten someone alive all day.” smail had a cut above his left eye, swelling around the wound where his foreskin had been cut away in the circumcision, and a mild case of dehydration. They would have to watch for internal bleeding, the doctor said.
“His body should be completely dried out.” The doctor shook his head in awed disbelief. “Unbelievable.”
“Why won’t he wake up?” Sinan asked.
“Exhaustion.”
“But he’ll wake?”
“Yes.”
The doctor turned to Sinan.
“Let me look at you. Your left eye is dilated.” The doctor shined a light in Sinan’s eyes and the pain flashed in his head. “You have a mild concussion,” he said. “We’ll have to run some tests later.” Then outside the room a door slammed, people yelled, and a man ran by with a woman hoisted over his shoulders. The doctor left and never came back, to run the tests or to do anything else.
Sinan spent the night sitting upright in a metal chair beside smail’s bed in an icy room surrounded by seven dead bodies. He could hear the hospital’s generators laboring beyond the cold walls. He checked the walls for cracks and found one etched from ceiling to floor, marking the edges of bricks hidden beneath egg-colored paint. The other rooms of the hospital were full, the nurse told him when he asked to move the bed, and the hallways were filling up with corpses. The air conditioners had been turned up until there was space in the morgues. She darkened the room to save them the burden of seeing the bodies, and switched on a bedside lamp that threw a weak yellow glow across the bed. The darkness eased the throbbing at Sinan’s temples and for a while he could pretend that the rest of the world did not exist, that there was only his son breathing on this bed.
The boy’s face seemed sunken, diminished of muscle and fat. Sinan held smail’s hand and felt the bone of the knuckles, ran his fingers over the soft pads of his son’s palm. An IV punctured a vein in smail’s forearm, and Sinan noticed how tiny smail’s arms really were. Before this he had felt his son was growing too fast, his body too quickly thickening into a young man’s, but now he recognized how truly fragile he was. Life had barely taken root in him and the boy’s body seemed ready to give it up.
Sinan tucked the blanket underneath smail’s shoulders, back, and legs. He rested his head on his hands and watched the rise and fall of smail’s breath, counting the seconds between each one. Sometime in the night the nurse draped a blanket over his shoulders, and, as if being given perm
ission, he fell asleep…
“Oh, Baba, it hurts.”
Sinan snapped awake, lifting his head from smail’s lap where it had fallen. “It hurts, Baba.”
Electrified with panic, Sinan shoved the blankets aside and tried to see if he was bleeding internally. He looked for red streaks, or a rash creeping across the skin. He tried to see something moving beneath the surface. What would it look like? He should have asked the doctor.
“Where?” Sinan said. “Where does it hurt?”
But smail just moaned.
“Tell me, smail. Where?”
With both hands, smail grabbed his crotch. “Here,” he said. “It burns.”
Sinan tried not to, but he burst out laughing.
“It’s not funny, Baba. It hurts! Bad!”
“I know,” Sinan said, trying to control his relief. “I remember. But in a couple of days it will all be over.”
At that moment the nurse wheeled in another body and pushed it against the wall. After she left, a blue arm slipped from beneath the sheet and hung in the air.
“I’m sorry,” Sinan said. “You shouldn’t see this. You’re too young.”
“It’s all right, Baba,” smail said. “Sarah Hanm died and it wasn’t bad.”
Sinan flashed on an image of the American’s wife’s fingers clutching on to his son. The rest of her body had been limp, lifeless.
“She just went to sleep,” smail said. “Then she got heavy. It wasn’t bad. Just quiet.”
The boy’s eyebrows furrowed and his lips downturned in what seemed to be the beginnings of a shuddering cry. Sinan walked over to the body and hesitated before lifting the arm by the wrist. The skin was cold, stiff, and rough-feeling, like the fibrous paper bags he wrapped produce in at the grocery.
“Is that her?” smail said.
“No, my son. I don’t know where she is.”
He tucked the arm away again and held it there a moment to be sure it wouldn’t spring back to life.
“It’s nothing to be scared of, smail,” Sinan said. “They’re at peace now.”
“I’m not scared,” smail said. “I thought I was going to die and it was okay, just like getting too tired.”
Hearing his son speak like this sent a shiver along Sinan’s spine.
“Sarah Hanm kissed me before she died,” smail said. His eyes had not left the body.
“It’s okay, smail,” Sinan said. “Rest now.”
“When I woke up after falling,” smail continued as though the words were spilling out, “she was holding me. She told me Mother loved me and that it would be okay. She said I would see Anne again, but I didn’t believe her. Her voice was so sad.” He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands, and then stared at the ground.
Sinan touched smail’s back and felt the boy’s heart beating through his ribs. “Water sprayed on us and made me cold but then it stopped and it got really quiet. She kept reaching behind me and then she’d drip water into my mouth. It tasted real bad, but I was thirsty.”
This is what saved him, Sinan thought. May God, His mercifulness, bless her soul.
“She kept talking about a dog in the snow, but her voice was quiet and it was hard to hear her. The dog ran through the trees and pushed his nose into the snow, but then she started speaking English and I couldn’t understand her. Her breath tickled my ear and I couldn’t scratch it because she was on my arm. It tickled for a long time and I wanted to scratch it so bad, Baba.”
“Shh, smail.” He wanted to cry with thankfulness.
“It made me want to scream. Then it didn’t tickle anymore.”
Sinan remembered how alone he had felt after his father was killed, how empty and separate from the world, and it pained him to know his son had experienced such loss. If there was one thing he wanted in life, it was to keep his children from such pain.
“I feel bad because I was happy she wasn’t tickling me anymore.”
“It’s okay.” He kissed the top of?
“Are mother and rem dead?” he said, screeching it out.
“No. They’re fine.”
But he couldn’t be sure. My God, he had left them alone all these days. Anything could have happened to them by now.
“Because I thought they might be dead like Sarah Hanm.”
“No, no, smailcan. They are fine.” He tried to pull smail close, but the boy tugged away, his eyes bulging with fear. “Shh, now. It’s okay to be scared.”
“I’m not scared,” smail said. “It was so dark, Baba.”
“I know. I know.” The boy wouldn’t be held and this scared Sinan more than anything. What could happen to a child that would make him refuse to be held by his father?
“It’s okay, smail.”
“It was so quiet.” He tried to control himself. “I’m sorry for crying.”
“It’s okay, canm. Cry.”
The nurse gave smail a couple of pills for the pain and near sunrise they both nodded off to sleep. Sinan woke to yelling and the sound of wheels squeaking down the hall. The noise didn’t wake smail, and Sinan sat and watched his son’s face until sunlight filtered through the single window in the examination room. He woke smail with a kiss on the forehead. “I’ll be back,” he said.
It nearly killed him to do so, but he left his son alone in a room full of death so he could find his wife and daughter, and as he walked out the door, smail called after him in his bravest voice.
“Don’t worry, Baba,” smail said, sitting straight up in bed. “I’m fine.”
smail’s head.
Chapter 11
NILÜFER WAS GOING CRAZY AND REM COULDN’T CALM HER. The first two days after the earthquake, while her father sat in the dirt and prayed for smail, rem had followed her mother through the streets, the buildings leaning like card houses above their heads. She followed her into half-collapsed buildings where bodies were being pulled from the rubble. Once, when a young boy was lifted from a pile, his head crumpled like a popped balloon, Nilüfer nearly stripped the boy out of the man’s arms before rem could yank her away. Nilüfer spun around and slapped rem on the cheek.
“It’s not him,” rem said.
Her mother glared at her, her bloodied hand lifted for another strike.
“Mother, it’s not smail.”
She lunged as if to strike rem, but then slapped her palms to her head and ripped fistfuls of her own hair from her scalp. rem followed behind, snatching strands of hair from the ground as though she were picking oregano at the stem. She wrapped the hair in her mother’s head scarf and clutched the nest to her chest because she was terrified to leave those pieces of her mother on the ground. They spent that night on the cement slabs of the waterfront, her mother finally passing out on her lap as rem tried to smooth the hair over the raw spots.
They awoke in the morning to an aftershock, waves of water sloshing against the cement and wetting rem’s skirt. One of the leaning buildings spilled over, and even though it was two blocks away, glass and metal clattered at their feet.
“Oh, God. Oh, God,” Nilüfer said, as she jumped up and ran down the broken sidewalk, holding her head. rem caught her, calmed her, and took her mother by the arm so that it seemed they were simply out for an early morning stroll. She sang a lullaby to her mother, one her father used to sing when she was a child, as she led them down the waterfront and out through the fields where yellow chamomile swayed in the breeze and back through the alleys near the slaughterhouses and by the time they wandered into town, the police wouldn’t let them back in. Too dangerous, they said. Possibility of disease. Did they know about smail? No, the police said. Did they know where Sinan was? No.
Now, on the fourth day, she and her mother sat on a square of cement beneath the leaning sign of a BP gas station, the fetor of gasoline burning her nostrils. The metal pole that held the BP sign was bent and the metal squeaked loose in the wind, but it was too hot to sit in the sun and there was no water to drink and she didn’t know what else to do. Earlier that day, she had pic
ked up a shard of blue glass from the ground, a shattered piece of an “evil eye” pendant, and she had placed it in the pocket of her skirt in hopes it still held some power. Now she pressed her thumb against the sharp edge of the glass, and she found that this little prick of pain helped her to stay calm.
“My son,” Nilüfer kept saying under her breath, followed by intervals of deathly silence.
“He’s okay, Anne,” rem said, patting her mother’s rounded shoulders. She tried to sound like she believed it, but she heard the lie in her voice.
She wanted to cry for her brother, even though she was, strangely, jealous of him. If he were dead, she wondered if he was looking down now and smiling, satisfied that his parents were sufficiently devastated.
She didn’t know if Dylan had survived, or her friend Dilek. She watched every man that passed, hoping to recognize Dylan’s gait or the funny way he dropped his hand after puffing on a cigarette. She thought she saw Dilek once, a figure picking rotten tomatoes from a spilled refrigerator. From behind the girl had the same dark hair, the slight, sloping shoulders. She left her mother and started to run to her friend, but the woman turned around and the weight of dashed hope dropped into rem’s stomach. She wanted someone to hold her and tell her it would be okay, but now she knew the limits of her parents’ strength, and she was terrified to realize that her strength surpassed theirs.
When she saw her father coming down the hill from the highway she wanted to run to him, but she couldn’t. Instead, she waited.
“Here he comes,” rem said.
The tall buildings in the distance, though fallen, towered over him. He looked tiny to her and weak as he limped on his twisted leg, and for the first time in her life he seemed more an ordinary man than her father.
“smail?” Nilüfer said, running toward Sinan. “smail?”
rem stayed sitting on the cement, thankful to let her mother stumble away from her, and watched as they held each other. They seemed completely separate from her, their arms like a little fortress.