by Alan Drew
Dilek tried to pull away from rem, but rem held her a few moments longer until the body bobbed past. “No one can protect us,” Dilek said, as they continued down the sea walk, the cement striated with cracks. “No one.”
rem blinked, and across the black screen of her closed eyelids the white skin of the floating body appeared. She tried to ignore it, but she was suddenly scared it was Dylan and she tried to remember, tried to see the body clearly to be sure it wasn’t him.
“I realize that now,” Dilek continued. “I used to think my father could keep me safe.”
They stopped at a four-foot fissure in the walkway. Three chickens clucked past and flapped themselves into the air just long enough to reach the other side.
“How’s Aye?” rem asked. She had seen her friend alive just after the quake, but she hadn’t seen her since.
“She’s fine; her family is fine. Her parrot died.”
“Well, at least we won’t have to listen to that horrible squawking anymore.”
Aye used to hang the caged bird from a hook outside her bedroom window. From that perch two stories above the street, the bird let out the most horrible noise that was like listening to a child’s colicky tantrum. The water boys hated it because the parrot had a habit of aiming its droppings at the part in their slicked-back hair.
Dilek laughed out loud. “Allah, Allah,” she said. “That was a terrible bird.”
They sat down together on a slab of concrete that overlooked the water. From here, if rem looked directly away from shore, it was almost possible to forget the chaos that was behind them. The water lulled rem, calmed her, and she wanted to dive in and stay underwater where nothing could be broken, where nothing could crush her.
“Have you seen Dylan?” she finally asked.
“No, rem. I heard he went back to America.”
“He’s alive?”
“Yes.”
Relief and disappointment, both, rose inside her simultaneously.
“Back to America?”
“That’s what I heard,” Dilek said. “He and his father.”
rem picked at her fingernails and watched two jellyfish push up against each other in the murky water.
“Wouldn’t you leave, too, if you could?” Dilek said.
“Of course. It’s not that. The night of the quake he tried to touch me, but I pulled away.”
“Where were you?” Dilek said, and suddenly it was just like it was before the quake. Where were you? What happened? How did it feel?”
“The kitchen.”
“The kitchen?!”
“Yes, and my parents in the next room with the guests.”
Dilek put her hand to her face, her eyebrows narrowing into a devilish grin.
“Oh, I would have let him, rem,” Dilek said. “He’s so handsome.”
“Yes, well, your parents are different.” Dilek’s father had been a school inspector, and, being the good Western-leaning government official he was, had hated anything that even resembled a hijab, and he despised anyone in an abaya. He would rather see a woman walk naked down the street, Dilek had once quoted him as saying, than see her wrapped in those fundamentalist robes. He shaved three times a day, according to Dilek, so he wouldn’t be mistaken for growing a beard.
“I’ll never see him again,” rem said.
Dilek’s smile left her face. “Oh, Dilek,” rem said, remembering her friend’s father. “I’m sorry.” “No, no,” she said. “It’s okay. I understand. This is different. Fathers and lovers are different things.”
“He’s not my lover.”
Dilek didn’t know anything about a lover—at least rem thought she didn’t—but she liked to say such things. “I know, I know,” Dilek said. “But it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?”
rem just smiled and the smile grew into a laugh until they were both laughing and then the laughing fell back into silence.
“Everything’s changed,” rem said. “I’ve changed. Even before the earthquake.” “I was mad at my dad the night it happened,” Dilek said. “Usually I kiss him good night, but I caught him on his cell phone on the terrace. I think my mother is right. He had a woman. But I still wish I’d kissed him good night.”
They sat silently for a minute, watching the transparent water become opaque as the sun rose and shone down flatly on the sea. Behind them, coming down the broken road, rem heard a rumbling. With no electricity, no open stores, with nothing to do but sit around and wait, the silence in town had become deafening, and at first she thought it was the rumbling of another aftershock. In panic, they both spun around, relieved to see a line of trucks coming down the broken road.
“I thought it was happening again,” rem said.
“A professor on the radio keeps saying a bigger quake is coming,” Dilek said.
rem couldn’t imagine a bigger quake.
There were five produce trucks at first, and then a line of white buses, like those used to bus rich students to their rich private schools. The first bus passed, and rem and Dilek could see they were not Turks. The fourth bus passed, and through the window rem caught a glimpse of Dylan, his head bowed, his earphones stuck in his ears. She waved, but he didn’t look out the window.
rem grabbed Dilek’s shoulder. “It’s him!” she said.
Dilek hugged rem and whispered into her ear. “Just remember,” she said. “You both might be dead before morning comes.”
Chapter 14
THE TRUCKS DROVE OUT OF SIGHT AND SINAN FOLLOWED the sound of their engines until they turned the corner, toward an empty field that used to be the recreation grounds to the old Ottoman prison. Watching the back of the buses throwing up dust from the road, Sinan was reminded of the jeeps the Turkish paramilitaries had driven through the center of Yeilli. Once he watched a driver speed up to run over a chicken, Emre Bey’s family’s only rooster, the breast of the bird popping open like a crushed melon. Another time, three jeeps parked in the center of the village on market day, keeping the produce sellers from setting up their tables.
The jeeps were built in America, his father had said.
In the South everyone knew America supported the Turkish paramilitary, the Special Teams, as they were called, giving them training and weapons and shelter from the U.N. while they destroyed whole villages in search of Öcalan and the PKK. All the Turks knew this, all the U.N. knew this, but it was kept quiet as if it didn’t happen. “Because America wants to spy on Russia,” his father told him once, “we get murdered.” Now the Americans were here to help. It was confusing, what to believe about America.
Using twine from the tomato vines, Sinan hung the ewe from a nearby tree, gutted it, and let it bleed. He sat on his haunches and watched the blood drip and soak into the ground.
He was so sick of death. There were people in the world that never had to face death, except in old age, when death is almost comforting. But they never had to face the violence of a young death. They never had to bury their father with tissue paper stuffed and sewn into his collapsed skull. They were mean, stupid people, he imagined, sitting in their homes in America or England, staring vacantly at their televisions, falling asleep in a bored stupor on their couches. He hated and wanted to be one of those vacant people.
Yesterday, at the ice-skating rink, he had identified the bodies of Ahmet and his family. Their faces had been calm, their bodies bloodless, but he could see where their ribs had been broken, where their chests lay as flat as their stomachs. Overwhelmed, he had embraced Ahmet before they wrapped his brother-in-law’s body in a bag, tied it together at his ankles and shoulders, and carried him away.
Because officials were afraid of the spread of disease, all the dead, including Ahmet and his family, were tossed into a common grave. The mayor was there, standing at the edge of the open pit, alternately trying to comfort family members who were praying over the burlap bags and loudly criticizing the government.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pressing a handkerchief to his nose. “I’m sorry, but w
e must bury them now.” He poured lemon kolonya over his already soaked handkerchief and pressed it again to his nose. “Where’s the government? Where’s the Red Crescent?” Touching a mourner’s shoulder, he said, “I’m so sorry, but we must do this.”
Before the mourners’ prayers were finished, bulldozers covered the bags with earth, and still people remained, speaking to the bumps and curves of the torn-up ground.
For a moment now, staring at the swollen flap of the sheep’s distended tongue, Sinan imagined death as a one-way mirror, like the glass it was said the Special Teams unit sat behind while watching the interrogations and torture of suspected PKK rebels. Some men—the ones who survived and came back to Yeilli to tell their story—said it was the being watched, the knowledge that men drank tea just on the other side of the glass while they were being beaten, that made the torture so unbearable. Most of the men who were tortured didn’t even care about a “Kurdistan” they simply wanted to live their lives—speak their language instead of Turkish, farm their fields, tend to their sheep, feed their families. Once you were behind that glass, though, Kurdistan Workers’ Party or not, separatist or Turkish nationalist, you might as well have been dead, because your body no longer belonged to you; it belonged to the brutality or mercy of a man and that man belonged to the Turkish state and his fists were the fists of the Turkish Republic and his boot was the boot of the Turkish Republic and the electricity that convulsed your body was provided by the Turkish Republic and the blood that was spilled, even if it was Kurdish blood, was the color of the Turkish Republic’s flag.
It seemed to Sinan that the living and the dead were separated by a thin membrane through which the living could not see, a membrane punctured only briefly at the moment of death, and he wondered if Ahmet, Gülfem, and Zeynep stood just on the other side now, so close but out of sight and out of reach. He wondered if Sarah Hanm stood there, too—looking in and regretting her sacrifice. His father, even, although he had been dead all these years. He imagined that if he looked closely enough at the dead sheep he would see some reflection of death, some living element in it, but all he saw was an eye, black and empty, and pooled blood as useless as spilled water.
By the time the animal was ready, the shepherd and his flock were gone—where to, Sinan did not know. It struck Sinan that God had sent the shepherd, and if he sent the shepherd then perhaps he had sent the Americans as well. He felt a sudden jolt of hope that this was part of some plan, some reminder from Him not to get too attached to his brief time on earth, because to be with your Father is the greatest—the only real existence. And that’s how the dead finally won over all living people, torturer or loving family member. No matter who you were, no matter how weak and helpless, once you were dead you knew what it meant to be with God and the living did not know and the not knowing haunted the living and the haunting was the doubt that God existed at all.
He skinned the animal, untied the twine, and slung the carcass over his shoulders. There was still a little blood coming from the gash and it trickled warm across his shoulders and chest. It was an unclean thing to carry an animal in such a way, and the burden of it made him a little sick to his stomach—he had never liked killing; it always made him brood with guilt. Two of the other men waited near their animals and smoked. Sinan nodded to them as he passed and they nodded back.
“May it go easily,” Sinan said.
“For you, too,” the older of the two men replied.
CARRYING THE SHEEP ON his shoulders now, he remembered lifting the American’s wife from the rubble.
Just like her, the ewe’s body felt light and insubstantial.
Just like the American’s wife, the animal’s skin was still warm, though stiff and lifeless.
It embarrassed Sinan to carry the sheep through the streets where people were forced to watch, their eyes hungry, their memories filled with dead bodies, but he needed something in which to place the meat so it would not spoil. He checked what remained of the grocery, walked two blocks to where the hardware store had once stood, and then down near the ruined port where the men used to sell their fish, but he couldn’t find anything, nothing was as it had been. He discovered a blanket, hanging from the edge of a leaning wall, and he pulled it loose with one hand and laid the sheep’s body in it.
He carried the carcass up the road through the rubble of town, past the old kraathane where thirty men had been crushed while playing the men’s club’s late-night card game. He kicked unbroken tea glasses out of his path, and saw the terrible pictures on a loose front page of the newspaper Milliyet. Four men were hauling a couch down the street, hurrying their feet as if they were being chased. Coming through the broken front window of an electronics store, a woman carried an intact color television. Where she would watch it, Sinan couldn’t imagine.
“Much shame on you,” Sinan said to her through his teeth.
She stared back, her eyes flashing with anger, but she said nothing.
He stopped at the spot where smail had been buried nine days before. He remembered Sarah Hanm’s arms wrapped around his son, the beams of wood and chunks of cement that crushed her ribs instead of smail’s.
He started back to the tent, but changed his mind. He would have to thank the American director personally; it was, unfortunately, the right thing to do.
His foot was beginning to ache, but he walked in the direction of the trucks, through the settling dust in their wake. The sun was brutally hot and his hunger and lack of sleep made him feel as though he were wading through water. In the field that used to be the prison yard, Mustard grass rose knee-high and poked through metal carcasses of fifties-era Chevrolets once used as taxis. A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the field and still bore government signs warning against trespassing. There had been too many riots here, Sinan had heard, and the government finally had closed the prison down, and moved it to a deserted part of Anatolia where the guards could better deal with uprisings without being bothered by human rights activists. On the far end of the grounds the remnants of masonry stood crumbled atop a cracked foundation—the last of the prison itself.
By the time Sinan reached the Americans, they were already at work. They were unloading bags of rice and stacking them in the grass, unwrapping rolls of canvas, and hammering poles into the ground. Their energy was amazing to see—there was hope in it, a sense that they had things under control, and Sinan stood on the edge of the field, watching. Townspeople surrounded him, watching with awe, but unwilling or unsure about entering the field to help. The American director yelled instructions, waved his hands, and directed the traffic of young people all dressed in light blue T-shirts emblazoned with white fish designs. Like a blue army, they unfolded canvas to be stretched atop the poles, and soon a large tent began to take shape, casting a house-sized shadow across the ground.
Sinan laid the sheep on the ground and walked into the field toward the American man. No one seemed to notice at first, but as he reached the group a few of the relief workers turned to stare at him. The frightened look on their faces reminded him that he was covered with blood. He wiped his hands on his pants, but the blood was dry, and before he could change his mind the American had already seen him.
“Please,” Sinan said. “I’m sorry. A moment, please.”
“You’re welcome here,” the man said in clear Turkish.
“Please, a moment.”
Sinan found the water truck and ran his hands beneath the leaky valve. The blood ran off into the grass but little crescents remained beneath his nails. When he finished, the man was already at his side. Some of the young Americans went on working, but many of them were watching and Sinan became self-conscious. The American held out his hand, but Sinan politely refused. His hands were still unclean.
“Forgive my appearance,” Sinan said.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” the man said.
“I must thank you for my son, Marcus Bey.”
“Just Marcus, please. Is he all right?”
&nbs
p; “Tired, the boy is tired.”
“Where is your family?”
Sinan didn’t answer. He looked around the camp. Some of the young people had begun working again, but others still stood and stared. Marcus gestured with his hand to a place behind one of the trucks.
“It’s a terrible time for us all,” Marcus said.
“I’m very sorry about your wife,” Sinan said. “I owe you much gratitude.” He should have told him the details of his wife’s sacrifice; he wanted to, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was ashamed because of it, but this shame would be better than the shame of betraying his father. “She was a good woman.”
“Yes, she was. Better than I.” Marcus clenched his jaw and looked to the sky for a moment, just long enough, it seemed, to keep himself under control. He sniffed and ran his hand over his goateed mouth. The American was a good husband; Sinan could see that. At least he was good at mourning his wife, and that alone was to be admired. Sinan knew men who wouldn’t mourn the death of their wife any more than that of the family goat.
“You owe me nothing,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “That was God’s work. But if you want to thank me, you can bring your family here.”
“Thank you, we’re fine.”
“There’s food, tents, and people who’ll take care of you.”
“Marcus Bey,” Sinan said. “You have tents here, we have a tent there. We’re fine. I’ll care for my family.”
“‘A man’s pride shall bring him low,’ Sinan, ‘but honor shall uphold the humble in spirit.’”
“‘No one eats better food than that earned by his own hands,’” Sinan said.
Marcus nodded and smiled.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Sinan Bey,” Marcus said, enclosing Sinan’s hand in both of his despite the blood that remained, “but I will come tomorrow and the next day and the day after that until you reconsider.”