Gardens of Water

by Alan Drew

  Chapter 15

  REM LEFT DILEK AND RAN TOWARD THE MINIBUSES, WHICH had disappeared behind the remains of the town mosque. She took a shortcut past the police barricade and ran toward the open field that used to be the prison. When she got there, she found the field packed with foreigners pitching tents and unloading bags from produce trucks. She stopped, a bit shocked by the scene, and watched them raise one canvas tent after another in perfect white rows. She started through the field until she saw her father carrying a goat on his shoulders, the whole left side of his body slathered in blood. Instinctively, she crouched among the weeds and watched him lay the animal in the dirt. Then she saw Dylan’s father coming toward her father, and her heart jumped, not because she was about to be caught, but because she knew she wasn’t going to let them stop her from finding Dylan. She scanned the crowd of workers, looking for his shape, until she found him sitting in one of the white buses, gazing out the window.

  He seemed to be staring directly at her, but his face was empty, his eyes glazed, as though he were looking into some deep emptiness encased in the glass window. She watched her father be led into the shadow between two trucks, and when his back was turned, she ran across the field toward the bus.

  Dylan threw open the window as soon as he saw her, and hung his torso out of the frame. She jumped into his arms, and she dangled there awkwardly against the hot metal of the bus, her feet two inches above ground. She laughed and couldn’t stop laughing, and he began laughing too until he lost his grip and she fell back to the ground.

  “I was afraid you were dead,” she said. “Or in America and never coming back.”

  “I couldn’t find you.” He grabbed her hand and kissed it and electricity shot all the way down to her toes.

  “Hold on,” she said. “My father.” She crouched down, sneaked over to the front of the bus, and peered around the bumper; she could see her father shaking Marcus Bey’s hand. “My father’s over there.” She motioned with her head in their direction. “Talking to your father.”

  “Shit,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “You’ve got guts.” He pointed to the back of the bus. “Come here.”

  He ran down the aisle of the bus, and she followed him on the ground to where he tugged open another window.

  “There,” he said, gesturing to the tires at her feet. “They won’t see your legs now.”

  “My dad thinks I’m going to kill myself or something,” he said. “Because of my mother. So he keeps looking over here to make sure I haven’t slit my wrists.”

  “Are you?” For some reason she thought he could do such a thing. He was dangerous enough.

  “Not now.”

  She smiled and she could feel her face flush.

  “But I miss her,” he said, his voice breaking a little.

  She took his hand, and let her fingers stroke his knuckles.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. There was a gash beneath his right eye and the socket was bruised. She briefly imagined dressing the wound, his face pressed against her blouse, the intimacy of a wife caring for her husband.

  “You’re hurt,” rem said.

  “Just a bruise,” he said.

  “I’ve been going crazy.”

  “Me, too,” he said.

  “Dilek said you went back to America.”

  “We did,” he said, looking at the ground now. “We buried her and got back on a plane. Right after the wake.”

  She watched the bump in his neck rise and fall as he swallowed down gathering tears.

  “You’re staying?” she asked.

  “We’re staying.”

  He looked at her now, his eyes soft but lit with excitement, and she felt herself getting lost in them.

  “Even at the funeral I kept thinking about you,” he said.

  “No,” she said, letting go of his hand. He shouldn’t have been thinking about her on a day of mourning; it was disrespectful toward his mother.

  “I swear,” he said. “Thinking of you kept me from losing it.”

  He stared at her and she stared back until his blue eyes embarrassed her and she looked away.

  “Damn,” he said. “Here comes my dad.”

  She fell to her knees and looked around the tires beneath the chassis of the bus. She saw the bare legs of Dylan’s father striding toward them, and beyond him she could see that her father was already gone.

  SHE KNEW HER FATHER would take Atatürk Street back to the tent, so she had to cut through what was left of the Gypsy camp. It reeked of feces and rot, and three filthy children sitting in the dirt watched her as she passed. Somebody screamed behind her and a child cried, but she didn’t dare look to see what was happening. A street dog followed beside her, his nose low to the ground, his body swaying from side to side, and as she got closer to their tent, she ran through a field to the street even though she knew she’d be caught and have to suffer her father’s anger. He had told her not to leave the tent. He wouldn’t even let her walk around outside, unless she and her mother were going to the toilet of a restaurant half-collapsed and stinking of backed-up waste, just because some stupid drunk supposedly tried to watch her wash her legs.

  But her father wasn’t on the road. She knew, then, that he was already at the tent, and she resigned herself to at least a verbal lashing.

  When she arrived, she found her mother and father leaning over smail. He was curled pathetically in a blanket, despite the fact that the day was already so hot she could feel the scorched dirt through the soles of her shoes.

  “Look at that!” her mother said, stroking near the raised, pink skin of the cut above smail’s right eye. Her father turned smail’s face toward a streak of sunlight filtering through the rips in the blanketed rooftop.

  “rem,” her mother said, grabbing her hand. “Look at that.”

  “That cut’s been there since the quake,” rem said, frustrated, but she knew what her mother was scared about. The skin was black in the middle and blossomed in folds of pink.

  “It’s infected,” her father said.

  smail’s eyes were big and sad and rem wanted to tell him to stop playing. “You need to wash it,” her father said. “What do I wash it with?” Nilüfer said. “We have no soap.” “Use the water, Nilüfer.”

  “Get a rag,” Nilüfer said to rem.

  rem found a rag hanging on the edge of a bucket they had used to wash tea glasses earlier that day. The water was murky and the rag smelled of mildew, but she dipped it and handed it to her mother, who immediately dabbed at the edge of the cut.

  “Oh, my baby,” her mother said to smail. “Oh, my baby. I’m so sorry.”

  Her father pulled back smail’s eyelids. He turned smail’s hands over and looked at his palms.

  “Do you feel sick?”

  “A little,” smail said.

  rem sat down on the blankets spread across the floor of the tent and watched them, still out of breath from her run back.

  “Oh, canm,” her mother continued.

  “A street dog followed me home,” rem said. “He was foaming at the mouth.” “Does anything else hurt?” her father asked.

  “I had to run to get away from it.” She rubbed her heel and made a face, hoping her father would notice. “I think I twisted my ankle.”

  “I thought I lost you,” her mother said to smail.

  “I met a boy,” she whispered to herself, watching now the unfurling of the tents in the field below. “An American boy,” she thought.

  “Oh, I thought I lost you,” her mother said again, completely lost now in the festering wound on smail’s head.

  rem briefly imagined being buried herself beneath the rubble, and the faces of her father and mother glowing with happiness and relief as they pulled her back into the world. They hugged her. They kissed her. They wouldn’t let her go.

  Chapter 16

  “WE NEED A DOCTOR,” NILÜFER SAID, DABBING AT SMAIL’S cut.

  “I know,” Sinan said.

  “Sinan—”

/>   “I know, Nilüfer.” He pulled the knife from his pocket and stabbed it into the tendon between the ewe’s hindquarters and belly. “Stop washing it. It’s as clean as it’s going to get with that water.”

  Nilüfer stopped, but she stood there holding the cloth as though ready to strike at the wound as soon as he turned his back.

  “What are we going to do?”

  The knife was dull, but he was able to separate the joints, carve through muscle, and peel away fat until he had quartered the animal. As he worked he felt their neighbors’ eyes on him.

  “Eat,” he said.

  Nilüfer lit a small fire made of gathered wood and dried weeds, and began to cut the quartered pieces into smaller sections for cooking.

  “Cook it all,” he said. “It won’t last.”

  She overfilled the pot, but still the pot was not big enough. At best the food she was able to cook would last for two days. He carried what remained of the animal to each of the three other families; it wasn’t much—the hide of the hooves, a chunk of the hindquarters, the white fat strips—but he was thanked profusely, an elderly grandfather kissing Sinan’s knuckles before raising the hand to his forehead. The drunk was watching now, a desperation in his eyes having returned with sobriety. Sinan remembered the way Ahmet’s hands sometimes shook in the morning before he took his first sip of rak, and he felt an intruding pity for this man. He cut away the head of the ewe, stripped the remaining skin from around the eyes, and gave it to the drunk, who stood to receive it.

  “I am not a beggar,” the man said.

  “I know,” Sinan said. The pleading in the drunkard’s eyes forced Sinan to touch his shoulders. “It’s a gift. To help my soul get to Heaven.”

  Sinan sat down in the evening shade of the tent. He was exhausted. His foot ached in rhythm with his heart, but he was anxious and it was difficult for him to be here, sitting idle, waiting for an answer to what to do next. From the hill he could just barely make out the movements at the camp, and the flashing of white material being raised in the midday light. He had no oil or butter, and the meat burned on the stove, sending up a trail of gray smoke. Still, the smell was intoxicating.

  smail had gotten up and gone to play. Sinan watched as smail kicked a ball in the air, chased it down the hill, ran back up, and repeated the process. rem fussed with her head scarf, scratching at it, pulling and tugging until her hair broke loose from the fabric.

  “Where’s the government?” Nilüfer said. “This boy’s sick.”

  smail threw the ball into the air and headed it when it came down. “He seems fine now,” Sinan said.

  “You saw the cut,” she said. “You felt his temperature.”

  He had, and he knew a boy could recover and fall sick again soon; he saw it happen in Yeilli, a sick child survives a fever in winter only to suddenly die feverish in spring.

  “The food is done, Nilüfer?”

  Nilüfer closed her mouth and spooned the meat onto chipped plates.

  The mutton was tough and burned and they ate in silence. The flies were up in the evening heat and they circled around their heads, lit on the corners of their mouths.

  “Is there more, Anne?” smail said when it was done.

  “Not tonight,” Sinan said. “Tomorrow.”

  “We should go to the American camp,” rem said.

  He looked at his daughter. Hair poked out from her scarf and he could see the whole of her hairline above her forehead.

  “Americans?” Nilüfer said.

  “They’re building a camp,” rem said. “I bet they’ll have doctors.”

  A wave of anger rose in him, and he let it show in his face.

  rem looked at the ground and fingered the fringe of a blanket. “Don’t you think so, Baba?”

  Nilüfer looked at him, a question in her eyes that was working its way down to her lips.

  “Yes,” he said. “I saw it today.” He pushed the plate of bones away toward his daughter. She stood and carried it to the stinking bucket they were using as a sink. “It’s not done yet.”

  “We should go,” Nilüfer said.

  “It’s not finished,” he said, his voice beginning to crack with frustration.

  Nilüfer dropped her head and bit at her nails.

  “rem,” he said. “Come here.”

  She knelt in front of him. He took her head in his hands and began to adjust the scarf. She would not look at him, but instead turned her eyes away and watched the cars on the freeway. She had his eyes; they were dark and furious and he knew he was going to have real trouble with her.

  “I know this is difficult, but what’s demanded of us doesn’t change.”

  She blew air out of her nose and her shoulders slumped. He folded the curls of her hair beneath the fabric; even he was a little sad to cover it up—it was so beautiful, black and rich with streaks of red.

  “We must still be who we are,” he said.

  She looked at him, water in her eyes. “Are you finished?” She said it softly enough to hide the challenge.

  “Yes,” he said.

  In the growing darkness he sat and drank cold tea, but Nilüfer’s eyes shamed him and he spun away from their tent and walked into the field, looking at the grass at his feet and trying to calm himself. A blast of light lit the field below and he watched the Americans crisscross the dirt, bathed in the bleaching white of floodlights. They looked like shadows walking on scissor legs. From this distance they seemed to have the efficiency of a machine, a hundred moving parts setting tent after tent in rows, each one casting a triangle across the ground. Just a few meters away from the camp, separated by a low hill, Gölcük was lost in darkness, like a bombed-out village—all collapsed roofs and walls that sheltered nothing except the haunting reminder that life once attached itself to this plot of land.

  Sinan needed to do something, he knew—everything was gone, everything had changed—but he couldn’t bring himself to take his family into that camp.

  At his feet, ants moved among the dried blades of grass like black rivulets of water. Some turned circles in the ground, some climbed over the slow-moving bodies of others, and still others climbed upon his shoes and up over his ankles. He walked over to the ewe’s carcass and lifted the blanket. The ants were already upon it.

  Chapter 17

  “YES, YES, MY BROTHER,” KEMAL BEY SAID. “I HAVE A COUSIN who can help you out.”

  For two days Sinan had been searching for a job—at the open market in Gebze, in the clothing bazaar in Yalova, even at the hot springs in the hills—but there were none to be had; at least none to be had by a Kurdish “terrorist dog,” as one butcher near Baghdad Street called him, pulling from his wallet—as Sinan backed out of the shop—an army portrait of a son killed fighting the PKK. He had even tried to sell tissues along with the barefoot boys at the Yalova ferry landing, but there were few cars and fewer buyers and he found himself stuck with a pocketful of tissues he did not need and would not sell. On the third day, today, he ran into Kemal in front of the bulldozed ground that used to be Kemal’s shop.

  Kemal produced a cell phone from his pants pocket.

  “Can you believe this?” he said, pointing with one hand at the flattened spot that used to be his store as he dialed a number with the other. While he held the phone to his ear, he said, “Life is an angry mistress. You want her, but she’ll rip your balls off.”

  Sinan knew Kemal Aras from the grocery. Before the quake Kemal owned a small electronics shop, but he always came in to the grocery to buy lightbulbs for his store. Ahmet teased him about it, but it had been a good business arrangement: Kemal regularly bought their bulbs—a slow-moving commodity—and sold them, just two blocks away in the light-store district, at inflated prices for a small profit. Although Sinan was not particularly fond of the man—his conversation was always interrupted by cell phone calls and they had to listen to him yell at suppliers in front of their customers—he admired the man’s business savvy; he had his own truck with the name of
his store painted on the side; a summer before he had installed at his store a beautiful red awning that could be seen from a block away.

  “Merhaba, abi!”

  And now even, while Kemal spoke to his cousin, he yelled into the phone.

  “No, abi!”

  He paced in front of Sinan, the phone to his ear, his head bowed to the dirt. His right cheek was covered in a large bandage, and streaks of blood stained the gauze.

  “Good man, yes.” He spun a circle in the dirt and threw his hand in the air. “No! He’s a friend. At least two hundred.”

  He nodded and smiled at Sinan.

  “No.” He nodded again. “Of course, of course.”

  Then he took the phone from his ear and hung up.

  “Okay, my friend.” He slapped Sinan on the back. “You have a job. I’d take it myself if my back wasn’t so bad.” He shook his head. “Allah, Allah, one day a businessman, the next day a mule.”

  The next morning, Sinan took the two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride to stanbul, and by nine found himself descending the stairs into a Byzantine cistern in the Bazaar Quarter of the city. He was amazed that the cistern had not collapsed in the quake, but nothing in the center of the city seemed to have been damaged. Above him a small exposed bulb dangled from the brick ceiling and cast the only light on the steps. The cavern was eight hundred years old, musty, with green moss clinging to the cracks in the mortar, but where water was once stored, Sony televisions now stood stacked ten high from floor to arches. A leather harness tugged against his shoulders, and a kind of saddle, with a twelve-inch shelf nailed to the base, lay across his back. His job was to strap two televisions onto his back—three, if he could manage it—and carry them from the back streets of the Bazaar Quarter down to the electronic stores of Sirkeci—a good kilometer walk downhill. Then, do it over and over again until the end of the business day.

  When he met the owner of the operation, a man known as Aslan, Sinan hid his foot behind a table so the man wouldn’t notice. With a cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, Aslan Bey felt the muscles in Sinan’s arms, slapped his back, and even rubbed his hands along his spine, but he never checked Sinan’s legs. Sinan would work on commission, one hundred fifty thousand lira per television.