by Alan Drew
“The children have eaten?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’ll serve dinner at five.”
He nodded and felt a weight of responsibility drop from his shoulders. He took another bite of the eggs and the buttery yolks melted on his tongue. And before he could stop it, a welling rose in his throat and he nearly choked on the food. The water gathered in the back of his eyes, and exhaustion, like heavy blankets being folded around his limbs, took possession of his body.
He dropped the eggs on the floor of the tent and placed his fingers on the exposed skin of his wife’s leg. He pushed the pantaloons up her calf, enough so that the whole palm of his hand could touch her skin. He dropped his head and kissed the skin there, rested his cheek against the ridge of her shinbone, and collapsed in her lap.
“Shh,” she said. “Shh. Everything will be all right.”
Chapter 24
SHE STRIPPED THE HEADPHONES FROM HER EARS AND JUMPED out of the water, shaking the skirt back down around her ankles.
She glanced up at the beach and saw a man carrying a fishing pole and cresting the hill. She recognized the man from her father’s store, but she couldn’t remember his name. He was looking the other way on the beach, his hand shaded against the sun and it seemed he had not seen them.
Dylan went left and she went right, hoping she didn’t run into anyone else with her shoes in her hands. When she was out of sight of the fisherman, she sat down on the beach and scraped the black pebbles from her wet toes. She started to put her shoes back on, but suddenly felt stupid. She hadn’t done anything wrong—just listened to some music and talked with a boy. Women were lying naked on beaches somewhere. Turkish women in stanbul went dancing in clubs, drank and smoked with men they slept with. She had only had a conversation.
The ground was rough beneath her feet, but she carried her shoes, swaying from her fingers like two trophies to defiance. She walked up the path where bushes crowded the sand and thorns stuck between her toes, but she bit her lip and walked on anyway. The sun was lower than she expected and she thought she might have missed dinner, but she didn’t care. She walked through the camp barefoot, watching to see if anyone noticed her bare toes, trying to get another look at Dylan but he was nowhere to be found and no one seemed to care about her feet. She found Dilek and Aye still swinging the rope for the little girl. People sat around outside, smoking and drinking and watching the girls jump, but she didn’t care about that, either.
“I’ve found him,” she said to Dilek and jumped into the rope.
The rope came around and she jumped just as she heard it hit the ground.
“Faster,” Aye said to Dilek, and rem watched the rope circle overhead.
She jumped and felt the rope pick up speed. She jumped and pebbles pressed into the raw skin of her heels and the soft balls of her feet. She jumped and jumped again, her heart beating faster, the blood rushing through her veins, her head spinning with the speed of the arc.
Chapter 25
THAT EVENING AFTER DINNER, MARCUS ARRIVED AT THE TENT with bandages and antiseptic. Nilüfer and the children were out in the camp, doing what he didn’t know, but, for once, their whereabouts did not worry him. Sinan had felt, for much of his adult life, as though he were the last barrier at the edge of town, a wall between the soldiers and his family, and should he fall asleep or look the other way, however briefly, the hostile forces would carry his family away. Even after moving to Gölcük, where there was no fear of attacks from the Special Teams, he couldn’t shake himself loose of this fear. Now, though, the military was gone. Even the tanks that rumbled down the streets of Gölcük each day were crushed under the cement of collapsed barracks, and the relief he felt was palpable in the leaden weight of his body. He thought about refusing Marcus’s help, but he was exhausted, and, besides, he liked the idea of an American doing something as base as washing his foot.
Marcus removed the sock and Sinan could smell the stench of sweat and blood and dirt. The discolored skin had stretched and separated like a seam and bled from chapped tears in the skin. He watched the American, thinking he would cringe or hold his nose or put on latex gloves, but the American did none of those things. He held Sinan’s foot in his hand and washed the blood away with a cotton swab—his blood staining the man’s skin.
“Do you know what your government did to us in the South?” Sinan said.
“I know what the American government allows the Turkish military to do,” Marcus said, never removing his eyes from the foot.
“The village next to mine was burned to the ground,” Sinan continued. “Women and children were killed.”
“I know.”
“And for what?” Sinan said. “Because—”
“Because you want to speak your own language, because you want your land, because the U.S. and NATO want Russia out of the Mediterranean.”
“Oil,” Sinan said.
There was silence for a moment while Marcus wrapped Sinan’s foot and pressed a metal hook into the fabric to keep it in place.
“There will never be a Kurdistan,” Sinan said, “because the Americans want the oil in Kirkuk.”
“And the British and the Dutch and the Iraqis, the Iranians,” Marcus said.
“The Turks,” Sinan added, feeling, strangely, like he was agreeing with the man.
“Try to keep it elevated,” Marcus said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”
And the next night he returned to perform the operation again. Sinan was happy for the American’s return because a loneliness was setting in, and the darkness of the tent in the evening and the absence of his family only deepened the feeling.
“Do you know,” Sinan said this time, “that this place used to be a prison?”
“No.”
His foot was covered in less blood this time and when the American touched the gauze with the alcohol to the cuts, it didn’t hurt so badly.
“When the military depopulated the South and rounded up boys they said were terrorists, they took them here. That tower near the soup kitchen is where the soldiers stood with their machine guns.”
Marcus remained focused on his work—pressing gauze on the cuts, dabbing away dried blood between the toes.
“There was a room with wires attached to a car battery.”
Marcus spread petroleum jelly on the split skin and taped a bandage there to keep the wounds from sticking to the wrapping material.
“There was another room without windows. They left them in there for days—left them sitting in their own piss, in their own feces.”
“I’ve heard the same horrible stories, Sinan.”
Marcus stretched the fabric over the stump—one time around, two times around…
“You Americans knew about this, but you never forced the government to shut it down,” Sinan said.
“I was living here, Sinan.”
He felt like kicking the American, but he controlled his foot if not his mouth. “You never made the Turks stop destroying villages, forcing people to move west. Did you actually believe, like the idiots in Ankara, that making people homeless would stop the war?”
…three times and then the metal clip.
“No. The Americans think, Just keep sending Ankara money, just keep selling them weapons, their war is our profit.”
“The PKK killed teachers,” Marcus said. “Because they had to teach in Turkish.”
What he said was true. Kurdish teachers were killed by the PKK for no fault of their own; the state wouldn’t allow them to teach in Kurdish. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party killed whole Kurdish families, Sinan could have added, because they were suspected of collaborating with the Turkish military. But Sinan said nothing, because those disgusting facts embarrassed him.
“Depopulation was a bad policy,” Marcus said, as though to appease Sinan. “An immoral one.”
“The Europeans,” Sinan said, his voice calming now, “got them to shut the prison down—the French and the Germans—not the Americans.”
�
��Keep the foot elevated, Sinan. I think it’s getting better.” He stood to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”
The next night, Sinan had Nilüfer make tea before she left for the evening. She said she was doing laundry, but he saw no laundry. What are the children doing? They spend time in the school tent, Sinan. smail plays soccer. rem talks with Dilek and Aye. Don’t worry about them. Rest.
The tea was bitter and tasted of metal and he was embarrassed to serve it, but Marcus drank it and, for a few moments, the simple act of pouring tea for a guest tricked his mind into believing everything was normal. Then, after the first cup of small talk, as though all the events of the last two weeks had been waiting to break loose from him, Marcus told Sinan about his wife’s funeral—the long flight to New Hampshire, the knowledge that her body lay beneath them in the cargo hold, the way Sarah Hanm’s sisters accused him of keeping her from them all the years they spent in Turkey, and how the next morning he and Dylan flew back immediately to stanbul, and he delivered his resignation to Balarbai American School and organized the relief effort with people from Texas.
“I couldn’t stay in America,” he said, “knowing what you all were suffering here.” He paused and rubbed the heel of his hand with his thumb. “Sarah’s gone. Staying in the States doesn’t make that any better.”
“You must hate me,” Sinan said.
Marcus looked as though he had been slapped in the face.
“Your wife is dead because of my son,” Sinan said.
“My wife is dead because it was her time,” he said. He shook his head. “I don’t hate you or your son.”
They sat silent for a few moments, sipping bitter tea and listening to the sounds outside the tent—a guitar being strummed somewhere and voices singing strange songs, the murmur of intimate conversations escaping nearby tents, the excited screaming of boys playing a soccer game. The silence lasted, and Sinan couldn’t think of one thing to say to the man. The American’s life—the job at the rich school, the flights back and forth from America, the simple ability to make the choice to quit your job—was so outside his realm of experience that he said nothing at all for fear of sounding stupid.
Marcus took a sip of the tea and made a face.
“It’s terrible, I know,” Sinan said.
“No, it’s fine.”
“You’re very polite.”
He took another sip.
“You’re right,” Marcus said, laughing. “It really is terrible.”
They laughed, and Marcus tossed the tea out the door.
SINAN SOON REALIZED THAT here, in the camp, he wasn’t needed at all. The Americans served three meals a day and donated clothes for his children. There was no rent to pay or grocery to run or even any chores to make his children do. rem and smail escaped to the school tent each day, and he was glad to see them go, glad for the freedom of their absence but sad for it, too, and he wished they would return to the tent if only so he could hear their feet shuffle the fabric.
In the mornings after breakfast, Nilüfer and rem would help him outside the tent, where he sat most of the day like some paralyzed idiot, on dusty pillows, and watched the people of the camp. The men spent hours sitting in the sun playing backgammon—the dice clattering against the wooden edges of the boards, the players roaring as the numbers fell. Children chased one another, their bodies threading between tents and kicking up dust, which mothers waved away as though swatting at offending flies. Uur, the Gypsy boy who lost his whole family in the quake, dropped discarded fruit peels, husks of eggplant, and other refuse into a plastic bag he dragged behind him. Sinan didn’t know if he was eating the leftovers, and he didn’t want to know. A woman two tents down lay curled inside her tent. He could see the soles of her sunlit feet through the opening. Except for the occasional wiggling of toes, those feet never moved. An elderly man wearing a motorcycle helmet walked up and down the tent aisle each morning. “Another earthquake is coming,” he said to everyone he passed. “God is punishing us.” Ziya Bey, Sinan’s next-door neighbor, tried to take the helmet off the man’s head one day. “You’re scaring the children,” he said to the man. But the man screamed and kicked at him until he gave up. The next morning he was shuffling his feet through the dust again.
Some of the men drank rak and beer all day and into the evenings as though they had given up on a future, and although Sinan despised these drunken men, a small part of him wanted their company. Ahmet would be drinking with them were he here, and sometimes he found himself closing his eyes and listening to their conversation—their Nasreddin Hoja jokes, their rude gossip about the women (their breast size, their hip size, which wife did this and which wife did that in bed)—and tried to imagine Ahmet’s voice among them. Sometimes he did imagine his brother-in-law’s voice and, briefly, the real world and the world in his mind combined to make one lost life exist again.
Nilüfer kept her normal motherly duties—comforting rem when she arrived back at the tent angry about something one of her friends had said, hugging smail when he scraped his knee in a soccer game. She maintained her domestic chores, even within this small tent—brewing tea, shaking out dirty carpets, washing clothes in the buckets behind the food tent.
But for Sinan there was nothing to do. Maybe it was because of his foot, but he had never felt half the man his father was until he ran the bakkal; his father had died, after all, defending his rights against the government, while Sinan couldn’t even make himself stand on a swollen foot. Ahmet had been a bad businessman and Sinan had been the one that turned the failing store into a profit-earning affair—albeit a very-little-profit-earning affair. Without the grocery to keep him busy and a household to keep in order, as he sat in the camp like a child being taken care of by Americans, he began to hate himself. Even after his foot had stopped throbbing and the swelling was down, he sat around the tent all day torturing himself over decisions and indecisions that had plagued his life—letting smail sleep by the open window the night of the quake, leaving rem and Nilüfer alone for four days, leaving his village of Yeilli, obeying his father the night of the Nowruz festival instead of kicking and screaming until his father came home with him—and dozens of other mistakes that seemed to lead him to this exact moment. When his wife returned from doing laundry, he was glad to have her near but he barely spoke to her. When rem failed to return when told, he ignored it. When Marcus visited, he shook his hand and held polite conversation but forgot what was said as soon as the man left. So inward were his thoughts that he seemed to be separated from the world around him, as though curled into himself behind a glass wall.
One night early in the second week, while they lay together inside the tent, listening to the sounds of their children sleeping, Nilüfer said, “I thought I was going to lose you. You slept so long, I thought you might die.”
Earlier that night, at dinner, between mouthfuls of watery spaghetti, Nilüfer had decided to voice all her fears openly in front of the children and the other people sitting nearby in the food tent. It had rained that afternoon, sheets of it blown by swirling wind and accompanied by strikes of lightning that set Sinan’s teeth on edge. Their tent flooded, but worse, one of the portable toilets tipped over and spilled into the lake left by the rain. In the broiling heat that followed, some of the children splashed into the lake before their parents and the Americans could get them out. In half an hour, acrid steam rose off the lake and filled the camp with a mean stench. Now we’ll wallow in our own waste? How will we ever get another apartment? There’s no work around here! This tent will be useless in wintertime. Have the Americans thought about that? What if the children get sick? How will we ever find rem a husband? What if the Americans leave? What will the government do for us then? What will we do? And Sinan had eaten an extra plate of spaghetti just to keep his mouth full so he wouldn’t scream at her. What was he to do? How was he to fix such things?
Now his stomach was too full and it pressed uncomfortably against the waist of his pants.
“
And what would you do without me?” he said, his voice strained with frustration.
“I don’t know, canm.”
“There’re a lot of people here to take care of you,” he said.
She was silent a moment before she leaned over and whispered in his ear in a way that made him wish they were alone.
“They can’t take care of me the way you can, my husband.”
Yet he couldn’t even be a man in that way, either. His children, though asleep, lay near, the canvas drapes of the tent were too thin to disguise the sound of such an act. A moment later, Nilüfer rolled over and before long he could hear her quiet snoring.
Chapter 26
HE LED HER UP THE HILL THAT ROSE ABOVE THE BEACH. Before they had only come here at night, but after the rains yesterday the stink of the camp was too much to bear in the afternoon heat, and now they walked the ridge between the sea and the camp. This precipice of land made her dizzy: to the right the sea lay like an opaque plate of glass and on her left the tents spread like tombstones in a distant cemetery. Their shadows fell across the ridge and seemed to double their size, and she thought she saw people below looking up at them as they moved together on the hill.
“Hurry,” she said. “We should have waited until dark.”
“They can’t tell it’s us,” he said. “Just two shapes on a hill. We could be anyone.”
No we couldn’t, she wanted to tell him, but she wanted to believe he was right. They sat beneath a ridge that blocked them off from the camp. Before them was nothing but water, blindingly brilliant in the evening sun. He tried to kiss her but she made him wait. They watched the sun fall into the sea and as darkness dropped, her fear changed into excitement, as though at night she were not rem Baiolu but a woman in one of Dilek’s stories. His hands moved over her shoulders and slipped occasionally to brush across her sternum. His tongue wrestled with hers, as though trying to pin it down, and then searched out her teeth, jumped across the roof of her mouth, and pushed against the thick skin of her cheeks. Each time his mouth moved, a spot in her chest tingled in just the right way to make her forget that what they were doing was wrong.