by Alan Drew
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You were hurt and I became angry with you.”
“It didn’t hurt,” rem said, sitting rigid in the chair. Even in the darkness he could see her grinding her teeth against him. He tried to think how best to tell her what he wanted to say.
He looked out at the water and the lights blurred in the currents. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, canm.”
“I said you didn’t hurt me.”
“rem, I’m tired of arguing with you.”
She looked at him. Her eyes catching the light from the soup kitchen blazed the way they did the day he returned from the German hospital: scared, angry—betrayed eyes, he suddenly realized. She turned away, presenting him with the side of her face. He wondered what it was like for her those four days after the earthquake, and a memory of her begging him to help her flashed in his mind. smail was buried, he was panicked with fear, he had a concussion, but that didn’t matter: he had chosen smail over his daughter. It was not a conscious choice; it was forced upon him by circumstance, but he had made it all the same and rem knew it. His stomach seized in a cramp.
“I haven’t been a good father to you,” he said, pressing three fingers into his belly.
rem lifted her head a little, but she kept her face hidden.
He wanted to apologize to her—being loved less was a burden a child shouldn’t bear—but he couldn’t bring himself to admit such a thing to her face.
“I just want you to live a good life, to be happy,” he said.
“Which do you want more, Baba?” She looked at him now, her chin raised against him. Her eyes, reflecting the light, shone like polished steel. “Me living a good life or me happy?”
“I want both.”
She looked away again.
“I will try harder, canm, to be a good father.”
She offered nothing—no thank-yous, no apologies for her actions, no “I love you”s—just silence and the defiance of the side of her face.
“Hear how quiet it is now?” They listened together for a few seconds and it was truly silent, except for the distant drone of dock cranes lifting containers from the backs of Chinese cargo ships. “Back home—did I tell you this? Did I ever tell you how quiet it is?”
“Yes, a hundred times,” she said.
“You don’t remember. You were too young.”
“I remember. I wasn’t that young.”
“It’s so quiet at night it’s like the earth has stopped spinning. Like everything terrible in the world has just fallen away.” He looked up at the sky. “Someday we’ll go back there and you’ll hear it and you’ll understand.”
“I don’t want to go back there.”
He almost ripped the compact disc player out of her hands.
“It’s your home, rem.”
“It’s not my home. There’s nothing there.”
He felt the anger rise in him, a flood of blood pumping into his chest.
“Come inside and go to bed, please.”
She blew air out her mouth and tossed her head in annoyance, but she got up and ducked inside the tent. He listened to her rustle around inside the bag—her frustrated kicks and sighs, her tosses and turns—until it was silent again, and he was left alone with the grinding echo of dock cranes and the two cats fighting over the scales left clinging to bones.
HE WAS SUPPOSED TO work a double shift the next day. He slept little that night and spent the early shift sipping tea at every break to get him through his duties. At lunch he was still thinking about rem, and during his break he found himself in the electronics section of Carrefour, the headphones to a portable CD player cupped inside his ears. The music was a crashing of noise, like a band of carpenters had gotten together to record the banging of their tools. Things screeched and screamed, other things clanged like controlled explosions, yet there was a moment—one beautiful moment—where the music fell to a dramatic rumble, the banging notes dropped to a sustained chord, and a singer whispered something in English that sounded like a pleading, like a man begging for help. The sound of that desperate voice touched something in him; comforted him in a way he couldn’t explain. He pressed rewind and listened to that moment again, and then pressed rewind and listened once more, until the voice faded out with the noise at the end of the song.
In the afternoon, as his back began to ache and his foot burned, he let his mind grow numb with the monotonous work. He was lulled by the rush of air-conditioner vents and the soft strains of pop music echoing in the metal rafters. He was grateful for the thoughtlessness of it, thankful for the relief, however brief, from the responsibilities of fatherhood. The customers in the store looked like foreigners; he was dressed like a foreigner—his khaki pleated pants, the brown belt, the polo-style shirt with the Carrefour logo on the chest—and for a few hours he was able to pretend that he was someone else, someone with money, a man living in one of the big yal perched above the Bosporus, a man who could hop on a plane and go wherever he pleased. Pouring black olives into a silver bin, he was an olive farmer with rows of green trees rising above the sparkling Mediterranean. Stacking boxes of frozen seafood in the walk-in freezer, he was a Black Sea fisherman setting out with the tide to haul lines full of sea bass; he was a famous soccer star, an author of romance novels, a bank teller. He was a farmer in a small eastern village, his family growing with the years—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
Toward the end of his shift, he was hanging a T-shirt on a rack in the clothing aisle, imagining himself a tailor of fine suits like Serdar Bey in the Yeilli of his childhood, when he watched a man press a dress against his young wife’s chest. One hand held the dress to the woman’s shoulder and the other one draped it across her hip. The woman smiled, her red lips shining in the fluorescent lights, her hand posed on her hip. “Beautiful,” the man said. “Çok güzel.” Then he pressed his body against hers, crushed the dress between them, and kissed her right there in the aisle. Sinan looked away, but looked again, and when he looked a third time, he was thinking of rem and the American boy.
Chapter 33
IT WASN’T SAFE FOR THEM IN THE CAMP ANYMORE, SO AFTER five days, when her father left for his new job and her mother went to smoke cigarettes with the women at the laundry bins, rem and Dylan took the bus into stanbul.
She wanted to go to Beyolu district, where on television she had seen crowds of beautiful-looking people jamming stiklal Avenue.
She wanted to cross the bridge into Europe, and hold Dylan’s hand in the alleyways of the old Jewish and Greek business district. She wanted to go to the fancy restaurants and clubs she had seen on the television gossip shows—the places where Tarkan drank beer, the clubs where women shone in camera flashbulbs, where the most exciting things happened at night, well after her parents had gone to bed.
But instead he took her to Kadiköy, still on the Asian side and full of more college students than stars. They stopped at a café in the bottom floor of an old house, and Dylan drank whiskey out of a small glass while she sipped tea. She watched the gold liquid slide like cooking oil down the glass, his Adam’s apple jumping up and down as he swallowed. His fingers stroked the lip of the glass as though he were playing a silent instrument. He ordered a second whiskey while she picked at the fennel seeds and candied hazelnuts, and watched his eyes get glassy and distant.
“It doesn’t look so bad,” he said, taking rem’s chin in his hand and turning it toward the morning sunlight. rem brushed his hand away, and pulled her head scarf a little lower to hide it.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“A little.”
“People are crazy,” he said. “My father always said that some people would spit in Atatürk’s face if they could. He thinks if he talks to them about God that’ll change things. I’d just like to kill them.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
He looked hurt.
“Let’s go away,” he said.
“We can’t.”
He took her hand.
“Germany,” he said, looking past her now at a couple coming through the patio door into the courtyard. “You’ll fit in there and I speak a little German.”
“No. We can’t.”
He rolled the glass in his hand and drank the rest of the whiskey. He squinched up his face as though it tasted terrible.
“Just imagine it for a minute,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Just forget about everything else for sixty seconds, would you?”
She felt stupid for ruining it.
“If my mom was still here,” he said, “she wouldn’t have a problem with this. But my dad—”
“And my father,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. He lit a cigarette and stared at the couple who were now sipping coffee with foam and sprinkles on top. The woman wore big, black-rimmed glasses and red jeans and her black-booted toes kept creeping up the opening of her boyfriend’s pant leg.
Dylan laughed and rubbed his palm across his forehead.
“What?” she said.
“Our parents don’t love us,” he said. “And you still want to make them happy.” He threw a few bills on the table and stubbed out his cigarette. “Let’s go.”
He walked her through the book bazaar and showed her the tattoo rooms underground where the passageway was warm and muggy and smelled like sweat and where some of the corners glistened wet. He took her to a record shop full of posters of men with guitars and eyes like lizards. The man behind the counter had spiked hair and a nose ring and he stared at her the whole time. The passage scared her a little. Last year two boys killed a child, and all the papers said the boys were Satanists who hung out in underground passages just like this one. Outside the shop, the passageway was filled with slouching kids, their clothes hanging off their bodies as though the fabric concealed nothing but skeletons. Girls leaned on boys and shared cigarettes. She even saw one blowing smoke rings above her head so that she seemed ringed with halos. She wondered if any of these kids knew those boys.
He led her back into the light, between the stands of men selling DVDs in wooden cases, past the kebab restaurants and gözleme shops where, behind steaming windows, Kurdish women kneaded dough into pancakes, their hands white with flour, and spread the pancakes on the circular pan. The smell of brine and guts announced the fish sellers’ street. Many of the men here wore beards and she noticed one man fingering prayer beads while taking a break with a simit and tea. Dylan wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her tight. His fingers rested on her hip, right where her stomach met her pelvis. A rush of heat flooded her skin. The open lightbulbs dangling above the baskets of fish reflected light against the wet cement and the men stared at them. Their hands slit open bellies of fish, they called out prices, they wrapped fillets in white oil paper and smiled as they took customers’ money, but they were watching, excitement and anger in their eyes, as though a fantasy about her had bled into hatred.
“Please, Dylan,” she said. “Stop.”
“Jesus,” he said, and let go. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground and they walked like that until they reached Tibbiye Road and the roar of buses and taxis.
“You can’t do that in public,” she said.
“Your father isn’t here, rem.”
“We have to be married,” she said. “How can you live here for so long and not know that?”
“I know it,” he said. “It’s just stupid. The other girls don’t have to be married.”
“I’m not those other girls,” she said. “And it’s not stupid!”
He spun around once with frustration. “You thought it was stupid until the other day.”
People were watching them, but they were near the shoe and clothing stores now and it was a different kind of crowd, a crowd that would agree with Dylan about how stupid it all was. A crowd that would wonder what such a boy was doing with a stupid covered girl.
“I just want to touch you,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re all I’ve got.”
They stood there for a moment in the middle of the street, saying nothing. Women with shopping bags rustled past. Children kicked bare feet in the fountain. With stained fingers, a shoeshine boy picked up the pieces of a broken shine jar. The boy reminded her of smail.
“Come with me,” Dylan said. He was smiling now. He had this way of being upset then suddenly fine. It confused her.
“Where?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, turning now to walk back through the fish bazaar. “I won’t lay a finger on you.”
Chapter 34
THAT AFTERNOON THE MANAGER SAID HE DIDN’T NEED SINAN for the evening shift. Yilmaz Bey had just arrived at the store, and Sinan followed him to his office, where he watched him hang his coat on the hook behind his desk, take his wallet from his pants pocket, and slip it into the pocket of his hanging coat.
“Please Yilmaz Bey, I need to work.”
“Sinan,” the manager said, sprinkling lemon cologne on his hands and slapping his palms together. “There are no trucks coming in today. It would be a waste of your time.”
“It wouldn’t be a waste of my time.”
“It’d be a waste of company time.” The man combed his clean fingers through his hair and pressed his eyebrows in place. “I’m sorry, Sinan. They check on these things.”
“Oh,” Yilmaz Bey said, reaching into his desk drawer. “This should help. Payday.” He handed Sinan an envelope. “It’s only for the few days you worked last pay period. Next one will be better.” The manager smiled and then started moving papers around on his desk and ignored him and Sinan knew it was time to leave.
36,732,045TL. He read the printed numbers again and rubbed his finger over their raised shape. It was the most money he had seen since his grocery. Nilüfer and the children wouldn’t expect him for another eight hours, so he took the ferries to Kadiköy, cashed the check, and went to see about train-ticket prices to Diyarbakr.
Haydarpaa train station echoed with the voices of passengers, merchants, and men loitering in corners. Well-dressed businessmen sat on a row of leather stools along one wall of the station, their feet pressed against wooden horns of copper shoeshine boxes. These men read papers or absentmindedly smoked cigarettes while snapping rags made their shoes sparkle. When the old shoeshine men bent to apply black to the shoe heels, it looked as though they were kissing their customers’ feet. A group of boys, unable to compete with the old-timers and their fancy punched-copper boxes, squatted in the dirty corner near the washrooms next to their wooden boxes, their hands permanently stained black, their skin as dirty and rough as the cement floor. They were Kurdish boys, their eyes a reflective black, their faces etched with anger.
As he crossed the huge open floor, incandescent fans of sunlight streamed through the high windows and cast light across the steel tracks. The railings shone like strings of gold necklaces through the darkness of the station, out past the rusting freight trains, and on into the heart of Anatolia. Sinan felt the possibility of that distant horizon, then, and he imagined the mountains his train would climb, the valleys it would descend through, and finally the gray cement station in Diyarbakr where it would squeal to a stop.
A poster listing destination and price hung next to the ticket counter window. There were hundreds of destinations and their times, and Sinan had difficulty finding the listing because the words were so small and crammed together. He found it and ran his finger along the box until he discovered the price: thirty-five million lira per ticket. He had five million plus the check money in his pocket and four million more tucked away in a pillow back in the camp.
One hundred and forty million lira! The number seemed impossibly huge. He knew about inflation the last few years, but ticket prices seemed to be inflated above even that ridiculous number. He would be paid in two weeks, but who knew if the check would be enough to cover such a price.
He stopped and rested on a bench near a café and tried to decide whether he could afford to spend the two hundred and fift
y thousand for a glass of tea. He finally decided he couldn’t, although he was tired and his throat was dry and the taste of something sweet would have given him at least a moment’s pleasure. He changed his mind—his life was too short on pleasures—ordered a tea, and sat and watched passengers board the trains. The doors to the cabins were just a few feet away and he smelled the pungent burn of smoke and leather and oiled steel. Nothing stopped him from boarding the train—no gates, no chains, no conductors or policemen, just a few steps of empty space, an open door, and then the tracks shining out ahead of him into the land, into the heart of another life.
In a sleeper car, a beautiful woman dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt reached to place her luggage above her seat. Usually he would have looked away, but now, here in this station where no one knew him, he watched her. Her thin exposed arms poked out of a shirt that clung to her torso. He admired the shape of her body—the curve of her breasts, the arc of each individual rib. He imagined kissing her in the compartment, pulling her tightly to him while the wheels of the train clicked beneath them. He imagined traveling with her to Sofia, Bucharest, maybe even Vienna, holding her tight in the middle of the European streets, caressing the knuckles of her thin fingers in smoke-filled cafés without anyone paying attention. He imagined sharing a room, watching her undress before bed. But in his imagination he didn’t see her body; he simply saw the blurry impression of nakedness, a light in her brown eyes, and her hair brushing against her neck.
Then the train lurched forward and the woman dropped into her seat. A whistle sounded, the engine spat a dash of black smoke into the sky, and the train pulled away. He watched her face through the window, its reflection pressed against the glass, until, as the train snaked out of the station, her face was nothing but a memory.
Once the train was gone, Sinan found himself facing a wall papered with advertisements. A beautiful woman laughed into a cell phone. He hated the woman—her white teeth, her perfect clothes, her skin like the finest silk. No one was that happy. People were only happy on television or commercials, but not in real life. He finished his tea and fought off the guilt of his fantasy. By the time he left the station and stumbled out into the sharp morning light, he was arguing with himself in his head, explaining why his fantasy was not a sin and then explaining again why it was.