by Alan Drew
“The war is over now,” Sinan said. “Öcalan is rotting on Dog Island, the PKK is dead, and the Kurds are sick of fighting.”
In the evening light Marcus’s face looked drawn, the bags under his eyes heavy and resting on the bone beneath.
“The boy who just died—Derin—was ten,” Marcus said. “You can’t tell me it was his time. We had medicine. It was treatable. Those people—”
“They don’t trust you Americans.”
Marcus slumped back into his chair as though he had run into this problem before, as though he thought his time spent in Turkey should earn him absolute trust. He raked his fingers through his hair.
“When I was twelve,” Sinan said, trying to explain, “I buried my father. But seven others, some of them my friends, buried empty caskets. The village men said those seven had been bound and dragged behind jeeps out into the desert, but no one ever found the bodies. A few days later a goatherd found three ears, but no bodies. One of the nice things the paramilitaries liked to do to suspected PKK men—cut off their ears, among other things.”
“Sinan—”
“Where do they make those jeeps, Marcus Bey? Detroit, is it Is that the name?”
Marcus shifted his weight, and let out a frustrated breath.
“The army waited outside the cemetery,” Sinan continued, “in American-made M-60 tanks and when a son of one of the dead men tried to drape a Kurdish flag over the casket—a flag with those three stupid colors that was to be buried in the ground—they ripped it out of his hands.”
He paused a moment, remembering the scene—the little cemetery on the edge of town, the dry, frozen ground, the treeless hill above the village where the government had written out the slogan HAPPY IS HE WHO CALLS HIMSELF A TURK in huge painted rocks.
“The mountains were covered in fresh snow,” he continued, “and the sun was so bright it hurt your eyes. I couldn’t watch when they shoveled the dirt, so I looked out at the peaks of Hakkâri and every rock looked like a body to me and all I could think was that somewhere out there were my father’s killers and those killers had my friends’ fathers’ bodies.”
“I’m not responsible for every tank and gun that makes it into the hands of terrible governments,” Marcus said.
“That gets sold to those terrible governments.”
Marcus leaned back in his chair and pushed his fingers against his stomach.
“Those people that wouldn’t let you see their son,” Sinan said, pointedly, “are Kurdish. Mine is not an uncommon experience.”
“You don’t trust me, either.”
“I’m indebted to you,” he said. “I don’t trust your son.”
“Or your daughter.”
Sinan said nothing.
“A pill, Sinan. The boy that just died, just hours before this, simply needed a pill.”
“They were protesting the closing of a school, my father and those men,” Sinan said, leaning across the table. “That’s why they were killed. They wanted their children to go to school.”
THE MOSQUE WAS PACKED with people for the janazah prayer. In the back, behind the scrim separating the females’ section from the males’, women cried quietly, trying not to disrupt the men’s prayers. Near the mihrab, just in front of his son’s wrapped body and the mam saying prayers over it, Derin Anbar’s father stood with his hands cupped around his ears. He wore the deep Kurdish skullcap Sinan had not seen since Yeilli. Instinctively, Sinan glanced around the room, expecting a soldier to rip it off his head, but there were no soldiers at the service—just the people of the camp, their faces drawn and tired, their skin ashen in the evening light.
“O Allah!” mam Ali said. “Make him a cause of recompense for us and make him a treasure for us on the day of Resurrection and an intercessor and the one whose intercession is accepted.”
The father swooned backward after the takbir and the man next to him, his brother, Sinan guessed, steadied him with a palm to his back. smail, who was standing next to Sinan, leaned to see into the space left by the swaying father to where the boy’s small body lay wrapped like a cocoon on a collapsible table. Sinan laid his hand on smail’s shoulder and gently pushed him back, the boy pressing against his hand to get a last glance before the father was righted again. He should have been angry with smail, but the brief force of his resistance reminded Sinan how close he came to losing his son and he was grateful for that little push of curiosity.
Outside the mosque a group of Americans waited. Sinan had seen them when he and smail arrived for the funeral. Standing to the side of the dirt path leading to the water trucks, some of the women wore head scarves and all the men wore pants, and Sinan was relieved to see them covered. Marcus was among them, and Sinan had nodded to him as they passed into the mosque. They seemed respectful—not trying to enter the mosque, keeping their distance, covering themselves, but displaying their pain over the loss.
After the ceremony, the father and his family left first, filing out as quietly as they should, the mother covering her wet face in her shawl so as not to embarrass anyone. The mourners waited silently as they passed, the quiet enveloping the mosque as though death itself was settling into the carpet. Sinan had just taken smail’s hand when an eruption of voices in front of the mosque shattered the cold calm. Through the crowd, Sinan saw the awkward jostling of middle-aged men pushing against one another—a broad back falling into an unsuspecting woman, thick hands shoving away a bulging belly, and the interlocking arms of men holding back the father.
“Stay away from my family!” the father was yelling. “Get away from here!”
As they passed, Sinan shielded smail from the barrage of limbs and the boy held on to his coat with both fists. Sinan could see the boy’s father’s face now—his eyes bulging with anger, his cheeks red from struggling against the men that held him—and the person his anger was directed toward. The young American held his hands in the air as if to calm the father, and in one outstretched fist he clutched a small black book. Marcus and a woman tried to pull the young man from the crowd and as they did he stumbled, dropping the book to the ground. He lunged to pick it up, but the father surged forward, pulling the men that held him nearly five feet until their rushing feet stomped the book into the dirt. Sinan, letting go of smail’s hand, jumped in to help. He placed his hand on the man’s stomach and felt the muscles working to rip loose from their restraints.
“It’s time to honor your son,” Sinan said in Kurdish. The man’s eyes suddenly focused and a bit of the rage receded. “Will you send your son to Paradise soaked in anger?”
Then the man broke down; he simply dropped into his brother’s arms as though he had turned to water.
Sinan found smail. The boy’s eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open in fear, and Sinan picked up his son and carried him away from the crowd. As they walked down the hill, Kemal caught up with them and took Sinan by the elbow.
“Have the Americans come into your tent yet?”
“What?”
“They read the Bible to his wife and kids before the boy got sick.” He lit a cigarette, took a puff, and pulled a thread of tobacco from between his teeth. “He says they tried to convert them. He thinks they made the boy ill.”
Sinan looked back at the man who was now being helped to walk to the old cemetery. He remembered the stories in the villages—the government poisoned the water, the Coca-Cola was laced with pesticides, nerve gas was encased in mortar shells.
“Have they—the Americans—visited your family when you’re at work, when your wife and children are alone?”
“No,” Sinan said.
“They will, Sinan Bey. They will.”
When Kemal left, Sinan sat the boy down on a rock and looked him in the eyes.
“It’s okay,” Sinan said. “The man is upset. He lost his son and he doesn’t understand why. Sometimes people need someone to blame. Do you understand?”
“No, Baba.”
He said nothing and simply hugged his son because ther
e was nothing to say. He didn’t understand it, either.
SINAN WAS EXHAUSTED WHEN they returned to the tent. The sun fell behind a wall of fog sitting just off the coast, and the light inside the tent was gray and diffuse like light caught beneath the suffocating weight of dirt.
He sat on one of the pillows and watched his family—smail sitting in the corner of the tent and drawing pictures on a pad of paper, Nilüfer mending one of his Carrefour shirts where he caught it on a sharp box edge, and rem stirring sugar into his tea. She put the cup to her lips and sipped the tea, checking it, he knew, to make sure it wasn’t too hot.
The gesture brought tears to his eyes. He had never asked her to do that. She began testing the water years before, after he burned his tongue on a cup she had served him, and the kindness stuck, became a habit she wouldn’t break despite blistering her own lips many times. Even now, when she was angry with him, she couldn’t quash this bit of care she had learned out of love for him.
He watched her as she brought him his tea and thought how beautiful she was and what a wife she would one day make a husband, how proud he would be of her when he gave her away knowing the man would be blessed with such a woman. He wanted to tell her this as she knelt to hand him the cup, but, as always, the words he thought to say sounded nothing like the feeling. So, he simply took her hand and held it in his. She tugged at her blouse cuff, pulling it down so that the lace fell over the heel of her palm. He smiled at her, surprised and encouraged by her sudden modesty.
“I do love you, canm.”
She smiled but pulled her hand away and held it to her waist as she walked away.
He took a sip of the tea. It was perfect.
THE NEXT DAY, AFTER his morning shift, Sinan visited Derin Anbar’s family. There was a line of people to see the family, and he had to wait behind the mayor, who had placed a flowered wreath on a tripod in front of the tent. The wreath read, IN LOVING MEMORY OF DERIN ANBAR, A BEAUTIFUL SON. Like bank sponsors at special events, the mayor had his name printed at the bottom of the wreath as a representative of the Faith and Justice Party. It was a tasteless political advertisement on a wreath that should have arrived the day before at the funeral. The mayor probably didn’t even know where the grave was and would have to carry it over there later.
Sinan hadn’t seen the mayor since the day of the mass burial and he wondered what the man had been doing in the month and a half that had passed. The man wore a pressed suit, and he kept rocking forward on the balls of his feet while he smoothed away a cowlick on the back of his head, and when he entered the tent—the tails of his coat still sticking out of the entrance—his voice boomed as though he wanted everyone to know that he was there.
The tent smelled of ripe fruit and rank sweat. It was clear to Sinan that Malik, the boy’s father, hadn’t taken a shower in a couple of days—the neck of his shirt was wet with sweat and blood, from what, Sinan didn’t know, until he saw the man’s neck and the scratch marks raised on the skin. Either the man had done it himself or the wife—who lay curled in the corner of the tent—had torn at his skin in her anguish. She was dressed in the colorful pantaloons of village women, her lined face turned toward the door so that her moans, like strange, rhythmic music, could be plainly heard.
“May your pain pass quickly,” Sinan said, taking the man’s hand and touching it to his chest and forehead. Sinan gave him the pastries he had purchased at the Carrefour bakery. The man didn’t look at them and set them aside with the other food.
“You’re Kurdish,” the man said. “What village?”
“Yeilli.”
He nodded, but Sinan thought he hadn’t heard of the village.
“He was my last son,” the man said. “My other two, twins, were taken in Diyarbakr. The government said they were spies for the PKK, but they were just students.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“It’s shit,” the man said. “This world. It’s shit.”
Sinan didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say to someone grieving. You just had to listen and accept what they said as truth.
“I might have killed that man,” Malik said. He looked at Sinan with a strange expression, his head cocked as though he were memorizing his face. “If you hadn’t stopped me.” Sinan couldn’t tell if he was being thanked or criticized.
“I’m out shoveling manure at a goat farm near Yalova. I think my son is playing soccer, kicking a ball around, but these people are talking to him, telling him fantasies, lying to him.”
“My brother,” Sinan said. “Wait a few days, mourn your son.”
“I’m not a very religious person,” he said. He began to scratch at his neck, and Sinan had the answer to his question. “I believe in God, I say my prayers at weddings and funerals, sometimes at night when I feel things are bad. I drink rak. But these people, they want to wipe Muhammad out of history. They want us to think he was some insane goatherd, a crazy idiot scribbling worthless shit on goatskins. Have you noticed that they won’t let any Turks serve the food here?”
Sinan hadn’t.
“I asked once, and they refused my help. They only let that Armenian.”
“You’re hurting yourself, my brother,” Sinan said, but the man kept scratching and Sinan could see the skin break.
“The man with the pills wouldn’t put the book down. He had the pills but he wouldn’t put the book down. My son is at peace now, he’s in Paradise.”
“I’m sorry, my brother,” Sinan said. “But please stop.”
“I’ll see him soon. It’s better this way. I know he’s safe.”
Sinan reached across the space between them and laid his hand over the top of Malik’s to stop him.
“You’re hurting yourself,” he said.
Chapter 40
THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE FUNERAL, SMAIL STAYED CLOSE to the tent. rem’s mother was easier on her, but only because she was too busy combing smail’s hair, hugging him, making him dishes of food he only barely touched. He had been quiet since the funeral, and spent hours in the corner, drawing with colored crayons given to him by the teacher at the school.
“I’m worried,” her mother said, watching smail as he scraped the crayons across the paper, his brow furrowed, his bare toes flexing and unflexing beneath his raised knees. “That boy was his friend.”
When Nilüfer tried to see smail’s drawings, he closed the pad and pushed it beneath his sleeping bag or he told her he wasn’t done yet.
“Something’s wrong with him,” she said to rem, and then she began biting her nails, the slivers of which rem had to clean up before her father got home.
The next day Nilüfer sent rem to do the laundry alone so she could stay with smail. rem was glad for the freedom, glad for the sunlight on her face, glad for the simple work of washing and the cool water on her hands, but how quickly her mother’s passion had passed disturbed her. Suddenly, she wasn’t worthy of concern. It was almost as though she were invisible except when a chore needed to be done. She thought briefly about leaving the laundry and finding Dylan—her blood raced with the thought of it—but three women stood watching her while wringing out clothes and hanging them on the line. She ignored the women, but she heard them whispering like a pack of crickets.
“A shame to her mother,” she heard one woman say, while the others clicked their tongues in agreement.
She wanted to slap the woman, wanted to rip her tongue out, but instead she ground the shirt she was washing into the ribs of the rack until her hand slipped and she ripped open the wounds on her wrist. The blood swirled in the water, and she stood pressing a tissue against the wound to stanch the bleeding as she watched. She would have to pour the water out and wash the shirt again.
“She can’t even do a simple chore,” she heard one woman say.
She changed her mind and hung the shirt on the line despite the taint of blood, just three feet away from the women who said nothing now, who closed their stupid mouths when she was so close. In three quic
k steps, she grabbed her wash tub, spun around, and tossed the dirty water at the women’s feet. The mud splashed against their pantaloons, and when she turned to leave she was so satisfied that she didn’t even care when she caught one of them, out of the corner of her eye, ripping rem’s freshly cleaned clothes from the line.
“THERE YOU ARE,” NILÜFER said. “I need to go to the W.C.”
“Go then,” rem answered back, throwing her hand in the direction of the porta-potties.
“Don’t start with me, daughter. Your brother’s not well. You better not have seen that boy.”
“Ask the women at the laundry.”
Nilüfer stared at her a moment and then rushed off to the restroom.
Inside the tent, smail sat working on another drawing. The rice she had made earlier for him was untouched. Now she was getting worried.
“You have to eat something,” she said.
He glanced at her and then began drawing again.
From the first-aid kit Marcus Bey had brought for her father’s foot, she pulled out a length of gauze and some tape. She turned her back on her brother and began to cover her wound.
“Why is mother so mean to you?” smail asked.
She knew exactly why. She was jealous, jealous rem might have freedoms she did not. The tape got folded up and she had to cut another length while holding the gauze in place with one hand.
“Maybe you should stop doing the bad things that make her mad,” smail said.
“How can I do anything bad, smail!” She turned toward him more than she would have liked and she saw him look at her wrist. She turned her back again. “How can I?” she said, calm this time. “I’m locked in this tent.”
“I don’t like it when she’s mean to you.”
She finished with the wrist and pulled down the blouse cuff.
“I don’t like it, either.”
The rice was sticky and cold, but she carried it over to him anyway and sat down on the sleeping bag next to him.
“Eat this,” she said, holding a spoonful up to his mouth. “For me.”