by Alan Drew
Dylan quieted, looked at the ground, and said something in whispered English. Marcus let go of his hand and composed himself.
“Is this true?” Sinan said to Marcus.
Marcus spoke to Dylan in English. The boy snatched up his earphones and stomped out of the tent without looking back. Sinan wondered where rem was.
“Forgive my son,” Marcus said. “He’s still angry, as you can see.”
“Is it true?”
Marcus blew air out of his nose and Sinan could see that he was very tired.
“Sinan, my son’s on medication. The doctors say he’s bipolar. They try this drug and then that drug and then three or four drugs together, but they never get it right. Sometimes he doesn’t know what he’s saying. It’s the medication talking, not him.” He paused. “And since the earthquake he’s been…” He shook his head. “He’s been worse.”
So the boy is crazy. He felt immensely sorry for Marcus, and secure that he had done the right thing by rem.
“You’ve got to understand, Sinan, that these were the only people willing to come here on such short notice.”
“So it’s true?” Sinan said.
“Some people might talk about Jesus.”
“They’re trying to convert people?”
“Sinan,” Marcus said, his voice growing more sharp and weary at the same time. “Listen, without these people, you’d still be sitting in that little circle of grass by the freeway waiting for the government to figure out which way is up.” He pointed his finger in the general direction of the freeway. “Your kids would be starving. If a few of them want to talk about Jesus, that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?”
“Is it them or is it you?”
Marcus ran his hand through his hair.
“Sinan Bey,” Marcus said. “smail’s been asking me questions. I answer them.” “You’re not really here to help, then,” Sinan said. “You’re here taking advantage of our weakness.”
“Not me, Sinan.” He waved a finger at him. “I’m not with these people. I just got them through my school connections.”
“Your missionary school connections,” Sinan said. “You brought them here.”
“I found someone who could help, and that’s all I did. Some of them are Baptists and some of them don’t believe the same thing I do. They were ready with people and supplies.” He threw his head back and looked at the point of the tent top. “Lord! C’mon, Sinan, when the body can be saved you worry about the soul later.”
“No,” Sinan said. “I think you’re thinking food and tents are a small price to pay to win some Muslims.” Sinan stood. “You’re all rich. What’s a few tents and some bags of food to you? You smile in my face and stab me in the back. You Americans are all the same.”
“No,” Marcus said.
“At first it seems like you’re helping, but really you’re taking what you want and the helping stops after you take it.”
“Please, my friend, calm down.”
Marcus held out his hand to try to calm him, but Sinan was too angry to be calmed.
“That’s not me,” Marcus said. “I used to be like them, but that’s not me anymore.”
Sinan stopped pacing.
“Sinan,” he said. “That’s not me. When I first came here with my wife I was very young and I used to believe the things they told you in church. I used to believe it was only people who accepted Christ that went to Heaven, and that seemed like such a sad thing—that billions of people would die without a chance at salvation. That thought depressed me in a way I can’t explain.” He rubbed his hand across his forehead and Sinan could hear the passion in his voice. “It made me black with guilt—and mad. Why was I one of the lucky few when so many people were damned to Hell I decided the only explanation was that they had not heard the good news of Christ, and I thought it was my moral obligation to share it. Now I think…I don’t know, I think what any of us knows about God is like one drop of water in the ocean.”
Sinan wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t sure if he should believe this man. His heart was telling him he should, but his mind was wary.
“And Sarah just confused me even more.” He pulled his glasses from his nose and rubbed his temples. “When I met her she was as strong in her belief as I, but later she changed. She was so much better than I am—selfless, loving, thoughtful, not full of the egoistic passions I suffer from. When she died, she was more of a Buddhist than anything.”
Sinan thought about what he told his son, and he was afraid he had actually told a lie. He thought people of the Book could be saved, but he didn’t know about ones who rejected it completely.
“Sinan,” Marcus said. “I should be happy for her now, but I don’t know if she’s—God, it sounds so stupid to say out loud—I don’t know if she’s in Heaven.”
“She was a good woman.”
“I know.”
Sinan waited a moment, but he didn’t want to be drawn away into Marcus’s problems.
“If my son has questions,” Sinan said, “I’ll answer them.”
“Yes,” Marcus said. “Yes, you’re right.”
“There will be trouble if this continues,” Sinan said. “If these people keep going into the tents.”
Marcus nodded. “I’ll talk to Peter.”
“You’ll get them to stop?”
“They’re helping.”
“You’ll stop them?”
Marcus cocked his head to the side in an expression of doubt. “I’ll try, Sinan.”
Chapter 44
WHEN SHE REACHED THE TOP OF THE HILL, DYLAN WASN’T there. Fog stretched toward the beach, a wall of clouds reflecting orange from the dock lights that lumbered like the massive body of an approaching sea animal, and when the first wet tentacles surrounded her she shuddered and crouched on the hillside. The sea suddenly disappeared and she was surrounded by darkness, the orange light gone, the sky and its stars blotted out, leaving her lost on this small patch of dust at her feet.
She was alone and the fog blew the sound of her breath back at her. Her heart beat inside her head so hard that she thought it would convulse and shudder to a stop. Something touched her shoulder and she swung at it, her open hand hitting something solid and then something soft, cartilaginous, that gave away under the pressure.
“Ah, shit, rem.”
When she turned she found Dylan fallen over on the ground, on the little patch of earth that was hers. He held his hand to his nose. She pulled his hand away and there was a little blood, but she kissed him hard on the lips anyway. He kissed her back and she could feel the warm blood on her lips. She surprised herself by kissing his neck, his collarbone beneath his shirt, the curls of hair on his chest.
“Let’s leave,” he said. “Tonight.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t do that.”
But she couldn’t stop kissing him.
He blew out a frustrated breath and pushed her away. The fog swirled around them and his head and shoulders seemed to fade in the mist.
“You want me to give up my family?” she said.
“Yeah. Haven’t they already given you up?”
“No,” she said. “They’re holding on as tightly as they can.”
“What’s this then?” He threw his hand at her. “What’s this we’re doing?”
She said nothing and the silence enveloped them. She tasted blood and salt. A foghorn bellowed and she felt dizzy for a moment, remembering the steep fall to the water.
“I’ve been here every day and night waiting for you.”
Her chest burst with love and anger and frustration.
“I thought I lost you,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You knew I couldn’t leave.”
“But you could,” he said.
“Look at this,” she said, holding out her wrist to him now. “Look. You think I’ve enjoyed being locked up in that tent? How stupid are you?”
He gazed at her wrist now, his eyes growing wider with realization. He took he
r hand and ran his thumb across her palm.
“You’d rather hurt yourself than hurt them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I—no, I want to be happy.”
“Then come with me. This place is terrible now. Fuck our parents.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Jesus!”
He let go of her wrist, stood, and kicked dirt, and she could hear the pebbles launch into the air.
“What do you want, rem?”
Allah, Allah! She stomped her foot.
“I want you to come to my parents’ home for dinner. I want you to bring a box of chocolates and take your shoes off at our door. I want my father to kiss you on each cheek and invite you into the living room. I want my mother to serve you her terrible chocolate-and-pistachio cake and for you to eat every dry bite of it and tell her how wonderful it is.” She was yelling now, screaming into the stifling fog. “I want to watch you and my father sipping tea as you ask his permission to marry me, and have my mother whisper into my ear what a handsome and good man I have chosen. I want my father to walk me down the aisle and deliver me to your arms. I want fireworks at the reception. I want to dance with smail in my wedding dress.”
Dylan sat back down in the dirt, his head bowed between his knees. She stood for a moment, feeling empty and relieved somehow, and then sat down next to him, the heat between their legs a little fire of warmth in the icy fog.
“I went to see your father today.” He lit a cigarette and the smoke flew away from his mouth to join the clouds. “I told him I wanted to convert.”
A pang of hopefulness hit her, even though she knew that sitting here meant the meeting didn’t go well.
“You’d do that for me?” She was moved, but the gesture bothered her, too. If he could so easily give up his religion, couldn’t he easily give her up, too—for a more beautiful woman, for boredom, for almost anything?
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “He hates me and it doesn’t matter what I do.”
“His father was killed by Americans.”
“Jesus, I’ve spent my whole fucking life in this country. I’m about as American as you are.” He blew smoke and the warmth hit her cheek. “He says it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t change anything, but he’s over at my dad’s tent bitching him out because ‘someone’s’ been talking to smail about Jesus. It changes things for his precious son but not for me, not for you.”
She pulled the cigarette from his fingertips and took a drag.
“Have you thought about that?” He took the cigarette back. “He’s ready to tear my dad apart for trying to convert his son, but he’s not willing to budge an inch for a guy about to come over to his side because he loves his daughter. Damn hypocrite.”
“Is it true?”
“What, my dad trying to convert your brother?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, it’s true. He loves the kid. Thinks smail’s some sort of miracle or something.” He laughed a sad laugh. “You should see the way he looks at him.”
She envisioned her father looking at smail. When smail wasn’t looking, she’d catch her father staring at him, a look on his face that betrayed all his pride, his love—a look that was glowing but full of pain at the same time.
“It’s like he thinks he’s perfect or something.”
She touched his back. An intense desire to kiss him blurred into a need to comfort him. She thought, for the first time, she understood him completely.
“It’s you, rem,” he said. “I’ve got you and that’s it.”
She put her arm around him and he fell against her, his face pressing into her shoulder.
“Jesus,” he said, lifting his head now. “I think you broke my nose.”
He pressed the end of it to the left and then he laughed and she laughed with him.
IF HER FATHER HAD hit her for defying him, she might have stayed. If he had left the tent in anger to attack Dylan or scream at Marcus Bey, she might have known that he loved her as much as Dylan did.
But when she stumbled in to the tent, well after dark, he didn’t even look up from his tea. Her mother glared at her and waited for her father to do something. rem waited, too, suspended in hope that he would take some decisive action that spared her decision.
“Your daughter is back,” Nilüfer said.
“I see that.”
He finished his tea and set it aside on a saucer next to his sleeping bag. He took off his shirt, his undershirt barely covering his strong shoulders, the muscles in his arms flexing as he laid himself down inside the sleeping bag.
“Your daughter is back.”
“Nilüfer, I have a double shift tomorrow.” He turned his back. “I can’t do this tonight.”
rem walked over to her father and picked up his tea glass. He didn’t even open his eyes, and she briefly thought about dropping the glass simply to get him to startle.
Her mother stood in the corner of the tent, the harsh white of the propane lamp casting a desolate glow over her skin.
When rem dropped the glass in the sink, her mother grabbed her by the arm. “Get in bed,” she said, her nails digging through her blouse. “I don’t know what’s wrong with your father, but get in bed and stay there.”
rem took off her head scarf and folded it next to her sleeping bag. Her mother watched her as she unpinned her hair and combed out the tangles.
“A man would love that hair,” she whispered across the tent as she turned out the light. “But not now. Not anymore.”
In the darkness and inside the sleeping bag, rem slipped out of her clothes and into her pajamas—the scratchy material of the bag briefly touching her bare skin before being covered again.
Her brother lay asleep next to her—one bare arm slipped outside the sleeping bag. In the half-light of fire and floodlight cast through the skin of the tent, she watched smail’s sides expand with each breath; she listened to the tiny whistling sound he made when he was deep in sleep, the same sound she had fallen asleep to thousands of nights before. She slid next to him, wrapped her left arm around his chest, and lay awake for hours. She hoped he wasn’t having bad dreams.
Chapter 45
THE NEXT DAY REM WAS GONE.
That morning, before his shift, before his wife arrived at work in a panic to tell him that rem had left, Sinan stood on the edge of the school tent, partly hidden behind one of the poles, and watched the teacher. She was one of the American relief workers who he had been told was an elementary school teacher at an expensive private school in zmir. She sat on a chair, a group of children crowded at her feet, and read a picture book in Turkish. Her accents were wrong, but she had the words right and the children watched her with wide eyes and upturned faces. One little girl, a poor child who had lost both her parents, held on to the woman’s leg and occasionally thrust a finger into her own dirty nose. She rolled the snot between her fingers while staring at illustrations directly in front of her face.
He finally found smail in the back of the crowd, crouched over a piece of paper, furiously drawing with colored wax pencils. He occasionally looked up from his drawing to listen to the story before returning to his artwork. Sinan noticed no crosses in the tent and saw no signs of Bibles. The teacher, while her head was uncovered, was dressed modestly and did not show any unnecessary skin. After watching for twenty minutes—long enough to see a game in which one child ran around a circle of kids and slapped the tops of their heads—he heard no mention of the prophet Jesus. The children seemed content, and to be content here was no small thing.
He watched a pickup soccer game, and while some of the Americans played with the boys, there were Turkish men also, and no one was standing around talking. They were too busy passing the ball, tripping over their own feet, and falling down to let the boys beat them to the goal.
For breakfast, he stood in the line that led to the Armenian. The man leaned over the table to serve the woman in front of Sinan, and the gold cross he wore around his neck fell over his sh
irt collar and dangled there just above the yellowish fluff.
“Peace be with you,” Sinan said when he took the eggs.
“May the Lord bless you, my brother.”
Sinan threw the eggs in the nearest trash bin before walking to work.
In the middle of his first shift, Nilüfer, dragging smail in tow, found Sinan bent over boxes of goods he couldn’t buy to earn money he couldn’t get.
“She’s left with that boy,” Nilüfer said. Her eyes were so dark and angry they looked solid, as though two rocks had been dropped inside her head.
“What do you mean she’s left?”
“She left, she’s gone,” Nilüfer said, her body shuddering with anger. “I go to the W.C. and when I come out she’s gone. I need to relieve myself, what do you expect me to do? The boy,” she motioned to smail. “The boy can’t stop her.”
smail, who a moment before was marveling at the wall of televisions broadcasting two dozen images of a Manchester United match, hung his head.
“You can’t even stop her,” Nilüfer said, waving a hand at Sinan.
“No, because I’m here lifting boxes all day!”
A handsome couple dressed in black and wafting with perfume and cologne turned to look at Sinan when he raised his voice. The man looked away as soon as he saw him, a disregard that was infuriating, but the woman stared Nilüfer up and down, taking in her dirty pantaloons, the cheap scarf wrapped around her head, the scuffed leather shoes with the soles tearing off. Sinan saw what she saw and he was disgusted with his wife and with himself, disgusted with his children, disgusted with everything.
“This is because you let her watch those American shows,” he said to Nilüfer. “You let ideas into her head.”
Trying to calm himself, he thrust the packing knife into the seam of a box and sliced it open.
“Who hid the earphones from me?”
He stabbed the next box open and shredded the seam apart.
“Don’t accuse me, Sinan.”
He slit open yet another box. Now three boxes full of goods lay open, and he began to recognize the stupidity of his actions.