Gardens of Water

by Alan Drew

  The taxi followed the highway around Camlica coming into Üsküdar and she could see the water, a huge gash through the middle of the city. The strait glistened like a river of silver sparkles. It looked very beautiful to her suddenly, a distant, separate beauty, as though she were watching it on a movie screen.

  The taxi came around a hill and in the distance, just poking out over a rise, she caught a glimpse of the bridge towers. Tomorrow was a military holiday and the span was draped with red flags, the banners furling in the wind. The tower disappeared again behind a hill, and her stomach turned. Her heart skipped strangely and she couldn’t stop shaking her legs.

  She noticed the cab fare, the yellow lights counting out thirty million now. The driver’s eyes filled the rearview mirror. She didn’t have even one lira on her.

  She bit her fingernails and tried to calm down.

  Then the taxi barreled down the grade that led to the bridge. Her view of the towers was unobscured now—gray and graceless, standing like cement gates. Cars rushed on either side of the taxi, just inches away, raced down the grade toward the bridge growing larger and uglier in the windshield. She bit through her nail to the skin on her thumb but the pain didn’t matter.

  She remembered the lyrics to the Radiohead song she had loved.

  Ben burada degilim. Bunlar bama gelmiyor. Ben burada degilim.

  The music echoed in her head, the floating guitars, the undulating bass.

  I’m not here. This isn’t happening.

  The music was like the soundtrack to a movie and that’s how she began to imagine this. This was her movie. She had the lead role. The audience would cry when she did this. She imagined her mother and father in a plush theater, dabbing their eyes in front of the brightly lit screen.

  Ksa bir süre içinde gitmi olacam.

  The cut in the hill opened up to the mouth of the bridge. She could see the line of cars at the tollbooths on the east-side lanes and beyond that the Bosporus like a sheet of polished metal between hills.

  “Stop here,” she said.

  The taxi driver looked at her through the mirror.

  “You’re meeting your husband here?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He looked at the road and then back at her. His eyebrows nearly poked him in the eyes.

  “It’s illegal,” he said. “You have to wait until the other side.”

  And then the taxi was on the bridge and she thought it would be impossible. That’s not how the movie ended. She sang the lyrics in her head again, the drifting bass, the levitating strings. She wanted to float; she wanted to be weightless.

  They passed the first tower and she watched the water, blue now, ripe as a bruise, infinite as the sky, flow beneath the bridge. The desolation crept back into her. She couldn’t do this. She had made a decision and now she wouldn’t be able to do it.

  Then up ahead red brake lights flashed and the traffic slowed.

  The driver watched her through the rearview.

  In a little while, I’ll be gone.

  Traffic was coming to a stop just on the other side of the rise in the middle of the bridge. The taxi slowed and the driver changed to the middle lane of traffic, right between an Ulas delivery truck and a dolmu full of passengers.

  The taxi stopped.

  A motorcycle raced between the taxi and the delivery truck, nearly shearing off the driver’s side-view mirror. The driver stuck his head out the window and screamed at the motorcycle.

  At that moment, she threw open the door and jumped onto the road. The edge of the bridge was just a few meters away. She ran around the delivery truck and almost got hit by a moving bus. As she dodged the bumper, she glanced behind and saw the driver getting out of the taxi and running after her.

  She had one lane left to cross. She could see the edge and the huge bolts that held the cables in place. She looked over her shoulder and the driver was closer now, gaining.

  “Stop,” she heard him say.

  But she wasn’t stopping now. He would hold her by the arm and drag her back to the taxi and take her to the other side.

  She squeezed between the bumpers of two cars.

  “Don’t,” the driver yelled.

  She lifted herself over the short wall and held on to the cable. Beneath her was nothing but blue water, deep and formless. It looked like she might fall forever. She let go and for a few moments she was weightless, tumbling like a bird whose wings had been clipped. The only sound was the wind in her face.

  Chapter 55

  THE NEXT DAY, SINAN MET THE POLICE AT THE BEIKTA ferry landing. The sea was choppy with the wakes of ferries docking and disembarking, and the hull of the boat slapped against rubber pontoons. He felt dizzy, and a policeman held him beneath his right shoulder and helped him into the boat. As soon as they left the dock, speedboats filled with reporters and cameramen followed, their lenses sparkling in the sunlight like little round planets fallen to earth.

  “We can’t do anything about them,” a policeman said. “They’re vultures. I’m sorry.”

  Atop the cabin of the boat a rotating beacon slapped Sinan across the face.

  “Can you turn that off?” he said, motioning to the emergency light.

  “Yes, abi,” the policeman said. “Of course.”

  The policeman called to the captain and the captain switched off the light. The policeman offered him a Maltepe, but Sinan refused the cigarette and stared at the water.

  Everything was incredibly bright—the sunlight flashing off the water, the white of the boat’s hull, the endless, ugly blue of the sky. The light burned a hole into his brain, but he watched the water, scanned the coastline, double-checked wood drifting on the surface, and every few seconds he had to cover his eyes to stop the burning.

  A young policeman stood swaying with the wakes on the bow of the boat, holding a long silver pole with a hooked end. It looked like a gaffing hook, like something fishermen used to stab through the bellies of large fish they had to haul inside the boat. He wanted to tell the man to put that hook away, but his stomach was roiling now and he couldn’t find his voice. The policeman who offered him a cigarette seemed to notice Sinan’s staring and called out to the man with the hook. They argued for a moment, before the hook man fastened the instrument to a rack on the bow.

  Birds gathered together on the surface of the water and formed the shape of a human body before becoming birds again; a pod of dolphins broke the surface, their gray backs like elbows piercing the skin of water; fish jumped and for a moment a head seemed to rise.

  Soon—how long Sinan did not know—the boat bobbed into the shadow of the bridge. From here the bridge didn’t look so tall. rem could survive a fall from that height, he was sure of it. It was only water, after all. The captain cut the engine and scanned the water’s surface with binoculars. With the engine off, Sinan heard the rush of cars on the bridge—a mechanical hum, like a river of metal parts flowing over steel rocks; that rushing had never stopped, not even as rem jumped.

  Jellyfish rose around the hull of the boat before sinking into the green darkness again, their bodies appearing and reappearing like pale, severed heads. Trash gathered in heaps of foamy bubbles where gulls foraged for scraps, sending up clouds of flies.

  The powerboats circled the police boat. Men with huge cameras dangling from their shoulders crowded the decks and pointed lenses toward the water. Sinan saw two men pass a cigarette between them, one said something to the other, and they both laughed, their white teeth shining in the harsh light. If he could reach them across the hulls of the boats, he’d kill them, he’d stab them right now in front of the police.

  “The current’s stronger to the north,” called the policeman standing on the bow. He motioned his hand downstream toward the shore.

  “Beylerbeyi,” the captain said. “Got it.”

  The engine growled to life and they crossed beneath the span, past the disgustingly ornate summer palace, moving up the waterway toward the Black Sea. They would never f
ind her; there was too much water, too much darkness beneath the boat they couldn’t search. She would not be buried in twenty-four hours; she would not be buried ever. And for a moment he panicked because he could not remember what his daughter looked like. An image flashed in his brain—her eyes, her nose, the shape of her head beneath the head scarf—but he could not remember her hair. Was it straight or curly? He couldn’t remember her legs. Were they thin and brown, thick and pale? Did her belly button stick out the way it did when she was a child?

  Then a huge oil tanker came plowing through the middle of the waterway, its faded red hull towering above the police boat, the bow sending up three-foot waves that swelled and broke into whitecaps. The ship was monstrous, as long as three soccer fields, as tall as a cliff, and the engine roared ahead of it, thundering out a warning. For a moment it seemed they would be run over by the ship and he was ready for it, hopeful even that the bow might rip through the middle of this boat and grind it into bits of wood and spilled fuel and drowning men. But the bow passed and the waves smacked the hull of the police boat, lifting it into the air and dropping it back down with a slap. He grasped the railing and closed his eyes to keep the sickness from rising.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw something bobbing on the surface of a wake. The white shape was sucked into the vortex of the passing ship and then shot out on top of the next cresting wave, the red bow pushing it away as though it were driftwood. The first thing he recognized was a leg and in the thrust of the wave the leg seemed to kick. Then an arm broke the surface of the water and splashed back through as though swimming. And that’s what he thought was happening—rem was swimming toward the boat, her limbs stiffly rising and falling, breaking the water and sinking back through. She seemed utterly animated and he thought, for a brief horrible, hopeful moment, that he was once again witnessing the grace of God.

  “We’ve got her,” the policeman on the bow said, standing and pointing out toward the swimming body.

  It was a miracle. There she was swimming toward the boat, her head turned to the side for air, her feet throwing up little splashes, her elbows bending and stretching in awkward strokes. Then the wake subsided as the tanker passed and she dove beneath the surface of the water, the bottoms of her feet waving at him as she disappeared.

  “She’s under, she’s under,” the young policeman yelled.

  The captain cut the motor and yelled to the powerboats with the photographers to do the same. The water rippled and flattened and rippled again. The sea here was dark, deep in the center of the passageway, and in the placid places between ripples he could momentarily see his reflection before it was torn apart.

  Then a few meters from the boat her pale head emerged, her mouth releasing a watery spit of air.

  “rem!” he called out, and flashbulbs burst from the powerboats, their sparks electrifying the water.

  The policemen scrambled to the edge of the hull, the young one holding the gaffing hook out over the surface of the water.

  “Oh, thank God!”

  But then the rest of her body surfaced—her shoulders first, dragging her arms, one broken sideways like a piece of timber so that the palm of her hand rested between her shoulder blades—and the realization that she was dead blew a hole in his stomach and he retched into the sea.

  The flashbulbs went off like handheld explosions, the clicking shutters like chattering insects.

  Her flowery blouse still clung to her torso, but her hips emerged as white as whalebone. Her legs came last—so thin, so like a little girl’s, and pink along her hips and knees as though they had been sunburned. He wanted to look away, wanted to tell the others to look away, but the cameras kept clicking and the policemen leaned out over the edge of the boat, reaching toward her body. The wakes caused by the powerboats jockeying for position spun her body around and pushed her right leg toward his hands. He reached to grab her ankle, but at that moment, the young policeman with the gaffing hook caught her around the waist and hauled her toward the boat.

  “Don’t,” Sinan screamed. “Don’t!”

  The man shook with Sinan’s voice and dropped the hook into the water, releasing her body.

  Leaning out over the water, he took hold of his daughter’s ankle. Her skin was slick with salt and spilled engine oil. When the young policeman reached for her hips—their nakedness shocking in the light, the hips of a woman, not his little girl—Sinan pushed him out of the way and, alone, lifted her body up.

  Chapter 56

  THE SHROUD WAS GREEN, THE COLOR OF HEAVEN, BUT IT didn’t matter—rem would not go to Paradise. Whoever purposely throws himself from a mountain and kills himself will be in the Fire falling down into it and abiding therein perpetually forever. This phrase, locked in his brain for years—some learning in Arabic he had kept secreted away from his childhood education at the madrassa—repeated in his head. Since he pulled her from the water, all through the paperwork he had to sign at the morgue, as he held Nilüfer while she choked on her own disbelief, and now, as they lowered rem’s pine casket into the hole in the ground, this phrase would not leave him.

  The men scrambled on either side of the box, releasing the ropes through gloved palms to lower the casket. God is great, read the gold lettering on the shroud. God is great. And terrible. And unforgiving. The box was so tiny, so incredibly thin, like a jewel case, really, like something you hid wedding gifts in.

  The box settled into the hole and the men pulled their ropes loose and coiled them around their shoulders before picking up the shovels. He seemed to be watching this through a dirty pane of glass—a nightmare from which he might awake. But he felt smail’s hot hand holding his. He heard Nilüfer’s wailings, a sound like someone pulling her lungs through her mouth. He wanted to tell her to shut up, wanted to tell her she had no right to give up her daughter one minute and mourn her the next. But it is one thing to give up a child who lives and another to lose a child to death. In death she becomes more your child, more a limb of your own body, and her death is also your own.

  Nothing made sense. The sky was a brilliant blue, gorgeous in its depth and absolute perfection of color. The birds sang in the trees. Roses, a garden of them, bloomed from the center of sarcophagi, and he imagined their roots grabbing the rib cages of the dead, their thin fingers shooting up through soil and blooming red to laugh at mourners, as if to say, “Look what’s become of your loved ones.” The sky should have been raging with clouds and rain, the flowers should have been nothing but knotted thorns.

  Nothing made sense in this world—Nilüfer’s crying, the numbness in his chest. He should have felt more. He had no heart, yet he could hear it beating in his head.

  “Oh, it’s the worst thing,” he heard someone say. “The worst.”

  He killed her; that was certain. She jumped, but, really, he pushed her off. It would have been better had she died in the quake. It would have been better—though he would not have been able to live with himself—if he had killed her. She would enter Paradise then, but not this way, not now.

  In love you try to kill a daughter to save her.

  It didn’t make sense. None of this.

  The Americans, the ones who caused this, bought the tombstone, laid huge wreaths of flowers across the casket. They stood on the edge of the gathered crowd, dabbing their eyes with tissue, the women covering their heads as though they were Muslim.

  The people of the camp stood with their heads bowed, mourning the death of a girl whose name they would not utter, today or ever again. Never speak the name of a suicide; treat them as though they never existed yet cry for them.

  The sky above him began to spin and Nilüfer’s screams became distant and he felt himself falling. The treetops toppled in on him and the world became a small circle surrounded by darkness until the circle disappeared and he could only hear the people around him gasping. Hands pushed into his back and propped up his shoulders, and in the darkness he felt himself lean against men’s chests.

  “Careful, caref
ul,” a voice said. “Abi, Sinan, can you hear me?”

  He could, but he didn’t want to. He wanted the darkness to overtake his ears.

  “Sinan.”

  Leave me alone.

  “Get some water.”

  Please. Leave me alone.

  But the light came back into his eyes and all the shapes of the world filled his mind, and when he looked up at the faces looking back at him, there was the strangest thing of all, the thing that made the least sense: Marcus Bey bent toward him, pouring the coolness of water upon his lips.

  FOR FIVE DAYS AFTER the funeral, people delivered food to the tent. And for five days the food sat in the tent rotting, filling up the space with a sickening smell, until Nilüfer finally carried each plate away to the trash. A line of people came to offer their condolences, not one of them mentioning rem’s name, simply saying sorry for your loss and leaving.

  Sometime during the five days, two policemen came to question him, their hats in their hands. The younger policeman with a mustache that hung over his top lip asked the questions, and the older one, the one with the wrinkled shirt, ate from the plate of pastry that had been sitting in the corner gathering flies for days.

  “Was there anything upsetting her?”

  “She was sad because of the earthquake.”

  “People say she was with an American boy?”

  “No.”

  “People say he was a Satanist? Ran around Kadiköy and Taksim in the bars and tattoo parlors. Someone said a half-dozen cats were found with their necks slit? They say—pardon me, abi—they say she might have been pregnant?”

  Sinan looked at the man a long time and the man, embarrassed by his own question, looked at the ground.

  “She was sad about the earthquake,” he said. “She was scared another one would come.”

  The policeman nodded solemnly. “We all are.”

  On the sixth day, after everyone else had made their appearances, just when Sinan thought he wouldn’t have to shake another hand or thank another person for their words, Marcus came to the tent carrying a loaf of bread. Sinan didn’t have the energy to refuse him, and as soon as he entered, Nilüfer left, taking smail by the hand, and glancing daggers Sinan’s way. “I imagine you’re not hungry,” Marcus said, setting aside the bread.