Gardens of Water

by Alan Drew

  Sinan said nothing. Marcus sat down and looked at the floor as though he were in great pain.

  “I’m so sorry about rem.”

  Sinan was thankful to hear someone utter her name, and, for a moment, it lightened him. He almost thanked the American.

  “I want to help you,” Marcus said. “We believe in the same God, but the way we think about Him matters.” He wrung his hands together and bit at a thumbnail. “She was a child, Sinan. She didn’t understand what she was giving up.”

  “Where’s your son?”

  Marcus lifted his hand and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “New Hampshire. I sent him to his aunt’s.”

  Sinan remembered the snow, the American wife’s dream of going back for a dog.

  “I know what the Qur’an says about suicide, Sinan. Christ was a man, too, so he understands a man’s suffering. That’s the difference. He’ll forgive rem.”

  “Your son raped my daughter.”

  “No, no,” Marcus said, throwing his head and shoulders back, assuming the posture of certainty. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “He raped rem and that’s why she jumped. Does your Jesus forgive such things?”

  “That’s not what happened,” he hesitated, “and you know it.”

  “Keep your son in America,” Sinan said. “If I see him again, I will kill him.”

  Chapter 57

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING REM’S DEATH SINAN CONTEMPLATED his own. In his mind he replayed the look on her face when she realized what he held in his hand—the way her eyes blinked with shock and then froze on him as though she were already dead. Why was it easier—he asked himself countless times—to hold the knife instead of his daughter? He never intended to use the knife, or at least that’s what he told himself. He wanted to believe it was rem’s fault, that she misunderstood his actions on the beach, but then he remembered the knife in his hand and he knew she had seen what she had seen. If he could take it back, those few seconds of blinding anguish, he would take her in his arms and parade her in the streets of the camp as his beautiful, worthy daughter. God could judge him, but not these people, not these people anymore.

  It would have been easier to give up, to swim out into the sea and never swim back, to drain the blood from his wrists, but what saved Sinan was smail’s silence. The boy would not speak. In fact, he barely opened his mouth at all except to eat a bite of food, push the plate away, and draw strange, dark scenes in his coloring book.

  By the end of the sixth day after the funeral, Sinan was afraid the boy would waste away, and it wasn’t until he began to worry about smail that he knew he would survive rem’s death. smail’s arms—already skinny—were as thin as ropes, his ribs pushed against the skin of his chest. His skin was pasty and occasionally his gums bled. Sinan tried talking to him. He tried kicking the soccer ball with him. He bought him a toy gun from a Gypsy merchant selling plastic wares, but nothing would get the boy to speak.

  “Eat,” Nilüfer said that night, forcing a spoonful of rice into his mouth only to watch him spit it out into the palm of his hand and place it on his plate. Since rem’s death, she wouldn’t let the boy out of her sight for even a minute. He couldn’t play soccer with the boys or visit the school tent. She held his hand when she walked him to the water closet and held his hand again when returning to the tent. She held his hand everywhere, even sometimes at night while the boy fell asleep.

  “Eat,” she tried again. He turned his cheek and Nilüfer smudged the rice into his skin and smeared it around his lips. But he would not take it. He simply wiped his face clean with his hands and rolled the remaining rice off his fingers.

  Carrefour allowed Sinan two unpaid weeks off, but he refused to take the second week. He couldn’t sit around this camp, replaying the memories in his head, trying to figure out the maze of mistakes he had made leading up to that day. He would go crazy.

  The first day back Yilmaz Bey brought him tea on his breaks, patted him on the shoulder as he made his rounds of the store, and offered to have Sinan’s family over to his house in Bebek for dinner. Even after a week, rem’s picture was on the front page of the papers, and when the manager realized this, he apologized to Sinan and had all the papers removed from the bins. When Sinan got home, he found smail buried deep in his sleeping bag, the fabric pulled over his head so that only a few strands of hair stuck out at the top.

  “He’ll kill himself, too,” Nilüfer said, her eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep, her lips thin and chapped with worry.

  “smail,” Sinan said, patting the bulge beneath the fabric. “smail, sit up.”

  The boy pushed back the sleeping bag, revealing his head. He lay there looking up at Sinan, his eyes glassy and tired.

  “Sit up,” Sinan said.

  smail did, but he let his head droop.

  Sinan ran his hands through the boy’s hair, but smail jerked his head away.

  “Son,” he said. “I miss rem, too. She’s gone, though, and nothing we can do will bring her back.”

  smail said nothing. He bit his bottom lip and looked at the floor. “You loved her, I know. I loved her, too.”

  smail looked at him, his eyes full of a question, his lips parted as though ready to ask it. Please don’t ask where she’s gone, Sinan thought. Please don’t ask that question.

  smail knitted his brow as though something sharp had sliced at his stomach. The boy looked closely at Sinan’s eyes—too close—and seemed to analyze his whole face before falling back into the bag and covering his head.

  “It’s okay to be sad,” Sinan said. “But it will get better.” But he felt like he was lying.

  Later that night, after they had turned out the light, Sinan heard the rustling of smail’s sleeping bag. It became quiet again, but he had the feeling he was being watched. He looked in his son’s direction and found smail sitting up in the dark, the boy staring directly at him.

  “What’s wrong, smail?”

  The boy didn’t say anything but kept staring.

  “smail?”

  “Nothing, Baba,” he said, and lay back down.

  AT FAJR PRAYER THE next morning, Sinan found the ritual comforting, found that the prayers, spoken as easily as his own name, calmed him. There was nothing but God. God had a plan for everything. Nothing, no matter how horrible, was accidental—it just seemed so to us.

  It was payday at Carrefour, but the check only came to fifty-six million. No one paid you to mourn your daughter. He needed nineteen million more, just nineteen, but he would have to wait another two weeks.

  He went through the motions at evening prayer—the washings, the recitations, the prostrations—and he noticed how his back hurt, the way the muscles in the palms of his hands ached. He felt each tensed tendon, every tender strand in his body. The worst of it, though, was that while he recited the suras, when he was supposed to be focused on God, he kept seeing the American boy’s face. He was out there somewhere, in some snowy American landscape, his face smug with the knowledge that he had taken rem.

  The men were gathered again in front of the mosque, and whatever quiet he was able to manage during prayer was ruined immediately. The crowd was larger this time, and Sinan sat and listened even after he had pulled on his shoes.

  “The government lets these people stay here and preach to you,” the mayor was saying, “because Ecevit and the others in Ankara don’t want you thinking about how they’ve failed you. They want you mad at these Americans and not them.”

  The crowd grew louder, the men playing backgammon suspending their game, the ones quietly smoking under the plane tree standing up to hear.

  “In Yalova—Do you know this?” the mayor continued. “Have you heard? The military is building houses for the people while you sit here in tents. I don’t have to tell you that it’s because the politicians have summer homes there.”

  Sinan saw Kemal light a cigarette and spit a leaf of tobacco on the ground. Kemal had not spoken to him since rem’s death. He hadn�
��t even offered condolences. Sinan wasn’t sure if it was because he was ashamed of himself for making the suggestion or ashamed of Sinan for being so weak as to allow his daughter to take her own life. It didn’t matter. Sinan didn’t want to speak to the man anyway.

  “You just want our votes in the fall,” Malik said. He had been hidden in the crowd, but he stepped forward when he spoke. “You have a summer home in Yalova.”

  “I do.”

  “And a mistress.”

  The mayor’s face grew red and he played with his tie.

  “Is that where you’ve been these two months?”

  “I was in Ankara—”

  “Ankara!” Malik threw his cigarette to the ground.

  “Winter is coming,” the mayor said. “Do you know what they have planned for you? Square cubicles made of particle board and aluminum.”

  “Shut up and do something,” Malik said. “Get these people out of here.”

  “It’s not that easy,” the mayor said. “They’re guests of the government.”

  Malik laughed, the bitter laugh Sinan remembered from the men in the village, the laugh that was like releasing steam from a boiling pot.

  Finishing the loop on his laces, Sinan stood to go.

  “You’re just another stupid politician,” Malik said. “Using God to get votes.” Malik caught Sinan’s eyes as he walked past the crowd. “My brother’s lost his daughter.”

  A sharp pain stabbed Sinan’s gut and his heart began to thump in his ear and he stopped to listen.

  “I’ve lost my son, and you’re just standing here talking. You’d be more useful if you were selling oranges.”

  “The Fazilat party will be here soon to help you, my friends. We’ll kick the Americans out and we’ll feed you.”

  mam Ali came out of the mosque and the men quieted. He embraced the mayor and kissed him on both cheeks. The mayor accepted the greeting but his face was red and there was sweat on his brow. He pulled a scarf from his back pocket and wiped the beads of water away.

  “Don’t worry about the Americans,” the mam said. “They cannot change you unless you want to be changed.”

  “But Efendi,” Malik said. “Already little Uur has let them splash water over his head. He wears a cross around his neck now.”

  “Since when have you cared about Gypsy children,” mam Ali said, in a voice filled more with the deflated hiss of disappointment than the bite of condemnation. “The Qur’an is the truth,” the mam said. “The truth will win, because it is the truth and people will recognize it as such. Do you make these Americans out to be stronger than the truth?”

  Some of the men looked at the ground in embarrassment, but Malik clicked his tongue in disgust.

  “They take advantage of us,” he said.

  “Ignore them, Malik,” the mam said. “Your struggle is inside yourself. If these people scare you, then it’s your own doubt that makes you weak.”

  But Sinan knew that wasn’t true. A daughter cannot fight for herself, a son cannot defend himself against his innocence. mam Ali looked small and fragile, his voice was strong but his words were weak. He dressed as an old cleric, his robes yellowed from years of use, his skullcap frayed at the edges. He seemed ancient and out of date, a man too lost in thought to understand action.

  The men argued with one another until the mayor spoke again.

  “Please,” the mayor said. “Brothers, please.” The men quieted. “mam Ali is wise. He understands God better than I. But I understand men. When men make our own struggle more difficult, then those men interfere with our path to God. The straight path is difficult enough to follow.”

  The men erupted with anger and Sinan turned to leave. mam Ali tried to quiet them, but even as Sinan turned the corner to his tent row he could hear the rumble of their voices.

  FOR THE NEXT FEW days, rumors raced through the camp. The Christians had baptized four orphans, brainwashed them so badly that the children even forgot their names. They were given new names, Western names, and had been sent to America to be adopted by people in Texas. The Christians put pork in the soup-kitchen meals without telling anyone, a sabotage meant to soil the souls of the faithful. At one of their evening bonfires, three children had seen the Christians burn pages from the Qur’an, sending God’s words rising into the night sky with the sparks.

  The rumors, as ridiculous as they seemed at first, were difficult to ignore. Each time Sinan heard a new one—after prayer, while walking to work, stepping out of his tent to use the water closet—the rumor gathered the strength of the previous ones and was lifted upon a wave of anger that made him want to believe them, until, finally, they began to feel like the truth. Didn’t the Americans kill his father? Didn’t they kill his daughter? Didn’t Marcus try to make him a Christian?

  Then one night the whole camp was presented with evidence to prove the rumors. It was after dinner when everyone sat outside their tents, taking tea and smoking cigarettes before the evening cold set in. Sinan was outside with smail, trying to get the boy to kick the soccer ball, when the Armenian paraded Uur, the Gypsy boy, down the street. The boy, who before the earthquake had worn nothing but dirty sweatpants with a funny-looking mouse sewn into the pocket and an equally dirty plaid button-down, now wore clean jeans and a red American basketball jersey with a bull’s face on the chest. He had new white shoes on his feet and he walked as carefully as possible, avoiding all puddles and trying not to kick up any dust. And around his neck, hung a gold cross, just as Kemal Bey had said.

  Sinan had never seen the boy smile, either before or after his parents’ death. He was simply a thin brown thing that foraged in the trash, gathering cardboard and wood to fortify the walls of his squatter’s house. Now, though, he smiled widely, his little boy cheeks pushing his eyes into creases. He looked back and forth at the people as he came down the street, flashing his wide grin at them as if to say, Look what I’ve got. Look what you can have, too.

  “Stupid Roma,” Ziya Bey, the man next door, said.

  But everyone watched him—his brand-new clothes, his expensive shoes, his gold necklace—and in a way he didn’t seem so stupid anymore. smail stopped to watch him, too. The sun hung low in the sky and the light glinted off the necklace. smail stared without blinking at the Gypsy boy until the Armenian led Uur around the corner of the street and out of sight.

  “Go inside,” Sinan said.

  smail ignored him.

  “smail,” he said. “Go inside.”

  The boy did, but not before he leaned on one foot to see around the corner.

  Chapter 58

  HE WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SON, TOO.

  On Sunday, when he had the morning off, he and smail took the ferries into the city to visit Eyüp Camii, the holiest mosque in stanbul. smail still wouldn’t speak, nearly ten days now of silence. Sinan’s stomach turned at the thought of traveling into that city again. So, the two of them sat silent together in the hull of the ferry, listening to the clang and ping of the engine. Outside, the fog was as thick as curdled milk and water droplets streaked across the window.

  When they caught the last ferry from Yalova to stanbul and he saw the opening to the Bosporus, Sinan lowered his head and stared at the floor and he didn’t raise it again until the boat bumped the dock in Sirkeci. Even then, as he held on to smail’s shoulders in the rushing crowd, he would not look over his shoulder toward the bridge.

  In Sirkeci, men opened doors to groceries, splashing buckets of water on the cement sidewalks and sweeping away the grime before laying out the produce of the day. He remembered the simple pleasure of washing down his square of pavement in front of the bakkal and he swore if he could have that life back again he would never complain.

  In the windows of a pastry shop, a woman placed colorful cakes under bright lights that made the glazed fruit shine like jewels. The pastanesi was famous in stanbul and Sinan stopped to show the boy. The woman waved to smail and offered him a pistachio madeleine. smail took the sweet bread but he stood there
in the shop, the bread between forefinger and thumb, his hand dangling at his side. The woman handed one to Sinan, but stared at the boy, apparently wondering what was wrong with him. Sinan bit into the madeleine and raved about the taste, but smail simply set the cookie on the silver tray next to the register and walked out.

  The fog lifted and they walked the thin, twisting streets draped in the morning shadows of leaning Ottoman buildings, their ornamented balconies and cracked floral tiles radiating the morning sunlight. Here the sky above them was just a mean sliver of gray, and he wondered how people could live their whole lives in such a place. Living here was like being pressed between cement slabs. In Yeilli the mud huts of the village sat low to the earth, the walls curving from the ground like something sculpted out of the soil. And the sky was towering, as though a million paper-thin layers of blue had been draped atop one another all the way up to Heaven. It made a man feel small and that was a good thing.

  At Sobaclar Avenue, they had to wait to cross and when they did they could only make it to an island in the center of the street. There they were swallowed up by traffic, the blur of cars and taxis racing by on either side, the dark smoke of bus exhaust blowing into their hair, and pop music blaring from passing windows. When there was another break, Sinan lifted smail into his arms and ran, his body swaying awkwardly, to the other side before the next wave overtook the street.

  They crowded into a bus packed with covered women heading to the open market in Fatih, and smail squeezed in among a crowd of soft hips and long skirts. Every few hundred feet the bus stopped to let someone off or take someone on or both. The broad street ran beside the Golden Horn where the waterfront was lined with hulls of rusting ships, and, this morning, even before the heat of the day, the water stank of rotting fish, leaking oil. It took the bus forty minutes to cover the four-kilometer trip, and by the time they reached Eyüp it was nearly eleven A.M.