by Alan Drew
When Sinan reached the camp, a soldier stopped him and asked him his tent number. Sinan gave it to him and the soldier let him through. He passed the soup kitchen where two more soldiers stood on either side of the canopy, guns dangling from holsters. At the tent he was surprised to find Nilüfer alone.
“Where’s smail?” he said.
“He finally spoke today,” Nilüfer said. She touched him on his forearms. Relief flooded her eyes. “He ate, too. Not enough, but he ate some cheese and bread.”
He was excited by the news and it seemed that a pall was lifting. The boy would be all right. He would go on and live, and, because of that, so too would Sinan and his wife—a family again, though a lesser one than before.
“Where is he?” he said. “I want to see him.”
“Playing soccer.”
Sinan took off for the soccer field. The sky was purple now, blown by a wet wind, and a circle of boys skipped around the field throwing up brown dust that mingled with the clouds. The ball escaped the circle and smail burst forward. He caught the ball, dribbled it into his control, and set off for the goal. It was beautiful to see, his son so alive with speed, his skinny legs throwing up dust as though he had real weight in the world.
smail had one last boy to beat. The boy tried to slide-tackle him, but smail, with amazing grace, kicked the ball over the defender’s feet while flying into the air to avoid the tackle. He caught the ball again, made a fancy move to throw off the goalkeeper and took his shot.
“Goooaaall!” the boys yelled as though they were television announcers.
They tackled smail, one tall pile of legs and arms singing the Galatasaray fight song, and Sinan thought smail might get crushed.
But he emerged smiling from the pile, his fist raised in the air in victory. He spun around in the field, glancing around the sidelines as though looking for someone.
Sinan limped across the field, through the middle of the boys who continued playing.
“smail,” Sinan said.
The boy turned around.
“Baba,” smail said, disappointment in his voice, Sinan thought, as though the boy was expecting someone other than his father.
“That was a beautiful shot.” Sinan tousled the boy’s hair. “You’re very fast. Like lightning.” He used his excited voice, the one that smail loved to hear, but the boy turned around and glanced across the field, to the other sideline.
“Come on,” Sinan said. “We’re going.” He placed his hand on the boy’s back.
“Wait,” smail said.
“Let’s go.” Sinan took the boy’s hand and pulled him back toward the camp.
“I’m good now,” smail said. “Before I was bad and the boys laughed at me. Marcus Bey taught me a lot and now they don’t laugh. Now they choose me first.”
“You’re good,” Sinan said, squeezing the boy’s fingers in his palm.
“It’s because of Marcus Bey,” smail said. “He taught me. Have you seen him?”
“Your grandfather was a great soccer player.”
smail looked up at him. “You never told me,” he said.
“He was great,” Sinan said, passing now in front of the short line at the soup kitchen. “It’s in your blood, smail. You’re good because it’s in your blood.”
“I wish I had met him.”
“You would have if people would leave us alone,” he said. “You would have, son, if these people would just go away and leave us.”
“But Dede died a long time ago.”
“Time doesn’t change anything.”
Sinan was aware of the strange look his son was giving him, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“Dede died because he was old,” smail said, a question in his voice.
“No, smail,” Sinan said. “He was young. These people killed him.”
smail’s brows pushed together, and his eyes shone with fear. “Not Marcus Bey. He’s nice.”
“No, smail. They seem nice, but they’re not. They seem to love you, but they don’t.” He was walking fast now, his anger dragging smail along until the boy tripped.
“I’m sorry.” He bent down and brushed the dirt from the boy’s knees.
smail’s eyes were wet and Sinan wished he had kept his mouth shut. The boy was innocent still, innocent even after all he had experienced, and he did not want to ruin that. “I’m sorry.” He kissed smail on the forehead. “Dede would have loved you. He would have loved you very much. I wish you had met him, too.”
“Maybe I’ll meet him in Heaven.”
“Someday, maybe.”
They began walking again and for a few moments they were quiet.
“Too many people die, Baba.”
“Yes,” Sinan said. “Too many die.”
THE MAYOR BROUGHT SINAN the hindquarters, and Sinan offered him tea until a soldier came.
“I’m causing a ‘disruption,’” the mayor said to Sinan. He stood quietly when the gendarme touched his elbow, and he didn’t fight as they led him by the arm out of the camp.
Nilüfer cooked the meat into a stew. It was tough, but it was meat, and it was meat slaughtered by a Muslim.
After dinner, Sinan was still angry. So angry it unsettled his stomach. He took a walk to calm down, and passed two men yelling at one of the soldiers. The soldier stood with his rifle by his side and stared straight ahead as though the men were not there. Even though it wasn’t prayer time, he went to mosque. There he found mam Ali alone, cleaning the mihrab with a wet towel.
“Good evening, Sinan Bey,” the mam said.
“yi akamlar.”
Sinan sat on the rugs and his body settled with a familiar weariness, as though his insides were made of wet dough. The mam sat next to him. “I’m tired,” Sinan said.
mam Ali touched Sinan’s hand and held it. His palm was warm and callused and it reminded him of his father’s. He had forgotten what it was like to be comforted by a man. A man understands what another man feels in a way a woman cannot. A woman’s comfort can make you feel alone, but not a man’s. Ahmet was the last man to understand, the last man who knew him.
“You’ll kill yourself with anger, Sinan.”
“I don’t know what to do, Efendi.”
“Do nothing, Sinan. You must submit to God’s will.”
He looked at the mam. The man’s eyes were red-rimmed; one was clouded over and Sinan thought he might be blind in it.
“Life begins and ends when it should, even your daughter’s.” He touched Sinan’s hand to his forehead and then to his heart. “God has a plan you cannot control. You must accept that, no matter how painful. Accept that and the pain will fade.”
Submit, though, meant “do nothing” and when he left the mosque, just as the muezzin began the nighttime call to prayer, he was even angrier than before. Why would God give us a brain, why would he give us free will if we are only to submit If we were only meant to submit then we might as well lie down in the dirt and die right now, we may as well let ourselves be killed.
When he got back to the tent, smail was tucked into his sleeping bag and drawing in his book. Nilüfer lay asleep with her hand resting on the boy’s back, her exhausted snores ruffling the fabric of the tent.
Sinan sat next to smail and kissed him on the back of the neck. The boy squirmed.
Over the boy’s shoulder, Sinan watched him draw. Every other picture his son had drawn was dark and full of nightmarish images, but this picture was bright with a shining yellow sun that sent bursts of color across the page. The sky was blue, and pink flowers sprouted from the green grass. There was a rock tomb, but it wasn’t a scary place. The rock covering the tomb had been pushed aside, and a man dressed in white cloth stood in front of the tomb as though he had just emerged. People stood to the side of the tomb, their faces drawn with smiles, their hands held up to the sky. And near these people, drawn in glowing yellow light, was another man, a circle of gold floating around his head, a beard clinging to his face, his eyes as blue as water. He held his h
ands out to the man covered in cloth as though commanding him to rise. It was—though a child’s drawing—a beautiful picture.
“What is this?” Sinan said.
“Prophet Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life.”
Sinan sat up then and saw, for the first time, the small book from which smail was copying the picture. He reached over the boy’s shoulder and grabbed it. Sinan turned the pages of the book—a flimsy pamphlet stapled together at the center—and his heart beat in his ears, the blood rushed to his face. He couldn’t read the other words in the title, but he understood “sa Bey.” Jesus was a prophet, although not the son of God as the Christians told the story, and he recognized all the prophets’ names. Inside were drawings of Jesus’ life. Jesus walking on the surface of the sea. Jesus turning water into wine. Jesus fixing a blind man’s eyes.
“He had been dead for four days, Baba!”
Turkish words were written in white squares in the style of comic strips. Sinan couldn’t read the story, but the pictures told it all. They were beautiful pictures—the sky blue, Jesus’ robe a clean white, the grass green with bright flowers growing in places, waterfalls in the background.
“Do we have miracles, too?”
Sinan didn’t answer because he was so enthralled with the pictures; they were like stepping into the innocent world of a child, where everything was clean, all people were kind, and the most amazing things could happen simply because they could be imagined.
“Marcus Bey said it was Jesus who saved me. If Jesus was here, Baba, think of all the people he could have saved. Maybe he could’ve brought rem back, too, even though she did a bad thing.”
Sinan’s head was spinning. Jesus—the Jesus in this little book—was so kind-looking, so unlike men he had known.
“To be a Christian all you have to do is let them pour water over your head. It’s easy and it doesn’t hurt.”
But the pictures were lies, lies told to children to make them believe.
“Who gave this to you?” Sinan said. He controlled his voice this time, made it sound as though he were not angry.
“Marcus Bey.” The boy kept coloring. “I told you he was nice.”
HIS HEAD SPINNING, SINAN ran down the street, shouldering past the men returning from mosque. The late-night bonfires of the camps blew heat in the wind that burned his cheeks. He loosened the leather on the knife and pressed the blade to his thumb, the edge biting into his skin. When he reached the tent, the light was on inside and what he was about to do crowded in on him. But then he remembered the look on his daughter’s face when she told him about Dylan; he remembered her white, dead face and the starker whiteness of her naked hips, and he felt free again to use the knife, felt an expansive rage surging in his muscles; it had been thrashing around inside him for too long now, ripping his insides apart.
He pulled the knife from his pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. He threw open the flap to the tent and pushed inside and he didn’t stop when he saw Marcus throw up his hands to shove him away. The American slapped at his face and tried to knock away the knife, but the blade cut through the skin of his palms, stabbed into the tips of his fingers. Marcus yelled but Sinan couldn’t understand what he said; the sound mixed with the rush of blood in his head. Then he was hit across the temple and sent tumbling sideways. It took a few seconds to get his vision back and when he did he was rolling across the tent floor, Marcus on top of him and then beneath him, a knee in his chest, a bloody hand in his eye, a rushing of breath in his ear, a slash of his own knife across his arm.
Then the labored breath of Marcus filled his left ear, and he realized that the American lay beneath him now. When the dizziness in his head cleared, he discovered his hand pressing his knife against the lump in Marcus’s throat. He had planned this, but, still, he was surprised to find himself so close to murder. He had thought of murderers as monsters, as profoundly debased human creatures, but now he realized that he was as capable of murder as he was of love.
Marcus’s fingers strangled Sinan’s wrist, trying to push the knife away, but Sinan was stronger, and he was filled with the excitement of being stronger. Sinan lay across the man’s body, his weight bearing down on the American, his own face so close to the man he could see specks of brown in the American’s blue eyes. He pressed more of his weight against the knife. The American breathed hard and the lump rose and fell against the edge.
Then, without warning, Marcus’s hands let go of Sinan’s wrist, and before he knew what was happening, the knife blade sliced open the surface of the American’s skin. The sudden blood shocked Sinan and he quickly jerked the knife away and held it just above the American’s throat.
“You must understand, Sinan.” The man was crying. “smail needed hope,” he said through labored breath. “I had to give it to him.”
Marcus’s whole body went slack, his arms now loosely wrapped around Sinan’s back, leaving his throat exposed there, just an inch away from the edge of the knife. There was no fight left in the man and Sinan was so shocked by this fact that all he could do was lie there, holding on to the American as though caught in an embrace. He felt the soft weight of Marcus’s palms resting on his shoulder blades and the pressing of the man’s rib cage against his with each labored breath. The windpipe was right in front of him, right there, and all it would take was one cut and all of this would be over. The knife shook in his hand and it bit into the skin at Marcus’s throat, streaking blood down the edge of his neck and into the collar of his shirt.
“She died to save your son, Sinan. She gave her life. Do you understand?” His eyes worked back and forth in a kind of impassioned pleading. “There must be a reason for it. I need there to be a reason.”
smail was the reason, Sinan understood now, and as a Muslim he wasn’t worth the American’s wife’s death. Sinan realized that if he, too, could have a reason for rem’s death, something tangible, something he was sure was true, he would take it. He would do anything for it. He would even steal it from another man.
He pulled the knife from Marcus’s throat, and unwrapped himself from the man’s limp arms. God, he wanted to kill him! He still wanted to slice open his neck. He wanted to shove that knife into his chest, stab all his anger into this man and leave it there, but he couldn’t do it, and he was too weak to force his betraying hand.
Chapter 60
HE FOUND THE WATER TRUCK IN FRONT OF THE MOSQUE. Prayers were done until morning and the darkened building stood empty and silent as though it had been bombed. His bloody hand slipped on the faucet handle before he was able to turn on the spigot. The water, still heated inside the drum by the afternoon sun, felt like blood rushing across his already bloody fingers. But he could see the color come back to his hands as he scrubbed and after a few minutes they seemed to be a part of his body again. He thought about throwing the knife into the sea, but God knew what he had done and He would punish him if he were to be punished. So he wrapped the blade back into the leather and placed it in the chest pocket of his coat.
When he returned to the tent, he sat outside on the plastic chair and waited for the military police. They would arrest him for trying to kill a humanitarian worker, a friend of the Turkish state in its time of need. They would lock him in a freezing cell until they discovered he was Kurdish. Then the real policemen would show up, the ones dressed in business suits. They would accuse him of terrorism, beat him, ask him for PKK members’ names. He almost felt ready for it, proud, in a way, that it would happen to him, too.
But the soldiers never came. He sat all night, watching the cats, listening to the snores of men, and thinking of his father. The stars slid toward morning, a band of yellow appeared on the horizon, and the call to prayer announced the sun.
SINAN WOKE NILÜFER.
“Pack only what you need,” he said. “We’re leaving tonight.”
She fingered the lapel of his jacket as though trying to rub something away, and Sinan saw the stain.
“Throw the jacket away,”
he said. “But keep the knife.”
She watched him change into his Carrefour shirt, fear blazing in her eyes.
“I can’t talk now,” he said. “Just be ready.”
She nodded and rolled the jacket into a ball.
He leaned over the sleeping smail, opened his coloring pad, and found the pamphlet. He slipped it into the pocket of his pants.
“Keep him here today.”
HE SKIPPED MORNING PRAYER, but found Malik Bey and another man playing backgammon on a card table near the mosque. Three other men, including his neighbor Ziya Bey, sat on a rug in the dirt, smoking cigarettes and talking with one another through their smoke. A few men exited the mosque and slipped into their shoes, but they were elderly and waiting to die and they shuffled back to their tents to lie there until the next call.
Sinan dropped the Jesus book in the middle of the board, just as Malik rolled the dice.
“First my daughter,” Sinan said. “Now my son.”
“Sit down, brother,” Malik said.
Malik set aside his cigarette, hanging the burning end over the edge of the card table. He flipped the pages of the book, shaking his head as the pictures passed before his face. He closed the cover and set his hands on top of it.
“Every night after the quake,” Malik said, “I’d come home from the field, shoveling shit all day, to find my son eating candy. It made him happy, so I was happy.” He picked up the cigarette and smoked it. “So one night I came back to the tent and Derin starts asking me about the end of the world. I tell my son the world’s not ending. He tells me that the earthquake is a sign that everything’s ending.” He blew smoke. “I just looked at him and told him about the plates underneath the water, that it was nothing but the earth moving. But the next night he’s asking again, and I tell him again about the plates, but this time I notice his eyes—they’re scared in a way I’ve never seen, even after the quake, and I know he doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t sleep that night or the next and then he gets sick and then my wife tells me that the American kid with the Bible keeps coming around and telling my son things, asking him to accept this and to take that into his heart.”