He sank deep into the sofa, his mind racing, until his daughter said, “Lola is not stupid, Ata.”
“I never thought she was.”
“This is not a good way to treat a marriage. A marriage I set up.”
“You do not understand,” Anarbek pleaded.
“What would Ama think?”
“This is not a daughter’s place to say.”
“You seemed to love Lola, and I went out of my way for you. There were difficulties.”
“Has Lola done badly for herself? She has everything she needs and wants.”
“Except a loyal husband.”
“Nazira.”
“It is one thing to marry a man twice your age. But you would expect such a man to respect you.”
“I take good care of her.”
Nazira clicked her tongue. “She’s not your daughter. She’s your wife. She needs more than to be taken care of.”
“It’s not the same.” He stood and walked to the wooden cabinet, where he kept a collection of pirated beta cassettes—Schwarzenegger, Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme. He ran his gnarled fingers along the titles.
“What’s not the same?” she asked.
He faced his daughter but tripped over his words. “She doesn’t seem—I don’t feel—”
“Did you treat Ama like this?”
This was too much. He lurched forward with an angry stomp and stood tall before her. But Nazira stayed on the offensive and quickly added, “Oui-at bay sin bah!”—You should be ashamed. She turned her back and hurried to the doorway, where she stood facing away, thinking. This ability to punish with her back, he realized, was an instinct entirely her own.
He remembered the letter from the American—the first they had received in two years. That would change the subject. That would please his daughter. He left the house and went back to the car, where he fished around on the floor for the envelope and found it encrusted in golden dust.
When he showed Nazira the letter and told her it was from Jeff, she flushed and tore it open. He listened as she read the strange English aloud, then translated it sentence by sentence for him into Kyrgyz. The letter was unusual: it mentioned Nazira twice and specifically asked if they were able to get by, if they needed some money. Midway through, her voice grew soft and she looked up at the cracked plaster ceiling, searching for the right words.
Anarbek was filled with great hope. Why had he not thought of him? Of course! Their old friend! The American! All problems have solutions.
9
IN A HOT, POORLY LIT office on the European side of Istanbul, Jeff struggled to get off the telephone. “Thanks,” he said. “Yeah, thanks. Thank you for your help. I know you went out of your way. Thanks again.”
He placed the phone down with a sweaty hand, cutting the connection to Damascus. The hollow receiver weighed almost nothing. Insubstantial, he thought. In America telephones weighed something.
“Are you all right?” Andrew asked from behind Jeff. “Bad news, I suspect?”
“Suicide.” Jeff fingered his goatee and stared at his desktop. “This Palestinian I interviewed. Alwan Said. Killed himself. I was the one who told him he didn’t have a case.”
“Did he have a case, Jeff?”
He lifted his head and turned to his boss, the dark mustached Kuwaiti. There was authority in his British inflections—high pitched, intelligent, yet callous. The voice told all: too many years of processing refugees. You see great suffering and people become faceless. Jeff had promised himself he’d never stay around long enough to let it happen to him.
He said, “Canada might have taken him.”
Andrew nodded. “Canada’s doors open wider sometimes.”
“He was former PLO.”
“Frightful mistake.”
“It would have come out eventually, right? State Department check.”
“Who can say with that?” Andrew tapped the corner of Jeff’s computer monitor. “Slight chance it wouldn’t have mattered. Quite honestly—”
“You should have seen this guy, Andrew. He was burly. His nose was broken in a hundred places. He comes right out and tells me he’s a boxer, and that once, as a teenager, he served with the PLO. Wants to know if either will hurt his claim.” His boss was listening, shifting on his feet. Jeff shrugged and managed a smile. “I laughed. What could I do but laugh? He had no case. I told him there was no way our State Department would clear him. My last day in Damascus, he comes back and tells me to forget it. He wasn’t former PLO. He took it back. Wants to know if he could erase it from the record.”
Jeff raised his eyes. Above his desk the fluorescent ceiling lights were blurry with dead insects. He lifted a pen and twisted the cap. He had told Alwan Said it was impossible—he couldn’t erase his past. But if the man had simply lied from the start, they would have gone ahead with the case. They would have interviewed him for refugee status, written up the application, and sent the poor guy to Utah or North Dakota, somewhere safe and quiet in America. The United States: that exclusive club, for which he now moderated the invitations.
Andrew was feigning patience, nodding slightly. “I’ve been doing this twenty years, Jeff, and worse things have happened. You were simply doing your job.” There was exhaustion in his tone.
Jeff opened a random application folder. “The job is placing refugees. We didn’t help him.”
Andrew laid a hand on his shoulder, then walked off in stiff long strides, and that was supposed to be the end of it. Jeff returned to the piles of papers cascading across his desk. Nearly three years on this job, and he had been behind from the very start. He should have been more organized; he needed efficiency, detachment. But these stacks of profiles would have intimidated anyone. Lives hung in the balance—a person’s future, a family’s safety—while they waited in hostile lands for him to get to the bottom of this pile.
He straightened the papers, signed a completed application, dated it January 11, and closed the folder. Inside his drawer he fumbled for a lemon cough drop. As much as he loved this old city on the sea, Istanbul had the dirtiest air he had ever breathed. His throat was permanently sore, and in the evenings, when he blew his nose, the tissue turned a sooty black. He slipped the lozenge onto his tongue, tossed the wrapper back into the drawer, and swallowed in pain.
Since he had left Kyrgyzstan, life had led Jeff in unexpected directions. With the Peace Corps readjustment allowance, he had traveled alone for the summer through Southeast Asia, from Tashkent to Bangkok to Hong Kong to Jakarta and back to Bangkok. In what seemed an endless flight, he had finally crossed over Asia to Turkey. The variety of foods served by the stewardess was disquieting. In that plane he had seen for the first time a woman with pierced eyebrows breastfeeding her baby. It hit him: things had changed; he was returning to a world two years older than the one he had left.
He put off the inevitable last leg of his flight to the States. In Istanbul he taught English for six months, living first in a hostel and then sharing an apartment with an Australian graduate student. Jeff was losing touch with his former life: he had not written to his college friends in over a year, had never answered a letter from a high school girlfriend, and for months put off sending his new address to Adam. He spoke to his father in Idaho once on the telephone, a stilted five-minute conversation in which Jeff assured him that he was in good health and asked him to forward his mail. Hearing his father’s voice after two years had shaken him. The person on the telephone, mentioning a wife Jeff had never met, was not the same man he once knew. He didn’t miss him, not in the least.
That first year in Istanbul he received sporadic letters from Kyrgyzstan. The mail took up to three months, if ever, to reach him from the village by way of America. (His father forwarded mail faithfully; he could be relied on for that, if nothing else.) At first he received no replies to the letters he had written to Anarbek and the factory workers, only desperate notes in Russian and broken English, asking why he never wrote back, demanding he not forget them
. In the margins the adults penciled little birds carrying packages or shadowed hearts with arrows—a sweet habit they retained from grade school. With his Russian dictionary Jeff pored over the letters, puzzled by the rough Cyrillic handwriting, but savoring the taste of a distant land he thought lost to him.
In April that year he received two letters from the Tashtanalievs. One, a single page from Anarbek, written on the notebook paper that also doubled as toilet paper in the village outhouses, told of failing electricity, a devastating drought, and the first-ever Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka election for an akim, which had ended in violence. The factory salaries had skipped a month, making it impossible for Anarbek to keep up with payments.
The second letter, from Nazira, was still more disturbing. “Written in a careful, loping English script, it consisted almost entirely of Kyrgyz pleasantries (How is your work? How is your family? How is your health? Here our health is fine.), but in a single line toward the bottom of the last page, Nazira wrote in capital letters that she loved him. He read both letters twice, full of deep shame; and unsure what to do, he told himself he would deal with the letters later and buried them under a pile of old correspondence.
He had come upon the advertisement for the job with the Development of Human Resource Organization in the Turkish Daily News. Based in Istanbul, the position required experience in counseling, teaching, and living overseas. The DHRO staff interviewed him in their drab office, a converted bakery in the old embassy district on the European side, and hired him on the spot. Over the two-month refugee-repatriation training, his boss, a former UNHCR worker, would count on his fingers and intone: “Your job is to do two simple things. Verify the facts. Verify the claim.”
Verifying the facts meant reams of personal forms for each refugee: name, date of birth, place of birth, nation of origin, spouse’s name, children’s ages, medical history. It all seemed simple enough—the kind of information a schoolchild should know. But sometimes verifying the facts took days. The refugees did not know their dates of birth. Jeff was trained to list all Somalis as born on February 10, all Iraqis as born on April 4, and all Sudanese as born on August 15. The refugees could not spell their names in English, and Jeff did not know Arabic. They claimed they had been born in countries—Kurdistan, Palestine, and Chechnya—that did not exist, and they refused to allow another nation’s name to be written on the forms. It would take hours of patient needling and translating for Jeff to explain that, unless they complied with the rules, their applications for American resettlement would be void.
When he had verified the facts, it was time to verify the claim. Through the translator he asked two simple questions:
“Why did you leave where you came from?”
“Why can’t you stay where you ran to?”
With a stone face Jeff would listen to tales of rape, torture, persecution, and flight. In his very first case he processed a Lebanese man who had paid smugglers to ship him to Italy. The smugglers kept him locked in their boat’s cargo hole for seven days, then finally pulled him out and told him he had arrived. The man left the boat, spent a happy afternoon admiring bikini-clad tourists on the black stone beach, and then discovered he was in Cyprus, not Italy, trapped on an island in the Mediterranean without a penny, a document, or a single friend. The tale at first seemed far-fetched; but as the weeks progressed, Jeff came to understand it was typical.
He wrote everything on the applications, whether the person had lied or not. If the story seemed impossible to believe—strange diseases, unprovoked cruelties, wild coincidences—still he documented it. One person’s truths were as impossible to believe as another’s lies. He did not judge; he was simply their advocate. He interviewed Baha’ists who could not worship in Iran, a Sudanese woman whose toes had been cut off, and Kurds rejected at every border, unwanted anywhere. Jeff wrote it all down. In this, the daily struggle for resettlement, he had never worked harder. He was helping change lives, making his small difference.
He saw now that he had floated through his twenties, adrift on waves of good intentions, from country to country, but this job, more than his others, had anchored him. It had provided an apartment, the opportunity for monthly travel, a modest living, and a sense of being useful. It was no small satisfaction to think he had remained in one place for four years, but those years were starting to feel like ages, and sometimes he felt the currents tugging again.
The lemon cough drop had not yet dissolved in his mouth before the phone rang once more. He ignored it. A sudden movement in the front office vestibule had caught his attention. Hurrying around the desks to the soundproof windows, he saw that another family had come.
Somehow they kept getting the office’s address. The Development of Human Resource Organization did not advertise services, so it was a mystery how these people learned that they placed refugees. Perhaps relatives living in the States, or a family the office had once processed, tipped them off. The DHRO operated under Christian auspices—Andrew was convinced that local churches were referring them. It made no difference; they found their way.
The organization maintained a strict policy against assisting people who walked in off the streets. If they listened to a single case like this, hundreds more of the Middle East’s destitute and homeless would soon flood the office.
Now, thick arms outstretched, the security guard was following policy and herding an entire family—the mother and daughters in sequined headscarves, the father in a ragged suit jacket—out the door. The woman, clutching to her chest a baby wrapped in sacking material, was trying to rein in two runny-nosed toddlers behind her. The guard was at first patient and polite; but the father forced his way back in, and Jeff sensed violence. Through the glass he heard the muffled voices—“Olamaz!” and “Bir dakika!”—as the father, dirty stubble on his weathered face, refused to leave. The man’s voice rose. He wanted to state his case. The guard shoved him back, two hands to the chest.
Armenian? Kurdish? Iraqi? Jeff couldn’t tell. The baby wailed as Jeff stepped into the vestibule. He could smell the putrid smoke in their clothes, the familiar sweat and sheep-stench of some distant village.
The guard was delivering his set piece in Turkish. “Call and make an appointment,” he was saying. This man probably did not have enough change for a phone call, never mind enough for the bus ride back to their ghetto. “Contact the Red Crescent Society by mail,” he was telling them. But Jeff wondered what the chances were that they could even write.
The father would not be denied. His wife was pulling him out the door, but he ripped his hand from her grasp, and when the security guard touched his shoulder, he flung that hand off as well. The guard’s eyes narrowed. Jeff stepped between him and the family.
He smiled and told the guard, “‘Ben, ben.” Me, me.
He turned to the father: “Dinliyorum.” I’m listening.
Chest heaving, the man examined Jeff. His eyes rose and fell and settled on his red silk tie. He spoke. He unfolded his tale of woe: the descriptions of poverty and the great distance they had traveled, the abuses they had suffered, the injustice of it all. Jeff could understand only a few of the words, yet he knew well the rising intonation, the glistening eyes and rapid hands, and he listened and nodded. After a minute he lifted a pen and paper from the reception desk and with the guard’s help wrote down the family’s name. He kept nodding as he wrote the baby’s name and the children’s names and the wife’s name and the father’s name. He gave them one of the DHRO’s business cards and told them to call tomorrow, miming the word call.
The father, having been allowed to speak, now accepted the shoves of the guard out the door. The thick metal clanged, and a dusty silence settled in the vestibule. Jeff knew he would never see that family again, and he fought off thoughts of what would happen to them, where they would go, now that the door had shut on their backs.
He worked the next three hours through early evening and ended the day by typing a quick, long overdue letter to Adam. He described the call
about the suicide, the family rejected at the door. “To get help in this world,” he wrote, “it seems you need to file the necessary paperwork.” He summed up his plans for the weekend: a night out at the W. B. Yeats pub with his girlfriend, Melodi; a Saturday spent reading and relaxing; a chance to catch his breath after the Damascus trip. Half joking, he suggested Adam come visit him one day, come see Istanbul; they’d smoke a hookah together. He posted the letter to the reservation and placed it in the outgoing box.
On winter evenings the endless rains fell in a heavy slant, pounding the beaux arts buildings of the ambassador’s district. After work Jeff ran through the rain along Istiklal Caddesi and took refuge in the heat of the musty bar where he’d planned to meet Melodi. He bought a drink and found his friend Oren Cartwright hunched over a smooth mahogany table. Oren eyed Jeff’s brown bottle of Troy and said, “You’re the only one I know who can stomach that piss.”
“Not all of us can afford your six-dollar Guinness.” Jeff pulled out a stool and sat down.
The W. B. Yeats, the only Irish pub in Istanbul, had walls of dark wood. Its low lights and fish-’n’-chips menu, its dartboard and snooker table, its back room with a couch and VCR and a few dozen films, were supposed to make expatriates feel closer to home. His friends in the Hash House Harriers (“Drinkers with a Running Problem”) arrived after their evening jogs, quenched their thirst with shots of whiskey, and inhaled cartons of cigarettes. After Thursday rehearsals, members of the Foreign Drama Club came to the pub under the pretense of practicing their lines. By midnight they were dancing on tables. The émigrés gossiped. They scowled. They did not like one another, but they could not live without one another. A few bottles of bitter Troy and they divulged all: personal tragedies, sexual proclivities, financial debacles, past addictions.
This Is Not Civilization Page 16