17
ADAM AWOKE to the bucking of his bed and fumbled for his shorts on the dresser. He rushed from his room, bumping into Jeff in the blackness of the hallway. “What the hell is this?” Jeff yelled. The floorboards were swaying, as if they were standing on a floating raft.
“I have no idea.”
They ran to the living room windows and peered outside. In the coming days Adam would read how the land had purled, rose, and roared around him. For forty-one seconds the quake twisted the steel bridges connecting the continents, toppled outlying neighborhoods, and crumbled entire apartment complexes. A gaseous light exploded from the Marmara. Tidal waves lurched over beaches and drowned shoreside communities. But at that moment he could see only black night through the windows. The electricity was wiped out and, except for the festive sails of a cruise ship below, the sprawling city had fallen into darkness.
The living room rocked, the ceiling moaned, and Adam and Jeff retreated to the kitchen door frame. This was ridiculous, Adam thought as he watched the bookshelves clatter against the cement wall; this was almost funny—like the trampoline ride at the Tribal Fair, and he felt he could have laughed if it wasn’t at the same time so frightening. He had seen nothing as terrible as that city around him, emptied of light. Jeff was crouched on his knees, propping himself up on one arm. Adam gripped the door frame. The floor continued to buck, and he thought of his mother and Verdena, at home, informed of his death, an unnecessary death, a wasted life, all his young years of struggling and striving, for nothing, for this, a death in a foreign country.
When the swaying ceased, Jeff found a flashlight in the closet, and they rushed barefoot down the cold cement stairwell, clutching sneakers to their chests, panic in each heavy breath. Adam found himself whispering, “An earthquake. A fucken earthquake.” Like them, the people of the neighborhood had fled outside. Some sought refuge in their cars, and many were racing through alleys, searching, he thought, for friends and family. The streets, a riot of confusion, looked like the random exodus after a heavy-metal concert. Police and ambulance sirens sounded, screams erupted from the maze of alleys below them, and only the occasional slash and weave of car headlights cut the complete blackness. He had seen the smoke of forest fires in the ponderosas, heard the raging of flash floods in the reservation canyons, but had never felt the earth shake beneath him. He had never witnessed an upheaval this massive.
They came upon a shadowy crowd huddled around the old Ottoman fountain at the end of the block, a good distance from the taller buildings Adam imagined still might fall. He leaned against one of the rough stone walls, and Jeff joined him, trembling. They stood shoulder to shoulder. Neither spoke. In the first moments of that silence, catching his breath, Adam thought only of Nazira.
When Anarbek regained consciousness, he thought he might be dead. It was so dark, he could have been in a grave. Two things re-connected him to life: the impossible pain he felt with any effort to move and the intense crying of a young child near him. The voice seemed only a meter or two away.
“Alo?” he called, his own voice cracking.
“Baba!” The boy sounded weak and hysterical; he must have thought until this moment that he was alone. Baba? The child had mistaken him for his father. Anarbek pictured a young boy—Oolan in his green pajamas, with missing front teeth and close-cropped hair. Painfully he twisted his chest to turn to the voice, but found he could move only his left side. It seemed his right arm was crushed; he had lost all feeling in it, and flailing his free arm, he found that he was pinned at the shoulder by something cold and metallic. The refrigerator: it had saved him.
“I am here,” he called in Turkish. “Just wait. Someone will come. Are you okay?” Anarbek gagged on the dust and heard more crying, but he could see nothing. “Are you with anyone else?” He managed to spit out the words, coughing.
“Baba!”
“Please listen. Do you see your mother? Anyone?”
“I don’t see her. Baba, it hurts.”
He swallowed, his mouth clammy, but there was hardly enough saliva to clear his tongue. He was about to tell the child he was not his father, then changed his mind. “I know,” he said, his throat filling again with grains of concrete. The boy must have come from one of the apartments above the sports club. “Hang on. We will be okay. Son, you rest. No crying. Just rest. Someone will help us.”
For as long as he could stand it, he called through the wall above him, screaming the single word—“Yardim!” “Yardim!”—until he fell into a fit of coughing, each spasm a momentary torture. He heard the boy sobbing; Anarbek’s screams had frightened him more.
His own fears swelled when he remembered Nazira. He would be okay, he was alive, but what about her? He decided to pray, only with the pounding of his chest his thoughts ran away from him. He thought then of Baiooz, her calming voice of reason. He wished he could speak to her now. He thought of Baktigul and Lola and Manas, and told himself he would rest just a second, and after that, no matter what it took, he would get out and find his daughter. But when he closed his eyes he realized—eyes open or closed—the darkness remained the same.
Jeff’s apartment was in the eye of the storm: the city’s outskirts were toppled, but the center remained unharmed. The buildings of Üsküdar were built on bedrock, and at dawn the neighborhood police assured Adam and Jeff that it was perfectly safe to return. In the kitchen that morning Adam bent low over the table, absently eating some browning apricots. Jeff had phoned his office and with the help of a Turkish colleague was able to locate the address and telephone number of the Hakan Pazarlama Leather Factory. For an hour Adam watched him dialing, trying to get the connection out of the city, and every time Jeff hung up, Adam grit his teeth. A simple telephone call—the sound of her voice, a single syllable, was all he needed.
Finally Jeff gave up, saying, “The worst is on the outskirts, along the northern shore of the sea. They probably can’t get a bus through there.”
“But they haven’t called.”
“There are lines down. I couldn’t get through—maybe they can’t either.”
“We don’t even know if they have your telephone number,” Adam said. “Anarbek never thinks about things like that. You ever tell it to him?”
“I must have given it to one of them.” Jeff turned away from him. “They’ve called here before, haven’t they?”
Adam locked his gaze on the table. “I honestly can’t remember.”
“I’m sure they have the number.”
In the afternoon Jeff was at last able to phone the factory and then the hospitals and police stations around Yeditepe. Few calls were answered, and when he got through, nobody offered any help. He said their best chance was to leave the line open and let Anarbek or Nazira find a way to get in touch. Waiting for the telephone to ring, for a key to turn in the front door, they sat helplessly through the afternoon on the living room carpets, reading the papers and watching televised helicopter coverage of the earthquake zone. Nearly once an hour the floors trembled, as if the earth were boiling.
The news was bleak. CNN Turk called it one of the worst earthquakes of the century. Scientists had announced that pressure on unbroken fault lines beneath the city continued at an alarming level. Television astrologists had observed the skies and predicted that a second quake, larger than the first, would hit at any moment.
In the evening Oren came by and invited them to camp with him outside, on the grassy campus of the girls’ lise.
“It’d be safer,” Jeff agreed. “A little peace of mind.”
“But what if they call?” Adam asked. “Or come back?”
He refused to leave, and Jeff stayed on with him. Adam paced the apartment, took long cold showers, and opened the refrigerator door without knowing what he wanted. He barely slept that night.
A photograph in Hurriyet the next morning showed children bathing in fountains and men barbecuing kebaps over small communal grills. Much of the population had spent that second night ou
tdoors in cars, public squares, and parks. Most frightening were the continual aftershocks—already over two hundred of them, more than ten measuring above 5.0. Over and over the city relived the nightmare, and when the earth shook even slightly, from the windows Adam could see that the neighborhood had fled to the streets.
The newspapers reported more than two thousand dead, ten thousand injured, and two hundred thousand homeless, predicting the numbers would rise. Armies of rescue teams—dogs, medical supplies, tents, and body bags—had arrived from every corner of the planet, but it wasn’t enough. The government was paralyzed by the scope of the disaster. The military had delayed in acting, and unable to handle the pressure, high-level state and city officials were resigning. Large-scale coordination of rescue efforts was failing. Nobody seemed to be in charge.
“We’ll rent a car,” Adam said the second evening. “We’ll drive and find them.”
“No one’s renting out cars now. The roads are closed,” Jeff said.
“Someone you know can get us out there. Someone at your office.”
“I’ll ask tomorrow and see if they can help.”
The third morning there was still no word. Jeff went to work, and alone, Adam could stand it no more. He felt weightless without Nazira, exhausted. He looked at a map and considered jogging or hitching the forty miles out to Yeditepe to find her. But he wouldn’t know where to start, and he didn’t have the language to ask anyone there for help.
Jeff returned from his office in the early afternoon and began stuffing his tent, flashlights, clothing, and toilet paper into his backpack. He said he’d had some luck. The DHRO and a dozen other organizations were establishing tent cities. His office was transporting displaced people to the shelters and distributing food, medicine, and water. He had convinced Andrew to send him out to the site, where he would spend the rest of the week helping the relief effort. “It’s just past Yeditepe. When I get a break, I’ll head into town and try to locate them. They’re just stranded out there.”
“I’m coming with you,” Adam said.
Jeff started to protest but stopped. “There’s an extra backpack in the hall closet. I’ll get Oren to check in on the apartment.”
They packed additional sleeping bags, and the DHRO security guard drove them in a Land Cruiser toward Gólcük, 175 kilometers southeast, near the epicenter of the quake. The radio announced that the death toll had reached three thousand. The roads were for the most part surprisingly intact, but Adam was otherwise unprepared for the extent of the destruction. Debris from fallen buildings rose fifty feet in the air. Mechanized claws picked like dinosaurs through the rubble. Next to a bulldozer a woman in head scarf and polka-dot skirt sat immobile, her face in her palms. Three men wearing sandals climbed a hill of concrete, pulling at slabs of masonry by hand, and Adam had to suppress the urge to ask the driver to stop so they could help. In Gebze an army regiment in paper facemasks spread disinfectant lime along the street gutters, around piles of green plastic body bags. The ripe smell of death reached inside the Land Cruiser; Jeff had the driver pull over so he could vomit.
In Yeditepe they located the Hakan Pazarlama Leather Factory, and Adam felt a surge of hope: from a distance it looked as if the huge structure had sustained little damage. The entrance gate, however, was closed, the parking lot empty. The driver could find no guards or janitors to give him information. On the main road across from the pier three small hotels still stood. The first two had no record of Anarbek and Nazira; the third had been shut down because of structural damage. Adam began to panic. The driver took them to the station and terminal: buses and ferries were still not running to Istanbul. They circled the ruined town.
In the cafés people sat glumly, shaking their heads and murmuring to themselves. On certain roads the pavement had been thrust upward, and the driver was forced to make a U-turn and retrace their path. Jeff pointed out evidence of the tidal wave—smashed boats and a small marooned ferry. Overturned sailing dinghies bobbed a hundred yards off the coast, jutting like stepping-stones in the water. Jeff said it was time to move on to the tent city. “We don’t even know where to look, Adam. We can’t keep the driver circling around here forever.”
“We’re gonna find them.”
Jeff was silent. “She’s important to you, I know. They’re important to me too. But we can’t keep this up all afternoon. Other people need this jeep, and I’ve got to get to my job.”
“If you need to go on to Gólcük, then fucken go. I’ll get out and look myself.”
Jeff shook his head, but he asked the driver to pass one last time up and down the main street. At the very edge of town they paused at a stop sign, and Adam spotted Nazira.
She was sitting alone in the hot evening sun on a stone wall by a statue of a soldier. Her fingers gripped her hair, and she seemed focused only on a fallen apartment building across the street, where a number of men clambered over the hill of debris, shouting and pushing at blocks larger than themselves. One of them was shining a flashlight through the cracks of rubble.
The driver honked his horn, and Jeff and Adam rushed from the jeep. Nazira stood slowly and hugged Jeff first, then Adam longer. “He never came back to the hotel,” she whispered, and pointed at the ruins of the building. Adam’s stomach dropped. She said, “The people in the factory say he was in the sports club all night. This was the sports club. I am waiting for three days. I think they will find him. They must.”
She explained what had happened that night in the hotel. She woke just after three. The bed was shaking from side to side, and at first she thought a truck was passing, until the bed slid far enough it hit the wall, frightening her. She realized the lamp hanging from the ceiling was swinging violently, and a piece of its glass fell onto her back as she rushed to grab her clothes. “The pictures were crashing on the walls,” she said. “I ran out of the door, but I did not know the direction to go in the dark.” She was propelled by a mass of people fleeing down the hall into the dim lobby. The hotel building, it turned out, had not fallen, though cracks gaped open in its front wall. Some men had climbed back in later that morning and retrieved her bag. She waited for her father and spent the afternoon searching for the sports club. A factory worker verified that he had seen her father in the club late that night, watching a backgammon game, and had given her the address.
“I found the building here, like this.”
They stared up at the thirty-foot pile of rubble. The flattened heap of concrete was as large, Adam thought, as the old ruined high school dome. Sticking up among the blocks were broken office chairs and desks, cooking pots, a dusty boot, weathered carpets, and what looked like a crumpled washing machine.
Adam thrust his hands into his pockets, nodded, and said, “Come with us now, Nazira.”
“No! I’m not leaving him.”
“You can’t spend another night here.”
“The people”—she indicated a couple of bent women crawling over the fallen concrete—“they have been very kind to me. The rescue workers have been here with dogs. They said they will return.”
Adam and Jeff exchanged looks. “It won’t do any good to watch the rubble,” Jeff said. He helped Adam gently lead her away from the site toward the parked Land Cruiser. “I promise you, tomorrow we’ll come back. We’ll go to the police and search the hospitals in town. For tonight, just come with us and rest.”
In the vehicle Adam slid onto the back seat and took hold of Nazira’s hand. He tried to assure her it was true; people could survive for quite a while in a fallen building; he had already seen many such rescues on the news. Jeff said they would notify the Kyrgyz embassy and stay in contact with the police. Her mood darkened, yet she steadfastly refused to admit the possibility Anarbek might be dead, claiming she would feel it if it were true. She said her village, her family, couldn’t afford to lose him.
The Land Cruiser headed farther east, around the sea, and Adam watched the destruction through the cracked bus window. The area looked more and more
like a war zone the farther from the city they traveled. There was little rhyme or reason to the devastation—among intact buildings lay the wreckage of identical structures that had collapsed. Pancakes, the driver called them, using the English word in a way that Adam would have never imagined. Some structures had fallen neatly—Adam could count the number of flattened floors. Others had toppled in a lopsided way, displaying wide cracks. The most stirring sight was the fallen minaret of a mosque. Adam knew little about Islam but loved the majesty of these structures, the sky-slicing rise of the columns above the domes. But this mosque’s minaret had collapsed across the roof, its debris scattered over the muddy grass; only its concrete tip remained intact. A few sheep grazed around it.
Adam pictured Anarbek entombed in the rubble; the thought raised a solid, heavy weight in his throat. He tried to compare this grief to that of other deaths he had known—the suicides in Red Cliff, Uncle Sparky’s murder—but decided this was different. This man had done no harm; he was hopeful, motivated. To Adam he seemed selfless. He was here only trying to earn a living for his family and village. And Adam felt partly responsible—his friendship had only encouraged Anarbek to stay in Istanbul longer, against what he now knew were the wishes of Nazira.
For another half-hour the Land Cruiser traced the shoreline. The quake had torn down power cables, and a black cloud of burning oil hung over the sea to the southeast. Survivors moved in a daze outside makeshift homes, carrying pails of water. Flimsy roadside tents had been constructed of plastic sheets, shopping bags, and cardboard. Light bulbs were rigged to electric lines, and a single lantern swung above the entrance to one plywood hut.
This Is Not Civilization Page 28