Opposite the collapsed crane of a steel mill, the driver dropped them off at the DHRO’s tent city. Adam saw two thousand tents, most still in packaging. Cardboard lined the muddy paths, and a canvas pavilion erected at the site entrance served as a kitchen. Next to it an army sergeant with a Kalashnikov patrolled a long line of people waiting to use the single public telephone.
Jeff set up his own tent behind the kitchen and told Nazira she could sleep in there. He asked her one last time if she wanted to head back with the driver to Istanbul, but Nazira worried that once she left the earthquake zone, she could not return through the closed roads.
In the open tent Adam convinced her to lie down; and he sat for an hour with her, hand in hand. Her sleeping bag was an old one, stuffed with cotton, worn and soft, and the tent smelled of mildew, like a pawn shop, he thought. Nazira finally began to doze, but it was a restless sleep, and he could see her eyes darting beneath her lids. She was alive, beautiful even in her grief. Her palm was turned up against the outline of her hip, her hands were worn and dry. Every few seconds her thin, limber fingers twitched. Adam left the tent quietly, and in the kitchen pavilion, near Jeff and a dozen Presbyterian church volunteers, he unrolled his own foam mat and sleeping bag—the newer, nylon kind, stuffed with polyester. Over the tent city hung a silence, immense and piercing. Adam tried to sleep, but again and again the ground beneath him seemed to list. It had been doing this for three days, sometimes in a genuine aftershock and sometimes simply in his imagination, but he didn’t know which bothered him more.
Jeff and Adam toured the field in the morning. Tents had come from Germany, Japan, and the Czech Republic, and the DHRO had begun to set them up, spread evenly in long lines. The burgeoning temporary city, occupying a plain between the bare green foothills and the sea, seemed to Jeff a cross between a suburban housing tract and a nomadic herding village. “I’m going, to have to log in supplies,” he told Adam. “You can help out, sorting through those.” He pointed to two open truck beds, where volunteers had begun rummaging through boxes and green garbage bags of donated clothes and food, and two nurses were stacking emergency supplies. The nurses brought Melodi to mind, and Jeff battled his ongoing temptation to telephone her. He knew that her European neighborhood, like Üsküdar, had sustained little damage, and he was afraid even a checkup call would open the floodgates between them. He wouldn’t show her he was weak, especially at a time like this.
Adam left him, and through the morning Jeff organized priority lists of meals to be prepared and medical requests to be ordered. If he kept busy, he could avoid the thoughts that had plagued him all night—thoughts tracing a straight line between his own actions and Nazira’s missing father. He began collecting family names of those living in the camp, to keep track of the numbers arriving and leaving. In the afternoon, with his DHRO colleagues and thirty church volunteers, Jeff helped cook enormous vats of soup and pasta. From plastic bags they distributed loaves of donated bread. The stricken Turks, carrying soiled bowls, lined up in ten rows to wait for food; but before volunteers could dole out the appropriate portions, Jeff had to ask each survivor the terrible question: “How many in your family?”
When things quieted down that evening, he, Adam, and Nazira hitched a ride into Yeditepe to check with the police. On the minibus Jeff asked Nazira if she wanted to send word back to Kyrgyzstan.
“But how can I do that?”
“A letter would take too long?” Adam asked.
“Weeks,” Jeff said. “Can you telephone someone in Bishkek and pass the word along?”
“I have a cousin in Bishkek, but what can I say to her?”
“You can tell her you’re okay,” Jeff said.
“Only me. Only I am okay. How can I say this on the telephone?”
Adam asked, “Have you called home, Jeff?”
“I’ve sent a message,” Jeff lied. The possibility his father might be worried had given him a perverse pleasure. Let him imagine the worst for a while.
In Yeditepe they reported Anarbek missing to the police, and the round-shouldered officer at the desk scratched the name and description on a yellowed report form, without a word of consolation or advice. As they left, Jeff said to Nazira, “It’s good that we did that. Your father will find out that you are looking for him.”
She shook her head. “Jeff, they were no help at all.”
At the hospital, beds and blankets had been set up on sidewalks. The building’s foundation was cracked, and many of its windows were broken. Jeff learned from a security guard that the hospital staff had moved the injured to a schoolyard and parking lot down the shaded street. The three searched the crowded lot for any sign of Anarbek. Amid the din of traffic and people screaming to get the attention of nurses, the doctors treated patients in the open air. Nazira hurried through the crowds, and trying to keep up, Jeff passed heavily bandaged patients, a young boy with a bloody chest. One doctor, just finished stitching up a wound in an old woman’s head, informed Jeff that no major medical procedures could be performed—nobody could reenter the hospital because of the strength of the aftershocks.
Back at the tent city, Jeff called Oren on a borrowed cell phone, but there was no news. Before the volunteers went to sleep, they gathered for a cup of Nescafe at a table in the main cooking tent to listen to the radio. Adam drank only water, and Nazira clasped a teacup with both hands, as if it alone could warm her.
The radio reported that, around the Sea of Marmara, rescue workers from fifteen countries were still hunting through the wreckage for survivors. The estimates of casualties had doubled. Last night it was five thousand; tonight it was ten.
Jeff looked at Nazira. She was staring into her teacup, and he couldn’t tell if she was listening.
The news was dominated by stories of faulty construction. Before the quake, through massive corruption, developers had erected illegal neighborhoods. To raise a building required only a single license, easily obtained through bribery. A fatal lack of regulations made the problem worse: once started, apartment buildings had been subjected to no further inspections. Buildings that should have been constructed with elastic features and steel reinforcing rods had instead been built from the cheapest materials, so that contractors could rake in more profits. The most infamous developer erected entire housing communities from concrete mixed with beach sand. His six-story apartments were now a dusty graveyard, and the man had fled the country.
“How could they let him do that?” Adam asked.
Jeff shrugged. “It’s corruption. It happens everywhere.”
“He’s responsible. He’s responsible for those deaths.”
Nazira quietly left the table and slipped into the darkness, toward her tent.
In the morning Jeff awoke increasingly sick with anxiety; his throat was scratchy from sleeping in the open. The miasma of rotting flesh hung in the air, and his stomach could hold no food. He supervised the extensive preparations for breakfast, which made him more nauseated still. Survivors lined up; they held out their bowls, their faces stern in collective shock. From between the tents, in the murky heat, came shouts of children playing tag.
Adam led a group of teenage boys around the dirt paths, putting up cardboard signs to give each lane a number, so Jeff could locate a family based on its address. As they worked he took it all in: the leaning outhouses, the women boiling water over fires, the makeshift school, the crowded orphanage, the cries of infants, the arguments of families, the electric wires strung overhead, the scrubbing of laundry in tubs, the clothing drying on tent poles, the chopping of wood, the subdued voices crackling from radios, the smell of urine, the leaking water pipes, the splashing of feet in puddles, the squeals of children kicking soccer balls. Three thousand people here, a city twice the size of Red Cliff, but with a collective intensity of suffering Adam could hardly comprehend.
For lunch he helped a crew prepare and serve mutton soup. Nazira quietly cut vegetables, then washed stacks of dishes, and Adam left her to her though
ts. He grew overly conscious of the Turks sitting listlessly near their tents, waiting for something to do. To keep busy, some survivors had volunteered to work in the tent kitchen themselves, and he began to feel superfluous. After lunch he was relieved when Jeff pulled a Frisbee out of his backpack, and the two taught a group of bored children at the orphanage how to throw it.
“What these guys need,” Adam joked, “is to learn how to play some real ball.”
He located some old coat hangers, rags, and a piece of soggy plywood, and in an hour’s work, with the aid of two army cadets, he secured the makeshift backboard to a telephone pole near the orphanage tent. He lined up twenty of the camp’s children and in a brief training session, using soccer balls, he taught them the proper way to shoot a basket. He then organized a three-on-three tournament, coaching the orphans, screaming at them in English peppered with pidgin Turkish, which they seemed to find endlessly amusing. “To run. To run!” he ordered. “To throw. To throw. To jump!” The youngest boys and girls imitated his directions, shouting at each other in ungrammatical infinitives.
After dinner two of the children attached themselves to him. Their names were Alp and Doruk, and they were about eleven years old—handsome, dirty, coal-haired boys. They tailed him through the busy kitchen pavilion, hanging off his arms and shoulders. Dark brown dust covered their fingers. Alp, the taller of the two, wore a zippered polo shirt with orange and purple stripes. Doruk had cropped hair, out of which protruded two of the largest ears Adam had ever seen. He wore a white T-shirt with a peeling decal that said 47 Sport. Adam asked if they were brothers. No, they told him, they were best friends. As he understood it, Doruk was living in Alp’s family’s tent. Alp waved his hands, palms out, and pointed at his friend.
“Doruk father no. Mother no.”
Doruk tried to smile, then snatched the soccer ball from Adam’s arm and dribbled awkwardly, stumbling once, down to the backboard to attempt a lay-up. Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Adam watched the kid.
Nazira found him later outside the orphanage, shooting with the boys, and smiled at him. “You have some friends now, I see.”
“I guess.”
The boys were yelling something at him that he couldn’t understand.
“Can you help me out here a minute?” he asked her. “I want to know what happened to Doruk’s parents.”
Nazira called to Alp and translated for Adam. The night of the earthquake, Alp explained, Doruk’s father had woken him up and sent him fleeing from their building. His parents stayed behind to gather his little sister and brothers. Three flights down, safely outside, Doruk turned to wait for his family and saw the entire complex collapse into dust. “Pancake!” Alp said, slapping his palms together. Alp’s own family had escaped safely. Now they were trying to track Doruk’s surviving relatives but, homeless and jobless themselves, were having no luck.
Adam watched the kid shooting, determined to bank a lay-up. He was haunted by the image of this boy, fleeing the crumbling building, where his family, left behind, had been crushed. Before the sun went down, Adam arranged a half-court shooting contest for the assembled crowd of children and offered the winner a Snickers bar. On his very first attempt, big-eared Doruk heaved the ball overhead. It sailed straight, smashed off the backboard, and sank right in.
To distract herself, Nazira had begun helping young mothers set up a home in the tent city with salvaged bedding, blankets, and carpets. The familiar work was a comfort, and she recognized through it her own need to commiserate with the other female survivors. On her first morning at the tent city she had admired how quickly the volunteers and survivors had set up a huge green tent as the orphanage, and in her free moments, between preparing meals, she would help care for some of the children. The orphanage served double duty as a sort of kindergarten, to keep other children occupied while their parents secured food and clothing. She and some Turkish teachers from Istanbul engaged the kids in playing, storytelling, and drawing, and the crayoned pictures they pinned to the canvas tent wall looked similar, at first glance, to the pictures Manas had always drawn for her. Only on closer inspection did she understand that the blue trees were fallen, green bulldozers pushed at collapsed houses, and purple stick figures played football in a field of tents.
The stocky blond British nurse who supervised the orphanage solicited Nazira’s help. She pointed to a carton of diapers and asked Nazira to distribute them to mothers with babies throughout the tent city. Nazira was allowed to give each woman only six diapers apiece, which did not seem enough to her. Unlike the rags she had once used for Manas, these diapers were made of stretchy plastic with a sticky adhesive patch and could not be washed. Around the tent city the mothers were at first grateful, calling out, “Thanks to Allah!” But on realizing how many diapers they were getting, they grew frustrated.
“Only six? That will last me one or two days, at the most!”
One young woman complained that the infant formula she had received for her child had run out. Another middle-aged, pink-faced Kurdish woman approached Nazira, pulled her behind a tent, and in a harsh whisper asked her if she had any Orkids. Nazira thought this must be a different brand of diaper and told her she was all out, but the woman blushed and described what sounded like sanitary pads. She was a simple village woman from southeastern Turkey near Diyarbakir, and she had been living in a shantytown north of Izmit when the earthquake struck. Nazira’s heart went out to her, and she said she would check and see if any pads were available.
From the truck of donated medical supplies, the nurse located a light blue carton of something labeled Tampons and handed them over. Nazira said she did not know what they were, but the harried nurse insisted she distribute them. “These’ll do the trick,” she promised.
“The women are from a village in the south. I don’t think they will know either.”
The nurse sighed. “Oh, bloody hell! I’ll come with you and show them then.”
Facing a small crowd of Kurds, with Nazira translating, the nurse peeled the paper from a tampon and explained the cotton wad, the cardboard pieces, the string, and how to use the contraption. She ended with dire warnings about the importance of changing the tampons frequently. When a group of young men approached, the women grew conspiratorially quiet. The eldest Kurd drove the men away.
Through Nazira, a middle-aged woman asked how many tampons could be used at once.
“Oh dear! Only one at a time. Please emphasize this. They must use them one at a time.”
A tan, finely wrinkled woman asked if one could urinate while using the tampon. She expressed disbelief when the nurse said yes. One mother asked in a whisper if the tampon would spoil a teenager’s virginity. Nazira relayed the question, and the Englishwoman stood still for a second, hips canted to the right, mouth slightly agape. Finally she warned that young ladies might not want to use them if they were worried about this.
On the way back to the orphanage, the nurse thanked Nazira, laughing. “Well, that wasn’t easy. You make a brilliant translator, though.” With the compliment, Nazira felt pride well up in her chest, but she pushed it away. She had no strength to be helping others like this; she had her own problems.
By nine o’clock that evening, after another fruitless trip to Yeditepe, she was worn out. Jeff asked if she wanted to join the volunteers for some tea, but she retired instead to her shadowy tent with a flashlight and spread out her sleeping bag. Suddenly she felt hostile to everyone.
On nights in her old village, managing without water or electricity, she had often dreamt of living in the open like this, in a Kyrgyz yurt in the mountains. But she understood now that it was a humiliation to have to wash in public, to change her clothes in the plastic portable army latrine. She hated the damp sleeping bag and wished she had her old shirdok. Late at night like this, when she was no longer busy, all she could think of was her father, and if she did not go mad with despair, it was because she found relief in waiting for Adam. He would come into the tent and sta
y with her for a while, and then she could make it through the night.
In a few minutes she heard the rustle of nylon, and he crawled in. He sat beside her on the ground, fiddling with his own flashlight as she adjusted her sleeping bag. He told her his frustrations with helping assemble tents for newly arrived families, and his voice was a comfort, though she barely listened to the words. Eventually he fell silent.
She pointed to his scarred forehead. “You never told me, Adam, where did you receive that scar? Basketball?”
“No, my father.”
“You were in an argument?”
Adam hesitated. “He pushed me against a wall.”
“Why would he do such a thing?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “He was angry.”
“I don’t understand. My father hit me when I was young, if I was naughty, but he did not hit me hard. Nothing like that.”
“You? Naughty?”
“I was very naughty as a child, Adam. I listened only to my mother.”
“What kind of things did you do?”
“Once I took my father’s gun, and Lola and I practiced shooting. Outside the village. At bottles. Bang! Bang! We could have killed each other.” She smiled.
“Did he hit you for that?”
“No, my mother hit me for that. My father beat me for once starting a fire in the kitchen. I left the gas tube on too long. When I lit the match everything caught on fire. Even my clothes.”
“Anarbek hit you? But it was an accident.”
“I was very, very careless, you see. My dress was on fire, and he put it out with a rug. I was crying on the floor. He hit me twice, here, on the face. He was very upset. Then he hugged me. I was only ten. I got many burns.”
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