This Is Not Civilization

by Robert Rosenberg

  “That’s not the same thing, really.” Adam told her then about Levi and the ongoing battle with his father.

  “It is terrible. Why did your cousin do such things?”

  “I guess he wanted the attention. I think he kind of wanted to be caught.” Adam shook his head. “He was just frustrated.”

  “You helped him then?”

  “No, not really. I never thought of it like that.”

  “You are brave, Adam.”

  “It wasn’t brave. I had to. And a lot of people don’t understand.”

  “I think you were brave.”

  He was gazing at the top of the tent, and he spoke more of Arizona. In short, choppy sentences, he described the chaparral: the juniper, the blossoming century plants, how the height of the sunflowers in the fall told how much snow you’d get that winter. He tried to explain the putrid smell of a pack of unseen javelina, the rainbow canyons with strips of colored sediment. He described the waterfalls, how the Red Cliff Creek tumbled in three twenty-foot drops before meeting the Salt River. “Summertime my family always used to camp there, next to the second falls. In tents like this. My mom would make spaghetti, and if we caught a fish we’d roll it in corn flour and fry it on the fire. My sister Verdena and me would sometimes share a tent.”

  “How old is your sister?”

  “She’s almost twenty now.”

  “My sister is a little younger then,” she said. “I am worried for her.”

  “Why are you worried?” Adam listened, trying to understand the traditions she explained.

  “It’s nuts,” he said. “If some guy wants you, you don’t even have to like him? He can just marry you like that?” Adam snapped his fingers. “If you walk around, any guy can just kidnap you?”

  “It is how it is supposed to work.”

  “If I was your sister, I wouldn’t even go outside.”

  “It is the way we live, Adam.”

  The outline of a shadow was growing larger on the tent wall. They both fell silent, and Nazira pressed closer to Adam’s hip. The large figure halted outside and stood over them, reached for the roof of the tent, and shook it.

  Jeff’s voice whispered, “I came to see if you guys are okay.”

  “We are all right,” Nazira said.

  His shadow knelt down at the front opening. “Do you need anything in there?”

  “We’re fine,” Adam said.

  “Here, I brought Nazira some water. And some extra batteries for the flashlight.”

  She exchanged an embarrassed look with Adam, and he reached outside and took the bottle of water, then the batteries. But Jeff didn’t leave. He remained squatting there, in the darkness outside the tent opening, in a strained silence. Nazira suddenly felt they should ask him in, that he wished to join them. But she fought her instincts. It would be too crowded.

  “Aren’t you hot in here?” Jeff asked at last.

  “It is warm,” Nazira said, “but we are okay.”

  More silence. “All right. I’ll leave you guys. Good night then.”

  Jeff stood up. His shadow against the tent grew taller, then shrank, and they listened as the footsteps faded. For a number of minutes Nazira did not speak.

  “What are you thinking about?” Adam finally asked.

  “My son.”

  He took her hand and pressed his fingers down into her palm. “Anarbek’s wife is watching him, you said.”

  “I know he is fine, but it doesn’t help. Today, every child I see at the orphanage, it gives me pain.”

  Adam was staring away from her. “I was wondering,” he said quietly. “Manas’s father. Were you in love with him?”

  “No.”

  “Did he steal you?”

  She had to think about it. “No, not in such a way.”

  “Why didn’t you marry him?”

  She turned over under her sleeping bag. “Adam, it was not practical.”

  He faced her, his eyes lowered. “I’m asking too many questions, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You are.”

  He touched her cheek and smiled. “You have two gold teeth. In the back.”

  “Yes. Three exactly. From when I was young.”

  “How does that feel? I mean the metal, in your mouth.”

  “I have never thought of it.”

  “There are some musicians, in America, who have those too. Rap stars.”

  “I do not know them.”

  “It’s supposed to be cool. Is it cool for you over there?”

  “Cool?”

  “Cool. Like, you think you’re important ’cause you have gold teeth.”

  Nazira laughed. “No, Adam, I am not so cool.”

  “You’re pretty cool.”

  “Stop it. I’m not.”

  He was quiet, and she held his hand in her fist now and raised it to her face. Outside the murmurs from the kitchen pavilion had subsided. The mournful voice of a muezzin sounded from a distant minaret—the final call to prayer.

  “My father is not coming back,” she said.

  “He’s coming back.”

  “I must not joke myself.”

  The muezzin’s voice grew louder. “Do you pray?” Adam asked over it.

  “Yes, I pray for him.”

  “It’s good you do that. I do it too.”

  “I was always so angry with him. I would tell him he did everything wrong. I was not a good daughter.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I did not show him the daughter’s proper respect. I’ll be better if he comes back to me.”

  “That’s right. You will.”

  “Thank you, Adam.”

  He stroked her neck with one finger. “I’ll get going now.”

  “Adam. Adam Dale. You have such a strange name.”

  “It’s a normal name. Nazira Tashtanalieva. That’s a strange name.”

  She smiled at him. “I should not love you now. I should think only of him.”

  “You’re right. Just think about him then.” After a minute Adam cupped her cheek in his warm palm, then slid his hand to her chin. “I gotta go. Sleep now.” He kissed her quickly—his lips dry—and left, ducking through the opening, then zipping it up behind him.

  Without Adam there, her exhaustion made her vulnerable to thoughts she preferred to avoid. Over the course of the hot, humid night she plunged into sleep, but her mind stabbed at her and she awoke again. She had been gone from home too long. How could she return and tell Lola that her husband was dead? Was Traktorbek waiting for them, or had he simply been terrorizing the family as a bluff? And Manas must be wondering every minute where his mother was. She felt that she was losing something of her old self, a disembodied part of her, last weekend’s youthful convictions that she would one day be happy. It seemed impossible that circumstances would ever again favor her.

  In the middle of the night she pulled herself from under her sleeping bag, unzipped the tent opening, and shuffled in her sandals to the bathroom. Even at this hour she had to wait for a free toilet—the tent city had only two portable latrines for nearly three thousand people. She stood in line in the wide open night, her mind cramped with fatigue, and the cool breeze on her face felt powerful enough to knock her over.

  In her delirium she had a vision of erasing the past few months of her life, of going backward in time to the moment she had let her father take off for Turkey. Instead of acquiescing, she would absolutely put her foot down and demand he not leave them, demand that he remain with the young wife that Nazira had found for him and the young son he had fathered. She would shame him into staying in Kyrgyzstan, and in doing so, shame him into life again.

  Inside the bathroom, her heart leapt when the metal walls around her trembled in an aftershock. She returned, frightened, to her tent, settled down on top of her sleeping bag, and listened to the grating chirrup of insects. She was too hot and restless to attempt sleep; she wanted only to be looking for her father, waiting for the machines that would lift the rubble and pull him
free. She tried to think of other things and found herself wondering how those Kurdish women had managed with the tampons, whether or not they had tried them, and if such things actually worked.

  In the stifling subterranean heat, Anarbek snapped back to consciousness a second time, to the sound of the child’s frightened scream. “Baba! Baba!”

  He answered, through the wall of rubble, “I’m here.”

  “I thought you left.”

  “I won’t leave. Understand? I’m going to try to reach you. What can you see?”

  “Nothing. Only dark stone.” The voice grew softer. “Baba?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m thirsty.” The boy said it as if getting a drink from the tap was a simple matter, and Anarbek realized that he was horribly thirsty himself—he couldn’t tell whether hours or days had passed. He raised his arm and swatted it around. Above and to his right lay the crumpled steel of the refrigerator. It leaned over a slab of concrete, creating a small open space, allowing him to breathe. A meter behind his head he swiped his free hand and found the plastic Hayat water bottle he had dropped when the building collapsed. It was covered in dust but still unopened, and miraculously, when he shook it, a quarter full. He had just enough strength to unscrew the cap and hold the bottle to his mouth. The liquid renewed him. He tried squeezing out from under the metal toward the child and managed to slide his waist half a meter; then he nearly bellowed at the lightning strike of pain that shot across his back.

  Every few minutes he mustered a shout into the void. The choking dust in his mouth, throat, and eyes felt like it would suffocate him at any moment. And he knew he was sweating, losing precious water. He let his bladder loose, then soaked up the wet drops with his shirtsleeve to try to cool himself.

  His chest pumping, he was consumed by thoughts of Nazira and the family, imagining how when he was rescued, he would apologize to Lola and his daughters. He would live the chaste, respectful life of a village elder.

  Unable to reach the child so close to him, he sometimes spoke to him, insisting that the boy answer. He needed to keep him reassured, raise his spirits.

  Straining his thin voice through the rubble, he told the boy his daughters’ favorite Nasreddin Hoja jokes. He told him the one about Hoja’s shirt being stolen: how, when he took off his pants to lure back the thief, Hoja accidentally fell asleep and awoke naked, with his pants gone too. He told the boy how a neighbor called on Hoja to borrow his donkey. Hoja, however, said he had already lent it out. “But Hoja,” the neighbor said, “I can hear your donkey braying in your stables.” “Shame on you,” Hoja said, “for taking the word of the donkey over my own.” He told the boy how Hoja wished Allah had created horses with wings. That way, Hoja thought, men could fly around the world. But when he got hit with a bird dropping, Hoja decided, in the end, that Allah knows best.

  Adam and Nazira hitched a ride to Yeditepe on a packed minibus. The afternoon roads were crowded with ambulances and half-filled trucks. Many gas stations had been destroyed, and each day it seemed to Adam that more cars had been abandoned by the roadside. The smell of scorched flesh from mass burials lingered over the seashore towns—the army burning unidentified bodies to prevent the spread of disease.

  They exited the bus a block south of the fallen sports club building. Donated bread, tomatoes, and canned goods were piled high on the street corner, and two women picked listlessly through a heap of secondhand clothing. Opposite them, the hill of concrete and twisted steel was unaltered—most of the people they had previously seen clambering over its heights had given up. Adam could hear a bulldozer and backhoe growling a few hundred yards to the west, beneath the flat orange sky.

  A lone construction worker wearing plastic boots climbed down off the wreckage and greeted them. He took off his helmet, and Nazira seemed to recognize him from earlier in the week. “Why do they work on all the other buildings,” she asked, “but nobody works here?”

  The man shook his head. Until today, he told them, he had heard noises, a voice that sounded like a friend he knew, calling for help. But today he no longer heard anything. “The United Nations is reporting it might be forty thousand,” he said. He had heard that twelve thousand bodies had been recovered, and thirty-three thousand were injured. Foreign rescue teams were beginning to give up—in this heat, people trapped without food or water couldn’t live more than a week. “But there are always miracles,” he said, gesturing to the rubble. “They’re still finding people alive.”

  The construction worker left, and Nazira began to climb up the hill of concrete. “Come, Adam, we will call for him.”

  “It’s dangerous. You don’t have good shoes.” He tried to pull her back from the crumpled metal.

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Please let me then.” With her skirt tangled at the knees, she stumbled over a bent section of rebar. Adam sighed, and together they scaled the concrete, twenty feet above the ground, calling out Anarbek’s name. They circled the remains, balancing on rocking slabs of masonry. Twice Adam imagined he heard movement beneath his feet, but it was only shifting bricks and metal. A few Turkish women came to the edge of the rubble to watch. Nazira called until she was hoarse, and at last Adam had to take her by the hand and lead her down off the pile.

  “We’ll check with the police. They’ll know if anyone’s been found,” he said.

  But in the station the round-shouldered policeman again only jotted down Anarbek’s description and the place where he disappeared, writing these notes on yellow report forms and clicking his tongue. He told Nazira that though many collapsed buildings might contain survivors, there was not enough heavy machinery to get to them. “Of course, God is the only one who knows why this happens to us,” he said.

  They left the station. “God, God, God,” Nazira mumbled as they pushed through the heavy wooden doors.

  Near the Yeditepe hospital the stench of decay bit Adam’s nostrils. The staff and patients had still not reentered the building, but large canvas canopies now covered the schoolyard down the street—a marked improvement over the night before—and a few of the patients, legs dangling uselessly, were pushing themselves around in brand-new wheelchairs. The doctors looked in dire need of sleep, and the conscious wounded stared emptily as Adam passed their cots. A sign had been posted in Turkish and English: ISTANBUL AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, POST-TRAUMATIC COUNSELING. Another sign hung at the gate: FIELD HOSPITAL OPENS AT 9:00. On the far side of the parking lot, the university had set up a pharmacy. Pasted around the schoolyard walls were signs with political slogans advertising the Islamic Virtue Party: LET’S HEAL THE WOUNDS TOGETHER!

  Adam was sweating and tired. This searching was useless, he realized. They were about to make a second sweep around the parking lot when he thought he heard a familiar voice calling his name. He turned and saw a sturdy red-haired nurse dressed in white, but he didn’t recognize her until she pulled down her facemask.

  “Melodi!” She looked weary and unkempt, her dark features hardened without her makeup. But it was uplifting to find a familiar face here.

  “Merhaba! I called to you before, but you didn’t see me.”

  Adam pointed to her clothes. “You working out here?”

  “For now. They are busing us here every morning from the city. I volunteered. They are very short on health workers.” She wiped a drop of perspiration off her face and smiled. “It’s good at last to see someone I know!”

  “You’ve met Nazira, Anarbek’s daughter?”

  At the sound of the name, Melodi seemed to flinch. “No, we haven’t yet met.”

  They shook hands, and Melodi held on to Nazira’s, gazing steadily into her eyes.

  “How are you?” Nazira asked absently in Turkish. She hardly seemed to register the presence of Melodi.

  “You are the first person in days to ask how I am. Nobody says nasilsiniz anymore. They see you and ask only, ‘Did your family survive?’ This is our
new greeting.”

  Adam indicated all the rows of beds and IV units, the generators grating away. “It’s awful.”

  “Awful?” Letting go of Nazira’s hand, Melodi smiled and shook her head. “Only awful, Adam? It is our nightmare. The army has finally begun to help today, but all they do is bury the bodies. They are using an ice-skating rink as a morgue! Allah, Allah! It’s not the dead bodies that will spread disease, as everybody thinks, but the unclean water and so few toilets.” She clicked her tongue. “And why are you here?”

  Her face colored as Adam explained what they knew about Anarbek. She took a long, heavy breath and said, “It is impossible.” Nazira turned away from her, but Melodi said, “Nazira, listen, please, give me his surname. I will see what I can find.”

  Nazira wrote it on a piece of paper, and Melodi disappeared into the nearest tent to check the available lists of names.

  “She is Jeff’s girlfriend?” Nazira asked.

  “Ex-girlfriend. I think she’s broken it off.”

  “She is very kind, and beautiful. Why did she do that to him?”

  “I don’t know. I never understand anything that happens with Jeff.”

  Melodi returned after a few minutes, her expression dire. “It’s a mess, Adam. Our critical patients are now sent to other hospitals.” There was a great deal of confusion, she explained. Many families could not find their loved ones, and the hospitals had yet to coordinate their efforts to create complete lists of the injured. But all this confusion, she said, should give them some hope that they might track down Anarbek.

  Adam asked, “Then where else can we look?”

  “Your looking cannot help. He might be anywhere: in Izmit, or Istanbul, or Bursa even. We’re getting new patient lists every day. I shall be here all week. Come, check with me tomorrow. I shall leave a message with Jeff’s office if I hear anything.”

  Nazira thanked her.

  “Not at all, not at all. May it pass quickly. Please tell Jeff you saw me, and I send my hello.”

  The encounter renewed Adam’s optimism, but on the minibus ride back to the tent city, Nazira appeared more despondent than ever. “I am thinking there will be no more rescues,” she said. For the first time she seemed convinced that Anarbek was lost for good. If her father was dead, she would have to go home to the village and inform Lola and the family.