Adam stared out the window. The evening darkness was settling. A farm truck piled high with household belongings rattled past them, and up ahead, where the land began to drop to the sea, he spotted a lone black bull wandering across the road. Halfway through the ride Nazira leaned heavily against his shoulder and said, “My father, he is the only person this could happen to.”
He ran a finger up her arm. “Lots of people are lost, Nazira.”
“No. It is his punishment. He has no feelings. Since my mother died he does not feel anything. He does not know what he does to hurt others. You see? He does not care how the other people feel. He travels so far and stays away from home, leaving his family to suffer.” She pointed out the window. “This is the result.”
Across the field of tents Jeff supervised the cleanup after dinner and found Nazira alone at a steel basin, scrubbing a pile of greasy utensils. When he approached, she turned on a hose to refill the basin, as if the loud running of water would keep him from speaking to her. He patted her arm and asked how she was holding up. Nazira lifted a long silver ladle, stained with tomato sauce, and said, “Someone who has lost her father, how do you imagine she should feel?”
“We don’t yet know what happened.” Jeff took a dirty spatula and spun it in his fingers. He wondered if he should encourage her like this. He never knew the right thing to say. Years ago, in the Peace Corps, he’d once found it so easy to talk to her.
“So much of my life is going wrong,” Nazira said, drying the ladle furiously with a cloth. “I feel I am cursed.”
“Come on, don’t think like that. You’ve helped so many.” His words felt empty to him, inadequate. “I remember how people spoke about you in the village. They depend on you. You’re their teacher.”
She concentrated on her washing. Her face was showing the effects of long travel, the strain of her grief. Her skin was pale, patchy below her dark eyes, and the flush on her temples looked like paint, pink beneath red.
“Jeff, you don’t know,” she said. “You never understood.”
“What don’t I know? I lived there, for two years. If anyone can understand what you—what you and your father—have gone through, it’s me.”
“Yes, you understand so much. Jeff, why then did you never come back to visit? Why did you never answer my letters? Why did you offer money and then refuse us? How could you pretend with us so much?”
He found it hard to believe that, here in the tent city, with the loss of life looming over them—and the possible death of her own father—she was bringing this up now. What was she accusing him of? Was she blaming him?
“We talked about it, Nazira. We have been through all this. I made many mistakes and I’ve admitted them to you.”
She gazed out across the field of tents where children were splattering in the mud, playing king of the hill on piles of sodden bags of lime. “You never understood, Jeff. And you still do not. I think it is too late. I must go back and inform my family.” She looked straight at him. “We do not have even his body to bury!”
“Nazira, I know you’re upset. Look, it’s been a long, terrible week.” He searched for something more comforting to say. “Why don’t we go back to the city tonight? Oren says the roads have opened, and you can come back to Yeditepe every day if you want. We’ll get you a change of clothes and a decent night’s sleep. Maybe a warm shower.”
“A warm shower!” she cried. “I don’t need any of that.”
She avoided him the rest of the evening, though he caught her glancing at him from across the kitchen tent; and once, whispering to Adam, she nodded in his direction. He decided there was no reason to spend another night in the tent city; he too could return each day as necessary. After› the kitchen pavilion was cleaned, with Adam’s help Jeff took down his tent and stuffed it into his backpack. He collected their things, and the DHRO security guard drove them all back toward Istanbul. They stopped in Yeditepe to assess the state of the ruined sports club. Nazira stood outside for a few moments, leaning against the vehicle, staring up at what now seemed to Jeff a grave of rubble. At last she asked them to take her back to the apartment. In the jouncing Land Cruiser nobody spoke. For nearly an hour Jeff pretended to sleep, his mind swimming through deeper, more powerful currents, until he felt he would drown under the pressure of so much guilt. He needed simpler rules in life. He needed to be told the right thing to say and do. An old friend was lost, and he didn’t know how much of it was his fault, or what might have been prevented. He was guilty of a crime he could not even label. Why hadn’t he simply maxed out his credit card and sent the Kyrgyz home, happy, with the money he needed? Instead, against his better judgment, Jeff had let him stay in his apartment, playing at newfound freedoms in a world Anarbek didn’t understand. Now the man was lost, both because Jeff had been too generous and because he had not been generous enough. He needed simpler rules.
The highway twisted around the sea, then swept them through the sprawling gecekondos, through traffic circles where plastic sheeting tents and houses built of blankets stood on every wet patch of grass, and finally into the city.
Burak’s computerized TOEFL exam had been rescheduled for Monday, and Adam resumed their lessons Friday afternoon. Their seaside café was mostly empty; the old backgammon players had not returned to their games.
“Government reporting only seventeen thousand people died,” Burak said. “I guarantee to you, it is twice that. At the least.” He slid his chair out to sit.
“Seventeen thousand?” Adam asked, sitting opposite. It was more than the population of the whole reservation.
“I am telling you, it is too few!” Burak said. “The government isn’t wanting to pay insurance for the deaths. They are lying.” He lowered his voice and began tearing off pieces of his paper napkin. “Uff! I have to get out of this shitty country. Everything is shit here; our buildings fall, our government cannot help, our army does nothing.”
Adam asked, “You leaving will help?”
“It will help me.” Burak patted his muscular chest. “I can do nothing. One person can do nothing when a system is shit. A person’s only work is to take care of himself. And his family. That is all a person must do.”
Adam opened the TOEFL workbook. “Let’s finish this stuff.” They practiced sentence-completion questions, then reviewed advanced vocabulary words for thirty minutes, and Burak made only one serious mistake—insisting that a praying mantis was a kind of rug.
Adam said he thought Burak was going to pass.
His student beat the side of his head with his fist. “If I don’t get too nervous. Tests make me nervous, and I forget everything.”
They read over the Turkish papers together and Burak practiced translating text into English. He told Adam that yesterday a survivor had reached the police on a pocket telephone. An Israeli rescue crew had located the man with search dogs, and a group of Turkish firemen pulled him from the wreckage, followed by the bodies of his wife and two daughters. The rescue had made national headlines. The newspapers called the survivor a living testimony to the nation’s resilience. Banners on the Milliyet and Star proclaimed
MAN SAVED BY POCKET PHONE!
A MIRACLE, A POCKET PHONE, AND
A TALE OF STRENGTH!
According to Burak the nation had watched the survivor last evening on NTV news, interviewed in his hospital bed. He was starving, dehydrated, at risk of kidney failure, but he would re-cover. The photograph in the Milliyet showed the man, sheets pulled up to his neck brace, with a weak smile on his lips.
For hours Anarbek had tried to squirm a half-meter closer to the young boy. He seemed near enough—if he could simply free his arm to stretch around the cement block, he might reach the child. But there was no room to maneuver, barely a half-meter of space above. From his new angle, though, Anarbek could make out chinks of light and hints of blue sky, and sometimes he imagined he heard voices calling his name. The light faded and came back—he lost track of how many times. Once in a while he mu
stered the energy to call out “Yardim!” But the effort exhausted him and sent the black pain throbbing in his legs. His tongue was large in his mouth. Each time he called, he sensed his voice was growing fainter. “Don’t scream,” he finally told himself. “Save your breath.” When his thirst grew unbearable, he would take a single sip from the Hayat water bottle, until it was finally empty.
His mind slipped in and out of clarity, but he continued to whisper to the boy. Sometimes it seemed the child had fallen asleep, and Anarbek found himself alone with his whispers. The boy slept for a long time, and eventually Anarbek went under too.
He was flying again, soaring through the air on a jet to America, the aisles filled with boxed goods he was importing from Istanbul to trade in the bazaars of Washington and New York. In his half-asleep thoughts he set up a leather factory in San Francisco and employed Traktorbek’s gang. They had joined the ranks of post-Soviet biznesmenski, hawking their wares in the global bazaar, competing in the worldwide market. He expanded his business. With Bolot’s help he traded in apple tea, in lettuce, in leather jackets, in embroidered towels. He wrote complex business proposals to drum up support for a network of pocket telephones for Kyrgyzstan. One day a cellular technology would connect their mountain villages to the rest of the world. Shepherds could barter on the streets of New York from the pastures of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka. He knew someone would see the brilliance of the idea. It was just a matter of time.
He woke from a white distance, unaware where he was or how long he had been gone. He tried to whisper for the boy, but found he had no voice left.
The child made no sound. Anarbek kept up his voiceless whispering, first gibberish, then questions, then prayers to Baiooz, Lola, and Nazira. The boy would not wake. The silent gaps between Anarbek’s whispers grew in length, until finally he understood he had slept too long. He had not even said goodbye.
From the living room couch, reading, Jeff heard the turn of the keys, then the quiet whine of the door. He leapt up. In the hallway Adam was bent over, pulling off his shoes, and Nazira stood behind him, her eyes swollen.
They had ridden back to Yeditepe to check at the hospital again, Adam explained. Melodi had at last found the complete updated lists of patients registered around the Sea of Marmara. Not one contained Anarbek’s name. They tried the police station once more, and the officer for the first time took pity and personally escorted them to the site of the fallen apartment complex. The sports club was now a patch of mud. Over the past two days bulldozers had cleared it. The policeman told them that any bodies found had been burned.
Nazira stumbled toward her bedroom, and Adam stayed by her side. The door to the apartment was still open, but Jeff sank against the wall to the hardwood floor. A random, forgotten memory came to mind, a fleeting image of Anarbek at the wheel, driving his crowded Soviet jeep home through the mountains. Halfway through “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” Anarbek had changed the words to the chorus, from beer to fermented mare’s milk. “Ninety-nine bottles of kumyss on the wall,” he had thundered, reaching back and slapping Nazira’s arm, encouraging her to join him.
V
18
IN THE DHRO OFFICE, no one agreed on the best safety measures to follow in the event of another earthquake. Each of Jeff’s coworkers had read different reports concerning the best plan of action, but his boss, a traditionalist, insisted the entire staff take shelter under the office furniture. During Jeff’s first week back, they drilled this procedure once a day. At random times Andrew yelled, “Earthquake!” and the staff dove under their desks and covered their heads until “All clear!” was shouted. The six-foot-four security guard, however, could not fit under a desk, and during the drills he reluctantly thrust his head under the nearest table, his monumental rear end protruding from it. Laughter spread through the office, first suppressed and guarded, then erupting in a tumult, the first laughter Jeff had heard in two weeks, and as welcome as it was, it seemed a strange, unsettling sound.
Coordination of the DHRO’s relief efforts kept Jeff working twelve-hour days. From field reports he knew relief was slowly spreading, and the survivors were slowly being helped. Even if the DHRO could not do all things for all people, even if they could not feed and clothe the masses, they were helping many.
On his second day back from the tent city he suffered through a particularly lousy afternoon. Garbage bags full of donated clothes lay in piles around his desk, the telephone rang incessantly, and at 1:20 another violent aftershock shook the building. The fax machine broke down. His printer was out of ink, and they had no replacement cartridges. He could barely concentrate on his work.
Midafternoon it took him an hour and a half on the phone with a Sultanahmet travel agent to secure two seats for Nazira and Adam on a flight to Bishkek—leaving in two days’ time. He had warned his friend against the move (what would Adam even do there?), but if it was what he wanted, then Jeff wouldn’t stop him. At least, he thought, he would soon have his apartment to himself. Soon he would have his own life again—solitude, the ability to come and go as he wanted, free from their watchful gaze. He could get over Melodi and think about his next move. Maybe he could talk to Andrew about a transfer, perhaps to West Africa. He had always wanted to work in West Africa.
On the phone he paid for the tickets to Bishkek with his credit card—the least he could do. Then he made one final, futile call to the Kyrgyz embassy to see if anyone had located the body.
That evening, still at the office, he realized he had not checked his e-mail since the quake. He found old messages from family and friends, most of whom he’d already been in touch with by phone, but it was his father’s six worried messages that especially bothered him. I’m seeing total destruction on the television, he had written. I’m so afraid something’s happened to you. Jot me a note, for Christ’s sake, and let me know you’re all right.
Jeff wrote a two-word reply: I’m alive. Then he reconsidered, deleted it, and wrote in its place: Dad, I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. I’ve had my hands full. I’m fine.
One strange address at the bottom of Jeff’s inbox caught his eye, and he clicked on the message. He did not have to complete the first sentence before he knew it was not for him.
Since you left Dad’s been on a tear. He fired the principal and all the teachers and closed down the high school. He took down the grandstand at Red Dust Rodeo. Everyone’s seen him drunk up at the casino, tossing money into the machines. He’s just given up.
Pastor’s told me where you are, that you got stuck in the earthquake. Everyone here’s just worried is all, and wants to know you’re alive. You’re all anyone’s ever talking about. We’ve got council election coming in a month. Dad’s up for the sixth time, and no one’s happy about it. All Red Cliff’s wondering who else to run, but there ain’t no one. People just scared of him. Rumor’s going round that Adam Dale’s coming home, that you’ll run. Pastor, Mom, and Marie think the idea’s the bomb. You’ll win, I guarantee. We’re sick of him. Everyone’ll vote for a schoolboy college grad like you. Everyone here remembers the SHOT. No one talks about Levi—they think you did the right thing. You just gotta come back is all. People already putting up signs. Mom and Marie breaking out pots for the frybread.
—Verdena
PS: I want my abalone shell back. Don’t leave us hanging.
Jeff hoped this letter would be enough, perhaps, to persuade Adam he was making a mistake. He printed it out on his boss’s computer, folded it twice, stuck it in his jacket pocket, then left the office. In the kitchen of his apartment an hour later, he handed the printout to Adam. “Some news from home?”
Adam grabbed the paper, and immediately his face flushed. He read only halfway through the message and walked out of the kitchen in a rage. Sprawled on a blue kilim in the living room, he read the rest of it, holding the paper up at the ceiling lamp so the light shone through it.
Jeff joined him after a few minutes. “I got your tickets today, Adam. You kno
w what I think, though.” He sank into the couch and wiped his face with his hands. His arms felt like weights; he was exhausted. “You want to make sure she gets back, well, okay, I get it. But staying there?” He shook his head.
Adam scowled, folding the paper. “I did all right here. I’ll do all right with her.”
“It’s not like you can just turn around and change your mind. You don’t know what it’s like, over there, Adam. It’s isolated, way up in the mountains. Freezing long winters. No jobs. And the place is falling apart. Half the time there’s no electricity.” Jeff pointed to the letter. “You’ve got important things to take care of in Arizona.”
Adam slapped the paper. “I don’t need to think about all this shit. It’s good being away. I forget stuff.”
“All right. Just forget about it then.”
Adam was growing angrier. “You know what it’s like, Jeff? I mean the pressure. Watching everything around you die, and there’s nothing you can do.”
“No, I have no idea. What’s that like?” The sarcasm was unintentional. “I lived there, Adam.”
“And I remember once you told me to get away. ‘Gotta get away, Adam. Somewhere with a future.’”
Jeff shook his head. “I was pissed because no one wanted me there. It’s different with you. Stop the self-pity already. Look at the goddamn e-mail. They’re begging you! You don’t go back, who’s gonna help?”
This Is Not Civilization Page 31