This Is Not Civilization

by Robert Rosenberg

  “Can’t guarantee they won’t.” Adam stepped back.

  “Maybe I’ll see you, then.”

  He could hardly look at Jeff. “Maybe I’ll see you.”

  He didn’t bother watching them walk away, but scanned the screen for departure information, found his Lufthansa flight to the States, lifted his duffle, and strode off through the crowd to look for the check-in counter.

  Without guests the apartment seemed enormous and empty. Jeff called in sick to work the next day and spent the afternoon slouching alone around the city. He felt he had nothing more to offer this world. His goodwill was exhausted. Thirty, and washed up. For an hour he sat on the jetty by the Kiz Kulesi and watched two young boys swim against the current of the polluted straits. Around him Istanbul was still in mourning. The screaming peddlers, the pleading shoeshine boys, the raucous gypsies—none of it had yet returned to life.

  It had thrilled him once, when he first arrived here: the sense that this city lay at the center of the world. An ancient earthquake had chiseled out these straits, and the ensuing flood had divided the continents. These roiling currents had swept the cold waters of the Black Sea down to the Aegean and the warm waters of the Mediterranean up to Russia. For over two millennia, from this very point, the city’s empires had spread east and west. Its emperors and sultans had ruled from that mighty-walled peninsula. Their gray palaces still loomed over the sea; their domed mosques still peered from the crowns of flowered hills toward Mecca.

  But on every hilltop now the concrete had grown outward and over the great peninsula. The vast empire had retreated upon itself. Its peoples left their inherited farms and war-ravaged nations. They fled distant mountain villages and the rusting ports of four different seas. They arrived with oversized bundles, crowded in burnt-out apartment buildings, collected in neighborhoods of shoddy cement structures and crouching cardboard houses. They lit homes with stolen electricity, they heated rooms with toxic coal, they fixed forests of makeshift antennas upon their roofs. And the people kept coming. The city had grown, swallowing suburbs and waterside villages, until entire regions of countryside, once shaded by vineyards and olive groves, were now no more than shantytowns. And no one these days even knew the city’s population. Some said seven million, books claimed ten, the news reported twelve, and authorities set it between fifteen and eighteen million—yet still the people came, until there were too many, and it seemed to Jeff the earth itself could not support them.

  He left the jetty, and early that evening took a taxi to the W. B. Yeats. Oren was out on a date, Mehmet had not arrived for work, and there was nobody behind the bar, nobody on the dance floor. In the bathroom the owner had hung another Yeats poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” printed in red, above the sink. Jeff made his way to the back room, where he sank into the green easy chair at the computer and checked the Arizona Republic Web site. The familiar names of Phoenix neighborhoods—Sun City, Chandler, Apache Junction—soothed him. For the first time in years he missed the heat of the Arizona blacktop in summer, the scent of air heavy with oranges, the saguaro cacti like sentinels on the highway medians. He remembered walking with his mother in a mall parking lot, in southern Phoenix. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Up ahead he had spotted his father, arm in arm, with another woman. He turned to his mother; she had also seen them. “What should we do?” he asked. Jeff wanted to confront the man, let him know the damage he was causing. They needed to have it out. Instead his mother gripped his arm and said, “Slow down. Just slow down. He doesn’t have to know we saw.”

  The words on the computer screen skated unintelligibly through his mind, until finally he realized the Internet server had failed. It could not find the article he wanted, and with the simple error message a sadness crept over him, a vast emptiness.

  He felt a light hand on his shoulder and jumped at the sound of Melodi’s raspy voice.

  “Why are you here, sitting all alone?”

  He turned. She was wearing a tight black silk blouse and jeans, and he noticed the slightest tan line, the outline of a facemask, across her cheeks. She leaned over him to examine the computer screen. “Just waiting for someone,” he lied.

  “I was so sorry I did not see you in Yeditepe,” she said, blinking her glittered purple eyelids. “After the earthquake—you know—I was very, very depressed. I saw Adam and Nazira. Did they tell you?”

  He clicked the search button on the keyboard once again. She came around and stood to his right.

  “You are angry at me, I know. Please, Jeff, I feel I have only been going to funerals, for days and days and days.” She waved her hand, palm out, the old Turkish exaggeration he’d always delighted in.

  Let her talk, he thought, she can talk all she wants. It got them nowhere. He scratched his knee.

  “I am back at the hospital,” she was saying. “We are short of nurses, but I was so tired, I took today off. I came here—I wanted a drink. And you, Jeff?” she asked. “How are you?”

  He turned from her again, back to the stalled computer screen, so she would not see his face.

  “Çok üzgünüm,” she said. “Jeff, I’m so sorry.” She began to rub his shoulders from behind. He tensed, but was grateful; he released a long breath. Her strong fingers worked into his shoulders, and he reached up and pressed each of his hands onto hers, remembering the pleasure of holding them, of touching this smooth dark skin. His mother would have adored Melodi. Both of them were stubborn bighearted women who knew how to put him in his place.

  She lifted his left hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles. He didn’t move. She embraced him from behind, around his neck, pressing her ear against his, whispering comforting thoughts in Turkish, thoughts he could barely understand. “Geçmiş olsun,” she said at last. May it all pass quickly.

  On the screen the error message appeared: the Web site could not be found.

  It was very sad, he thought, what had happened between them. The smallest things that divided. All the ways people managed not to save one another. He did not want to move, not one inch. He wanted only to surrender to this life. He thought it would do him good to stay here awhile, just like this, in her grasp, cheek to cheek. There were worse places to be. He felt a wetness on his neck, Melodi’s own tears running down under his T-shirt, sliding cold along his chest.

  “Come here,” he said, turning to face her. He pulled her around the easy chair, then solidly onto his lap.

  In the overbooked plane Nazira had to steal a seat from a Kyrgyz man who had foolishly chanced the restroom. Her luggage blocked the aisle—neither sports bag would fit in the overhead compartment. She argued with a stewardess who demanded she move them, until the woman finally huffed and gave in. Nazira settled into the lumpy seat. The Russian businessman to her left would not share the armrest, and above her the reading light did not work. She felt as if she was already home.

  She closed her eyes during takeoff. The unfamiliar turbulence of the flight—Nazira’s first—made it hard for her to breathe. Nothing held the airplane up; the deserts and mountains of Asia swam kilometers below her feet. She passed the first hours remembering her duties to her father. She would have to get the relatives in Cholpon Bai to assemble the yurt, the women would sing the koshoks for three days. She could barely remember the words: “When our father was with us, we could touch the sky. Now we have been separated from him, now we are left alone . . . May your daughters live a long life, may your sons always be happy, they are my gift that you left me, they are the ones on whom I can rely . . .”

  The men would enter the yurt, singing, “Dear father, I will never see you again.” Lola would help her bake the borsok. Nazira would need to ask the men to slaughter a horse. For three days the village guests would come; the women would cry and sing and wet their faces. This is what they must do, even without the body to wash and bury. On the morning of the third day the village mullah would recite the janaza—their final farewell.

  If Adam had come, what would he have thought?
He could have helped slaughter the horse. He might have learned how to assemble a yurt. Would he have wailed, like the other men, during the janaza?

  His gift! She pushed her seat upright, removed the envelope from her purse, reached inside it, and slid out a thick bundle wrapped in manila paper. It took her a moment to decipher Adam’s rough handwriting: N—This will help awhile. Use it for your son.—A.

  She unwrapped the paper and found, secured with a rubber band, a stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. The pile was heavy in her hand, like a brick. She lowered it into the folds of her skirt, between her legs, and checked that the Russian to her left was still asleep. One by one she counted the bills. Ten thousand American dollars.

  Her heart skipped, and she fumbled with the green money, trying to get the edges of the bills lined up evenly again. At last she hid it away in her purse. It was too much—she couldn’t keep such money on her body. Sweat dripped down her arms, and suddenly she worried that with this money she would never make it back to her village alive. She clutched her purse to her stomach for the rest of the trip.

  The plane landed in Bishkek at dawn, and she climbed down the stairs onto the steady ground. The airport hosts were dressed in traditional Kyrgyz costume—red felt vests and fur-lined hats—and they offered the passengers warm pieces of bread before herding them onto a rusted airport bus. A faded poster on the bus still advertised the thousandth anniversary of the Epic of Manas. Another proclaimed MENCHEEKTESHTEEROO. The shuttle bus backfired and sputtered but managed the two-minute drive to the terminal without breaking down.

  It was a long taxi ride to Bishkek’s otovakzal. There, she loaded her luggage in the lower compartment of a bus leaving for Talas. Halfway through the eight-hour trip they pulled into the rest stop in Kazakhstan. The maggot-filled outhouse reeked worse than she remembered, but Nazira did not mind much. She had expected it, even with a strange anticipation. At the Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka bus stop a benzene seller offered her a lift to the village. She said nothing to him of her father or of where she had been for nearly a month. They piled her things into his truck and drove along Fifty Years of October Street, past the new mosque (still under delayed construction) to the cheese factory, where she would store the luggage. Later she would drag it home to Karl Marx Street.

  The door to the factory office was locked. Nazira pressed her face against the dark window, blocking the late afternoon sunlight. “Alo?” she called and patted the glass pane. Somebody should have been working. She stood on her toes and looked in again. Her father’s office was barren; there were no books on the shelves, no papers on the desks, no calendars on the walls. Abandoning the window, she dragged the oversize bags to the stables. The sliding door lay open, but she found the building ghostly empty: not a single cow remained, not even the smell of cow. She pushed the bags against the aluminum wall and in a panic hurried along the muddy street that led to her father’s home.

  Crashing through the gate into the courtyard, she found, sitting on the tea bed—not Lola and the children, as she had expected—but Baktigul. A beige silk platok was tied around her sister’s head, and behind her a powerful figure drew forward. Traktorbek. He was lounging on the cushion like a sultan, poised to pull red chunks of dripping shashlyk off a skewer with his teeth.

  Not one of them moved. From the kitchen window Lola spotted Nazira and shrieked in surprise. She called inside to the children, and through the door a small figure shot out of the darkness and into the dusty courtyard.

  Suddenly Traktorbek, Lola, and Baktigul were all speaking at once, but Nazira heard nothing. She was aware only of her child running toward her, screaming, “Ama, Ama!” Over the last few years she could never be sure if time in this village marched forward or backward, but it no longer mattered: with her father’s death, it seemed all time had stopped. Manas clutched her legs and held them. Ten thousand dollars—Adam’s gift to her—would be enough to raise him, to keep his body clothed, his stomach fed, as he grew. She bent and embraced him, kissed both of his ruddy cheeks, lifted him and squeezed him tight to her chest. “Uff! You’ve gotten so big!” she said, and gave her son one long kiss above his wet nose, between his blue American eyes.

  She lowered him to the ground and looked up. Baktigul was beaming triumphantly. Traktorbek had risen, and was addressing her politely. “Eje,” he had called her. Big sister. “Kosh Kelingiz!” He was welcoming her into her own home, the home in which she had grown up, given birth. Nazira froze; she didn’t know which direction to turn. This squat, shiftless hooligan, who sold meat in the bazaar, who had dreamed of opening a gas station in the capital, had upset the balance of the family. But now she had no choice. Now the balance must be regained; now, more than anything, they would need a man. Steeling herself, she stepped forward to offer her hand.

  “Thank you, brother,” she said, grimacing. “How is your health?”

  “Jakshii.”

  “How are your works?”

  “Jakshii.”

  “And how is your family?”

  “Jakshii.” Traktorbek smiled, offered her an infuriating half-bow. “And our father?” he asked. “Has he come back with you?”

  Nazira steadied herself, then turned to bear Lola the unbearable news.

  From the plane window Adam could see through the clear air of Arizona. He would not allow himself to think of Nazira or Anarbek, and to take his mind off of them, he had just finished for the second time an old Newsweek article describing Bill Clinton’s visit to a South Dakota reservation—the first president to set foot on Indian land since 1936. In his speech the president promised that rez town immediate access to the Internet.

  He forced Nazira’s face from his mind, conjuring up instead the city he had left last night, remembering the statues and photographs of Atatürk. Father Turk, the people had called him. Adam pressed his forehead to the window. The Red Mountains, small as goose bumps, swept past below. The plane approached Phoenix and he spotted Sun Devil Stadium, and then the Arizona State campus. The plane canted, circling the downtown towers, over Bank One Ballpark, and then over the capitol.

  The family met him at the gate. His mother was twisting her thin gray hair, and Aunt Marie Anne stood with her fists on her hips, a prescient authority in her cold expression. Adam dropped the duffle bag.

  “Mom.”

  Lorena came close, reached up to his face, and touched his forehead. Her fingers drew lines over his nose and over the arcs of his ears as she took him in. He accepted the affection without moving his head; he felt almost impenetrable, and the rage was gone. When he spoke, he directed the words straight into her eyes. “Came back to see you.”

  She grasped both his hands and offered him her defeated smile. “You gained weight.”

  “It was those kebaps,” he said.

  In the parking lot the seats of Jeff’s old Toyota pickup scalded his legs as he slid in. Marie Anne drove them out of Phoenix, and halfway home they stopped at McDonald’s and switched places. Adam drove the last two hours to the reservation. The high desert spread before them through the burning late-summer haze. Saguaro and cholla dotted the dry cliffs. He drove through the mining towns of Globe and Miami, beyond the Wal-Mart, and higher up, toward the Salt River Canyon—the swift expanse of cliffs, the dazzling light—and higher still, into the piñón pines. He rolled down the window, and warm, clean air lapped against his face. He could practically smell home—the manzanita berries, the wild horses—and in those smells he knew the steady peace of sacrifices rightly made.

  “Tell me what’s been going on,” he asked his aunt.

  Marie Anne uncrossed her arms and seemed to think about it, as if she had to travel far back into her memory. Adam wound the truck through the canyon. When they reached the top, his aunt cleared her throat and looked straight ahead. In pure Apache, the sound of the syllables a benediction, she told him the news: who had won that year’s Fourth of July rodeo, who had taken off to Tucson and gotten into all kinds of trouble, who had been fired from the sawmill
.

  His mother pushed him playfully in the side of the head with her palm. “Istanbul, heh? What were you thinking? Six months I am praying nothing happened to you.” She gripped his elbow. “Now look there,” she said. “You’re almost back.” She pointed across Adam’s chest, over the steering wheel, to the hill in the distance, the mesa rising behind Lonely Mountain.

  He slowed the pickup at the Turnoff. A spray-painted sign stood next to Uncle Sparky’s memorial:

  Don’t Screw Up Vote A. Dale.

  “What’s this? I didn’t tell you I was running.”

  Marie Anne said to his mother, “Go ahead.”

  His mother nodded, speaking almost in a yell. “Your father’s thinking he might not run for council again. Says he’s tired of fighting for this town. Says no one’s appreciating him.”

  “Afraid he’d lose, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll run?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Didn’t say I’d run.”

  Let them beg if they wanted him, let the whole town beg. He stepped hard on the gas and made a right at the Turnoff, following the only paved road. Each time he had left Red Cliff, he returned to find that the town seemed smaller, as if the outside world had grown. Now he had been halfway around the earth, as far as a man could go. Crossing over the pass, he could see it in the distance, the strip of the white deflated school dome, the corrugated iron roofs blinking in the sun, a town so small it seemed like nothing, like he could palm it in his hand.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest gratitude to

  My agent, Dorian Karchmar, an inspired reader and a tireless coach, and my editor, Heidi Pitlor, for her creative vision and utter dedication. They are true chong kishi, and a first-time novelist could not have been more privileged.

  To my father, Ron Rosenberg, for the words of wisdom that kick-started this book; my mother, Marilyn Crain, for a decade of long-distance phone calls; as well as Teri Rosenberg, Howie Crain, Linda and Jerry Marsh, Dan and Sharyn Rosenberg, Lori and Darren Ruschman, Todd and Barbara Marsh, Steve Hamm, Allison Hamm, Jessica Crain, and Melissa Crain.