Gardens of Water (11 page)

And she realized now—as she scraped the gooey cake crumbs of “ladies’ navels” into the trash—that she had spent more time since that day in the gray light of this kitchen than she had outside in the sun.

She slapped the plate against the trash can to loosen the pastry from the globs of honey and thought about taking each and every one of the tea saucers and smashing them to the floor.

But then Dylan arrived, carrying an armful of plates.

“Circumcision and food,” he said, setting the plates on the counter. “You Turks have got interesting ways of having fun.”

“It’s not supposed to be fun,” she said, scraping harder at the plates.

“Joke,” he said. “A joke?”

She stopped, blew air through her teeth, and leaned a fist on her hip.

“They really make you work, huh?” he said. “I’ll help.”

“No. You don’t have to.”

“It’s too much for one person.”

He took the first plate off the top of the stack, scooted closer to her, and ran it under the hot water. She could smell his cologne—not cologne exactly, not like the sharp scents the Turkish boys wore, but something that smelled like sweet burning, an oil maybe. She watched his hands circle the rim of the plate, looked at the back of his neck, admired the place where his earlobe met the curve of his jaw. Something about his posture, the way he concentrated on the washing, perhaps, made him seem so much older than she, though they were only two years apart. There was nothing separating them now, no glass, no metal, no cement, yet now she almost wished there were.

She left him there and returned to the living room. She wanted to get some air. Her mother and father were still sitting beside
smail, and she thought her brother looked very tired, as though all he wanted was for them all to go away and let him sleep. She stacked as many plates in her arms as possible, all the way up to her chin, and returned to the kitchen.

Dylan was still there, working now on a stack of utensils. She wanted him to stay and she wanted him to leave. She wanted him to be a man and stop washing the dishes, but she loved him for the help.

She placed the new stack of plates beside him.

“Slave driver,” he said.

She didn’t get the joke, but she smiled and laughed timidly just to make him happy.

He washed and she dried and she wondered if this was what it was like to be married to an American man. She wasn’t sure she liked it. What did a woman get in this world if she didn’t get the kitchen? But his company electrified her and she leaned in a little more and felt the steam from the sink touching her face and her heart started jumping all around and she had a difficult time getting her breath and suddenly his hand was on hers and she dropped the plate in the water.

“No,” she said, pulling away.

They both looked toward the doorway to see if anyone was coming.

He smiled and moved closer again, pressing her against the wall of the kitchen, taking both of her wet hands in his.

“No,” she said again, throwing away his hands and squirming free. She leaned against the doorway and adjusted her blouse and straightened her skirt. “Not in this house.”

Chapter 7

S
INAN STARTLED AWAKE FROM A DREAM IN WHICH HIS FATHER
scolded him for abandoning their village. “My grandson will never know Ye
illi, his home,” his father had said in the dream, his black eyes staring holes into Sinan. The house behind his father was on fire and it was very hot and Sinan wanted to tell him this but he couldn’t make his mouth work.

The clock next to the bed said 2:45. He kissed Nilüfer on the cheek before getting up in the dark and walking into the front room.

In the glow from the streetlights, he saw
smail there sleeping. A slight breeze blew through the open window, and the few strands of tinsel still stuck in his son’s hair sparkled in the wind. He stood next to the bed and listened to the steady rise and fall of the boy’s breath. He thought about closing the window—something about the wind touching his son’s sleeping face disturbed him—but it was too hot and he decided to leave it open. As he pulled the remaining strands of tinsel from his son’s hair,
smail stirred and swatted at the annoyance. His hand stuck there next to his ear, a loose fist with the palm open to the sky. There was an air of the sleeping infant in the pose, and it seemed to Sinan that only days before he had held the baby
smail in his arms, the small, pudgy body, the toothless gums of his mouth, that fresh powdery smell of his skin.

He climbed the staircase to the roof of the apartment building, and his left foot, deformed since birth, and sore from the day’s walking in
stanbul, throbbed with each step. It looked like Berker Bey, the owner of the apartment, was going to build another level—there was exposed rebar, bags of cement, and loosely stacked cinder blocks—but Sinan knew that he was really just avoiding paying taxes; the government couldn’t assess taxes until construction was finished. Life was full of these little immoralities.

From the rooftop he could see over the Americans’ terrace, past the other apartment rooftops and their cluttered satellite dishes, and out over the Gulf of
zmit toward the forested hillsides across the water. He stood on the edge of the roof, his shins pressing against the raised edge, and was surprised to see the American wife below him, sitting alone on a wicker chair. Her back was to him, her face turned toward the black water. She was still except for the rise and fall of her right hand, which held a lit cigarette.

For some reason he felt sorry for her, this woman he knew nothing about. She seemed the picture of loneliness at that moment—her stillness in the dark, the curve of her thick, motherly back, her bare white legs dully shining in the light of the waterfront. A lot of things were said about these Americans, but if they were so rich, he wondered, why didn’t they have their summer home in Yalova with all the other rich people? Gölcük, though by the sea, was a poor town, a working-man’s town. If they were so rich, why did the wife seem so sad? Maybe he should have been kinder to them at the party. He thought briefly about breaking her silence with a “Good evening,” but decided against it and retreated out of sight to sit on a plastic chair on the rooftop.

There he took off his left shoe and rubbed the inflamed stump that should have been a foot. He would have to run the register at the grocery for a few days so he could stay off the foot until the swelling went down.

He often sat on the roof when he couldn’t sleep. Since Öcalan had been caught by the government and the civil war in the South seemed over, his father had been visiting him more often in his dreams. His father would have been devastated to hear that the Turks had captured the PKK leader. Without Apo, as Öcalan was called by his father and all separatist-leaning Kurds, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party was effectively dead, and so was the movement to carve a Kurdistan out of a corner of Turkey. No one else could kill the Turkish paramilitaries the way Apo did; no one else could inspire such fear in the government buildings in Ankara.

Perhaps it was safe to return home to Ye
illi, but it was difficult to imagine it so. He touched the shard of bullet hanging from a chain around his neck—it was all he had left of his father, God bless him. He remembered the night his father was killed, the popping of the M-16 rifle shots, the screaming, the men and boys gathered for the new-year celebration diving away from the bonfires. His father had sent him home when the paramilitary jeeps arrived, and he was already past Emre Bey’s butcher shop when his father’s friends and the other men began yelling
Long live Kurdistan,
or else he might have been killed, too.

He felt a sting of guilt about having the Americans in his home. If his father had been here tonight, he wouldn’t have stepped into the apartment with them there. “The Americans let the Turks do this to us,” he would have said. “And now you feed them, invite them to your son’s most important day?” He had dishonored his father’s memory, and he would have to suffer the pangs of remorse for giving in to his wife’s hospitality.

He watched the streak of black water beyond the rooftops, and the city lights strewn around the bay like a necklace. The tea-black sky floated above him, punctured with only three stars, just three tiny pinpricks. At night in the village there were more stars than night sky, more worlds out there staring back than there were people in the whole of this city, probably more than there were people in all of the world’s cities. He wanted to return to Ye
illi, he wanted his children to grow up in the shadow of the mountains, but where would he get the money for the trip? How could he leave the business? How would he make a living there? He wanted to explain this to his father, tell him that it was best to stay here, for his children. There was nothing in the South—no jobs, no schools, no future. But even as he built his argument in his head, his father’s angry face appeared, and doubt clouded his logic.

The breeze felt like air blowing off an open fire. He heard the metal droning of cranes at the docks, a place that never stopped moving. You could hear its machinery grinding away at all hours of the day, during prayers, waking before sunrise in the morning—it didn’t matter, the sound was always there, like the scrape of gnashing your own teeth together. He could see a party boat floating close to shore, the white lights strung from its bow reflecting against the black water. As it got nearer to shore Sinan heard the thumping of music from loudspeakers and watched dozens of people dancing on its flat rooftop. The sound was distant and sad, like the echo of some lost pleasure. But as the boat drew closer to the dock, he heard individual voices, the laughter of women, a deejay announcing a raffle, and the clapping of hands. The deejay played another song, and it was so loud that Sinan got angry because he thought it might disturb his family’s sleep.