Gardens of Water (14 page)

The American whimpered something in English and softly ran his hands over the thigh, dug his nails between skin and debris to jostle it loose. The color of the skin and the way it moved under the man’s touch left little doubt that the woman was dead. The American repeated a phrase, air escaping from his mouth as if he were hyperventilating.

“I’m sorry,” Sinan said.

The man did not look up, but he bent the knee out of the destruction to reveal a broken foot, the ankle blue and swollen the size of a fist. He hugged the knee, pulled it to his chest, and kept repeating a single phrase in English while he rocked back and forth.

“I’m sorry,” Sinan said again, resting his hand on the man’s back. “But we’ve got to dig her out.”

The American stopped and nodded. Sinan pulled at a piece of sheet metal that shook the leg.

“Gently, gently!” the American screamed. “Gently, please.”

Together they lifted the twisted metal from her body. Then they brushed away cement dust that had buried her thigh. Her shorts were pulled high to expose her underwear and a little of what was hidden beneath. Sinan choked with pain for the man, and worked her shorts down over the smooth edge of her thighs. They removed ropes of rebar and lifted the wet cloth of a rug that clung around her stomach. They did it so softly, with such slow, deliberate care, that Sinan remembered the night he cleaned his father’s body for burial—the way he scrubbed between the cold fingers, and washed his penis and the soft skin of his testicles. He remembered squeezing the water from the wet cloth over a bullet wound where his eye should have been, the black blood turning red and trickling across the mottled skin of his cheek and down over his white lips.

A tent of wooden slats leaned above the woman’s chest, and they tried to dislodge them gently so as not to cause damage to her face. Each one they pulled revealed more of the woman—an arm with a silver bracelet looping around the wrist, the blade of a shoulder, her sunburned neck pushing through a shirt. The other side of the woman’s body and her face was covered by a wet shower curtain and one heavy block of broken cinder. The shower curtain was painted like a coral reef and colorful fish with smiles on their faces swam in the imaginary water. They removed the cinder block and suddenly the shower curtain jerked.

“She’s alive,” the American said. He spoke frantically in English, and they both reached to tug loose the waterlogged curtain.

Then a miracle! “Oh God most merciful,” Sinan said when he saw it. Beneath the woman, caught in her embrace, lay
smail, his face white with cement dust, his body convulsed in a coughing fit.

“
smail!”

The boy’s eyes flashed open as if he were taking in the world for the first time, his pupils filling with the angry spark of life.

Sinan didn’t wait for them to remove the American wife’s body. He tugged at his son’s shoulders and dislodged him from beneath the woman’s weight, but he couldn’t pull him free. He turned to see what was holding him still, and found the woman’s hand clamped around
smail’s forearm. He had to wait for the American to uncurl each stiffened finger before he had his son in his arms, safe, and free from death.

Chapter 10

W
HEN THEY REACHED THE PANDEMONIUM OF THE GERMAN
hospital Sinan was told his son had been buried alive for nearly three days.

“Unbelievable,” the doctor said when he checked the boy in an examination room filled with dead bodies. Each body was laid out on a gurney, covered in a blue sheet, only the feet sticking out—men’s polished black shoes shining like mirrors, pink shaggy house slippers, bare toes red with enamel. “We haven’t gotten someone alive all day.”
smail had a cut above his left eye, swelling around the wound where his foreskin had been cut away in the circumcision, and a mild case of dehydration. They would have to watch for internal bleeding, the doctor said.

“His body should be completely dried out.” The doctor shook his head in awed disbelief. “Unbelievable.”

“Why won’t he wake up?” Sinan asked.

“Exhaustion.”

“But he’ll wake?”

“Yes.”

The doctor turned to Sinan.

“Let me look at you. Your left eye is dilated.” The doctor shined a light in Sinan’s eyes and the pain flashed in his head. “You have a mild concussion,” he said. “We’ll have to run some tests later.” Then outside the room a door slammed, people yelled, and a man ran by with a woman hoisted over his shoulders. The doctor left and never came back, to run the tests or to do anything else.

Sinan spent the night sitting upright in a metal chair beside
smail’s bed in an icy room surrounded by seven dead bodies. He could hear the hospital’s generators laboring beyond the cold walls. He checked the walls for cracks and found one etched from ceiling to floor, marking the edges of bricks hidden beneath egg-colored paint. The other rooms of the hospital were full, the nurse told him when he asked to move the bed, and the hallways were filling up with corpses. The air conditioners had been turned up until there was space in the morgues. She darkened the room to save them the burden of seeing the bodies, and switched on a bedside lamp that threw a weak yellow glow across the bed. The darkness eased the throbbing at Sinan’s temples and for a while he could pretend that the rest of the world did not exist, that there was only his son breathing on this bed.

The boy’s face seemed sunken, diminished of muscle and fat. Sinan held
smail’s hand and felt the bone of the knuckles, ran his fingers over the soft pads of his son’s palm. An IV punctured a vein in
smail’s forearm, and Sinan noticed how tiny
smail’s arms really were. Before this he had felt his son was growing too fast, his body too quickly thickening into a young man’s, but now he recognized how truly fragile he was. Life had barely taken root in him and the boy’s body seemed ready to give it up.

Sinan tucked the blanket underneath
smail’s shoulders, back, and legs. He rested his head on his hands and watched the rise and fall of
smail’s breath, counting the seconds between each one. Sometime in the night the nurse draped a blanket over his shoulders, and, as if being given permission, he fell asleep…

“Oh, Baba, it hurts.”

Sinan snapped awake, lifting his head from
smail’s lap where it had fallen. “It hurts, Baba.”

Electrified with panic, Sinan shoved the blankets aside and tried to see if he was bleeding internally. He looked for red streaks, or a rash creeping across the skin. He tried to see something moving beneath the surface. What would it look like? He should have asked the doctor.

“Where?” Sinan said. “Where does it hurt?”

But
smail just moaned.

“Tell me,
smail. Where?”

With both hands,
smail grabbed his crotch. “Here,” he said. “It burns.”