Gardens of Water (31 page)

She heard a shuffling behind her and snapped her head around, her heart beating with panic.

It was Dylan.

She smiled and dropped her skirt to cover her calves; she even sat down and pulled her feet inside and stretched the fabric down to cover her toes. The pink fabric blossomed red around her feet. She watched the water, acting as though she didn’t see him. She knew, though, that he knew she was playacting. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him strutting down the beach. A bubble gathered in her throat, threatening to burst into a giggle. When he sat down next to her, she could hear the music coming from his headphones, but she still looked away, her hand pressed against her mouth to squelch the laugh.

“You know,” he said, pulling the headphones from his ears. “German women down in Bodrum lie around on the beach topless.”

She blushed and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Stupid women,” she said. “They’ll make the men do terrible things.” She could just imagine the Turkish men hovering around those women, their tongues hanging out of their mouths like feral dogs.

“Nobody gives a damn, really.”

“Why do you always curse?” She looked at him now.

“They’re just words,” he said. “They’re only offensive if you let them be.”

“Turkish men see a woman’s body and they think they own it.”

“Maybe because you guys make such a big deal about it.” He lit a cigarette and let the wind carry the smoke above his head. “You hide your toes,” he said pointing with the cigarette, “and they become the sexiest thing alive.”

He was making fun of her!

“You show it all off and it becomes nothing,” she said.

He just shrugged and looked out at the water. Ah, he could be so frustrating! They sat like that for a minute, in silence looking at the cool water. It was hot; she could feel herself sweating beneath the fabric of her blouse. He was wearing dark jeans, and a black T-shirt that showed off the tattoos on his arms and the leather bands around his wrists.
rem wondered why he would wear such hot clothes in this heat, if he didn’t have to.

She inched her toes out from beneath the skirt, just little crescents of toenails poking out.

He glanced at them and smiled.

“You know,” he said, “my mom and dad and I took a trip down to the Sinai once, in Egypt. We were at this beach—Sharm el-Sheikh, I think—and I saw this woman swimming in her
abaya.
Man, it was the craziest thing—dressed head to toe in black, all the fabric billowing out like a parachute. Something happened, she slipped, a wave hit her, something, but she fell down and the wet fabric got so heavy she almost drowned. Her husband had to jump in and pull her to shore. He slapped her when he got her to the beach.” He blew smoke away from his face.

Was he comparing her to this woman? A fundamentalist in an
abaya
? At least she got to wear pretty skirts and nice blouses. Her parents were conservative, but they weren’t fundamentalists.

She remembered a trip to Büyükada Island years before, back when her father still took her swimming. She was floating in the water next to a man with a thick black beard. He kept paddling like a dog does, his head held just above the water, his eyes squinting against the splashes he inflicted upon himself. He kept splashing her, too, and she wanted to tell him to go swim somewhere else, but she would never do such a thing. Suddenly, he stopped thrashing around and stood up, his head and shoulders above the water. It surprised her because she couldn’t see the bottom and her toes didn’t touch anything. She had assumed she’d swum out into deep water, and she had been proud of herself for not being scared. He waved toward the beach and a woman in full
abaya
—a rare sight then—waved back. He kept waving, like a stupid child, but the woman—his wife, she guessed—had put her hand down and stared out at her husband with an absolutely blank expression, as though she were dead, a black ghost on a white beach.

“That’s what used to piss my mom off the most about being here,” Dylan said. “The way some men think they own women.”

She thought about telling Dylan her memory, but she realized he’d compare her to the poor woman on the beach, and, even worse, he’d think her stupid for not recognizing the irony in her own memory.

“But that didn’t happen here,” she said. “Egypt is different. The Arabs are barbaric.”

He looked at her, smiled, and glanced at her toes again.

“You won’t even show your ankles,” he said.

“It’s immodest,” she said. “Besides, men cannot control themselves. It’s better this way.”

“You really believe that?” He looked at her as though she were the stupidest girl in the world and she felt a hot embarrassment flood her body.

“Women here don’t have to cover themselves,” she said. “It’s a choice.”

“Is that what your dad said?”

She clenched her jaw. “Yes,” she said. “I don’t have to do this.”

He handed her the cigarette, but she was too mad to smoke it. She just held it away from her face while he untied his shoes.

“What’re you doing?” she said.

“It’s hot.”

He pulled off his shoes and stripped away his socks.

“What’re you doing?” she said again, looking around.

He rolled up his pants to his knees, revealing dark curly hair poking out of white calves. He sat down and dropped his legs in the water. Goose pimples speckled his skin.

“Ahh,” he said. “Shit, that feels good.”

“Stop cussing,” she said.

“Too bad you gotta protect me from myself.”

The water distorted the shape of his legs, making him look short.

“You look like a midget,” she said. It was a silly thing to say, but she felt like being mean.

“
Cüce?
” he said. “What?”

“A small person, a mini—like people in the circus, like a Roma.”

“Hey,” he said, laughing. “Come over here and say that to my face.”

She laughed and looked around the beach again. There was a hill to the right, and behind them a rise separated the beach from the camp. From the camp, all you saw was the sea. You only knew a beach was there once you were practically standing on top of it.

She scooted over to him and slowly, timidly, rolled up her skirt. With each roll, a strange fluttering beat in her stomach; it was like being a little sick, but in a good way.

“Be careful,” he said, holding his hands in front of his face. “I might lose control of myself.”

Sometimes she wished he would shut up.

She stopped rolling the skirt when she reached her knees, and when she set her legs in the water, a sudden and pleasant chill shot through her body.

“
Cüce,
” she said, jerking her face his way.

“American guys don’t like to be called short,” he said, with more seriousness in his voice than she expected.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

She watched their legs—so close she thought she could feel the heat from his skin, even beneath the water. He stared out at the sea and didn’t seem to be paying attention, so she flexed her toes to make the muscle come up on her calf. Nothing. She was naked in front of him, and he didn’t even notice! She thought about brushing her leg against his, but that was too much, and the silence thickened until the air felt as heavy as honey and she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore.

He flicked the cigarette out into the water and she watched it bob on a wave.

“You know,” he said. “I really don’t care if you want to cover yourself.” He dug a hole in the sand with his heel. “You make me nervous, so I tease you.”

“I make
you
nervous?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re different than other girls.”

Different how? she wanted to ask, but she was afraid to know, so she said nothing and they sat there in silence watching the tiny waves break and ebb against the shore.

“Hey, listen,” he said, pulling his earphones from his neck. “I want you to hear this.”

Before she knew what he was doing, he pulled the edge of her head scarf back to reveal her ear.

“Stop,” she said, grabbing his hand.

“It’s only so you can hear this.”

She stared at him, still holding his hand.

“There’s no one here,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

She dropped her hand and let him push back the scarf from her other ear. His fingers touched her hair as he positioned the headphones, and when the music started—sad, beautiful music, like gray birds flying in a foggy sky—the sound swept over her in a way she couldn’t explain except to say that she could feel it inside of her, as though the instruments were playing in her chest.

“What’s this?”

“Radiohead,” he said. “They’re incredible.”

She had never heard anything like this before. It was sad music, music like crying, music like a beautiful death and she felt he was letting her inside of him, into his own sadness.

He watched her as she listened, his eyes intent on her face as though he were hearing the music that was inside of her now. As she listened the world receded. There was no
stanbul, no destroyed town, no camp, just the two of them on the beach—a tiny warm bubble of music and their naked legs together in the cool water.

“It’s good,” she said. “Really good.”

“You can have it.”

“I don’t have the right machine.”

“No,” he said. “I mean you can have the player, too.”

She looked at him, stunned by the present.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve got another one.”

Something moved behind them on the hill.

“Someone’s coming,” Dylan said.

Chapter 23

S
INAN SLEPT FOR EIGHTEEN HOURS, A BLACK SLEEP FREE
of nightmares of collapsing buildings and bodies wrapped in burlap, an uninterrupted sleep without startling awake and the late-night bouts of insomnia. He slept like he hadn’t since he was a child, and for those precious few hours he had been free of the burdens of a man.

When he finally woke, he found himself staring at the blank whiteness of the tent’s top. It took his conscious mind a moment to catch up to his eyes, so at first he thought the world had been erased, that he was with God in a paradise that was not green at all, but instead as clean as mid-winter snow. And in his exhaustion, before logical thoughts told him that this was ridiculous, before he remembered his wife and his children, before the memory of the earthquake jolted loose in his brain, he was glad for that emptiness. It demanded nothing, it did not ask to be interpreted or understood. It suggested that God was nothing more than a benign force; a mind could be at ease in such a world.

He moved his left leg and a stinging pain shot up his back. His heart throbbed with disappointment. First because pain still existed in Heaven, and then a half moment later—like a collision of realizations—because this was not Heaven at all but the inside of one of the American’s tents. Through the white fabric, he saw a whiter splotch of light where the sun beat down. He was zipped inside a sleeping bag that smelled of detergent, and he threw it off himself and tried to sit up but his back hurt and his ribs felt like they had been stretched to the breaking point only to be pressed back together around his lungs. Nilüfer and the children were gone, but their unzipped bags lay next to him.

He couldn’t find his shoes, so he crawled out of the tent in his socks and bandaged left foot. A family, sitting in the sun drinking tea and eating bread with honey, stared back at him as though he had landed uninvited in their living room. He was embarrassed. He had not combed his hair, his armpits smelled, and he stood in the dirt in plain socks.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Good morning.”

“Good afternoon,” the woman said and smiled as though he were crazy.

That sent his heart racing; half the day gone and he hadn’t found his family even a bite of food to eat or searched out a job. Still half-asleep and disoriented, he found his shoes beside the tent entrance, only because he kicked them over. He slipped his right foot in and carefully fitted his left into the special shoe, but because it was wrapped in the bandage it wouldn’t fit inside comfortably. Out ahead of him stretched a sea of tents, like white sails rolled to points and fixed to the ground. He stumbled through the street as though he were trudging through oil, and he wanted to sit down, he wanted to go back to the tent and sleep again.

He found Nilüfer coming toward him, two paper plates of piled scrambled eggs in her hands.

“You stubborn man,” she said. “You shouldn’t be on that foot. You don’t listen to me.”

“Listen to you?”

“I told you to stay asleep,” she said.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“You’re exhausted.” She balanced the two plates of eggs in one hand and used the other to buttress his left shoulder, and they walked like that back to the tent.

“Where are the children?” he said.

“Around here somewhere.”

“Where?” he said.

“Sinan,
can
m,
they’re safe. A doctor saw
smail yesterday and said he is fine. Don’t worry about them.” She used her fingers to caress the fabric of his shirt where it was pulled tight around his shoulders. “Don’t worry now.”

When they reached the tent, she helped him inside. Sitting next to him, she crossed her legs like a child and revealed a sliver of skin between the elastic of the pantaloon leggings and her socks.

“
smail and
rem have eaten,” she said. “This is for you.”

The skin of the paper plate was warm and soaked with grease.

“You should have seen it,” she said. “They had eggs and fried potatoes and even orange slices. There were little flat cakes with sweet syrup, but the children ate all those and there weren’t any left for you. I’m sorry.” She smiled. “They were so happy to eat them that I couldn’t say no. Also there was juice for the children, Kool-Aid, they call it.” She picked at her eggs. “A real American breakfast.”

Sinan scooped up the eggs with the plastic fork and placed a biteful on the tip of his tongue. They were watery and oversalted, but they tasted like Heaven.

“The children have eaten?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’ll serve dinner at five.”

He nodded and felt a weight of responsibility drop from his shoulders. He took another bite of the eggs and the buttery yolks melted on his tongue. And before he could stop it, a welling rose in his throat and he nearly choked on the food. The water gathered in the back of his eyes, and exhaustion, like heavy blankets being folded around his limbs, took possession of his body.

He dropped the eggs on the floor of the tent and placed his fingers on the exposed skin of his wife’s leg. He pushed the pantaloons up her calf, enough so that the whole palm of his hand could touch her skin. He dropped his head and kissed the skin there, rested his cheek against the ridge of her shinbone, and collapsed in her lap.

“Shh,” she said. “Shh. Everything will be all right.”