Gardens of Water (32 page)

Chapter 24

S
HE STRIPPED THE HEADPHONES FROM HER EARS AND JUMPED
out of the water, shaking the skirt back down around her ankles.

She glanced up at the beach and saw a man carrying a fishing pole and cresting the hill. She recognized the man from her father’s store, but she couldn’t remember his name. He was looking the other way on the beach, his hand shaded against the sun and it seemed he had not seen them.

Dylan went left and she went right, hoping she didn’t run into anyone else with her shoes in her hands. When she was out of sight of the fisherman, she sat down on the beach and scraped the black pebbles from her wet toes. She started to put her shoes back on, but suddenly felt stupid. She hadn’t done anything wrong—just listened to some music and talked with a boy. Women were lying naked on beaches somewhere. Turkish women in
stanbul went dancing in clubs, drank and smoked with men they slept with. She had only had a conversation.

The ground was rough beneath her feet, but she carried her shoes, swaying from her fingers like two trophies to defiance. She walked up the path where bushes crowded the sand and thorns stuck between her toes, but she bit her lip and walked on anyway. The sun was lower than she expected and she thought she might have missed dinner, but she didn’t care. She walked through the camp barefoot, watching to see if anyone noticed her bare toes, trying to get another look at Dylan but he was nowhere to be found and no one seemed to care about her feet. She found Dilek and Ay
e still swinging the rope for the little girl. People sat around outside, smoking and drinking and watching the girls jump, but she didn’t care about that, either.

“I’ve found him,” she said to Dilek and jumped into the rope.

The rope came around and she jumped just as she heard it hit the ground.

“Faster,” Ay
e said to Dilek, and
rem watched the rope circle overhead.

She jumped and felt the rope pick up speed. She jumped and pebbles pressed into the raw skin of her heels and the soft balls of her feet. She jumped and jumped again, her heart beating faster, the blood rushing through her veins, her head spinning with the speed of the arc.

Chapter 25

T
HAT EVENING AFTER DINNER, MARCUS ARRIVED AT THE TENT
with bandages and antiseptic. Nilüfer and the children were out in the camp, doing what he didn’t know, but, for once, their whereabouts did not worry him. Sinan had felt, for much of his adult life, as though he were the last barrier at the edge of town, a wall between the soldiers and his family, and should he fall asleep or look the other way, however briefly, the hostile forces would carry his family away. Even after moving to Gölcük, where there was no fear of attacks from the Special Teams, he couldn’t shake himself loose of this fear. Now, though, the military was gone. Even the tanks that rumbled down the streets of Gölcük each day were crushed under the cement of collapsed barracks, and the relief he felt was palpable in the leaden weight of his body. He thought about refusing Marcus’s help, but he was exhausted, and, besides, he liked the idea of an American doing something as base as washing his foot.

Marcus removed the sock and Sinan could smell the stench of sweat and blood and dirt. The discolored skin had stretched and separated like a seam and bled from chapped tears in the skin. He watched the American, thinking he would cringe or hold his nose or put on latex gloves, but the American did none of those things. He held Sinan’s foot in his hand and washed the blood away with a cotton swab—his blood staining the man’s skin.

“Do you know what your government did to us in the South?” Sinan said.

“I know what the American government allows the Turkish military to do,” Marcus said, never removing his eyes from the foot.

“The village next to mine was burned to the ground,” Sinan continued. “Women and children were killed.”

“I know.”

“And for what?” Sinan said. “Because—”

“Because you want to speak your own language, because you want your land, because the U.S. and NATO want Russia out of the Mediterranean.”

“Oil,” Sinan said.

There was silence for a moment while Marcus wrapped Sinan’s foot and pressed a metal hook into the fabric to keep it in place.

“There will never be a Kurdistan,” Sinan said, “because the Americans want the oil in Kirkuk.”

“And the British and the Dutch and the Iraqis, the Iranians,” Marcus said.

“The Turks,” Sinan added, feeling, strangely, like he was agreeing with the man.

“Try to keep it elevated,” Marcus said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”

And the next night he returned to perform the operation again. Sinan was happy for the American’s return because a loneliness was setting in, and the darkness of the tent in the evening and the absence of his family only deepened the feeling.

“Do you know,” Sinan said this time, “that this place used to be a prison?”

“No.”

His foot was covered in less blood this time and when the American touched the gauze with the alcohol to the cuts, it didn’t hurt so badly.

“When the military depopulated the South and rounded up boys they said were terrorists, they took them here. That tower near the soup kitchen is where the soldiers stood with their machine guns.”

Marcus remained focused on his work—pressing gauze on the cuts, dabbing away dried blood between the toes.

“There was a room with wires attached to a car battery.”

Marcus spread petroleum jelly on the split skin and taped a bandage there to keep the wounds from sticking to the wrapping material.

“There was another room without windows. They left them in there for days—left them sitting in their own piss, in their own feces.”

“I’ve heard the same horrible stories, Sinan.”

Marcus stretched the fabric over the stump—one time around, two times around…

“You Americans knew about this, but you never forced the government to shut it down,” Sinan said.

“I was living here, Sinan.”

He felt like kicking the American, but he controlled his foot if not his mouth. “You never made the Turks stop destroying villages, forcing people to move west. Did you actually believe, like the idiots in Ankara, that making people homeless would stop the war?”

…three times and then the metal clip.

“No. The Americans think, Just keep sending Ankara money, just keep selling them weapons, their war is our profit.”

“The PKK killed teachers,” Marcus said. “Because they had to teach in Turkish.”

What he said was true. Kurdish teachers were killed by the PKK for no fault of their own; the state wouldn’t allow them to teach in Kurdish. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party killed whole Kurdish families, Sinan could have added, because they were suspected of collaborating with the Turkish military. But Sinan said nothing, because those disgusting facts embarrassed him.

“Depopulation was a bad policy,” Marcus said, as though to appease Sinan. “An immoral one.”

“The Europeans,” Sinan said, his voice calming now, “got them to shut the prison down—the French and the Germans—not the Americans.”

“Keep the foot elevated, Sinan. I think it’s getting better.” He stood to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

The next night, Sinan had Nilüfer make tea before she left for the evening. She said she was doing laundry, but he saw no laundry. What are the children doing? They spend time in the school tent, Sinan.
smail plays soccer.
rem talks with Dilek and Ay
e. Don’t worry about them. Rest.

The tea was bitter and tasted of metal and he was embarrassed to serve it, but Marcus drank it and, for a few moments, the simple act of pouring tea for a guest tricked his mind into believing everything was normal. Then, after the first cup of small talk, as though all the events of the last two weeks had been waiting to break loose from him, Marcus told Sinan about his wife’s funeral—the long flight to New Hampshire, the knowledge that her body lay beneath them in the cargo hold, the way Sarah Han
m’s sisters accused him of keeping her from them all the years they spent in Turkey, and how the next morning he and Dylan flew back immediately to
stanbul, and he delivered his resignation to Ba
larba
i American School and organized the relief effort with people from Texas.

“I couldn’t stay in America,” he said, “knowing what you all were suffering here.” He paused and rubbed the heel of his hand with his thumb. “Sarah’s gone. Staying in the States doesn’t make that any better.”

“You must hate me,” Sinan said.

Marcus looked as though he had been slapped in the face.

“Your wife is dead because of my son,” Sinan said.

“My wife is dead because it was her time,” he said. He shook his head. “I don’t hate you or your son.”

They sat silent for a few moments, sipping bitter tea and listening to the sounds outside the tent—a guitar being strummed somewhere and voices singing strange songs, the murmur of intimate conversations escaping nearby tents, the excited screaming of boys playing a soccer game. The silence lasted, and Sinan couldn’t think of one thing to say to the man. The American’s life—the job at the rich school, the flights back and forth from America, the simple ability to make the choice to quit your job—was so outside his realm of experience that he said nothing at all for fear of sounding stupid.

Marcus took a sip of the tea and made a face.