Gardens of Water (33 page)

“It’s terrible, I know,” Sinan said.

“No, it’s fine.”

“You’re very polite.”

He took another sip.

“You’re right,” Marcus said, laughing. “It really is terrible.”

They laughed, and Marcus tossed the tea out the door.

SINAN SOON REALIZED THAT
here, in the camp, he wasn’t needed at all. The Americans served three meals a day and donated clothes for his children. There was no rent to pay or grocery to run or even any chores to make his children do.
rem and
smail escaped to the school tent each day, and he was glad to see them go, glad for the freedom of their absence but sad for it, too, and he wished they would return to the tent if only so he could hear their feet shuffle the fabric.

In the mornings after breakfast, Nilüfer and
rem would help him outside the tent, where he sat most of the day like some paralyzed idiot, on dusty pillows, and watched the people of the camp. The men spent hours sitting in the sun playing backgammon—the dice clattering against the wooden edges of the boards, the players roaring as the numbers fell. Children chased one another, their bodies threading between tents and kicking up dust, which mothers waved away as though swatting at offending flies. U
ur, the Gypsy boy who lost his whole family in the quake, dropped discarded fruit peels, husks of eggplant, and other refuse into a plastic bag he dragged behind him. Sinan didn’t know if he was eating the leftovers, and he didn’t want to know. A woman two tents down lay curled inside her tent. He could see the soles of her sunlit feet through the opening. Except for the occasional wiggling of toes, those feet never moved. An elderly man wearing a motorcycle helmet walked up and down the tent aisle each morning. “Another earthquake is coming,” he said to everyone he passed. “God is punishing us.” Ziya Bey, Sinan’s next-door neighbor, tried to take the helmet off the man’s head one day. “You’re scaring the children,” he said to the man. But the man screamed and kicked at him until he gave up. The next morning he was shuffling his feet through the dust again.

Some of the men drank
rak
and beer all day and into the evenings as though they had given up on a future, and although Sinan despised these drunken men, a small part of him wanted their company. Ahmet would be drinking with them were he here, and sometimes he found himself closing his eyes and listening to their conversation—their Nasreddin Hoja jokes, their rude gossip about the women (their breast size, their hip size, which wife did this and which wife did that in bed)—and tried to imagine Ahmet’s voice among them. Sometimes he did imagine his brother-in-law’s voice and, briefly, the real world and the world in his mind combined to make one lost life exist again.

Nilüfer kept her normal motherly duties—comforting
rem when she arrived back at the tent angry about something one of her friends had said, hugging
smail when he scraped his knee in a soccer game. She maintained her domestic chores, even within this small tent—brewing tea, shaking out dirty carpets, washing clothes in the buckets behind the food tent.

But for Sinan there was nothing to do. Maybe it was because of his foot, but he had never felt half the man his father was until he ran the
bakkal;
his father had died, after all, defending his rights against the government, while Sinan couldn’t even make himself stand on a swollen foot. Ahmet had been a bad businessman and Sinan had been the one that turned the failing store into a profit-earning affair—albeit a very-little-profit-earning affair. Without the grocery to keep him busy and a household to keep in order, as he sat in the camp like a child being taken care of by Americans, he began to hate himself. Even after his foot had stopped throbbing and the swelling was down, he sat around the tent all day torturing himself over decisions and indecisions that had plagued his life—letting
smail sleep by the open window the night of the quake, leaving
rem and Nilüfer alone for four days, leaving his village of Ye
illi, obeying his father the night of the Nowruz festival instead of kicking and screaming until his father came home with him—and dozens of other mistakes that seemed to lead him to this exact moment. When his wife returned from doing laundry, he was glad to have her near but he barely spoke to her. When
rem failed to return when told, he ignored it. When Marcus visited, he shook his hand and held polite conversation but forgot what was said as soon as the man left. So inward were his thoughts that he seemed to be separated from the world around him, as though curled into himself behind a glass wall.