Gardens of Water (69 page)

But she wasn’t stopping now. He would hold her by the arm and drag her back to the taxi and take her to the other side.

She squeezed between the bumpers of two cars.

“Don’t,” the driver yelled.

She lifted herself over the short wall and held on to the cable. Beneath her was nothing but blue water, deep and formless. It looked like she might fall forever. She let go and for a few moments she was weightless, tumbling like a bird whose wings had been clipped. The only sound was the wind in her face.

Chapter 55

T
HE NEXT DAY, SINAN MET THE POLICE AT THE BE
IKTA
ferry landing. The sea was choppy with the wakes of ferries docking and disembarking, and the hull of the boat slapped against rubber pontoons. He felt dizzy, and a policeman held him beneath his right shoulder and helped him into the boat. As soon as they left the dock, speedboats filled with reporters and cameramen followed, their lenses sparkling in the sunlight like little round planets fallen to earth.

“We can’t do anything about them,” a policeman said. “They’re vultures. I’m sorry.”

Atop the cabin of the boat a rotating beacon slapped Sinan across the face.

“Can you turn that off?” he said, motioning to the emergency light.

“Yes,
abi,
” the policeman said. “Of course.”

The policeman called to the captain and the captain switched off the light. The policeman offered him a Maltepe, but Sinan refused the cigarette and stared at the water.

Everything was incredibly bright—the sunlight flashing off the water, the white of the boat’s hull, the endless, ugly blue of the sky. The light burned a hole into his brain, but he watched the water, scanned the coastline, double-checked wood drifting on the surface, and every few seconds he had to cover his eyes to stop the burning.

A young policeman stood swaying with the wakes on the bow of the boat, holding a long silver pole with a hooked end. It looked like a gaffing hook, like something fishermen used to stab through the bellies of large fish they had to haul inside the boat. He wanted to tell the man to put that hook away, but his stomach was roiling now and he couldn’t find his voice. The policeman who offered him a cigarette seemed to notice Sinan’s staring and called out to the man with the hook. They argued for a moment, before the hook man fastened the instrument to a rack on the bow.

Birds gathered together on the surface of the water and formed the shape of a human body before becoming birds again; a pod of dolphins broke the surface, their gray backs like elbows piercing the skin of water; fish jumped and for a moment a head seemed to rise.

Soon—how long Sinan did not know—the boat bobbed into the shadow of the bridge. From here the bridge didn’t look so tall.
rem could survive a fall from that height, he was sure of it. It was only water, after all. The captain cut the engine and scanned the water’s surface with binoculars. With the engine off, Sinan heard the rush of cars on the bridge—a mechanical hum, like a river of metal parts flowing over steel rocks; that rushing had never stopped, not even as
rem jumped.

Jellyfish rose around the hull of the boat before sinking into the green darkness again, their bodies appearing and reappearing like pale, severed heads. Trash gathered in heaps of foamy bubbles where gulls foraged for scraps, sending up clouds of flies.

The powerboats circled the police boat. Men with huge cameras dangling from their shoulders crowded the decks and pointed lenses toward the water. Sinan saw two men pass a cigarette between them, one said something to the other, and they both laughed, their white teeth shining in the harsh light. If he could reach them across the hulls of the boats, he’d kill them, he’d stab them right now in front of the police.

“The current’s stronger to the north,” called the policeman standing on the bow. He motioned his hand downstream toward the shore.

“Beylerbeyi,” the captain said. “Got it.”

The engine growled to life and they crossed beneath the span, past the disgustingly ornate summer palace, moving up the waterway toward the Black Sea. They would never find her; there was too much water, too much darkness beneath the boat they couldn’t search. She would not be buried in twenty-four hours; she would not be buried ever. And for a moment he panicked because he could not remember what his daughter looked like. An image flashed in his brain—her eyes, her nose, the shape of her head beneath the head scarf—but he could not remember her hair. Was it straight or curly? He couldn’t remember her legs. Were they thin and brown, thick and pale? Did her belly button stick out the way it did when she was a child?

Then a huge oil tanker came plowing through the middle of the waterway, its faded red hull towering above the police boat, the bow sending up three-foot waves that swelled and broke into whitecaps. The ship was monstrous, as long as three soccer fields, as tall as a cliff, and the engine roared ahead of it, thundering out a warning. For a moment it seemed they would be run over by the ship and he was ready for it, hopeful even that the bow might rip through the middle of this boat and grind it into bits of wood and spilled fuel and drowning men. But the bow passed and the waves smacked the hull of the police boat, lifting it into the air and dropping it back down with a slap. He grasped the railing and closed his eyes to keep the sickness from rising.

When he opened his eyes, he saw something bobbing on the surface of a wake. The white shape was sucked into the vortex of the passing ship and then shot out on top of the next cresting wave, the red bow pushing it away as though it were driftwood. The first thing he recognized was a leg and in the thrust of the wave the leg seemed to kick. Then an arm broke the surface of the water and splashed back through as though swimming. And that’s what he thought was happening—
rem was swimming toward the boat, her limbs stiffly rising and falling, breaking the water and sinking back through. She seemed utterly animated and he thought, for a brief horrible, hopeful moment, that he was once again witnessing the grace of God.

“We’ve got her,” the policeman on the bow said, standing and pointing out toward the swimming body.

It
was
a miracle. There she was swimming toward the boat, her head turned to the side for air, her feet throwing up little splashes, her elbows bending and stretching in awkward strokes. Then the wake subsided as the tanker passed and she dove beneath the surface of the water, the bottoms of her feet waving at him as she disappeared.

“She’s under, she’s under,” the young policeman yelled.

The captain cut the motor and yelled to the powerboats with the photographers to do the same. The water rippled and flattened and rippled again. The sea here was dark, deep in the center of the passageway, and in the placid places between ripples he could momentarily see his reflection before it was torn apart.

Then a few meters from the boat her pale head emerged, her mouth releasing a watery spit of air.

“
rem!” he called out, and flashbulbs burst from the powerboats, their sparks electrifying the water.

The policemen scrambled to the edge of the hull, the young one holding the gaffing hook out over the surface of the water.

“Oh, thank God!”

But then the rest of her body surfaced—her shoulders first, dragging her arms, one broken sideways like a piece of timber so that the palm of her hand rested between her shoulder blades—and the realization that she was dead blew a hole in his stomach and he retched into the sea.

The flashbulbs went off like handheld explosions, the clicking shutters like chattering insects.

Her flowery blouse still clung to her torso, but her hips emerged as white as whalebone. Her legs came last—so thin, so like a little girl’s, and pink along her hips and knees as though they had been sunburned. He wanted to look away, wanted to tell the others to look away, but the cameras kept clicking and the policemen leaned out over the edge of the boat, reaching toward her body. The wakes caused by the powerboats jockeying for position spun her body around and pushed her right leg toward his hands. He reached to grab her ankle, but at that moment, the young policeman with the gaffing hook caught her around the waist and hauled her toward the boat.

“Don’t,” Sinan screamed. “Don’t!”

The man shook with Sinan’s voice and dropped the hook into the water, releasing her body.

Leaning out over the water, he took hold of his daughter’s ankle. Her skin was slick with salt and spilled engine oil. When the young policeman reached for her hips—their nakedness shocking in the light, the hips of a woman, not his little girl—Sinan pushed him out of the way and, alone, lifted her body up.