Gardens of Water (13 page)

She took his hand and he grabbed
rem’s, and Nilüfer led them back up the stairwell. When they reached the neighbor’s threshold, Sinan didn’t even think of knocking, but simply threw open the unlocked door and entered their neighbors’ apartment.

“Mehmet!” he yelled, but there was no response.

They ran together down the leaning hallway, past the kitchen and into the front room; the wall was gone. This apartment had been on the third floor, but now it sat on the ground, the two floors beneath it a crush of cinder blocks and broken glass.

They teetered out into the darkness of the destroyed town, down nearly thirty meters of rubble. They scrambled over ledges of concrete, stepped over kitchen sinks, jumped across crevasses of rooftops, and the whole time, with each step, Sinan was afraid he might be stepping on his son. He tried to place his feet lightly, but he had to walk, had to lead the rest of his family down, and there was no way to be weightless.

“Forgive me,
smail,” he said to himself.

A water main broke beneath the street, and a rush of water burst into the air. The alarm of a crushed car bleated out a call and headlights flashed on and off, and in each strobe-light flash Sinan glimpsed the outlines of the destroyed town. People were scaling walls, hugging in the street, scrambling out of broken windows. Strafed by the light, their gestures looked mechanical, the clipped preciseness of limbs moving by degrees, and he hoped this might be a terrible dream. But it was real—he felt the dust landing on his skin, the grainy scratch of it in his lungs, the fingernails of his daughter scraping his palm.

Finally they reached the street, and he led Nilüfer and
rem to a little space of green that used to be the center of the traffic circle.

“Don’t move from here,” he said.

The light from the car alarm caught Nilüfer’s face and the look scared him; her eyes were distant, as though a film had clouded over her pupils. He shook her lightly to make sure she understood him. She nodded her head, but it was the movement of someone who could no longer hear, someone who wasn’t there anymore.

“
rem,” he said, “do not let go of your mother. Do you understand me?”

“Don’t leave me,”
rem said.

“Do not let go of her, and stay here.”

She nodded, but pleaded, “Don’t leave me, Baba.”

But he was already running back to the pile in front of his apartment.

Now sprinkles of water fell through the air, mixed with the floating dust, and dropped to the ground as mud. The strobe light illuminated the front of the now-teetering apartment building; it looked like a great hulking monster, the ripped innards of insulation hanging from the walls, the sockets of empty rooms, the limbs of electrical wires. Beneath the looming building, he saw people digging in the debris, but his vision was blurry at the edges, prismed through the pain in his head, and he didn’t recognize anybody.

He didn’t know where to begin, so he started at his feet, digging his hands into a space between slabs and pulling at the first chunk of concrete he could wrap his hands around. He dislodged it and it tumbled onto his foot. Kicking the chunk away, he slipped his fingers down into the rubble again, throwing pieces aside, between his legs. His palms ripped on metal sheeting and shards of glass stabbed his wrists. The cement crumbled under his nails and turned to sand in his fists.

His heart slammed against his ribs and his lungs seemed to shred. His hands worked faster than he thought possible, his arms lifting impossibly large blocks of cement. Digging in again, deeper this time, all the way to his shoulder: he felt something soft. His fingertips met fingertips. Then he felt a ring on the finger, and he knew it was not
smail. Pulling himself up to where the body lay, he saw the caved-in face of a man. His scalp was cleaved open and it might have been Ahmet, but in the flashing light he couldn’t tell.

“
Allah rahmet eylesin,
” he said to the body, and he kept going.

He dug for what seemed like hours before coming to a long slab of unbroken cement he couldn’t break through. He climbed out of the hole and tried digging in another area, but he met the same impenetrable wall.

He ran around the corner to Ali Sünbay’s hardware store, with the idea that he would get a metal pick and break the slab into smaller pieces, then he could move them with his hands, but the whole street was gone. Three buildings had toppled sideways, the floors strewn across the road like extended accordion bags. Another building had simply jumped fifteen feet to the side, completely intact save the first floor, which was left broken on its foundation. A woman stumbled down the street with a young man in her arms, his head tilted back, his feet scraping the ground. He was too old to be carried, and the woman’s legs buckled beneath her. She stood again, holding the man to her breast, carrying him away from the collapsed buildings. Sinan should have helped her, but he was shocked by the vision, and as she got closer he ran the other way.

He was panicked now, running on his twisted foot, the reality of it all expanding in his chest. He was helpless. Everyone was helpless. There wasn’t one thing he could do to help his son. When that thought exploded in his head, he dropped to his knees in the dirt, turned his palms toward the sky, and prayed.

Chapter 9

O
NLY THE PRAYER AND THE TERRIBLE VISION OF HIS SON
falling filled his mind. He had a vague memory of sunlight and darkness followed by sunlight again. Perhaps another night passed, but he didn’t know. His head hurt, a throbbing pain as though a hot balloon had expanded inside his skull, and the world outside his head sounded muffled and fluid, like screams drowned underwater. And within this muffled space, he heard his daughter’s voice.

“Baba,” he heard
rem say, as if from across some great flooded cavern. “Baba, I need your help.
Anne
is saying crazy things.”

But he had to pray; he couldn’t break this prayer.

“She’s pulling out her hair. I can’t make her stop.”

His words of prayer were the most fragile strands of a thread pulling
smail toward life. One skipped phrase, one misplaced recitation, and he knew that thread would snap, severing him from his son.

“He’s dead, Baba.”
rem seemed to be crying from the bottom of the sea, her voice barely rising through fathoms of water. “
smail is dead.” too far away.

“I need you,” he heard her say again. There was distant sobbing, but after a while it stopped and he didn’t hear her voice again.

He wanted to slap her for giving
smail up so quickly, but she was After that there were only the words of supplication and the space in his head, the space in which he tried to lift his soul closer to God so God could see that he couldn’t live if
smail should die. He might have slept; he had a vague memory of someone making him lie down, tree limbs swaying above his head, but he wasn’t sure, and when he was most lucid he found himself prostrated in the very same spot in the dirt. In his mind he offered his own life for the life of his son, he offered his wife’s and his daughter’s, he even bartered away their time in Heaven. He swore if God should be merciful that
smail’s life would be the picture of Muslim humility; he would see to it, make it his personal mission in life.

Then sometime later, hours, days, when he began to weaken and the sounds of bulldozers rattled his skull and the shouts of men filled his head, he realized he was demanding God to bend to his will. He was not offering God anything; he was fighting him, throwing up his fists and spitting into the sky. And then a calm suddenly came over him, a calm like the moment before he drifted off to sleep, when breathing becomes steady and the brain feels submerged in warm water, and he said clearly in his mind:

“Take my son if it’s your will. If it is your will, then it’s his fate.”

He repeated this in his head, until the words began to lose their meaning, until his voice became nothing and he felt as though every bone in his body was as insubstantial and weightless as a bird’s. He whispered it to himself until he no longer felt the muscles in his mouth, and his tongue seemed to have been cut out, until even his heart ceased beating in his ears and he was no longer a father, a husband, or a man. He was dust, simply the grains of God’s making.

He heard the voice cry out, “There’s someone here.” The words pierced the fog and emptiness and shocked him into consciousness. He didn’t know how long he had been collapsed in the dirt, but he could no longer feel his legs and he was bent to the side, half-lying in the street. A tractor with a scoop attached to the front lumbered by him, the wheels spinning up dust just in front of his face. The sun beat down and his brain pounded as though someone had hit him in the forehead with a hammer. He was thirsty, starving. He looked toward the voice and found a dozen men pulling at a pile of debris. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t work.

“Help me!” he screamed.

The man who had just parked the tractor jumped from the driver’s seat and pulled Sinan to his feet.

“I can’t walk,” Sinan said.

The man carried him to the pile of rubble and set him down. There Sinan began to shove his bare hands back into the shards of broken buildings. As he dug, his legs tingled back to life. He plunged into a hole in the pile and pulled at every torn thing in front of him, searching for something round, something soft—skin, the curve of a skull, the length of an arm, the tender underside of bare feet.

“Stop, stop,” a man yelled in accented Turkish. It was the American from upstairs and he stood in a hole just next to Sinan’s. Dried blood caked his right eye and his silver-rimmed glasses sat askew across the bridge of his nose. He was covered in white dust. Everyone stopped digging, and the American dropped to his chest, placing an ear to a television with a hole clear through the middle. Thick dust swirled in the air and in the silence Sinan could hear the grains settle on the debris, as though the sky were raining pebbles. Thrushes sang in still-standing trees, an outboard motor whined offshore—sounds of normal life that angered him now. Then an unsteady ping, ping of tapped metal rose from the rubble. A few men cheered, but the American threw his hand in the air and they quieted.

“We’re coming,” the American said. And then he yelled something in English Sinan couldn’t understand.

Sinan climbed into the hole with the man and together they scraped away disintegrated cinder blocks, piling the coarse stuff behind them. He shoved his torn knuckles into the pile, and then the American filled the space with his own bloody hands. One of the American’s fingers was snapped sideways, but he kept jabbing his hands into the debris. They pulled and twisted and threw and tugged for what seemed like hours until they finally came to something soft: a white thigh.

The leg poked through a section of broken wood, and exposed wires wrapped around the blue knee like tendrils of seaweed. For a few seconds Sinan and the American froze at the sight, unsure what to do next, and Sinan had the grotesque thought that this leg was no longer a part of a whole body, that it was just the severed meat of what had once been a person. He was sure, though, it wasn’t
smail’s leg. It was a woman’s leg—the blue spider veins, the delicate kneecap, and the dark stubble of shaved hair left little doubt. The thigh was the American’s wife. You didn’t need to see her face to know that—few other women in the neighborhood would have left their legs uncovered, even to sleep at night.