Gardens of Water (3 page)

Behind
smail, the sun collapsed in red bands along the horizon.

Sinan knelt beside
smail and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “It
will
hurt, but that pain will pass and God will know you’re willing to endure pain for him. A man has to endure pain,
smail. But it will pass.”

smail looked at the ground, his long eyelashes pressed against his cheeks.

“Baklava soaked in honey afterward? Two, maybe?”

Finally, the boy smiled.

THEY HAD LEFT HOME
that morning, just as sunlight broke above the bay, and took the three ferries the length of the Gulf of
zmit into
stanbul. Sinan hadn’t been to
stanbul since they had first arrived in the city from Ye
illi, their village in the Southeast, seven years ago, but it had been
smail’s special request to be paraded around the city on the day of his circumcision. Sinan hated
stanbul—too many people, too much cement, too little sky—but
smail was fascinated by it. Even after a full day of stomping around the city that caused Sinan’s foot to ache, his son’s fascination rubbed off on Sinan.

People had been kinder than he had expected. A woman in a pastry shop had offered the boy a slice of chocolate cake laced with pistachio nuts, a bite of which
smail promptly dropped on the white satin of his pasha’s costume, soiling the garment that had cost Sinan a week’s earnings. A taxi driver gave them a free ride up to Topkap
Palace, where, like sultans of another age, they gazed out over the shimmering waters of the Bosporus. They marveled at Bo
aziçi Bridge, standing like a huge metal suture between the hills of Asia and Europe. They counted the boats crisscrossing the Sea of Marmara—massive tankers that shoved the water aside, lumbering car ferries leaning into the current, driftwood-sized fishing spits—and settled on the number forty-six. As they passed the fish houses in Kumkap
neighborhood, the musicians at one of the tourist restaurants left their table and followed
smail down the street, blowing their reed flutes to announce his passing.