Gardens of Water (34 page)

One night early in the second week, while they lay together inside the tent, listening to the sounds of their children sleeping, Nilüfer said, “I thought I was going to lose you. You slept so long, I thought you might die.”

Earlier that night, at dinner, between mouthfuls of watery spaghetti, Nilüfer had decided to voice all her fears openly in front of the children and the other people sitting nearby in the food tent. It had rained that afternoon, sheets of it blown by swirling wind and accompanied by strikes of lightning that set Sinan’s teeth on edge. Their tent flooded, but worse, one of the portable toilets tipped over and spilled into the lake left by the rain. In the broiling heat that followed, some of the children splashed into the lake before their parents and the Americans could get them out. In half an hour, acrid steam rose off the lake and filled the camp with a mean stench.
Now we’ll wallow in our own waste? How will we ever get another apartment? There’s no work around here! This tent will be useless in wintertime. Have the Americans thought about that? What if the children get sick? How will we ever find
rem a husband? What if the Americans leave? What will the government do for us then? What will we do?
And Sinan had eaten an extra plate of spaghetti just to keep his mouth full so he wouldn’t scream at her. What was he to do? How was he to fix such things?

Now his stomach was too full and it pressed uncomfortably against the waist of his pants.

“And what would you do without me?” he said, his voice strained with frustration.

“I don’t know,
can
m.
”

“There’re a lot of people here to take care of you,” he said.

She was silent a moment before she leaned over and whispered in his ear in a way that made him wish they were alone.

“They can’t take care of me the way you can, my husband.”

Yet he couldn’t even be a man in that way, either. His children, though asleep, lay near, the canvas drapes of the tent were too thin to disguise the sound of such an act. A moment later, Nilüfer rolled over and before long he could hear her quiet snoring.

Chapter 26

H
E LED HER UP THE HILL THAT ROSE ABOVE THE BEACH.
Before they had only come here at night, but after the rains yesterday the stink of the camp was too much to bear in the afternoon heat, and now they walked the ridge between the sea and the camp. This precipice of land made her dizzy: to the right the sea lay like an opaque plate of glass and on her left the tents spread like tombstones in a distant cemetery. Their shadows fell across the ridge and seemed to double their size, and she thought she saw people below looking up at them as they moved together on the hill.

“Hurry,” she said. “We should have waited until dark.”

“They can’t tell it’s us,” he said. “Just two shapes on a hill. We could be anyone.”

No we couldn’t, she wanted to tell him, but she wanted to believe he was right. They sat beneath a ridge that blocked them off from the camp. Before them was nothing but water, blindingly brilliant in the evening sun. He tried to kiss her but she made him wait. They watched the sun fall into the sea and as darkness dropped, her fear changed into excitement, as though at night she were not
rem Ba
io
lu but a woman in one of Dilek’s stories. His hands moved over her shoulders and slipped occasionally to brush across her sternum. His tongue wrestled with hers, as though trying to pin it down, and then searched out her teeth, jumped across the roof of her mouth, and pushed against the thick skin of her cheeks. Each time his mouth moved, a spot in her chest tingled in just the right way to make her forget that what they were doing was wrong.

Then they’d stop to come up for air and the blackness of the sea stared back at her and the stars shined down like a billion eyes and she remembered her father sitting alone in the tent, his foot propped up on an empty apple box. Then she wanted Dylan to kiss her again, because when he kissed her she forgot her family and the camp and the earthquake and that she should not be here doing what she was doing.

“Oh, God,” Dylan said. “Your lips are incredible.” He shook his head, his hair whipping around his face, as though he were trying to get control of himself. “For someone who’s never done this before, you’ve got serious skills.”

She laughed an embarrassed laugh.

“What?” he said.

She laughed again, wanting to tell him the secret she remembered because she had never told anyone before and she was sick of keeping secrets to make herself seem innocent.

“You’re laughing at me,” he said.

“No, no.”

“You are. What’d I do?” he said, acting genuinely upset now.

“No,” she said. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just…”

“What?”

“I’ve done it before.”

“Kissing?” he said. “Like in the shower, on the tiles?”

“No,” she laughed again, this time at him because she briefly imagined him alone, kissing wet shower tiles with his thick, wandering lips. “No. Me and my best friend practiced.”

“What?” he said, laughing.

“Just to see what it was like,” she said, hitting him on the knee. “What are we supposed to do? Husbands want us to be good at it, but we can’t get near any boys. A lot of the girls do it.”

“It’s freaky,” he said, “but kind of cool.”

“It didn’t mean anything,” she said. “I thought of Tarkan when I did it.”

“Tarkan’s gay.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Have you watched him dance in his videos?” He laughed and while still sitting, rolled his body in an awkward belly-dancing move. “You’re the only person in Turkey who doesn’t know that. But I guess thinking about a gay, male pop star—I know, I know, you didn’t know he’s gay—while kissing your best girlfriend makes it all right.”

“It makes it all right for you,” she said.

“That’s for sure.”

Then they were kissing again, the self-consciousness and the guilt receding along with the dark hole of the sea. The spinning stars turned pinwheels in her vision before she closed her eyes and against that black canvas of her mind there was only the feeling and only the feeling mattered.

SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT
time it was when she left him, but the dipper had moved from the fringe of the horizon to just off center in the sky. They had a routine: she scrambled down the hill toward the beach and he took the goat trail down to the edge of town where he waited behind the fence to the camp until he saw her climb into her tent.

Now she was stepping delicately from rock to rock down a dirt path, the sea on her left and the dull lights of the camp on her right. The white crescent strip of beach lay far below, resting against the sea tide like a huge rib bone. This part of the walk scared her because at night she thought one misstep would send her flying into the air to a landing, her neck broken, on the pebbles below. During the day, she knew this wasn’t so. She would simply roll into the weeds—a few thorns poking her skin through her clothes—get up, and continue down.

An old tanker clunked its way up the coast. The call to prayer rang from the new mosque, the sound of the muezzin echoing off the hillside to the beach and coming back again in louder reverberations, and she knew it was near eleven and much too late to be out.

Because the cacophony of sound was so loud and because she was watching the beach and not the rocks beneath her feet, she tripped and, for a moment, she thought she was tumbling toward the beach. But a hand suddenly grasped her arm, crushing her muscle in its grip, as it steadied her against falling.

“Dylan,” she said.

“No,” a voice said, its arm pulling her toward it. “It’s not your boyfriend.”

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light, but she recognized the man. She had seen him many times in her father’s store buying cartons of lightbulbs. She smelled onions on his breath and the damp stench of cigarette smoke.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s no problem,” he said. His fingers gripped the skin near her armpit too tightly.

“I’m fine now,” she said.

“Your father know where you are?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Of course not,” he said. She caught his teeth, shining gray through his black mouth, in the light from the camp. “What would a father do if he knew his daughter was out kissing a boy? Especially a father like yours?”

He still hadn’t let go of her arm and now he was moving closer, his other hand floating toward her in the dark.

“He knows about it all,” she said.

“Of course he doesn’t. But don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”

He pulled her toward him and then he was kissing her, his tongue slashing away inside her mouth like a sharpened knife. She tried to pull away, tried to grab the shard of glass in her pocket, but his arms locked around her. She tried to kick him in the groin, but he was too close. His tongue grazed her teeth, and, without thinking, she bit down as hard as she could. He groaned and his arms went weak.

Then she was running down the hill, jumping from rock to rock as though she had the placement of each one memorized.

OUT OF BREATH, SHE
stumbled into the tent and accidentally kicked her father’s leg.

“Sorry, Baba,” she said. She braced herself for his attack, sure it would be vicious this time, and she knew she deserved it. She wanted him to attack her so she could admit to everything, so she could lie in his arms and be protected, but he simply moved his leg and curled up inside his sleeping bag.

She let her eyes adjust to the light, the taste of blood still in her mouth, and found her sleeping bag next to her mother. She slipped inside and wiped the blood from her tongue, cleaning her fingers on the inside fabric of the bag. Her mother raised herself up on her elbow and looked away from her toward her father. Nilüfer sat there for a minute, like a dark cloud hovering above her, and
rem thought she saw her start to shake. She lay back down and
rem felt an emptiness crowd her body, as though a stale air pressed everything good out of her and left her only with the taste of this man’s blood.

Her mother’s sleeping bag rustled again, and the shadow of Nilüfer’s face hung near her cheek.

“You can’t stay out so late,” she said, loud enough that it hurt
rem’s ear.