Gardens of Water (40 page)

“You’ll rest for a few days,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

HE ASKED AROUND CAMP
to see if anybody knew of any jobs. If they did, they jealously guarded the information. The Turks said, “No,
abi,
” and diverted their eyes, the Armenians hedged, perhaps out of a bit of minority sympathy, and said they had heard of something on the other side of the city, or that there
was
a job but someone else got to it first.

By the end of the third day he was furious, sure there were jobs but no one would tell a Kurd about them. He sulkily took dinner with his family under the shade of a leaning plane tree where fewer eyes could watch them, and listened to the blind Gypsy singer and her father on his keyboard. He watched the Armenian, Nazar—the only “Turk” serving food—a gold cross swaying from his neck as he leaned over to hand plates to people. A few of the Americans on break from serving food had gathered to listen to the Gypsy music, and sitting on the lap of one American woman was U
ur, the Gypsy child, his hair combed, his face a single color rather than mottled with dirt. The boy stared at the performers, his eyes heavy with a sagging loneliness that filled Sinan with his own, and he began to think he’d never see his home again. The house his aunt and uncle had built for him would stand empty, a waste.

As they walked back from dinner, a young man dressed in blue pants and a yellow Carrefour shirt strode past them on the dusty path. His clothes looked brand-new, all shiny and crisp—except for the dust on the pants cuffs—as though they had been recently pressed.

Sinan stopped him in the street.

“You’re working at Carrefour?”

“Yes,” the man said. He was a child, no more than twenty with hair barely growing on his face. “I spray water on the vegetables to keep them clean.”

“They pay you for that?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “They pay my friend to sign delivery forms when the trucks arrive. All he has to do is make sure all the stuff comes in, sign his name on a paper, then he sits around in the air-conditioning drinking tea all day.”

Later that evening Sinan walked the three kilometers to the huge Carrefour. It sat on the other side of the freeway, in the middle of a sea of asphalt and parked cars that used to be a goat field. It was a monstrous building, larger than the big mosque with the broken minaret that stood next to it.

In Ye
illi, nothing was larger than the mosque. It towered over the mud buildings and its silver dome shone in the afternoon light. When the government came to town and tried to build a six-story apartment building to house workers building a dam for the Great Anatolian Project,
mam Khalid led a revolt against the contractors because the building’s sixth floor was to be two feet taller than the tip of the mosque’s minaret. Women on their way to market and children playing in the street threw stones at the contractors as they balanced on the scaffolding, and men, under cover of night, sledgehammered newly laid cinder blocks, reducing them to broken pieces and piles of dust. The contractor pulled out of the project and the government moved their workers to another town, but only after the paramilitaries burned a few stores to make their point. The apartment complex, only three stories high when abandoned, stood an empty shell and protected sheep from snowdrifts in winter.

Inside Carrefour now, the store felt cavernous, stacked to the ceiling with boxes of stereos and televisions and car supplies and even furniture. Sinan had forgotten how big the building was. There were at least thirty rows of shelves lined with food and the produce section alone was ten times the size of his old
bakkal.
Seeing so much food in one place after the earthquake was shocking beyond belief. He first wondered how they could sell so many things, wondered if there were really enough people in
stanbul to purchase all these products. But the store was packed with men wearing pleated pants and women draped in Vakko blouses. They pushed shiny metal carts around while they spoke on cell phones, and filled those shopping carts to the brim with amazing, useless things. For these people, it seemed, the earthquake was simply an unpleasant, passing sadness.

He found the employment office and was seated at a desk in a booth in front of a piece of paper covered in tiny typed words. The man asked him to fill out the form and left. Sinan wrote his name on the appropriate line and jotted down the numbers of the phone that didn’t exist anymore, and then waited for twenty minutes before the man returned. He felt ashamed when the man picked up the blank paper and shook his head.

“Can’t write?” the man said.

He could write, but in Kurdish. In Turkish, he could write the words for every product he needed in the grocery, but not to answer long questions on an application. He wanted to tell the man so he wouldn’t think him an idiot, but he was afraid he wouldn’t get the job.

“I used to own a grocery,” Sinan said. “I have experience.”

“You don’t need experience for this job,” the man said. “You just need to fill out the application. The home office has to have your information on file—for insurance and payroll.”

“It was Brothers’ Grocery. Maybe you know it? Just down Nation Street, near the water seller’s?”

“I don’t live around here,
abi.
”

“Oh.” Sinan rubbed his hands together.

“It doesn’t matter,” the man said, picking up the pen Sinan had left on the table. He was middle-aged with a belly that hung over his pants, but his face was handsome and his skin glowed as if it were fashioned out of glazed ceramic. He didn’t seem to be a Turk. He looked like the people Sinan used to see on television—the ones in the commercials with the unlined, happy faces, the ones who seemed to belong to a special television race who looked nothing like the people he saw in real life.

The man explained that the store had a problem. Since all the markets nearby were destroyed, more people than ever were shopping at Carrefour. Business was good, but so many employees were killed in the earthquake that they didn’t have enough staff to keep up with the demand.

“Can you start tomorrow?” he said.

“I can begin right now.”

“Can you work tomorrow, double shift?”

“Yes,” Sinan said. “I can work triple shift.”

The man flashed him a strange look and scratched his head.

“Tell me your name,” the man said, leaning over the application in preparation to write.

“Sinan Ba
io
lu,” he said. “Thank you, thank you very much.”

“Your address?”

Sinan just stared at him.

“That one’s not important,” the man said.

Chapter 32

N
ILÜFER TOOK THE CARREFOUR SHIRT OUT OF THE PLASTIC
packet, laid it out on one of the rugs, and used the bottom of the hot tea kettle to iron out the creases.

“There,” she said. “Put it on.” She was smiling—the first time since he could remember—and even though it was a little stupid, he put the shirt on and modeled it in the tent.

“We’ll be home soon,” he said. “I’ll earn the money for those tickets.”

“Baba,”
smail said. “Do they sell Galatasaray shirts there?”

IN THE MORNINGS AT
the store, he set out newspapers in the metal stands by the registers. The pages were still filled with pictures of destroyed buildings, but the half-naked women began to appear again in the corners of the front pages, some of them with wet T-shirts pressed against their skin and others without the shirt altogether. After that, he moved huge boxes filled with smaller boxes of food or drinks or silly outdoor furniture for people who had patios. He had to match the boxes of products with the price tags and when there was a special sale on, he had to mark the item’s tag with a red sticker that looked like a bomb exploding with the new price inside. All the prices were less than what he and Ahmet had charged at their grocery, and he thought they must have been stealing the merchandise to be selling it so cheaply.

He pushed a silver dolly stacked high with boxes of food through the shining aisles, cut open the plastic packing tape with the knife they gave him, and stacked the smaller boxes on top of one another beneath hanging lights that made all the boxes shine with brilliant colors. After stacking the products, he returned to the warehouse where he stacked new products, and returned to the aisles to stack those. There were no windows to see outside and a few hours into his work it was easy to believe the world outside the walls of the store was completely intact. He created pyramids of German beer cans, and the higher he stacked them the prouder he became of his work. He set out displays of wine and used a feather duster to brush away the patina of dust on the curves of the bottles. The lights above the wooden wine shelves glittered little stars in the liquid so that they looked like bottled jewels, and he wanted to taste the wine just to know what it was like, just to feel another world on the tip of his tongue.

That evening, as she had for the last three days,
rem made tea for him without complaint, although she wouldn’t talk to him other than to say, too formally, “Here’s your tea, Baba.” Each request he or Nilüfer made was met with polite obedience—a docility that, while wished for by Sinan many times in the past, was more unsettling to him now than her flashes of anger. She played cards with
smail, but didn’t argue when he tried to cheat. She helped her mother wash the teapot and picked the ants out of the sugar tin one by one, their wriggling black bodies pinched between forefinger and thumb. When they went to bed, she even kissed him on both cheeks—coldly, though, her lips barely brushing his skin.

Later, as they took tea outside the tent, the children behind them safely in their sleeping bags, he asked, “Did the American boy come around?”

“You don’t think I’d tell you?” Nilüfer said. She took his hand. “Don’t worry. I spoke with her and reminded her that it’s a question of honor, that she cannot ruin our name in front of so many people. People talk, innocent or not.”

“She understood?”

“Yes,” she said. “She cried and I held her a while, but she understood. She’s just a child, Sinan.” She laughed. “Sometimes I forget. Children are so foolish. They don’t understand things. They can hurt you so easily, but really it’s them who get hurt.”

Sinan thought it was just the opposite. Children recovered from their wounds, they had the energy to do so, but adults carried them around like rocks in a grain sack.

“Yes, she’s just a child,” Sinan said. “Marcus Bey gave me his word, but that boy will come around again.”

They sat silent together. A flare burst above the water and colored the camp red.

“Remember how it was for us?” he said, squeezing her hand.

“We were to be married, Sinan. That was different.”

“Mohammed Bey’s shop?”

They were just teenagers and her father had just recently set the date for the wedding. He had watched her through the painted advertisements of the egg seller’s shop window while she ordered a dozen eggs. Lucky for him, to fill the orders Mohammed Bey had to go out to the back of the building where he kept the chickens in small wooden cages. That’s when Sinan entered the shop and found Nilüfer waiting for him. Her shoulders were open to him and he could see her breasts poking against her blouse. She had a sly smile on her face that scared him.

“I’m to be yours, Sinan
can,
” she said, her eyes dilated with a power that drew him in.

“Yes, you’re to be mine,” he said. He tried to make his eyes as powerful as hers, but he had little practice with such looks and it felt like he got it wrong.

In the corner where the cobwebs clung to their clothes, he stood just inches from her body, so close he felt her heat radiating through the folds of her skirt. Her fingers tickled his palm and he pressed his cheek to hers, his lips almost brushing her skin. When the back-door screen banged shut, Sinan darted out the front, composing himself as he came into the light of the street.

“I broke three eggs on the way home,” she said now. Her father had hit her for her carelessness, a minor beating that didn’t leave a bruise. “If my father had known what broke those eggs, who knows what he would have done!”

Sinan remembered the smell of her hidden hair, like a wet field of oregano under the scarf, filling his head.

“We were stupid children,” she said. “Thank God my mother didn’t know.” The flare disappeared behind the tents and the red faded. “She was a good woman.”

SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE
of the night,
smail let out a scream. Nilüfer got to him first and pulled the still-sleeping boy to her chest and rocked him. The boy whimpered, but soon he was calm and his breathing became regular and heavy and both of them were asleep again, Nilüfer’s arms locked around the boy’s chest. Sinan was nearly asleep again, too, when he noticed a strange, hushed sound coming from just outside the tent—a tinny, rhythmic beat that sounded like tiny metal cans crashing together. He raised himself up on his elbow to look across the tent floor, past sleeping
smail and Nilüfer, to find
rem’s sleeping bag empty.

Outside the tent, he discovered her slouching in the plastic chair, her hands held up to her ears, her head rocking back and forth as though she were dancing in her seat. He came around to face her, but her eyes were closed, and she didn’t notice him standing so close he could have stroked her cheek. He might have done so, too, if he thought she would allow it. Two black wires hung from her ears and were plugged into a small metal device that sat balanced on the chair next to her hips—a compact disc player, he realized.

He could take it from her, but what would that do? Start a fight in the middle of the night. Wake up his neighbors. He hadn’t been a patient man with her, and he realized now, in the stillness of the night, that he could either push her away—away toward this American boy—or he could wait her out, offer her his love and bring her back to him.

So he sat in the chair next to her and listened to the muffled beats and bleeps of the strange music coming from the headphones. Above him, stars blinked down through millions of miles of space, and the camp was still except for a couple of cats pawing the bones of a half-eaten fish. And he thought this was all right; he could sit here calmly for a while next to his daughter and pretend she was not becoming a stranger.

But
rem startled. “Baba!” She immediately brushed the headphones from her ears and tried stuffing them inside her coat.