Gardens of Water (7 page)

“Shh,” she said, her head out the window now. “Quiet. My father would kill you if he discovered this.”

He smiled his crooked smile.

“No. I mean it.”

“We’ve been invited down to your apartment,” he said.

“What? Tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Allah, Allah!” she whispered to herself.

“Hah,” he laughed sarcastically. “I can’t wait to meet you.”

Chapter 3

S
INAN HEADED DOWN THE STAIRS TO COLLECT
SMAIL AND
to borrow more groceries from his own store’s inventory. Nilüfer needed fresh bread, not the day-old stuff he had brought this morning, bulgur wheat, and dried mint. Not only did he have the pain in his stomach, but his chest hurt now. The cost of the food would break him. It was too hot out. People wouldn’t come and the night would be a failure. Nilüfer would cry about her baby becoming a man.

He passed the Gypsy camp on the way to his
bakkal,
where a filthy boy and his little sister unloaded a donkey cart of cardboard they had scavenged from the trash that morning. Sinan and his family were lucky, he reminded himself. As hard as life was for a Kurd, it was harder on a Roma. If he didn’t say anything, no one bothered him about being Kurdish. But everyone hated the Gypsies. They were rootless people—from Romania or Egypt or India; no one knew. Even Sinan, who had good reason to identify with their itinerant life, fought his disdain for people who made homes out of his garbage.

On Flower Street, a woman lowered a basket from the fifth-floor window of her kitchen, and left it dangling a few inches above the street. A boy from Sunrise Grocery, one of Sinan’s competitors, took the money out of the basket and filled it with
pide,
cheese, and a container of honey. The woman tugged on the rope and the container rose like a spider on a single thread. This apartment was closer to Sinan’s
bakkal
than it was to Sunrise, and he made a mental note to have a sale next week to keep the street’s business.

He found
smail and Ahmet sitting on wooden crates in front of the grocery, both of them chewing on large chunks of sweet
helva.
When they saw him coming,
smail and Ahmet pretended to hide the candy behind their backs. Sinan laughed, and immediately the tightness in his chest eased.

“Sweets before dinner?” Sinan said. “Your mother won’t be happy.”

“Don’t tell your mother,” Ahmet said, winking at
smail.

smail laughed and took another bite of the candy.

Sinan hugged his brother-in-law and kissed him on each cheek, and he could smell the alcohol on Ahmet’s breath.

“Just a little
rak
,”
he would say on the days Sinan reproached him for it. “If I’m going to spend my life in this grocery, I’m going to live a little doing it. God understands.”

“God is disappointed,” Sinan would say, and leave it at that because, despite himself, he loved the man.

Sinan owed Ahmet his life. When things got bad in the village, when men were being taken away by the Turkish paramilitaries and it seemed only a matter of time before he, too, disappeared, it was Ahmet who sent them the bus tickets to Gölcük, Ahmet who gave them money for the first month’s rent on the apartment. He also made Sinan a partner in the grocery, changing the
bakkal
’s name from Ahmet’s Grocery to Brothers’ Grocery. There was, he knew, room enough in God’s Paradise for such goodness.

“
Te
ekkürler,
Ahmet,” Sinan said.

“No problem, my brother.” Ahmet took Sinan by the arm. “You’re limping. You need ice on that foot.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ll be dancing tonight.”

Sinan just looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Ahmet put one hand in the air and rolled around on his ankles. He laughed and slapped Sinan on the back.

“Your wife says to bring bread with you.”

“I know.”

“She called earlier,” Ahmet said. “She wasn’t happy. Better do what my sister says, my brother.”

“I will,” Sinan laughed. “But the house is filled with food.”

“I’ve seen it!” Ahmet said. “
Börek
to the ceiling. A river of olive oil down your hallway.”

With a pat on the rear end, Sinan sent
smail home to get cleaned up. “Finish that
helva
before you get there.”

Together he and Ahmet entered the grocery, a one-room, concrete-floor shop lined with shelves of canned tomato puree, canned fruit, canned beans, and canned soda. Ahmet reached behind the counter and held up the front page of the
Milliyet.

“They locked Öcalan up on Dog Island today,” he said.

“I saw,” Sinan said. If all the buildings were gone, and they had a clear sight to the sea, they would be able to see the island on which the prison was built. In Ottoman times, the island was where they took the rabid street dogs to let them rip one another to pieces. That’s what Öcalan was to the nationalist Turks, a Kurdish separatist dog. “He’ll rot there until everyone forgets and then they’ll hang him.”

Ahmet lit a cigarette. “They say the war is over.”

“That’s what they say.”

Ahmet looked at Sinan, blew smoke to the ceiling, and picked a strand of tobacco from between his teeth. Sinan said nothing and avoided his eyes while he gathered Nilüfer’s groceries. He always said he’d return to Kurdistan if the civil war was finished, but now he didn’t know. He always thought they’d win and the Kurds would have their own country. A man can accept a life of poverty if it’s in his own country, if it’s his own doing, but not if it’s caused by others.

Ahmet folded up the newspaper and tossed it aside. “Check the receipts,” he said. “I can’t do the math. Without you I’d run this place into the ground.”

“Slow day?” Sinan asked, sorting through the strips of paper.

“You’re our best customer,” Ahmet said, taking a sip from his coffee cup. “Too hot to shop,” he said. “Tomorrow will be better.”

The motor to the cooler hummed loudly and Sinan slapped the casing to quiet it. Behind the fogged glass, the goat’s cheese and garlic sausage lay sweating in the heat.

“
In
allah,
” Sinan said, fingering the few bills in the drawer beneath the calculator.