by Sue Star
Laughter floated on a current of air from the house next door. Americans. She should’ve danced for them, instead, but she’d been blinded by greed because of the gun that had killed her brother.
She’d known her path intertwined with the Americans’. She hadn’t known it would only lead her to trouble. She should’ve left kismet alone.
She crept along the balcony, looking for a way into the garden below, when another sound reached her. The soft murmur of voices. They lured her on to the far end of the balcony, graced by overhanging branches of a tree. A window stood open, brushing into leaves and releasing men’s voices along with soft bursts of their laughter. Meryem ducked beneath the branches and caught a whiff of tobacco from the open window above her head.
“Bring the girl back,” said one of the men inside the general’s sitting room.
“Patience, Murat, in the name of Atatürk,” said the general. Authority resonated through the deep registers of his voice, making him easy for Meryem to recognize by voice alone.
Water gurgled—they were smoking their nargiles. Men, and their filthy vices, she thought. How she hated the games they had to play, when everyone knew it was always the women who held the real power, unrecognized as it may be.
“But Atatürk was the least patient of us all,” said a third man.
“It is in honor of his memory that I have asked you here for our evening discussions,” the general said.
“You risk all of our lives, pasha, by inviting us here. It is against the law to hold political—”
“This is not such a gathering, you fool, and I remind you not to use that word again. Spies are everywhere these days.”
“Surely not in your employ?”
“To the best of my knowledge, but no one is ever completely certain. That is why I brought the girl here, so that outside eyes would think she provides pleasure for nothing more than casual entertainment among friends.”
“Where conversation naturally turns to ways to unseat the Prime Minister and his party,” said one of the guests, amidst throaty chuckles and gurgles.
“One must learn caution,” the general said, “when the assistant minister of the Interior lives only across the street.”
“Perhaps we take unnecessary risks by meeting here,” said another. “This rich neighborhood is where the men in power live.”
Another voice spoke up. “This is the last place where they would expect us to meet, right under their very noses.”
“’Where makes no difference,” said the first man who’d spoken. “These are troubled times for all of us. Nowhere is safe because the Press Law has everyone stirred up.”
“Especially for you, Murat.”
“Murat is correct to see the depth of our concern,” the general said. “Our Prime Minister has failed to keep his promise to amend the Press Law, and that is one more example of the promises he breaks. Promises he never intended to keep.”
A restless murmur rumbled among the guests.
“Worse than that,” the general continued, “the current government is undoing all of Atatürk’s reforms, one by one. Now the fez is back, even though Atatürk banished it. Religious instruction is back in our schools, after Atatürk correctly gave us a secular Republic.”
Murmurs grew to outcries.
“Gentlemen!” The general’s voice rose above the unrest in his parlor. “Our greatest fears are coming to pass. The men we have entrusted with our government are wringing the secular out of our state, and no one will know it until after the deed is done. Now they’ve banned reports of what goes on within the Grand National Assembly. Each day they move us farther away from the Eternal Leader’s vision for us. It is time for us to bring it back. It is time for us to act. Remember Atatürk’s words when he said, ‘Resistance to the flood-tide of civilization is in vain’...ah! But my memory is not so great as it once was.”
“‘...nations which try to function with medieval minds’,” continued another voice, “‘are doomed to annihilation—’”
A tapping sound suddenly interrupted the buzz of excitement that the general had incited. A door clicked.
“What do you want, old man?” The general’s voice rumbled with impatience.
“A thousand pardons, pasha, but I must warn you that the girl is a thief.”
“A thief? Explain yourself.”
“I told her not to disturb you. I paid her, as you instructed. I did! But she demanded more, the greedy slut, and she came up here to bother you for the money.”
“You are the only one who is bothering me. Why are you bringing your problems to me? What have you done with the girl?”
“But...she is not here?”
* * * * *
Anna felt the world stop around her. The moment froze in time, as she stared, no, gaped at Rainer... His nose, just slightly crooked from that time long ago when his horse unseated him. His fearless jaw, defining the defiance that gave him the strength to leave her. The coarse black hair that allowed him to blend with Mediterranean people... He was Rainer, not someone who merely reminded her of Rainer. Yet, he was the man who called himself Viktor. Their gazes locked together, and the other partiers surrounding them in the Wingates’ backyard ceased to exist.
“Oh!” Cora said with a little titter that broke the spell. “I see the two of you have already met?”
“No,” Rainer quickly said from the chaise where he sat. “I no yet have the pleasure.” Using an accent—a fake accent—Rainer aka Viktor sprang to his feet. His long, lean legs and his familiar, swift stride carried him closer to her.
Anna got the message, although she did not know why. Why didn’t matter. Their relationship was over. She’d thought him dead these last twelve years, but her love for him had never died. Still, it was over.
If he’d deliberately kept his survival hidden from her all these years, then there was no hope that their relationship could be resurrected.
It really was over.
In a supreme effort to keep her voice steady, she held out her hand and managed to say, “Pleased to meet you. Viktor, is it?” Later, he would explain to her why she had to lie for him.
“Yes, Viktor,” he murmured, taking her hand and bringing her fingers to his lips. Her hand burned in his grip, or perhaps it was his hand that felt like fire.
“Oh my,” Cora said again, giggling. She narrowed her eyes, and her gaze darted back and forth like worry beads sliding along on a strand.
Hayati stepped into the circle and chuckled. “Don’t tell me you two forgot, already. The taxi, remember?”
“The taxi?” Anna repeated.
“Yes, the taxi, of course,” Rainer said in his heavy accent, an accent that pretended to be heavier than Hayati’s. He laughed.
Cora laughed, too, a shrill sound. “You met in a taxi?”
Anna frowned, not wanting to be pulled into their silly cover story. There had been no meeting in any taxi. What was this all about?
Hayati shrugged and laughed.
Everyone seemed awfully damned merry, Anna thought. As their merriment increased, her initial shock faded. Anger took its place. This charade now—the need for such a charade—reminded her of the questions circling through her mind, and she frowned with a mixture of confusion and impatience. She glared first at Hayati and then at Rainer. Were they in league together? And then she remembered her own suspicions of danger. Rainer was involved in some dangerous game. Somehow, Hayati knew.
Anna tried to laugh too, but now doubts replaced her anger.
Rainer smiled, his teasing, tiny smile that Anna remembered, and memories came flooding back of other times he’d teased her with that smile, the smile that no one else realized was a smile because the corners of his lips barely flickered, and she could see by the sparkle from the depths of his hazel eyes, yes she could see now under the distorted light of the Chinese lanterns that his eyes were hazel (changeable, that’s why she hadn’t remembered before in Yaziz’s office), and she knew now that he actually meant to sm
ile at her.
“Viktor?” said the woman from the chaise next to Rainer’s.
Anna remembered Cora’s introductions—Mrs. Viktor Baliko. Tonya. The soaring song that filled her being crashed rudely back to the ground. His wife. Viktor’s wife. She would explain Rainer’s absence all these years. His silence.
“Darling?” said Tonya, Mrs. Viktor Baliko, as she pointed to her wristwatch.
Rainer bowed his head to his hosts, Cora and Paul Wingate. “Please, I beg you forgive us. My wife...” Rainer’s gaze avoided Anna. “She is...not well.”
Anna raised her glass to her lips, hiding her cheeks that flamed with the heat of her anger and hurt and fear and more. Confusion. Next to her, murmurs of concern rippled through the guests.
“No, no,” Rainer continued, “please, it is nothing. A little rest and she is good as new.”
Giggles and snatches of whispers arose as the guests parted for Rainer and the woman he called his wife. Tonya.
Anna watched, stunned, as Rainer walked away, swallowed bit by bit by a sea of partiers. Snatches of gossip snapped around her. “Indisposed,” and “poor dear,” and “the family way.”
None of that mattered. Anna didn’t care about anything. Nothing mattered except one single fact: Rainer was alive. She didn’t even care that he seemed to be married. There was a logical explanation, there had to be, and she would get her answers. The party was simply not the best setting in which to get those answers. She and Rainer would have to have a private discussion, and it would happen. Later. She’d waited twelve years for word of what had happened to him, and she could wait a little longer.
“Dear,” Cora said, shaking Anna’s elbow. “You schoolteachers are off in a world of your own. Wool-gathering? I do believe you haven’t heard a word I said.”
“I’m sorry,” Anna said. “Do go on.”
“Don’t you think it’s interesting? Our belly dancer and the Balikos? They all live in that apartment building down the hill from us, on the other side of the vacant lot. Isn’t that just so handy? We’ll get to spend lots of time with them.”
Anna stiffened with attention as Cora continued.
“Mitzi and Henry have included them in their Saturday afternoon barbecues,” Cora said, “and I expect you will continue the tradition, too. That’s why you need to know about them, dear. About how they managed to escape through the Iron Curtain. They came here after that trouble in Hungary last fall.”
“My, but isn’t he handsome?” said Eve, leading a round of oohs that rippled through the group. “Weren’t they in the middle of all that trouble in Bucharest?”
“Budapest, you mean,” said Fran. “Bucharest is in Romania.”
“But I’m quite sure there was some problem in Bucharest, too,” Eve said with a pudgy frown.
“There’s trouble wherever the Soviets go.” Paul scowled and cast his gaze down.
“I declare,” said Eve. “Isn’t it dreadful the way those commies think they can just march into whatever country they want and do whatever they want?”
Cora wobbled from Anna to her husband and clung to his arm. “What the Reds did in Hungary won’t happen here, will it, dear?”
Paul shook his head. “Not if we can help it.”
“Why else do you think Uncle Sam is spending so much money on this mission?” asked Fran, fitting a fresh cigarette into her meerschaum holder. Hayati glided forward, snapping a lighter to life.
Eve fanned herself with her gloves. “Thank goodness. I can sleep at night with Ike in the White House.”
“Although, he wasn’t much help in Cyprus,” said the major. “Anyway, Mr. Khrushchev is geographically closer to us than the White House is.”
“Oh dear,” said Eve, fanning herself faster. “Now I’m sure I won’t sleep a wink after all.”
“Phooey.” Cora leaned against her husband. “They’d evacuate us before anything could happen to us.”
Paul’s scowl went deeper. “It won’t come to that. We’ll keep the trouble in our backyard from exploding into violence.”
“Like the gypsies,” Cora said. “They stir up trouble, too.”
“I wasn’t talking about gypsies.”
“But I am, dear,” said Cora. “You see, a funny thing happened to me today regarding one of them. A gypsy woman came to the door and spoke to my maid. Turns out she was offering up something rather interesting for sale, some old love letters to a soldier during the war.”
Fran arched her eyebrow. “Where’d she get them?”
“She didn’t say. They weren’t doing her any good. Their kind can’t read, you know. So she thought she’d make a little money from them.”
“What’d you do?” Eve asked, breathless.
“Bought them, of course.”
“Oh, good lord,” said Paul, digging through his coins again. “What’d you go and do that for?”
“I thought it’d be amusing,” Cora said with a laugh. Then she turned to Anna. “Anything wrong, dear? You’re white as a ghost.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Meryem perched on the balcony, swallowed by night. Tipsy from the sound of laughter that floated through treetops, she did not wait for the general and the old asker to discuss her whereabouts any further. Without a moment’s hesitation, she reached for one of the limbs that sprawled over the balcony’s railing, and she used it to balance herself as she swung across to the tree. Its trunk was sturdy enough to support her as she climbed slowly down, pausing on each branch to pull her garment loose from its twiggy snags. By the time she dropped to the ground, a commotion stirred behind her. Doors of the general’s palace slammed, lights blazed, feet ran, voices raised in questions.
Meryem landed on a garden path of gravel, bathed in a ring of light that now surrounded the mansion. The old man must have switched on every light in the place as a show of his employer’s power and wealth. Bah! With a few brisk steps, she moved out of its blazing circle, into the shadows that enveloped most of the garden.
The men’s words that she’d overheard played through her mind. They’d used her, like a nargile, as their cover, while they met illicitly, at risk to their lives, so they’d said, to plan the overthrow of the government.
They would not allow her to escape with that information.
Her slow, careful steps—careful, to minimize the crunch of gravel—made her want to scream her impatience. There was no choice but to stay on the gravel paths, since they boxed in little plots of shrubs and flowers that someone cultivated. Asker. She’d seen his garden tools. None of his plots would provide enough cover for her escape now.
It was only a matter of minutes before the general’s men would realize she’d overheard their plans. They would join the old soldier in his inspection of the grounds now that every light in the house had been turned on, doing its best to illuminate the entire hill of Kavaklidere.
But the old asker was not fast enough in his drunken stupor, nor as smart as she. Shadows skirted the perimeter of the blazing mansion, and she moved deeper into them. Both cautiously and swiftly, she fled to the gate at the back of the garden. Only a few more feet away.
All she had to do was escape to the street, then run the short distance to the bottom of the hill where the vacant lot with the hollow stump awaited her. That’s also where the fields began, where she could disappear into the peasant fold. Her tsharchaf concealed the dancer’s costume, which would have given her away, even among peasants.
By the time she made it to the gate, she was breathing deeply. Her hand stopped in mid-air, reaching for the latch. A footstep scuffed the pavement of the street. She ducked against the wall to one side of the gate and craned her neck to see through the wrought-iron grillwork. Something moved out there, on the street.
Someone stood just beyond the puddle of light coming from the lamppost on the corner. A man. Now she saw him, leaning against a low wall. The end of a cigarette glowed in her direction, as if he watched her. No, not her, but the gate. Her very means of escape. A
s if he waited for her to leave the general’s palace.
That was impossible! He couldn’t be her enemy. The gunman didn’t know where she was.
Even so, she jerked back against the rough surface of the stucco wall, sucked in her breath, and studied the dark for an alternate escape.
If she couldn’t use the street, she’d have to slip through backyards. Over fences.
She turned away from the gate and crept on, groping her way along the wall. The Americans’ yellow house, which she could not see, lay ahead. She paused long enough to release her tsharchaf from thorny snags and branches. From somewhere off to her right came the sounds of muted laughter. Here, the dark that engulfed her was so dark that she had to hold her arms in front of her, feeling her way past branches and stems and dried flower pods.
Her fingers brushed the thin wire of the fence before she saw it. This, her first fence on her way down the hill, strung from the end of the general’s pink wall at the street and ran along the side of the Americans’ yellow stucco house. Only wire separated the general’s garden from the Americans’ side yard.
She paused, breathing hard, frowning over her planned escape. The thinly woven wire, not as sturdy as the tree, would never support her weight if she attempted to climb over it. It would snare her flowing skirts and slash her flesh. Anyway, whether she climbed the wire fence or the pink wall in this corner where the two of them met, she’d end up on the street where the man with the cigarette could see her.
The back door of the mansion opened, and the hulking shape of a man stepped out into the ring of light. “I know you’re out there, gypsy!” The old soldier bellowed. “There is no way out.”
Meryem clutched her robe tighter around her, pulling the fabric over her face in case the moon attempted to betray her. Using the wire fence to guide her, she ran along its length, away from the street and toward the interior of the city block. But this direction wasn’t promising, for now she closed in on the sounds of laughter, American voices and their clinking glassware. The backyard party where she should’ve danced.
