Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  “How is Ali?” Grace asks her. “The boys?” Bahar has two little ones, miniatures of her bearish doctor husband, dark fire hydrants of boys, always hitting each other, racing around Bahar’s feet in one war game or another, which she serenely ignores.

  Bahar lights a cigarette with a mosaic lighter, blows curling streams from her wide nostrils. She shrugs, and moves her mouth in that uniquely Turkish way, that disdainful gesture of “so what?”

  “Husbands,” she says. “Children.”

  Grace looks at the water: the swans move their feathers in a motion like a shiver. The grass is browning: there has been no rain for weeks, just the soupy heat, the swelter, the broiling, rancid smell of the city. Not far away she hears the faint cacophony of traffic, the honking and screeching of tires that has become background music to virtually everything.

  This city, Grace has written to her friend Edie, is an utter contradiction: in places it is the worst of bedlam, ugly, concrete and charmless, but turn a corner and ivy grows on the walls of brick houses, at night the Ankara castle glows from a hilltop, minarets reach up through the smog and flowers explode from window boxes. Men spit on the street like animals, then offer an arm to help you through traffic. The streets are filthy, but trees bloom and there is always color and music. Everything is in opposition. But, it is magical, in its way, she has written, and I think I will love it.

  “What about you?” Bahar says. “How do you like our roasting pan of a city?”

  Grace smiles. “I do like it, very much.”

  “And Rand? Is he happy too?”

  Grace lifts her hands, palms up. “Who knows,” she says. “He doesn’t say. Locked in the embassy all day playing at his secret job, he doesn’t tell me a thing. Can’t or won’t, who knows which.”

  Bahar puts her hand on Grace’s arm. Her nails are tapered, perfect, the color of dark plums. “Well,” she says, “this is why we have our own lives, our days, our card games. Do you think I pay attention to what Ali says, when he comes home from the clinic? Or do I nod, like this, and hand him a plate of something? I do not think to confide in him my troubles. That would be foolish. I do not ask where he is when he is late or when he travels. And I do not care particularly, because my life is quite nice.”

  Grace, lost for a moment in thought, does not respond.

  “What will worry accomplish?” Bahar says. Her open hand strikes Grace’s shoulder in a playful gesture. “We’ll go to the baths, or to that rug merchant on Tunali. Forget it, you will only make yourself unhappy.” She grinds her cigarette out with the fragile heel of her sandal and continues. “I am not unsympathetic, but what you describe is the manner of all marriages I know. I went to Switzerland, you remember, a few weeks ago? Was this for jewelry shopping, as I said? No. It was for a plastic surgery and to get rid of a baby. Did Ali notice? And he is a doctor.”

  “You did what?”

  Bahar smiles her mysterious smile. “I am like a movie star now, yes?”

  “But wouldn’t Ali have wanted another baby?”

  Bahar tucks her arm inside Grace’s as they cross the street. She has the enviable, imperious quality of all women who are wealthy and beautiful: she does not wait for traffic to pause, rather she halts it with her eyes, or steps carelessly into the middle of it. When horns blare and drivers curse, she stares them down or offers an obscene gesture, which from her is a strangely elegant motion.

  Grace says, “If I did that, I’d be squashed.”

  “Certainly Ali would want a baby; if it were his.”

  Crossing the street into the gold district, they are surrounded by street merchants and shopkeepers, caught up and swept along, suddenly part of the city’s frantic daily business. Always here, Grace feels her senses rushed, overwhelmed. She smells lamb roasting, the char of bread in a wood fire, a sharp scent of dried apricots, the heavy animal damp of wool. Gold glitters in window cases and everywhere men sit high on piles of rugs, drinking tea from slender glasses. They throw dice, smoke pipes and stunted cigarettes, laugh raucously.

  Bahar, calm as an island, smiles, fingers the gold chains and bangles held out to her and shakes her head no. From the corner of her eye, as they walk along, Grace catches Bahar looking at her. Some expression, some interior decision-making process, works swiftly across her features.

  “Otherwise it would not be worth the screaming,” she says, “the—how do you call them? Interrogatories. My friends and I always go to Europe, in such a predicament.”

  Grace is silent for a moment. Long enough that Bahar nudges her arm and laughs. “Are you so naïve?” she says. “If so, then I apologize for being indiscreet.”

  “No,” Grace says. “Not at all.”

  She is thinking of Bahar’s husband, his charm and practiced hands. She remembers a recent cocktail party she and Rand gave and how Ali’s laughter had echoed around the small space, how he had helped Rand to bed when he’d staggered and then afterward, in their bedroom, how his hands had strayed down the back of her dress, suggestively but without commitment, a touch that might have been a friendly accident.

  Standing on the street corner in the shimmering heat, with Bahar’s silk cuff against her wrist and the smell of sesame from the simits stacked on the heads of the vendors, Grace feels a faint shiver of hope, an odd and unexpected lightness. It might be the glint of Bahar’s jewelry, or the merchant winking at her as he holds up a cheap cotton dress, but it might be something else—some promise of intrigue, perhaps, or adventure. Maybe it’s just the allure of these new cosmopolitan women—women who seem to inhabit airy and secret places, in which they are free to live out their private, fantastical lives.

  Despite the bad publicity, and all her initial misgivings, Grace does love Turkey. On the mad streets, with crowds streaming by, and this new foreign friend, Olson Loop and America seem a million miles away. It’s almost hard to remember now—the numbing sameness of those days, the churchy darkness of Edie’s house across the street, the raging irritability brought on by the heat and the waiting.

  WHEN THEY arrived on Olson Loop it was summertime, bright and humid; all day bicycles whirred in increasingly reckless orbits, gathering speed for the steep hill down the far side near the school. Children shouted and mothers called out cautions in ever-louder tones, rarely leaving the stoops where they gathered in clutches, drinking coffee or iced things, collectively smoking or quitting, painting their faces or nails, tanning their shoulders and thighs, gossiping from sunup to nightfall.

  Grace quickly learned the facts: Olson Loop was a tight circle of asphalt and rumor. Stunted driveways bore numbers painted in acid yellow, and the semidetached brick structures—two families sharing a common wall, a front lawn, a porch—were separated only by a low brick divider, easily stepped over.

  Noisy, she’d complained to Rand. It’s so goddamn loud here. (She could not say why this bothered her so. They had just come from a post in Frankfurt, Germany, a city far louder than this place. Perhaps it was merely the nearness to the ground that irked her.) Rand just turned on the television and ticked the volume up, up, up.

  But before long she had befriended Edie, or perhaps it was the other way around. Edie lived directly across the street with her own uniformed husband, in her identical little house. She was small framed, of Spanish descent, and she ate tapioca pudding all day, spooning it from an earthenware bowl in the refrigerator, hunkered down inside her dark brick house.

  “Those women,” she said to Grace early on, speaking of the stoop-women. “They make me tired.”

  Edie was perpetually tan, lion-shaded—tawny skin, chestnut haired, golden eyed—though she seemed never to leave the house, never ventured much beyond the stoop or the two short steps below it. Instead she paced barefoot, like an edgy housecat, through the shag carpeting. She set the table for dinner, using her good service and silver, every day at ten in the morning. These gestures and protocols, without meaning in the shared purgatory of Olson Loop, were things Grace easily understood. Edie set the
table for the same reasons Grace herself had unwrapped her few boxes of knickknacks and breakables and photographs and arranged them on the scarred furniture they’d found when they’d moved in. The same reason she’d moved an end table to cover a virulent, juice-colored stain on the carpet and scrubbed the walls until they lightened almost imperceptibly, by half a dingy beige shade.

  Edie kept her house shuttered and dim, a manufactured darkness enhanced by heavy, carved furniture and low, flickering votive candles. Unlike Grace and Rand, Edie had all her own things—she and Greg had been on Olson Loop nearly two years. Most of Grace and Rand’s household goods remained in storage in some distant warehouse, ready to be shipped as soon as their new orders arrived. “Your house makes me want to genuflect,” Grace once said to her, when they were friendly enough. And that had happened in the sped-up way Grace had come to expect—there was no wasteful dawdling over preliminaries on Olson Loop, no auditions.

  Usually they sat just inside the screen door of Edie’s house, on the cool tiled floor beside a potted hibiscus and the ornate carved legs of a hallway table, watching the street through the wire netting. They played simple card games, and once in a while the hearts and spades and queens and jacks, loosed from their fingers, would catch a rare breath of wind and slide or scuttle across the grooved entryway. They would scramble after them in a halfhearted way, laughing. When they rose for a drink or to visit the bathroom, they found that the diamond-shaped tiles of the floor had embossed the backs of their bare legs. They carried those grooves, etched by the long idle days, around with them, through dinners and television and marital arguments, until sleep smoothed them away.

  While they played and mixed pitchers of iced tea, Edie relayed information, details Grace thought she couldn’t have learned just by watching the street in her patient, flickery-eyed way.

  “That one,” Edie said once, pointing sideways into the street, toward an overweight woman in blue shorts standing on her scrap of lawn. The woman was mysteriously lifting up first one leg and then another, like a shorebird. “That one and her daughter, they kiss with tongues. I’ve seen it.”

  Edie had no children of her own and the subject was one she mostly veered from. Inside her friend’s house, Grace kept one ear tuned for Canada’s voice; the screen door was all that separated her from the street, but the difference in light was so great that even when she stepped to the door to check—infrequently, with a sudden jolt of guilt—it took a few long moments for her eyes to adjust, to roam the small circle, to identify Canada in the bunch, to classify her as alive, kicking.

  The children were still swarming when the sun went down, as Grace picked her way across the hot, rocky street in bare feet and began to think about getting her husband’s dinner. By then they were playing statues and red rover, swinging one another wildly by the arms or barreling toward a line of clasped wrists. The grass was green and prickly, the insects gathered, and Grace stood for a moment shading her eyes. The children moved from one lawn to another as though in a public park—no fences, no boundary lines. A mutt dog chased up and down behind them, a bicycle bell rang endlessly, the sound of hot wind whipping spokes, a smell of hamburgers somewhere close. She shivered. The heat on her body, after the long hours indoors, chilled her.

  During the days, while Grace was closeted inside with Edie, Canada became briefly close with the girl across the street, the mother-kissing girl, a little doll with dimpled legs and long blond ringlets. Grace was relieved: the appearance of a playmate, someone with whom her daughter engaged from time to time in some inexplicable, painstakingly ruled game, made her feel a little less neglectful.

  Then one afternoon near the middle of the summer, for no apparent reason, Canada gave this little girl a fairly brutal shove, knocking her down hard in the driveway. The screams brought Grace and Edie to the screen door, then outside it, and finally across the street to where Canada was standing over her friend without any trace of remorse. Her face was blank as the street itself; she looked up as Grace came running, blinking as though she’d just been woken from a dream. The girl came up screaming, spitting blood—she’d struck her chin hard on the driveway—dark specks of gravel embedded in her knees and palms. Briefly, there was some emotion—chilly and triumphant—on Canada’s face, which Grace caught as she crouched barefoot on the hot tar and examined the victim’s fat, raw knees. But still, even later, shaking her, she could not get out of Canada why she’d done it—what on earth had possessed her. She called Rand at the office, then sent Canada to the willow tree to break off a switch. That she’d even thought of this amazed her, but she was terribly angry and it had made her inventive.

  Rand laughed when he came home and saw the switch on the hall table. He’d accused her of hysteria. Then, standing at the screen door, his back to the street, he turned angry. Didn’t she know, he said coldly and slowly, that he was busy? Did she have any idea what he did for a living? Did she think he’d nothing better to do than solve the problems of little girls? He’d meant—she understood him clearly—all of them: her and Edie and Canada and the girl with the torn-up knees—all you little girls, your petty squabbles. Then he left, banging the screen door hard behind him.

  When he’d gone, everything was terribly quiet. She heard nothing from Canada’s room, where she had been sent to think about it, and even the street outside, normally so caught up in itself, so bursting with noise and activity, seemed now to be hung up in a long, airless lull.

  Afterward, Grace began taking Canada with her across the street. They let her watch television in the darkened living room for hours while they baked and played cards and kept their eyes on the street. One day in the middle of July, she and Edie stood staring out the narrow kitchen window, watching a car pass at a snail’s pace.

  Edie said, “It’s strangling here, don’t you think? I feel that way, like there’s always something around my neck.” She put her hands there. “Never mind. Let’s play cards: I need to do something with my hands. I’m trying not to smoke.”

  The summer wore on. In other brick two-families, up and down Olson Loop, orders were received. Boxes were packed and sealed, vans stole up to doors in the dawn hours, families peeled off and drove away, waving. Write, people called to each other, and the departing families called back, We will. But nobody really did. Certainly not for longer than a month or two.

  One night in the fall, Rand came home even later than usual. It was early October by then. The trees were creeping with color, the air brisk. Canada had started school. Grace heard the sound of a car pulling away and looked up to see him standing on the sidewalk. He’d worn his uniform that morning and for a moment he looked quite handsome to her: he might almost have been someone else. The papers in his hand fluttered. He came to the screen door and called for her. In the kitchen, washing her hands, Grace took her time. There was salmon loaf in the oven, something on the radio—she had the fanciful thought that it might float out to him on the sidewalk. She moved quietly, not answering him, drying her hands, refolding the dishtowel. The moment had, just then, the feel of a Christmas morning: the knowledge Rand held out on the walkway seemed at once as enormous and as trivial, an item to be eagerly torn into, exclaimed or despaired over, but in the end, it would be what it was. She wanted to know; she didn’t. She raised her eyes and looked out the window, over Rand’s shoulder, toward Edie’s house. Their orders had finally come in last week—Saudi Arabia—and Edie seemed happy enough.

  Grace ran her hands along the countertop; she used her fingernail to pry up a sticky little stain. She studied her husband’s expression for some sign. He had a slight smile and he swayed a little, side to side. The street beyond him was unsettlingly hushed.

  He called her name again, louder this time.

  She went to the screen and looked at him through the torn wire—the cat had clawed herself a little exit on the left, by the frame. Clever cat, she’d thought, but then the small hole she’d torn kept ripping, tearing away from the flimsy wood, and the flies came
in, the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums. Grace pushed the door open and stepped onto the porch.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me. Don’t make me guess.”

  “Guess,” he said.

  She went back inside. Clearly he’d found out earlier, gone to celebrate with the boys. He’d known for hours and kept it. She sat down at the dining room table, feeling murderous. She sat there until he came inside and put the paper on the table in front of her, back in its envelope—official-looking, with a big blue seal. Grace picked up the envelope and held it square in her hands, then turned it. She lifted the flap with her thumb, smelled its gumminess, tested it with her finger. Dry.

  “It’s Turkey,” he said. He was in the kitchen then, rummaging in the fridge for a beer.

  She put the envelope down. “Turkey?”

  The kitchen door pushed back open and he came in. “Ankara. There’s a book coming, and a dictionary. Briefings. Shots. Not gamma globulin though, thank Christ. Better start soon. Tell the school.”

  He surveyed the room, mentally packing. He looked exasperated at the prospect, though most of their things were still in storage.

  “I’ll take the cat to the pound some morning this week,” he said.

  He flicked on the television and sat down in his chair. The news was on; they were moving to Turkey. Grace went across the street to tell Edie. The frame of the screen banged behind her in a suddenly resonant way—once, twice, a diminutive little third, then the bare brush of a fourth note. She rubbed her dry hands on her hips and let them open at her sides to push the cooling air in front of her.

  She spent the next week packing, attending briefings, learning about a country she’d barely even heard of. She was suddenly busy, and it lit a little blaze inside her. The night before they shipped out, she and Edie carried sweet sherry in thimble glasses out onto the stoop and sat down. Canada was hugging a dog a patch of grass away; her pigtails were ragged, her knees raw.