Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  “We’ll write, won’t we? We’ll make the effort.”

  Grace leaned back, her hands flat on the rough concrete of the stoop. Directly opposite, only a few hot steps away, were her own temporary twinned steps, her door, the empty, peeling window boxes. She sipped the warm, viscous liquid from her glass, then set it down. “We will,” she said, with more certainty than she felt. “We absolutely will.”

  “Hey,” said Edie. “Is that dog humping Canada?”

  Grace leaned forward. “Absolutely yes,” she said. “Yes, he is.”

  They sipped their drinks and watched the sun go down; they made some promises, exchanged their new temporary addresses on carefully folded slips of paper.

  GRACE LEAVES a letter addressed to Edie on the telephone table in the hallway and slips out the door to meet Bahar for lunch. She rushes down the steps, crosses the marbled lobby and pulls the front door shut behind her. She wants to miss Hidayet, the kapıcı. Who ever heard of such a thing? she’d written Edie early on. Here the apartment super does your grocery shopping. Fresh bread twice a day, milk, fruit. Will wonders never cease? But now she wants to avoid him: his eyes, his cringing brand of insolence, the way he holds pieces of fruit up for her to admire, apricot by apricot, peach by peach.

  After lunch in the gold district, they walk through the crowded streets to the park. Bahar deftly eludes the merchants and beggars, towing Grace behind her. “You need a maid,” Bahar says. “She’ll keep the kapıcı in line. That’s how it’s done.”

  They’ve only been in the apartment a month but Grace already hates being cornered by this smelly little man on the landing, forced to admire what he’s brought, to fumble in her coin purse for small lira.

  “Fine,” she tells Bahar. “A maid. How do I get one?”

  Soon, they’re standing in the park near the swans. “Or a houseboy,” Bahar says, passing her a cigarette. “Either one.”

  Grace considers it. Maids and houseboys, she’s discovered here, are not quite the same animal. Houseboys lend an undercurrent of voltage to a household, a quiet, subterranean pulse that makes her think, unwillingly, of sex. Furtive, illicit sex: in pantries and closets, against household appliances, the kind of acts committed in daylight with one’s eyes closed and never spoken of again. Standing there with Bahar’s eyes fastened on her, Grace thinks that the choice between the two alternatives, maids and houseboys, probably speaks some essential truth about the chooser.

  She thinks of Canada’s friend Catherine and her dreadful mother, Simone. Grace doesn’t much care for their houseboy. He materializes as if conjured when a glass is empty, holding a champagne bottle, his arrogant, beautiful head cocked in question. All the reservations Grace has about houseboys are distilled in Simone’s: his air of scorn, a faint expression of derision—vanishing as if imagined when one looks again—his serene, appraising manner. With merely a glance in the doorway as he relieves her of a wrap, he manages to make her feel old and small.

  Grace knows she is not alone in the opinion that something unusual is afoot in that household. If Simone is absent from a card game with the Turkish ladies and talk turns to servants, someone will mention Simone and then, almost always, a conspiratorial, gossipy hush will hang for a few moments above the table and the women’s eyes will slide from one to another, twinkling. A houseboy, passing through the room on some innocuous errand, might be subject to a long, evaluating glance. And Bahar, to put an end to it, will slap her fan of cards against the table’s edge, and with wicked eyes make a crack about how hard it is to find good help in this city.

  Grace glances at Bahar, who is watching her carefully. A boy in ragged clothes passes, simits are piled high on his head and he’s calling out his quavering sales pitch: simit, simit, simiiiiiiit.

  “Houseboys make me nervous,” she says. It’s true. Grace does not think she can abide that cool arrogance in her own home: lately, living with Canada brings all the domestic disdain a person can be reasonably expected to tolerate. “A maid,” she says to Bahar. “Definitely.”

  And Bahar raises her eyebrows and laughs in a way that might mean anything.

  Not long after, Rand gets a tip from someone at the embassy and they drive over to Çankaya together one evening. Not to meet the maid, but to be interviewed by her current employers. They hope to inherit this woman—this being the way domestic help commonly changes hands in Ankara—from a Mormon family leaving for another post. The maid is called Firdis.

  Grace stands with the wife, completing the transaction, in a pantry they’ve custom built for the apocalypse. A staggering sight: stacked boxes of powdered milk, sacks of flour, towers of cans and rolls of toilet tissue and candles and batteries. The woman seems to think all this is perfectly normal.

  “Have you begun stocking up?” she asks. “Remember, one never knows.”

  Grace shakes her head. She feels cramped, skeptical and awed; but she’s also a little on edge. She herself is lapsed, devoid of any recognizable brand of faith. She loves Ankara’s mosques and minarets, the men bent on prayer rugs, the idea of a whole city facing one direction in unison, responding to an ancient, nearly tuneless call. Ezan, it’s called here. In contrast, the antiseptic church gatherings on the British compound—which at first they’d all attended regularly, at her insistence—now seem tiresome and terribly staged. She’d skipped the previous Sunday, let Rand and Canada sleep, and when they woke up and wandered out, confused and relieved, she pretended to have forgotten what day it was. While Grace speaks with the woman about the maid, Rand drifts out onto the balcony with the husband, probably tamping tobacco into his pipe, admiring tomato plants and home-grown peppers, or something just as useless. Since they’ve arrived in Ankara, Rand has been supremely unhelpful, leaving, as usual, all the pedestrian details of life to her. She’d chosen the apartment. He had stood in the bare, dusty living room, swiveled once around, said “fine,” and decamped immediately for the embassy. She’d fought with the shippers over water damage, filed the reimbursement claims and trotted Canada to her cursory interview at the British school. She’d even waited, for nearly seven freezing hours one day at a depot, for his beloved red car to arrive on a trailer from Istanbul. (“It smells of rot,” he’d said accusingly, when she presented it to him at the embassy.)

  Near the end of the interview about the maid—a one-way interrogation, Grace wrote to Edie later, in entirely the wrong direction—the woman says, “Now she’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong. She’s miraculous. There is just the one thing.”

  Grace is standing pressed against a shelf of canned beans, desperately wanting out. The space is suffocating; the shelves loom precariously. Hand built, she assumes. This Rand will later confirm, shaking his head and muttering about fanatics.

  “What thing?” Grace asks.

  Not that it matters. Lately she’s been weeping over the wringer-washer, pulling torn, mangled clothing from its pernicious jaws. She can’t communicate at all with the kapıcı, who just grins at her and nods every time she speaks to him from her phrase book. Grins and nods and vanishes.

  “Well,” says the woman as she lowers her voice and leans too close. “Things move.”

  Grace shakes her head a little. She runs a hand through her sticky hair. “Move? She steals?”

  The woman draws back and puffs herself up. “Certainly not,” she says. “I’m just saying that items change places. When I haven’t touched them.”

  Grace assumes, comfortably, that the woman is certifiable. She confirms it with a glance around her—the teetering canned goods, the bedrolls and flashlights and first-aid paraphernalia.

  Rand and the husband come in off the balcony together a moment later, looking satisfied and male and jolly. As she and Rand leave, he offers to sell the contents of the pantry to them—lock, stock and barrel, he says, including shelving.

  “Can’t take it with you?” Rand says heartily. The two men are shoulder clapping each other, saying goodbye.

  Grace stands nearby, her hand on
the doorknob. She squeezes it hard. Miniature plastic rain boots are lined up under the coat hook in military formation. Orange, red, blue, green.

  The woman reaches around Grace for the door. “It’s all specific for the climate, for Ankara,” she says seriously. “We’ll have to start again in Paris.”

  In the car, Grace says, “Paris? They’re going to Paris?”

  Rand says, “I pity Paris.”

  Grace sighs and leans back in her seat; Rand steers around a clump of dirty sheep congregating on a residential roadway. Canada is playing at her friend Catherine’s—Grace hopes she will stay for dinner. At home, there is nothing in the refrigerator or the cupboards; Grace cannot seem to accomplish even the minor everyday haggling that constitutes commerce in Turkey. The price of nearly everything, it seems—flour, fruit, bread, floor polish—is infinitely negotiable.

  “Who suggested this woman?” she asks him. “Who gave you the tip?”

  “Paige Trotter,” he says. “You like her. The one who reads cards.”

  “He’s CIA, isn’t he? That’s what everyone says.”

  Rand doesn’t answer—she isn’t surprised. No one discusses what the men do for a living here, or whom they work for. It isn’t polite; not even appropriate, it seems, between husbands and wives. But Grace does like Paige Trotter. Many of the other wives here remind her of the insipid women from Olson Loop; at parties, they gather and chatter in little parliaments around the room, giggling and making eyes—but not Paige. She drifts around in caftans and turbans, drinking scotch neat and laughing just as loudly as the men. Late at night, in her own messy house, she lays out fortune-telling cards, rolls back the carpets and initiates dancing and games of charades.

  Grace watches her husband’s big hands gripping the steering wheel; it seems like a child’s toy under them, a circus car. “I had a letter from Edie yesterday,” she says. “She says Saudi reminds her a little of Paris. The shopping, I suppose.”

  Rand ignores her through Çankaya’s winding hills. They pass the American Residence and Ankara University; the electricity returns as they drive and she watches it punch bright holes through the darkness. As they enter Gasi Osman Paşa, Rand says, “I wouldn’t advise either of them to get too comfortable there. They can’t possibly last out a full tour.”

  “She sounds quite happy.”

  “Goldfish are happy,” he says. “Greg hasn’t got mettle enough for Saudi…and she’s not exactly made of the ideal stuff either. In fact, he should probably be filing papers somewhere right now, not in a sensitive field post.”

  “I’m sure you’re wrong.”

  Rand shakes his head wonderingly. “I’d have bet money they’d be sent to Guam or something. But Saudi Arabia, for God’s sake. Saudi.”

  “You don’t sound very happy for them.”

  He keeps his eyes on the road and doesn’t respond. She lets it go. Rand has always disapproved—in his maddeningly oblique way—of Grace’s friendship with Edie. Of all things, he’d said, when he’d learned where they were going. Of all the goddamn things. And when she’d asked, What goddamn things? he had merely looked at her as if she were shockingly dim. Never mind, he’d said, popping a beer and sucking foam from the lip. Forget it.

  He glances at her now in just the same way and eases the car into a space across from their apartment building.

  SMALL THINGS move first. Almost imperceptibly. A picture that has been propped against a wall seems to hang itself, directly above its original resting spot. At first Grace wonders if she’s done it herself. Then a carpet shifts, from one side of the bed to the other. Silver serving dishes go from inside the china cabinet to the outer shelf; a chair from the right side of the fireplace to the left. A heavy crystal ashtray sweeps around a room—on a coffee table one day, a side table the next, then the mantel, then the sideboard, before finally landing on the desk in the corner by the window.

  On the fifth day Grace comes home and finds her dressing table moved—mere inches, from east to west. The contents are untouched, but the table itself has definitely moved.

  She says to Rand, “Do you notice this?”

  “What?”

  “The moving, is what. Do you not notice it?”

  And like a line in a radio skit, he says, “Who’s moving?”

  “Never mind,” Grace says and concludes, not for the first time, that she’s married a handsome, brilliant idiot.

  She gets used to it. When an entire seating section of the living room gets up and rearranges itself in a different corner, she sits down there and smokes a cigarette. When the contents of the kitchen cabinets change entirely, up going down and down going up, she asks Canada where the powdered milk has gone and proceeds accordingly. Because Canada always seems to know. If Grace comes home and finds her nose-down in a book, oblivious, and asks her where such and such is, Canada knows. “She put it there,” she’ll say. At times, Grace suspects collusion. Others, she chalks it up to Canada’s observant nature—very little gets by her. Even when she has a pulpy paperback tucked inside the pages of a huge, battered poetry anthology, she’ll have managed to memorize some terrible, boring poem, in case she is asked.

  A few weeks into Firdis’s tenure, Grace is at lunch with Bahar and brings the subject around to her new maid. “The woman is miraculous,” she says. “But I do feel as though she’s taking over my house.”

  Firdis scours and cooks and cleans from morning until night; she hunches on her knees, polishing the wood floors one meticulous inch at a time, swaddled in her many layers of multicolored fabric. The woman is a walking, scrubbing coatrack. She also leaves in her wake a pungent combination of sweat and lemon oil, which Grace has become almost completely accustomed to.

  Bahar lifts an eyebrow and plays with her salad. “This is something wrong? A bad thing?”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  They pay the bill and walk over to the park. Grace has with her a thick military-issued binder on cultural matters, on protocol, on navigating the city and tipping: Dependents’ Guide to the Customs and Culture of Turkey. “Turkey” is typed in on a separate line below the other words, indicating that an entire library of such books exists somewhere, with the names of other lands filled in by some anonymous clerk.

  She shows it to Bahar. “Military efficiency,” she says.

  Bahar takes it from her, flips it open and skims the pages. She laughs out loud. “No,” she says. “Not correct. Nor this. This is not true either. Who writes this merde?”

  Grace leans over to follow Bahar’s finger. She has read the book several times but is still drawn to its peculiar information: how much leg is appropriate, how one must avoid stray dogs, respect Islam and Kemal Atatürk. A strange collection of topics, a glossary of phrases, bits of trivia compiled, she imagines, in the same choppy, haphazard way it’s presented: religion leading into history, government flowing into the role of women, economics and foreign exchange devolving into matters of courtesy.

  Bahar is absorbed in the binder when Grace notices a woman standing nearby at the marshy end of the lake, holding the hand of a dark toddler who gnaws busily at its fist. The woman is wrapped in clothing and headscarves and wears heavy socks under pink plastic sandals. The layers of fabric beneath her coat are wild and mismatched and she seems perilously overdressed for the weather. Grace cannot tell where one article of clothing ends and another begins. The child is similarly bundled; no determining if it is a boy or a girl. When the woman smiles back at her, Grace sees gold teeth and wide, dark gaps between them.

  The binder and the briefings Grace attended before shipping out have taken pains to point out the chasm here between East and West, Christianity and Islam, between the poor and the privileged. Driving to the city from the airport on the night of their arrival, their host had pointed out the shantytowns—geçekondus—cobbled together from bits of tin and cardboard, where families lived in huddles, barely sheltered from the elements, cooking over smoky coal fires. These were squatters’ camps, erected at ni
ght and torn down quickly in the morning. Bleary-eyed from travel, Grace saw ragged children running alongside the car or stepping brazenly into its path, holding out their hands. Don’t give them a thing, the binder warns (and their uniformed host had echoed sternly from the front seat that evening), or you’ll never get away. On the other hand, with no hint of irony, it suggests that one always carry American cigarettes and booze, if possible. Charity is frowned upon, she gathers, bribery openly sanctioned. Rand’s nondescript government car already holds a stash of bottles and red and white cartons stacked in the trunk.

  Grace feels around in her pockets and finds some peppermints. They are quite old, left over from the airplane, in fact. For a moment she examines them—the wrappers are slightly soiled, the pink stripes running together from heat and moisture—then looks up to find the child’s eyes watching her above a grubby fist. She decides it’s a boy, for no particular reason. But when she offers him the candies, the woman’s face changes swiftly. She shakes her head and begins to back away. The little boy bursts instantly into tears and pulls at her hand; they tug at each other like that for a few moments until the woman, with her brute strength and harsh tone, prevails. She sweeps the child into her arms and carries him away. Embarrassed, Grace tucks the candies back in her pocket.

  When she turns back, Bahar is watching her.

  “You think we let our children take candy from strangers?” she says. “I wonder: would I do this in your country, with your children?” She closes the book, sets it down on the bench and stands up. Grace feels her face burn as she hurries across the grass behind Bahar, apologizing. Bahar slows, finally, before she crosses the street and lets Grace tuck her arm into hers.

  “Not everyone here wants your American charity,” she says, more kindly. “You cannot learn everything from that silly book.”

  But as time passes and summer comes on in earnest, the early missteps she’d made seem humorous, just beginner’s mistakes. Grace grows comfortable with the Turkish ladies and their afternoons, with the crazed bustle of the streets, the barking of vendors and the constant presence of Firdis, who continues to effect her own arbitrary changes within her household.