Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  Catherine and I watched them, staying right where we were. We knew we would be conscripted into service soon enough—another thing that both our mothers believed in was silent, well-mannered children circulating through parties with trays. Soon the pool lights flickered on and the water brightened to a deep, unnatural shade of blue. We smelled fried pastries and pungent white cheese and heard the clink of liquor bottles and glasses. Music sputtered through speakers hidden in the bushes, and houseboys in dinner jackets began lighting torches around the pool.

  My father had returned from a trip that very morning, smelling of the unknown, his shoes uncharacteristically dusty, his eyes tired. He’d changed and gone over to the embassy but I expected him to arrive at any moment. He and my mother had argued about it and she’d won.

  Cars began pulling into the driveway and people wandered down the illuminated path to the swimming pool, lifting drinks from trays as they came, chattering and laughing. My mother and Simone emerged from the changing room at last, both in long skirts and silver jewelry, and they glared at us until we retreated from our towels and sat on a low stone wall in the background. We cadged Cokes from the bar and dunked lemon slices down through the ice with paper straws. We braided and unbraided each other’s wet, chlorine-scented hair.

  Before long, my mother and the other women pressed Mrs. Trotter into reading cards. She was one of my mother’s favorite people in Ankara—a lovely person, she always said, a real person, one of the best. Paige sat curled and barefoot—with her turban, clunky jewelry and knotty, unpainted toes—on a striped chair as they gathered around her. One by one, she built their futures in the shape of a cross, the cards shifted and slid on the plastic chair, seemingly tuned to the women bending over them, the motion of their hips and breasts, their intent, leaning bodies.

  Before long my father came, kissed me hello and then settled on a lounge chair and got busy with his pipe. He still looked tired to me and he gave me a smile I’d seen before—it said: I hate this, and you hate this, but we can get through it together. Soon the smell of his tobacco drifted on the night air, lovely, rich and whiskey-dark, purely him. He wore long pants and a dress shirt—the rest of the men were in swimming trunks and the thick, dark-rimmed eyeglasses that were fashionable at the time. Eventually, they all gathered around him for a photograph; Simone was taking it. I heard my father laugh, his voice thick with booze and exhaustion. People congregated by the drinks table; boys in jackets passed trays. I hovered nearby, my back against the low stone wall, watching, smelling the alcohol rising off their glasses. Everything felt a little heady; everyone seemed a little drunk. I shivered; white lights sparkled in the trees, midges and tiny flies swarmed the food. Simone had come for Catherine and now she too was passing drinks, her hair still damp and the back of her shirt stained dark. I’d been overlooked, forgotten.

  I watched Catherine skirt the edge of the pool. Lights danced on the water and underneath, the bottom of the pool seemed to undulate in wide, aquamarine ripples. It looked unearthly and beautiful, a place you might elect to drown in.

  I was wearing only my American-flag bikini, and goose pimples came up on my arms. Still, I was waiting until someone explicitly instructed me to get dressed. In the dank, chlorinated cool of the dressing room, with its benches and compartments and slatted wooden walls, were my shoes and street clothes. Rolled inside, tight in the middle, was a small stash of John’s candy. A breeze moved across the pool, the clustering adults; it blew through the trees and ruffled the flowers. Pink and yellow petals drifted from the trees and made kaleidoscope patterns on the grass. The American Residence was just up the hill from the Canadian one; the gardens met at a discreet fence. I could see their lights, the bunched shadows of their trees.

  I tried to catch Catherine’s eye. John was standing near her, taking glasses from the tray she held. Simone had lent him to the ambassador’s wife for the evening; it wasn’t unusual for him to appear in places like this, in homes and at parties where he didn’t actually belong. But it always gave me a shiver when he turned up looking both apart and at ease, as though his presence were merely a fateful accident. But there was always about John the implication that he was doing us a great and undeserved favor just by being where he was. As I watched, he spoke into Catherine’s ear and she laughed. A hot flush of jealousy skittered along my arms, made my neck itch.

  I pushed off the wall I was leaning against and started toward her, meaning to pull her away, to take one of them—which? I have to wonder—from the other. But I never made it. Halfway there, I saw my father lurch up from his chair and stagger toward the men standing for the photograph. Instinctively, the men moved back, shifting clear of him. A glass crashed to the tile; a table went over. Frozen in my place, I watched as his arms windmilled, and then he pitched hard into the pool, his legs scissoring in his long pants, his head striking the concrete edge. There was a sickening noise. He was wearing his dress shoes. A bright red flower grew at the pool’s edge. My mother screamed.

  PRELUDE TO a marital argument:

  My mother and I sat on the edge of a communal well in a small, dirty village on the Antalya coast. Fishing boats and pleasure craft dotted the harbor nearby, none of them the least bit splendid. They bounced on the roughening water, tethers slapping the waves. A storm was gathering, a dark, domed headpiece of clouds in the distance. The tree we were sitting under had jaundiced slowly in the changing light—the yellow of maturing bruises, coming thunder.

  My father had been gone well over an hour and my mother was hopping. We had watched streams of people stop at the shabby little mosque nearby to wash their hands at the taps and rub the crumbling mosaic wall with their fingers. But now the square was nearly deserted and fat raindrops had begun to splatter the ground beyond the tree. A goat tied to a rusted bicycle folded its knees solemnly, then lowered its haunches to the ground. My father had disappeared with a man promising to show him some antiquities, undoubtedly looted from a nearby archaeological dig or tomb. I had a Coke my mother bought me from a street vendor, tepid, the bottle filmed with dust, very nearly an artifact in its own right. Bored, I picked at a scab on my knee; I was familiar with this scenario. In the beginning, new to Turkey, we often made weekend trips to tourist attractions and historic sites, and my parents fought habitually about the things he acquired and the manner in which he did it. These unsavory characters you turn up, my mother said every time. You’ll have us all killed.

  This morning outside the pillars of Ephesus my father had made contact with a dirty little man who sidled up to us speaking pidgin English: Roman coins, he said. Authentic artifacts. Follow me. My father turned to him with amused eyes and spoke rapidly in Turkish. Before long the talk quickened and the eyes of the peddler brightened. He knew another man, as it happened. A bargain was struck. It was only a short walk. His wife would make tea. It was the same every time, and my mother and I had watched him go, marching off with the diminutive man, the two of them speaking and laughing and gesturing, until they vanished down the dusty road.

  Strange bedfellows, my mother once said to me, in a rare moment of humor. We were sitting on the hill beyond the Virgin Mary’s little stone house, gnawing at bread we’d bought earlier that day by the roadside. The waters of the spring below were teeming with pilgrims. Twisted olive trees rustled overhead; the air smelled of oranges and the sea. My mother used a house key to cut a corner of crumbling white cheese; she spoke through a mouthful, her manners momentarily abandoned. Miniver Cheevy, she said. Born too late. She trailed off, chewing.

  You had to wonder: how did my father find these men, or what was it about him that drew them, these slit-eyed, craven little men, dressed in ragged clothes, with their terrible teeth? They always seemed to recognize each other. Unlike my mother, though, I enjoyed these transactions. I liked the furtive commerce, the way the men glanced over their shoulders and touched my father’s sleeve in a pleading way, the way they offered up their bundles of rags and pockets full of coins. And my father’s
excitement was contagious.

  We’d trooped to innumerable dirty houses and apartments, to tumbled burial sites where ragged articles were spread across stone slabs on which chiseled lettering, finger-wide, grown shallow and worn, had faded almost entirely away. Huddled together over ancient epitaphs, my father haggled happily with these men over the price and authenticity of countless dirty, unidentifiable relics. But eventually my mother refused to accompany him.

  The rain became serious. The tree was no longer an awning but an honest-to-goodness gutter, sluicing water onto our shoulders and knees. Raindrops the size of marbles bounced on the dusty ground and the air thickened with the smell of wet stone and dirt. I glanced over at my mother, who sat, her hands folded on her knees and her eyes closed, while water ran in rivulets down her cheeks. The edges of her scarf drooped; her makeup ran. I looked around for a place to get out of the wet, but she said, “Stay put.” I closed my eyes against the water; I understood what we were doing. The rain slicked my skin and needled at my sunburned knees; my socks went sloppy and my cheap white tennis shoes soaked through, expanding by at least two sizes. My mother’s eyes stay closed, and somehow, between the expression on her face and the streaming water, she managed to look beatific. Which was, of course, the point.

  When my father returned, carrying some heavy wrapped thing, he took one look at us and doubled over, hooting with laughter. “You,” he said to me. “You, I thought had more sense.”

  We were back in the car for a while before the rain finally stopped. Mountains rose in the near distance; the sea below was one of those unnatural, natural hues—crystal, cerulean—lapping at an alabaster shore. I was in the backseat, my clothes dried cardboard stiff, reading a lurid version of Sinbad, my hand busy between my legs under a blanket, head turned into the fragrant, smoky leather of the seat. The argument was on, held in hushed tones, my mother’s voice chilly and hard. My father laughed, which outraged her.

  “It isn’t safe,” my mother said finally. “You disappearing off who knows where, leaving us in the middle of some godforsaken hellhole. One of these days you’re going to get your head bashed in.”

  “Not today,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Pull over,” my mother said after a moment. “Stop the car.”

  I closed my eyes and stilled my hands on the pages. The car continued to move, snaking along the road; the sunlight was hot on my eyelids, intrusive, insinuating.

  “Stop this car this minute.” Her voice rose; her teeth were clenched. I heard her fingers scrabbling at the nub of the door lock. But the car gained speed. I smelled sand and salt in my hair, a gritty feeling along my arms and neck, the day’s sand and dirt caked into the creases of my skin.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said.

  My father was quiet. I couldn’t even hear him breathe—just the hum of the little red car, the noise of air beating against the windows.

  Then the car stopped. There was the sensation of it lurching onto the shoulder, the wheels dipping onto the packed earth. The passenger door opened; my mother exited and slammed it behind her. A few hot moments passed.

  He said, “I know you’re awake.”

  I sat up and looked around. We were stopped on a cliff, the sea glittering below. In the distance on the other side of the car a hill rose gently, the vegetation sparse among the usual tumble of gray-white stones the size of oranges, and a few whiter ones, more square in shape, that dotted the field. Farther away were the rounded woolly bodies of sheep. I saw the plumed tail of one of the Turkish sheepdogs and the glint of its great spiked collar as it circled its flock in wide arcs.

  My mother walked slowly along the roadway. Her scarf lifted in the wind rising from the sea; she swayed along in tight cigarette-style pants. White pants, and I saw the silhouette of her underwear clearly. She was wearing small heels and teetering a little on the uneven surface.

  “Look,” said my father happily, pointing up the hill outside the passenger window. “Graves. Let’s go see.”

  We got out of the car and started up the hill together. My mother didn’t glance back. I was wearing shorts, a sun hat tied below my chin. The grasses were spiky, leaving thin red lashes along my calves. My father moved purposefully but slowly, his eyes on the ground. I’d done this a thousand times with my father: he had infinite patience and we could be there for hours. He bent down and with his handkerchief wiped a slab clean of grit and debris, sheep droppings. The marble was veined and cool to the touch, a surprising contrast in the heat. The lettering was Roman; there were numbers I could almost decipher. My father stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at it. He kicked around gently, found other markers and cleared them off as well. He did this almost reverently, humming a little tune. The bald spot on the top of his head reddened and sweat sprang up on his forehead.

  After a while we shared the candy bar he had in his pocket, sitting beside a tomb in the dirt. I made a little wreath of grasses and tiny purple flowers. Anemones, I think; they peppered the field as far as the eye could see. My father licked the chocolate from his fingers, then stood and wandered farther up the hill, and in his absence I experienced a rare moment of spiritual consternation. I had taken the little wreath and placed it on one of the marble slabs. But it occurred to me suddenly that this might be sacrilege—I had sufficient schooling in my mother’s faith to grasp this. I removed the wreath from the stone but suddenly was afraid of offending the Roman gods. It went back and forth like this for a while. I put the wreath down; I picked it up.

  When my father returned, we walked back down the hill to the car. There’s no telling how much time had passed. My mother was sitting in the passenger seat, and when we got in the car she made a small noise in her throat and turned her head away, staring fixedly out the window. I understood she was angry with me as well, that I had committed some betrayal, but certainly not the first one between us.

  “And we’re off,” my father said cheerfully. He started the car and we drove back to the city. Soon the view became monochromatic again, and the pleated hills looked like nothing so much as great swaths of canvas flung out across the land and allowed to gently billow down.

  All that had been months earlier, in the summer, when Catherine and I were set free of the chilly schoolroom with its slanted caramel light, the deserted garden, the dirty city and frantic streets, the dense, troubled silences of our city homes. We’d run wild, and not only in the alleys of Ankara. On many weekends we’d also shared the cramped backseat of the Rover, piled high and soft with pillows and blankets, the floor littered with books. We played games—Ghost, I Spy—on endless drives as the road wound along the coast, past jagged peninsulas and villages, past women squatting in fields, past boys driving sheep and cattle, along countless tumbled ruins and fields of scrubby brush.

  Sometimes the landscape was ferociously bare, sometimes wild formations of stone and caves jutted startlingly from picturesque meadows. Behind my father we crept together through ancient caves and catacombs, holding ropes strung along damp, streaming walls, crawling in tunnels and passageways, deep into the hearts of rock churches and subterranean cathedrals where our whispers came back strangely shaped, echoing and distorted. In a hotel in Pamukkale, a place too expensive for us to stay in, we swam through ruins they’d flooded to make a swimming pool, chasing each other’s kicking legs through cloudy green water, hiding from each other behind submerged stone colonnades. In hot springs nearby, steam rose in columns around our bodies and we scrambled down calcified terraces barefoot, stunned by the whiteness, the amazing, endless, stepping whiteness of the view. We shared small beds in cheap beachside hotels, where sand blew up in mounds against the wooden steps and pilings of the cottages, where snails traveled unmolested along the walls and floors and we played all day in shallow blue water, faces clownish with sun cream.

  AFTER THE accident, Bahar’s husband came daily to our apartment when he had finished with his patients. My mother, for her own r
easons, had not wanted my father treated at the American hospital. Even before the fall, my father had had a reputation for drinking too much, for staggering at parties, for needing to be taken home by the elbows. “Your father is fine,” my mother told me the morning after the accident, “but we’re telling people he’s gone on a trip. So he can recover in peace. It’s a little secret.” She narrowed her eyes. “You can keep a secret, can’t you?”

  Bahar’s husband, Ali, was big and stocky, a man who loved his beautiful wife, adored his wild boys, dressed immaculately and carried himself with an air of friendly dispassion. He treated my parents’ bedroom as if it were a sickroom, tiptoeing in and out, opening the door just wide enough to permit his not-insubstantial body to slide through and then silently closing it. He carried a very expensive-looking satchel; the scratched exterior, its general distress, seemed to enhance its luxury, and I often contrived to touch it when he wasn’t looking. Inside the bedroom—even my mother sensed she was unwelcome—I imagine that dressings were changed and medicines dispensed and certain words exchanged. I heard them laughing in there from time to time. Men’s laughter—rough and low and secretive.

  Later, he and my mother would speak in quiet tones in the hallway, or behind the frosted-glass doors of the living room. He would often poke his head into the kitchen on his way out and say something in Turkish to Firdis, who would giggle insanely and cover her head with her apron. Ali had a strange effect on Firdis: he undid her completely. Firdis was a woman of an indeterminate age and body type, so swathed and swaddled in garments that there was nothing remotely womanly about her shape. Her husband was a kapıcı in Çankaya and she seemed to have children in litters. When Ali’s fleeting, male attentions were turned on her, she reddened and cowered, would knock to the floor some item from the kitchen counter or the mantel, then scramble for it, nearly hysterical, one hand pressed to her mouth.