Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  She cannot turn up the checkbook and Firdis has gone for the day, on the bus home to Çankaya, where her husband is a kapıcı in a better apartment building than this one. Why, oh why, can’t this woman leave things where they belong?

  In apologetic gestures, she communicates all this to the guitar teacher, who bows his concession but is clearly displeased. He sucks his belly in and lifts his guitar through the door. She hears him humph on the landing, and curse in English as the case bangs against the rail.

  Grace pads down the narrow corridor, past the closets (neither bedroom has its own; they line the hallway, little boxes, hardly deep enough for the shoulders of Rand’s suits and uniforms), past the postage-stamp-size kitchen, where three grown people cannot stand comfortably. The curtains on the balcony door hang in the still air; Firdis has left the door cracked, despite what Grace tells her, and now the kitchen smells of the city. There is a phrase the Americans like to throw around, about apartment hunting: Mutfak utfak, ama farketmez. The kitchen is too small, but it doesn’t matter. In the beginning, they like the way it sounds—almost naughty, a silly little phrase, nearly rhyming. But now it does matter. You can’t turn around without touching something—the tiny round table, the avocado-green refrigerator. It makes Grace itch to stand in there, where the smell of Firdis and her cooking gathers and coils, invisible and inescapable.

  Grace dreads tonight’s party. She steps down the hall to the closet at the far end and studies its contents. Dressing for Simone—perfect, meticulous, climbing Simone—is always perilous. She’ll have Catherine in a princess dress, passing canapés and clearing glasses—Catherine, with her squared shoulders and lowered head, her remote eyes, her polite, murmuring answers. What do they have in common, those two girls? Catherine’s behavior is always impeccable but she often seems to Grace more like a mannequin than a child—almost too beautiful, too perfect and robotic to love. Simone is grooming Catherine for a career in ballet, carting her to lessons, choreographing recitals, terrorizing the teacher. Everyone has heard about Simone’s own career in dance, but the general suspicion is that the stories are highly exaggerated. Also, she has installed a barre in the hallway, Grace heard recently.

  Simone’s parties are all the same: dully elegant, engineered by that houseboy she holds in such suspiciously high regard. John is not his name, of course, but it’s what Simone chooses to call him. So classically, so perfectly Simone.

  Grace selects a dress—pale, simple, unremarkable—and returns to her room. She would very much like to know where the checkbook has got off to; there is something about Firdis’s reordering of her household that strikes her lately as proprietary, presumptuous. She imagines Canada will be down the hill tonight as well—that she will run into her own daughter at a party. She anticipates being amazed by her good manners, her helpfulness—the Simone effect—enviable, but not, as far as she can see, replicable.

  Before she leaves she wakes Rand and doses him with pills. He is very nearly better now, though Grace can hardly bear to look at him. When she does, she cannot help but think of Bahar and Ahmet, and all the imagined details of their trysts. In recent weeks, Bahar has become breezy and distant, and since her appearance at card games can no longer be counted on, Grace’s attendance has slipped as well.

  AT THE party later, Grace’s eyes find Catherine standing by the balcony doors, a macramé plant holder dangling behind her, cradling a potted ivy. Catherine’s head is raised to John’s and he leans near her, whispering, a tray upheld on one palm, the other hand shielding his mouth. The black shoulder of his jacket presses the ruffled cap of Catherine’s sleeve, flattening it, and the girl’s expression is wholly unreadable. Her own daughter is nowhere in sight.

  Grace studies them for a moment and then turns away, with the feeling that her attention—and that alone—is interrupting something private. They seem engrossed and strangely complicit, the two of them—an island, the party lapping at them gently but without consequence.

  Grace catches Simone’s eye then; she is standing by the doorway in a cluster of men in dress uniform. In her expression and the angle of her body, her bright smile and fluttering hands, is a kind of antic, half-hysterical vivacity. Something passes between the two women then and Simone turns her head away. Then she touches the shoulder of a man in a tuxedo and glides toward Grace, her dress the color of champagne, rustling softly around her ankles.

  “Having a nice time?” she says. “Single girl out on the town.”

  Grace smiles tightly. “Lovely. I’m forgetting what it’s like to be married.”

  “No such luck though, right?” says Simone. Her eyes are heavily lined, her lips sugary pink. “Unless you’ve killed him and not told us how you’ve gotten away with it. Which would be dreadfully mean of you.” She wags a finger. “Unforgivably so.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Grace, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Will I?” she says, ever so lightly. Her head swivels, surveying the room. “Sometimes I think I don’t know a blessed thing. I feel totally out in the cold half the time.”

  Grace sets her glass down on the piano. Simone deftly slides a napkin beneath it and then, rubbing her fingers together, brings some small pearls of moisture from the glass to her lips. “I mean, you and Bahar are so chummy these days, and Rand has been off on one of his superimportant missions. It seems like years since we’ve seen him.”

  “Yes,” says Grace, “I know what you mean.”

  “Maybe we should play bridge? Just us English-speaking girls? I can’t stand all the language nonsense, personally. I always feel as if they’re making jokes at my expense.”

  “Really?” says Grace. “I think they’ve been quite gracious.”

  Simone smiles. “Well, they like you, don’t they? You fit in so well, you’re so awfully good that way. It’s a talent of yours I envy. Always flattering them and currying favor. Complimenting their awful decorating, that terrible hair, their spoiled children. You’re the real diplomat, Grace. We could all take lessons.”

  Grace touches her hand to her warm face and laughs. But it comes a beat too late and Simone pinches her upper arm, as if to suggest she was just being mischievous. As if either of them thought her capable of it.

  “And now,” she says brightly, “I must go whip the help into shape. That fellow visiting from Riyadh is stag too, so I’ve put you next to him. Do try to behave yourself, though—we wouldn’t want any nasty rumors started.” She laughs. “I mean we’re totally full up in that department already, don’t you think?”

  Later that night, Grace opens the door to the bedroom where Rand is sleeping—she’s a little tipsy, the evening has been filled with questions that were a little too piercing, a little too hard to deflect—and finds Canada standing half asleep, rocking a little on her feet, at the foot of the bed. The air in the room is sticky with alcoholic breathing. (Rand is sneaking booze again; she’s begun to find smeary glasses behind the curtains and underneath the bed.) She takes Canada back to bed, pulls the covers around her shoulders and sits there for a moment in her dress and tight shoes, looking around her daughter’s unfamiliar room.

  After a while she gets up and walks into the den. She unfolds the blanket from the back of the rough tweed couch and props a pillow against its hard wooden arms. The space is cramped; her knees knock against the coffee table if she shifts position in any dramatic way. Still, she sleeps soundly enough. The things she would like to say to Rand she keeps to herself. The fear she saw in his eyes those first few days is gone. Now he is defensive and falsely jolly. How does he remember that night anyway? She hasn’t asked and doesn’t intend to. He’s gracefully held up the story: water-slick tile, the confusion of lights and darkness, a freak accident, one that might have happened to anyone. A bump on the head, and then the call in the night, the secret business he’d suddenly been called away on. In fact, she’d overheard him on the phone with some superior in the States a few days earlier, telling this very same story. Their pretenses ha
ve coincided again, conveniently, and to his benefit.

  2

  September 1975

  7

  IN SEPTEMBER SCHOOL BEGAN. CATHERINE AND I MET IN FRONT of my apartment and walked together to the bus stop at the end of the street. The building next to ours was still under construction; the workmen stood around drinking coffee, eating simits over a fire in a rusted barrel. The flames licked up into the morning air and the men shouted at us, as they always did, when we crossed the street to walk on the rough wall that bordered the vineyard. I replied with an expression John used routinely with beggar children, and offered the corresponding hand gesture. Their laughter carried across the street, followed us all the way down to the corner, where we waited under spreading trees. Turkish schoolchildren in their uniforms drifted by in twos and threes, the boys in short pants, the girls in dark skirts and white blouses, chattering. Standing there, kicking at the ground, I held all of them responsible for Pasha’s death. My mother had offered to get another kitten, but her callousness about it infuriated me. I was not speaking to Firdis, either. I often dreamed about Pasha and the way we had found him—tortured, mutilated, discarded.

  Both Catherine and I attended a private school at the British Embassy, though I had lobbied hard for the American school on the base. My mother wouldn’t hear of it: she had strong, ingrained ideas about the inferiority of American education. Our school was housed on the British Embassy grounds in a low-slung, modernish building with glass windows tinted the color of Coca-Cola in bottles. A cricket pitch was being laid behind the school and above that sat the embassy and the Anglican Church, which we’d attended with some regularity when we first arrived in Ankara. The embassy also had a swimming pool in which we were obligated to take morning lessons—regardless of the weather. It was nothing like the Canadian pool and we dreaded it. The water was glacial, the changing rooms moldy and cramped. We crowded in on chilly mornings before classes, when both air and water were far too cold, and swam straight through the first frost. We stood shivering at the edge in bathing caps and regulation navy one-pieces, toes curling, goose pimples peppering our skin, while the swimming mistress, a thick, squeaky woman with no common sense, wetly shrilled a whistle. She called to us in nasal English syllables to: “Crack it, girls. It’s worse standing here than it is in the water.”

  But it wasn’t. The water was bone chilling, breath stealing. We swam, still shivering, always shivering, up and down the roped-off lanes, until our turns mercifully ended and we scurried into the changing rooms to paste our clothes back on, wring out frigid suits and pull off leaky bathing caps. We passed the boys walking in a line back down the hill, all of them skinny and sharp featured, whispering to one another, reaching out with bony hands to grab someone’s hair, a sleeve, the hem of a skirt. Hands were slapped, there were urgent, thrilled whispers of, “Stop it. Cut it out. Don’t.” Our two lines were parallel for only a few moments, but in those instants a range of sophisticated interactions occurred: sweets changed hands, plans were formed, threats were made and met.

  The school was a gathering of embassy children from all over the world. We followed the English curriculum, studying Latin and algebra and literature and French. We segregated ourselves, the boys and the girls, steering well clear of one another except when we were forced to mingle—for dancing lessons or field days or the production of plays. Toad of Toad Hall was planned for the winter pageant and I was to play Rat, a role of which I was terrifically proud but which I pretended, with elaborate weariness, to feel was a great, unwelcome chore.

  At lunch Catherine and I sat on the hill above the cricket pitch and spoke idly of the boys. They did not, for the most part, interest us. They ran wildly around on the pitch below, fighting with one another and kicking soccer balls around, running up the hill occasionally to torment us with profanities and innuendo.

  Every day Catherine wore a long grosgrain ribbon in her hair, very old-fashioned, and a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Her legs were smooth and pale, like the marble limbs of statues I had seen with my father. I knew that Simone picked out her clothes for her and laid them out on the bed every evening. I was left to myself in this regard and as a result I generally looked very silly, or messy, or dirty. In the mornings my mother brushed my hair, which was long and dark and horribly tangled. The ritual often ended in tears, and in the second week of school it concluded with the back of my mother’s silver hairbrush smashing into my mouth. I went to school humiliated and frightened, and had hidden my bloody mouth—I was certain teeth were loose—from everyone, including Catherine. I kept my mouth closed and went to the bathroom three times to cry.

  After school, I walked up the hill slowly and was surprised when I reached the top to find my mother waiting there. She and Bahar were spending the afternoons together, visiting the orphanage or driving to the outlying villages to help teach English to the local schoolchildren.

  But there she was on that afternoon, sitting in the red Rover, wearing sunglasses and a headscarf, her face puffy. She was smoking a cigarette out the window, and when I climbed into the car she grabbed me fiercely. Her chin dug into my shoulder; she knocked the breath clean out of me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said wildly. “I’m so sorry. I’m just having a terrible time right now.” She pulled her scarf away from her face. “I must be a terrible, rotten, miserable mother.”

  It was not my mother’s custom to apologize to children. But I heard her usual, overdramatic manner, her desire to be placated and comforted. Most of all, she was fishing to be told that she was not as bad as that, not as bad as she said.

  And it was soon after that that I was allowed to begin horseback riding lessons.

  GETTING TO the American base, Balgat, required a long drive down unpaved roads, past Atatürk’s tomb—a huge memorial and mausoleum that could be seen from virtually everywhere in the city. While Catherine went to ballet after school, my mother began driving me there and I learned to ride on a vaulting saddle and eventually on an actual saddle on an actual horse. I had campaigned for years to ride. I’d been told it was too expensive, or inconvenient or impractical.

  “It’s simply convenient now,” she’d said when I asked. “Bahar’s friend has offered to teach you. It’s very kind of him. Say thank you.”

  On a horse Ahmet looked like a statue you might find crowning a monument; striding around the ring, he slapped his tall boots with a whip and called out to me that he could see Atatürk’s tomb between my backside and the saddle, which was his way of scolding me. “Sit it down,” he said, “or I will glue it to the saddle. I have done it before.”

  While he taught me in the big dusty ring, my mother sometimes watched from a white bench nearby. But on many days she never even left the car. Bahar was usually there as well, cantering her big chestnut horse over red and white barrels in the jumping ring. Beyond the ring were long stretches of open land, scrubby green fields that rose up to the horizon.

  The stables soon occupied almost all my free time. I loved being there—the big heads of the horses hanging over their stalls looking for sugar and peppermints, the smell of hay and oats and the extraordinary, matchless feeling of being aloft, of flying around the ring. I learned to tack and groom, to fall and remount, to clean saddles and bridles, to muck out stalls. Often we did not get home until well after dark. It must have been exceptionally boring for my mother, who eventually, as the weather turned, began spending the whole time in the car, reading travel brochures and writing letters. In the late afternoons Bahar and Ahmet bey often sat together in the little trailer near the entrance that served as his office. It had a couch and a lamp, a big desk on which he did paperwork and a hot plate. They consumed huge quantities of tea in there, and you could often hear their laughter through the flimsy walls.

  Sometimes in the afternoons, while she waited, my mother would obsessively plan trips to points of artistic or cultural or archaeological interest. Perhaps this distracted her. When I opened the car door and slid inside, she wou
ld go on and on about her plans, pushing pictures under my nose and telling me to look at this or that, to think of the history, the significance, to appreciate the opportunity we had to see these places. I could not have been less interested.

  The car was filled up with her—the cigarettes and Arpège, the smell of laundered clothes and the noise of those bracelets moving on her wrists—and it overwhelmed and infuriated me. I rode home with my nose pressed against the cold glass, counting telephone poles or yellow automobiles, whatever I had arbitrarily chosen, ignoring her.

  Meanwhile, my father recovered. His driver brought to the apartment large stacks of paperwork and other documents and he began moving around, slowly at first, but with increasing strength and humor. I had never seen so much of him.

  It was growing colder, the leaves had turned and the air was perfumed with woodsmoke from the fires that burned on the streets, and with the hot smell of street food—roasting lamb and sesame and bread. Swimming at school stopped—even the hearty British drew the line somewhere—and Catherine and I sat above the cricket pitch with our skirts pulled over our knees and our hands under our sweaters for warmth. We wore our heavier tights and watched the boys’ exertions below us, their white breath mingling in the air, their shoes making a faint noise on the frost. Inside, the school smelled of coats and scarves and gloves—of damp wool and sweet sweat, of chalk and the pages of books, the breezy perfume our Latin teacher wore.