Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  We said to each other: Hic, haec, hoc. Huius, huius, huius. Agricola, agricolarum. Amo, amas, amat. We were both struggling with Latin pluperfect, but Catherine’s French was exquisite, compliments of Simone’s insistence on speaking French at the dinner table.

  When our afternoons were free, which was rarely, we went to Catherine’s apartment. We had plowed through the entire text of The Officer’s Wife, had followed many of its recipes and drilled each other on matters of protocol. Though we did it laughingly, disdainfully, I think we both harbored the vague notion that these skills might one day be valuable. We thought we might end up like our mothers—leading the same glamorous, vagabond lives, traveling in diplomatic circles.

  Catherine’s father, like mine, was not around much. He was an attaché, with sloping shoulders and nicotine-stained fingers. When he was home he was quiet and unobtrusive and Simone bossed him around mercilessly; he had the air of a man who’d been long neutered. It was clear that Simone did not need a husband, except in the most desultory of ways, and she moved through the world with an off-putting competence, battering down walls with the force of her personality. What Simone did all day, and what my mother occupied herself with, was somewhat obscure. They overlapped in social circles and sometimes played cards together. But Simone was tight with the Canadian ambassador’s wife and had wrangled a little position as her social secretary: she spent a few afternoons a week penning invitations and thank-you notes, which on the surface seemed beneath her but was actually a social leg up, a way of knowing nearly everything.

  “All serving of food is from the left, and dishes are removed from the right. It’s not rocket science, and since the ambassador will be here you will please take pains to do it correctly.”

  We overheard Simone as we slid into the apartment, already taking off our shoes. She called us in: she was in the dining room with John, who stood with his hands folded at his back and his feet apart like a soldier at attention.

  “Girls,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Catherine and I glanced at each other in the hallway; being summoned by Simone was ever a thing to dread.

  She wore a red and white striped day dress and low-heeled shoes; she looked like an awning or a deck chair, and her creamy skin carried two spots of bright blush on the cheekbones. They were a little riveting, those two apple-colored circles.

  “You’re gaping,” she said to me, very snappily. “Don’t gape. How’s your father?”

  The whole time she was fussing around the table, moving a salad fork a centimeter to the right, examining a water goblet for streaks.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Has he come back?”

  I considered this for a moment.

  “No,” I said finally, uncertainly. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to say that at that very moment, he probably was in our apartment; I had seen him just hours earlier, going through papers in his dressing gown.

  Simone narrowed her eyes. “Really?” she said. “It’s very mysterious. No one’s seen hide nor hair of him since he took that nasty fall.” She paused. “Your father is one of those people who really shouldn’t drink.”

  It did not trouble Simone at all to say things like this—she was extraordinarily tactless, though I believe she thought herself forthright.

  She stared at me for a moment. I heard John shift position, ever so slightly. I glanced over; he might have been made of wood. Then she brushed her hands together brusquely and said to Catherine, “I need you dressed this evening. I’ve hung it up on the closet door. Put it on and brush your hair. Better yet, have John do your hair. You’ll make a botch of it. You’ll pass canapés during cocktails and then have dinner in the kitchen.”

  We all stood there for a beat until she clapped her hands and said, “Well? That’s all. Don’t stand around like automatons, go do something productive.”

  “Jesus,” said Catherine under her breath, as we escaped down the hallway. “What a cunt.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “It’s a very bad word,” she said. “Maybe the worst. John told it to me. He says it all the time.”

  “What is it in Turkish?”

  “Amcyk.”

  “Huh,” I said. I rolled it around in my head, committing it to memory.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  That afternoon I learned all the foul language John had taught Catherine, all the native profanities, the colorful insults and curses he used to describe Simone. Cross-legged on Catherine’s twin beds, with her neat dresser holding her matching comb and hairbrush and mirror, the ruffled lamp on her bedside table, her pictures in little silver frames, we quizzed each other on the terrible words John whispered to her, all the vulgar things we had known to be true about Simone, but had only, until then, had one inadequate set of words for. The whole time we talked, she fingered a string of rough blue beads like the ones my mother had at home. I had never seen them before.

  John had given Catherine a few pieces of jewelry—a bracelet with an evil eye bead, a Maşallah pendant like the one my mother wore around her neck. Catherine had given some of these to me to hold and I kept them taped inside the lid of an orange plastic record player. I looked at them often in secret, touching the graceful strokes of the Arabic symbol, or putting the beads to my tongue, feeling the strange protrusion of the blue eye, the cool, lacy metal of the silver. Neither of us wanted to be seen with these items but I hoarded them like a dragon’s treasure, as if they were gifts from my own boyfriend.

  Later, while Catherine bathed, I helped Simone set the dinner table: you would have thought that the precise positioning of salad forks was a matter of life and death. When I returned to Catherine’s room, John was standing behind her at the dressing table, brushing her hair—gently lifting the dark weight of it and hefting it in his hand. He pulled the brush through it in long, slow, sleepy strokes. I thought of my mother yanking through mine that morning and how that had ended and I saw the tenderness in his touch and then, suddenly, the way he pulled her head back hard and bent his face over hers. He was about to say something; his lips parted. He saw me in the mirror then and his hands moved away. He stepped back, laid the brush down on the table and left the room. Unhurried, unfazed.

  Boyfriend. I used that word, ribbing Catherine.

  “Is that what you think?” she said, rising from the vanity and bending into the closet. That hair swung around and whisked across her face. Her dress was hanging on the door—a childish confection, cherry-colored, with ribbons and smocking.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “No,” I said. “Maybe.” I folded a candy wrapper into a tiny square, then folded it again.

  “You like him,” I said. I was fishing, of course. “I can tell.”

  “Then you’re stupid,” she said quickly. “I hate him. I can’t stand the sight of him. He makes my skin crawl.” She’d been holding a pair of ballet shoes in her hand and she threw them, hard, against the dresser, knocking the music box to the floor and setting off that tinkling little Nutcracker tune.

  “Damn it,” she said. “God, god, god damn it.” She crawled over on her knees and snapped the lid closed with such force that the ballerina was nearly decapitated. Honestly, I had not thought her capable of such passion.

  “Maybe you should tell your mother,” I said to her. “Maybe you should.”

  She wasn’t looking at me, but down at the pink tea roses that scrolled her bedspread; she traced a vine with her finger. “I did.”

  “You did? When? What happened?” Why hadn’t she told me this? It irritated me.

  “Nothing happened is what happened.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her he touched me. She said I was silly, of course he touched me. She said I had an overactive imagination. She said you give me too many dirty books.”

  I was offended but still, somehow, not entirely displeased. “I told you she wouldn’t care,” I said.

  THE WORKINGS of Catherine’s home remained
mysterious, an enigma I could never quite unwrap, not entirely. Once after school we came quietly past the living room and saw a terrible and strange thing. Though it was broad daylight, the blinds were drawn and the room was dim. Simone was on the couch, her shoes were off and her feet lay in John’s slender hands. Her shoes were askew under the glass coffee table. There was something soft and French playing on the stereo. John was crouched in front of her, rubbing her bare feet, while Simone breathed softly, like a sleeping animal, her eyes closed. We stood at the edge of the door, frozen. Then I felt Catherine’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me away.

  John didn’t look up when he heard us, nothing in his posture suggested he knew we were there—but he did. We slipped silently away, down the hall to Catherine’s room. She shut the bedroom door behind us and stood breathing heavily, her straight back flush against the frame.

  “What?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  We didn’t say it aloud but it could not have been worse had we found her naked, with her breasts bared and her legs splayed, bone-bright against the black leather.

  A while later we heard Simone humming in the hallway, the rustle as she gathered her bag and fussed in the foyer. The scent of her—musky and floral—drifted under the door.

  Simone, as you would expect, was militant about privacy, about the sanctity of her room. Had we ever been caught in there, the punishment would have been dreadful. But John had license and slid inside often, carrying laundry or sheets or dusting cloths, shutting the door softly behind him. He must have made her bed and cleaned the fragrant bathroom—the bath rail trailing a jungle of silk stockings and hand-washables, the vanity lined with expensive lipsticks and cut-glass bottles, the whole place saturated with the luxurious, concentrated scent of Simone and her myriad toiletries.

  Sometimes we saw him coming out of the bedroom, with empty hands and a glowering face. If we met in the hallway, near one of Simone’s ugly, incomprehensible paintings, he might glare at us, say something under his breath. His expression didn’t soften as it landed on Catherine but seemed instead to resolve.

  And soon, not long after we saw them together in the living room, Catherine and John began stealing things from Simone’s bedroom, from her drawers and bathroom—perfumes and lipsticks, silver spoons and tiny glass figurines. They didn’t stash these in Catherine’s room, but instead gave them to me to keep. I do not remember our discussing this, or that I asked any questions; I’m sure I didn’t, as I wanted only to be included. I took these trinkets home as I had taken the jewelry, hidden under my clothes or in my coat, and kept them under my bed, inside board games or in the back of my closet in the hallway.

  My father returned to the embassy and a small scar on his forehead was all that remained of those weeks and the lies we had told to protect him, to protect us. It all seemed tied to the changing season—the new coolness, strange smells on the air, the scent of horses and schoolbooks and powdered milk. Gusts of wind traveled the alleys behind the apartment building, gathering up dirt and swirling it down the length of the alley in tiny funnels of grime and debris, sending cats scattering. Leaves dropped from the plane trees along the far end of the street and we jumped into them, crunching them to bits under the soles of our shoes and tossing them wildly at each other, fat fistfuls of crackling brown confetti.

  My mother was overly bright and cheerful for a stretch of time, driving me to the stables and venturing past the parking lot, wrapped tight in scarves and woolens, watching me circle the ring. Ali came to the apartment less frequently now, only for social visits with my father. They’d become friends during his convalescence. In the afternoons they drank scotch together in the living room, smoking their pipes and speaking, I imagined, of politics and rising anti-American sentiment.

  October 1975

  8

  ON A BRISK AFTERNOON GRACE SITS IN THE PARKING LOT ABOVE the stables at Balgat, running the heat on high and smelling the stale, recycled air pumping from the vents. She smokes through a crack in the window and stares out at the banked dirt in front of the fender. With one hand she fingers a rip in the leather seat; it started small, but she has been worrying it to ruin. It’s been over a month now that she has been coming here in the afternoons, providing flimsy cover for Bahar and Ahmet, waiting out their private moments.

  When a knock comes at the passenger window, she jumps. She sees Ahmet’s face leaning down to the glass, his cloud of prematurely white hair, his knuckles resting in a fist on the window. She leans across the seat and cranks the glass down.

  “Hello,” he says. “Merhaba.”

  “Merhaba.” She drops the cigarette out the window and looks up at him, aware of his scent of horse and something else, less definable, like the smell of sun and wind.

  “Come down,” he says. “She is cleaning stalls, it will be a bit. I’ll make tea.”

  He is holding a saddle, the pommel of it resting on his knee. He hefts it up and adjusts it against his body.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “I’ll wait.”

  She lifts the book that is sitting spine-up on the dash and gestures with it, to indicate that she’s occupied. His face disappears from the window and she thinks for a moment that she’s insulted him, that he’s gone off in a huff. But he has merely stepped to the other side of the car, and now he opens the door, extending his free hand to help her out.

  “Please,” he says. “Sit with me.”

  In his trailer, where she has been before only for moments at a time, there is the gathered scent of horse and leather and sugary tea. On a plastic tray by the hot plate are a bowl of lump sugar and mugs, three limp carrots, a snaffle bit. The trailer is overly warm; there is the buzzing, electric sound of a space heater, Turkish voices coming from a radio on his desk. She sits cautiously on a stained floral couch; a thin spotted kitten sleeps at one end, its paws twitching in dreams.

  “Thank you,” she says. She accepts the tea and holds it between her hands; steam rises.

  “She is doing well here,” he says to her. “Canada.”

  Grace nods: she too has been surprised by Canada’s aptitude for this, her uncharacteristic display of discipline. “It’s good for her, I think.”

  She is startled to find that she means it. She had hated this mightily, being manipulated by Bahar, more or less forced to bring Canada here, part of Bahar’s romantic subterfuge. Bahar had said to her, “I can only take so many riding lessons a week. There is a limit, and Ali may become suspicious. But if you are there, and the girl, then my time is more easily explained. I am helping you, translating and so forth.” Of course Ahmet’s English is quite perfect; no translation is required.

  He watches her now, one hip resting on the corner of his desk, the saddle balanced on his knee. Grace has noticed in Canada all the markings of a schoolgirl crush on this man—her high color and tittering laughter, her willingness to attempt all manner of dangerous, absurd, unnatural-seeming things. As Grace drives her home her daughter is warm-faced and pensive, smelling all over of animals, her eyes distant, her posture hunched and inimical.

  “Bahar is a beautiful woman,” Ahmet says then, thoughtfully.

  He rubs his hands along the smooth, worn seat of the saddle. The tea shimmies in the mug Grace holds.

  “She is also a very selfish woman. But I think you know this.”

  Grace looks up at him, surprised. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you might,” he says. He rises from the desk and places the saddle over the arm of the couch. He sits down beside her, dislodging the kitten, which mews and repositions itself. “She has said to me what this is about. I am aware of the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances are those?”

  Ahmet hesitates for a moment. He rests his hand lightly on her knee. “That your husband drinks too much and injured himself. That there is the matter of keeping this unfortunate event quiet, that Bahar’s husband is caring for him. I hope he is doing well.”

  He
rattles these off, his fingers drumming a little beat on her knee. She stares at his hands. They are finely shaped, roughened by work and weather.

  She says, “Canada has wanted riding lessons for some time. I’ve been meaning to do it.”

  His eyes are the color of cognac, and, actually, the eyes of a dog she remembers from childhood, a freckled spaniel called Brigadier.

  “Well,” he says. “Then it has worked out for everyone. You will continue with the lessons then, in spite of Bahar?”

  “In spite of Bahar what?” she asks.

  “Have you not seen her lately?” He takes his hand from her leg and begins rubbing his palms on his knees—he is wearing slim-fitting britches and tall boots, his feet look surprisingly small and delicate.

  Grace has not, actually. She telephoned several times but couldn’t raise her. She assumed they had merely been missing each other at the stable.

  “Bahar is a woman who changes her mind very frequently. I have not seen her recently. Maybe a week, maybe more.”

  Grace considers this. She recalls the sketchy answers the housekeeper has given on the telephone, the way her English suddenly deteriorated.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she is tiring of this place, or not. It means she will come back or she won’t. It means someone has to exercise that horse of hers. I do not know, precisely, what it means. Only Bahar does.” He laughs, a low sound but not a harsh one, and then rises and shakes a cigarette from a pack on the desk. He holds it out to her and she takes it, pulling off her glove to fit it into her mouth, reaching forward for the light he offers.

  Sitting stiffly on the couch, inhaling the harsh Turkish tobacco, Grace realizes she is furious. She is angry with nearly everyone—with Rand, for being such a jackass, with Bahar for using her so badly and with herself for allowing it, for going along the way she does, the way she always has. Sometimes, lately, she even feels as though she might be the woman her daughter imagines she is—irritable, middle-aged, beneath interest. Now she sees in Canada that look with which children will inevitably come to regard parents, as though she suddenly recognizes in her mother every despicable, hidden thing. Grace is disgusted with herself, with all of them, and she stands abruptly, putting the mug down hard on the table, watching the tea slosh over the sides and pool on the surface. Ahmet leans forward on the couch, palms pressed together in front of his face.