by Beth Helms
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Me?” she said. “Nothing I can think of. Except being married to you, in this hellhole, with little to no modern conveniences, the stink of this city, the gamesmanship, the craziness—I’m fed up.”
He shifted on the step in his polished shoes and rubbed his red face with one big hand. His eyes were watery and he fell back to brace himself against the wall. Hung over, as usual, and badly. “You couldn’t possibly understand the pressure I’m under,” he said. “You have absolutely no idea.” He assumed a familiar posture: a man supremely misunderstood, colossally unappreciated.
It infuriated her. “Of course I don’t. How could I? It’s all so bloody important. So classified. So triple top secret. I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you. Honestly, Rand, what a bore you are. All of you. Can’t you see it?”
What had seemed glamorous about it all those years ago—promises of intrigue and romance, exotic locales, matters of national security—now seemed like an almanac’s advertisement for some quackery, a charlatan outfit promising eternal youth in a bottle.
Of course, she’d been thinking of Ahmet, saying all that to him. Thinking of the drive to Balgat in the morning air, escaping the gunmetal pall of the city, the long uphill drive through the rocky landscape, the parking lot with the stable nestled below, where the days held a new kind of possibility, the bright electricity of hope.
Standing in the trailer, Grace feels a sudden surge of regret and anxiety, an edgy, discomfiting energy. She feels a nerve twitch at the corner of her mouth and claps her hand to it.
“Ah well,” Ahmet says, and gets to his feet. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you love her?” Grace is surprised at herself; though the words are out, she had not really expected to hear them.
“Bahar?” he says, and this strikes her as deliberate obtuseness, stalling.
He walks to his desk and begins to rearrange the very papers he has asked her not to touch. “That is complicated,” he says, after a minor eternity.
“Oh,” she breathes. “I see.”
It’s then that he kisses her. He steps across the room and pulls her close to his chest—that familiar, fraying, horsey sweater—and bites at her lips and neck. His breath smells of tobacco and crushed orchids; his body against hers is lithe and solid, shockingly present.
As he pushes her down on the couch, the kitten—bigger now, proprietary—cries out and leaps to the ground. The telephone rings, quivering against the papers it rests on; Ahmet reaches up and pulls the curtains closed across the window. They rattle together along the rod, a cheap floral pattern in waxy fabric, the ring of the metal hooks; the dimming room.
11
THE BUS RATTLED, THAT FIRST COLD SATURDAY, INTO THE OLDER part of the city, left the main thoroughfare and entered a poor, rundown neighborhood. Bouncing along on the torn green seats, we peered out the thick windows. There was no laughter, no chatter, we were locked in our private miseries, mute and helpless.
My mother had signed me up for charity visits to the Turkish orphanage. The idea had struck her when she and Bahar visited there, and nothing I did or said could dissuade her. Some girls my age from the American base were along and a few other unfortunates, some of whom I knew from school. All the mothers had cooked this up together; clearly it had been coming for some time. But not Catherine, of course, for Simone, with her fear of germs and the unwashed foreign masses, would never, ever have enlisted her in this.
Kate, who was the headmaster’s daughter from my school, was the only person who spoke on the drive. She sat slumped in the rear of the bus, her oily hair hanging around her face, her big, chapped hands dangling between her knees.
“Bloody buggering orphans,” she said and then fell silent.
The orphanage was on the corner of two streets, a spreading brick monstrosity held fast behind barbed-wire fencing. Around it, the streets were quiet and depressed. Uncollected garbage gathered in heaps in the gutters and stringy cats stood atop them like royalty, kneading refuse, arching their backs. Not a living human soul was evident. The buckling roofs of the houses seemed verging on collapse and the streets we traveled were barely paved. The bus sank into a pothole, lurched and stuttered, then gained momentum and sped too fast into the drive. We stood up, involuntarily, clutching the backs of the seats and stared unbelievingly through the windshield.
The gates were huge, rusted and Gothic, overgrown with bushes and greenery, and they swung open slowly, creakily, just wide enough to admit the big yellow bus. The road curved through a small passage, branches snatched at the roof and windows and then there was a sudden noise like gunfire—we’d blown a tire.
The bus rolled to a pitchy stop. For long moments no one moved. The driver stood and gestured us off; he was already rolling a cigarette and violently cursing the roads, the tire, us, our mothers and their mothers. We hesitated, looking around for things we hadn’t brought, adjusting our socks and sweaters. We came down the steps at last, rubbing at ourselves and stretching—delay tactics—and clustered together in a sympathetic knot. Suddenly, standing in front of the grim, peeling doors of the orphanage, we were all friends.
Then they were flung open—not a speck of light escaped, blackness gaped in the background—and several bright, fluttery church ladies came tripping down the stone steps to greet us, flapping their arms: they would split us up, one announced, take us to the playground, the nursery. How lovely it was that we had come. How kind. What nice children we were.
We went off casting desperate looks at one another, checking our watches and glancing back at the bus as if it might disappear and leave us there…stranded, forever. Already, the driver had the tire off and was studying it, perplexedly, as if considering whether all of them, all four, were really absolutely essential. Perhaps everyone was wondering, as I was, if this was part of some more diabolical plan our mothers had concocted to get rid of us.
Inside, the hallways were narrow and dark, plaster peeled from the walls and we scurried to keep up with the women striding ahead of us. The only sound was that of our shoes echoing on the tiled floors. For safety’s sake we kept our hands at our sides or stuffed deep in our pockets; the whole building and all the air trapped inside it seemed contagious. The matron led us immediately to the nursery—large and dim, it was lit only with naked bulbs, filled with the cloying smell of souring formula, of unwashed diapers and unhappiness.
Metal cribs stretched along the walls, quiet women standing among them here or there, heads bent, hands reaching. Inside the cribs, the babies lay like forgotten dolls, lost on beaches of cheap plastic—dark shocks of hair, diapers held shut with masking tape, rosebud lips coated with pasty white film. The babies either howled despairingly or lay utterly still. It was as though human touch were foreign to them, completely without meaning. We moved around the room in silence, looking into the barred cribs, unable, unwilling to utter the cooing noises that seemed expected of us.
We escaped outside finally—sneaking off one by one, with assorted excuses—to a small, dilapidated playground at one side of the building. The swing set had one working swing, its rubber seat nearly frayed through on one end. The slide listed so dramatically you had to climb it sideways.
At the orphanage Kate and I stayed together—on that first morning and subsequent ones—though we were not really friends. I was wary of her; she was the kind of girl who liked to hide other people’s clothes in the changing room after swimming. More than once she had taken knickers from the younger girls and hidden them inside her own things. Then later, on the playground, she would display them to the boys, while their mortified owner shrieked and cried and chased after her with flailing arms. She could be as cruel, and as inventive, as any boy.
Kate wanted nothing to do with the orphans. She had no compunction about this—it did not embarrass her at all to seem uncharitable. She could have joined the others, who after the second Saturday began avoiding the matrons—it turned out that the other girls wer
e all earning a badge for Girl Guides—but for some reason she seemed to prefer my company. The others played marbles under the shade of a tree near the entrance and watched the driver roll and smoke cigarettes until it was time to leave. He could get through about fifteen before he would let anyone back on the bus.
So Kate and I sat together, taking turns on the lone swing, and waited out the mornings. A small girl began hanging around us, an orphan named Aynur, maybe six or seven years old. She smelled of old milk and clothes that had not been washed; she wore plastic sandals with torn bindings and mismatched socks.
“Go away,” Kate would say to her, kicking her feet in Aynur’s direction. “Scram.”
Aynur ignored her. She sat at our feet in the dirt and moved rocks from one place to another. This seemed to absorb her completely. It is fair to say that the orphans wanted no more to do with us than we did with them. Most of the children Aynur’s age vanished when we arrived, leaving the playground deserted.
“Why doesn’t she go with her friends?” Kate would say. “What does she want with us?”
Nothing much, it seemed. She played silently at our feet, following at a safe distance if we moved from one piece of broken equipment to another.
“Hey,” Kate said once. “What are you doing here anyway? Where are your parents?”
Aynur barely looked up. She was sucking loudly on her sleeve, playing with her rocks and clumps of dirt.
“Don’t,” I said, for no real reason.
“Don’t what? I bet she doesn’t speak a single bloody word of English. Hey, ugly little girl, tell us something. Is your mother a dirty Turkish whore? And is your father, by any chance, a donkey-fucking pig?”
Aynur smiled up at her, pleased with the sudden attention and Kate’s new conversational tone. Encouraged, Kate continued. She had an extraordinarily foul vocabulary.
Aynur was an unsatisfactory victim, oblivious to abuse, and eventually Kate pushed off the swing and grabbed for her hand. “Show us around,” she said, gesturing indiscriminately, “Show us something. We want to bakmak. Look. Bakmak istiyoruz.”
Aynur scrambled to her feet, thrilled.
The playground was at the back of the building, pressed up against the fence that bordered the deserted residential street. The orphanage itself was brick faced, tall and wide: beyond it, the rest of the city, its crammed buildings and crazed bustle and occasional beauty, might not have existed at all. But the few trees were golden, the sky was smoke and a brisk wind stirred the dirt around our feet. Led by Aynur, we wandered around the side of the building where thick bushes and trees obscured the windows. Quickly we came face-to-face with the undergrowth. Above, the stone building rose several severe stories.
Aynur pointed, showing us a trampled little path through the bushes. The trail was clearly well used—bottle tops and candy wrappers on the ground, a doll’s plastic head crushed flat, the marks of a toy car etching its soft pink scalp—but the path was made for children her size, not ours.
“Capital,” said Kate. “A secret passage.” She bent her gangly body and ducked down through the undergrowth. “Come on,” she said to me, peering over her shoulder. “Crack it.”
We nearly walked smack into the building, it came up so quickly. The cool, greening stone was suddenly right in front of us. It was claustrophobic in there and more than a little spooky—the dank stone in our faces and the dense tangle of bushes behind.
I half turned away. “This is stupid,” I said. “I’m going back.”
Kate’s fingers snatched at my jacket. “She’s showing us something,” she said. “Don’t be such an invertebrate.”
On Aynur’s heels, we shoved through the thick vegetation alongside the building until we came to a tiny window set nearly into the ground. Thick iron bars, reddened with rust, crossed it in narrow xs.
“Look,” Kate said with pleasure. “A dungeon.”
She leaned down beside Aynur and gripped the bars with her hands. She motioned me to do the same; next to her, Aynur was nodding her head, her features working busily.
“Bozuk,” said Aynur, pointing.
Bozuk. I couldn’t think what it meant. I crouched down beside Kate. The window was filthy with grime, but a smeary patch had been cleared in the middle, as if made by someone’s sleeve, rubbed in circles. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust.
It was a basement of some kind, a large room without a stick of furniture; a single bulb swung from the ceiling, the light it threw dusty and yellow. For a few moments I saw nothing—then a flash of white near the far corner. I squinted and the room came clear. I heard Kate’s intake of breath, the low whistle as she let it out.
“Now, that’s something,” she said.
There were maybe a dozen children, all of different ages, some wearing diapers, the rest in little more than rags. Children nearly our own age were naked but for diapers; a girl with huge breasts rocked herself, backed flat and terrified against the wall, her face twisting in monstrous expressions. And there were children Aynur’s size as well; one was hitting his head repeatedly against the wall, as if he had been doing it for years.
Infants like the ones we’d seen in the nursery lay marooned in the middle of the room, on the concrete floor, their faces slack. There were no mattresses, no cribs. Everywhere we saw contorted limbs and faces, the walls were smeared with dark streaks and once our eyes adjusted it all became unmistakable: puddles on the floor, garbage in the webbed corners. In the middle of an opposite wall was a heavy door with a window set up high and bars like the ones we leaned on.
Bozuk. Broken.
“Bozuk,” said Kate. “No fucking joke.”
She patted Aynur on the head and then, slowly at first, she began to kick the bars on the window. The sound rang out and she kicked faster and faster, wildly. Aynur shrieked with joy; the rusted metal quivered and sang. The children in the room looked up, and a few rose and staggered to the window. They reeled there below us, pointing, gabbling noiselessly. I felt as if I’d swallowed a stone. Suddenly, I was in a film my mother would never have allowed me to watch.
Aynur glanced at Kate for approval and then grabbed the bars and began to shake them. I snatched quickly, clumsily, at her hands, trying to pull them away, but they were claws, her grip deathly, and her face moved in parody of the expressions that gazed up at us. The room below erupted. Some of the children opened their mouths in noiseless howls. One grabbed his head and shook it violently. The girl with long, horrible breasts held them up in her hands; her lips babbled and drooled and she grinned up, showing toothless gums. I heard Kate whistle again. I could imagine, I could very nearly taste, the smell in there.
I dragged Aynur away. Her laughter was like bells pealing. Clear of the undergrowth, standing up straight again, I took her and shook her hard by the shoulders; she was frail under my hands but suddenly grotesque. Shabby, ugly, demonic. How had I ever felt sorry for her? Kate came rustling out a few moments later, her face flushed, hair tangled with leaves. She uncurled her body and put her hands on her hips.
“Good show,” she said. “I bet they do that all the time, the little monsters.”
I glanced down at Aynur; she’d sidled over to Kate and taken her hand.
“Sik sik?” I said. “Siz?” I pointed back through the undergrowth, toward the window. “Oraya?” Often. You. There.
“Evet.” She nodded furiously. “Bize. Hep.” Us. All the time.
“Bloody hell,” Kate said, clearly pleased. And on the bus that day, through the teeming Ankara streets, she whistled all the way home.
That night I dreamed of secret children, hidden away in the crevices of our tiny apartment; they peered out from the depths of my closet: stolen, disfigured and forgotten. Children for whom no one would ever go looking.
I did not go to the orphanage again. My mother seemed to lose interest in the whole business and several Saturdays came and went before she noticed I was still at home and underfoot.
“DID YOU know that Ahmet has offe
red to teach me to ride as well?” my mother said one evening as we drove home from the stables. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
No. It would not.
The electricity was back full-time and it had become darker in the afternoons. By the time we left Balgat the city was illuminated, and it seemed we were driving from pitch blackness behind us—it gathered coldly at the skirts of our taillights—straight into a low, distant skyline, into a galaxy of multicolored constellations.
It was then, in that fuzzy time period, while everything was in its seasonal flux—we were unearthing winter tights and testing coats for fit and suitability, finding mismatched mittens and thinking prematurely of Christmas—that she began her full-fledged pursuit of Ahmet.
I already hated my mother’s intrusion into my world at Balgat; her gawky movements around the animals, her silly laugh and fresh way with Ahmet, her proprietary gestures and glances.
The day of her third lesson I caught her slipping out of his trailer as I came around the corner, her face flustered and triumphant. That very afternoon he had put her up on Uğurlu—beautiful Uğurlu, with the perfectly sewn scar on his knee, the one Ahmet and I had made together. I saw his hand adjusting her leg as he did mine, his palm at the small of her back. She was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes and giggled as she sat up there, hunched over and terrified.
“That was fun,” she said to me.
“It didn’t look fun,” I said. “You looked petrified.”
“Ahmet said I did very well.”
I snorted, turned away and stared fixedly out the window, jabbing the glass with my index finger as we drove. I heard her sigh beside me and then she turned up the radio and began to hum along. She sounded so pleased with herself that I wanted to strangle her.
It was only November but there was a sprinkling of Christmas cards taped around our fireplace, occasionally fluttering in some unseen movement of air across the room. At school, in the basement of the Anglican church, we were practicing for our pageant. Catherine was excused from the production because it interfered with her ballet: I almost never saw her anymore. During recess she sat above the cricket pitch wrapped in her blue woolen coat, staring off into space. I was spending time with Kate—she was Toad, the star of our play—and we developed an alliance based on that, that and a mutual, new-found desire to be cruel to Catherine.
