Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  He put his hand up and touched his crow-black hair, patting it gently. His eyes slid around the landing and he looked down the stairs: empty. The entire building was quiet as a tomb. Even the kapıcı’s wife and her bucket were nowhere in sight.

  Looking at him, I found that I could barely, barely breathe.

  He spoke very clearly, softly, in perfect English. He said, “You people care for nothing. You are like animals. And you. You are an ugly stupid girl. I have always said this.”

  Then he slapped me. Hard.

  He said, “Now go away and don’t come back.”

  My legs went weak. I put a hand to my scalded cheek.

  He looked at me for a moment. “Stupid girl. Go cry somewhere else. Go to your mother maybe, who will not care either.”

  And then he turned and opened the door, leaving the garbage on the mat, and went back inside. The door clicked firmly behind him.

  Walking home, I kicked around at the obsidian fragments in the hollow midway up the hill. The Turkish children were always using these as missiles, hurling them at one another, and early last spring, when there had been a sudden snowstorm and we’d gone sledding, Catherine and I had both come home with our faces and clothes streaked with inky-black marks, our mittens irredeemable. My mother had thrown me in the bath and scrubbed violently at my head, her short, square nails raking my scalp.

  It was growing dark. I picked up a piece of coal and crumbled it in my glove; it fell apart in shiny, iridescent bits. These trailed me uphill, like bread after the woodcutter’s children. In apartment buildings across the street, lights flickered on, illuminating kitchens and the shapes of women inside them. They seemed to move slowly, almost as if choreographed, bending and reaching, gesturing, lowering their heads. One side of my face felt as if it were glowing; my knees shook.

  At the top of the hill I stood across the street from my apartment building. I rested my back against the vineyard wall and looked up at our windows. The living room curtains were open and through the sheers I could see brighter patches that indicated lamplight. I imagined the circumference of the room as I knew it: the couch backed against the window, the two bergère chairs alongside an occasional table, the fireplace, the desk in the corner, the other small grouping of table and chairs. The room was lit, but inside, nothing moved or shifted or seemed remotely lifelike. I wondered if my mother was in there; I pictured her little halo of smoke, her dark cap of hair, her absent eyes.

  Ugly, he’d said. I had known it of course; I’d often seen his eyes pass over me without any recognition at all. Once, walking with my mother on Tunali, we passed him near the carpet merchants. He was standing, passing the time with a young man his own age, both of them smoking. He carried a string bag heavy with fruit, a loaf of bread protruding between the handles. My mother was several paces ahead, studying the cases in a jeweler’s window. Drawing beside them, I had lingered for a moment, pretending to fumble in my pocket, to make some legitimate business of loitering there on the street. But the moment wore on without his turning, though his companion’s eyes passed over me briefly before resting on the traffic beyond—cars crawling by, horns screaming, boisterous Turks conducting their daily traffic squabbles. I heard John speaking rapidly in Turkish and that familiar, derisive laugh of his. People shoved past me, annoyed; I saw my mother turn to scan the crowd. I put my hand up finally, to touch his sleeve, planning in my head some expression of surprise, some adult exclamation of greeting. But when I touched him he turned his head only briefly in my direction, his eyes fastened on that sleeve. Then he shook my hand away severely, the gesture automatic, utterly dismissive. He made a quick hissing noise, as he did in the alley behind Catherine’s apartment when cats had gotten into the garbage. “Hayır,” he said coldly, as he would to a beggar, and then he moved away from the shop door with his purchases, falling into pace with the crowd.

  It was now fully, completely dark. Dogs barked in the near distance. These packs took over the streets at night: shadowy mongrels, all ribs and yellow eyes, raggedly joined and scavenging the city, low, desperate noises in their throats. As if reciting from some script they’d been given, our parents had terrified us with stories of excruciating shots in the stomach, dozens of them, with needles big as loaves of bread. If the shots came too late, they’d warned, we’d die of thirst as we struggled against our own disintegrating brains, petrified of water. It sounded like some gruesome tale from Greek mythology. Still, I stood there, imagining that the barking grew closer. The throbbing in my cheek subsided and was replaced with the heat of humiliation, which I felt all over. I touched my hands to the cold stone wall behind me, feeling its valleys and bumps, the unique roughness of its surface. Above, in my living room, someone drew the curtains and the window went dim. A few minutes passed and then headlights appeared in the distance, their beams rising as they climbed the hill at the far end of the street. I sank into the shadows and froze.

  The car stopped opposite where I stood, beside the low iron railing of our building; it was the long blue station wagon that carried my father around the city. The driver’s door opened and the interior of the car was suddenly illuminated; I saw his bulky figure in the backseat, his head bent into his hands. Kadir stood beside the open door and stared into the distance beyond the car. My father stayed hunched inside. For a long moment nothing happened. Then my father got out and grasped Kadir’s hand. I heard them exchange words; there was low, comradely laughter. Kadir climbed back into the car and drove away, the lights bounced back down the hill.

  My father steadied a hand against the gate and stood looking up at the same windows I was observing. He seemed to gather himself to go inside. I heard him huff out air, bring it back in. Then he fumbled in his pockets and began to fiddle with something. I heard his lighter flick, the plastic noise of the tobacco pouch opening. He swore in a language I didn’t recognize.

  I tried to make myself smaller, remembering the giveaway rustle my winter coat made when I moved. I held perfectly still. I wanted to watch him for hours.

  He managed to get the pipe lit and then turned on his heel, swaying a little. The dogs set up again and he lifted his head for a moment and listened.

  He said, “I know you’re there.”

  I stayed where I was, silent, still. There was a long pause. Then he laughed.

  “Canada,” he said. “Come out. I know it’s you.”

  I ran across the street and threw myself against his warm, liquory body. He held me tight; I lifted my head for air, trying to breathe without complaining. The bowl of the hot pipe brushed my ear but I didn’t even squeak.

  “Where have you been?” he said. “Who hurt you?”

  I shook my head into his chest and he said wonderingly, “Where do you go? What do you do?”

  Rhetorical questions, clearly. He lifted me off my feet and hugged me close. I put my shoes on top of his and he danced me a few steps, the smell of Captain Black drawing a warm circle around us. He staggered and I stepped down from his shoes and took his elbow.

  “How did you know it was me?” I led him up the walkway, pushing open the door to the yellow light of the lobby, looking up at the long flight of steps ahead of us.

  He tapped his temple with one finger. “Intuition,” he said. And then, after a boozy pause: “I know my girl. I’d know you anywhere.”

  I walked with him up the steps and he said, “So, what’s your old mother up to? No good as usual?”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  He thought we looked out for each other, my mother and I. I didn’t bother to tell him otherwise. I didn’t really hold him accountable for things he didn’t do, or even the ones he did. The morning my mother had hit me with the hairbrush he’d been home, still recovering from his fall, moving somewhere about in the apartment. After the brush landed there had been a long moment of shock, and my mother and I were motionless, frozen and staring at each other. I swung back to the mirror: my lip was split. Blood flooded my mouth; in the mirror I saw myself op
en it to scream. My mother quickly touched her hands to her mouth, to her ears, and left the room. Then I heard his footsteps, moving somewhere—coming, going. I flew down the hallway, down the narrow space between the closets, around the corner past the black rotary telephone, in pursuit of his rounded, hurrying back. But he didn’t stop, and it was only when I reached him in the doorway of the bathroom, when he was obviously involved in some decision—interfere or not—that he finally looked at me.

  “God,” he said, but not really to me. He was speaking to the air, the closets, the kitchen. And then he turned, limped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. “No,” I wailed at the door. “No. No. No.”

  His voice came from behind it, thin and helpless. It said, “I’m sorry,” and “I can’t.” He turned on the water, drowning me out.

  Now I had him at hand and I gripped his elbow. His shoes kicked and scuffed at the risers of the stairs. “Listen, have I told you about Suppiluliumas? Probably the greatest of the Hittite kings? No, I didn’t think so. He ruled four decades and refortified the citadel at Boazköy. It’s spectacular. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sure.”

  He patted my hand. “I’m fine,” he said. He extricated his elbow and braced himself on the railing. “I’m going to show you amazing things. Stick with me, kid.”

  I watched him fumble in his pocket for the key. “Okay,” he said, when he’d found it. “Onward. Morituri te salutant.”

  He looked down at me and grinned; it seemed we stood for a moment before we tackled the last, steep staircase. The stinging in my cheek was a dull, steady throb and I was terrified of the vast, blind love I felt for him.

  The next morning, before daylight, he left the house without saying goodbye. Later that day it began to snow.

  14

  FAST ASLEEP, GRACE HEARS THE PHONE RING FROM THE hallway—its panicked midnight sound of emergency and distress. But for Grace, indoctrinated as she is, that noise always means the same thing and it is no longer so alarming. Soon Rand is moving around, and she rises from the couch and finds her slippers and meets him in the hallway. She senses rather than hears Canada in her bedroom, awakened by the noise, always sensitive to her father’s movements.

  In the hall, Rand is nearly dressed, in a suit designed for warmer weather, and he’s struggling with his tie.

  “Let me,” Grace says. She’s still half asleep but her fingers know the job and do it automatically.

  She stands with him in the drafty hallway near the mirror and the coatrack and the telephone and finds she wants to say something to him, something he will remember.

  But he beats her to it. He says, “Will you finish this thing? This business with the riding teacher? Everything else?”

  She doesn’t argue or deny it or fumble for explanations. She just says, “It isn’t what you think anyway.”

  She shrugs inside her dressing gown. The space between them seems enormous—but it’s merely the breadth of a prayer rug, one step in bedroom slippers, over a gold-domed mosque stitched on a faded background of red.

  A clock strikes in the hallway then, one of the German ones; there are five or six of them and the chimes overlap. Another goes, and then another.

  “So where are you going?” she says. She thinks he will know the question is a capitulation, an overture: it’s now so far outside the conventions of their relationship.

  But he shakes his head quietly and picks up his suitcase. He lifts a raincoat from its hook beside the mirror. “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he says.

  “Of course not. And what shall I tell Canada when she asks?”

  “I’ll say goodbye to her. I’ll go in.”

  “Don’t,” she says and puts up her hand to stop him. “Don’t wake her.”

  She stands behind the solid door and listens to his steps down the marble stairs, and once or twice the noise of the bulky gray suitcase striking the iron railings, making them ring, and then the sound of the lobby door as it closes behind him.

  “IT’S FUNNY,” Grace says to Ahmet, “to hear you say what time you will come, or that you need to go to the pharmacy.” They are walking along a quiet street near Ahmet’s apartment. She has asked him to meet her. “Everything my husband does is veiled in this absurd secrecy.”

  He says, “It’s his work, I suppose, that makes him like this.”

  “That’s what he would say. Don’t excuse it. You can’t imagine what it’s like to live with that manufactured drama all the time—it’s as though he’s living in a black-and-white movie. Everything is so fraught.”

  Ahmet laughs. She is holding his elbow in broad daylight. The bare trees overhead creak with the wind; the sound is musical, faintly antique. Ahmet wears a yellow scarf wrapped tight around his neck and street clothes.

  “What is it you wished to talk about?” he asks.

  “About Bahar. I wanted to know what you thought of this adoption business she’s involved in.”

  Ahmet draws a little away and slows his pace. “I don’t wish to discuss this matter. It does not concern me.”

  “It concerns my maid, though.”

  “Still,” says Ahmet. “I have told Bahar that I do not wish to know about it. I will tell you the same thing.”

  They walk in silence for a time. Ahmet waves to a shopkeeper. The day is cool and clear and the part of the city they are strolling in feels almost European. They pass under striped awnings, by flower vendors, a store selling fancy hats, a bakery with beautiful confectionery stacked architecturally in the window. Beside her, Ahmet has the upright quality of a military officer—which he is, but a different kind than the one she married. Ahmet is stoic and elegant and implacable. He makes her think of foreign legions, of campaigns waged in deserts, of rapiers, crimson sandstorms, silken tents.

  “I would advise you not to get involved,” he says. “That is my advice.”

  What more can Grace tell him? She is beholden to Bahar and Bahar sees no reason to release her. She cannot seem to take a step without getting in deeper over her head.

  “What do you know about all this? Is it even remotely proper?” By this she means legal, but she cannot quite bring herself to say it.

  Ahmet shrugs. “Do not think this is the first time she is making such arrangements. It is a business for her and her husband. I believe it is very lucrative.”

  “Still, I’m surprised Ali is involved in something like this. He seems so decent.”

  “Hmm. You are talking of all his charitable work with the poor women of the city.”

  “You’re being facetious.”

  “Perhaps.” Ahmet takes her elbow. “Let’s have a coffee.”

  He steers her deftly through the traffic to a café across the street. When the coffee arrives—very sweet for her, medium for him—he removes his leather gloves and leans forward across the rickety table.

  “I am fond of you, as you know. I believe we have become friends.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  He smiles. “Probably. But I want to tell you not to mix yourself up in this. No good will come of it.”

  Grace sips her sludgy coffee; the tiny cup is enameled in a pretty mosaic pattern. At some point in this country, without noticing it, she’s grown accustomed to coffee you could eat with a spoon.

  “My friend is overjoyed,” she says. “Maybe it isn’t so terrible. Unorthodox, but only that. I mean, Firdis wanted to get rid of the baby entirely.”

  “Perhaps you think this means she does not care about this child. Perhaps it does not occur to you that she sees no other choice.” He looks around for a moment. The place is quiet, only a few other tables are occupied. “Look,” he says, “it is easy to find Bahar alluring. She is an unusually convincing person.” He pauses, twirling the small cup between his palms.

  Grace watches him. They have not spoken of his relationship with Bahar, not explicitly. When Grace tries to raise the subject, Ahmet invariably changes it. It’s funny how easy it is to
put it from her mind, to not think, when his hands are on her, of those same caresses on that familiar woman’s skin, of his lips at her slender neck, pressed to the locket of bone at the base of her throat.

  “Still,” he says, “this is no simple indiscretion. I am speaking of Bahar now. The matter of this baby.”

  She understands him clearly: what is here between them is temporary. She folds her hands together on the table. “Well, anyway. It’s done. And the situation on the other end is more complicated than you might think.”

  “You are talking like your husband now. All this intrigue and deception. Perhaps you are making too much of it. Maybe all this conspiracy is contagious.”

  For a moment Grace is certain he is patronizing her. She bristles a little, feeling the need to say something that will absolve her, Edie, even Bahar.

  “My friend is really desperate for a child. There’s some trouble in their marriage.”

  Ahmet regards her across the table. “You Americans are too concerned with what happens in the bedrooms of others.” He says this in a perfectly level tone, with a faint hint of amusement.

  “No doubt. But these things are foolishly complicated when one is with the government. The military. Whoever he works for now. They pay attention to the smallest things.”

  Ahmet raises an eyebrow, but still covers his hand with hers on the table. She curls her fingers inside his gratefully. Suddenly, she feels as though exposing herself might be the answer, or the antidote, to all the displeasing, secretive, fatiguing aspects of her life.

  “Do you have any idea,” she says, in a confiding rush, “how they watch us? How they evaluate what we do and what we say, even the parties we give? Rand never much liked this friend of mine. She didn’t toe the line, or do what they expected. I think he was afraid it might rub off.”

  “And do you always do what is expected?” He squeezes her hand; she feels his knee, warm against hers beneath the table.

  “We’re under a microscope half the time. Honestly, it’s lunacy.”