by Beth Helms
“You should kiss me,” he says. And he leans forward so she can.
She thinks, I really should remember this. This feeling of being eaten up alive, this wholesale surrender. His face, so close and so amused; that waiter over there, watching, fingering his collar.
She goes on, too hurriedly, “He wanted me to join this club, that one. Knit, sew, organize. Be on the PTA.”
“The what?” Ahmet’s face is very close. She smells coffee, his cologne—even, she imagines for a moment, his ailing wife.
“Rand never thought Edie was up to being an officer’s wife. Can you imagine anything sillier? The list of qualifications is not exactly exhaustive.”
He kisses the palm of her hand and lets it go. “It seems very complicated to me. But I am a simple man.”
He sighs and drains his coffee cup. “Anyway, I do not know what to tell you. I think you have set on this path and what happens will happen. Inşallah, it will not be a catastrophe.” He looks at his watch. “I must go and run some errands for my wife. I have already been too long.”
Grace stays at the café nearly a half hour after he’s gone: he’d kissed her cheeks formally and strode off, his coat held close around his body. She orders a pastry and looks around the neighborhood. She suspects it was a mistake to come; no more than her childish need to have a man tell her she’s doing the right thing. For all that, she does not feel very much better.
How odd, really, the position she finds herself in. Could Ahmet be right? Has she courted as much intrigue as Rand does? And yet, for all the risks, she feels that disaster—real disaster—is not imminent. Maybe she has caught it at last, the ennui of the diplomatic wife: little will not be washed away with time, with mitigating years and intervening miles. Another post, another country; different friends, new rooms, closets, streets, servants. She feels a quick swell of equanimity, the sort of composure she so often envies in Paige Trotter—Paige with her turbans and fortune-telling, her pragmatism and quick mind—a charming, disheveled competence Grace has admired since they first met.
Eventually, Grace rises from the table, nods to the waiter and walks home. She leaves thinking of what Paige has said to her on more than one occasion: Soldier on.
When she returns to the apartment in Gasi Osman Paşa, Firdis is clattering and banging around. In recent days she’s become clumsy, and it seems to Grace that she is deliberately making more noise than the chores require, that she is unnecessarily, even purposely, underfoot. She is also, to Grace’s eyes if no one else’s, quite, quite pregnant.
Grace has recently had a letter from Edie. They are thrilled, it says—she can almost hear Edie’s soft, trilling voice—they cannot wait. The letter has a European postmark; Edie had gone to Germany for her ostensible confinement, on Bahar’s instruction. It was odd how those two women, strangers to each other, had fallen so quickly into the roles of customer and purveyor. Through Ali, a doctor had been found in Saudi Arabia, and he had produced papers insisting that Edie complete her pregnancy in a climate less harsh than that one. But Edie wrote: I don’t feel at all delicate. To tell you the truth I am having a marvelous time. Were it not for this package you are sending I might never go back to the desert!
Grace sighs. In the tiny kitchen, smashing pots together, Firdis is waiting to pounce on her, to grab her hands and kiss them punishingly, in her hard-lipped way, to say, “Mersi, madam, mersi. Çok teşakkür.” Over and over and over again.
And Grace will say, as she does at least once or twice a day, “Evet, evet, evet,” and hurriedly leave the room. Lately she can hardly look at this woman, this shapeless stranger in her house, who would so casually trade her child for American money.
She draws the curtains and stares down through the apartment buildings into the bowl of the city below. Snow has fallen again and it lies across the roofs of the city like an icing she might have made in her kitchen, of sugar and lemon; it frosts the minarets and glazes everything with a sudden prettiness. The day seems to stretch out in a lovely, lazy, Turkish way. She goes out of the room humming “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and thinking of Christmas.
Her romance with Ahmet is happily consuming. She lets herself shiver under his touch, she cultivates the queasiness in her stomach, the electricity coursing along her arms when she catches sight of him—bent over his desk through the grimy window of the trailer, or cleaning out a horse’s hoof with deep, sweeping motions, slinging bales of hay. She likes him in her social circle, sitting in the living room during some function, sipping amber liquor from a heavy tumbler, his white hair perfectly groomed, his jacket and tie an odd fit on his small, compact body—he seems to her shorter away from the horses, and altogether more human. And in rooms like these, women and men both surround him, drawn to his gentle charisma, and they coax from him stories of wars and engagements in lands even more distant and exotic to her than this one.
She and Bahar have made an odd peace now, the kind that incorporates their new circumstances and treads more lightly around sensitive topics. They do not mention Ahmet by name; in fact, they do not speak of romance at all, in any form or fashion. Grace is learning, at last, to keep a piece of herself in reserve. She might have taken this lesson to heart years ago, she thinks, and saved herself heartbreak. Grace had noticed long ago that Canada was like this—her friendships were always conditional, more apt to dissipate and fray. They were not the passionate kind Grace remembered having as a girl.
At the table in the living room later, she leafs through travel brochures and thinks of a trip to Istanbul to see the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi. She wants photographs of the Golden Horn at sunset, when the red light strikes the water in that famous, overdocumented way, building a little bridge of radiance from one shore to another. She wants to fight her way through the Grand Bazaar and haggle for trinkets and treasures, and she wants Ahmet to take her. But it won’t be easily arranged, he says. There is not a place for them in that city. He will not risk taking a hotel room.
But Grace wants more than snatched hours in the trailer like a teenager, more than moments in the hayloft, where they might at any moment be discovered by the grooms or the leggy, knowing American girls, who lately give her glances that she shrugs off, telling herself she is imagining things. Flipping the pages of her pamphlets, she dreams of walking through ruins with Ahmet, of crossing the Bosporus in a small rented boat, of fresh fish and wine in a dockside restaurant, of sitting near the water’s edge as the sun sets while long, gorgeous minutes slip by.
15
THE SNOWFALL SENT ME TO THE CLOSET. I WAS LOOKING FOR A scarf I wanted, some hand-knitted disaster sent by a relative, one that matched the equally terrible hat I was wearing. I was thinking of going to the sledding hill—hoping I might run into Catherine there. Early last spring, Catherine and I had swept down the steep hill together, pressed front to back astride a one-man wooden sled, afraid to part company even for the swift, blinding seconds that carried us to the foot of the slope. The run ended only inches from the street, where hurtling cars threw up a dark vomit of muddy snow and soot and wet, flecked coal. We’d come to a stop with our boots outstretched, the toes spotlighted a sickening yellow by the headlights. Then, mitten in mitten, we’d struggle back to the top, dragging the sled, our eyes on the ground, chattering. Beside us, all around us, the Turkish children screamed and shoved and laughed on the darkening slope. Bundled in coats and balaclavas, with only their eyes showing, they looked hostile to us (and dangerous). Catherine had needed me then. There were always skirmishes: boys pushed us, girls plucked jeeringly at our coats. One evening a tall, bold boy grabbed our sled away and took it into a circle of his friends. They stood around it, laughing, kicking at it with their boots, leaning over in bulky coats to punch it with their fists. Then three of them clambered aboard and rode it clumsily down the hill; when they reached the bottom they tumbled shouting to the ground in a pile, scrambled up and kicked the sled over. Then they stepped off the curb and vanished between the passi
ng lights, their bodies sliding into the darkness like shadows, leaving the sled upturned, its runners in the street. It was the last we saw of that sled, our last time on the hill.
Looking for the scarf, I went pushing around in the front closet, jamming aside the stiff shoulders of coats, cursing in John’s Turkish. Suddenly, hands deep inside the closet, I stopped. An absence struck me.
I shoved around among the things on the floor with my foot, accidentally kicking over the straw crèche my mother treasured, the one she assembled in a tableau every Christmas with meticulous, childish care—every figure: each sheep and goat and robed, myrrh-bearing wise man; the baby Jesus, swaddled in blue ceramic, and Mary, with her concerned, peaceful, painted-on countenance. In the fracas, in my hurry, Joseph fell to the floor and was injured, his blue robe chipped and his beard dislodged, revealing a weak, crumbly white chin. Panicked still, I pressed on, pushing my hands deep into the recesses of the closet, fumbling around on the floor, running my hands over every object—every shoe and boot and box and tennis racket. My hands reached the rough walls at the end and I sank back on my knees.
Then I pushed myself upright and stood, brushing my hands on my hips, stopping to check my new breasts as I passed the hall mirror—an obsessive habit I could not break, even in catastrophe. I poked my head into the living room, where the furniture was neatly arranged, the heavy shot-silk curtains hung motionless at the windows and my father’s old typewriter sat at the desk in the corner, a fresh piece of paper spooled between the cylinders. The apartment smelled thickly of ammonia and furniture polish, tinged with the tangy, bitter scent of artificial lemon.
In the kitchen I stepped over Firdis, who was bent bulkily on her knees, scrubbing back and forth across the gray-flecked linoleum and humming tunelessly. The door to the balcony was ajar and the curtains drifted inward, admitting the cool, smoky breath of the city.
Of course, it flooded back, then, with Firdis hunched on the floor at my feet: the phone ringing, the sound of my father moving in the house in the darkness, his footsteps, the whispering I’d heard in the hallway. Still, I needed confirmation.
“Where’s the suitcase from the front closet? My father’s suitcase?”
I mimed a square with my hands, holding them in front of her face. “Gray,” I said. “Bavul. Gri.”
She leaned back on her heels and stared up at me. “Baba go. Evet,” she said, nodding. She waved her hand, mirroring mine. “Güle güle Baba.” She smiled fiercely, exposing rotten teeth, patches of purply gum.
I flew out of the kitchen and returned to my room, first sitting down on the bed and then getting up and pacing back and forth, from the window to the door, again and again. Outside, the snow deepened, the hill grew soft and white; I heard the distant clamor of children, but I forgot all about it: my scarf, Catherine, sledding.
IN THE weeks after he left, my mother and I sometimes wandered down Tunali to the kebab place by the park, sat at long, communal tables and ate from tin plates, pressed close to loud, happy Turkish families. We ordered lamb smothered in yogurt and tomato sauce, salads of cucumbers and olives and sharp white cheese, and warm Cokes in dusty bottles, which we drank through delicate paper straws. Sometimes Bahar would stroll in, like a minor celebrity, with Ali or one or another of her shiny-faced, eager little boys. My mother brought along her travel books or her stationery, chewed her disintegrating straw, and penned notes in the margins or long letters to her friend Edie.
With my father away, my mother didn’t attempt to draw me into conversation, and she virtually ignored my table manners. She abandoned the pretense that I was well brought up and polite, capable of small talk, that I could be trusted not to play with my food. I wonder if she ever noticed that my father cared very little for such things. My mother’s concern for decorum was hers alone, and mostly for show. My father never did have a military man’s obsession with rules and regulations, with posture and correctness; these were her impositions, though she preferred to attribute them to him. “Try to show your father you weren’t raised by wolves,” she’d say, before punching me between the shoulders to encourage good posture. But when he was gone, her concentration shifted, her eyes watched doorways instead of other people’s cutlery, her hands fidgeted with napkins and linens, and she didn’t notice if I stared at unfortunates, if I scraped my fork on my teeth or slouched like a hunchback over my book. She was clearly preoccupied with her own troubles in those days, the outlines of which were clear, though their interiors remained opaque to me.
Paige Trotter came around more often, reading the dregs of coffee or laying out her cards on the coffee table in elaborate designs. Folky music played on the hi-fi. My mother banged out rudimentary carols on the piano. Often, the women—Paige, Bahar, Ben Gul and others—sat around drinking steaming beverages that smelled of liquor, laughing uproariously. By evening the room was always a haze and my mother retired with a crashing headache.
Paige and my mother taught me to play whist and hours passed like this: a fire burning in the grate; raki, giving off its pungent smell of licorice, swirling cloudily in their glasses. We decorated a spindly tree, and when my mother unwrapped the crèche she discovered the tragedy that had befallen Joseph. When she blamed Firdis and swore and wept, I didn’t bother—or it didn’t occur to me—to correct her.
I didn’t miss my father, not so much. I was too accustomed to his absence. It was as familiar to me as smoky rooms and airports and languages I understood only in snatches. In fact, there was very nearly a familiar warmth to it, to the way the rooms shifted and reconfigured themselves, the way we ate the things we wanted and never worried if there was nothing for breakfast in the mornings. We subsisted on bread and fruit and pastries, and I was nearly always a little high from the unaccustomed sugar—that, and the thick and heady remains of the women’s glasses, which I drained every evening in the kitchen.
Though time had passed, Catherine still wouldn’t talk to Kate or me. At school she swung in wide and graceful arcs, ignoring us completely. Not in the studied, careful way girls scorn other girls, but in a quiet way that suggested we did not even exist. She didn’t stare through us or turn her head abruptly in another direction when we passed; no, her eyes gave us the same flat, casual attention you would give any insect or inanimate object or stranger. Though it didn’t faze Kate at all, it made me queasy. I’d grown to dislike Kate: among other things, she used her position as the headmaster’s daughter to extract special favors from the teachers and lord it over the younger children. My mother, too, professed not to care much for her (“a bit sly, isn’t she?”), and I found myself defending her, this friend I no longer liked, a compulsion I resented in the extreme.
Ramadan was ending and my mother began to plan for a party. Since my father was gone, it would be a gathering of her friends, the Turkish ladies and their husbands, Paige Trotter, some friends she’d made at the stables. In the days leading up to it she made lists of foods and things she wanted, sending Firdis scurrying all over the city, and at night she sat on the floor in front of the ancient stereo and piled record albums into stacks. She rolled up the big carpet in the living room and polished the more intricate silver herself with a toothbrush. One afternoon, I heard her on the phone trying to borrow a punch bowl.
The morning of the party, I went to Kate’s house to watch the slaughter of the lamb. It was Kurban Bayramı, the Feast of Sacrifice. All over the city, people would be killing animals—sheep, goats, even camels—and giving the meat to the poor. For many Turks, for millions, my father had said, this might be the only meat they would see in the entire year.
The day was chilly and we were out of school for the holiday. The air was clear and the tree was swept of leaves; there were little frost heaves in the earth, and ice palaces, minuscule but intricate, had formed in the depressions made by our tramping feet. Kate’s brother and sister had clambered into the limbs above us and they hung there like monkeys, cackling and crinkling cellophane wrappers. We had a clear view over the
wall into the neighbor’s courtyard. There was a great deal of activity—laughter and shouting, snatches of song. But for a long while nothing important happened. The lamb was standing as it usually was, its face butted into the corner of the wall. We could see the black tip of its tail, its stained bottom, two diminutive hind feet.
Nestled in the tree, we hugged ourselves and stamped our feet against the branches, liking the way they groaned. Kate and I talked and teased, we grabbed at the small ankles and feet that dangled from the upper limbs and pretended to pull at them, to dislodge their owners. When we looked up, the men were already advancing on the lamb with exaggerated steps and gestures. We quickly left off what we were doing—I had Josephine’s anklebones pinched between my fingers and when I let go, a little bleat escaped her, a tiny breathless noise of relief.
I smelled fire somewhere nearby; the houses of the neighborhood were spread below us in a patchwork, and smoke rose from chimneys and twisted in the air. Down in the courtyard, men dragged the squealing lamb into the center: the whole family was there, men and women and children. A skinny dog ranged through their legs, barking and whining, taking kicks good-naturedly. The father, large and mustached and jolly with holiday spirit, suddenly caught sight of us, pointed up at our tree and laughed. He waved a hand in a slow, exaggerated fashion, as if he were communicating with the deaf or the infirm, as if he was uncertain whether it was a universal gesture.
Kate’s mother came out just once and shook her head in disbelief. “Little savages,” she said, and then disappeared again. A few moments later she materialized on an upstairs balcony almost level with the tree and began shaking duvets out over the yard. Feathers flew, crumbs scattered, the down comforters snapped white in the air and then billowed softly down.
The men struggled to hold the lamb quiet; then one produced a piece of cloth and tied it over the animal’s eyes. It wriggled desperately under their hands, and for a moment it seemed like they were playing a game at a fair, that the lamb would emerge unharmed, frightened but intact. Then suddenly they stopped, bowed their heads and began to pray. The wind carried the strange words up to us in the tree. The men stood gathered around the animal, their hands disappearing into the wool of its back, their mouths moving and their voices joined in a chant, guttural but somehow lovely, drifting with the smoke and the cold. The rhythm was mesmerizing, singsong and sad; I wanted to close my eyes and listen. But then, just as quickly, the prayer was over and the blade flashed—it seemed to come from nowhere, glinting, curved, massive—and we heard a sharp, strangled cry, a noise like taps left open in a sink and suddenly there was blood: splattering, splashing, pouring.
