Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  Grace laughs neutrally.

  Greg continues in a different tone, “You know it was Rand who helped get us reposted. He put in a word with someone. We might still be cooling our heels on Olson Loop if he hadn’t stepped in. It was kind of him. Very unexpected.” He pauses. “I’ll assume he doesn’t know anything about this.”

  They end the conversation soon after, and Grace puts the phone down with a churning stomach and white knuckles. She thinks of Rand extending himself to Greg, the uncharacteristic largesse. Why had he done it? Perhaps he’d only been hoping to get rid of them, to put distance between Edie and his own wife. He’d have been surprised, and not necessarily happily, to find out they’d been posted to Saudi Arabia, a place he himself had often mentioned as desirable.

  Sitting in the hallway beside the telephone, Grace recalls so many long and silent evenings with Rand—and her relentlessly bright talk of her day, of the street’s doings, of the gossip that had drifted past Edie’s screen door. In the living room on Olson Loop, Rand sat in a stupor in front of the television, the news flickering blue on the screen in front of him, the rabbit ears tilted backward and slightly to the left, the only position that ensured reception. Still, Grace had kept up that cheerful, strained patter as long as she could—until Rand rose to change the channel, or push into the kitchen for a beer, his posture telegraphing disinterest, boredom, contempt. At times she had tried to speak of Edie, to recount something Edie had said or done, some charming peculiarity, and Rand would snort dismissively, lift his pipe from the standing ashtray and, with an enraging concentration, begin to fill it, as though tamping Soviet spies into its capacious, burled bowl.

  She thought of standing on cool wet sand beside Greg, on the morning they were meant to leave the beach; it was the night before that Edie had broken down in the kitchen. The ocean was still; she studied his profile as he stared out at the water. How handsome he is, she thought.

  “Thank you for being such a good friend to Edie,” he said. “She’s been so unhappy here. You’ve really cheered her up.”

  “It isn’t me she needs, Greg.” But she’d heard the preachy little note in her voice and tried to laugh it away.

  “No?” he said. “What is it, do you think?” But there was no sarcasm in his question—rather curiosity, real interest. He was playing with his wristwatch and she heard the repetitive click of the winding mechanism.

  She was thinking how to put it when he said, “I don’t know what she’s said to you. Maybe it was all a mistake, perhaps she did just mean to admire it, to hold it for a moment. But no one took it that way, if you know what I mean. It didn’t look like that at all.”

  “Well,” she said, “okay.” She didn’t know anything about it then and for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what he was referring to: she felt as if she’d walked into a conversation at its end, or woken up in the middle. Later, she’d thought of shoplifting, which she’d seen Edie do once or twice, in the commissary or the PX—dropping a toiletry item into her bag, or a box of pudding into her pocket. But Grace had never mentioned it. She’d pretended she didn’t see and distracted herself with her purchases, her wallet.

  What else had Grace overlooked, in her blinding desire for a friend and a confidante? Might Rand have wondered after her own sanity, those long hours she spent with Edie?

  “The tapioca,” Greg then said. “The damned tapioca. It’s all they fed her in the hospital. She came out craving it.”

  Hospital?

  After hanging up with Greg, Grace sits near the small telephone table, on a sturdy milking stool from Germany, for long minutes. She picks up the phone several times and replaces it; she cannot quite think whom to call.

  AFTER THE evacuation from Baghdad, they’d landed in Frankfurt. Their boxes had taken weeks to come, and when they finally did, she unwrapped their scant belongings expectantly. She felt as if she were being reunited with lost family members, old friends. But other hands had packed their things, carelessly, hurriedly, and many were broken or chipped or entirely destroyed. She knelt in the empty, too-bright apartment overlooking the shopping district of that new city and held up one and then another of her lost treasures. She broke down then, over the crèche with its thatched roof, now in tatters, which she remembered from childhood, and the photographs of her sisters and her stern father, scattered and dead, respectively. The pictures were glued together with damp, and tore heartbreakingly when she tried to separate them, leaving rough white patches on the paper, the faces fractured and blotched.

  Was it unreasonable that she blamed Rand for this? For the loss of her memories, her precious childhood? And when he had come in waving the papers of his commendation, his award for meritorious service, she’d just held up her dead mother’s ring, the diamonds obviously pried from the setting not by hands but by clever little tools. Look what it’s gotten me, she said, your wonderful medal, your marvelous commendation.

  There had been a flurry of career successes following the war and the evacuation. What for Grace had been trying and frightening and deracinating had for Rand been a boost; whatever he had done in those lost days had made him a kind of minor hero. She saw that afterward, in the commendation ceremonies and the parties that followed, the way men clapped his shoulder and looked at him with admiration, and even women whispered when he entered the room and shoved at one another like schoolgirls. She resented it, being congratulated on her husband’s mysterious successes, having no idea what she was approving of, what atrocities he might have committed, what he might have detonated or destroyed or smuggled away. She detected in him a new smugness and self-devotion that irritated her. It made her want to see him brought low. For a time she called him the Big Fish, and joked to the other wives that he was too puffed up to share an apartment with. They’d probably thought her mean-spirited. But really, she was mostly annoyed at being left out, at being excluded so completely and so casually.

  Her husband’s charm had always had the quality of a bright, warming light, but the radiance was unpredictable and too easily redirected. For all his complaining and reluctance about the pregnancy and the baby’s ultimate arrival, he became, for a time, fascinated by his daughter. As an infant she didn’t interest him—her needs were too base and unglamorous. Diapers had horrified him, and during feedings he had looked on in rapt disgust. But in Germany, when she began to demonstrate intelligence and curiosity and the most rudimentary signs of personality, Rand had thrown himself assiduously into fatherhood. He taught Canada the German equivalents of all the English words she mastered and liked to parade her into shops and bakeries and show her off. In museums and cathedrals he lectured her—Canada in ruffled knickers and smocked dresses, her fat hands patting his cheeks—on art and ecumenical histories. As Christmas approached, bright packages tumbled concussively from the closets and cabinets.

  Nothing Grace said or did, none of her protests or pleas, made any difference. In Canada, Rand found an unquestioning disciple, one who could no longer be counted on to keep the daily secrets of the household. If a critical dinner ingredient fell to the floor and Grace retrieved it and used it anyway, Canada would meet Rand at the door and inform him of the contamination; when Canada got stuck alone in the elevator—Grace had been looking elsewhere, chatting with a neighbor—and the fire brigade had to be called, Canada wasted no time in telling her father the details of her mother’s neglect. It wasn’t long before Grace felt quite competently ganged up on: she was raising a clever little turncoat. It seemed to her as well that Canada’s language skills were far too advanced for her age. Often she felt locked in a battle with her daughter and her husband, no longer a war for affection, because that had been quickly decided, but rather one for survival, for merely keeping her head above water.

  Grace complained of it to friends she made through the embassy—older women who’d been at it much longer. She quickly sensed their world-weariness, their inattention to their own children. Not one of them, Grace discovered, wanted to own up to a good ma
rriage. Domestic happiness seemed to them dull and provincial. Instead they preferred to complain, to trade miseries and trespasses: they swarmed like ants at the first sign of marital distress.

  But Germany was a coveted post. Many were resting there between wars and less attractive postings, taking a breather from more exotic cities and cultures, from strict dress codes and burdensome religious protocols. In Germany, the life suddenly felt a little glamorous. They could buy the things they needed; they became accustomed to more-sophisticated goods. The women could exchange pleasantries in German and make themselves understood in the grocery store. However simple these skills, they seemed to signal a longed-for polish and worldliness. Sometimes, her heels clicking along the cobbled sidewalks of the city, returning from shopping, Grace felt the way she had meant to feel on her wedding day—stylish and traveled and urbane. And at night there was an atmosphere of abandon. The parties were nonstop, the scandalous antics of the wives winked and whispered about, the men drinking and carousing and a general feeling of ease and self-satisfaction.

  But after a time Grace perceived a widespread ennui, an exhausting vacancy, a whiff of corruption. It permeated the air at parties and functions, at endless coffees. She felt a flood of maternal remorse, redoubled her efforts to win Canada’s affection: she took an active role in the nursery school and went along as chaperone on trips to the zoo. But her involvement seemed only to spur bad behavior: twice in one week Canada climbed on a desk during lessons and removed her dress as if performing a burlesque. It was gently suggested to Grace that she might find other ways to occupy her time, that Canada’s conduct was indicative of her need to separate from her mother. She did that long ago, Grace thought to tell them. In fact, Canada had never been a child who clung to her mother’s skirts or wept inconsolably when she left the house. Her father, that was another matter. If Rand was called away on a trip Canada went into an immediate decline: she became impossible to manage and threw world-class tantrums.

  Grace began to dread the phone calls in the middle of the night summoning her husband away. The long, uninterrupted days and nights alone with her daughter were a kind of torture, the weekends especially dismal. She did not have the wherewithal, the maternal fortitude, for endless games of Old Maid, for singing a hundred choruses of the “Wheels on the Bus,” for dressing up teddy bears in doll clothes. Grace hated this about herself but could not seem to shake it off.

  She took German classes several evenings a week and often left Canada with Ava, the maid they had found through a bulletin board at church. Canada had her father’s aptitude for languages: each time Grace came home, she was just a little more fluent. It was another barrier between them, another thing that put Canada firmly in her father’s camp. When he was home, the two of them spoke together in German, a language Grace could not understand beyond the basics. Her husband and her daughter curled in the tweed chair near the window and read together from the Little Bear books, which Canada preferred in German. If Grace picked up the English version, Canada would shake her head violently and open her mouth to howl—and it seemed to Grace that she understood too well her mother’s failings, that she had sensed her weaknesses and ferreted out her fears.

  Even here in Turkey, Grace senses in Canada a too-acute understanding of things she couldn’t possibly know. At the barn, now that Ahmet has grown cool—not unfriendly but aloof, which is somehow worse—Canada snuggles up to him with a new, almost womanish coyness. When Grace approaches them at the stable—they will be grooming a horse, or taking apart some contraption built of leather—they stop talking, or their voices lift from whispers to become bright and smooth. Once, when she finds them together in a stall, Canada is wearing Ahmet’s jaunty little cap and when Grace nears she plucks it from her head and returns it to his. There is something deliberately intimate in her gesture, something she wants Grace to appreciate. Now the glances Canada gives Grace over her shoulder telegraph that she is intruding, that she is less than welcome there, among the horses and the grooms and the piled-up hay, the young girls in their riding gear, with their purposeful hands and strong, fluent legs; Grace has no real business in this place.

  Canada is always so much more accessible in Grace’s imagination than in the living room. Some nights when she and Canada are alone in the apartment, she creeps in and watches her daughter sleep.

  Since their return from Istanbul, Ahmet’s eyes are apologetic, and once or twice he raises his hands at her in a helpless gesture, one that might encompass any situation, any difficulty at all. When she telephones him, thinking a conversation is in order, his voice is even and polite. She invites him for dinner but he doesn’t show up, despite cordial assurances that he will. And now that Bahar has returned—her interest in horses kindled again, for some baffling reason—the two are nearly always together. Sometimes, waiting for Canada, Grace’s heart contracts to see their two diminutive figures riding in the fields beyond the flat fenced rings, their horses side by side, their bodies moving in effortless harmony. They return flushed and warm from exertion, the horses foam-flecked from their gallops, their laughter coming up ahead of them, drifting on the wind down the hill, where Grace waits with an all too familiar catch in her throat, hands clasped together inside her sleeves.

  Alone with Canada, Grace often thinks she might jump out of her own skin. She is waiting for her daughter to say something cutting or mock sympathetic, to let her know that she intuits Grace’s ruin, that it’s no secret between them. But Canada says nothing, and sometimes Grace wonders if she is dreaming up these things, all this ill will and evil intent she ascribes to her daughter. She thinks of Catherine, home again with Simone, with John. Grace had delivered the girl right to the front door: she’d been folded back into that household with its inexplicable boundaries and its terrible unspoken consents.

  Once after Istanbul, Grace meets Ahmet coming around the corner at the stables; she is holding a travel book near her face, her collar turned up against the wind.

  “Don’t overdo it,” she tells him, “with Canada. Go easy on her.”

  He looks bewildered. It’s such an affectation on his part, that blankness, she suddenly sees it clearly.

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” she says. “You know what I mean.”

  He doesn’t answer, but turns and strikes up a conversation with a groom, the two of them vanishing into a stall. He seems churlish now, this man she had not loved, and she goes away feeling wearied by the whole thing.

  She thinks how easy it is in the beginning—friendships, romances, new countries—how easily bewitching they can be. One can feel such affinity with a stranger, or think to throw an entire life over for the promise of some untested ardor.

  EVENTUALLY, WORRIED by silence and inaction, cut free of Ahmet and his distracting attentions, Grace decides to confide once more in Paige, who listens to her somberly over coffee in her cluttered living room.

  When she finishes, there is a long stretch of silence.

  Paige sighs. “Listen, Grace, I like you. I do. You’ve made some silly mistakes since you’ve been here, some rather whopping missteps, but on the whole I like you. I’ve always told people that. But what do you expect me to do with this extraordinary information?”

  “I understand,” says Grace, and her tone and the movement of her hands are more impatient than she intends. “I understand all that. But what should I do? Shall I just forget the whole thing, hope nothing comes of it? It certainly seems to be working for Simone.”

  Paige shuffles a deck of cards on her lap; the sound is irksome. “The two situations are quite different.”

  “I agree. That one seems far more sinister.”

  “Does it?” says Paige. “I wonder why.”

  Grace is amazed, as she was on the train that day, hearing Ahmet’s similarly offhand reaction.

  Paige says, “Perhaps Catherine seems like a different sort of child to you. A bit more valuable.”

  “No,” she says. “That’s not remotely the case.”


  Paige looks at her over folded hands. She says nothing.

  Grace says, “I’d like you to tell me you didn’t know about this. About John and Catherine. Simone.”

  Paige returns to her oversize cards, with their ornate renderings of knights and pages and emperors. “I don’t pretend to understand everything, Grace. And I don’t ask questions about what doesn’t concern me. I’d advise you to do the same. It’s rarely profitable.”

  “I find this all utterly outrageous.”

  “Do you? Perhaps you simply think you should.”

  “Either way. Take it as you like.” Grace feels petty and obstinate; she stares at her hands: the ropy veins, the plain gold band.

  “You shouldn’t be so heartfelt, Grace, so provincial. So damned American. Tell me, does Rand know about this? Edie? The baby?”

  Grace looks up, a little desperately. The American remark pricked. “Yes. No. Paige, look, I know full well I’m living in a glass house, but honestly, isn’t this a bit different? Doesn’t this violate…some…some boundaries of decency?”

  “You misunderstand me, Grace. I couldn’t care less about the horse teacher. That is what it is. You tell me—diversion, exercise, recreation. But, to put it plainly, you seem to forget you’ve arranged for a baby to be sold on the black market. To a woman you’ve just come to me and described as a lunatic.”

  “Hysterical, I think. Troubled. Not crazy. You’d agree there’s a difference.”

  “As you like. But wouldn’t you agree your position is precarious? You do know you live in a foreign country? And not the most progressive one in the world either.”

  This is hard to argue and Grace temporarily abandons the matter; perhaps Paige is right, and what does Catherine have to do with her, really? All this trafficking in children and servants—it’s begun to seem almost commonplace. And she remembers Catherine’s stubborn expression from the train; it fuses in her mind with the one Canada lately wears.