Gardens of Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

there next to his ear, a loose fist with the palm open to the sky. There was an air of the sleeping infant in the pose, and it seemed to Sinan that only days before he had held the babysmail in his arms, the small, pudgy body, the toothless gums of his mouth, that fresh powdery smell of his skin.
    He climbed the staircase to the roof of the apartment building, and his left foot, deformed since birth, and sore from the day’s walking instanbul, throbbed with each step. It looked like Berker Bey, the owner of the apartment, was going to build another level—there was exposed rebar, bags of cement, and loosely stacked cinder blocks—but Sinan knew that he was really just avoiding paying taxes; the government couldn’t assess taxes until construction was finished. Life was full of these little immoralities.
    From the rooftop he could see over the Americans’ terrace, past the other apartment rooftops and their cluttered satellite dishes, and out over the Gulf ofzmit toward the forested hillsides across the water. He stood on the edge of the roof, his shins pressing against the raised edge, and was surprised to see the American wife below him, sitting alone on a wicker chair. Her back was to him, her face turned toward the black water. She was still except for the rise and fall of her right hand, which held a lit cigarette.
    For some reason he felt sorry for her, this woman he knew nothing about. She seemed the picture of loneliness at that moment—her stillness in the dark, the curve of her thick, motherly back, her bare white legs dully shining in the light of the waterfront. A lot of things were said about these Americans, but if they were so rich, he wondered, why didn’t they have their summer home in Yalova with all the other rich people? Gölcük, though by the sea, was a poor town, a working-man’s town. If they were so rich, why did the wife seem so sad? Maybe he should have been kinder to them at the party. He thought briefly about breaking her silence with a “Good evening,” but decided against it and retreated out of sight to sit on a plastic chair on the rooftop.
    There he took off his left shoe and rubbed the inflamed stump that should have been a foot. He would have to run the register at the grocery for a few days so he could stay off the foot until the swelling went down.
    He often sat on the roof when he couldn’t sleep. Since Öcalan had been caught by the government and the civil war in the South seemed over, his father had been visiting him more often in his dreams. His father would have been devastated to hear that the Turks had captured the PKK leader. Without Apo, as Öcalan was called by his father and all separatist-leaning Kurds, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party was effectively dead, and so was the movement to carve a Kurdistan out of a corner of Turkey. No one else could kill the Turkish paramilitaries the way Apo did; no one else could inspire such fear in the government buildings in Ankara.
    Perhaps it was safe to return home to Yeilli, but it was difficult to imagine it so. He touched the shard of bullet hanging from a chain around his neck—it was all he had left of his father, God bless him. He remembered the night his father was killed, the popping of the M-16 rifle shots, the screaming, the men and boys gathered for the new-year celebration diving away from the bonfires. His father had sent him home when the paramilitary jeeps arrived, and he was already past Emre Bey’s butcher shop when his father’s friends and the other men began yelling
Long live Kurdistan,
or else he might have been killed, too.
    He felt a sting of guilt about having the Americans in his home. If his father had been here tonight, he wouldn’t have stepped into the apartment with them there. “The Americans let the Turks do this to us,” he would have said. “And now you feed them, invite them to your son’s most important day?” He had dishonored his father’s memory, and he would have to suffer the pangs