The Gendarme (15 page)

“Are we near the hospital?”

“Yes. Behind that building.” She points in the direction of a crumbling edifice. “I am going to the market for bulgur. Although they are kind to us and give us food, this
vesika
bread, it is not much. It comes only every few days. Otherwise we have to buy, or beg.”

“I can give you some money.” I dip into my bag.

“No.” She shakes her head.

I pause, my hand still in my bag. “What should I do?” The question sounds desperate, if not ridiculous. Only a few hours before, this woman was my prisoner. Now I ask her advice.

Ani glances around. “Look for me in the big square, by the woman in the center selling jewelry. I will bring you word of her. I am hopeful she will soon come herself.”

I nod.

“Now go.”

 

 

 

I accompany
Violet on a trip to Valdosta, an hour or so away. She has a meeting at the university there, some kind of discussion regarding accounting office practices. I am grateful for a change in routine, a chance to get out of Wadesboro. We have heard nothing more from the police. I have been told by the agency that Ethan is both “fine” and “recovering.”

I wait in a small cafeteria while Violet has her meeting. Everyone is so young here, supple and full-cheeked, like children. It is hard to believe many are older than Carol and I were when we married. They nod to me, some of them, or ignore me. I purchase a cup of tea but it is flavored, the way Americans like it. I drink it anyway. I think of going to the library here and continuing my research but what more is there to research? I know the basics. There was war, conflict, insurrection—real or imagined. Deportations. I try not to think about it. Perhaps I have moved on, not unlike Recep’s nephew.

I take a seat by a window with a view of a small courtyard. A snatch of music floats in, maybe a band practicing somewhere, but the melody buckles me suddenly down and down, such that I reach to place my hands on my knees but still plummet, the music loud in my ears. I see a band playing, a group of musicians in formal but dated attire. Others stand watching, listening, women in headscarves, men in baggy trousers held firm at the knees. Another sound carries across the music’s intervals: piercing, then obliterated, drowned out by brass and strings. At first I cannot identify it, but then it bleeds through, welling up to overwhelm the intertwined melodies I recognize now as Mozart. The sound of human screams.

“Papa, are you okay?”

I sit up. Violet bends above me.

“I am fine,” I say. “It is hot here.” I search for my cup and find it spilled on the floor.

“Are you sure, Papa?”

“Yes, fine.” I am irritable.

We exit the cafeteria to daylight, to jumble. Students trudge on pathways worn in lush grass. A young man attaches flyers to a post with a stapler. Buildings fill and empty, inhaling, expelling. A group sits at a concrete table with heads bent, as in prayer. It is so ordered, so foreign. In another life I might have learned as they do, but my daughters did, and is that not what I wanted? Violet and her accounting. Lissette studied history. They would have walked on paths like these, bent their heads into books. Yet the thought of captured knowledge serves to feed my discomfort, as if someone will ask me something and then expose my deception. Are there Armenians here, too? A bass thunders close and I hear it, the Mozart. Chills make their way up the edge of my spine.

Violet is speaking, asking me something, but I am dazed and sweating and submerged in the heat, intent on blocking the music’s return and, as such, whatever she is saying. What is happening to me? My heart thumps in upbeats, in cadence. The Armenians, these dreams—I did not ask for or want this. Are they glimpses of hell, of some afterlife just beyond? My life spent without God, without religion, and perhaps this is my consequence, to greet suffering with inaction, chained and observant, a man sentenced to watch a child’s slow, painful death. Punishing. Equalizing. Such a prideful, vengeful God this would be, a God of retribution, not mercy. Do I think I deserve more? There is innocence, denial, faithlessness, blasphemy. The emptiness of happenstance, nothingness. These seeds I have sown.

“Papa!”

Violet is angry. I have ignored her. I have failed to respond. I think to speak now but would I then tell her, inflict her with the plague of my history, this turmoil that arrives at the dusk of my life? I do not wish to talk or dwell on it. If I talk there will be questions, calls for explanation, and justification. I do not wish to burden her any more than I have.

We enter the car, drive in silence. Signs litter the road, advertisements for mayhaw jelly, for tupelo honey. Church announcements. Remember, Moses Began as a Basket Case. If You Die Today, Where Will You Sleep Tonight
?
I count the churches, the denominations professing allegiance and yet fragmented, different. I think again about God, Allah, about the words of the prayers—do I remember? I turned my back on it, focused as I was on starting anew, a new life. There is a word for this shunning but I cannot find it. I meant no disrespect in existence, avoidance. My survival. Is it too late now? It is late. I stare out at farm implements. If I were younger I would work that much harder.

We pass green deer stands, the ladders up to short platforms. A dog trots, its head down. A house’s gray siding curls like peels from a peach. I am thinking, aware again of my silence. Carol used to do this when angry, growing still and mute, refusing to acknowledge any question or comment. I found it infuriating. I do not wish now to mimic it. I determine to say something, anything, perhaps a new announcement, something clever—like these church messages? I am not clever. Still, I wet my lips. I venture forth.

“Everyone has a map, but most cannot read it.”

Violet’s gaze remains fixed.

I try again. “Is it better to follow a leader or lead only the followers?”

She crooks her head, puzzling. I indicate a blank sign.

“If God is watching, is he missing something else?”

I am pleased with myself. Again, “One wrenched from his childhood is always a stranger.”

I smile, but she turns now, her jaw set. She takes a long breath, as if prolonging some pleasure.

“Everyone is wrenched from their childhood, Papa. You, me, Mother. You know this, don’t you? We’re all wrenched.”

There is savagery in her tone, bitterness. I nod, my satisfaction quickly ebbed. I glance at her. Wrenched, from her childhood—the baby? I consider this. Violet came back but left again. She would have been eighteen then, maybe twenty. We went some time without contact. She was in California, on a land cooperative. Consumed with herself, with discovering “consciousness,” she once told me, a rare conversation. She spoke more with Carol. She protested the war, Vietnam, though she would not be a soldier. She did not work. Carol sent her money. Eventually she came back, lived with us again, slept at odd hours. She went to the community college and worked a little, moved out and returned. A series of jobs followed, as bank teller, waitress, salesclerk, secretary. None lasted long. And then a new pregnancy. I think of my life, my obligations and effort. I stare out at new signs. Jesus Saves
.
Hot Boiled Peanuts
.

Peter and Josephine—Brains and Brainsetta—are at the house when we return. This is an annoyance, as I am in no mood for company. I slip around them, hoping to escape to the rear of the house, but Peter catches my arm.

“Listen, I need to ask you something,” he whispers, his lips barely moving.

This is a code phrase, for his asking for money. I have invested before, in the failed pest control venture (blasting bugs with sound waves), the failed ostrich ranch (the male and female soon so disliked each other that reproduction became out of the question). Now that Carol is gone, must I listen? Lissette always thought Peter and Josephine were themselves a bit unsteady when it came to procreation. But perhaps I am the fool, for investing my funds to begin with.

“Listen,” Peter continues, his lips still not moving, “I can get you in on a piece of a really great investment, if you’re interested.”

I open my mouth, unable to speak.

“I’ve got an exclusive deal on this process to turn cow manure into energy. A guy up in Ohio’s done it there. Says it works like you wouldn’t believe. And all these dairy farmers, they’re facing a big environmental problem with what to do with their manure. This solves their problem. We’ve got a grant application in to the Department of Agriculture to fund a study.”

I try to remember his current place of employment—Ace Hardware? Food Lion? “Peter,” I say finally, “I am an old man. I have been ill. I am uninterested in risky investments just now.”

“Okay, okay. No, I understand. I was just thinking of Violet, you know, and Lissette. It’s up to you.”

“Do you still have the ostriches?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah.” He pulls at his chin, twisting his face back to toothsomeness. “I can put a saddle on one of them now, ride her a little ways.” He pulls some more, as if he has a goatee, but he does not. “She’s a mean cuss, though. Bite the hell out of you if you’re not careful. And smart—smart as the devil. Hmmm-hmm. Hmmm-hmm.”

I look at my hands and the calluses there. Is life now plans and scheming? I worked twelve hours each day, fifteen hours. In the beginning I spoke little English. I took any job; I worked on tall buildings, underground. I did repair work at night. I studied the language all hours. Men stole from me, cheated me. I plodded on like a beast. My children had it easier, but this is what I intended, that they could further their minds. They could
be
! And yet it has not been, not as much as I hoped. I envisioned them creating, engineering this country, having dark-eyed babies as their husbands charged ahead. Is it discipline, only discipline? Perhaps religion again, if we had started them early—Carol’s religion, any religion. I wonder if I have failed them. This bothers me so.

I sit. Peter’s voice fades away. I am tired, thinking, other voices blurring, sleep coming quickly as it does at this age. As a young man I slept soundly, the perfect sleep of the dead. Now things are flimsy, shifts of sleeping and waking. And then these dreams, this current that flows through me. Can I not send it past, divert or bury it? I want to wake or sleep and not languish between them. Someone laughs nearby, but still my head falls back, into darkness.

The tang of dust
catches deep in my nose, mixed with dead smoke and a charred metal smell that sneaks under my skin and remains. I pull myself up from the floor. The tools of the knife maker’s trade lie about me: the charcoal, wood, and animal dung used as fuel for the fire; the bellows; the vats of water; the hammers; the anvil; the raw pieces of metal; the sharpening stones; the finishing stones. To one side, on a table crowded with pots and urns, lie blocks of wood, knives for whittling and carving, metal screws and fasteners—materials for fashioning hafts. On the opposite side lie the finished products: the small, sturdy blades that gleam and shine in the faint light. I stand, feeling the dim heat from yesterday’s coals that have never extinguished, still a dull red under layers of gray.

I have taken a job as a knife maker’s assistant, in a shop behind a khan not far from the bazaar. The knife maker, a thin, older man named Abdul with disproportionately sized arms, perhaps owing to his profession, does not say much. He looked at me with long, questioning eyes as I offered my services in halting Arabic and Turkish, asked a few questions about my experience, examined the scars adorning my arms—past contact with hot metal fragments—the pockmarks on my face from the same. He said nothing about a
tezkere
or any other permit. I offered little else.

The work is as physically demanding as I remember it, leaving me exhausted by the end of each day. We arise before dawn, eat a cold breakfast of bulgur, supplemented sometimes by grapes or dates or occasionally a bit of
pastırma
sausage, and begin our work. It is my job to regenerate the fire, to stoke it until the coals glow orange, to tend it throughout the day, to shovel the ash into a small barrel to take to the street. The fire generates a constant plume of black smoke that engulfs us in the small space, burning our eyes, catching in our mouths and noses. Our faces and arms are blackened, marked by patches of white around eyes, nose, and mouth; discharges from blinking and sneezing form tiny paths in the blackness, as if worms have emerged and left trails crawling away. I begin coughing the first day, a cough I remember from my youth, a more or less constant croaking fueled by irritation from the smoke. Abdul exhibits a deeper, less frequent cough, a harsh, wet expulsion that shakes his body and forces him to release hammer or rod in an attempt to rid himself of whatever his body is trying to expunge. I remember this sound, also, a sound my father made in the years before he died.

I participate in almost all facets of the work, banging the raw metal into shape with the hammer, honing and sharpening the blades, cutting and fashioning the hafts, fastening blade to haft, sanding and polishing the final product. The only part Abdul keeps to himself is the sales effort. His trade is mostly wholesale, fueled by a band of swarthy, irregular dealers who arrive from time to time and engage in furious discussion over price, quantity, and quality. We make all manner of knives, but primarily smaller, utilitarian blades used for hunting, skinning, and butchering. On one wall of the tiny shop hang swords, scimitars, and even a stiletto, all strung in a row. Occasionally a dealer will peer through the smoke at these or ask that one be taken down for examination, although I gather from the reaction that the price is high, too high for the certainty of resale.

The work brings back memories, most of them negative. My arms ache from the working of the hammer—I estimate I deliver a thousand blows a day, maybe more—and the pumping of the bellows. Flying metal fragments cut and burn, searing my flesh into a thousand tiny sores that sting as I move. My hands are raw, between the sanding of haft and blade and the operation of the foot-powered grinder, where a slip of concentration can result in serious injury. Working in such tight quarters, Abdul and I bump each other regularly, and it is only the second day when I accidentally touch his arm with an orange-hot strip of metal. He flinches but says nothing, not even a reprimand, moving to a corner of the shop to bathe the wound in a salve taken from a brown jar. I notice afterward that his arms are a mass of scars, like tattoos hidden under layers of smoke. He returns the favor several days later, turning when I do not expect it, stabbing me in the abdomen with the hot tip of a knife just out of the fire. I gasp, trying to mimic his stoicism but failing, clutching at myself, bent double by the pain. He walks calmly to the back of the shop, returning with a dollop of salve and reaching under my shirt to apply it to the angry spot on my belly. It cools the pain, allowing me to return to work, but it will be nearly a week before I feel completely free of the burning sensation, the painful catch every time I twist my body. This, too, I remember from my father’s shop, the lightning-like pain of a poke with an ember—sometimes an accident, other times not.