The Gendarme (5 page)

Mrs. Fleming pulls back, flustered, but not much.

I mutter, “He is staying with me, to . . . monitor.” My breath is short.

Mrs. Fleming appears undeterred. I put my hands on her elbows.

“Thank you for your visit,” I say. I make my voice strong.

She brushes at her hair, then presents a bright smile. “I’ll be praying for you.”

“Thank you.”

She hesitates still. I close the door. But something shifts in my body, something I have not felt for some time. Desire? I am so old for desire.

I force Ted to take me to the grocery, the Piggly Wiggly, where Wilfred goes. They know me here, the clerks and cashiers, know that I linger, that I never buy much.

Ted comes in also, which I do not like. I do not wish to be rushed. I take the free coffee, even though I do not drink it. We stay, but not as long as I wish. I watch the people, take note of the things they purchase: the boxes of corn flakes, the frozen food in a tray. They push double carts, mounded with pizzas, with dog food, with packaged goods. I stare at the coffee, the purples and grays on its top. The door opens and closes. Wilfred does not come.

 

 

 

In the dream
there are colors—so brilliant as to make daylight dull. Sound, too, even smell. I can feel things, feel the cold seep through blankets. Taste? There is halva,
sucuk
, food seared on a flame. I curl my tongue, lick my lips. I am alive here, anticipating.

The last strands of dusk light the sky, coating lean clouds shades of orange and gray. The air hangs smooth and heavy, stirred by the occasional breeze tossed from the plateau below. Gendarmes poke and prod, faces down, eyes intent, separating old women who wail and curse gibberish but do nothing more. One by one the men retrieve what they seek: young, struggling females. Several of the selected weep, one yells and cries, another stands stoic and quiet. Some are barely older than children. The other guards watch from their spots at the camp perimeter, jealous, wanting, coerced by duty to forgo nightly pleasure. One perimeter guard, Izzet, had partaken one night when he believed I was asleep—his back still bears the scars of this past miscalculation.

I find her upon the last guard’s selection. The short, heavily bearded gendarme named Mustafa emerges from a scrum of deportees pulling a girl by her hair. She is tall, taller than most, her dark hair cascading from beneath a man’s faded cap. She wears men’s trousers and a white blouse voluminous enough to hide any evidence of her breasts. Her head twists briefly as they near where I stand, long enough for me to recognize a jawline, a manner of movement, a hint of defiance even in captivity.

“Let me see this one,” I demand. Mustafa hesitates before pushing her forward. She raises her head slowly, almost regally, the hair blocking her face. I reach out a finger to part it, a groom removing a veil. I pause. The mismatched eyes glare back at me, their whites now red and wild as an animal’s, large and frightened, bright and translucent. Even in the fading light there is no mistaking them, the lightness of one eye against the other, the petal of a flower against its dark center. She looks past me, as if expecting someone else, fidgeting, breaking free of Mustafa’s grasp. The wailing in the background intensifies. The older women trailing catch up.

“I will take her,” I say.

Mustafa growls. He is thick and strong, able to lift large loads and tote water barrels with ease. I once saw him lift a recalcitrant camel. He is older than I, maybe mid-twenties, from Pertek, near my village, an acquaintance of my cousins. I have heard he served prison time in Diyarbekır.

“That will be all.”

He twists his fingers deep in his beard. The noise around us eases. Heads turn, onlookers retreat. For a while no one moves or says anything. Even the older women quiet. Then he turns and stomps away.

I look at the girl. “Come with me.” I motion away from the crowd.

She proceeds. The moon has risen, a quarter globe eaten by darkness. I keep her in front of me, directing her away from the camp with prods of my rifle, down a small ravine and onto a sandy streambed. We march up it some distance, past rocks that take the shape of silent workers—here a gravedigger, there a basket weaver—past a small hill, until no sound from the camp can be heard. The stream sparkles, broadening in spots to a full stride in width, narrowing in others to no more than a trickle. I wonder if she is thirsty. The deportees are permitted water only after the gendarmes, and then sometimes for a price. Often the wells have been polluted by previous encampments. Corpses have been discovered in several. Even the gendarmes sometimes go without.

“Do you want to drink?”

She turns. The cap has been lost now, her hair falling free down her face. She holds my gaze for some time, perhaps not understanding. Then she sinks to her knees and cups her hands, pushing hair behind her ears to sip.

I stare at her, at the lean, stretching figure, the buttocks lifted high in the air. The water splashes and patters, insects motor and hum, a bird calls from somewhere, but all function outside me as if I do not exist, as if I’ve become paralyzed, encased in a moment to be remembered forever. Some part of me thinks to join her in drinking, but I remain motionless. I wait. She rises, a single, supple movement, brushing hair from her face, wiping her mouth on her forearm. I place my gun on the ground. I will later recall excruciating desire, broad thirst, and certainty. I will remember the feel of the breeze, the position of the moon, the smell of the damp earth. I step toward her.

A painful erectness brings
me halfway awake. I twist, the dream slipping from me. Things outside—the great breathing air conditioner, a distant truck’s groan—interfere, interrupt. Recognition follows. A clock spins, five a.m. All is dark.

A snoring comes from the other room. Violet? I remember, the home health person. Ted. Violet is to be here at six. I struggle up from the bed.

I am shaken, pulled by the dream. Why must I dream this? I was a soldier, not a gendarme. I scan my memory, coaxing, summoning forth some recollection . . . but there is nothing. No girl. No dusty trek.

I shower. Violet arrives; I am pleased at her attentiveness. We say good-bye to sleepy-eyed Ted and make our way to the hospital. So soon, this procedure! Radiosurgery, beams of focused radiation more precise than a surgeon’s knife—I make no claim to understand it. I am a quiet patient. Dr. Wan said the procedure will last several hours, that a preparation is first required, a frame attached. I wonder again why we bother.

An electric door whooshes. I am maneuvered, catalogued. A man tilts his head and its raccoon’s-tail hairpiece, steering me down floors shined to slick, sparkling brightness. Others march past, sneaker-clad, holding clipboards. A redheaded man pushes an overflowing cart. All nod. I say hello. I recognize Faye Blanton, whose husband, Bill, is in the Rotary Club. I see Terry Crabtree, Carol’s friend. A smiling man reminds me of the gendarme Izzet. I scan patients in a holding area, focusing on ear shapes ranging from rounded to crimped, elongated to flattened, corrugated to bearded to tilted to protruding. Would I know Burak’s if I saw it? Wilfred’s? I finger my own ear, its thick knobs and hackles.

We wait. I flip through one of the magazines arranged for those waiting, an old news periodical. I have little interest. But it is there that I see it as I turn the last pages, a photo of dark-eyed women and children standing on a dirt roadway, their faces solemn and gray.

I flinch. Air exits my lungs. I recognize these people. In the dream I am driving them to Katma.

I push the magazine from me, then scratch at it, reexamine. I grasp and grab at my chair.

“Papa!”

I breathe, and things still. The article below the picture describes an anniversary, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armenian genocide. But it is the picture that holds me. My hands shake and flutter.

“What is it?” Violet cocks her head.

My hands tremble still. My heart is beating, beating. “It is nothing,” I say, but my mind is adrift. The dreams, this . . . I know about the Armenians, of course. There were a number in Mezre, the village in which I grew up. They were neighbors, traders, artisans, bakers. Some fought in the war. There was a resistance, of sorts, an alliance with Russia, our enemy. Many had left the country, or been forced to leave. They were different, but I had no quarrels with them. How then to explain this, this recognition? These dreams?

My name is called, the wheelchair spun. We enter a room with yellowish wallpaper. A nurse shaves my scalp, the sound odd and distant like a scratch against cardboard. The metal frame to be affixed to my skull is presented, measured, held aloft, taken away. A technician appears and delivers a shot. Then everything blurs: swarming figures in white, unidentifiable background music, words spoken but not understood, Violet’s pink lips. People stand as in the magazine’s picture, unsmiling, downcast. I feel the onset of coldness, the brush of fierce wind. Then darkness, like the drawing of a curtain at the end of a play.

 

 

 

The girl speaks to me.
We are back at the stream, the moonlight drawing outlines, of lips, hair, eyelashes, shoulders. I am aware, at some level, of confusion, of not expecting to be here, of the sense of a movie interrupted then resumed. I even know, somehow, that a procedure is under way, a mass in my skull is held in mid-eradication. But still I am here, at this stream in the hills with a girl I have pulled away, my desire as pressing as if it never left. Dryness thickens my mouth.

“I have been here before.”

The words slow my approach. Did I know she spoke my language? Some of the deportees do, though usually in a languid, marble-mouthed accent.

“I used to travel often with my father. He . . . is a spice merchant. We have visited Adana, Smyrna, even Baghdad.”

I have been to none of these places. My father was a knife maker.

“Have you seen the ziggurats? The best is on the road to Baghdad. The hill behind us reminds me of one, overgrown now and forgotten.” She turns to examine the small rise, barely visible in the background.

I examine her from behind, the dark, thick hair, the narrow hips tapering up to their zenith. The dark skin. How can she prattle on, knowing the fate that awaits her? She is stalling, she must be, for she would have seen too much on this trek not to recognize the reason for her culling. The memory of her red, wild eyes comes back to me, the disdain I feel for her race. They are all so superior, these Armenians, so prone to condescension, boastful of their education, miserly and clannish, worshipping their God in their little round churches. Better than us—I heard one now-dead deportee proclaim the empire’s demise without Armenian bankers, lawyers, merchants, and traders. Yet if the Armenians are so smart and the Turks so stupid, how have we arrived at the current situation? Power will dictate, just as in nature, just as in battle. Just as it will tonight.

“What did you say?”

She turns back to me. “A ziggurat. They were temples of a sort, used in the ancient sects, before Christ or Muhammad, before anything. They were meant to be houses of religion, where the gods could be close to mankind.”

I pause, digesting this information, poised between violence and something I cannot identify, curiosity perhaps, even tenderness.

“Shall we climb to the top of the hill?” she asks. Her mouth flattens, the beginnings of a smile. “Bring ourselves closer to God?”

She is off before I can answer, moving laterally, then climbing. I grab my gun and follow. She moves swiftly, at times too swiftly for me to keep pace, such that at one point I conclude she is attempting to elude me, and call out for her to stop. If she hears me she does not show it, but appears moments later, hands on hips, one leg in front of the other, waiting with the air of a governess slowed by a child. She gives such an appearance of innocence, of a girl playing hide-and-seek, that I reconsider my appraisal. I envision the shock she will experience when we reach the top, the change in her demeanor at the onset of adult pursuits. I find the thought invigorating, my efforts redoubling. I see myself from above, a predator fixed on its prey. Gasps follow my exertion, the taste of salt in my mouth, the tantalizing scent of conquest sifting up through my nostrils. I hear myself snorting, feel the tightening in my groin. I reach the hill’s crest, and slow.

I cannot find her. I start to shout, then stop, probing instead among the bushes and trees adorning the small plateau. All is silent, even the birds. A knob of larger trees stands in the middle, cathedral-like, branches lifted skyward; I make for this, leading with my rifle, suddenly aware of the possibility of entrapment, of a confederate secreted in murderous ambush. But then laughter echoes, a stirring of leaves, and she appears from behind a tree as if disgorged from its center. I stop. I point the gun at her. Her smile slowly withdraws.