The Gendarme (9 page)

Perhaps she has left with the others, although I am relatively certain she has no valuables. She spoke little at the boardinghouse, nodding or shaking her head at questions, eating almost nothing. She went with me to the pit each day, to the stares and knowing looks of my fellow gendarmes (including, one day, a black-faced Mustafa), to the sneers of her fellow deportees.
Boz
, some called out. Whore.
Dönme
. Turncoat. She did not shrink from them, or hang her head, but instead seemed to look through them, as if they no longer existed, as if she, or they, were now dead. After one such visit she spoke to me, one of the few direct exchanges during our days there together.

“Do something,” she said.

But I was at a loss as to what to do. I had to wait for orders, which were not quick in coming in the disorganized mess of Katma’s command. The
vali
in charge of the region had been away, and the second-in-command was reluctant to make decisions. There was pressure from the Syrians, who wanted no more refugees, and from a handful of British and American missionaries, who wanted alleviation of the deportees’ deplorable conditions. One day I saw a bearded, robed man emerge from the command center, the bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church. German military officials came and went. Still, nothing happened. The temperature rose. Conditions worsened. Food became an issue, the deportees reduced to fighting over scraps, standing in endless lines, picking the seeds from fecal matter. The swarms of flies intensified, if such a thing was possible, heaving about in such densities they resembled shimmering gray and white clouds. Then rain arrived, merciful at first but destructive in time, soaking the shelterless deportees, turning the ground into vile, soupy mud. The heat roared back afterward, moistening and thickening things, a condition more wretched than even before. I loitered near the command center, watching and observing. I annoyed the bey’s staff with my questions, my frequent appearances. We sweated, swatting flies. We drank foul-tasting water. We waited.

The cramped confines of the rooming house forced a certain closeness. Araxie and I slept within a few hand lengths of each other, she close to the curtain, her back turned to me. I heard her breathing at night, soft and measured, heard the trickle of her urine in the chamber pot we silently shared. Once in the night I sensed her shaking, her body twitching in soundless sobs. I spoke to her often, even if she would not respond, telling her about myself, about the village in which I’d grown up, my father’s trade as a knife maker, my pride for my cousins taking part in the war. I respected her grief and her privacy, averting my gaze, demanding nothing, avoiding physical contact. I offered her food before I ate. I bathed every day, looked at myself in the tiny cracked mirror, made several attempts at combing my hair. I disrobed in front of her only once, proud of my nakedness, ashamed when she looked away.

My money dissipated, drained by the larcenous landlady and the thieving villagers at the bazaar. Only the day before, I had decided we must move out, take shelter in the tent and blankets I had expropriated from a deceased deportee, wait out the orders on the fringe of the dirty town. I spent the last of my
gurûş
on an overpriced haircut. I swung by the command center as I always did, expecting no movement and backpedaling when it came. We were to depart for Aleppo the next day. I did not report this to Araxie, preferring to show her by action how I had made something happen. Perhaps she had sensed it anyway, as this morning when we are to leave, she is gone.

I squint into the morning mist, listening to the creak of wagons and oxen, the snap of the herders’ switches, the clang of merchants setting up for the day. The wind shifts, bringing with it a foul plume, the distant stench of the pit. The wail of the muezzin rises, dipping and wavering, bending those standing like wheat blown by a wind. I bow, immersing myself in the rhythm of the prayers, the words repeated to a point past familiarity:
“. . . In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful: Praise be to Allah, Creator of the worlds . . .”
I scratch my head, fingering the shortness of my newly shorn locks.

I stand when the prayers end, stretch, urinate against the side of the building. It is then that I see her. She sits astride the building’s roof, one leg hooked over its edge. Her hair glistens with water, as if she has just bathed, and she glances not at me but across the town, across the dust and cook fires and scabs of habitation. Her stillness makes her part of the building, an ornament affixed to its top. I am unsure how she has climbed there, or even how one accesses the building’s second story. I see no steps, no doors or ladder.

“We are leaving,” she says, part question and statement, her gaze still directed out above the far rooftops.

“Yes.”

I wait for her to say more, but she does not.

“What are you doing?” I ask finally. Given that she has spoken perhaps four words in four days, I hardly expect a response.

She glances in my direction. “I had thought to kill myself,” she says calmly. She smiles, a sort of sad half-grimace I have not seen since the night at the hilltop. “But I cannot.” She twists a strand of hair in her fingers. “The will to live is strong. No matter the pain.”

She looks older, thinner, a woman, not a girl. I imagine her scolding a young child, instructing a group of pupils, sweeping the floor of a stone house. So different from my own mother and her crouching presence, but in a way so similar—strong and measured, unafraid. I want to hold her, help her, climb up the side of the building and carry her, smother her, feed her, warm her, comfort her. I want to put my head against her chest and listen to the sound of her breathing. But I watch her instead, watch as she unwinds herself from her perch and slides along the edge of the building, as she drops down its opposite side, her legs dangling and twisting, her arms wide, then thin—a
kelebek
on a branch. A butterfly.

I offer my hand in assistance, but she leaps the last few feet. Her hair
is
wet, her face newly scrubbed, the smell of soap stretched around her. She glances at me, without malice or affection or sorrow or anything, the light eye on me now, then the dark.

I gesture toward the
oda
.

She leads the way.

 

 

 

Brainsetta drives
us to Jacksonville. This is not her true name, of course, but the name by which others refer to her, though not to her face. Her given name is Josephine; she is married to Violet’s first cousin, Peter “Brains” Melville. A large, simple-faced woman, she has hair that looks like a wig but is not and breasts that angle forward like the prow of a battleship. She drives a huge Buick with a trunk big enough, she says, to “sleep six.” Violet has to work, Ted is not insured for driving, and I am not capable of such, so Josephine (having nothing else to do) has been drafted. She picks Ted and me up at eight.

Josephine talks the way others breathe—without ceasing. She begins with a history of her dog Mule’s health issues, followed by her sister Lula’s fight with her boss. By the time we reach Monticello she is deep into a description of the unfounded sexual allegations against her uncle Silas, in which a pet pig plays an unclarified part. Ted asks pertinent questions and feigns great interest while I remain silent, thinking I may have to strangle Josephine or myself if this keeps up all the way to Jacksonville. But it continues. The horse that got loose and kicked in her back door. The illness she contracted by eating bad tacos. I stare out the window and pretend to fall asleep. Josephine moves on to baseball, cursing the Braves and the designated hitter, maintaining that the player Dale Murphy has “developed a fat ass.”

Her husband, Brains, is himself a strange fellow, having earned his own nickname in legitimate fashion, falling off the roof at the apartments he maintained, ingesting women’s birth control pills as a poor man’s prophylactic device. I was once told that, due to his southern drawl, the people at his job thought for some time his name was Tater, and still referred to him so. His reputation is as a nice guy, the kind who would give you the shirt off his back. A stupid nice guy. Stupid enough to marry Josephine. Brainsetta.

“Uncle Emmett, how’s your headache?”

She motors on before I can answer. More monologue: an incident with a woman at the beauty parlor, a tame squirrel named Mud. But I am thinking of Carol, of how she came from this place, these people. Of how we came to connect. She had trained as a nurse. When the war started she was determined to be involved, even before the United States entered. This led her to London—the British needed nurses—and so to Fulham Military Hospital, second floor, head-injury ward. To the patient deprived of a past.

My earliest memory of Carol is of her hair. She was blond, like the sun, a white angel. She spoke an angel’s strange tongue. She was kind to me when others were not. I was there for so long we grew to know each other well, even though we spoke different languages and I remembered so little. Again, perhaps simple pity waylaid her, perhaps my exoticness, my smooth, darker skin. I thought of it then as my destiny, as payment for pain and for service. Only later would I learn of my penance, as her limbs became thin and palsied, her voice stringy with need. She was forced to quit working before we left New York for Georgia. The sudden tremors, the rigidity, the long heartache that is Parkinson’s. Her medicines made things almost worse. I do not complain of this now—I have lived the life given. And yet I find it so strange. Seventy years together and she is a ghost to me now.

Josephine has gone silent. We near Jacksonville, the car slowing in traffic. She shifts position, adjusting her seat belt. Her breasts reach almost to the steering wheel.

“Now where are we going?”

“To the Shady Rest Nursing Home.” It is Ted speaking. “I’ve got the address.” Ted has been most helpful in locating Recep. In the end he called every nursing home in Jacksonville until he found him.

“Oh. Is this a relative?”

“No.” I clear my throat. “He is someone I knew long ago.”

“Where? Back in Eye-stan-bul?”

I shake my head. I was never in Istanbul—Kostantiniyye. At least not that I remember.

“From my childhood.” I fold my arms. I do not wish to go further.

She presses on. “I thought you couldn’t remember anything from your childhood.”

“I remember some things.”

I remember snow, and muddy streets. I remember fire in a little hearth. I remember Burak, and a neighbor boy, Emre. But there is more, somewhere. Somewhere just past my reach.

The dream plays back through me. The girl. I think of Burak. I want my dream to be his, to absolve myself. It must be! And yet I think I know it is not. I rub my face, focus again on my purpose here, on what to say to this person, Recep. I try to remember his appearance: a slender man, a small mustache. He has to be in his nineties as well. He is in a nursing facility. Perhaps his mind has gone, too.

I exit the car and ask the others to wait. The building before me is low-slung and gray. Inside, a broad counter stands before a long vestibule, the first of many such gateposts. The floors are shiny-polished, stark, a feel of something once modern. Several residents in wheelchairs perch at odd angles, heads lolling, mouths open. An elderly-looking visitor dips and tugs with metal needles. The receptionist at the desk, a young man with long fingernails, looks up as I approach.

“I am here to see Recep Gencay. I called yesterday.”

The attendant grunts as if this is something new. I have no idea why Recep lives in Jacksonville, or what family he has. The man flicks his nails, shifts in a worn chair, reaches to punch an intercom button.

“Bring Recep up front, please.”

He motions across the lobby with a slender-fingered wave. “He’ll meet you in the visiting room. Over there.”

I cross to the room indicated, circling a disheveled man who mutters “Johnny, Johnny” from behind a thick lip. The room is small and stale, with a hard-looking sofa and dirty chairs fronting an ancient TV. A shelf holds collapsed puzzles, a faded board game in a creased cardboard box. Shaded windows emit little light. I am reminded of why I hate these places, why I insisted Carol never be put in one. The floor near the window is stained with bloodlike orange spots. The place smells of urine and sweat, and disuse.

An enormously tall nurse wheels in a gray figure. I stare at the man in the wheelchair, his face slackened with time, his hair matted like cobwebs. His skin bunches and pulls, tight on his cheeks but full at his neckline, like a doll twisted out of its shape. I recognize him from his visit—was it only twelve, fifteen years earlier? But nothing from times before.

“I’m not sure he’s gonna know you,” the giantess nurse says. “He hasn’t said nothing this morning.” She shakes her head at Recep, as if scolding a child. “I told him you were coming.”

Another man enters behind her, a younger man, dark-complected. He kisses Recep on the cheek, introduces himself as Recep’s nephew. I do not catch his name. Perhaps he is a great-nephew, for he looks very young. He shakes my hand. He speaks in Turkish, but I respond only in English. I tell him the language has changed so much that I am more comfortable in English. He smiles and is pleasant. He states that he has been in the United States only a few years. His English is accented. I feel less of an immigrant than he—this is pleasing.

The nurse shifts behind Recep. “I’ll be out here at the nurses’ station if you need me.”

“Thank you.”

Recep stares vacantly, in the direction of the blank TV. There is silence, an awkwardness. I wish now that this nephew were not present. I smile, I tell him there are things I do not remember. He says we can be so forgetful.

I knead my hands. “I keep dreaming that I was part of a trek,” I explain to Recep’s nephew. “In 1915—the Armenians. Do you know of this?”