The Gendarme Read online

  “Halt! ”

  The figure stops. I draw closer, the rifle erect in front of me, leaves crunching beneath my feet. I near the edge of the trees.

  It is a woman. One of them—the baggy, dark clothes, the braided hair, the large eyes. Out trying to escape, or perhaps murder a guard. I have heard of such things. My charges have been mostly docile, cowed into submission by deprivation and the judicious culling of their men. But I must take care.

  I stick the rifle barrel under her chin, lifting her face. I edge her backward, into a plume of glimmering light.

  Her face hangs words half formed in my throat. She has mismatched eyes, one dark, the other light, as if neither perfect gene could be denied by her mother. I attribute it at first to the starlight. I even turn her a full rotation to get a better, closer look. The thought strikes that she has been blinded in the light eye, but I know this is not true, as both eyes are alive, reflecting the heavens stretched and glowing above us. I stand silent, struck by this oddity, wondering how I have not seen it before, how she has survived this long march without others taking advantage. She is beautiful beyond the exoticism. She is maybe in her early teens, the small rise of breasts evident beneath the oversized garments.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, my voice almost shaky. I could have this girl, now, here on the ground, if I wished.

  The eyes stare back, unblinking, as if detached from the body. They resemble, in a way, the blank eyes of a corpse, vacant, almost unseeing. I wonder again if she has suffered some injury.

  I finger the rifle. My mouth lathers and dries.

  “I was collecting eucalyptus leaves,” the girl says quietly. She raises an arm to indicate a bag held in one hand. She does not seem afraid like the others, nor hateful, nor particularly submissive. When I touch my hand to her face, she neither flinches nor cries. Her skin is soft, cooled by the breath of the wind.

  I release my hand. We stand for some time, until I step aside to let her pass. I feel confused afterward, as to my actions, as to why I made no move to take her. I convince myself I am merely saving her for later, like a man who saves his sweets for after his meal.

  I turn before she vanishes under the trees. “What is your name?” I ask.

  She does not respond, or if she does, her name is lost in the leaves.

  3

  These things I know: I served in the Ottoman army, I was part of a unit, I fought the British at what they call Gallipoli. I was wounded, my face and head and clothes so battered I was mistaken for a British soldier. I was evacuated to a British hospital ship, then a military facility in London. I have admission slips, dates, facts. I have lost my memory, yes, but these things are documented. And then this dream comes, this fantasy, but I see no soldiers. This could be any place. Any time.

  A whistling intrudes, followed by a rub of footsteps and a volcanic “Good morning!” Harry Wan’s smooth face appears.

  “Hello, Mr. Conn.”

  “Yes. What is it?” I sound impatient. I see the verdict in Dr. Wan’s eyes before he opens his mouth.

  “It is a glioma, malignant. A small one, less than one centimeter. We are fortunate to catch it this early. As these tumors grow larger, they infiltrate surrounding tissue like a spider, and as such become hard to remove without damaging the brain.”

  He continues on, but I am looking at Violet, thinking of when she was young, her hair blond like a duckling’s. Her sister, Lissette, was blond, too. Carol’s hair was golden-white, like a swan’s feathers, before it became thin and dull gray. Even her eyebrows were light-colored. Carol, who brought me to America when I spoke almost no English, who endured years of treatment before her own silent death. I remember her shuffling, her walker with the tennis balls cupped at the ends, her mind opaque and floating. The way her head cocked as if some silent voice spoke to her. And now me. Is surgery not wasted on a man of my age? I stare up at the ceiling, wondering if a question has been asked and not answered. “Okay,” I say, when a silence emerges. My voice is faint. I see myself lingering, extending. Clinging. If I were stronger I would turn and demand that they leave me, that nature be left to take its certain course. Even buildings and machines wear down and break. But instead I clear my throat and push my lips to a smile. They look on, expecting me to say something more but I am silent. I find nothing to say.

  “We’d like to do the surgery on Wednesday,” Dr. Wan says. “You’ll be fitted into a frame, similar in some respects to the halo used for the biopsy.”

  I had dozed through much of the biopsy, awake only to bits of the procedure: the cold, sterile room, the prick of the anesthetic’s injection, the brush and crackle of face masks and gowns. I squint now at Harry Wan, noting for the first time the large mole on his face. He is speaking, but the sound seems to come from the mole. “You will experience . . . fatigue,” the mole says. “The medication will . . . help you.”

  I shift position, my arms on my chest. Harry Wan smiles and departs. I have feared hospitals, as far back as the war. For a time I had dreams of lying like a caterpillar in a big white bed, restrained and unable to move. I would wake screaming, my arms waving and circling. Carol would then calm me, hold me, watch as I stood to prove I could walk. Such dreams stopped, long ago. I usually sleep well. But now these dreams come.

  I look around. The wall, the ceiling, the curtain are white. A crack runs in the ceiling, disappearing over my head.

  “Papa. Does your head still hurt?”

  It does not. The pain from before has departed. But I need to tell her. “These . . . these dreams,” I whisper. “They come. They are like . . .” I go no further. It is silly now.

  “Dreams?” Violet looms above me. “I’ll ask Dr. Wan about it. Maybe it’s the medication.”

  I nod. So silly. So foreign.

  She drives me home. The day is bright, plastic. We pass a child walking, a man bent on a bicycle. I rode a bicycle to work for years, not a fancy one like this man’s, but an upright, with fenders and a basket up front for my tools. Gone now, like so much else, though I still feel the pull of the chain, and the rhythm. I remember teaching the girls to ride, the glee on Violet’s small face at the moment she balanced, her tricks after that—no hands, standing on the seat, steering backward. The bell on her bike that gave a strange, strident ring. A crow lifts in flight and I think on how odd it is, she and I, this history swerving between us. Can conversation be had without the past so intruding? We do not try now. We do not speak. I stare out at oak trees and moss hanging like beards. I have lived here forty years but it is not so familiar. A man mows circles with a riding mower, an old woman lifts her paper from her driveway and stares. The car’s brakes squeak. The azaleas in my yard need pruning, and trimming.

  The house is empty since Carol died. The hospital bed, the linens, the diapers, the medicines—all gone. I cared for her myself until almost the end. It became my routine, my obligation. I grew to accept and abhor it. I envision now a new bed, new medicines, a silver wheelchair. Accidents of the bowel and bladder. Days spent being cleaned, transported to doctors, plied with medication, fed vegetable mush. I cannot bear the thought of these things, or of having them done now for me.

  “Let me make you some lunch,” Violet says.

  “No, I’m all right.”

  We stare at each other. Violet has Carol’s light hair, my dark eyes and skin. She is overweight though still beautiful. She is no longer young. Why are things between us so hard? I place the blame on my working, my absence. She was absent later, with her mother not well. She has been irresponsible. She has a son, Wilfred, who is fifteen and smart but has difficulties. She is protective, keeping Wilfred from me, though I want only to help. This frustrates me so! I remember Wilfred, too, as a baby, a little brown thing so unlike the girls. But like me. I had wished to start over, to be things with Wilfred I had not been before. I still wish this, still try. I had so wanted a son.

  “Some tea?”

  “No.” Her sister, Lissette, is older. She lives in Mon
treal. She visits once a year, sometimes less often. She calls on the holidays, my birthday. The calls are not long.

  “At least let me get you some movies, okay?”

  I relent. I have a weakness for movies. After coming to America, frantic in my desire to learn English, Carol and I went to movies. Lots of movies. Sometimes the same four or five times. The first talking pictures, the high-pitched, fast-paced voices Carol claimed she, too, had a hard time understanding. I have loved movies since, perhaps because I think of us there, in those times. I read a lot, too, and in time I enjoyed that as well. Shakespeare, poetry, mysteries. I began to crave books. I found myself thinking in English, forgetting Turkish words. That is the odd thing about the dreams these past days. I have not heard Turkish spoken since before I left New York. I have not spoken it myself since childhood.

  Violet returns, with The Searchers and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I consent to her fixing lunch. I watch the movies—I have seen each dozens of times—trying to lose myself again in these voices and people that are so forceful, so American. Today, though, the dream pulls me. I am distracted. I plow though the chaff of my youth, the bits and pieces that survived war and injury, remembering some things: my father, the veins in his hands, the way he balanced enormous loads on his shoulders. My mother had died much before—her I remember less well. I remember my brother best. Burak was two years older. He went to military school, he wore a little uniform, he wanted always to become a soldier. I trailed behind him like a stray dog, imitating the way he walked, the way he held his head. He was popular with boys and girls, the older people as well. He loved sucuk, a type of sausage, and döner. He died in the war. This I remember, my father’s face at the news of his death. As if the world itself had darkened, as if life had left him, too. He did not live much longer, my father. These things are clear in my mind.

  Other things are lost. It is strange, these absences. So much time has gone past. The history I created for myself—a childhood, a hometown—sometimes mixes with the shards of my memory and connects things, confuses them. I have a paper somewhere with things written in the hospital in London, things that came back as I struggled to remember. There is not much there. A few events, a few places, people. Very little of the war. Memories flared sometimes afterward, arriving in bursts of color, but on the whole not much more drifted back than came before I left London: the races we held as boys, the dripping wax of a candle, a group of men bent and kneeling to pray. I remember dreaming as a child of coming to America. Once I arrived, the life I lived before seemed lived by another, someone muted and dreamlike. Someone I remember no longer.

  The movies end. There are things to be dealt with—arrangements for my cat, Sultan, letting the relatives know. Violet has taken on most of this effort. Still, it is strange to hear myself say, “I have been diagnosed with a brain tumor,” or “They operate on Wednesday.” Reactions range from shock (“Oh, my God!”) to stoicism (“You’ll get through it. My aunt Edith was left for dead six times and still went to Talladega last year”) to various religious exhortations (“Pray without ceasing,” “God’s will be done,” or, with repetition, “Repent while there’s still time!”). The religious appeals are from Carol’s relatives, the flock that surround us in southwestern Georgia, the reason we came here in the first place. Carol grew up in Albany, sixty miles north of Wadesboro. Her people are a religious lot, deniers one and all of the fact that I am not a Christian, or a churchgoer, or anything in between. I left Islam when I came to America, but declined to follow Carol into her church. My daughters were raised as Christians, and I have attended church musicals and weddings and many similar things. I accept all prayers for my soul. But I am too old to start over. Death will be death.

  I think of this later in the day as I attend, of all things, a funeral. Carol’s nephew Stephen died before I entered the hospital. Stephen was a strange man, loud and boisterous and prosperous. He died on a round-the-world trip. I generally avoid funerals, but Violet asks me to go and I want to be amenable, to prolong our time together. Will Wilfred be there? She says he has “therapy” and will say little more. This shielding is typical. She acts as if others might take him, even me! I resent this. It only strengthens my desire to be with him. I tell myself that she must live her life, that he is her son, not mine, that I should not interfere. But I am drawn to him, this boy. I have much yet to offer him.

  Stephen’s wife, Mary Beth, meets us in the funeral home foyer. She is a large woman, Mary Beth. White bosoms like watermelons rest in a black dress too small.

  “Oh, Uncle Emmett! I’m so sorry to hear about your brain!” She makes it sound as if the thing has run off.

  I murmur condolences regarding Stephen. Others stand in the foyer, regarding me slyly through gaps in their eyes. It is always this way—I am the foreigner, the outsider. My children have adapted but I never will. I accept this. I am accustomed to head turns, exclusion. I take in the flowers and ushers and programs, the people. I greet and smile, I am friendly. But my estrangement is magnified. I am a ghost here, a shadow. I am not one of them. I wonder, as I stand nodding—will my funeral be next?

  I have not thought much about death, even at Carol’s passing, even as at my age it cannot be far. Parts of my body do not work as they did, but my mind is still present. I am not frail. I awake and I think of the day, not the blackness to follow. I do not dwell on sad thoughts. The thing that scares me so is to end up like Carol, alive but not knowing it, saddled not with pain but with nothingness, feeling nothing. I would rather be dead, but is death so much different? I picture the departed as floating and released. Carol was trapped in a shell. To be released seems quite pleasant if I think of things in this way, but what I think doesn’t matter. All things must come. Death has always been waiting.

  We enter the parlor. The pews have mostly filled. One by one, each row of mourners makes a pilgrimage up front to glance at the casket. I find this custom so strange, even for the South. The viewing, the tears. The rustle of clothing, the gentle coughs. There is a funeral home nearby with a drive-through for viewing—a horn’s honk pulls the curtain back. I have driven through once. What is the nursery song I learned with my English? “Life is but a . . .” I force a smile from my lips.

  I remember Carol’s funeral. So similar—many of those present today were there then. I sat with Violet and Lissette but could not look at my daughters. Their mother who cared for them all the length of their lives, yet at the end they were not there for her. Violet lived in the same town! They offered little assistance. There were a few phone calls, a handful of forced visits. By then Carol did not know them, or anyone—this was long before she passed on. It was difficult to be with her. Still, they owed her respect and failed to give it. I swallow as I think this. I squint back more unformed tears.

  We stand and approach Stephen’s casket. The odor of flowers is strong. Stephen’s stomach protrudes like a baked cake, visible on a greater level than his face, large and, apparently, bare. At first I think gravity has realigned his shirt, but when I peer inside I discover that he is in fact shirtless, his chest and stomach an odd brownish pink, thin strands of hair erect about his nipples. A pair of shorts peeks below his great belly, tucked into the folds of a sheet. His face is waxen, freshly shaved, his hair combed delicately to one side. He looks better than he did in life.

  “He’d always wanted to be buried this way,” Violet whispers as we return to our seats. “In his shorts.”

  I shake my head. I think again about Violet, and Wilfred. Wilfred was born when Violet was forty-five, via a father never identified or acknowledged. He is her second child. Her first was given up for adoption when she was sixteen. Carol and I blamed each other the first time—a child at sixteen, without marriage? Our shameful Violet. The first father a Slavic boy whose parents only shrugged and said in English, “Goddammit.” Later I blamed America, its thin roots and permissiveness. One of my few memories from before the war is of American missionaries telling us of skyscrapers, of subway
s. It sounded so full of possibility then, so modern. And was it not so? Despite the hardships I faced, the difficulties in having skin slightly darker, the need to fall back, to work more. My children have known abundance, though I question how well it has served them. I place Wilfred’s troubles here, too, although he also endures the discrimination I suffered. It is the cement that binds us. Wilfred is picked on, ostracized. His unknown father was black.

  A woman begins to sing but my mind remains on Wilfred. He and I once met like spies, at the grocer’s. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Violet does not know this. We would talk, he would tell me things. I told him how Turkish sons are so prized because they remain part of their parents’ family even as the girls move away. He has not shown up at the store for some time, though. I still go there. I still wait.

  I look back at the coffin and think again about death. I have outlived so many. Why am I afraid?

  A burst of cold comes from a gusting air conditioner. I smell perfume and sweat. I think about the dreams. Hatırlamak—that is the Turkish word. Remember. But I do not remember, not much.

  The room has stilled now, suits and dresses smoothed, throats cleared, necks bowed. I shut my eyes again, the thump of blood in my jaw. Someone is speaking, but I think only of memory, of what is lost, what never occurred. I open my eyes to Violet, to the imprint of my ancestry, my genes, in her face. I touch her hand, the warmth in it, the slight dampness. And I smile.

  That night I sleep soundly, at least for a time. I wake at 2:15 and am pleased, as I have not dreamed. But sleep fails to return. I turn and reposition myself, bunch my pillow, attempt to deaden my thoughts. I count my breaths, slowly, deliberately, until I reach a narrow cliff and fall from it, knowing I am dreaming but unable to stop it. Light shimmers, boards creak. A clock clicks, ticks, and falls quiet.

  In the dream morning breaks—a harsh, red morning, raw like a blistering skin. The wind has withered and withdrawn, allowing odors to germinate and swirl. It smells of animals and decay, of death. I walk my horse among shabby tents and patched-together shoes, eyeing the displaced as they struggle to wake. They seem less loathsome as they rouse from sleep, less contemptible. Earlier in the journey some would have scowled, or begged, but their faces now wear only hungry stares, neither hateful nor hopeful, more resigned than resentful. Here and there a corpse lies in stiff coldness, its face clenched in final grimace, its eyes focused away. I stare at one, an old woman with her brown mouth open as if she wants to sing or speak. The deaths are unavoidable, a function of moving thousands of people over hundreds of miles in difficult and primitive conditions. There is little that can be done about them, even if I wish to. They will be left where they lie, for predators, human and otherwise, to plunder.