East of the West (20 page)

“He’s a fat bastard,” Elli says, and giggles. “Like in the movie.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Fat
bastard
describes him spot on. For eighteen long years this fat bastard of a sultan prays to Allah to give him good health so he can live long enough to hold the most beautiful of all women in his arms. On one misty spring morning after almost two decades of suffering, the sultan disbands his harem and sends his servants to call for the great vizier.

“ ‘It is obvious that I have lost my mind over this woman,’ the sultan tells him. ‘I have waited long enough for her to grow up, and now I should finally hold her in my arms. Tell the best silk weaver to make the finest black
feredje
. Then send our most merciless janissary along with one hundred soldiers to take her from her house. Tell them to veil her with the
feredje
and never to look at her face, because whoever lays eyes upon my bird I will punish with blindness.’

“The vizier signs a
firman
and puts the sultan’s red seal on it, then gives it to the best rider with the swiftest Arabian steed and tells him: ‘Run all day and all night until you reach the village of Klisura, where Ali Ibrahim is converting slaves by the sword to our true faith. Find him and give him this
firman
. Tell him to obey every word in it lest he lose his head. Be back in one moon and the sultan will give you your weight in gold. Come a day later and your head will roll in the dirt.’

“The rider finds Ali Ibrahim waving his yataghan through the air near the chopping log in the yard filled with peasants and soldiers. He gives Ali the
firman
and waits for him to read it.

“ ‘Never have I been more humiliated,’ Ali Ibrahim says, and throws the letter at the feet of the notice bringer. ‘I should at least take the pleasure of killing you for bringing me such news. Go back to His Greatness and tell him that Ali Ibrahim will bring him the most beautiful of all women. But along with her, you tell him, Ali Ibrahim will turn her whole village to the true faith; for Ali has sworn to reveal the face of Allah to the slaves, not to chase harlots for the sultan.’

“After these words he jumps back on his black stallion and casts a last glance at the yard washed in red and the crowd of trembling faces. He orders half of his men to carry on with the conversion, while the remaining hundred soldiers he leads out of the valley, heading for the village of my great-grandmother, the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Elli’s breathing has become soft and even, but she isn’t sleeping yet. She’s just dozing off and coming to again. I lie quiet for some time until suddenly she perks up, surprised at herself for dozing. “Ali Ibrahim,” she chatters. “Who is he,
taté?
Who is Ali Ibrahim?”

I pet her cheek and hair and tell her to lie down and close her eyes.

“Ali Ibrahim is a janissary,” I say. “It is Bulgarian blood that runs in his veins. According to the orders of the sultan, every five years the slaves have to pay their blood tribute—the
devshirmeh
. No one can escape the recruitment; the most capable boys are taken away to become part of the imperial army, and those parents who try to hide their sons are punished with death.

“Ali was parted from his mother when he was twelve, when he still had his Bulgarian name and still believed in the power of the Holy Cross. At dawn one morning, the recruiting soldiers came like crows of darkness, and by the time the sun died behind the Balkan Mountains they had selected forty of the healthiest and strongest boys in the village to take away. Ali Ibrahim was not among them. But it was his mother who chased the soldiers and fell at their feet and begged them to take him. She was a widow and meant well for her boy: as a peasant, she knew, he had no future, he was destined to die a slave. But as a soldier, as a janissary, the whole world could be his. ‘Take him, Aga,’ she cried, and pushed the boy forward, and the boy did not know why his mother did this, could not understand.

“For weeks, then, the convoy of boys, guarded by fifty soldiers, walked the path to Istanbul—south through the Rhodope Mountains and east through Edirne, then farther east. In Istanbul the boys were bathed, their hair was shorn and torched. The names of their fathers were erased and they were given good Muslim names. No past lay behind them: they were faceless in the hands of the sultan. Humble servants in the name of the true God.

“Ali Ibrahim was sent to a small village in Anatolia where he served in the house of a linen merchant. An old man, who’d once fought the Siamese to the east. There Ali Ibrahim was taught the foreign tongue and the new faith. There he was taught to hate all he once loved.

“Ali Ibrahim’s mind is haunted, Elli. The invisible pull of his wicked heart is so strong that none of those he has slain has ever managed to escape it. Fettered to his body, the dead follow wherever he goes. A never-ending chain of wretched souls trails behind him, and no one else can hear their cries. Behind his back, his soldiers call him ‘Deli Ali,’ which in Turkish means Crazy Ali, but no one dares say that up front, for they also know him to be Merciless Ali, who never hesitates to take a head. Some say that during a conversion in his native village, among the non-believers who refused to recognize the greatness of Allah, Ali killed his own sister and his own mother.”

Then I’m quiet for a long time. Elli is asleep on my chest and I have to get up, to turn the light off. But I don’t want to get up. I lie and I think of my own mother, of how I haven’t seen her in seven years; of my sister, who had a baby last spring. I listen to Elli’s even breathing and wish for things that can’t be.

IV.

Next morning I ask John Martin if he’d let us borrow his truck to go to the zoo.

“Over my cold, stiff body,” he says, rocking in the recliner, and behind him Elli mouths off his words exactly as he says them.

“But I’ll take you fishing,” he says, “if you pay for gas.”

I look at Elli and she shrugs a
Why not?
So I tell John to put it on my tab and hurry off to get us ready before he’s had the time for some clever reply. Half an hour later we’re loading his boat behind the truck. Another half hour after that, I’m dipping my toes in the lake.

“Get your toes out,” John Martin scolds me, “you’re slowing us down.”

In the back of the boat he holds the handle-looking thing on the motor and steers us forward. I know nothing of fishing or boats. What I do know is that this boat looks about as sturdy as the ones the Russians must have used when crossing the Danube to attack the Turks in 1878. But this boat is John’s jewel, dearer to him than his truck, even. He has named it
Sarah
, and that there says it all.

My own daughter sits at the nose, or the stern, or however you call it, and points at distant spots across the lake where she thinks fish will be hiding. But John Martin never listens. He always takes us to the same place on the far end of the horseshoe, by an abandoned, half-collapsed wooden dock where the water, only three feet shallow, is filthy with osier, lilies and grass, where there is a permanent fog of mosquitoes and large, black turtles snap on the oars, where dipping your toes is completely out of the question.

“Jesus Christ, John,” I tell him when I realize that’s where we’re heading again. I smear mosquito repellent on Elli’s neck, legs, arms. “Take us someplace else, will you? There, by that concrete tower, or by that island. Anywhere else but the dock.”

“The dock,” John Martin says, and once more Elli mouths off his words as he speaks them, “is where the fish are situated. The dock is where I’ve been going for fifteen years and where I’ll be going for another fifteen if the good Lord wills it. That’s where Sarah took that ten-pounder, and if it was good enough for Sarah, by golly …”

But I’m not listening anymore. The sun is climbing steadily toward mid-sky, and there is no shade for us to hide in, no good trees along the banks. Here and there across the lake I can see other boats, all larger than ours, with faster motors. I can see expensive rods bending, and waves splashing, and men pulling out fish as large as calves, or at least baby lambs.

The first few times I took Elli to fish with John Martin—the first few times when we gutted the bass and cleaned them, when Elli peed behind a bush, once upon a time—those first few times were fun and I enjoyed them. I could lie in the boat and look at my daughter and feel empty inside, free of regret, of envy. It didn’t matter that I saw her only on the weekends. It didn’t matter that my wife lived with another man now, and even that man himself didn’t matter. So what if I didn’t own a car? So what if I lived at John Martin’s, drank his beer and ate his macaroni? At least I had Elli.

But now our weekends have become repetitions of those first weekends of fun. Only, we’ve murdered the fun. Sure, Elli seems to enjoy them, but I no longer lie in the boat free of hatred. Oh, how I hate now. Nothing seems enough.

“Don’t you just hate them, John Martin?” I ask him. “Don’t you just envy the shit out of these people in their fancy boats?”

“No, sir, I sure don’t,” he tells me, and keeps steering.

“Well, I hate them,” I say. “I feel this thing called
yad
when I watch them. So much
yad
, my chest gets constricted. Elli?” I say and gently nudge her on the back with my toe. “Do you feel
yad
when you watch them?”

“Not really,” she says.

“You should, honey. You ought to.
Yad
, John Martin,” I explain, “is what lines the insides of every Bulgarian soul. It’s
yad
that propels us, like a motor, onward.
Yad
is like envy, but it’s not simply that. It’s like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for a chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered. All those feelings in one beautiful word.
Yad
. Can you say it?”

But he doesn’t say it. “Let me give you,” he says instead, “one word of my own. Elli, Princess, cover your ears.”

Then Elli turns around and looks at him. “Bullshit,” she says. “Is that the word, John Martin?”

•

We take six bass. Or rather, Elli catches two and the rest are John Martin’s. I drink my Champagne of Beers at the back, while John teaches my daughter flippin’ and pitchin’ and other neat angler tricks. It’s a bit creepy how he pets her head, how he calls her “Princess” over and over, but the lesson is worth it and I decide not to intervene.

Finally, Elli says she can’t hold it much longer. And would I please quit asking her to go over the side: girls don’t go over sides like that. John Martin orders me to retrieve the cinder block we use for an anchor and I pull on the rope, but the anchor is stuck in the mud below us. With a sigh John takes the rope and pulls, as if he can do better, and his face turns tomato. “God damn it,” he says.

“That’s right,” I say. “Every time.”

We pull on the rope for a while, left, right, in circles. Elli has clenched her legs crossed and, eyes shut, she’s biting her lip. John Martin curses and I curse a little as expected.

“Come on, now,” he says, and twines the rope around his hand. “Come on.”

We pull for fifteen minutes, give or take.

“I can’t hold it much longer!” Elli cries. So John Martin jumps out on one side of the boat and I jump on the other. The water is up to my chest, waist for him, and it gets up to our chins when we kneel and grope in the warm mud for the anchor. We puff, we work the mud, we kick on the block until it finally loosens. With a yelp John Martin lifts the block up and lays it enormous in the boat, a chunk of lake, and weeds, and slimy brown leaves.

Then, after seven pulls of the cord, the motor is roaring and we fly, four miles an hour, toward the closest bank. Elli hops out of the boat and splashes to seek cover behind some mangy bush.

“Jesus Christ, that was close,” John Martin says, and searches the cooler for full cans. He begins to roll one against his cheeks to cool them. I look at his neck.

“John,” I say, “there is a leech the size of a five-year-old Gypsy’s dick on your neck.”

“God damn it, Michael, not again,” he says. Then he leans backward and stretches his neck to allow me easier access.

V.

“The news that Crazy Ali is coming to take her away reaches my great-grandmother as she is washing clothes in the river. Panic seizes all other girls, but great-grandmother never loses her calm. She wrings out a shirt and washes another.

“ ‘I have no time to be frightened,’ she tells them. ‘Work waits for no one.’

“A bright moon blooms in the sky. Ali Ibrahim and the hundred soldiers stop before the wooden gates. Ali dismounts, takes out his yataghan, and knocks three times with the ivory handle.

“ ‘I have come for your daughter,’ he tells the man who opens the gate. He brings his sword to the man’s face, and on the tip of the blade hangs the black imperial
feredje
. ‘Go veil her face and bring her here. We have much road ahead and time is short.’

“The man takes the kerchief and walks to the cattle shed where the most beautiful of all women is milking the cows. He hands her the black cloth, which flickers like a wounded pigeon in his trembling hand.

“My great-grandmother narrows her eyes, takes the kerchief, and throws it in the dirt. She then finishes milking a cow and jumps on the only horse in the shed.

“ ‘
Az litse si ne zabulyam,’
she says: ‘I shall never veil my face.’ She whispers something to the horse and grabs him by the mane.

“People say that right then a great storm rose from the west, and that when my great-grandmother vaulted over the yard walls, over Ali and his soldiers in a cloud of dust with her long hair flowing, her beauty was astounding.

“For a long time Ali stands in disbelief. His face is calm except his right eyebrow, which twitches every now and then. He mounts his horse and puts the yataghan in the sheath.

“ ‘Bring me the
feredje,’
he says. And when the soldiers bring him the black kerchief from the cattle shed, he commands them, ‘Chop all heads if you have to, but when I come back I want to hear a
hodja
chanting in the name of Allah.’