The Gendarme (19 page)

“Papa!”

“Yes.”

“Look at me!”

Violet’s face fills my vision, an object too close to a camera.

“The sheriff’s office is sending someone to pick you up. I know this sounds horrible, but they have to handcuff you to provide transport to the facility—it’s state law for anyone being . . . placed there. We have to wait in the adjacent room until they arrive.”

I stumble next door, wishing to let all things pass. White sheets. Nurses. The hospital, again. I am in a faded chair, a dozing semi-sleep. Intrusions knife through: Violet’s movements in and out, the arrival of someone new, the opening and shutting of doors, Dr. Mellon’s voice through the wall. I think of Araxie. How could all be so lost? Then I am moving, down a hallway and out through the vestibule, past the stares of others still queued and waiting, a woman sobbing, her face deep in a handkerchief. I stumble out into sunshine, to a day left earlier than I remembered it to be.

“You’ll be okay?” This from Dr. Mellon, to Violet.

Doors shut, a motor revs. Hands grasp my wrist, binding. My head tilts back. Violet is speaking, but to someone beyond. “They’re sending him now.” Her voice cracks. She says nothing more.

I awake to someone’s touch,
to a fluttering against my neck, a brushing of my chest, a teasing manipulation of my groin. I sit, staring into the gloom around me, trying to orient to person and place, time. I smell incense and wax. The woman in front of me withdraws, smiling, chirps of laughter escaping lips curled like a flower. She perches at the end of the bed. I shift, feeling straw beneath the thin sheets. Recognition comes slowly.

“Were you dreaming of her?” Isis asks, fingering my big toe. “You certainly seem . . . aroused.” She laughs again, a high-pitched, reedlike sound.

“What time is it?”

She shrugs, shifting her body in a practiced way. “Morning.” Beads of sunlight enter through cracks in the walls and the window in the back. “I could not sleep.”

I pull my knees to my chest, wipe my hands down my face. “So you came to bother me.”

She smiles, exposing blackened bottom teeth. “Yes.”

“Tell me,” I say, sharpening, remembering. “How did you come to be here?”

She laughs her magpie laugh. “Oh, it was quite a journey. I was born in Egypt, hence my name.” She smiles again, offering a small bow. “My father was in the army. He was killed in a fight in a café, in Alexandria, when I was eight. My mother was forced to find work, but she had no skills. She did whatever she could, poor woman, cleaning people’s homes, selling firewood, even growing her own vegetables. After a time I noticed a number of men visiting our house. I didn’t understand what they wanted, why they disappeared into the back room with my mother, what the moans and curses and movement were all about. But soon I learned. My mother became pregnant from her efforts. She didn’t want this baby. She already had me, and my sister, Hami. Plus, the pregnancy would hinder her business. So she visited a doctor, not a regular doctor who had attended university, but one who lived in the poor part of town, like us. He gave her some medicine—I don’t know what it was. She became sick, and the baby died. Three days later, so did she. I was eleven.

“I tried to provide for Hami, who was only nine, but I was even more inept than my mother. We ended up begging at the side of roadways, the entrance to mosques. Men from the government tried to capture us but could not. We lived like this for almost a year. Then one day when I was nearly faint with hunger, a man offered me money for . . . service. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, but I had an idea. I didn’t particularly like it, but I liked the money. It bought food, and clothing. It altered my life.”

“How did you get to Aleppo?”

She grins again, shifts her position. “Through Sasha. Sasha is, as you know . . . unusual. She was once one of my customers.”

She lifts her gaze. I swallow. I did not know this about Sasha.

“At that time,” Isis continues, “we had lost our house—some men moved in and then refused to leave. We could do nothing about it. In this trade, if you have no place to go, no bed or room or refuge, it throttles your business. Sasha suggested I accompany her to Aleppo. She offered to make arrangements for Hami to be placed with a family. It was difficult for the two of us to part.” She gives another breast-bouncing shrug. “But it was probably for the best.”

I nod, chew my lip. “Do you like what you do?”

Another laugh, another shrug. “Most of the time. Compared to the situation I was in, this is much better.”

“Do you have boyfriends?”

“Too many!” Her laugh broadens her face. “That part is hard. I would like to be married someday. But I don’t know that I will be.” She pauses, glancing across at the light dancing up the far wall. “Sasha is good to us. She understands that sometimes you hate yourself, that you need time to recover. She knows men can be violent. There was one man, a few months ago, who nearly strangled Bibi. Sasha heard, entered the room, pulled him off, and tied him up. She then permitted each of the girls to terrorize him. Some slapped him, others peed on him. Bibi and Sasha rammed a candle up his bottom—it was like a party. We never saw him again.” She pauses. “Sasha also helps with disease and pregnancy. There have been other girls here . . . Sometimes they have to go away.”

I shift on the bed. “There was a man here the other night, with Bibi. His name is Hussein. Thin man, young—maybe my age. Do you know him?”

She nods slowly. “Yes, I know him.”

“Does he come here often?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“I just wondered. I recognized him from somewhere.”

She scratches her leg. “He was here the night of the raid.”

“The raid?”

“Yes. It happened several months ago. We were in the midst of a normal evening—a girl who used to be with us, Luki, was onstage—when the door burst open and ten policemen entered. They stormed into the back, interrupting sessions. The customers, cowards that they are, ran off without robes or trousers, dangling and flapping. It was the funniest thing. Then the police captain, who I guess had a sense of humor, rounded up the girls and told us we would not be charged if we put on an adequate show. My, you have never seen such a show! It ended with Sasha seducing the captain onstage. Everyone clapped and cheered! But this Hussein, he was one of the runners.”

Voices resound in the hall. I stretch and stand. Sasha’s oblong head pokes through the adjacent doorway.

“Isis! Are you delaying our employee from his duties? We girls are hungry.”

“I am only telling him the ways of the world,” Isis counters. “Stories of the
harîm
.” She stands and exits, offering a final waggle.

“You are quite the popular one, Ahmet,” Sasha says. She spreads her robes, seats herself on the end of the bed. “The girls talk about you constantly. Who is this young woman you meet in the bazaar?”

I hesitate, studying Sasha’s face, trying to guess her age. Thirty-five? Forty? Traces of mustache are visible in the dim light. I sit down beside her. “She is an
arkadaş
,” I say, using the Turkish word. A friend.

“She is Armenian, yes?”

I nod. Are my movements so well known, so obvious?

“And you are a Turk.”

I nod again. “What are you?”

Sasha laughs, a low, guttural sound that rises from deep in her chest. “Oh, I am many things, my dear. I am a Syrian, and I am an Ottoman. I am a Muslim, and I am a Christian. I am a believer, and I am a skeptic. I am a woman, and”—she lifts her robe, exposing a miniature, fully formed penis—“I am a man.”

“H-h-h . . . how?”

“An accident of nature.” She (or he) waves a bejeweled hand. “Sometimes Allah overwhelms with his gifts. There are similar examples throughout the world; I have met five like myself. One, who considered himself a man, was for a time my husband. I decided some time ago I was more comfortable as a woman.” She reaches over to touch my leg, bracelets jangling. I recoil in response, but her hand stays on my knee. “I am more concerned about you.”

I do not respond, caught between discomfort and a desire to unburden myself, to share secrets, seek guidance. My lips move but only air emerges. Tendons twitch in my thigh.

“I always ask the girls what they’re looking for,” she continues, “where they want to go. Some have unrealistic dreams of becoming princesses, of employing many servants. Others have no dreams at all—they want only to eat. I try to help each of them, to fashion their goals into those that are achievable, to make them think about what will come next. For no one can do this forever.” She sits straighter, releasing my leg. “I would like to help you as well. I like you. I like the way you work, the interaction you have with the girls. I like your devotion to your Armenian friend.” She pauses again. “How can I help you?”

“I . . . I want to go to America.”

She smiles and leans back. “As do we all. Do you want to take your friend with you?”

“Yes.”

She nods. A bead of light catches her face, making her look older, almost haggard. Wisps of gray cling at her temples.

“Do you know anyone in America? You need a job to get in. It is expensive.” She turns to me, her square jaw thrust forward. I can picture her now as a man, the rounded shoulders, the light beard. “Do you have any money?”

I shake my head.

She nods again. “It is a difficult dream, my son. How long do you think you have?”

I place my face in my hands. “Not long.”

She stands, her fingers brushing the top of my head. “We shall work on it, then. But I can promise you nothing. It is, as I said, a most difficult thing.”

I nod, grateful but fearful, of unstated quid pro quos, of the mutations seen lurking beneath Sasha’s robes. Are the girls somehow indebted? I look at things in a new light.

My day proceeds in the usual fashion, cooking, refurbishing mattresses, replacing spent candles. I accompany Sasha to the bazaar to buy food, I accompany Bibi and Isis to the hammam. I unload casks of wine from the cart of a man with no teeth. I bring candies to Avi, who is not feeling well. At dusk I sneak away to see Araxie at the citadel, concerned that so many are aware of our meeting, a concern only heightened when I cannot find her there. I pace about, staring with disinterest at peddlers picking up their wares, at camel drivers and rope makers, at the loading of donkeys and carts. I examine the iron-plated citadel doors, decorated with carvings of intertwined serpents. I waste money on a Turkish cigarette, filling my lungs with the harsh, tarry smoke that chafes my throat and makes my eyes tear. I search faces and profiles. I recognize no one.

I interrupt my pacing to examine a bed of flowers growing in a courtyard nearby—roses, in different shades, buttery yellow and sunset orange. I stoop close to one, a red so deep as to be almost lavender, sniff and think of picking it for Araxie as I look about, trying to remember why I have not seen these before. Has this courtyard been open? I imagine my future, sniffing a rose some decades hence, setting sail, weathering, nailing crossbeams, growing old, being reborn. And yet the past crouches, the clink as men march roped together, the blood of the woman’s sliced breasts. I think about the start of this journey, the knifing of the men, the forcing of the women into sick-smelling flames. How my arm ached from the thrusting, the blood bathing my face! The sound of air gushing from punctured lungs, the stench of perforated bowels, the final expulsions of the dead and the dying. The wails and sorrow, like song, feeding my energy. The camaraderie. The ecstasy. I must push it all back.

“Ahmet!”

I rise, squinting. It is almost dark. Ani is difficult to recognize in the shadows.

“I have been looking for you everywhere! Araxie is sick. She has the stomach illness. She sent me to tell you.”

I stiffen at the sound of her name. “She is sick?”

“Yes. I am hoping it is not the sickness from before, a relapse. She will try to meet you tomorrow, but at a different place—in front of the Khan al-Wazir. Do you know it?”

I do. The so-called minister’s khan, with its black-and-white marble façade. I have grown to know Aleppo well, to learn the distinctions between the labyrinthine streets and the various covered bazaars, to differentiate the spice suq from the one selling women’s clothes, the Khan al-Gumruk from the Khan al-Sabun. I stare up at the citadel above us, caught like a fist in the dying residue of the sun.

“I will be there.” I return my gaze to Ani, who has partly turned to go. Candles flicker in yellowing windows, the streets and passageways now shrouded in darkness.

“Ani,” I say. I want to say more, to address what has happened, to explain—how to explain things? I can see now through her dulled, gloomy eyes. I should ask . . .

“Yes?”

I pause, the apology I intended suddenly caught and contained. “Tell her I will be there.”

She nods, her quizzical expression turned solemn. “I will do so.”

I wander back to the
klimbim
, down sweet-smelling corridors with blurred faces and murmuring voices, through the smoke of cook fires, the drifts of spice and incense, the odor of burning hashish. A woman calls out to me, reaching from the shadows to pull at my arm as I pass, dancing, evading. Laughter and chanting merge and fade, replaced by a strange, atonal music, a shuffling of drumbeats, a patter of wind or of rain. From somewhere a bell rings clear like a knife. I experience all of this and none of it, my mind locked into sickening remembrance, this searing time past I cannot now seem to shake. It is done, I say. Done. I walk for miles, maybe for hours, for it is late by the time I return to the
klimbim
, the first show having started, the mats already filled with squatting male forms.

Thus begins a strange night, even by
klimbim
standards. One of the first customers backstage is an elderly man I have seen before, a man named al-Wati, whose unsteadiness requires support on either side from sheepish sons or associates, until he nears his destination and gains a new life. He parts the swinging door at almost a trot, paired with his consort, Avi, at which point I pay them no further notice, busy as I am with other customers and the orders of a petulant Sasha, still unhappy with my tardiness. Moments later, however, a low scream pierces the thin walls, different in tenor from Avi’s usual eruptions. I rise up in the darkness of an adjacent room. Sasha hurries forth in the corridor outside. Avi emerges, going the other way, precipitating a near collision in the narrow, dim hallway. Edging along the damp wall, I sidestep the still-muttering Avi and follow Sasha into the vacated room.