Dervishes by Beth Helms

Author:Beth Helms
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2008-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

“DID YOU know that Ahmet has offered to teach me to ride as well?” my mother said one evening as we drove home from the stables. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

No. It would not.

The electricity was back full-time and it had become darker in the afternoons. By the time we left Balgat the city was illuminated, and it seemed we were driving from pitch blackness behind us—it gathered coldly at the skirts of our taillights—straight into a low, distant skyline, into a galaxy of multicolored constellations.

It was then, in that fuzzy time period, while everything was in its seasonal flux—we were unearthing winter tights and testing coats for fit and suitability, finding mismatched mittens and thinking prematurely of Christmas—that she began her full-fledged pursuit of Ahmet.

I already hated my mother’s intrusion into my world at Balgat; her gawky movements around the animals, her silly laugh and fresh way with Ahmet, her proprietary gestures and glances.

The day of her third lesson I caught her slipping out of his trailer as I came around the corner, her face flustered and triumphant. That very afternoon he had put her up on Uğurlu—beautiful Uğurlu, with the perfectly sewn scar on his knee, the one Ahmet and I had made together. I saw his hand adjusting her leg as he did mine, his palm at the small of her back. She was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes and giggled as she sat up there, hunched over and terrified.

“That was fun,” she said to me.

“It didn’t look fun,” I said. “You looked petrified.”

“Ahmet said I did very well.”

I snorted, turned away and stared fixedly out the window, jabbing the glass with my index finger as we drove. I heard her sigh beside me and then she turned up the radio and began to hum along. She sounded so pleased with herself that I wanted to strangle her.

It was only November but there was a sprinkling of Christmas cards taped around our fireplace, occasionally fluttering in some unseen movement of air across the room. At school, in the basement of the Anglican church, we were practicing for our pageant. Catherine was excused from the production because it interfered with her ballet: I almost never saw her anymore. During recess she sat above the cricket pitch wrapped in her blue woolen coat, staring off into space. I was spending time with Kate—she was Toad, the star of our play—and we developed an alliance based on that, that and a mutual, new-found desire to be cruel to Catherine.

Kate invited me home for lunch. Hers was a real house with a walled garden in a neighborhood some distance from ours. Directly across the street was a public school behind a chain-link fence. The schoolyard was dirt and there was no play equipment, not a bit more comforting than the orphanage. While we walked from the bus, she yelled obscenities at the boys who ran to the fence and clung there, their fingers and toes jammed between the diamond-shaped links. Girls jumped rope frenetically behind them, singing out rhymes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.