Gardens of Water by Alan Drew

Author:Alan Drew
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781588366801
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

THAT AFTERNOON THE MANAGER SAID HE DIDN’T NEED SINAN for the evening shift. Yilmaz Bey had just arrived at the store, and Sinan followed him to his office, where he watched him hang his coat on the hook behind his desk, take his wallet from his pants pocket, and slip it into the pocket of his hanging coat.

“Please Yilmaz Bey, I need to work.”

“Sinan,” the manager said, sprinkling lemon cologne on his hands and slapping his palms together. “There are no trucks coming in today. It would be a waste of your time.”

“It wouldn’t be a waste of my time.”

“It’d be a waste of company time.” The man combed his clean fingers through his hair and pressed his eyebrows in place. “I’m sorry, Sinan. They check on these things.”

“Oh,” Yilmaz Bey said, reaching into his desk drawer. “This should help. Payday.” He handed Sinan an envelope. “It’s only for the few days you worked last pay period. Next one will be better.” The manager smiled and then started moving papers around on his desk and ignored him and Sinan knew it was time to leave.

36,732,045TL. He read the printed numbers again and rubbed his finger over their raised shape. It was the most money he had seen since his grocery. Nilüfer and the children wouldn’t expect him for another eight hours, so he took the ferries to Kadiköy, cashed the check, and went to see about train-ticket prices to Diyarbakr.

Haydarpaa train station echoed with the voices of passengers, merchants, and men loitering in corners. Well-dressed businessmen sat on a row of leather stools along one wall of the station, their feet pressed against wooden horns of copper shoeshine boxes. These men read papers or absentmindedly smoked cigarettes while snapping rags made their shoes sparkle. When the old shoeshine men bent to apply black to the shoe heels, it looked as though they were kissing their customers’ feet. A group of boys, unable to compete with the old-timers and their fancy punched-copper boxes, squatted in the dirty corner near the washrooms next to their wooden boxes, their hands permanently stained black, their skin as dirty and rough as the cement floor. They were Kurdish boys, their eyes a reflective black, their faces etched with anger.

As he crossed the huge open floor, incandescent fans of sunlight streamed through the high windows and cast light across the steel tracks. The railings shone like strings of gold necklaces through the darkness of the station, out past the rusting freight trains, and on into the heart of Anatolia. Sinan felt the possibility of that distant horizon, then, and he imagined the mountains his train would climb, the valleys it would descend through, and finally the gray cement station in Diyarbakr where it would squeal to a stop.

A poster listing destination and price hung next to the ticket counter window. There were hundreds of destinations and their times, and Sinan had difficulty finding the listing because the words were so small and crammed together. He

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