Gardens of Water
By Alan Drew
Random House, 341 pages, $25
Imagine a Turkish Kurd and devout Muslim who returns to his distant suburban apartment after a day in Istanbul with his son, only to find his 15-year-old daughter raptly watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (dubbed in Turkish) on TV. He snaps off the set (“There was killing and there was kissing, enough for him”), only to be informed by his wife that she is inviting the Americans upstairs to help celebrate the traditional sunnet ceremony, their 9-year-old son’s circumcision.
Welcome to Alan Drew’s “Gardens of Water,” a novel that takes Samuel Huntington’s concept of a clash of civilizations down to the personal level and turns it into a mash of civilizations instead, one that, despite its occasional lighter moments, is bound to entail tragedy as one of the trade goods.
Some of the cultural dissonance has little to do with the Americans, at least the ones directly upstairs (Marcus and Sarah Roberts, and their son, Dylan, 17, who spend summers in Golcuk but live in Istanbul, where Marcus is director of an expensive private missionary school): The Turk, Sinan Basioglu, and his family are living out a form of internal exile to begin with, having moved to this urban setting from their small village in the south, their Kurdish homeland, seven years before because of low-scale civil war between the paramilitaries of the Turkish government and fighters of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). When it “seemed only a matter of time before he, too, disappeared,” as many had at the hands of the men in Jeeps, Sinan and his family were aided by his brother-in-law Ahmet, who helped them relocate. The two men have since run a small grocery in the city of Golcuk, three hours by ferry from the capital, although the new fear is economic, stiff competition from a recently opened French-owned Carrefour superstore. The last people Sinan wants visiting his apartment are Americans: When he was 12 his father was killed by the military, for which he blames the U.S. government in its support and arming of the Turks.
“Gardens of Water” is set in 1999, never explicitly stated but clear from events: The Turkish government has captured PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, and an enormous earthquake (known as the Marmara quake, it measured 7.4 on the Richter scale and estimates run as high as 17,000 dead) is about to strike as the novel opens, with its fictional apartment-building locale sitting virtually on the real-world epicenter. The aftershocks will come as the tectonic plates of Christianity and Islam grind against each other in an emergency camp set up by none other than the Americans upstairs.
But first the quake: Sinan, bothered by a congenitally deformed foot, was awake in the middle of the night and had climbed to the roof of his apartment building, only to hear a horrific growl and witness “a brilliant spark of green” in the black water of the Gulf of Izmit, after which surging water flipped over a party boat and the building next door to him disappeared. Amid screams and gas-line explosions, his own roof dropped and tipped precipitously, he was left hanging at an angle and witnessed below his son, Ismail, still in his bed, floating away from the crumbling building “as if on a pillow of air.”
Survival is an open question for some characters briefly, but in this debut novel Drew tells a story devoted mostly to aftermaths, to the consequences of choices that can shake the ground of one’s life, meaning that most of the characters who were introduced before the quake walk out of the rubble alive. Sinan, wife Nilufer, daughter Irem and Ismail are physically intact, although in Christ-like fashion, Ismail was entombed for nearly three days before being discovered, his face pallid with cement dust. In the days following the quake, with everyone fearful of a recurrence, the family inhabits a makeshift tent of cardboard and bedsheets that Sinan has tied together on a swath of grass by a highway on-ramp. Food is scarce: In one stretch, they eat only rotten apples and a few slices of bread in three days.
Back at the now-crumpled apartment building, Marcus and Dylan live through the earthquake, and Sarah’s death affects both sides of the national and religious divide: In one of the novel’s most touching revelations, it becomes apparent that Sarah helped Ismail underground, preserving him at her own expense, which Ismail describes to Marcus in a tender scene.
The Robertses went missing in the days after the quake — Marcus and Dylan had gone home to bury Sarah — only to reappear when Sinan spots Marcus and a grave-looking Dylan in a convoy of trucks and minibuses, the trucks carrying stacks of canvas bags imprinted with American flags and little crosses. Stopping in a field that used to be a prison yard, the strangers begin unloading bags of rice and setting up tents. “Their energy was amazing to see — there was hope in it, a sense that they had things under control,” Sinan thinks as he watches young people “dressed in light blue T-shirts emblazoned with white fish designs.”
Before one could say “crusade” a tent city is set up for the homeless, one that Sinan is loath to enter, given his residual antipathy to Americans, though of course this will give way to necessity. That is the basic setup from which “Gardens of Water” will flower, its clashing sensibilities playing out in several venues: in the tent, through the cloistering instincts of Irem’s parents to keep her dress and behavior in check in modest Muslim fashion, when she is sorely tempted by the modern, outside world as represented by Dylan; at work, where Sinan’s need of income leads to employment at Carrefour, where not only did the customers look like foreigners but “he was dressed like a foreigner — his khaki pleated pants, the brown belt, the polo-style shirt with the Carrefour logo on the chest”; in Istanbul, where the earphone-equipped Dylan gives the head-scarfed Irem a quickie tour of the underground scene and later introduces her to liquor and more on an overnight runaway; on the soccer field, where distress over Ismail’s mind-set and his violent, obsessive drawings are relieved when Sinan simply kicks a ball with him; outside a hastily erected mosque, where Imam Ali counsels the men to ignore the proselytizing Christians because, ” ‘The Qur’an is the truth’ ” and the truth will win out, nicely juxtaposed by Drew with a local political hack campaigning for his party by promising to distribute goat meat.
The push-pull stresses on Dylan and Irem become the largest plot elements driving events in “Gardens of Water,” but the relationship itself is rather aseptic, and, given the cultural gap, rather typically worked out, including its climatic end, although sometimes it is rendered to amusing effect. On the beach together, Dylan complains, ” ‘You won’t even show your ankles,’ ” but when he hikes his pants up to stick his legs in the water, she follows suit, rolling her skirt up to her knees. Dylan is oblivious, even when she flexes her toes for attention, leaving her to marvel, “She was naked in front of him, and he didn’t even notice!”
Sinan’s internal struggle over murderous impulses are executed with more nuance by Drew, and are correspondingly more moving and intense. Sinan will wield a knife repeatedly, as thoughts of honor killing and revenge plague him: “Why was it easier — he asked himself countless times — to hold the knife instead of his daughter?” He also must contend with his son’s exposure to Christianity: ” ‘Do we have miracles, too?’ ” Ismail asks him, and reports that Marcus has told him ” ‘it was Jesus who saved me.’ “
Nilufer’s fury at her daughter for carrying on with Dylan (who sports tattoos that include a dragon’s tail and is rumored to be a Satanist) is also well-presented, part of the overall struggle to retain traditional life in the implacable face of change. She smashes a CD player she finds in Irem’s sleeping bag and pushes Sinan to threaten their daughter when she senses his reluctance, ranting, ” ‘I’ve kept my mouth shut too many times so I could be called a good woman, and for this girl — for you — to ruin my name!’ “
Yet Nilufer’s name and Sinan’s are already ruined, in the eyes of Irem’s close friend Dilek, who lost her secular-minded father in the quake. ” ‘[Y]our parents are different,’ ” she tells Irem in tactful moments, and, ” ‘Yeah, well, your parents are backward’ ” in others. Sinan is not unaware of the world. He is at Carrefour when Nilufer and Ismail come to tell him Irem has run off with Dylan. Ismail watches two dozen images of a Manchester United football match beaming out from a wall of TV sets, and a customer eyes Nilufer with disdain.
Sinan, catching it all, “was disgusted with his wife and with himself, disgusted with his children, disgusted with everything.” That is where we see the real earthquake in “Gardens of Water,” the seam that will not hold together, the structures that will not stand, the past shaken out of itself, moment by moment.
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Art Winslow is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.
