“I don’t know you,” Carl told him evenly. “Aside from the fact that the two of you don’t get on and that you left Turkey for political reasons, Sevgi hasn’t told me anything about you at all. I wouldn’t know what your attitude is to my kind. Though my impression is that you weren’t too happy about Sevgi’s last variant thirteen indiscretion.”
Ertekin sat rigid. Then he slumped. He closed his eyes, hard, opened them again to face the world.
“I am to blame,” he said quietly. “I failed her. All our lives together, I encouraged Sevgi to push the boundaries. And then, when she finally pushed them too far for my liking, I reacted like some village mullah who’s never seen the Bosphorus Bridge in his life and doesn’t plan to. I reacted exactly like my fucking brother.”
“Your brother’s a mullah?”
Murat Ertekin laughed bitterly. “A mullah, no. Though perhaps he did miss his vocation when he chose secular law for a career. I’m told he was never more than an indifferent lawyer. But a self-righteous, willfully ignorant male supremacist? Oh yes. Bulent always excelled at that.”
“You talk about him in the past. Is he dead?”
“He is to me.”
The conversation jerked violently to a halt on the assertion. They both sat for a while staring into the space where it had been. Murat Ertekin sighed. He talked as if picking up the pieces of something broken, as if each bending down to retrieve a fragment of the past was an effort that forced him to breathe deeply.
“You must understand, Mr. Marsalis, my marriage was not a successful one. I married young, and in haste, to a woman who took her faith very seriously indeed. When we were still both medical students in Istanbul, I mistook that faith for a general strength, but I was wrong. When we moved to America, as it still was then, Hatun could not cope. She was homesick, and New York frightened her. She never adjusted. We had Sevgi because at such times you are told that having a child will bring you together again.” A grimace. “It’s a strange article of faith—the belief that sleepless nights, no sex, less income, and the constant stress of caring for a helpless new life should somehow alleviate the pressures on a relationship already under strain.”
Carl shrugged. “People believe some strange things.”
“Well, in our case it didn’t work. My work suffered, we fought more, and Hatun’s fear of the city grew. She retreated into her faith. She already went head-scarfed in the streets; now she began to wear the full chador. She would not receive guests in the house unless she was covered, and of course she had already quit her job to have Sevgi. She isolated herself from her former friends and colleagues at the hospital, frustrated their attempts to stay in touch, eventually changed mosques to one preaching some antiquated Wahhabi nonsense. Sevgi gravitated to me. I think that’s natural in little girls anyway, but here it was pure self-defense. What was Sevgi to make of her mother? She was growing up a streetwise New York kid, bilingual and smart, and Hatun didn’t even want her to have swimming lessons with boys.”
Ertekin stared down at his hands.
“I encouraged the rebellion,” he said quietly. “I hated the way Hatun was changing, maybe by then I even hated Hatun herself. She’d begun to criticize the work I did, calling it un-Islamic, snubbing our liberal Muslim or nonbelieving friends, growing more rigid in her attitudes every year. I was determined Sevgi would not end up the same way. It delighted me when she started asking her mother those simple child’s questions about God that no one can answer. I rejoiced when she was strong and determined and smart in the face of Hatun’s hollow, rote-learned dogma. I egged her on, pushed her to take chances and achieve, and I defended her to her mother whenever they clashed—even when she was wrong and Hatun was right. And when things finally grew unbearable and Hatun left us and went home—I think I was glad.”
“Does her mother know what’s happened?”
Ertekin shook his head. “We’re not in contact anymore, neither Sevgi nor I. Hatun only ever called to berate us both, or to try to persuade Sevgi to go back to Turkey. Sevgi stopped taking her calls when she was fifteen. Even now, she’s asked me not to tell her mother. It’s probably as well. Hatun wouldn’t come, or if she came she’d make a scene, wailing and calling down judgment on us all.”
The word judgment went through Carl like a strummed chord.
“You are not a religious man, are you?” Ertekin asked him.
It was almost worth a grin. “I’m a thirteen.”
“And thus genetically incapable.” Ertekin nodded. “The received wisdom. Do you believe that?”
“Is there another explanation?”
“When I was younger, we were less enamored of genetic influence as a factor. My grandfather was a communist.” A shrewd glance. “Do you know what that is?”
“Read about them, yeah.”
“He believed that you can make of a human anything you choose to. That humans can become what they choose. That environment is all. It’s not a fashionable view any longer.”
“That’s because it’s demonstrably untrue.”
“And yet, you—variant thirteens everywhere—were thoroughly environmentally conditioned. They did not trust your genes to give them the soldiers they wanted. You were brought up from the cradle to face brutality as if it were a fact of life.”
Carl thought of Sevgi, tubes and needles and hope withering away. “Brutality is a fucking fact of life. Haven’t you noticed?”
Ertekin shifted on the bench, turned toward him. Carl sensed that the other man was close to reaching out, to taking his hands in his own.
Groping for something.
“Do you really believe that you would have become this, that you were genetically destined to it, however you were raised as a child?”
Carl made an impatient gesture. “What I believe isn’t important. I did become this; how I got here is academic. So let the academics discuss it at great length, write their papers and publish, get paid to agonize. In the end, none of it affects me.”
“No, but it might affect others like you in the future.”
Now he found he could smile—a thin, hard smile, the rind of amusement. “There aren’t going to be any others like me in the future. Not on this planet. In another generation, we’ll all be gone.”
“Is that why you don’t believe? Do you feel forsaken?”
The smile became a laugh of sorts. “I think you’ll find, Dr. Ertekin, that the technical term for that is transference. You’re the one feeling forsaken. I haven’t ever expected to be anything other than alone, so I’m not upset when I find it to be true.”
Marisol sat in his head and called him a liar. Elena Aguirre ghosted past, whispering. He held down a shiver, talked to stave it off.
“And you’re missing a rather important point about my lack of religious convictions as well. To be a believer, you have to not only believe, you also have to want someone big and patriarchal around to take care of business for you. You have to be apt for worship. And thirteens don’t do worship, of anyone or anything. Even if you could convince a variant thirteen, against all the evidence, that there really was a God? He’d just see him as a threat to be eliminated. If God were demonstrably real?” He stared hard into Ertekin’s eyes. “Guys like me would just be looking for ways to find him and burn him down.”
Ertekin flinched, and looked away.
“She’s chosen you well,” he murmured.
“Sevgi?”
“Yes.” Still looking away, fumbling in a jacket pocket. “You will need this.”
He handed Carl a small package, sealed in slippery antiseptic white with orange flash warning decals. Lettering in a language he couldn’t read, Germanic feel, multiple vowels. Carl weighed it in his palm.
“Put it away, please.” Ertekin told him. The garden was starting to fill as students and medical staff came out on lunch break to enjoy the sun.