Waiting with Sevgi was different. He had her there with him. He had purpose.
He was still going to fucking lose her.
He met her father in the gardens, a big, grey-haired Turk with powerful shoulders and the same tigerish eyes as his daughter. He wore no moustache, but there was thick stubble rising high on his cheeks and bristling at his cleft chin, and he had lost none of his hair with age. He would have been a very handsome man in his youth and even now – Carl estimated he must be in his early sixties – even seated on the beige stone bench and staring fixedly at the fountain, he exuded a quiet, charismatic authority. He wore a plain dark suit that matched the thick woollen shirt beneath it and the purplish smudges of tiredness under his eyes.
‘You’re Carl Marsalis,’ he said, as Carl reached the bench. There was no question mark in his voice, it was a little hoarse but iron firm beneath. If he’d been crying, he hid it well.
‘Yeah, that’s me.’
‘I am Murat Ertekin. Sevgi’s father. Please, join me.’ He gestured at the empty space beside him on the bench, waited until Carl was seated. ‘My daughter has told me a lot about you.’
‘Care to give me specifics?’
Ertekin glanced sideways at him. ‘She told me that your loyalty cannot be easily bought.’
It brought him up short. The received wisdom about variant thirteen was that they had no loyalties at all beyond self-interest. He wondered if Ertekin was quoting Sevgi directly, or putting his own spin on what she’d said.
‘Did she tell you what I am?’
‘Yes.’ Another sidelong look. ‘Were you expecting disapproval from me? Hatred, perhaps, or fear? The standard-issue prejudices?’
‘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, wilfully 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 breath 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 headscarfed 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 Wahabi nonsense. Sevgi gravitated to me. I think that’s natural in little girls anyway, but here it was pure self-defence. 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 criticise the work I did, calling it unIslamic, snubbing our liberal Muslim or non-believing 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-learnt 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 any more, 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 judgement on us all.’
The word judgement 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 enamoured 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 towards 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?’