It was Paradise. Not the walled garden of angels and houris. It was the Shangri-La dreamed by the Brits and the Yanks. It was the Garden of Eden. It was the place of peace where the lion lies down with the lamb. The woman beautiful as a Madonna never looked up but cradled the bear cub as it fed from a bottle, its paws wrapped in total trust around her arm. Her lips moved. Surely a lullaby. Another cub nursed at the teat of a complacent nanny goat and two others wrestled in play and then stood on hindlegs together, dancing like the dogs he’d seen in a traveling exhibit of pre-Columbian art.
The afternoon drizzle began. Oğuz found himself in the supply tent. Hoisted up on ropes where the bears couldn’t reach there were sacks of powdered milk labeled Deseret Dairy, USAID, Australia Gold Cow. It had to be refugee relief, and the box of Micronutrient-Fortified Biscuit. A woman was adding some honey to a bottle and shaking the mixture. She smiled and handed it to him. She wrapped his arm in a discarded sack and then he was sitting on an unrolled carpet mat, a bear cub wriggling and looking up at him and then settling down to feed.
He had left behind the world of Peshawar’s inhabitants, the Pashtuns and Hindkowans, the Tajiks and Hazaras, Uzbeks, Persians, Punjabis, Chitralis, the Gypsies who made him feel guilty about how ignorant he was of the Roma back home. They spoke Pashto and Dari and Hindko, Urdu, Hazaragi and Baluchi and Khowar and Saraiki. There were Sunnis and Twelver Shi’as and Ismailis and Alevis. And what of it? Why couldn’t Kurds speak Kurdish? Why could Turkey only be Turkey if everyone agreed to speak nothing but Turkish? He cuddled the bear and could feel its heart beating against him. The exhilaration of language gave way to wordless wonder. The little animal made sounds that had to be contentment. Without knowing how to express it, he’d known this truth: nothing is exotic in the essential continuum of life.
We are all part of it, he thought, me and Emine and the children we will have.
His intentions had been pure, maybe tainted just a bit with fraternal rivalry. But now he found his act of charity, zakat, had turned into adventure. And adventure was sheer pleasure. And soon he would return home and he and Emine would have children and they’d go back to being responsible and careful and the only adventures on the horizon would belong to their children, and his stories about travels in India and Pakistan would encourage them to be daring and open to experience. This was how he could justify his self-indulgence, not as charity but his attempt to be a role model for sons and daughters as yet unborn. Emine, he thought, I’m coming home. He would have a baby boy or girl in his arms soon, a tiny human being, and someday he would tell the child how he had held a bear cub and spoken to it Benim bebeğim, küçükayı, Benim küçük bebeğim. Sweet thing, he said, I’m going to take you to Baba. The cub looked upon him not as an alien being but as a loving parent. Tranquilized, drugged, the baby would sleep and Oğuz had to believe a little money would cause the eyes at border inspection to close just enough to let them pass. The bear cub trusted him because the power of love crosses all boundaries and we must live from this day on, he thought, as though boundaries don’t exist, as though there are none.