The Bastard of Istanbul (10 page)

Among what she inherited from her relatives, there were some pleasant qualities too. For one thing, her hair! She had frizzy, sable, wild hair—theoretically, like every other woman in the family, but in practice, only like Auntie Zeliha. The disciplined high school teacher in Auntie Cevriye, for instance, kept her hair in a tight chignon while Auntie Banu was disqualified from any comparison, since she wore a head scarf almost all the time. Auntie Feride frantically changed her hair color and style depending on her mood. Grandma Gülsüm was a cotton-head, as her hair had gone snowy and she refused to dye it, claiming it wouldn’t be appropriate for an old woman. Yet Petite-Ma was a devoted redhead. Her ever-worsening Alzheimer’s might have caused Petite-Ma to forget a plethora of things, including her children’s names, but to this day she had never forgotten to dye her hair with henna.

Finally in her list of positive genetic features, Asya Kazancı included her almond-shaped fawn eyes (from Auntie Banu), a high forehead (from Auntie Cevriye), and a temperament that rendered her prone to explode too quickly but that also, in an odd way, kept her alive (from Auntie Feride). Nevertheless, she hated to see that with the passing of each year she more and more resembled
them.
Except for one thing: their proclivity for irrationality. The Kazancı women were categorically irrational. Some time ago, so that she would not act like
them,
Asya had promised herself she’d never swerve from the path of her own rational, analytical mind.

By the time of her nineteenth birthday, Asya was a young woman so profoundly stimulated by the need to assert her individuality that she had become capable of the most peculiar rebellions. Thus, if she repeated her cake objection, this time even more fervently, there was a deeper reason behind her fury: “No more stupid cakes for me!”

“Too late, miss. It’s already done,” Auntie Banu said, darting a glance at Asya over a newly opened Eight of Pentacles. Unless the next three cards did not turn out to be exceptionally promising, the tarot deck on the table was heading in the direction of a bad omen. “But pretend not to know anything about it or your poor mama will be upset. It must be a surprise!”

“How could something so predictable be a surprise?” Asya grumbled. By now she knew too well that being a member of the Kazancı family meant, among other things, professing the alchemy of absurdity, continually converting nonsense into some sort of logic with which you could convince everyone, and with a little push, even yourself.

“I am the one who is supposed to predict and portend in this house, not you.” Auntie Banu winked.

It was true, at least to a certain extent. Having worked upon and fleshed out her talent for clairvoyance over the years, Auntie Banu had started seeing customers at home and making money from it. It took a fortune-teller no longer than a flash to become legendary in Istanbul. If luck was on your side, it sufficed to successfully read someone’s future, and the next thing you knew, that person would become your top customer. And with the help of the wind and the seagulls, she would spread the word so quickly throughout the city that in no more than a week there would be a line of customers waiting at the door. So had Auntie Banu made her way up the ladder of the art of clairvoyance, becoming more famous with each rung. Her customers came from all around the city, virgins and widows, lasses and toothless grannies, the poor and the affluent, each immersed in their own qualms and all dying to learn what Fortuna, that fickle feminine force, had in store for them. They arrived with gobs of questions and left the house with additional ones. Some paid large sums of money to express their gratitude or in the expectation that they could bribe Fortuna, but there were also some who did not shell out a penny. Diverse as they were, the customers had one basic thing in common: All were women. The day she had baptized herself a soothsayer, Auntie Banu had taken an oath never to receive male customers.

Several things about Auntie Banu had undergone a radical transformation in the meantime, starting with her appearance. At the beginning of her career as a clairvoyant, she had paraded around the house in flamboyantly embroidered scarlet shawls carelessly flung around her shoulders. Soon, however, the shawls were replaced by cashmere scarves and scarves by pashmina stoles and stoles by loosely tied silk turbans, always in hues of red. After that, Auntie Banu had suddenly announced the decision that she had secretly been contemplating for only Allah knows how long: to withdraw from everything material and mundane, and to dedicate herself totally to the service of God. Toward this end, she had solemnly declared that she was ready to go through a phase of penitence and abandon all worldly vanities, just like the dervishes had done in the past.

“You are not a dervish,” her sisters cynically chorused in unison, determined to dissuade her from such sacrilege, unheard of within the annals of the Kazancı family. And then all three of them started to raise objections, each in the most officious voice she could muster.

“Mind you, the dervishes used to clad themselves in coarse sacks or woolen garbs, not cashmere scarves,” interjected Auntie Cevriye, the most maudlin of all.

Auntie Banu swallowed uneasily, uncomfortable in her clothes, uncomfortable in her body.

“Dervishes used to sleep on hay, not on queen-size feather mattresses, ” Auntie Feride joined in, the most moonstruck of all.

Auntie Banu stood silent, gazing across the room to avoid eye contact with her interrogators. What could she do, her back pain went through the roof if she didn’t sleep on a special bed.

“Besides, the dervishes had no
nefs
. Look at you!” It was Auntie Zeliha, the most offbeat of all.

Eager to defend herself, Auntie Banu launched a counterattack. “Neither do I. Not any longer. Those days are over.” Then she added in her new mystical voice, “I will go into battle with my
nefs
and I shall prevail!!!”

In the Kazancı family whenever someone had the nerve to do something unusual, the others always reacted in the same way, following the old course of action, which could be summarized as: “Go ahead. See if we care.” Accordingly, no one took Auntie Banu seriously. Upon noticing the general skepticism, she headed to her room and slammed the door, never to open it again for the next forty days except for quick visits to the kitchen and toilet. Other than that the only time she left the door ajar was to attach a cardboard sign that said: ALL
SELF
ABANDON YE WHO ENTER HERE!

Initially, Banu attempted to take with her Pasha the Third, who at the time was going through his last days on earth. She must have thought he could keep her company in her lonesome penitence, not that the dervishes kept pets. But no matter how antisocial he could be at times, the life of a hermit was too much for Pasha the Third, he having too many stakes in worldly vanities, starting with feta cheese and electrical cords. After no more than an hour inside Auntie Banu’s cell, Pasha the Third launched a series of high-pitched meows and scratched the door so forcefully he was immediately let out. After losing her only company, Auntie Banu sunk into her lonesomeness and stopped talking, mute and deaf to everyone. She also stopped taking showers, combing her hair, and even watching her favorite soap opera,
The Malediction of the Ivy of Infatuation
—a Brazilian drama in which a kindhearted supermodel suffered all sorts of betrayals by those she loved most.

But the true shock came when Auntie Banu, always a woman of immense appetite, stopped eating anything but bread and water. She had been notoriously fond of carbohydrates, especially bread, but no one ever thought that she could
survive
on bread. To tempt her into indulgence, her three sisters did their best, cooking many dishes, filling the house with the scents of sweet desserts, deep-fried fish, and roasted meat, often heavily buttered to enhance the smell.

Auntie Banu did not waver. If anything, she more resolutely clung to her devotion, as well as to her dry bread. For forty days and nights she remained unreachable under the same roof. Washing the dishes, doing the laundry, watching TV, gossiping with neighbors—everyday life routines became profanities she wanted to have nothing to do with. During the days that followed, every time the sisters checked to see how she was doing, they found her reciting the Holy Qur’an. So intense was her blissful abyss, she became alien to those who had known her all her life. Then on the morning of day forty-one, while everyone else was eating grilled
sucuk
and fried eggs at the breakfast table, Banu shuffled out of her room, beaming a radiant smile, with an uncanny sparkle in her eyes and a cherry red scarf on her head.

“What’s that sorry thing on your head?” was the first reaction of Grandma Gülsüm, who having not softened a wee bit after all these years still maintained her Ivan the Terrible resemblance.

“From this moment on I am going to cover my head as my faith requires.”

“What kind of nonsense is that?” Grandma Gülsüm frowned. “Turkish women took off the veil ninety years ago. No daughter of mine is going to betray the rights the great commander-in-chief Atatürk bestowed on the women of this country.”

“Yeah, women were given the right to vote in 1934,” Auntie Cevriye echoed. “In case you didn’t know, history moves forward, not backward. Take that thing off immediately!”

But Auntie Banu did not.

She remained head-scarved, and having passed the test of the three Ps—penitence, prostration, and piety—declared herself a soothsayer.

Just like her appearance, her techniques of clairvoyance underwent profound change throughout her psychic trajectory. At first she solely used coffee cups to read the future of her customers, but in the fullness of time she gradually employed new as well as highly unconventional techniques, including tarot cards, dried beans, silver coins, rosary beads, doorbells, imitation pearls, real pearls, ocean pebbles—anything, as long as it would bring news from the paranormal world. Sometimes she chatted passionately with her shoulders whereupon, she claimed, sat two invisible
djinn,
dangling their feet. The good one on the right shoulder and the bad one on the left shoulder. Though she knew the name of each, in order not to utter them aloud, she simply called them Mrs. Sweet and Mr. Bitter, respectively.

“If there is a bad
djinni
on your left shoulder, why don’t you throw him down?” Asya asked her aunt once.

“Because there are times when we all need the company of the bad,” was the answer.

Asya tried a frown and then rolled her eyes, gaining no effect with either gesture other than a childish face. She whistled a tune from a Johnny Cash song, which she liked to recall on various encounters with her aunts:
“Why me Lord, what have I ever done . . .”

“What are you whistling?” Auntie Banu asked suspiciously. She didn’t know any English and was deeply distrustful of any language that made her miss something obvious.

“I was singing a song that says as my eldest aunt you are supposed to be a role model for me and teach me right from wrong. But here you are giving me lessons on the necessity of evil.”

“Well, let me tell you something,” Auntie Banu decreed, looking at her niece intently. “There are things so awful in this world that the good-hearted people, may Allah bless them all, have absolutely no idea of. And that’s perfectly fine, I tell you; it is all right that they know nothing about such things because it proves what good-hearted people they are. Otherwise they wouldn’t be good, would they?”

Asya couldn’t help but nod. After all, she had a feeling Johnny Cash would be of the same opinion.

“But if you ever step into a mine of malice, it won’t be one of these people you will ask help from.”

“And you think I will ask help from a malicious
djinni
!” Asya exclaimed.

“Perhaps you will.” Auntie Banu shook her head. “Let’s just hope you’ll never have to.”

That was that. Never again did they talk about the limitations of the good and the necessity of the unscrupulous.

At or around that time Auntie Banu once again remodeled her clairvoyant reading techniques, and switched to hazelnuts, roasted hazelnuts more often than not. Her family suspected that the origin of this novelty, as with most other novelties, might have been pure coincidence. Most likely Auntie Banu had been caught gobbling hazelnuts by a client and offered the best explanation that had come to her mind: that she could read them. This was the belief shared by all in the family. Everyone else had a different interpretation. Being the holy lady that she was, rumor had it in Istanbul, she did not demand any money from her needy customers and instead asked them to bring her only a handful of hazelnuts. The hazelnut became a symbol of her bigheartedness. In any case, the oddity of her technique only served to further augment her already bloated fame. “Mother Hazelnut” they started to call her, or even “Sheikh Hazelnut, ” oblivious to the fact that women in their limitedness could not assume this respected title.

Bad
djinni,
roasted hazelnuts . . . though Asya Kazancı had in time gotten used to these and other eccentricities, there was one thing about her eldest aunt she seemed to be having a hard time accepting: her name. It was just impossible to accept that “Auntie Banu” could metamorphose into one “Sheikh Hazelnut,” so whenever there were customers inside the house or tarot cards opened on the table, she simply avoided her. That is why, although Asya had perfectly heard the last words uttered by her aunt, she pretended not to. And she would have remained blissfully ignorant had Auntie Feride not walked into the living room at that moment, carrying a huge, flat plate upon which glistened the birthday cake.

“What are you doing here?” Auntie Feride frowned at Asya. “You are not supposed to be here; you’ve got a ballet class now.”

Now
that
was another shackle around Asya’s ankles. Like numerous middle-class Turkish mothers aspiring to see their children excel in all the things the children of upper classes supposedly did, her upper-middle class family compelled her to perform activities she had absolutely no interest in.