The Bastard of Istanbul (14 page)

Auntie Surpun lived in Berkeley, where she had been teaching forever, at least ever since Armanoush was a child. She drove to San Francisco on the weekends but it was highly unusual of her to show up during the week. But the question would cease to concern Armanoush once she proceeded to give an account of her day. She remarked heartily, with a beaming face, “I bought myself some new books.”

“Books!? Did she say ‘books’ again?” a familiar voice yelled from inside.

That sounded like Auntie Varsenig! Armanoush hung up her raincoat, flattened her wind-ruffled hair, and wondered in the meantime what Auntie Varsenig was doing here as well. Her twin daughters were coming back this evening from Los Angeles, where they had been participating in a basketball tournament. Auntie Varsenig was so excited about the competition that she hadn’t been able to sleep properly for the last three days, constantly chatting on the phone with either of her daughters or their coach. And yet on the day the team was returning, instead of arriving at the airport hours early, as was her habit, here she was at grandma’s house setting the dinner table.

“Yes, I did say ‘books,’ ” Armanoush said, shouldering her canvas backpack as she walked into the spacious living room.

“Don’t you listen to her. She’s just getting old and grumpy,” Auntie Surpun chirped from behind her as she followed her into the living room. “We are all so proud of you, sweetheart.”

“We
are
proud of her, but she could just as well act her age.” Auntie Varsenig shrugged as she placed the last china plate on the table and then gave her niece a hug. “Girls your age are usually busy beautifying themselves, you know. Not that you need to, of course, but if you read and read and read, where is it going to end?”

“You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one.” Armanoush winked without knowing how pretty she looked under the sun’s fading light in the room. She set her backpack on her grandma’s armchair and instantly emptied it, like a kid eager to see a bunch of new toys. Books rained on top of one another:
The Aleph and Other Stories, A Confederacy of Dunces, A Frolic of His Own, The Management of Grief,
Borges’s
Collected Fictions, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Landscape Painted with Tea, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit,
and two by Milan Kundera, her favorite author,
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
and
Life Is Elsewhere.
Some of them were new to her, others she’d read years ago but had been wanting to read again.

All things considered, Armanoush knew, perhaps not rationally but instinctively, that the Tchakhmakhchian family’s resistance to her passion for books came from a deeper, darker source than simply from an urge to remind her of the things girls her age were busy with. It was not only because she was a woman but also because she was an Armenian that she was expected to refrain twice as much from becoming a bibliophile. Armanoush had a feeling that beneath Auntie Varsenig’s constant objection to her reading lay a more structural, if not primordial, concern: a fear of survival. She simply did not want her to shine too bright, to stand out from the flock. Writers, poets, artists, intellectuals were the first ones within the Armenian
millet
to be eliminated by the late Ottoman government. They had first gotten rid of “the brains” and only then proceeded to extradite the rest—the laypeople. Like too many Armenian families in the diaspora, safe and sound here but never truly at ease, the Tchakhmakhchians were both elated and vexed when a child of theirs read too much, thought too much, and swerved too far away from the ordinary.

Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you could be so carried away that you could lose touch with reality—that stringent and stolid truth from which no minority should ever veer too far from in order not to end up unguarded when the winds shifted and bad times arrived. It didn’t help to be so naïve to think things wouldn’t get bad, for they always did. Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced. If as a child of survivors you still wanted to read and ruminate, you should do so quietly, apprehensively, and introspectively, never turning yourself into a vociferous reader. If you couldn’t help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as if you had been de-energized and now had only enough strength to be average. With a fate and family like this, Armanoush had to learn to downplay her talents and do her best not to glimmer too brightly.

A sharp, spicy smell wafted from the kitchen and tickled her nostrils, yanking her out of her reverie. “So,” Armanoush exclaimed, turning toward the most talkative of her three aunts, “are you going to stay for dinner?”

“Only briefly, honey,” Auntie Varsenig murmured. “I need to leave for the airport soon; the twins are coming back today. I just stopped by to bring you guys homemade
mantı
and”—Auntie Varsenig beamed with pride—“guess what? We got
bastırma
from Yerevan!”

“Gosh, I’m not eating
mantı
and I’m definitely not going to eat
bastırma.
” Armanoush frowned. “I can’t reek of garlic tonight.”

“No problem. If you brush your teeth and chew a mint gum there will be no smell whatsoever.”

That was Auntie Zarouhi walking in with a plate of
musaqqa,
beautifully garnished with parsley and slices of lemon. She left the plate on the table and opened her arms wide to embrace her niece. Armanoush embraced her back wondering all the while what was
she
doing here . . . ? But she started to get the picture. What a well-planned “coincidence” it was that the whole Tchakhmakhchian family had materialized at Grandma Shushan’s house at the same time Armanoush would be going on her date. Everyone here had shown up with a different pretext but exactly the same purpose: They wanted to see, test, and judge with their own eyes this Matt Hassinger, the lucky young man who would be dating the apple of their eye this evening.

Armanoush looked at her relatives with a stare that bordered on desperate. What could she do? How could she be independent when they were so frighteningly close? How could she convince them that they didn’t have to worry so much about her when they had had so much in life to worry about? How could she break free from her genetic heritage, especially when a part of her was so proud of it? How could she fight off the kindness of her loved ones? Could goodness be fought?

“That’s not going to help!” Armanoush gasped. “No toothpaste, no chewing gum, not even those awful minty mouthwashes— there is nothing on earth strong enough to suppress the smell of
bastırma.
It takes a week to finally disappear. If you eat
bastırma
you smell and sweat and breathe
bastırma
for days on end. Even your pee smells like
bastırma
!”

“What’s peeing got to do with dating?” Armanoush heard a befuddled Auntie Varsenig whisper to Auntie Surpun as soon as she had turned her back.

Still protesting but unwilling to squabble with them, Armanoush headed to the bathroom, only to find Uncle Dikran there, his head inside the cabinet under the sink, his bulky body on hands and knees.

“Uncle?” Armanoush almost let out a shriek.

“Hellooo!” Dikran Stamboulian hooted from the cabinet.

“This house is full of Chekhovian characters,” Armanoush muttered to herself.

“If you say so,” echoed a voice from under the sink.

“Uncle, what are you doing?”

“Your grandma always complains about the old faucets in the house, you know. So this evening I said to myself, why don’t I close the store early, stop by Shushan’s house, and repair those damn pipes?”

“Yeah, I can see,” Armanoush remarked, suppressing a smile. “Where is she, by the way?”

“She’s taking a nap,” Dikran said, worming his way out of the cabinet to get the pipe bender and crawling back inside. “Old age—what you gonna do?—body needs sleep! She will be awake before seven thirty, though, don’t worry.”

Seven thirty! It looked like every person in the family had set a biological alarm for the moment Matt Hassinger would ring the bell.

“Give me the smooth jaw wrench, will you?” came a frustrated voice. “This one doesn’t seem to be working.”

Armanoush pouted at the bag on the floor, in which glinted over a hundred tools of all sizes. She handed him a chain tong, a pipe reamer, and an HTP300 hydrostatic test pump before she chanced upon the smooth jaw wrench. Inauspiciously, that wrench too turned out to be “not working.” Seeing the impossibility of taking a shower with Uncle Dikran the Impossible Plumber on the job, Armanoush moved toward her grandma’s bedroom, opened the door slightly, and peeked inside. There she was sleeping lightly but with the blissful placidity found only in elderly women who are surrounded by their children and grandchildren. An elfin woman who had always had a flimsy body and too much to shoulder, she had been shortened and slimmed down by old age. As she had aged she had grown more and more in need of some sleep during the day. At night, however, she was as awake as ever. Old age had not diminished Shushan’s insomnia one tiny bit. The past didn’t let her rest for too long, her family thought; it allowed her only these fleeting catnaps. Armanoush closed the door and let her sleep.

The table was ready when she returned to the living room. They had also set a plate for her. She wondered how she could possibly be expected to eat if she was going to have a date in less than an hour, but preferred not to ask. To be too reasonable in this family would be a blunder. She could nibble a little so that everyone would be happy. Besides, she liked this cuisine. Her mother in Arizona wanted to keep Armenian cuisine as far from the borders of her kitchen as possible, and profoundly enjoyed vilifying it to her neighbors and friends. She was especially fond of drawing attention to two dishes, which she publicly disparaged on every available occasion: cooked calf’s feet and stuffed intestines. Armanoush recalled how Rose once complained to Mrs. Grinnell, the next-door neighbor.

“Gross,” Mrs. Grinnell exclaimed with a trace of disgust creeping into her voice. “Do they really eat the intestines?”

“Oh yeah.” Rose nodded heartily. “Believe me, they do. They spice it up with garlic and herbs, stuff it with rice, and wolf it down.”

The two women unleashed a condescending snicker and would have probably snickered some more if at that moment Armanoush’s stepfather had not turned toward them and, with a jaded look on his face, remarked: “What’s the big deal? That sounds just like
mumbar.
You should try it sometime, it’s really good.”

“Is he Armenian too?” Mrs. Grinnell whispered when Mustafa left the room.

“Of course not,” Rose said, her voice trailing off. “It’s just that they have some things in common.”

The doorbell rang shrilly, snatching Armanoush out of her trance and making everyone else jump in panic. It was not even seven o’clock yet. Punctuality, apparently, wasn’t one of Matt Hassinger’s merits. As if a button had been pressed, all three aunts scampered to the door only to stop short of opening it. Uncle Dikran hit his head on the cupboard he was still working in and Grandma Shushan opened her eyes in fright. Only Armanoush remained calm and composed. In intentionally measured steps she walked to the door under the fixed gaze of her aunts and opened it.

“Daddy!!!” Armanoush fluted with delight. “I thought you had a meeting this evening. How come you’re home so early?”

But before she reached the end of her question, Armanoush had already sensed the answer.

Barsam Tchakhmakhchian smiled his soft dimpled smile and hugged his daughter, his eyes glimmering with pride and traces of anxiety. “Yeah, but it didn’t work out, we had to reschedule the meeting,” he said to Armanoush. As soon as she was beyond ear-shot, he whispered to his sisters: “Is he here yet?”

The last thirty minutes before Matt Hassinger’s arrival were marked with escalating apprehension on the part of everyone but Armanoush. They made her put on several dresses and parade around in each one, until they unilaterally reached a decision: the turquoise dress. The outfit was completed with earrings that matched, a burgundy beaded purse that Auntie Varsenig claimed would add a feminine touch, and a fluffy dark blue cardigan, just in case it got cold. That was one other thing Armanoush knew she should not question. Somehow the world outside the family house had an arctic character in the eyes of the Tchakhmakhchians. “Outside” meant “chilly land,” and to visit it, you had to take your cardigan, preferably handwoven. This she partly knew from her childhood, having spent her early years under the downy blankets Grandma knit for her with her initials stitched at the edges. To go to sleep without anything covering your body was simply unthinkable, and going out into the street without a cardigan would be a blunder. Just like a house needed a roof above its head, human beings too needed an additional skin between them and the rest of the world so that they could feel safe and warm.

Once Armanoush agreed to put on her cardigan and the dressing part was over, they came forth with another demand, one that was fundamentally paradoxical but not to the Tchakhmakhchians. They wanted her to sit with them at the table and eat, so that she could be ready and strong for tonight’s dinner.

“But honey you are just nibbling like a bird. Don’t tell me you are not even going to taste my
mantı
?” Auntie Varsenig wailed with a scoop in her hand and such severe dismay in her dark brown eyes that it made Armanoush wonder if something far more life-and-death than a bowl of
mantı
was concerned.