The Bastard of Istanbul (20 page)

Though saddened and offended by her stepson’s acrimony, Petite-Ma was an exuberant, extroverted girl with a wide imagination and an even wider list of requests. There were things in this world far more interesting than nursing babies, such as learning the piano. Before long, a Bentley piano made by Stroud Piano Co., Ltd., in England was gleaming in the best spot in the living room. It was with this piano that Petite-Ma started taking her first lessons from her first piano teacher—a white Russian musician who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution and settled permanently in Istanbul. Petite-Ma was his best student. She not only had the talent but also the perseverance to make the piano a lifelong companion rather than a fleeting pastime.

Rachmaninoff, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky were her favorites. Whenever she was alone at home, playing just for herself with Pasha the First on her lap, these were the composers whose works she would perform. When she played for guests, however, she’d choose songs from an entirely different repertoire. A Western repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and above all, Wagner, on those special occasions when they had government officials and their dainty wives as guests. After supper the men would gather near the fireplace with drinks in their hands to discuss world politics. The late 1920s were the years when national politics could only be either venerated or reaffirmed, the louder the better since the walls had ears. Accordingly, whenever there emerged a need for genuine discussion, the new Turkish Republic’s political and cultural elite instantly switched to world politics, which was a mess on its own and thereby always interesting to talk about.

Meanwhile, the ladies clustered at the other end of the house, holding crystal glasses of mint liquor, eyeing one another’s clothes. In the ladies section there were two types of women, starkly different from each other: the professionals and the wives.

The professionals were the comrade-women, the epitome of
the new Turkish female
: idealized, glorified, and championed by the reformist elite. These women constituted the new professionals— lawyers, teachers, judges, managers, clerks, academics. . . . Unlike their mothers they were not confined to the house and had the chance to climb the social, economic, and cultural ladder, provided that they shed their sexuality and femininity on the way there. More often than not they wore two-piece suits in browns, blacks, and grays—the colors of chastity, modesty, and partisanship. They had short haircuts, no makeup, no accessories. They moved in defeminized, desexualized bodies. And whenever the wives giggled in that annoyingly feminine way of theirs, the professionals tightened their fingers around the small, leather purses under their arms, as if they had some top-secret information in them and had given their word of honor to protect it no matter what. The wives, conversely, came to these invitations wearing satin evening gowns in whites, pasty pinks, and pastel blues—the hues of ladylikeness, innocence, and vulnerability. They didn’t like the professionals very much, whom they regarded more as “comrades” than women, and the professionals didn’t like them, whom they regarded more as “concubines” than women. In the end nobody found anyone “woman” enough.

Each time the tension between the comrades and the concubines intensified, Petite-Ma, who identified herself with neither group, secretly gestured to the maid to serve mint liquor in crystal glasses and almond paste sweets on silver plates. This duo, she had discovered, was the only thing that could soothe the nerves of every single Turkish woman in the room, no matter which camp she was in.

Late into the party, Rıza Selim Kazancı would call his wife and ask her to play the piano for the honored guests. Petite-Ma never refused. In addition to Western composers, she played national anthems exuding patriotic fervor. The guests cheered and applauded. Particularly in the year 1933, when the anthem of the Tenth Anniversary was composed, “March of the Republic,” she had to play it over and over again. The anthem was everywhere, echoing in their ears when they slept. It was a time when even babies in their cradles were put to sleep with this hearty rhythm.

Consequently, at a time when Turkish women were going through a radical transformation in the public sphere thanks to a series of social reforms, Petite-Ma was savoring her own independence within the private sphere of her home. Though her interest in the piano never diminished, it didn’t take Petite-Ma too long to come up with a list of new diversions. Hence in the years to follow, she would learn French, pen never-to-be-published short stories, excel in different techniques of oil painting, doll herself up in shiny shoes and satin ball gowns, drag her husband to dances, throw crazy parties, and never do a day of housework. Whatever his perky wife asked for, Rıza Selim Kazancı complied with fully. He was usually a composed man with a lot of esteem for others and a profound sense of justice. However, like too many made out of a similar mold, he could not be mended once broken. Consequently, there was one topic that brought the bad side out in him: his first wife.

Even years later whenever Petite-Ma happened to ask him anything about his first wife, Rıza Selim Kazancı drifted into silence, his eyes shadowed by an uncharacteristic gloom. “What kind of a woman can abandon her son?” he said, his face crumpling with detestation.

“But don’t you want to know what happened to her?” Petite-Ma inched closer and sat on her husband’s lap, caressing his chin softly, as if to cajole him into facing the question.

“I have no interest in learning that slut’s fate.” Rıza Selim Kazancı stiffened, without caring to lower his voice so that Levent wouldn’t hear him smear his mother.

“Did she run away with someone else?” Petite-Ma insisted, knowing she was surpassing her limits but confident that she could not fully know what her limits were until she had surpassed them.

“Why are you poking your nose into things that are none of your business?” Rıza Selim Kazancı snapped in reply. “Are you interested in repeating the act or what?”

With that Petite-Ma learned what her limits were.

Except for the moments when the topic of the first wife came up, their life flowed tranquilly in the years that followed. Comfortable and contented. Unusual indeed given that the families around them were anything but. Their contentment was a source of envy for relatives and friends and neighbors. They would meddle in whenever they could. The most suitable topic to pick on was the couple’s childlessness. Many tried to persuade Rıza Selim Kazancı to marry another woman before it was too late. Since under the new civil law men could no longer have more than one wife, he would have to divorce this wife of his who, by now everybody suspected, was either barren or bolshie. Rıza Selim Kazancı turned a deaf ear to such counsels.

On the day he died, a totally unexpected death common to generations of Kazancı men, Petite-Ma came to believe in the evil eye for the first time in her life. She was convinced that it was the gaze of the jealous people around them that had pierced through the walls of this otherwise blissful
konak
and killed her husband.

Today she barely remembered any of that. As her creased, bony fingers caressed the old piano, Petite-Ma’s days with Rıza Selim Kazancı flickered from a distance like a dim, ancient lighthouse misguiding her through the stormy waters of Alzheimer’s.

On a divan in a renovated apartment facing the Galata Tower, a neighborhood where the streets never slept and the cobblestones knew many secrets, under the rays of the sunset reflecting from the glass windows of decrepit buildings and amid the squeals of the seagulls, Asya Kazancı sat nude and still, like a statuette absorbing the talent of the artist who had carved her out of a block of marble. As her mind drifted into fantasyland, so did the thick smoke she had just inhaled coil inside her body, burning her lungs, elating her spirits until she finally exhaled it slowly, reluctantly.

“What are you pondering, sweetheart?”

“I am working on Article Eight of my Personal Manifesto of Nihilism,” Asya replied as she opened her foggy eyes.

Asya took another drag, and held the smoke in.

“Here, let me feed you,” said the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, taking the joint from her hands. He leaned toward her, his hairy chest pressing against her; she opened her mouth like a blind baby bird ready to be fed. He blew the stream of smoke directly into her mouth; she inhaled it eagerly as if thirstily drinking water.

They repeated the act, he directing the smoke into her mouth, she taking it in again and again, until the last puff of smoke that had disappeared down her throat was released.

“I bet you are feeling better now,” cooed the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, his face reflecting his desire for more sex. “There is no cure better than a good screw and a good joint.”

Asya bit the inside of her mouth to fight back the urge to raise objections. Instead, she tilted her head toward the open window and stretched her arms as though she were about to embrace the whole city, with all its chaos and splendor.

He in the meantime was busy perfecting his statement: “Let’s see. There is nothing so overrated as a bad fuck and nothing so underrated as a good—”

“Shit.” Asya lent a hand.

Nodding heartily, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist stood up with only his silken boxers on and his slight beer belly exposed. He lolloped toward the CD player to put on a song, which happened to be one of her all-time Johnny Cash favorites: “Hurt.” Swinging with the opening rhythm of the song, he walked back, his eyes all glittery:
I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel .
. .

Asya scrunched up her face like she had just been pinched by an invisible needle. “It’s such a pity. . . .”

“What is a pity, sweetheart?”

She stared at him with widely opened troubled eyes that seemed to belong to someone three times her age. “It sucks,” she groaned. “These managers and organizers, whatever they are called, they organize European tours or Asian tours or even hurrah-perestroika-Soviet Union tours . . . but if you are a music fan in Istanbul you do not fit into any geographical definition. We fall through the cracks. You know, the only reason why we don’t have as many concerts as we’d like to is the geostrategic position of Istanbul.”

“Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East.” He chuckled. “It’s no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity.”

But high above the clouds, Asya didn’t hear him. She lit another joint and put it between her chapped lips. She drew a deep puff of indifference, ignoring afterward the feeling of his fingers on her skin, his tongue on her tongue.

“There had to be a way to reach Johnny Cash before he passed away. I mean the guy
had
to come to Istanbul, he died without knowing he had die-hard fans here. . . .”

The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist broke into a soft smile. He kissed the little mole on her left cheek, caressed her neck gently, until his hands started moving down to her abundant breasts, cupping them each in his hands. The kiss was brash, unhurried, but also woven with a shade of force, if not ferocity. With shimmering eyes he asked, “When are we meeting again?”

“Whenever we both run into each other in Café Kundera, I guess.” Asya shrugged, pulling herself away from him. When she withdrew, he came closer.

“But when are we meeting here in my house?”

“You mean
when are we meeting here in my cathouse
?” Asya spit out, no longer fighting back the urge to backbite. “Because as we both know too well, this is not your home! Home is where your wife of so many years is, whereas this place is your secret cathouse where you can imbibe and get laid without your wife knowing a thing. This is where you screw your
chicks.
The younger, the shallower, the tipsier, the better!”

The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist sighed and grabbed his glass of
rakı.
He drank half in one gulp. His face was marred with a desolation so intense that for a second Asya feared he would either yell at her or start to sob, she could not imagine that much hurt remaining calm. Instead, he muttered in a hoary voice, “You can be so cruel sometimes.”

There was an eerie silence in the room, muffled by the screams of the children playing soccer on the street outside. From the pitch of the screams it sounded like one of the boys had just been shown a red card and all the players on his team were now busy arguing with the referee, whoever that was.

“You have such a dark side, Asya,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist’s voice came from a distance. “Because it doesn’t show on your sweet face, it is hard to tell at first glance. But it is there. You have a bottomless potential for demolition.”

“Well, I do not
demolish
anyone, do I?” Asya felt the need to defend herself. “All I want is to be free and to be myself and all that shit. . . . If only I could be left on my own . . .”

“If only you could be left on your own so that you could destroy yourself faster and earlier. . . . Is that what you want? You are attracted to self-destruction like a moth is attracted to light.”

Asya snorted a tense chuckle.

“When you drink you drink to extremes, when you criticize you bulldoze, when you get down you sink and hit the bottom. I honestly don’t know how to approach you. You are so full of rage, baby. . . .”

“Perhaps it’s because I was born a bastard,” remarked Asya, taking another puff. “I don’t even know who my father is. I never ask, they never tell. Sometimes when my mother looks at me I think she sees him in my face but never says a word. We all pretend there is no such thing as
father.
Instead there is only
Father,
with a capital
F.
When you have Allah up there in the sky to look after you, who needs a father? Aren’t we all His children? Not that my mother buys that crap. I tell you she is more cynical than any woman I’ve ever known. And that is precisely where the problem is. My mom and I, we are so alike and yet so distant.”