The Bastard of Istanbul (29 page)

Asya, however, did not let the excitement wane. “Did you know that Armanoush’s family was Istanbulite?” she said in between chomping on two almonds.

“They were made to suffer all sorts of pain in 1915. Many died during the deportations—died of hunger, fatigue, brutality. . . .”

Pure silence. No comment. Asya pulled the strings a bit tighter under the concerned gaze of the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist.

“But her great-grandfather was killed before all that, mainly because”—Asya turned to face Armanoush, though her next statement was directed less at her than at the members of the group— “he was an intellectual!” She sipped her wine slowly. “The thing is, the Armenian intelligentsia were the first to be executed so that the community would be left without its leading brains.”

It didn’t take long for the silence to be broken.

“That didn’t happen.” The Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies shook his head vigorously. “We never heard of anything like that.” He took a puff on his pipe and amid the swirling smoke looked Armanoush in the eye, his voice now dwindling into a compassionate whisper. “Look, I am very sorry for your family, I offer you my condolences. But you have to understand it was a time of war. People died on both sides. Do you have any idea how many Turks have died in the hands of Armenian rebels? Did you ever think about the other side of the story? I’ll bet you didn’t! How about the suffering of the Turkish families? It is all tragic but we need to understand that 1915 was not 2005. Times were different back then. It was not even a Turkish state back then, it was the Ottoman Empire, for God’s sake. The premodern era and its premodern tragedies.”

Armanoush pressed her lips together so hard that they paled. She had so many counterarguments, she didn’t quite know where to begin. How she wished Baron Baghdassarian were here and could hear all this.

Armanoush’s pause was instantly filled by Asya’s interruption: “Oh yeah? I thought you weren’t nationalist!”

“I’m not!” the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies exclaimed, raising his voice a couple of octaves. To keep his temper, he began to stroke his beard. “But I do respect historical truths.”

“People have been brainwashed,” his new girlfriend rallied in an attempt to both support her lover and take revenge for the tattoo discussion.

Asya and Armanoush now exchanged looks. Within that fleeting moment the waiter appeared again and replaced the empty carafe of wine with a new one.

“Well, how do you know? Maybe you too have been brainwashed, ” Armanoush said slowly.

“Yeah, what do you know?” Asya echoed. “What do we know about 1915? How many books have you read on this topic? How many controversial standpoints did you compare and contrast? What research, which literature? . . . I bet you’ve read nothing! But you are so convinced. Aren’t we just swallowing what’s given to us? Capsules of information, capsules of misinformation. Every day we swallow a handful.”

“I agree, the capitalist system nullifies our feelings and curtails our imagination,” the Exceptionally Untalented Poet broke in. “This system is responsible for the disenchantment of the world. Only poetry can save us.”

“Look,” the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies replied. “Unlike many other people in Turkey, I have done a lot of research on this issue due to my job. I write scenarios for historical movies. I read history all the time. So I talk like this not because I have heard it elsewhere or because I have been misinformed. Quite the opposite! I talk as someone who has done meticulous research on the topic.” He paused to take a sip of his wine. “The claims of the Armenians are based on exaggeration and distortion. Come on, some go as far as claiming that we killed two million Armenians. No historian in his right mind would take that seriously.”

“Even one is too many,” Asya snapped back.

The waiter rematerialized with a new carafe in his hand and a concerned expression on his face. He made a gesture to the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist: “Do you want to keep ordering?” In return he was given the thumbs-up. Having long finished his three beers and loyal to his decision to have only that amount, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist had by this time switched to wine.

“Let me tell you something, Asya,” the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies said while refilling his glass. “You know about the infamous Salem witch trials, don’t you? The interesting thing is that almost all the women accused of witchcraft had made similar confessions, shown common symptoms, including fainting at the same time. . . . Were they lying? No! Were they pretending? No! They were suffering from collective hysteria.”

“What does that mean?” Armanoush asked, barely able to control her anger.

“Yeah, what the hell does that mean?” Asya chimed in, without controlling her anger.

The scenarist allowed a tired smile to cross his grim features. “There is such a thing as collective hysteria. I’m not saying that the Armenians are hysterical or anything, don’t get me wrong. It is a scientifically known fact that collectivities are capable of manipulating their individual members’ beliefs, thoughts, and even bodily reactions. You keep hearing a certain story over and over again, and the next thing you know you have internalized the narrative. From that moment on it ceases to be someone else’s story. It is not even a story anymore, but reality,
your
reality!”

“It’s like being under a spell,” remarked the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.

Running a hand through her hair, Asya slouched back in her chair, puffed some smoke, and said, “Let me tell you what hysteria is. All those scripts you’ve penned thus far, the whole series of
Timur the Lionheart
—the muscular, herculean Turk running from one adventure to another against the idiot Byzantine. That’s what I call hysteria. And once you make it into a TV show and make millions
internalize
your awful message, it becomes collective hysteria.”

This time it was the Closeted-Gay Columnist who broke in. “Yes, all those vulgarly macho Turkish heroes you created to ridicule the effeminacy of the enemy are signs of authoritarianism.”

“What’s wrong with you people?” the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies asked, his lower lip quivering in rage. “You guys know so well I do not believe in that crap. You know those shows are just for entertainment.”

Armanoush did her very best to change the mood. Though she knew Baron Baghdassarian would strongly disagree, she believed increasing the tension did not help the recognition of the genocide. “That frame over there,” she pointed to the wall. “You know that carroty-framed road picture over there is from Arizona. That’s a road my mom and I used to take many times when I was a kid.”

“Arizona,” the Exceptionally Untalented Poet muttered, and sighed as if the name implied a utopialand for him, some sort of Shangri-la.

But Asya was not going to let it go. “But that’s the thing,” she said. “What you have been doing is even worse. If you believed in what you were doing, if you had the foggiest faith in those movies, I would still question your standpoint, but at least not your sincerity. You write those screenplays for the masses. You write and sell and earn huge amounts of money. And then you come here, take cover in this intellectual café, and join us to mock those movies. Hypocrisy!”

Color drained from the scenarist’s face, leaving his expression hard and his eyes almost glacial. “Who do you think you are to tell me about hypocrisy, Miss Bastard? Why don’t you go and rummage around for your
papa
instead of plaguing me here?”

He reached for his wine glass but there actually was no need since by this time a glass of wine was reaching out for him: The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist jumped to his feet, grabbed a wine glass, and threw it at the scenarist, just missing. The glass hit a frame on the wall, spilling wine all over, but surprisingly it did not break. Having failed to hit his target, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist rolled up his sleeves.

Though barely half the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist’s size, and just as drunk, the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies managed to dodge the first blow. He then quickly retreated to a corner, keeping an eye on the exit.

He didn’t see it coming. The Closeted-Gay Columnist bolted from his chair and darted to the corner with the carafe in his hand. In next to no time the scenarist was on the floor with blood oozing from his forehead. Pressing a bloody napkin to his head like a war casualty, he stared first at the columnist, next at the cartoonist, and then at an oblique angle.

But after all, Café Kundera is a comfy, dreary intellectual café where the rhythm of life is, for better or worse, never disrupted. This is no place for a drunken brawl. Even before the scenarist’s forehead stopped bleeding, everyone else at the café had gone back to what they were doing before the interruption—some grimacing, some chatting over wine or coffee, and some others drifting into the framed photos on the walls.

I
t is almost dawn, a short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. It is the only time in which it is still possible to find solace in dreams and yet too late to build them anew.

If there is an eye in the seventh sky, a Celestial Gaze watching each and every one from way up high, He would have had to keep Istanbul under surveillance for quite some time to get a sense of who did what behind closed doors and who, if any, uttered profanities. To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in the hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour. From where the Celestial Gaze is situated, from that high above, all these sporadically lit bulbs must seem in perfect harmony, constantly flickering, as if coding a cryptic message to God.

Apart from the scattered twinkles, it is still densely dark in Istanbul. Whether along the grimy, narrow streets snaking the oldest quarters, in the modern apartment buildings cramming the newly built districts, or throughout the fancy suburbs, people are fast asleep. All but some.

Some Istanbulites have, as usual, awakened earlier than others. The
imams
all around the city, for instance; the young and the old, the mellow-voiced and the not-so-mellow-voiced, the
imams
of the copious mosques are the first ones to wake up, ready to call the believers to morning prayer. Then there are the
simit
vendors. They too are awake, headed to their respective bakeries to pick up the crispy sesame bagels they will be selling all day long. Accordingly, the bakers are awake too. Most of them get only a few hours of sleep before they start work, while others never sleep at night. Every day without exception, the bakers heat their ovens in the middle of the night, so that before dawn, the bakeries in the city are thick with the delicious smell of bread.

The cleaning ladies are also awake. These women, of all ages, get up early to take at least two or three different buses to arrive at the houses of the well-off, where they will scrub, clean, and polish all day long. It is a different world here. The wealthy women always wear makeup and never show their age. Unlike the husbands of the cleaning ladies, the husbands in suburbia are always busy, surprisingly polite, and somewhat effeminate. Time is not a scarce commodity in suburbia. People use it as lavishly and freely as hot water.

It is dawn now. The city is a gummy, almost gelatinous entity at this moment, an amorphous shape half-liquid, half-solid.

To the Celestial Gaze up in the sky, the Kazancı domicile must seem like a glittering sphere of sullied sparklers amid the shadows of the night. Most of its rooms are dark and quiet now, but a few are lit.

One of the Kazancı residents awake at this hour is Armanoush. She woke up early and instantly went online, eager to tell the members of the Café Constantinopolis about the shocking incident of the day before. She told them about the bohemian circles in Istanbul and then about the quarrel, summarizing every character and detail she took in at Café Kundera. Now she is giving them a full description of the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, adding how he had found a new function for the wine at the table.

That cartoonist sounds fun, writes Anti-Khavurma. So you are saying he might go to prison for drawing the prime minister as a wolf? Humor is serious biz in Turkey!

Yeah, the guy seems cool, Lady Peacock/Siramark agrees. Tell us more about him.

But apparently someone has an entirely dissimilar interpretation of the incident.

Come on, guys, there is nothing cool or that interesting either in him or in any other character at that dingy cafe. Don’t you see, they are all faces and names from the bohemian, avant-gardist, arty-farty side of Istanbul. Typical third world country elite who hate themselves more than anything else in the world.

Armanoush winced at this sharp message from Baron Baghdassarian and looked around.

Asya is asleep on the other side of the room with Sultan the Fifth curled up on her chest, a pair of headphones on her head, and an open book in her hand:
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority,
by Emmanuel Levinas. There is also a CD case next to Asya’s bed—Johnny Cash dressed from head to toe in black, erect against a gray, gloomy sky with a dog on one side of him and a cat on the other, staring dourly at something far beyond the frame. Asya has slept with the Walkman set on constant replay. She is her mother’s daughter in this respect as well, perfectly capable of battling all sorts of voices but unable to cope with silence.

Armanoush cannot make out the lyrics from where she is, but she can hear the rhythm spinning round. She enjoys hearing Cash’s baritone voice pour into the room from the headphones, just as she enjoys listening to the various sounds circulating inside and outside: the morning prayers echoing from the distant mosques; the clatter of the milkman as he leaves milk bottles in front of the grocery store across the street; the surprisingly cadenced breathing of Sultan the Fifth and Asya, a whistlelike fusion of snores and purrs, though it is not always easy to tell who does which; and the sound of Armanoush’s fingertips as they move on the keyboard searching for the best response to give to Baron Baghdassarian. It is almost morning, and although Armanoush hasn’t had enough sleep, she feels elated, with the sense of triumph that comes after defeating sleep.