The Bastard of Istanbul (36 page)

All my life I wanted to be pastless. Being a bastard is less about having no father than having no past . . . and now here you are asking me to own the past and apologize for a mythical father!

There came no answer, but Asya didn’t seem to be waiting for one. She kept typing as if her fingers acted on their own, as if she were navigating with eyes closed.

Yet, perhaps it is exactly my being without a past that will eventually help me to sympathize with your attachment to history. I can recognize the significance of continuity in human memory. I can do that . . . and I do apologize for all the sufferings my ancestors have caused your ancestors.

Anti-Khavurma wasn’t content. It really doesn’t mean much if you apologize to us, he cut in. Apologize aloud in front of the Turkish state.

Oh come on! all of a sudden Armanoush had pulled the keyboard toward her and wrote, unable to resist the temptation to interject. It’s Madame My-Exiled-Soul, here. What is that gonna do other than get her into trouble?”

She has to go thru that trouble if she is sincere! Anti-Khavurma blew up.

But before anyone could respond to that came a most unexpected comment.

Well, the truth is, dear Madame My-Exiled-Soul and dear A Girl Named Turk . . . some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they’ll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.

It was Baron Baghdassarian.

“They still aren’t sleeping,” Auntie Feride paced left and right outside the girls’ room. “Is there something wrong?”

The older women had gone to sleep, and so had Auntie Cevriye, as a disciplined teacher. Auntie Zeliha had passed out on the couch.

“Why don’t you go to sleep, sister, and let me guard their door to make sure they are all right.” Auntie Banu squeezed her sister’s shoulder. Now and then, whenever her illness escalated, Auntie Feride panicked about the possible harm that might come from anyone or anything in the outside world.

“Let me take the night shift,” Auntie Banu smiled. “You go to bed and sleep. Don’t forget that your mind is a stranger at nights. Don’t talk to strangers.”

“Yes.” Auntie Feride nodded, and for a moment she seemed like a little girl stirred by a tale. Now visibly relaxed, she shuffled toward her room.

As soon as they had logged off Armanoush checked her watch. It was time to give her mother a call. This week she had called her every day at the same time, and each time Rose had scolded her for not calling more often. Trying not to be distressed about this unvarying pattern, she dialed the number and waited for her mom to pick up.

“Amy!!!” Rose’s voice escalated into a shriek. “Honey, is it you?”

“Yes, Mom. How are you doing?”

“How am I doing? How am I doing?!” Rose repeated, now sounding bewildered and her voice muffled. “I need to hang up now, but you promise, you promise me, you will call me back in ten . . . no, no, ten isn’t enough, in fifteen minutes exactly. I need to hang up and collect my thoughts now and then I will wait for your call. Promise me, promise me,” Rose echoed hysterically.

“Okay, Mom, I promise,” Armanoush stammered. “Mom, are you all right? What’s happening?” But Rose had already gone.

Stunned, pale, and desolately holding the phone, Armanoush looked at Asya. “My mother asked me to call back later instead of asking me why I hadn’t called before. It’s so unlike her. This is so not her.”

“Please relax.” Asya shifted in her bed, popping her head up from under the blanket. “Maybe she was driving or something and couldn’t talk on the phone.”

But Armanoush shook her head, a fretful shadow crossing her face. “Oh God, there’s something wrong. Something’s very wrong.”

Her eyes swollen from crying, her nose miserably red, Rose reached out for a paper towel as she broke into tears. She always bought the same paper towels from the same store: strong, absorbent Sparkle. The company produced these in different styles and Rose’s favorite was called
My Destination.
Printed on the towels were pictures of seashells, fish, and boats, all in blue, and among them swam the following words: I CAN’T CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF THE WIND, BUT I CAN ADJUST MY SAILS TO ALWAYS REACH MY DESTINATION.

Rose liked this slogan. Besides, the azure tint of the printed images perfectly matched the color of the tiles in her kitchen, the part of the house she was particularly proud of. Despite her initial fondness, once they had purchased the house, Rose had lost no time in remodeling the kitchen, adding pull-out shelves, placing a thirty-six -bottle lacquered-top wine rack in the corner—though neither she nor Mustafa were drinkers—and decorating the entire room with oak swivel stools. Now as she felt a surge of panic, it was onto one of those stools that she dropped her body.

“Oh my God, we’ve got fifteen minutes. What are we gonna tell her? We’ve only got fifteen minutes to decide,” she cried to Mustafa.

“Rose, darling, will you please calm down,” Mustafa said as he rose from his chair. He didn’t like the stools and instead kept two solid-wood honey pine dining chairs in the kitchen, one for him and the other for him too. He approached his wife and held her hand, in the hope of laying her worries to rest. “You will be calm, very calm, you understand? And you will calmly ask her where she is right now. This is the first thing you need to ask her, OK?”

“What if she doesn’t tell me?” Rose said.

“She will. You ask her nicely, she’ll tell you nicely.” Mustafa spoke slowly. “But no scolding. You need to keep your cool. Here, have some water.”

Rose took the glass with trembling hands. “Is that possible? My little girl has lied to me! How stupid of me to trust her. All this time I think she’s in San Francisco with her grandma and then it turns out she’s lied to everyone . . . and now her grandma . . . oh, God, how am I gonna tell her?”

The day before when they were both in the kitchen, she making pancakes, he reading the
Arizona Daily Star,
the phone rang. Rose picked up the phone with the spatula in her hand. The call was from San Francisco. Her ex-husband, Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, was on the line.

How many years had they spent without exchanging a word? After their divorce they had been forced to communicate often concerning their baby girl. But then, as Armanoush had grown up, their talks had become rare and then ceased entirely. Of their brief marriage, only two things remained: mutual resentment and a daughter.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Rose,” Barsam said with a smooth yet drained voice. “But it is an emergency. I need to talk to my daughter.”

“
Our
daughter,” Rose corrected tartly, and as soon as the words had come out of her mouth she instantly regretted her bitterness.

“Rose, please, I need to give Armanoush some bad news. Will you please call her to the phone? She is not answering her cell phone. I had to call her here.”

“Wait . . . wait—isn’t she
there
?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t she there in San Francisco with you?” Rose’s lips quivered with panic.

Barsam wondered if his ex-wife was playing games. He tried not to sound irritated. “No, Rose, she decided to go back to Arizona. She is spending the spring break there.”

“Oh my God!! But she is not here! Where is my baby?! Where is she?!” Rose started to sob, falling into one of those anxiety attacks she thought she had long ago left in the past.

“Rose, will you please calm down? I don’t know what’s going on, but I am sure there is an explanation. I trust Armanoush with all my heart. She won’t do anything wrong. When did you last speak with her?”

“Yesterday, she calls every day—from San Francisco!”

Barsam paused. He didn’t tell her that Armanoush had been calling him too, although from
Arizona.
“That’s good, it means she is fine. We need to trust her. She is an intelligent, dependable girl, you know that. Next time she calls just tell her to give me a call. Tell her it is urgent. You got that, Rose? Will you do that?”

“Oh my God!” Rose started to cry louder. But then all of a sudden it occurred to her to ask: “Barsam, you said there was bad news. What is it?”

“Oh . . .” A heavy pause. “It’s my mom . . .” He could not finish his sentence.

“Just tell Armanoush that Grandma Shushan has died in her sleep. She did not wake up this morning.”

Fifteen minutes had never passed so slowly. Armanoush paced the room under the worried gaze of Asya. Finally, it was time to give her mom another call. This time Rose picked up the phone instantly.

“Amy, I will ask you just one question and you will tell me the truth; you promise you’ll tell me the truth.”

Armanoush felt a wave of worry well up in her stomach.

“Where are you?” Rose rasped, her voice breaking. “You lied to us! You are not in San Francisco, you are not in Arizona, where are you?”

Armanoush swallowed hard. “Mom, I’m in Istanbul.”

“What?!”

“Mom, I’ll tell you everything but please calm down.”

Rose’s eyes sparkled with pure indignation. How she hated to hear everyone telling her to calm down.

“Mother, I am terribly sorry for worrying you so much. I should never have done this. I am so sorry, but there is nothing to worry about, believe me.”

Rose put her hand over the phone. “My baby is in Istanbul!” she said to her husband with a hint of a reprimand as if this were his fault. Then she yelled into the receiver: “What the hell are you doing there?”

“Actually, I am staying at your mother-in-law’s house. It is a wonderful family.”

Flabbergasted, Rose turned again to Mustafa and this time scolded harder: “She is staying with
your
family.”

Then, before an ashen and alarmed Mustafa Kazancı could put in a word, she said, “We are coming there. Don’t disappear anywhere. We are coming. And don’t you ever turn off your cell phone again!” With that she hung up.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mustafa squeezed his wife’s arm, harder than he intended. “I am not going anywhere.”

“Yes, you are going,” Rose said. “
We
are going. My only daughter is in
Istanbul
!!!” she screamed, as if it meant Armanoush had been taken hostage.

“I cannot leave my job now.”

“You can take a few days off. And if you don’t, I will go alone,” Rose, or someone who looked like Rose, snapped. “We will go there, make sure she is safe, pick her up, and bring her back home.”

Late that night when they were about to go to sleep the Kazancıs’ phone rang.

“
Inshallah
it is nothing bad,” Petite-Ma whispered from her bed, a rosary in her hand, a shadow of anxiety on her face. She reached out for the glass of water with her false teeth inside and, still praying, took a sip. Only water could quell fear.

Still awake, it was Auntie Feride who picked up the phone. More than anyone else in the family, she was the most talkative and communicative when it came to phone conversations.

“Alo?”

“Hi, Feride, is it you?” the receiver asked in a male voice. And without waiting for an answer, he added, “It is me . . . from America . . . Mustafa. . . .”

Thrilled to hear her brother’s voice, Auntie Feride grinned. “Why don’t you call us more often? How are you? When are you coming to see us?”

“Listen, dear, please. Is Amy—Armanoush there?”

“Yes yes, of course, you sent her to stay here with us. We love her very much.” Auntie Feride beamed. “Why didn’t you come with her, you and your wife?”

Mustafa stayed put, his forehead buckled with discomfort. Behind him in the window lay the Arizona soil, always dependable, always secretive. In time he had learned to appreciate the desert, its infinity soothing his fear of looking back, its tranquillity easing his fear of death. At times like this he remembered, as if his body reminisced on its own, the fate awaiting all the men in his family. At times like this he felt close to committing suicide. Finding death before death found him. He had lived two very different lives. Mustafa and Mostapha. And sometimes the only way to bridge the gap between the two names seemed to silence them simultaneously—to bring both of his lives to an abrupt end. He shunned the thought. A sound similar to sighing. Perhaps it was him. Perhaps it was just the desert.

“I think we are. We will come for a few days to pick Amy up and to see you. . . . We are coming.”

These words seemed to come effortlessly, as if time was not a sequence of ruptures but an uninterrupted continuity, easily bendable even when fractured. Mustafa would visit as if it had not been almost twenty years since he had been home.

T
he miraculous news that Mustafa was coming to visit them with his American wife instantly instigated a series of reactions in the Kazancı domicile. The first and foremost one involved detergents, washing powder, and soap flakes. In two days the whole house had been thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom, windows scoured and buffed up, shelves dusted, curtains washed and ironed, every tile on all the three floors scrubbed and mopped. One by one Auntie Cevriye wiped the leaves of every houseplant in the living room, the geranium and the bellflower, the rosemary and the sweet wood-ruff. She even wiped the leaves of the touch-me-not. Meanwhile Auntie Feride surprised everyone by taking out the most precious latticework in her dowry. But it was no doubt Grandma Gülsüm who was most thrilled with the news. At first she refused to believe her only son was coming to visit them after all these years, and when she finally was convinced of the news, she incarcerated herself in the kitchen amid the dishware, cutlery, and ingredients, cooking the favorite dishes of her favorite child. Now the air inside the kitchen was heavy with the scents of freshly baked pastries. She had already oven-baked two different types of
börek
—spinach and feta cheese—and simmered lentil soup, stewed lamb chops, and prepared the
köfte
mixture to be fried upon the guests’ arrival. Though she was determined to make ready half a dozen more dishes before the end of the day, undoubtedly the most important item on Grandma Gülsüm’s menu was going to be the dessert:
ashure.