The Bastard of Istanbul (5 page)

Even as a little girl, there was something bizarre about Feride. A most difficult student at school, she had shown no interest in anything other than physical geography classes, and in the geography classes had shown no interest in anything other than a few subjects, starting with the layers of the atmosphere. Her favorite topics were how the ozone was broken down in the stratosphere, and the connection between surface ocean currents and atmospheric patterns. She had learned all the information she could gather on high-latitude stratospheric circulation, the characteristics of the mesosphere, valley winds and sea breezes, solar cycles and tropical latitudes, and the shape and size of the earth. Everything she had memorized at school she would then volley in the house, peppering every conversation with atmospheric information. Each time she displayed her knowledge on physical geography, she would speak with unprecedented zeal, floating high above the clouds, jumping from one atmospheric layer to the next. Then, a year after her graduation, Feride had started to display signs of eccentricity and detachment.

Although Feride’s interest in physical geography had never petered out in the fullness of time, it inspired yet another area of interest that she profoundly enjoyed: accidents and disasters. Every day she read the third page of the tabloids. Car accidents, serial killings, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and floods, terminal illnesses, contagious diseases, and unknown viruses. . . . Feride would peruse them all. Her selective memory would absorb local, national, and international calamities only to convey them to others out of the blue. It never took her long to darken any conversation, as from birth she was inclined to see misery in each and every story, and to fabricate some when there was none.

But the news she conveyed did not upset the others, as they had renounced believing in her long ago. Her family had figured out one way of dealing with insanity, and that was to confuse it with a lack of credibility.

Feride was first diagnosed with a “stress ulcer,” a diagnosis no one in the family took seriously because “stress” had become some sort of catchphrase. As soon as it was introduced into Turkish culture, “stress” had been so euphorically welcomed by the Istanbulites that there had emerged countless patients of stress in the city. Feride had traveled nonstop from one stress-related illness to another, surprised to discover the vastness of the land since there seemed to be virtually nothing that could not be related to stress. After that, she had loitered around obsessive-compulsive disorder, disassociative amnesia, and psychotic depression. Managing to poison herself, she was once diagnosed with Bittersweet Nightshade, the name she most relished among her infirmities.

At each stage of her journey to insanity, Feride changed her hair color and style, so that after a while the doctors, in their endeavor to follow the changes in her psychology, started to keep a hair chart. Short, midlength, very long, and once entirely shaven; spiked, flattened, flipped, and braided; subjected to tons of hair-spray, gel, wax, or styling cream; accessorized with barrettes, gems, or ribbons; cropped in punk style, pinned up in ballerina buns, highlighted and dyed in every possible hue, each one of her hairstyles had been a fleeting episode while her illness had remained firm and fixed.

After a lengthy sojourn in “major depressive disorder,” Feride had moved to “borderline”—a term construed quite arbitrarily by different members of the Kazancı family. Her mother interpreted the word “border” as a problem to be associated with police, customs officers, and illegality, thereby finding a “felon foreigner” in the persona of Feride. She thus became even more suspicious of this crazy daughter whom she had not trusted in the first place. In stark contrast, for Feride’s sisters, the concept of “border” mainly invoked the idea of edge, and the idea of edge invoked the image of a deadly cliff. For quite a while they treated her with utmost care, as if she were a walking somnambulist on a wall meters high and could fall down any time. However, the word “border” invoked the trim of latticework for Petite-Ma, and she studied her granddaughter with deep interest and sympathy.

Feride had recently emigrated into another diagnosis nobody could even pronounce, let alone dare to interpret: “hebephrenic schizophrenia.” Ever since then, she remained faithful to her new nomenclature, as if finally content to achieve the nominal clarification she sorely needed. Whatever the diagnosis, she lived according to the rules of her own fantasyland, outside of which she had never set foot.

But on this first Friday of July, Zeliha paid no attention to her sister’s renowned distaste for doctors. As she started to eat, she realized how hungry she had been all day long. Almost mechanically, she ate a piece of
çörek,
poured herself a glass of
ayran,
forked another green
dolma
onto her plate, and revealed the piece of information growing inside her: “I went to a gynecologist today. . . .”

“Gynecologist!” Feride repeated instantly, but she made no specific comment. Gynecologists were the one group among all the physicians she had had the least experience with.

“I went to a gynecologist today to have an abortion.” Zeliha completed her sentence without looking at anyone.

Banu dropped her chicken wing and looked down at her feet as if they had something to do with this; Cevriye pursed her lips hard; Feride shrieked and then oddly unleashed a whoop of laughter; their mother tensely rubbed her forehead, feeling the first aura of a terrible headache approaching; and Petite-Ma . . . well, Petite-Ma just continued to eat her yogurt soup. It might be because she had gone quite deaf in the course of the recent months. It might also be because she was suffering from the early stages of dementia. Perhaps it was simply because she thought there was nothing to fuss about. With Petite-Ma you never knew.

“How could you slaughter your baby?” Cevriye asked in awe.

“It is not a
baby
!” Zeliha shrugged. “At this stage, I’d rather call it a
droplet.
That’d be more scientific!”

“Scientific! You are not scientific, you are cold-blooded!” Cevriye burst into tears. “Cold-blooded! That’s what you are!”

“Well, I have good news then. I have not killed . . . it—
her
— whatever!” Zeliha turned toward her sister calmly. “Not that I did not want to. I did! I tried to have the
droplet
aborted but somehow it did not happen.”

“What do you mean?” asked Banu.

Zeliha put on a brave face. “Allah sent me a message,” she said tonelessly, knowing it was the wrong thing to say to a family like hers but saying it anyway. “So there I am lying anesthetized with a doctor and a nurse on each side. In a few minutes the operation will begin and the baby will be gone. Forever! But then just when I am about to go unconscious on that operating table, I hear the afternoon prayer from a nearby mosque. . . . The prayer is soft, like a piece of velvet. It envelops my whole body. Then, as soon as the prayer is over, I hear a murmur as if somebody is whispering in my ear: ‘Thou shall not kill this child!’ ”

Cevriye flinched, Feride nervously coughed into her table napkin, Banu swallowed hard, and Gülsüm frowned. Only Petite-Ma remained far off in a better land, having now finished her soup, obediently waiting for her next dish to arrive.

“And then . . . ” Zeliha carried on with her story, “this mysterious voice commands: ‘Oooo Zeliha! Oooo you the culprit of the righteous Kazancı family! Let this child live! You don’t know it yet, but this child will be a leader. This baby will be a monarch!’ ”

“He cannot!” the teacher Cevriye broke in, missing no opportunity to show her expertise. “There aren’t monarchs anymore, we are a modern nation.”

“ ‘Oooo you sinner, this child will rule over others!’ ” Zeliha continued, pretending not to have heard the lesson. “ ‘Not only this country, not only the entire Middle East and the Balkans, but the whole world will know her name. This child of yours will lead the masses, and bring peace and justice to humankind!’ ”

Zeliha paused and let out a breath.

“Anyhow, good news everybody! The baby is still with me! Before long, we’ll put another plate at this table.”

“A bastard!” Gülsüm exclaimed. “You want to bring into this family a child out of wedlock. A bastard!”

The word’s effect spread out, like a pebble thrown into still water.

“Shame on you! You’ve always brought disgrace on this family.” Gülsüm’s face contorted in anger. “Look at your nose piercing. . . . All that makeup and the revoltingly short skirts, and oh, those high heels! This is what happens when you dress up . . . like a whore! You should thank Allah night and day; you should be grateful that there are no men around in this family. They’d have killed you.”

It wasn’t quite true. Not the part about the killing perhaps, but the part about there being no men in the family. There were. Somewhere. But it was also true that there were far fewer men than women in the Kazancı family. Like an evil spell put on the whole lineage, generations after generations of Kazancı men had died young and unexpectedly. Petite-Ma’s husband, Rıza Selim Kazancı, for instance, had all of a sudden dropped dead at sixty, unable to breathe. Then in the next generation, Levent Kazancı had died of a heart attack before he had reached his fifty-first birthday, following the patterns of his father and his father’s father. It looked as if the life span of the men in the family got shorter and shorter with each generation.

There was a great-uncle who had run away with a Russian prostitute, only to be robbed by her of all his money and frozen to death in St. Petersburg; another kinsman had gone to his last resting place after being hit by a car while trying to cross the autobahn heavily intoxicated; various nephews had died as early as their twenties, one of them drowning while swimming drunk under the full moon, another one hit in the chest by a bullet fired by a hooligan enjoying himself after his soccer team had won the cup, yet another nephew having fallen into a six-foot-deep ditch dug out by the municipality to renovate the street gutters. Then there was a second cousin, Ziya, who had shot himself, for no apparent reason.

Generation after generation, as if complying with an unwritten rule, the men in the Kazancı family tree had died young. The greatest age any had reached in the current generation was forty-one. Determined not to repeat the pattern, another great-uncle had taken utmost care to lead a healthy life, strictly refraining from overeating, sex with prostitutes, contacts with hooligans, alcohol and other sorts of intoxicants, and had ended up crushed by a concrete chunk falling from a construction site he happened to pass by. Then there was Celal, a distant cousin, who was the love of Cevriye’s life and the husband she lost in a brawl. For reasons still unclear, Celal had been sentenced to two years on charges of bribery. During this time Celal’s presence in the family had been confined to the infrequent letters he had been sending from jail, so vague and distant that when the news of his death had arrived, for everyone other than his wife, it had felt like losing a third arm, one that you never had. He departed this life in a fight, not by a blow or a punch, but by stepping on a high-voltage electricity cable while trying to find a better spot to watch two other prisoners exchange blows. After losing the love of her life, Cevriye sold their house and joined the Kazancı domicile as a humorless history teacher with a Spartan sense of discipline and self-control. Just as she waged battle against plagiarism at school, she took it upon herself to crusade against impulsiveness, disruption, and spontaneity at home.

Then there was Sabahattin, the tenderhearted, good-natured, but equally self-effacing husband of Banu. Though he was not a blood relative and looked exceptionally hale and hearty, though the two were still married on paper, except for a brief period following their honeymoon, Banu had spent more time in her family’s
konak
than at home with her husband. So noticeable was their physical distance that when Banu had announced being heavy with twin boys everyone had joked about the technical impossibility of the pregnancy. Yet the ominous fate awaiting every Kazancı man had struck the twins at an early age. Upon losing her toddler boys to childhood illnesses, Banu permanently moved into her family house, only to sporadically visit her husband in the years that followed. Every now and then she went to see if he was doing okay, more like a concerned stranger than a loving spouse.

Then, of course, there was Mustafa, the only son in the current generation, a precious gem bequeathed by Allah amid four daughters. The result of Levent Kazancı’s fixation on having a boy to bear his surname had been that the four Kazancı sisters had each grown up feeling like unwelcome visitors. The first three children were all girls. Banu, Cevriye, and Feride had each felt like an introduction before the real thing, an accidental prelude in their parents’ sex life, so determinedly were they oriented toward a male child. As for the fifth child, Zeliha, she knew she had been conceived with the hope that fortune could be generous twice in a row. After finally having a boy, her parents had wanted to see if they were lucky enough to make another one.

Mustafa was precious from the day he was born. A series of measures had been taken to protect him from the grim fate awaiting all the men in the family tree. As a baby he was bundled in evil-eye beads and amulets; as a toddler he was kept under constant surveillance, and until age eight his hair was kept long like a girl’s so as to deceive Azrail, the angel of death. Whenever someone needed to address the child, “girl” they would say, “girl, come here!” Though a good student, most of Mustafa’s high school life was ruined by his inability to socialize. A king in his house, the boy seemed to refuse to be one among many in the classroom. So unpopular had he become over time that when Gülsüm wanted to throw a party for Mustafa and his friends to celebrate their graduation, there was no one to invite.

So arrogantly antisocial outside his house, so indisputably cherished as the king at home, and with the passing of each birthday so ominously close to the doom suffered by all the Kazancı men, after a while it seemed like a good idea to send Mustafa abroad. Within a month, Petite-Ma’s jewels were sold for the money required and the eighteen-year-old son of the Kazancı family left Istanbul for Arizona, where he became an undergraduate student in agricultural and biosystems engineering and would hopefully survive to see his old age.