The Bastard of Istanbul (9 page)

Awakened by her sister’s movement, the other twin started to cry. Auntie Varsenig ran to her side and managed to shush her with only the touch of her fingers.

“Then the next day an Armenian enters for a haircut. After the haircut, he tries to pay the barber and the barber objects—‘Sorry, I cannot accept your money. This is a community service.’ The Armenian is pleasantly surprised and leaves the shop. The next morning when the barber opens his shop . . . guess what he finds?”

“A package of
burma
?” Kevork suggested.

“No! He found a dozen Armenians waiting for a free haircut!”

“Are you trying to tell us that we are penny-pinching people?” Kevork asked.

“No, you ignorant young man,” Uncle Dikran said. “All I am trying to tell you is that we care for one another. If we see something good, we immediately share it with our friends and relatives. It is because of this collective spirit that the Armenian people have managed to survive.”

“But they also say, ‘When two Armenians come together, they create three different churches,’ ” said Cousin Kevork, taking a firm stand.

“
Das’ mader’s mom’ri, noren koh chi m’nats.
” Dikran Stamboulian grunted, switching to Armenian as he always did when he tried to teach a young person a lesson, but failed.

Able to comprehend only house-Armenian but not newspaper-Armenian, Kevork chuckled, a bit too nervously perhaps, as he tried to conceal the fact that he had understood the first half of the sentence but failed to get the rest.

“
Oḡlani kizdirmayasin.
” Grandma Shushan raised an eyebrow, speaking Turkish, as she always did when she wanted to directly convey a message to an elder in the room without the younger ones understanding.

Having gotten the message, Uncle Dikran heaved a sigh, like a boy scolded by his mother, and went back to his
burma
for consolation. A silence ensued. Everyone and everything—the three men, the three generations of women, the myriad rugs decorating the floor, the antique silver in the cupboard, the samovar on the chiffonier, the videocassette in the VCR (
The Color of Pomegranates
), as well as the multiple paintings and the icon of The Prayer of Saint Anna and the poster of Mount Ararat canopied under pure white snow—fell silent for a brief moment as the room acquired a rare luminosity under the drowsy light of a streetlamp just lit outside. The ghosts of the past were with them.

A car pulled over and parked in front of the house, its headlights panning the interior of the room, illuminating the letters on the wall in a gilded frame: AMEN, I SAY TO YOU, WHATEVER YOU BIND ON EARTH, SHALL BE BOUND IN HEAVEN, AND WHATEVER YOU LOOSE ON EARTH SHALL BE LOOSED IN HEAVEN.—ST. MATTHEW 18:18. Another trolley passed by chiming its bells, transporting noisy children and tourists from Russian Hill to Aquatic Park, the Maritime Museum, and Fisherman’s Wharf. The rush-hour sounds of San Francisco poured into the room, pulling them out of their reverie.

“Rose is not a bad person at heart,” Barsam ventured. “It was not easy for her to get used to our ways. She was a shy girl from Kentucky when we first met.”

“They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Uncle Dikran snapped.

But Barsam ignored him, and continued. “Can you imagine? They don’t even sell alcohol there! Forbidden! Did you know that the most exciting event in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, is this annual festival when people dress up as the Founding Fathers?” Barsam flipped his hands upward either to make a point or to call God’s attention in a desperate prayer. “And then they walk downtown to meet General George Armstrong Custer!”

“That is why you shouldn’t have married her in the first place.” Uncle Dikran cackled quietly. By now all the anger had drained out of him, replaced by the knowledge that he couldn’t possibly manage to remain upset with his favorite nephew any longer.

“What I am trying to say is that Rose had no multicultural background,” Barsam remarked. “The only child of a kind Southern couple operating the same hardware store forever, she lives a small-town life, and before she knows it, she finds herself amid this extended and tightly knit Armenian Catholic family in the diaspora. A huge family with a very traumatic past! How can you expect her to cope with all of this so easily?”

“Well, it wasn’t easy for us either,” Auntie Varsenig objected, pointing the tines of her fork at her brother before spearing them into another
köfte.
Unlike her mother she had a good appetite, and given the amount of food she ate every day, plus the fact that she had recently given birth to twins, it was nothing short of a miracle that she could stay so thin. “When you come to think that the only food she knew how to cook was that horrendous mutton barbecue on buns! Each time we came to your house, she would put on that dirty apron and cook mutton.”

Everyone but Barsam laughed.

“Oh, but I should be fair,” Auntie Varsenig continued, pleased with her audience’s response. “She would change the sauce every now and then. Sometimes we would get mutton barbecue with Spicy Tex-Mex sauce, and other times mutton barbecue with Creamy Ranch sauce. . . . Your wife’s kitchen was a land of variety!”

“Ex-wife!” Auntie Zarouhi corrected again.

“But you guys gave her a hard time too,” Barsam said, without looking at anyone in particular. “Mind you, the very first word she learned in Armenian was
odar.
”

“But she is an
odar.
” Uncle Dikran lurched forward, slapping his nephew on the back. “If she is an
odar,
why not call her an
odar
?”

Shaken by the slap more than the question, Barsam dared to add: “Some in this family have even called her Thorn.”

“What is wrong with that?” Auntie Varsenig took it personally, in between her final two bites of
churek.
“That woman should have her name changed from Rose to Thorn. Rose is not appropriate for her. Such a sweet name for that much bitterness. If her poor papa and mama had had the faintest idea as to what sort of a woman she would turn out to be, believe me, my dear brother, they would have named her Thorn!”

“That’s enough joking!”

It was Shushan Tchakhmakhchian. The exclamation had sounded neither like a reproach nor like a warning, but somehow had both effects on everyone in the room. By now the dusk had turned to night and the light inside shifted. Grandma Shushan stood up and turned on the crystal chandelier.

“We should save Armanoush from harm, that is the only thing that matters,” Shushan Tchakhmakhchian said softly, the many lines on her face and the thin, purplish veins in her hands all the more apparent under the harsh white light. “That innocent lamb needs us, just like we need her.”

Her face faded from determination to resignation as she slowly bobbed her head and added: “Only an Armenian can understand what it means to be so drastically reduced in numbers. We’ve shrunk like a pruned tree. . . . Rose can date and even marry whomever she wants, but her daughter is Armenian and she should be raised as an Armenian.”

Then she leaned forward and with a smile said to her eldest daughter: “Give me that half on your plate, will you? Diabetes or no diabetes, how could one decline
burma
?”

A
sya Kazancı didn’t know what it was that made some people so fond of birthdays, but she personally detested them. She always had.

Perhaps her disapproval had something to do with the fact that ever since she was a little girl, each year on her birthday she was made to eat exactly the same cake—a triple-layer caramelized apple cake (extremely sugary) with whipped lemon cream frosting (extremely sour). How her aunts could expect to please her with this cake, she had no idea, since all they heard from her on the matter was a litany of protests. Perhaps they simply forgot. Perhaps each time they erased all recollections of last year’s birthday. That was possible. The Kazancıs were a family inclined to never forget other people’s stories but to blank when it came to their own.

Thus on each birthday Asya Kazancı had eaten the same cake and at the same time had discovered a new fact about herself. At the age of three, for instance, she had found that she could get almost anything she wanted, provided she went into tantrums. Three years later on her sixth birthday, however, she realized she’d better stop the tantrums since with each episode, although her demands were met, her childhood was prolonged. When she reached the age of eight, she learned something that until then she had had only a sense of but did not know for sure: that she was a bastard. Looking back, she thought she shouldn’t be given the credit for this particular information since if it weren’t for Grandma Gülsüm, it would have taken her much longer to discover it.

It so happened that the two were alone in the living room on that day. Grandma Gülsüm was immersed in watering her plants, and Asya in watching her as she colored in a clown in a children’s coloring book.

“Why do you talk to your plants?” Asya wanted to know.

“Plants bloom if you talk to them.”

“Really?” Asya beamed.

“Really. If you tell them soil is their mother and water is their father, they buoy up and blossom.”

Asking no more, Asya went back to her coloring. She made the clown’s costume orange and his teeth green. Just when she was about to color his shoes a bright crimson, she stopped, and began to mimic her grandmother. “Sweetie, sweetie! Soil is your mom, water is your daddy.”

Grandma Gülsüm pretended not to have noticed. Emboldened by her indifference, Asya increased the dose of her chant.

It was the African violet’s turn to be watered, Grandma Gülsüm’s favorite. She cooed to the flower, “How are you, sweetie?” Asya cooed mockingly, “How are you, sweetie?”

Grandma Gülsüm frowned and pursed her lips. “How beautifully purple you are!” she said.

“How beautifully purple you are!”

It was then that Grandma Gülsüm’s mouth tightened and she murmured, “Bastard.” She uttered the word so calmly, Asya did not immediately understand that her grandmother was addressing her, not the flower.

Asya didn’t learn the meaning of the word until one year later, sometime close to her ninth birthday, when she was called a bastard by a kid at school. Then, at age ten, she discovered that unlike all the other girls in her classroom, she had no male role model in her household. It would take her another three years to comprehend that this could have a lasting effect on her personality. On her fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth birthdays, she uncovered respectively three other truths about her life: that other families weren’t like hers and some families could be
normal
; that in her ancestry there were too many women and too many secrets about men who disappeared too early and too peculiarly; and that no matter how hard she strived, she was never going to be a beautiful woman.

By the time Asya Kazancı reached seventeen she had further comprehended that she no more belonged to Istanbul than did the ROAD UNDER CONSTRUCTION or BUILDING UNDER RESTORATION signs temporarily put up by the municipality, or the fog that fell over the city on gloomy nights, only to be dispersed at the crack of dawn, leading nowhere, accumulating into nothing.

The very next year, exactly two days before her eighteenth birthday, Asya plundered the pillbox in the house and swallowed all the capsules she found there. She opened her eyes in a bed surrounded by all her aunts and Petite-Ma and Grandmother Gülsüm, having been forced to drink muddy, smelly herbal teas as if it wasn’t bad enough that they had made her vomit up everything she had had in her stomach. She began her eighteenth year discerning a further fact to be added to her previous discoveries: that in this weird world, suicide was a privilege as rare as rubies, and with a family like hers, she sure wouldn’t be one of the privileged.

It’s hard to know if there was a connection between this deduction and what ensued next, but her obsession with music started more or less in those days. It wasn’t an abstract, encompassing love for music in general, not even a fondness for selected musical genres, but rather a fixation on one and only one singer: Johnny Cash.

She knew everything about him: the myriad details of his trajectory from Arkansas to Memphis, his drinking buddies and marriages and ups and downs, his pictures, gestures, and, of course, his lyrics. Making the lyrics of “Thirteen” her lifelong motto at the age of eighteen, Asya had decided she too was born in the soul of misery and was going to bring trouble wherever she went.

Today, on her nineteenth birthday, she felt more mature, having made yet another mental note of another reality of her life: that she had now reached the age at which her mother had given birth to her. Having made this discovery, she didn’t quite know what to do with it. All she knew was that from now on she could not possibly be treated like a kid.

So she grumbled, “I warn you! I do not want a birthday cake this year!”

Shoulders squared, arms akimbo, she forgot for a second that whenever she stood like this, her big breasts came to the fore. If she had noticed it, she surely would have gone back to her hunchback position, since she abhorred her ample bosom, which she detected as yet another genetic burden from her mother.

Sometimes she likened herself to the cryptic Qur’anic creature
Dabbet-ul Arz,
the ogre destined to emerge on the Day of Judgment, with each one of its organs taken from a different animal found in nature. Just like that hybrid creature, she carried a body composed of disconnected parts inherited from the women in her family. She was tall, much taller than most women in Istanbul, just like her mother, Zeliha, whom she also called “Auntie”; she had the bony, thin-veined fingers of Auntie Cevriye, the annoyingly pointed chin of Auntie Feride, and the elephantine ears of Auntie Banu. She had a most blatantly aquiline nose, of which there were only two others in world history—Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s and Auntie Zeliha’s. Sultan Mehmed had conquered Constantinople— whether you liked it or not, a fact significant enough to overlook the shape of his nose. As for Auntie Zeliha, so imposing was her personality and so captivating her body that no one would see her nose—or any other part of her, for that matter—as a source of imperfection. But having no imperial achievements on her curriculum vitae and possessing a natural incapability for charming people, Asya thought, what on earth could she do about her nose?