The Bastard of Istanbul (17 page)

I think I can relate to the Janissary’s Paradox. As the only child of resentfully divorced parents coming from different cultural backgrounds,

She paused with the discomfort of revealing her personal story, but the urge to carry on was too strong.

Being the only daughter of an Armenian father, he himself a child of survivors, and of a mother from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I do know how it feels to be torn between opposite sides, unable to fully belong anywhere, constantly fluctuating between two states of existence.

To this day she had never written anything so personal and so direct to anyone in the group. Her heart pumping hard, she took a breather. What was Baron Baghdassarian going to think about her now and would he write his true thoughts?

That must be hard. For most Armenians in the diaspora, Hai Dat is the sole psychological anchor that we have in order to sustain an identity. Your situation is different but ultimately we are all Americans and Armenians, that plurality is good as long as we do not lose our anchor.

That was Miserable-Coexistence, a housewife unhappily married to the editor-in-chief of a prominent literary journal in the Bay Area.

Plurality means the state of being more than one. But that was not the case with me. I’ve never been able to become an Armenian in the first place, Armanoush wrote, realizing she was on the brink of making a confession. I need to find my identity. You know what I’ve been secretly contemplating? Going to visit my family’s house in Turkey. Grandma always talks about this gorgeous house in Istanbul. I’ll go and see it with my own eyes. This is a journey into my family’s past, as well as into my future. The Janissary’s Paradox will haunt me unless I do something to discover my past.

Wait, wait, wait, Lady Peacock/Siramark typed in panic. What the hell do you think you are doing? Are you planning to go to Turkey on your own, did you take leave of your senses?

I can find connections. It’s not that difficult.

How so Madame My-Exiled-Soul? Lady Peacock/Siramark insisted. How far do you think you can go with that name on your passport?

Why don’t you instead directly walk into a police headquarters in Istanbul and get yourself nicely arrested! broke in Anti-Khavurma, a grad student in Near Eastern Studies at Columbia University.

Armanoush felt this could be the right moment to confess another fundamental truth of her life. Finding the right connections might not be that difficult for me since my mother is now married to a Turk.

There was an unsettling lull. For a full minute no one wrote anything back, so Armanoush continued.

His name is Mustafa, he is a geologist who works for a company in Arizona. He’s a nice man, but he is completely disinterested in history and ever since he arrived in the USA, which is like twenty years ago, he has never been back home. He didn’t even invite his family to the wedding. Something’s fishy there but I don’t know what. He just doesn’t talk about that. But I know he has a large family in Istanbul. I asked him once what kind of people they were and he said: Oh, they are just ordinary people, like you and me.

He doesn’t sound like the most sensitive man on earth—that is, of course, if men can ever have feelings, barged in the Daughter of Sappho, a lesbian bartender who had recently found a job in a shabby reggae bar in Brooklyn.

He sure doesn’t, Miserable-Coexistence added. Does he have a heart?

Oh, he does. He loves my mom, and my mom loves him, Armanoush replied. She realized she had for the first time recognized the love between her mother and stepfather, as if seeing them through a stranger’s eyes. Anyway, I can stay with his family; after all I am his stepdaughter, I guess they will have to accept me as a guest. It’s a puzzle to me how I will be received by
ordinary
Turks. A real Turkish family, not one of those Americanized academics.

What are you going to talk about with ordinary Turks? asked Lady Peacock/Siramark. Look, even the well-educated are either nationalist or ignorant. Do you think ordinary people will be interested in accepting historical truths? Do you think they are going to say:
Oh yeah, we are sorry we massacred and deported you guys and then contentedly denied it all.
Why do you want to get yourself in trouble?

I understand that. But you should try to understand me as well. Armanoush felt a sudden surge of despondency. Disclosing one secret after another had triggered the feeling of being lonely in this huge world—something she always knew about but waited for the right moment to face. You guys were all born into the Armenian community and never had to prove you were one of them. Whereas I have been stuck on this threshold since the day I was born, constantly fluctuating between a proud but traumatized Armenian family and a hysterically anti-Armenian mom. For me to be able to become an Armenian American the way you guys are, I need to find my Armenianness first. If this requires a voyage into the past, so be it, I am going to do that, no matter what the Turks will say or do.

But how will your father and his family let you go to Turkey? That was Alex the Stoic, a Bostonian Greek American who was content with life as long as he was surrounded by sunny weather, tasty food, and pretty women. As a loyal follower of Zeno, he believed that people should do their best not to push their limits and be happy with what they had. Don’t you think your family in San Francisco will be worried?

Worried? Armanoush grimaced as the faces of her aunts and grandmother crossed her mind. She knew they would be worried sick.

They should not know anything about this, for their own good. Spring break is coming and I can spend the whole ten days in Istanbul. Dad will think I am in Arizona with my mom. And mom will think I am still here in San Francisco. They never talk to each other. And my stepfather never talks with his family in Istanbul. There’s no way this can be revealed. It’ll be a secret. Armanoush squinted at the screen as if she were perplexed by the statement she had typed there. If I keep calling my mom on a daily basis and my dad every two or three days, I can keep everything under control.

Nice plan! Once in Istanbul, Lady Peacock/Siramark suggested, you can send reports to the café every day.

Wow, you will be our war reporter, enthused Anti-Khavurma, but there followed an even longer pause as no one joined in the joke.

Armanoush leaned back in her chair. Deep in the stillness of the night she could hear her father’s unruffled breathing and her grandmother tossing in her bed. She felt her body slipping sideways, as if part of her craved sitting in this chair all night long to savor what insomnia was like, while part of her wanted to go to bed and fall into a deep slumber. She munched the last bit of her apple, feeling a rush of adrenaline about her dangerous decision.

Armanoush turned off the table lamp, leaving a grainy light radiating from the computer. Just when she was about to exit Café Constantinopolis, however, a line appeared on the screen.

Wherever your inner journey might take you, please take care of yourself dear Madame My-Exiled-Soul, and don’t let the Turks treat you badly.

It was Baron Baghdassarian.

I
t had been more than two hours since she had woken up, but Asya Kazancı was still lying in bed under a goose-feather quilt, listening to the myriad sounds only Istanbul is capable of producing while her mind meticulously composed a Personal Manifesto of Nihilism.

She gave this statement some thought and decided she liked it well enough to make it the opening line of her manifesto. As she proceeded into the second article, outside on the street somebody slammed on his brakes. In next to no time the driver was heard swearing and shouting at the top of his voice at some pedestrian who had materialized on the road, crossing an intersection diagonally and also on a red light. The driver yelled and yelled until his voice dwindled amid the humming of the city.

“I cannot believe you are still in the same position that I found you in half an hour ago! What the hell are you doing in bed, lazy girl?”

That was Auntie Banu, having ducked her head into the room without feeling the need to knock on the door first. She was wearing an eye-catching head scarf this morning of a hue so dazzlingly red that from a distance it made her head look like a huge, ripe tomato. “We have finished a whole samovar of tea while waiting for you, our Lady Queen. Come on, rise and shine! Can’t you smell the grilled
sucuk
? Aren’t you hungry?” She slammed the door shut before waiting for an answer.

Asya muttered under her breath as she pulled the quilt up to her nose and turned to the other side.

There amid the typical bustle of a weekend breakfast, she could hear the water dropping from the tiny faucet of the samovar, the seven eggs feverishly boiling in a stockpot, the slices of
sucuk
sizzling inside the grill pan, and somebody continually flipping through the TV channels, skipping from cartoons to pop music videos and from there, to local and international news. Without needing to sneak a peek, Asya knew that it was Grandma Gülsüm who was in charge of the samovar; just like she could tell it was Auntie Banu who grilled the
sucuk,
her unparalleled appetite having returned now that the forty days of Sufi penitence was over and she had successfully declared herself a clairvoyant. Asya also knew that it was Auntie Feride who flipped through the channels, unable to decide on one, having enough room in the vast land of schizophrenic paranoia to absorb them all, cartoons and pop music and news at the same time, just like she yearned for success in multiple tasks in life and ended up accomplishing none.

“Asya!!!” The door banged open and Auntie Zeliha rammed in, her green eyes glittering like two round pieces of jade. “Do we have to keep sending envoys to your bed to make you join us?”

“Asya!!!”

“What?!!!” Asya’s head popped up from under the bedcovers in a curly, raven ball of fury. Jumping to her feet she kicked the pair of lavender slippers beside the bed, missing one of them but managing to catapult the other directly on top of the dresser where it hit the mirror and from there parachuted to the floor. She then pulled up her loose-around-the-waist pajamas in a funny sort of way, which, if truth be told, did not quite support the dramatic effect she wanted to generate.

“For heaven’s sake, can’t I possibly have a moment’s peace on a Sunday morning?”

“Regrettably there exists no
moment
on earth that lasts two hours,” Auntie Zeliha pointed out, after watching the distressing trajectory of the slipper. “Why are you getting on my nerves? If this is a teenage rebellion that you are going through, you’re too late, miss, you should have been there at least five years ago. Remember, you are already nineteen.”

“Yeah, the age you had me out of wedlock,” Asya croaked, knowing she shouldn’t be so brutal but doing it anyway.

Standing in the doorway, Auntie Zeliha stared at Asya with the disappointment of a visual artist who after drinking and working on a piece of art all night long sleeps with satisfaction, only to wake up later the next morning confronted with the bedlam he has created while intoxicated. Despite the dourness of the discovery, she didn’t say anything for a full minute. Then her lips twisted into a morose smile as if she had just realized that the face she had been looking at was in fact her own image in the mirror, so alike and yet completely detached. Her daughter had turned out to be just like her in character, though vastly different in appearance.

As far as the personality went, it was the same skepticism, the same unruliness, the same bitterness she had displayed when she was Asya’s age. Before she knew it, she had neatly passed on the role of the maverick of the Kazancı family to her daughter. Fortunately, Asya didn’t look world-weary or angst-ridden yet, being too young for all of that. But the temptation to raze the edifice of her own existence was there, softly glittering in her eyes, the sweet lure of self-destruction that only the sophisticated or the saturnine will ever suffer from.

As far as the appearance went, however, Auntie Zeliha could plainly see that Asya barely resembled her. She was not and probably would never become a beautiful woman. Not that there was anything wrong with her body or face or anything. In point of fact, when regarded independently every part of her was in good shape: the right height and weight, the right curly raven hair, the right chin . . . but when added together, there was something flawed in the combination. She wasn’t ugly either, not at all. If anything, a mediocre prettiness, one that is good to look at but won’t stick in anybody’s mind. Her face was so average many who met her for the first time had the impression of having seen her before. She was uniquely ordinary. Rather than “beautiful,” “cute” would be the best compliment she could get at this stage, which was perfectly okay, except that here she was painfully going through a phase of her life in which “cuteness” was the last thing she wanted to be associated with. Twenty years down the road she would come to see her body differently. Asya was one of those women who though not pretty in their teens or attractive in their youth, could nevertheless become quite good-looking in their middle age, provided they could endure until then.