The Bastard of Istanbul (33 page)

Years later when he thought about his father, Yervant would remember that kitten all alone on the dark, empty street. Even in Sivas, in the small Catholic Armenian village of Pirkinik where they went next to seek shelter with Grandpa and Grandma, only to be expelled one night by soldiers breaking into the house; even when he found himself walking amid thousands of drained, famished, beaten Armenians guarded by soldiers on horseback; even when he trudged through a long, thick carpet of mud, vomit, blood, and excrement; even when he didn’t know how to stop the cries of his little sister, Shushan, and then one day, amid an ensuing turmoil, let go of her hand for a split second and lost sight of her; even when he watched his mother’s feet swell into two blue pillows of pain covered with purple veins and blood; even when she died, quiet and light as a dry willow leaf swirling in the gusting breeze; even when he saw swollen and stinking corpses along the road, stables filled with smoke and fire; even when upon having nothing left to eat, he and his brothers grazed on grass like sheep in the Syrian desert; even when they were saved by a group of American missionaries dedicated to collecting the Armenian orphans lost hither and thither along the road of exile; even when they were brought all the way back to the American College in Sivas that operated as a sanctuary, and from there sent to America; even when years later he was finally able to find his little sister, Shushan, in Istanbul and bring her to San Francisco; and even after many happy suppers surrounded by his children and grandchildren, that kitten remained ingrained in his mind.

“That’s enough,” Auntie Banu exclaimed, flinching. She untied her head scarf and covered the silver bowl with it. “I don’t want to see this anymore. I learned what I had wanted to learn. . . .”

“But you have not seen it all,” Mr. Bitter objected with a rasping voice. “I haven’t told you about the lice yet.”

“The li- . . . li-ce?” Auntie Banu stuttered. Whatever spirit had moved her to put an end to this session seemed to have passed now. She picked up her head scarf and peeped into the bowl again.

“Oh yeah, the lice, my master, is an important detail,” Mr. Bitter said. “Remember the part when little Shushan let go of her elder brother’s hand and all of a sudden got lost in the crowd? She got the lice from a family whom she had approached in the hope of getting some food. The family had little to consume themselves, and they pushed her away. A few days later little Shushan was aflame with a roaring fever: typhus!”

Auntie Banu let out a loud, prolonged sigh.

“I was there. I saw it all. Shushan dropped to her knees. Nobody in that convoy of people was in any condition to help her. They left her there on the ground, her forehead covered with sweat and her hair full of lice!”

“Enough!” Auntie Banu rose to her feet.

“But aren’t you going to listen to the best part? Don’t you want to learn what happened to little Shushan?” Mr. Bitter asked, sounding offended. “You wanted to learn about your guest’s family, didn’t you? Well, that little Shushan in my story is your guest’s grandmother. ”

“Yes,” Auntie Banu replied. “I had figured that out. Continue! ”

“All right!” Mr. Bitter enthused, savoring his triumph. “After she was left half-dead on the road and after the convoy had disappeared on the horizon, little Shushan was discovered by two women from a nearby Turkish village. They were a mother and a daughter. They took the sick girl back home with them and bathed her with chunks of daphne soap and washed off the lice in her hair with potions concocted from the herbs in the valley. They fed and cured her. Three weeks later when a high-ranking officer stopped by the village with his men and interrogated the villagers to learn if they had chanced upon any Armenian orphans in the area, this Turkish mother hid Shushan inside her daughter’s dowry chest to save her from harm. A month later the little girl was on her feet again, except she didn’t talk much and cried in her sleep at nights.”

“I thought you said she was brought to Istanbul. . . .”

“Eventually she was. During the following six months this mother and daughter looked after her as if she were one of their own family, and would probably have kept doing so. But then a horde of bandits arrived, searching and plundering the houses. They stopped and ransacked every Turkish and Kurdish village in the region. It didn’t take them long to find out that there was a little Armenian girl there. Despite the wails of the mother and daughter, they took Shushan away from them. They had heard about the orders to deliver all Armenian orphans below the age of twelve to the orphanages around the country. So before long Shushan was in an orphanage in Aleppo, and when there was no room there, in a school in Istanbul under the care of several
hocahanım,
some benevolent and caring, others cold and strict. Like all of the children there she was dressed in a white robe and a buttonless, black coat. There were both boys and girls. The boys were circumcised and all the children were renamed. So was Shushan. Everyone called her Shermin now. She was also given a surname: 626.”

“Enough is enough,” Auntie Banu put her head scarf back over the silver bowl and gave her
djinni
a long, piercing stare.

“Yes, master, as you wish,” Mr. Bitter muttered. “However, you skipped the most important part of the story. Should you wish to listen to that part too, just let me know because we
gulyabani
know everything. We were there. I told you the past of Shushan, once a little girl, now the grandmother of Armanoush. I told you things that your guest doesn’t know. Will you tell her? Don’t you think she has a right to know?”

Auntie Banu stood silent. Would she ever narrate for Armanoush the story she had learned tonight? Even if she wanted to, how could she tell her she had seen the story of her family in a silver bowl of water shown by a
gulyabani,
the worst kind of
djinn?
Would Armanoush believe her? Besides, even if she
did
believe her, wasn’t it better that the girl never learned about all of these sorrowful details?

Auntie Banu turned toward Mrs. Sweet for solace. But instead of an answer all she got from her benevolent
djinni
was a bashful smile and a sudden shimmer of the corona around her head, flickering in shades of plum, pink, and purple. Together with the
djinni
’s corona, a thorny question flared up: Was it really better for human beings to discover more of their past? And then more and more . . . ? Or was it simply better to know as little of the past as possible and even to forget what small amount was remembered?

It is past dawn now. A short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. The only time of the day when it is early enough to harbor hopes of realizing one’s dreams but far too late to actually dream, the land of Morpheus now flung far away.

Allah’s eye is omnipotent and omniscient; it is an eye that never closes, or even blinks. But still no one can tell for sure if the earth is equally omniobservable. If this is a stage wherein spectacle after spectacle is displayed for the Celestial Gaze, there might be times in between when the curtains are down and a gauzy head scarf covers the surface of a silver bowl.

Istanbul is a hodgepodge of ten million lives. It is an open book of ten million scrambled stories. Istanbul is waking up from its perturbed sleep, ready for the chaos of the rush hour. From now on there are too many prayers to answer, too many profanities to note, and too many sinners, as well as too many innocents, to keep an eye on.

Already it is morning in Istanbul.

T
hrough the range of the months of the year, every month knows the particular season it belongs to and behaves accordingly, every month but one: March.

March is most unbalanced in Istanbul, both psychologically and physically. March might decide she belongs to the spring season, warm and fragrant, only to change her mind the very next day, turning into winter, sending chilly winds and sleet all around. Today, March nineteenth, was an unusually sunny Saturday, far above the average temperature for this time of the year. Asya and Armanoush took their sweaters off as they walked the wide, wind-swept road from Ortaköy toward Taksim Square. Asya was wearing a long batik dress, hand painted in tones of beige and caramel brown. Every step she took, tiers of necklaces and bracelets jingled. Armanoush, in turn, was loyal to her style: a pair of blue jeans and on top of it a loose UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA sweatshirt, pasty pink as a ballet slipper. They were on their way to visit the tattoo parlor.

“I’m so glad you will finally meet Aram.” Asya beamed as she shifted her canvas bag from one shoulder to the other. “He is such a nice person.”

“I heard you mention his name before, but I have no idea who he is.”

“Oh, he is . . . ” Asya paused, searching for the right word in English.
Boyfriend
sounded too light for the situation,
husband
was technically wrong,
husband-to-be
didn’t look plausible.
Fiancé
seemed to suit better, but the truth is they had never been formally engaged. “He is Auntie Zeliha’s significant other.”

Across the road, under an elegantly carved Ottoman archway, they caught a glimpse of two Gypsy boys, one of them plucking cans from garbage bins and then piling them on a dilapidated cart. The other boy sat on the edge of the cart sorting the cans, doing his best imitation of working hard while basking in the sun.
That could be such an idyllic life
, Asya thought to herself. She would give anything to switch places with that boy on the cart. First, she would go and buy the most lackadaisical horse she could find. Then every day she would ride her horse cart up and down along the steep streets of Istanbul, collecting things. She would wholeheartedly gather the most unattractive artifacts of human life, embracing the debris rotting underneath its polished surface. Asya had a feeling that a garbage collector in Istanbul probably led a far less stressful life than she and her friends at Café Kundera did.

If she became a garbage collector, she would wander the city whistling Johnny Cash songs, while a balmy breeze caressed her hair and the sun warmed her bones. Should anyone dare to disturb such blissful harmony, she would scare the hell out of him with the threat of her mammoth Gypsy clan in which probably everyone was convicted of a felony of some sort. Despite the problem of poverty, Asya concluded, as long as it was not wintertime, it must be fun to be a garbage collector. She made a mental note to herself to remember this in case she couldn’t come up with a better profession after graduating from college. On that note she started to whistle; only when she reached the end of the couplet did Asya notice that Armanoush was still waiting for a more detailed response to the question she had asked her a few minutes ago.

“Well, yeah, Auntie Zeliha and Aram have been seeing each other for Allah knows how long. He is like my step-dad, I guess, or for the sake of consistency, I should call him step-uncle. . . . Whatever.”

“Why don’t they get married?”

“Married?” Asya spat out the word as if it were food between her teeth. They were now passing the can collectors, and upon closer inspection of her role models, Asya realized that they were not boys but girls. This she liked even more. To blur the gender boundaries was one more reason to become a garbage collector. She put a cigarette between her lips, but instead of lighting it, she sucked the end for a moment as if it were one of those cigarette-shaped chocolate sticks wrapped in edible paper. She then revealed an inner thought: “Actually, I am sure Aram wouldn’t mind getting married, but Auntie Zeliha would never have any of that.”

“But why not?” Armanoush wanted to know.

The breeze shifted direction just then, and Armanoush caught a pungent whiff of the sea. This city was a jumble of aromas, some of them strong and rancid, others sweet and stimulating. Almost every smell made Armanoush recall some sort of food, so much so that she had started to perceive Istanbul as something edible. She had been here for eight days now and the longer she stayed, the more twisted and multifaceted Istanbul grew to be. Perhaps she was getting used to being a foreigner in this city, if not getting used to the city itself.

“My guess is it’s all because of Auntie Zeliha’s experience with my dad, whoever that was,” Asya continued. “That must be why she is so against marriage. I think she has a trust issue with men.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Armanoush said.

“But don’t you think there is a huge difference between the two sexes when it comes to recovery after an affair? I mean, when women survive an awful marriage or love affair, and all that shit, they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however, it is just the opposite; the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”

Armanoush gave a curt nod of acknowledgment, although the pattern did not quite fit her parents’ situation. It was her mother who had remarried after her divorce while her father had remained single to this day. Armanoush then asked:

“This Aram . . . where is he from?”

“He’s from around here, just like us.” Asya shrugged, but then in a flash she understood what was being asked. Surprised at her own ignorance, she lit the cigarette she had been sucking on and took a puff. How could she have failed to make the connection? Aram came from an Armenian family in Istanbul. He was, theoretically, Armenian.

And yet there was a sense in which Aram could
not
be Armenian or Turk or any other nationality. Aram could only be Aram, entirely sui generis. He was a unique member of a unique species. He was a charmer, a colossal romantic, a political science professor who often confessed to being more inclined to live the life of a fisherman in a seedy village on the Mediterranean. He was a fragile heart, a gullible soul, and a walking slice of chaos; a sanguine utopian and an irresponsible promiser; an outstandingly messy and quick-witted and honorable man. He was one of a kind and consequentially Asya had never associated him with any collective identity. Tempted as she was to say something in this vein, she simply replied: “Actually, he is Armenian.”