The Bastard of Istanbul (39 page)

Once aboard the plane, however, Rose swiftly relaxed, enjoying every detail of the experience—the tiny, chic travel kits they distributed, the matching pillows, blankets, and eye blinds, the continuous service of beverages interrupted by complimentary turkey sandwiches. Before long, the dinner service commenced, rice and oven-roasted chicken with a small salad and stir-fried vegetables. THERE ARE NO PORK PRODUCTS IN OUR FOODS, it stated on a piece of paper that came with the tray. Rose couldn’t help but feel guilty about the Wendy’s combos.

“You were right about the food. It’s good,” she said, giving her husband a shy smile and rotating a bowl of dessert in her hand. “And what’s this?”

“
Ashure,
” Mustafa said, his voice oddly constricted as he looked at the golden raisins decorating the small bowl. “It used to be my favorite dessert. I’m sure my mother cooked a big pot of it when she heard I was coming.”

Much as he tried to refrain from remembering such details, Mustafa couldn’t erase the sight of dozens of glass bowls of
ashure
lined on the shelves inside the refrigerator, ready to be distributed to the neighbors. Unlike other desserts,
ashure
was always cooked as much for others as for one’s own family. Accordingly, it had to be cooked abundantly, each bowl an epitome of survival, solidarity, and cornucopia. Mustafa’s fascination with the dessert had become apparent when at the age of seven he was caught wolfing down the bowls he had been entrusted to dole out door to door.

He still remembered waiting there in the stillness of the apartment building next to their
konak
with the tray in his hand. There were half a dozen bowls on the tray, each for a different neighbor. First he had nibbled the golden raisins sprinkled on each bowl, confident that if he ate just those nobody would notice. But then he went on to the pomegranate seeds and the slivered almonds used for decoration, and before he knew it, he had eaten everything, consuming six bowls at one sitting. He had hidden the empty bowls in the garden. The neighbors often kept the bowls until they would return them with some other food that they had cooked, oftentimes another
ashure.
Thus, it had taken the Kazancı family some time to discover Mustafa’s misdeed. And when they had, though visibly embarrassed by his greediness, his mother had not scolded him, but from then on she had kept extra bowls of
ashure
in the fridge, ready for him and him alone.

“What would you like to drink, sir?” asked the stewardess in Turkish, half bent toward him. She had eyes of sapphire blue and wore a vest of exactly the same color, on the back of which were printed puffy, pasty clouds.

For a split second Mustafa hesitated, not because he didn’t know what he would like to drink but because he didn’t know which language to reply in. After so many years he felt much more comfortable expressing himself in English than in Turkish. And yet, it seemed equally unnatural, if not arrogant, to speak in English to another Turk. Consequently, Mustafa Kazancı had up till now solved this personal quandary by avoiding communicating with Turks in the United States. His aloofness toward his fellow countrymen and countrywomen became painfully blatant at ordinary encounters like this one, however. He glanced around, as if searching for an exit, and having failed to find one nearby, finally answered, in Turkish: “Tomato juice, please.”

“I don’t have tomato juice.” The stewardess gave him a sprightly smile, as if finding great humor in this. She was one of those devoted employees who never lost their faith in the institutions they worked for, capable of saying no regularly with the same cheery face. “Would you care for a Bloody Mary mix?”

He took the thick, scarlet mixture and leaned back, his forehead broodingly creased, his hazel eyes blurred. Only then did he notice Rose staring at him, scrutinizing his moves carefully, apprehensively. Her expression darkened when she asked, “What is it, honey? You look nervous. Is it because we’re going to see your family?”

Having already discussed this trip exhaustively, there wasn’t much to say now. Rose knew Mustafa had no desire to go to Istanbul and was simply yielding to her adamant request to go there together. Though she appreciated that, it is hard to say she felt grateful.
A wife of nineteen years has the right to ask her husband for an act of kindness once in a blue moon,
she thought to herself, as she held Mustafa’s hand and squeezed it tenderly.

This gesture caught Mustafa off guard. An immense melancholy surged over him as he inched closer to his wife. From her he had learned two fundamental things about love: first, that unlike what the romantics so pompously argued, love was more a gradual course than a sudden blossoming at first sight, and second, that he was capable of loving.

Over the years he had grown used to loving her and had found in her a measure of tranquillity. Rose, though highly demanding and difficult at times, was always true to her essence, decipherable and predictable; she was a straightforward chart of energies, every possible reaction of which he was familiar with. She never challenged him, just as she never truly confronted life, and she had a natural talent for adapting to her surroundings. Rose was an amalgam of clashing forces that effortlessly operated on their own, purely out of time, and thereby, out of family genealogies. After meeting her, the family torments that festered inside him had been transformed into a plodding but easygoing love, which was perhaps the closest he could get to real love. Rose might not have been a perfect wife in her first marriage, where she had failed to adapt to an extended Armenian family, but for exactly the same reason she was the ideal haven for a man like him, a man trying to flee his extended Turkish family.

“Are you OK?” Rose repeated with a slight edge to her tone this time.

And in this same moment, a wave of anxiety washed over Mustafa Kazancı. He paled as if he couldn’t get enough air. He shouldn’t be on this plane. He shouldn’t go to Istanbul. Rose should go there alone and pick up her daughter and return home . . .
home.
How he longed to be back in Arizona now, where everything was canopied by the smooth flow of familiarity.

“I think I should walk a little,” Mustafa said, handing his drink to Rose and standing up to control what was quickly turning into a panic attack. “It’s no good sitting still for hours on end.”

As he walked toward the back of the plane down the narrow aisle, he glanced at the passengers in each row, some Turkish, some American, some of other nationalities. Businessmen, journalists, photographers, diplomats, travel writers, students, mothers with newborn babies, complete strangers with whom you shared the same space and could even share the same fate. Some of them were reading books or newspapers, some watching King Arthur slay his enemies on an in-flight video game, while others were immersed in crossword puzzles. A woman ten rows back, a tanned brunette in her midthirties, looked at him intently. Mustafa averted his eyes. He was still a good-looking man, not so much for his tall, burly body, sharp features, and raven hair as for his genteel manners and style of chic dressing. Even though he had attracted the attention of numerous women throughout his life, he had never cheated on his wife. The irony was that the more he steered clear of other women, the more they had been attracted to him.

While passing the brunette’s row, Mustafa noticed uneasily that the woman wore a brashly short skirt and had crossed her legs in such a way that you could easily be fooled into thinking that you might catch a glimpse of her underwear. He didn’t like the disconcerting feeling the miniskirt brought on him; heavy, thorny memories he wished he could jettison once and for all; the sight of his younger sister, Zeliha, who had always been fond of such skirts, scurrying on the cobblestones of Istanbul in painfully hurried steps as if to escape her own shadow. As he lurched ahead, Mustafa’s eyeballs darted to the other side so as to avoid looking where he shouldn’t. Now that he had reached middle age, he sometimes wondered if he had ever liked women at all. Other than Rose, of course. But then again, Rose was not a woman. Rose was Rose.

Overall he had been a good stepfather to Rose’s daughter. Though he truly loved Armanoush, he himself had not wanted to have any children. No kids for him. Nobody knew that deep inside his heart he believed he didn’t deserve to have them. He wasn’t sure he’d make a good father. Whom was he kidding? He would make a terrible father. Even worse than his own father.

He recalled the day he and Rose met, not a very romantic encounter perhaps, in a supermarket aisle as he stood with a can of garbanzo beans in each hand. Over the years, they had talked about that day so many times, making fun of every detail they could recollect. Still they had quite different memories of it: Rose always evoked his shyness and nervousness, while he recalled her glowing blond hair and intrepidness, which initially had intimidated him. Never again had he felt intimidated by Rose. On the contrary, to be with Rose was like abandoning himself to a serene stream, knowing that it would never pull him down, an imperturbable flow with no surprises along the way. It hadn’t taken him a long time to start loving her.

In the mornings Mustafa would watch Rose toil in the kitchen. They both loved the kitchen, although for completely different reasons. Rose loved it because she loved cooking, and it made her feel at home. As for Mustafa, he simply liked to watch her amid the multiple ordinary details, the paper towels that matched the tiles, the mugs sufficient for a garrison, the puddle of chocolate fudge sauce hardening on the counter. He particularly liked to observe her hands as they sliced, stirred, minced, and chopped. Watching her make pancakes was one of the most soothing sights life had ever bestowed upon him.

At first, his mother and elder sisters kept writing to him, asking him how he was doing, when he was coming to visit them. They asked questions he busily ran away from and kept sending letters and gifts, his mother more than anyone else. Throughout these twenty years he met his mother again only once, not in Istanbul but in Germany. While on a visit to Frankfurt for a conference of geologists and gemologists, he had asked her to fly there to join him. So they met in Germany, mother and son, just as political refugees who couldn’t go back to Turkey had been doing for many years.

By that time his mother had been so desperate to see him that she hadn’t even questioned why he didn’t come to Istanbul. It was astounding how quickly people managed to get used to such abnormal circumstances.

When he reached the rear of the plane, Mustafa Kazancı stopped in front of the toilets, right behind two men in line. He heaved a sigh as he thought about the evening before. Rose didn’t know that on the way home from work, he had stopped by a corner in Tucson he had secretly been visiting every now and then for the last ten years. The shrine of El Tiradito.

It was a modest, out-of-the-way place in downtown Tucson, the only shrine in America dedicated to the soul of a sinner, reported the historical plaque there. The soul of an excommunicate, a
tiradito,
an outcast. Today nobody knew much about the details of the story, which went back to the mid-nineteenth century; who exactly the sinner was, what exactly his sin was, and more significantly, how he had ended up with a shrine dedicated to his immoral name. Mexican immigrants knew more about him than others, but then again, they were inclined to share less with outsiders. But Mustafa Kazancı wasn’t interested in investigating historical details. Suffice it to know that El Tiradito was a good man, at least no worse than the rest of us, and yet he had committed awful deeds in the past, mistakes base enough to turn him into a sinner. Yet he had been spared and given what many a mortal lacked, a shrine.

So last night Mustafa had visited the shrine again, tormented by thoughts. Though small, Tucson was large when it came to holy places and he could have gone to a mosque if he desired. The truth is, he wasn’t a religious man, and never had been. He needed no temples or holy books. He did not go to the El Tiradito to worship. He went there because that was the one holy place that didn’t compel him to change into someone else in order to welcome him. He went there because he liked the feeling of the place, unpretentious and yet imposing and gothic at the same time. The mixture of Mexican spirits with American mores, the dozens of candles and
milagros
placed by different people, perhaps sinners themselves, the folded papers in the walls where visitors confessed and hid their sins—all appealed to him in his present mood.

“Are you all right, sir?” It was the stewardess with the sapphire eyes.

He gave a curt nod and answered, this time in English.

“Yes, thank you. I’m OK. Just a bit airsick. . . .”

Under the velvety light of a streetlamp penetrating the curtains, Auntie Zeliha lay slumped with the cell phone still in her hand, the vodka bottle leaning against her chin, and the cigarette still lit in her other hand.

Auntie Banu tiptoed into her room. Briskly she smothered the smoldering blanket and stubbed the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. She grabbed the cell phone and placed it on the cupboard, took the vodka bottle and hid it under the bed, then tucked her sister under the bedsheet and turned off the lamp.

She opened the windows. The air was crisp with the salty tang of a sea breeze. As the smoke and smell inside the room wafted out, Auntie Banu looked at her youngest sister’s pale face, tired beyond her age. In the dim, yellowish light filtering in from the outside, Zeliha’s face had grown incandescent, as if alcohol and sorrow had given her a radiance rarely encountered in nature. Auntie Banu softly kissed her on her forehead, compassion welling in her eyes. She then glanced left and right at her two
djinn
who had been carefully watching her every move from their usual places on her shoulders.

“What are you gonna do, master?” asked Mr. Bitter, a tinge of gloating in his voice. He did not bother to hide his delight in seeing his master so helpless and distressed. It always amused him to see the powerlessness of the mighty.