The Bastard of Istanbul (43 page)

There was a knock on her door and without waiting for a response, Banu popped her head in. She was about to say something but her mouth opened and closed without words as she stood frozen, staring at her youngest sister.

“What happened to your face?” Banu asked anxiously.

Zeliha knew if there ever was a time to reveal this, it was now. She could either tell it now or hide it forever. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said slowly, the moment already gone and the choice made. “I went out for a walk and then I saw this man beating the hell out of his wife in the middle of the street. I tried to save a battered woman from her husband, but I guess I ended up getting beaten myself.”

They believed her. It was something she would do, something that could only happen to her, if it were to ever happen to anyone.

The day Zeliha was raped she was nineteen years old. An age deemed to be a grown-up according to the Turkish laws. At this age she could get married or get a driver’s license or cast a vote, once the military permitted free elections to be held again. Likewise, should she need one, she could also get an abortion on her own.

Too many times Zeliha had the same dream. She saw herself walking on the street under a rain of stones. As cobblestones fell one by one from above, digging a hole underneath, digging it deeper, she started to panic, afraid to follow suit, afraid to be swallowed without a trace by the hungry abyss. “Stop!” she cried out as stones kept rolling under her feet. “Stop!” she commanded the vehicles that sped toward her and then ran her over. “Stop!” she begged the pedestrians who shouldered her aside. “Please stop!”

That next month she missed her period. A few weeks later she paid a visit to a newly opened lab near her house. FREE PREGNANCY TEST WITH EACH BLOOD SUGAR TEST! it said on a sign at the entrance. When the results arrived, Zeliha’s blood sugar turned out to be normal and she was pregnant.

Looking out the kitchen window with a spoon in her hand, Asya sighed as she watched the silver-metallic Alfa Romeo depart.

“You see?” She turned to Sultan the Fifth. “Auntie Zeliha didn’t want me to go to the airport with them. She is being mean to me again.”

How stupid of her to allow herself to be vulnerable the other night when they had all gone out to drink! How stupid of her to count on finally bridging the barrier between them. It would never entirely disappear. This mother she had auntified would always remain at an unbridgeable distance.
Maternal compassion, filial love, familial camaraderie, she sure needed none of that.
. . . Asya paused and spat out: “
Shit.
”

“You are not talking to yourself, are you?” said Auntie Feride, just then entering the kitchen.

“Actually, I was.” Asya instantly exited her trancelike rage. “I was just telling my cat friend here how strange it is that the last time Uncle Mustafa was here he wasn’t even born and Pasha the Third ruled the house. It’s been twenty years. Isn’t it strange? The man never visits us, and now here I am scooping out his
ashure
because we still welcome him.”

“What does the cat say?” Auntie Feride asked.

Asya smiled sardonically. “He says I’m right, this must be a nuthouse. I should lose all hope and work on my manifesto instead.”

“Of course we will welcome your uncle. Family is family, whether you like it or not. We are not like the Germans; they kick their children out of the house at the age of fourteen. We have strong family values. We don’t meet just once a year to eat turkey. . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Asya asked, puzzled, but before she reached the end of her question, she sort of guessed the answer. “Are you referring to the Americans’ Thanksgiving Day?”

“Whatever.” Auntie Feride dismissed the information. “My point is that Westerners don’t have strong families. We are not like that. If somebody is your father, he is your father forever; if someone is a brother, he will be your brother till the end. Besides, everything in this world is strange enough already,” Auntie Feride continued. “That is why I like to read the third pages of the tabloids. I cut and collect them so that we don’t forget how crazy and dangerous the world is.”

Never having heard her aunt attempt to rationalize her behavior before, Asya couldn’t help but look at her with renewed interest. They sat there in the kitchen amid appetizing smells, while the March sun shone through the window.

They sat together until Auntie Feride left after hearing her favorite VJ announce the video clips of a new band, and Asya craved a cigarette. She craved not as much a cigarette as smoking that cigarette with the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, though it surprised her that she had missed him so much. She had at least two hours until the guests came back from the airport.
Besides, even if she were late, what difference would it make to anyone?
she thought.

A few minutes later, Asya closed the door softly behind her.

Auntie Banu heard the door, but before she could call out, Asya had already stepped out.

“What are you planning to do, master?” Mr. Bitter croaked.

“Nothing,” Auntie Banu whispered as she opened a dresser drawer and took out a box. Inside the velvet cover rested the pomegranate brooch.

As the oldest of the Kazancı children, this brooch was given to her, a present from her father, who had inherited it from his mother—not his stepmother, Petite-Ma, but from the mother he never talked about, the mother who had abandoned him when he was a child, the mother he had never forgiven. The brooch was both sublime and heartbreaking, Auntie Banu feared. This nobody knew, but she had once kept the golden pomegranate with ruby seeds in salted water to wash away its sad saga.

Under the watchful gaze of the
djinn,
Auntie Banu caressed the brooch, feeling the glamor of the rubies glowing inside. Until she met Armanoush it had never occurred to her to investigate the story of the pomegranate brooch. Now that she knew the story, however, she couldn’t figure out what to do next. Tempted as she was to give the brooch to Armanoush, for she believed it belonged to her more than to anyone else, she hesitated because she wasn’t quite sure how to explain why she was giving it to her.

Could she tell Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian that this brooch had once belonged to her grandma Shushan without telling her the rest of the story? How much of her knowledge could she share with those whose stories she learned through magic?

Forty minutes later on the other side of the city, Asya entered through the squeaky, wooden door of Café Kundera.

“Yo, Asya!” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist called out cheerfully. “Over here! I’m here!”

He hugged her and then, as she drew back from his arms, he exclaimed, “I’ve got news for you, one piece is good, one is bad, and one is yet to be classified. Which one would you like to hear first?”

“Give me the bad one,” Asya said.

“I am going to prison. My drawings of the prime minister as a penguin weren’t well received, I guess. I am sentenced to eight months in prison.”

Asya stared at him with astonishment that soon widened into alarm.

“Shush, dear,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist mumbled in a meek voice, putting his finger on her lips. “Don’t you want to hear the good news?” Then he beamed with pride. “I decided I need to be true to my heart and get a divorce.”

As the shadow of bewilderment that marred her face faded out, it finally occurred to Asya to ask, “And the yet-to-be classified news?”

“Today is my fourth day without a drink. Not even a drop! You know why?”

“I guess because you went to Alcoholics Anonymous again,” Asya replied.

“No!” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist drawled, looking hurt. “Because today was the fourth day since I last saw you and I wanted to be sober the next time we met. You are my one and only incentive in this life to become a better person.”

Now he blushed. “Love!” he declared. “I am in love with you, Asya.”

Asya’s hazel eyes slid toward a frame on the wall, the photo of a rutted road from Camel Trophy 1997 in Mongolia. It would be nice to run into that picture now, she thought, to be traversing the Gobi Desert in a 4x4 Jeep, heavy, dirty boots on her feet, sunglasses on her face, sweating out her troubles as she went, until she’d become as light as a nobody, as light as a dry leaf in a gust, and thus waft into a Buddhist monastery in Mongolia.

Hovhannes Stamboulian pursed his lips, as his mind worked feverishly, and the whirl of writing swallowed him up. With each new line added to this last story of his children’s book, generations of lessons swirled back to him, some disheartening, others raising his spirits, but all similarly reverberating from another time, a time without beginning or end. Children’s stories were the oldest stories in the world, where the ghosts of generations long gone spoke through the words. The urge to finish this book was so instinctive and undeniably riveting as to be irrepressible. The world had been a gloomy place since he had started writing it and now he had to finish without ado, as if its becoming a less heartrending place depended on this.

After Hovhannes Stamboulian had been taken away by the soldiers, his family did not have the heart to enter his writing room for days. They had been in and out of every room but that one, and kept the door closed as if he were still inside working day and night. But the despondency permeating the house had become too intense and too palpable to pretend that life could return to normal. Soon Armanoush decided they would all be better off in Sivas, where they would stay with her parents for a while. It was only after this decision that they entered Hovhannes Stamboulian’s room and found his manuscript,
The Little Lost Pigeon and the Blissful Country,
waiting to be completed. There among the pages they also found the pomegranate brooch.

Shushan Stamboulian saw the pomegranate brooch for the first time there on the walnut desk that belonged to her father. All of the other details of that ominous day faded away, but not that brooch. Perhaps it was the twinkle emanating from the rubies that had mesmerized her, or else seeing the world around her fall apart in a day made this the only thing she could remember. Whatever the reason, Shushan never forgot that pomegranate brooch. Not when she dropped half dead on the road to Aleppo and was left behind; not when the Turkish mother and daughter found her and took her into their house to heal her; not when she was taken by bandits to the orphanage; not when she ceased to be Shushan Stamboulian and became Shermin 626; not when years later Rıza Selim Kazancı would fortuitously chance upon her in the orphanage and, finding out she was the niece of his late master, Levon, decide to take her as his wife; not when she would the next day become Shermin Kazancı; and not when she would learn she was pregnant and would become a mother, as if she wasn’t still a child herself.

The Circassian midwife revealed the sex of the baby months before his birth, by observing the shape of her belly and the types of food she craved. Crème brûlée from posh patisseries, apfelstrudel from the bakery opened by White Russians who escaped from Russia, homemade baklava, bonbons, and sweets of all sorts. . . . Not even once during her pregnancy had Shermin Kazancı craved anything sour or salty, the way she would have had she been expecting a girl.

Indeed it was a boy, a boy born into harrowing times.

“May Allah bless my son with longer life than any man in this family has ever had,” Rıza Selim Kazancı said when the midwife handed him the baby. He then put his lips to the baby’s right ear and announced to him the name he’d carry hereafter: “You will be named Levon.”

Honoring the master from whom he had learned the art of cauldron making was not the only incentive behind this nominal choice. By naming their son Levon, he was also hoping it would be a favor to his wife for having converted to Islam.

Thus he chose the name Levon and like a good Muslim repeated it thrice: “Levon! Levon! Levon!”

Shermin Kazancı, in the meantime, remained as silent as a displaced stone.

It wouldn’t take long for the triple echo to boomerang back to them in the form of a negative question. “Levon? What kind of a Muslim name is that? No Muslim boy can be named that!” the midwife balked aloud.