The Bastard of Istanbul (45 page)

The door opened a crack and a second later Auntie Banu’s head peeked into the room. “Can I come in?” she asked in a hushed, hesitant voice. Upon hearing a plausibly affirmative noise, she cautiously stole across the room with her bare feet buried in the high pile carpet, and then stopped. Her red head scarf glowed as if lit by a mysterious light and the dark bags under her eyes made her look ghostly. “You haven’t come downstairs all day long. I just wanted to check on you,” she whispered while eyeing Rose, asleep on the other side of the bed, her arms wrapped around her pillow.

“I wasn’t feeling well.” Mustafa looked at her, and then quickly glanced away.

“Here, my brother,” Banu said as she handed him a bowl of
ashure
, decorated with pomegranate seeds. “You know, Mom has cooked a huge pot of
ashure
for you.” Her serious face broke into a smile. “I must say, she is the cook but I am the one who decorated the bowls.”

“Oh thank you, you are so kind,” Mustafa stuttered as he felt a chill run down his spine. He had always feared his eldest sister. Whatever voice he possessed deserted him the moment he felt Banu’s gaze inspecting him. Though she had made it a habit to scrutinize others, she herself remained inscrutable. Banu was the exact opposite of Rose: transparency was not among her virtues. If anything, she resembled a cryptic book written in an arcane alphabet. No matter how hard Mustafa tried to read her intentions, he could not for the life of him unravel her shadowy expression. Nevertheless, he did his best to look appreciative as he took the bowl of
ashure.

The silence that followed was heavy and unfathomable. No silence had ever felt so cruel to Mustafa. As if disturbed by it, Rose turned in her sleep, but she did not wake up.

There had been many times in his life when Mustafa had been swept away with a sudden urge to confess to his wife that what she saw in him was not the whole of him. Yet at other times he had been satisfied impersonating a man without a past, a man with a cultivated denial. This amnesia of his was deliberate, though not calculated. On the one hand, there was somewhere inside his brain a gate that wouldn’t close no matter what; some memories always escaped. On the other hand was the urge to dredge up what the mind had neatly expunged. These twin currents had accompanied him all throughout his life. Now, back in his childhood house and under the penetrating gaze of his eldest sister, he knew one of the currents was bound to lose its strength. He knew if he stayed here any longer, he would start to remember. And every memory would trigger yet another one. The moment he had stepped into his childhood home, the spell that had shielded him all these years against his own memory had been shattered. How could he take refuge in his manufactured amnesia any longer?

“I need to ask you something,” Mustafa gasped, his gasp almost that of a boy’s in between a spanking.

A leather belt with a copper buckle. As a boy Mustafa prided himself on never crying, not even a tear, when Daddy would take the leather belt out. As much as he had learned to control his tears, he had never managed to suppress the gasp. How he hated this gasp. Struggling for breath. Struggling for space. Struggling for affection.

He paused briefly as if to gather his thoughts. “There’s something that has been nagging at me for quite some time now. . . .” There was just the slightest hint of fear in his otherwise tranquil voice. Moonlight penetrated the curtains and made a tiny circle on the rich Turkish carpet. He focused on that circle as he unleashed the question: “Where is Asya’s father?”

Mustafa turned to his eldest sister in time to catch her grimace, but Banu was quick to restore her composure.

“When we met in Germany, Mom told me Zeliha had a baby from a man she had been engaged to briefly. But, she said, he had left her.”

“Mom has lied to you,” Banu interrupted. “But what difference does it make anymore? Asya grew up without seeing her father. She doesn’t know who he is. The family doesn’t know who he is either,” she added hastily. “Other than Zeliha, of course.”

“Including you?” Mustafa asked incredulously. “I heard you were a genuine soothsayer. Feride says you have enslaved some bad
djinni
to get all the information you need. You seem to have customers from everywhere. Now are you trying to tell me that you lack the knowledge of something this crucial? Haven’t your
djinn
revealed anything to you?”

“They have, actually,” Banu confided. “I wish I didn’t know the things I know.”

Mustafa’s heart beat faster as he absorbed the words. Petrified, he closed his eyes. But even behind closed eyes he could see Banu’s piercing gaze. And another pair of eyes portentously glittering in the dark, so hollow and bloodcurdling. Was that her evil
djinni
? But all of this must have been a dream, for when Mustafa Kazancı opened his eyes again, he was alone with his wife in the room.

Yet right beside his side of the bed there was a bowl of
ashure
waiting for him. He stared at it and suddenly he knew why it was placed there and what exactly he was asked to do. The choice belonged to him . . . to his left hand.

He looked at his left hand, now waiting next to the bowl. He smiled at his hand’s power. Now his hand could either grab this bowl or just push it aside. If he chose the second option, he would wake up tomorrow to just another day in Istanbul. He would see Banu at the breakfast table. They wouldn’t talk about the exchange they had the night before. They would pretend this bowl of
ashure
was never concocted and never served. If he chose the first option, however, things would come full circle. But having reached the age limits for a Kazancı man, death was close anyway, one day more or less would not make much difference at this point in his life. At the back of his mind echoed an old story—the story of a man who had escaped to the ends of the earth hoping to avoid the Angel of Death, only to run into him where they were originally destined to meet.

It was a choice less between life and death than between self-controlled death and sudden death. With such a family heritage he was sure he would die soon anyway. Now his left hand, his guilty hand, could choose when and how.

He remembered the little piece of paper he had stuck in the stone wall at the shrine of El Tradito. “Forgive me,” he had written there. “For me to exist, the past had to be erased.”

Now, he felt like the past was returning. And for it to exist, he had to be erased. . . .

All these years, a harrowing remorse had been gnawing him inside, little by little, without disrupting his outer facade. But perhaps the fight between amnesia and remembering was finally over. Like a sea plain stretching as far as the eye could see after the tide went out, memories of a troubled past surfaced hither and thither from the ebbing waters. He reached out to the
ashure.
Knowingly and willfully, he started to eat it, little by little, savoring each and every ingredient with every mouthful.

It felt so relieving to walk out on his past and his future at once. It felt so good to walk out on life.

Seconds after he finished the
ashure
, he was seized with an abdominal cramp so sharp he couldn’t breathe. Two minutes later his breathing stopped completely.

That is how Mustafa Kazancı died at the age of forty and three-quarters.

T
he body was cleansed with a bar of daphne soap, as fragrant and pure and green as the pastures in paradise are said to be. It was scrubbed, swabbed, rinsed, and then left to dry naked on the flat stone in the mosque-yard before being wrapped in a three-piece cotton shroud, placed in a coffin, and, despite the adamant counsel of the elderly to bury it on the same day, loaded in a hearse to be driven directly back to the Kazancı domicile.

“You cannot take him home!” exclaimed the scrawny dead-washer as he blocked the exit of the mosque-yard and frowned at each and every one involved. “The man is going to stink, for Allah’s sake! You are embarrassing him.”

Somewhere between the “you” and “him” it started to drizzle; sparse, reluctant drops, as if the rain too wanted to play a role in all this but just hadn’t taken sides yet. This Tuesday, in the month of March, no doubt the most unbalanced and unbalancing month in Istanbul, seemed to have changed its mind yet again, deciding it in fact belonged to the winter season.

“But dead-washer brother”—Auntie Feride sniffed, instantly integrating the nervous man into her engulfing and egalitarian cosmos of hebephrenic schizophrenia—“we will take him back to his house so that everyone can see him one last time. You see, my brother had been abroad for so many years, we had almost forgotten his face. After twenty years, he finally returns to Istanbul and on his third day here, he breathes his last breath. His death was so unexpected, neighbors and distant relatives will not believe he has passed away if they don’t have a chance to see him dead.”

“Woman, are you out of your mind? There is no such thing in our religion!” the dead-washer snapped, hoping this would stop whatever she might be planning to say next. “We Muslims do not exhibit our deceased in a showcase.” His face visibly hardened as he added, “If your neighbors want to see him, they’ll have to visit his gravestone in the cemetery.”

While Auntie Feride paused to ponder this suggestion, Auntie Cevriye, standing next to her, stared at the man with a raised eyebrow, the way she looked at her students in an oral quiz when she wanted them to realize, by themselves, how illogical was the answer they had just given.

“But dead-washer brother,” Auntie Feride continued, now catching up. “How can they
see
him when he is in a grave six feet down?”

The dead-washer’s thick eyebrows shot up in frustration, but he preferred not to answer, finally sensing the futility of discussing anything with these women.

Auntie Feride had dyed her hair black that morning. This was her mourning hair. She shook her head with determination and then added: “Don’t you worry. You can rest assured that we are not going to display him like the Christians do in the movies.”

Pouting at Auntie Feride’s relentlessly moving eyeballs and fluttering hands, the dead-washer stood dead still for an awful minute, now looking less annoyed than distressed, as if he had suddenly realized she was the craziest person he had ever come across. His ferrety eyes looked around for help. Having found none, they then slid toward the corpse patiently waiting for them to reach a decision about its fate, and finally back to both aunts again, but if there was a message secreted somewhere in this back-and-forth chilly glance, none of them could decode the meaning.

Instead, Auntie Cevriye tipped him, generously.

So the dead-washer took his tip and the Kazancıs their dead.

In a flash, they formed a convoy of four vehicles. Leading the procession was a hearse, sage green as a Muslim hearse is dictated to be, the color black being reserved for the funerals of the minorities, Armenians and Jews and Greeks alike. The coffin lay at the back of the three-sided truck, and since somebody had to go with the dead, Asya volunteered. Armanoush, her face full of confusion, was tightly gripping Asya’s hand so that it looked like the two had volunteered together.

“I am not having any women sitting in front of a hearse,” remarked the driver who startlingly looked very much like the dead-washer. Maybe they were brothers; one of them washed while the other carried the dead, and perhaps there was a third brother working in the cemetery, in charge of burying them.

“Well, you have to because there aren’t any more men left in our family,” Auntie Zeliha chided from behind, in a voice so icy the man grew quiet. Perhaps it had occurred to him that if there truly were no men to escort the dead in the hearse, it was better that these two girls accompanied him rather than this intimidating woman with her miniskirt and nose ring.

So the man stopped complaining and soon the hearse lumbered off.

Right behind them was Rose’s Toyota Corolla. Her panic was almost palpable from the way the car lurched and halted, moving inch by inch, as if she were either convulsed by rhythmic hiccups or intimidated by the wild traffic.

Given her steadily increasing trepidation, it was now hardly possible to imagine Rose at the wheel of a five-door, ultramarine Grand Cherokee Limited 4x4, equipped with an 8.0 cylinder engine. The woman who roared down the wide boulevards of Arizona had turned into a different driver on the snaky, crowded streets of Istanbul. Truth be told, Rose was completely astounded at the moment, her bafflement and disorientation almost outweighing her grief. In no more than seventy-two hours after their arrival, she felt like she had accidentally fallen through a wormhole in the cosmos and stumbled into another dimension, a strange land where nothing seemed normal, and even death was smothered by surrealness.

Grandma Gülsüm sat next to her, unable to communicate with this American daughter-in-law she hadn’t seen all her life, but also feeling concern and pity for her now that she had lost her husband, though not as much concern and pity as she felt for herself, now that she had lost her son.

In the back seat was Petite-Ma. Today she wore a teal outdoor head scarf trimmed with inky black on the edges. On her first day in Istanbul, Rose had spent a great deal of time trying to unravel the essential criteria that would illuminate once and for all why some women in Turkey wore the head scarf and others did not. Before long, however, she had given up, failing to solve the puzzle even at the local level, or even within the household. Why on earth ageless Petite-Ma wore the head scarf while her daughter-in-law Gülsüm did not, and why one of the aunties wore the head scarf while her three sisters did not, was simply beyond her.

Right behind the Toyota was Auntie Zeliha’s metallic silver Alfa Romeo, with her three sisters crammed inside and Sultan the Fifth curled in a basket on Auntie Cevriye’s lap, startlingly tranquil today, as if human death had a soothing effect on his feline ferocity.