The Bastard of Istanbul (12 page)

“This café is called what it is called because the word
Kundera
is a code. The gist of the issue is not what the name is but what the name is symptomatic of!”

“And what would that be?” asked the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies, a short, gaunt man with a beard dyed ash gray ever since the day he concluded young women preferred mature men. He was the writer and creator of a popular TV series,
Timur the Lionheart
, which featured a hefty, robust national hero capable of mashing entire battalions of enemies into a bloody puree. When asked about his tacky TV show and movies, he would defend himself by arguing that he was a nationalist by profession but a true nihilist by choice. Today he showed up with another girlfriend— a comely, eye-catching woman but without much depth. This he didn’t confess to her, but within male circles they had a specific name for shallow females like her: “appetizers”—not the main course, of course, but good to snack on. Bolting cashews from the bowl on the table, he guffawed as he put his arm around his new girlfriend: “Come on, tell us what that code is!”

“Boredom,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist said with a puff of smoke. Coils of smoke ascended from all sides as people smoked like chimneys all around, and his wispy puff lazily joined the thick, gray cloud hovering over the table.

The only one who didn’t smoke at the table was the Closeted-Gay Columnist. He detested the smell of smoke. Every day when he went home he immediately took off his clothes to get rid of the stinky odors of Café Kundera. Still, he did not object when others smoked. Neither did he stop going to the café. He came here regularly both because he enjoyed being part of this motley group and also because he was secretly attracted to the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist.

Not that the Closeted-Gay Columnist wanted to have anything physical with the cartoonist. Even the thought of him naked was enough to send shivers down his spine. This wasn’t about sex, he assured himself, but about kindred spirits. Besides, there were two big obstacles that blocked his way. First, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist was strictly heterosexual and the chances of him changing seemed slim. Second, he had a crush on that morose girl Asya—a fact that everyone but she had noticed by this time.

So the Closeted-Gay Columnist did not harbor any hopes about having an affair with the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. He just wanted to be close to him. Every now and then he felt a sudden shudder when the cartoonist, while reaching for a glass or an ashtray, accidentally touched his hand or shoulder. Still, in the itch to assure everyone that he had absolutely no interest in him, or in any man for that matter, there were times the columnist treated the cartoonist distantly, denigrating his opinions out of the blue. It was a complicated story.

“Boredom,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist remarked when he had knocked back his café latte. “Boredom is the summary of our lives. Day after day we wallow in ennui. Why? Because we cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture. Western politicians presume there is a cultural gap between Eastern Civilization and Western Civilization. If it were that simple! The real civilization gap is between the Turks and
the
Turks. We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hill-billies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city.”

He threw the windows a sidelong look, as if afraid that a throng of folks might ram them with their clubs and cannonballs.

“The streets belong to them, the plazas belong to them, the ferries belong to them. Every open area is theirs. Perhaps in a few years this café will be the only place left for us. Our last liberated zone. We rush here every day to seek refuge from them. Oh yes,
them
! God save me from my own people!”

“You are talking poetry,” said the Exceptionally Untalented Poet. Since he was an exceptionally untalented poet, he had the habit of likening everything to poetry.

“We are stuck. We are stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They’ve got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalists, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They’ve got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side. What is left for us?”

He put the cigarette back between his pale, chapped lips, where it remained throughout his continued grievance. “The Modernists tell us to move forward, but we have no faith in their idea of progress. The Traditionalists tell us to move backward, but we do not want to return to their ideal order either. Sandwiched between the two sides, we march two steps forward and one step backward, just like the Ottoman army band did! But we don’t even play an instrument! Where can we possibly escape to? We are not even a minority. I wish we were an ethnic minority or an indigenous people under the protection of the UN Charter. Then we could have at least some basic rights. But nihilists, pessimists, and anarchists are not regarded as a minority, although we are an extinct species. Our number is lessening every day. How long can we survive?”

The question hung heavily above their heads, somewhere below the cloud of smoke. The cartoonist’s wife, who was a jittery woman with full, somber eyes and too much umbrage welled inside, and who happened to be a better cartoonist than her husband but far less appreciated, gnashed her teeth, torn between picking on her partner of twelve years, as she would like to do, and supporting his frenzy no matter what, as an ideal wife would do. They sincerely disliked each other and yet all these years they both had clutched at their marriage, she with the hope of revenge, he out of hope that it would get better. Today they spoke with words and gestures stolen from each other. Even their caricatures were analogous now. They drew deformed bodies and invented twisted dialogues involving depressed people dropped into sad and sarcastic situations.

“You know what we are? The scum of this country. A sorry soggy pulp, nothing more than that! Everyone but us is obsessed with entering the EU, making profits, buying stocks, trading up their cars, and trading up their girlfriends. . . .”

The Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies fidgeted nervously.

“This is where Kundera enters into the picture,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist continued without noticing the gaffe. “The whole idea of lightness permeates our lives in the form of a meaningless emptiness. Our existence is kitsch, a beautiful lie, which helps us to defy the reality of death and mortality. It is precisely this—”

But his words were cut off by the jingling of the bells as the door of Café Kundera opened with a blast and a young woman walked in, looking tired beyond her age and pissed off.

“Yo, Asya!” the scenarist yelled, as if she were the much-awaited savior who would terminate this daft conversation. “Over here! We’re here!”

Asya Kazancı offered a half smile and her forehead furrowed with an expression that said,
Oh well, I can join you folks briefly, what difference does it make anyway, life sucks either way.
Slowly, as if saddled with invisible sacks of inertia, she approached the table, gave everyone a toneless greeting, took a seat, and started to roll a cigarette.

“What are you doing here at this hour? Aren’t you supposed to be at ballet now?” asked the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, forgetting his soliloquy. His eyes flickered with consideration—a sign that was noticed by all but his wife.

“But that’s exactly where I am: in my ballet class. And right now”—Asya stuffed the rolling paper with tobacco—“I am doing one of the most difficult jumps, meeting my calves in the air between forty-five and ninety degrees—
cabriole
!”

“Wow!” The cartoonist smiled.

“Then I make a turning jump,” Asya continued. “Right foot front, demi plié, jump up!” She grabbed the leather tobacco pouch and held it in the air. “Turn a hundred and eighty degrees”—she ordered as she rotated the pouch, sprinkling some tobacco on the table—“and land on left foot!” The pouch perched next to the bowl of cashews. “Then repeat the whole thing one more time to go back to the starting position.
Emboîté
!”

“Ballet is like writing poetry with your body,” muttered the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.

A sullen torpor set in. Someplace far away churned the sounds of the city, an amalgam of sirens, horns, shouts, and laughter accompanied by the squeaks of the seagulls. A few new customers came in, a few customers left. One of the waiters fell with a trayful of glasses. Another waiter fetched a broom and as he swept the glass off the floor, the customers watched nonchalantly. Here the waiters changed frequently. The working hours were long and the pay not great. Still, no waiter had resigned to this day; instead they would get themselves fired. That’s how it was in the Café Kundera; once you stepped inside, you remained fastened to it until the place spat you out.

In the following half hour some people at Asya Kazancı’s table ordered coffee, the rest ordered beer. In the second round, the former drank beer and the latter drank coffee. And so it went. Only the cartoonist stuck to café lattes and nibbled the vanilla biscuits that came with them, although by this time his frustration was becoming visible. In any case, nothing was done in harmony, and yet in that dissonance there lay an unusual cadence. This is what Asya liked most about the café: its comatose indolence and farcical disharmony. This place was out of time and space. Istanbul was in a constant hurry and yet at Café Kundera only lethargy prevailed. People outside the café stuck to one another to disguise their loneliness, pretending to be far more intimate than they really were, whereas in here it was the opposite, everyone pretending to be far more detached than they really were. This spot was the negation of the whole city. Asya took a drag on her cigarette, fully appreciating the inaction until the cartoonist looked at his watch and turned toward her. “It’s seven forty, dear. Your class is over.”

“Oh, do you have to go? Your family is so outmoded,” the scenarist’s girlfriend blurted out. “Why are they making you take ballet classes when obviously you aren’t into it?”

That was the problem with all these butterfly-life-spanned girlfriends the scenarist brought with him. Driven by an impulse to become friends with everyone in the group, they asked too many personal questions and made too many personal comments, miserably failing to acknowledge that it was precisely the opposite, the lack of any serious and sincere interest in each other’s privacy, that drew the group members to one another.

“How can you cope with all those aunts?” the scenarist’s girlfriend continued, failing to read Asya’s face. “Gosh, so many women playing the role of mother all under the same roof. . . . I couldn’t stand it a minute.”

Now that was too much. There were unwritten rules in a group as eclectic as this and they were not to be violated. Asya sniffed. She did not like women, which would have been easier to deal with had she not been one of them. Whenever she met a new woman she did one of two things: either waited to see when she would hate her or hated her right away.

“I don’t have a family in the normal sense of the word.” Asya gave her a condescending gaze, hoping this would stop whatever the other was planning to say next. Yet in the endeavor she caught sight of a shiny silver frame on the wall right above the latter’s right shoulder. It was the picture of a road to the Red Lagoon in Bolivia. How nice it would be to be on that road right now! She finished her coffee, stubbed out her cigarette, and began to roll another one as she mumbled, “We are a pack of female animals forced to live together. I don’t call that a family.”

“But that’s exactly what a family is about, my dear,” objected the Exceptionally Untalented Poet. At times like this he remembered that he was the eldest of the group, not only in terms of age years but also in terms of
mistakes
years. Married and divorced three times, he had watched as one by one all of his ex-wives left Istanbul to get as far away from him as possible. From each marriage he had children whom he visited only once in a long while, but always proudly claimed ownership of. “Remember”—he wagged a paternal finger toward Asya—“all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“It is so easy for Tolstoy to sputter that nonsense,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist’s wife shrugged. “The guy had a wife who took care of every little detail, raised the dozens of kids they had, and worked like a dog so that his majesty the great Tolstoy could concentrate and write novels!”

“What do you want?” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist asked.

“Recognition! That’s what I want. I want the whole world to admit that if given the opportunity, Tolstoy’s wife could be a better writer than him.”

“Why? Just because she was a woman?”

“Because she was a very talented woman oppressed by a very talented man,” his wife snapped.

“Oh,” said the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. Perturbed, he called the waiter and to everyone’s chagrin, he ordered a beer. Yet when it was served he must have felt some sort of guilt, for all of a sudden he switched the topic, embarking on a speech on the benefits of alcohol.

“This country owes its freedom to this little bottle which I can so freely hold in my hand.” The cartoonist raised his voice over an ambulance siren squealing outside. “Neither social reforms, nor political regulations. Not even the War of Independence. It is this very bottle that differentiates Turkey from all other Muslim countries. This beer here”—he raised the bottle as if to toast—“is the symbol of freedom and civil society.”

“Oh, come on. Since when is being a rotten drunkard a symbol of freedom?” the scenarist reprimanded sharply. The others did not join in. Debating was a waste of energy. Instead, they chose a frame on the wall and focused on a road picture.

“Since the day alcohol was forbidden and denigrated in all the Muslim Middle East. Since forever.” The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist grunted. “Think about Ottoman history. All those taverns, all those
mezes
to accompany each glass. . . . It looks like the guys were having a good time. We as a nation relish alcohol, why don’t we accept that? This is a society that likes to imbibe eleven months a year and then panic, repent, and fast in Ramadan, only to go back to drinking when the holy month is over. If there never was
sharia
in this country, if the fundamentalists never succeeded as they did elsewhere, I tell you, we owe it to this twisted tradition. It is thanks to alcohol that there is something resembling democracy in Turkey.”