The Bastard of Istanbul (13 page)

“Well, why don’t we drink, then?” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist’s wife gave a tired smile. “And what better reason do we have to drink than Mr. Tiptoe? What was his name—Cecche?”

“Cecchetti,” Asya corrected her, still lamenting the day she had been intoxicated enough to give the group a speech on ballet history, and in passing mentioned the name Cecchetti. They loved him. Ever since that day, now and again someone at the table would propose a toast to him, the dancer who introduced the pointe walk on the toes.

“So if it weren’t for him ballet dancers wouldn’t be able to walk on their toes, huh?” Someone would chuckle each time.

“What was he thinking?” Someone else would add, and then everybody would have a laugh.

Every day they met at the Café Kundera. The Exceptionally Untalented Poet, the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies and whomever his girlfriend might be at that moment, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist’s wife, the Closeted-Gay Columnist, and Asya Kazancı. There was tension buried far below the surface, waiting for talk of the day to pump it out. In the meantime, things flowed swimmingly. Some days they brought other people along, friends or colleagues or consummate strangers; some days they came alone. The group was a self-regulating organism wherein individual differences were displayed but could never take over, as if the organism had a life outside and beyond the personalities composing it.

Among them Asya Kazancı found inner peace. Café Kundera was her sanctuary. In the Kazancı domicile she always had to correct her ways, striving for a perfection that was beyond her comprehension, whereas here in Café Kundera no one forced you to change since human beings were thought to be essentially imperfect and uncorrectable.

It is true, they were not the ideal friends her aunts would have chosen for her. Some in the group were old enough to be Asya’s mother or father. Being the youngest, she enjoyed watching their childishness. It was rather comforting to see that nothing really improved in life over the years; if you were a sullen teenager, you ended up being a sullen adult. The pattern was with us to stay. True, it sounded a bit glum, but at least, Asya consoled herself, it proved that one didn’t have to become something else, something more, like her aunts kept nagging her about day and night. Since nothing was going to change in time and this sullenness was here forever, she could continue to be her same sullen self.

“Today is my birthday,” announced Asya, surprising herself since she hadn’t had any intention of declaring that.

“Oh yeah?” someone asked.

“What a coincidence! It is also my youngest daughter’s birthday today,” exclaimed the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.

“Oh yeah?” Now it was Asya’s turn.

“So you were born on the same day as my daughter! Gemini.” The poet shook his fluffy head with glee, theatrically.

“Pisces,” Asya corrected.

And that was that. Nobody tried to hug her or suffocate her with kisses, just like nobody thought about ordering a cake. Instead the poet recited an awful poem for her, the cartoonist drank three bottles of beer in her honor, and the cartoonist’s wife drew her caricature on a napkin—a surly young woman with electrified hair, huge tits, and a sharp nose under a pair of piercingly astute eyes. The others bought her another coffee and at the end did not let her pay her share of the bill. It was as simple as that. Not that they hadn’t taken Asya’s birthday seriously. To the contrary, they had taken it so seriously that soon they were excogitating aloud the notion of time and mortality, only to travel from there to the questions of when they were going to die and whether there really was an afterlife. “There
is
an afterlife and it’s going to be worse than here,” was the general opinion in the group. “So enjoy whatever time you have left.”

Some mulled it over, others stopped midword and fled into this or that road picture on the wall. They took their time, as if no one was waiting for them outside, as if there was no outside, their grimaces gradually evolving into beatific smiles of indifference. Having no energy, no passion, no need for further conversation, they sunk deeper into the murky waters of apathy, wondering why on earth this place was named Café Kundera.

At nine o’clock that night, after finishing a square meal and with the lights turned off, amid singing and clapping, Asya Kazancı blew out the candles on the triple-layer caramelized apple cake (extremely sugary) with whipped lemon cream frosting (extremely sour). She was able to blow out only a third of them. The rest of the candles were doused by her aunts, grandmother, and Petite-Ma, all of them blowing from all sides.

“How was your ballet class today?” Auntie Feride asked as she turned the lights back on.

“It was good.” Asya smiled. “My back hurts a little because of all the stretching the teacher compels us to do, but, still, I can’t complain. I learned many new moves. . . .”

“Oh yeah?” came a suspicious voice. It was Auntie Zeliha. “Like what?”

“Well . . . ” Asya replied as she took her first bite of the cake. “Let’s see. I learned the petit jeté, which is a little jump, and the pirouette and the glissade.”

“You know, this is like killing two birds with one stone,” Auntie Feride remarked. “We pay for her ballet class, but she ends up learning both ballet and French. We save a whole lot of money!”

Everyone nodded—everyone except Auntie Zeliha. With a skeptical glint in the abyss of her jade green eyes, she drew her face up close to her daughter’s and said in an almost inaudible voice, “Show us!”

“Are you crazy?” Asya flinched. “I can’t do those things right in the middle of our living room! I need to be in the studio and working with a teacher. We warm up and stretch first, and concentrate. And there is always music. . . .
Glissade
means to glide, did you know that? How am I possibly going to glide here on the carpet? ! One cannot start doing ballet just like that!”

A saturnine smile etched along Auntie Zeliha’s lips as she ran her fingers through her dark hair. She said nothing further, seeming to be more interested in eating her cake than in quarreling with her daughter. But her smile was enough to infuriate Asya. She pushed her own plate away, pulled her chair back, and stood up.

At nine fifteen that evening, in the living room of a once fashionably opulent but now long outmoded and dilapidated
konak
in Istanbul, Asya Kazancı was doing ballet on a Turkish carpet, her face romantically poised, her arms stretched out, her hands softly curved so that her middle fingers touched her thumbs, while her mind swirled with rage and resentment.

A
rmanoush Tchakhmakhchian watched the cashier at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books pile the twelve novels she had just purchased one by one into a canvas backpack while they waited for her credit card to be processed. When finally given the receipt, she signed the paper, trying to avoid looking at the total. Once again she had spent all her monthly savings on books! She was a true bookworm, not a promising feature at all given that it had zero value in the eyes of boys and thus served to only further upset her mother about the prospects of her getting married to a moneyed husband. Just this morning on the phone her mother had made her promise not to whisper a word about novels when she went out tonight. Armanoush felt a surge of angst rise in her stomach as she thought about her upcoming date. After a year of not going out with anyone—a solemn tribute to her twenty-one years of chronic singleness marked with disastrous pseudodates—finally today Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian was going to give love a try again.

If her passion for books had been one fundamental reason behind her recurring inability to sustain a standard relationship with the opposite sex, there were two additional factors that had fanned the flames of her failure. First and foremost, Armanoush was beautiful— too beautiful. With a well-proportioned body, delicate face, dark blond, wavy hair, huge gray blue eyes, and a sharp nose with a slight ridge that might seem a defect on others but on her only added an air of self-confidence, her physical attractiveness when combined with her brains intimidated young men. Not that they preferred ugly women, or that they had no appreciation for intelligence. But they didn’t quite know where exactly to pigeonhole her: among the group of women they were dying to sleep with (the darlings), or among the group they sought advice from (the buddies), or among the group they wished to marry eventually (the fiancée-types) . Since she was sublime enough to be all at once, she ended up being none.

The second factor was far more complicated but equally beyond her control: her relatives. The Tchakhmakhchian family in San Francisco and her mother in Arizona had antagonistically different views when it came to the question of who would be the right man for Armanoush. Since she had been spending almost five months here (summer vacation, spring break, and frequent visits over the weekends) and the remaining seven months in Arizona almost every year since she was a toddler, Armanoush had had the chance to learn firsthand what each side expected from her and how utterly irreconcilable those expectations were. Whatever made one side happy was bound to distress the other. In order not to upset anyone, Armanoush had tried to date Armenian boys in San Francisco and anyone but them when she was in Arizona. But fate must have been pulling her leg, because in San Francisco she had been attracted only to non-Armenians, whereas all three of the young men she had had a crush on while in Arizona turned out to be Armenian Americans, much to her mother’s disappointment.

Lugging her anxieties together with the heavy backpack, she crossed Opera Plaza while the wind whistled and wailed uncanny tunes to her ears. She caught sight of a young couple inside Max’s Opera Café who were either disappointed with the piled-high corned beef sandwiches in front of them, or else had just had a quarrel.
Thank God I’m single,
Armanoush half jokingly thought to herself before she turned toward Turk Street. Years ago when she was still in her teens, Armanoush had shown the city to an Armenian American girl from New York. Upon reaching this street the girl’s face had crumpled. “
Turk Street! Aren’t they everywhere?
”

Armanoush recalled her own surprise at the girl’s reaction. She had tried to explain to her that the street was named after Frank Turk, an attorney who had served as second alcalde and was important in the city’s history.

“Whatever.” Her friend had broken off the lecture, showing not too much interest in urban history. “All the same, aren’t they everywhere?”

Yes indeed, they were everywhere, so much so that one of them was married to her mom. But this last bit of information Armanoush had kept to herself.

She avoided talking about her stepfather with her Armenian friends. She did not talk about him with non-Armenians either. Not even with those who had absolutely no interest in life outside of their own and therefore couldn’t care less about the history of the Armenian-Turkish conflict. All the same, wise enough to know that secrets could spread quicker than dust in the wind, Armanoush maintained her silence. When you didn’t tell anyone the extraordinary, everyone assumed the normal, Armanoush discovered at an early age. Since her mother was an
odar,
what could have been more normal for her than to get married to another
odar
? This being the general assumption on the part of her friends, Armanoush’s stepfather was thought to be an American, presumably from the Midwest.

On Turk Street she passed by a gay-friendly bed-and-breakfast, a Middle Eastern grocery store, and a small Thai market, and strolled next to pedestrians from all walks of life until she finally got on the trolley to Russian Hill. Leaning her forehead on the dusty window, she reflected on the “other I” in Borges’s
Labyrinths
as she watched the wispy fog drift up off the horizon. Armanoush too had another self, one that she kept at bay no matter where she went.

She liked being in this city, its vim and vigor pulsating in her body. Ever since she was a toddler she had enjoyed coming here and living with her dad and Grandma Shushan. Unlike her mom, her dad had not married again. Armanoush knew he had had girlfriends in the past but none had been introduced to her, either because the affairs weren’t serious enough or her dad had been afraid of upsetting her in some way. Probably it was the latter. That would be more typical of Barsam Tchakhmakhchian. He was the most unselfish soul and the most
genderless
man, Armanoush believed, that existed on the face of the earth, and to this day she couldn’t help marveling at how he could have ever ended up with a woman as self-absorbed as Rose. Not that Armanoush didn’t love her mother; she did, in her own way, but there were times in which she felt suffocated by her mother’s dissatisfied love. At those times she escaped to San Francisco right into the arms of the Tchakhmakhchian family, where a satisfied but equally demanding love would be awaiting her.

Once off the trolley she began to hurry. Matt Hassinger would be picking her up at seven thirty. She had less than an hour and a half to get ready, which basically meant to take a shower and don a dress, perhaps the turquoise one everyone said looked so good on her. That would be all. No makeup, no jewelry. She was not going to doll herself up for this date and she certainly wasn’t going to expect much from it. If it worked out well, that would be nice. But if it didn’t, she would be prepared for that too. Thus inching her way under the fog canopying the city, at ten past six in the evening Armanoush reached her grandmother’s two-bathroom condominium in Russian Hill, a lively neighborhood built on one of the steepest hills in San Francisco.

“Hello, sweetheart, welcome home!”

Surprisingly, it was not her grandmother but Auntie Surpun who opened the door. “I missed you,” she twittered lovingly. “What have you done all day long? How was your day?”

“It was OK,” Armanoush said placidly, wondering what her youngest aunt was doing here on a Tuesday evening.