The Bastard of Istanbul (18 page)

Regrettably Asya was not blessed with even a wee bit of faith. She was too mordant to have confidence in the flow of time. She was a burning fire inside without the slightest faith in the righteousness of the divine order. In that respect too, she greatly resembled no one but her mother. With this kind of moral fiber and in this mood, there was no way she could be patient and faithful, waiting for the day life would turn her body to her advantage. At this point in time, Auntie Zeliha could clearly see that the knowledge of her physical dullness, among other things, was pricking at her daughter’s young heart. If only she could tell her that the beauties would only attract the worst guys. If only she could make her understand how lucky she was not to be born too beautiful; that in fact both men and women would be more benevolent to her, and that her life would be better off, yes, much better off without the exquisiteness she now so craved.

Still without a word Auntie Zeliha walked toward the dresser, fetched the slipper, and placed the now united pair in front of Asya’s naked feet. She stood up before her mutinous daughter, who instantly lifted her chin and straightened her back in the posture of a proud prisoner of war who had surrendered arms but certainly not his dignity.

“Let’s go!” Auntie Zeliha commanded. Mutely, mother and daughter convoyed toward the living room.

The folding table was long set for breakfast. Despite her grumpiness Asya couldn’t help noticing that when the table was festooned like this, it fit perfectly, almost picturesquely, with the huge, fire-brick rug underneath, glowing in its intricate floral patterns within a handsome coral border. Just like the rug, the table above looked ornamented. There were black olives, red pepper-stuffed green olives, white cheese, braided cheese, goat cheese, boiled eggs, honeycombs, buffalo cream, homemade apricot marmalade, homemade raspberry jam, and olive-oil-soaked minted tomatoes in china bowls. The delectable smell of newly baked
börek
wafted from the kitchen: white cheese, spinach, butter, and parsley melting into one another amid thin layers of phyllo pastry.

Now ninety-six years old, Petite-Ma was sitting at the far end of the table, holding a teacup even thinner than herself. With an engrossed and somewhat befuddled look on her face, she was watching the canary twittering in the cage by the balcony door, as if she had only now noticed the bird. Perhaps she had. Having entered the fifth stage of Alzheimer’s, she had started to muddle up the most familiar faces and facts of her life.

Last week, for instance, toward the end of the afternoon prayer, as soon as she had bent down and put her forehead on her little rug for the stage of
sajda,
she had forgotten what to do next. The words of the prayer she had to utter had all of a sudden fastened together into an elongated chain of letters and walked away in tandem, like a black, hairy caterpillar with too many feet to count. After a while, the caterpillar had stopped, turned around, and waved at Petite-Ma from a distance, as if surrounded by glass walls, so clearly visible yet unreachable. Lost and confused, Petite-Ma had just sat there facing the
Qibla,
glued on her rug with a prayer scarf on her head and the string of amber prayer beads in her hand, motionless and soundless, until someone noticed the situation and lifted her up.

“What was the rest of it?” Petite-Ma had asked in panic when they made her lie on the sofa and put soft cushions under her head. “In the
sajda
you must say Subhana rabbiyal-ala. You must say it at least thrice. I did. I said it three times.
Subhana rabbiyal-ala, Subhana
rabbiyal-ala, Subhana rabbiyal-ala,
” she twirped the words repeatedly, as if in a frenzy. “And then what? What is next?”

As luck would have it, it was Auntie Zeliha who happened to be by her side when Petite-Ma raised this question. Having no practice in
namaz,
or in any religious duty for that matter, she had absolutely no idea what her grandmother might be talking about. But she wanted to help, to soothe the old woman’s anguish in any way she could. Thus she fetched the Holy Qur’an, and skimmed through the pages until she came across a resemblance of solace in some verse: “Look what it says. When the call is sounded for prayer on Fridays, hasten to the remembrance of God . . . but when the prayer is ended, disperse abroad in the land and seek of God’s grace and remember God, that you may be successful” (62:9-10).

“What do you mean?” Petite-Ma blinked her eyes, now more lost than ever.

“I mean, now that the prayer has ended in one way or another, you can stop thinking about it. That’s what it says here, right? Come on Petite-Ma, disperse abroad in the land . . . and have supper with us.”

It had worked. Petite-Ma had stopped worrying about the forgotten line and had dined with them peacefully. Nonetheless, incidences like this had lately started to occur with an alarming frequency. Often subdued and withdrawn, there were times in which she forgot the simplest things, including where she was, which day of the week it was, or who these strangers were with whom she sat at the same table. And yet there were also times it was hard to believe she was ill, as her mind seemed as clear as newly polished Venetian glass. This morning it was hard to tell. Too early to tell.

“Good morning, Petite-Ma!” Asya exclaimed as she shuffled her lavender feet toward the table, having finally washed her face and brushed her teeth. She leaned over the old woman and gave her a sloppy kiss on both cheeks.

Ever since she was a little girl, of all the women in her family, Petite-Ma retained a most special place in Asya’s heart. She loved her dearly. Unlike some others in the family, Petite-Ma had always been capable of loving without suffocating. She would never nag or nitpick or sting. Her protectiveness was not possessive. From time to time she secretly put grains of wheat sanctified with prayers into Asya’s pockets to save her from the evil eye. Other than crusading against the evil eye, laughing was the thing she did best and most— that is, until the day her illness escalated. Back in the past, she and Asya used to laugh together a lot: Petite-Ma, a lengthy stream of mellifluous chuckles; Asya, a sudden spurt of rich, resonant tones. Nowadays, though deeply worried about her great-grandmother’s well-being, Asya was also respectful of the autonomous realm of amnesia that she drifted into, being constantly denied autonomy herself. And the more the old woman digressed from them, the closer she felt to her.

“Good morning my pretty great-granddaughter,” Petite-Ma replied, impressing everyone with the clarity of her memory.

Sitting there with a remote control in her hand, Auntie Feride chirped without looking at her. “At last, the grumpy princess is awake.” She sounded jovial despite the tinge of harangue in her voice. Just this morning she had dyed her hair, turning it to a light blond, almost ashen. By now Asya knew too well that a radical change in hairstyle was a sign of a radical change in mood. She inspected Auntie Feride for traces of insanity. Other than that she seemed to be absorbed in the TV, watching with delight a terribly untalented pop singer spinning around in a dance too ridiculous to be real, Asya couldn’t find any.

“You have to get ready, you know, our guest is arriving today, ” Auntie Banu said as she entered the living room with the tray of
börek
fresh out of the oven, visibly pleased to have her daily carbohydrates. “We need to get the house ready before she arrives.”

Trying to push Sultan the Fifth away from the dripping little faucet with her feet, Asya poured herself tea from the steaming samovar and asked dully: “Why are you all so excited about this American girl?” She took a sip of the tea, only to make a face and search for sugar. One, two . . . she filled up the tiny glass with four cubes of sugar.

“What do you mean ‘why are you all excited’? She is a guest! She is coming all the way from the other side of the globe.” Auntie Feride stretched her arm forward in the Nazi salute to indicate where and how far the other side of the globe was. The thought of the globe brought an agitated timbre to her voice, as the map of global atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns flashed in her mind’s eye. The last time Auntie Feride had seen this map on paper, she was in high school. This nobody knew, but she had learned the map by heart down to its tiniest detail, and today it remained engraved in her memory as vividly as the day she had first scrutinized it.

“Most importantly, she is a visitor sent to us by your uncle,” broke in Grandma Gülsüm, who still tenaciously retained her reputation of having been Ivan the Terrible in another life.

“My
uncle
? Which uncle? The one I have never seen to this day?” Asya tasted her tea. It was still bitter. She threw in another cube of sugar. “Hello, wake up everyone! The man you are talking about has not visited us even once ever since he stepped on American soil. The only thing we have received from him to prove he is still alive are patchy postcards of Arizona landscapes,” Asya said, with a venomous look. “Cactus under the sun, cactus at twilight, cactus with purple flowers, cactus with red birds. . . . The guy doesn’t even care enough to change his postcard style.”

“He also sends his wife’s pictures,” Auntie Feride added to be fair.

“I couldn’t care less about those pictures. Plump blond wife smiling in front of their adobe house, where by the way we have never been invited; plump blond wife smiling in the Grand Canyon; plump blond wife smiling, wearing a huge Mexican sombrero; plump blond wife smiling with a dead coyote on the porch; plump blond wife smiling, cooking pancakes in the kitchen. . . . Aren’t you sick of him sending us every month the poses of this complete stranger? Why is she smiling at us, anyway? We have not even met the woman, for Allah’s sake!” Asya gulped her tea, ignoring the fact that it was still scalding hot.

“Journeys are not safe. The roads are full of perils. Airplanes are hijacked, cars crash in accidents . . . even trains tumble. Eight people died in a car accident yesterday on the Aegean Coast,” Auntie Feride noted. Unable to make eye contact with anyone, her eyeballs drew nervous circles around the table until they landed on a black olive resting on her plate.

Every time Auntie Feride conveyed ghastly news from the third page of the Turkish tabloids there followed a prickly silence. This time it was no different. In the ensuing silence Grandma Gülsüm grimaced, disturbed to hear her only son being disparaged like this; Auntie Banu tugged on the ends of her head scarf; Auntie Cevriye tried to remember what kind of an animal “coyote” was, but since twenty-four years in the profession of teaching had made her terrific with answers and equally bad with questions, she didn’t dare ask anyone; Petite-Ma stopped nibbling the slice of
sucuk
on her plate; and Auntie Feride tried to think of some other accidents she’d read about, but instead of more macabre news, she recalled the bright blue sombrero that Mustafa’s American wife was wearing in one of the pictures—if only she could find anything close to that in Istanbul, she sure would like to wear it day and night. In the meantime, no one noticed that Auntie Zeliha’s face looked woeful all of a sudden.

“We need to face the truth!” Asya announced with certitude. “All these years you have all doted on Uncle Mustafa as the one and only precious son of this family, and the instant he flew from the nest, he forgot about you. Isn’t it obvious that the man doesn’t give a hoot about his family? Why should he mean anything for us, then?”

“The boy is busy,” Grandma Gülsüm interjected. In truth, she favored her son, of which she had only one, over the daughters, of which she had too many. “It is not easy to be abroad. America is a long way away.”

“Yeah, of course it’s a long way, especially when you consider the fact that you need to swim the Atlantic Ocean and walk the entire European continent,” Asya said, biting into a slice of white cheese to soothe her tea-burned tongue. To her surprise the cheese was really good, soft and salty, the way she liked it. Finding it a bit difficult to gripe and enjoy the food at the same time, she shut up for a second and chewed nervously.

Taking advantage of the momentary lull, Auntie Banu launched into a moral story, as she always did in times of distress. She told them the story of a man who decided to travel the entire globe round and round, in an endeavor to escape his mortality. North and south, east and west, he wandered every which way he could. Once, in one of his numerous trips, he unexpectedly ran into Azrail, the angel of death, in Cairo. Azrail’s piercing gaze raked the man with a mysterious expression. He neither said a word nor followed him. The man right away abandoned Cairo, traveling nonstop thereafter until he arrived in a small, sleepy town in China. Thirsty and tired he rushed into the first tavern on his way. There, next to the table to which he was ushered, sat Azrail patiently waiting for him, this time with a relieved expression on his face. “I was so surprised to run into you in Cairo,” he rasped to the man, “for your destiny said it was here in China that we two would meet.”

Asya knew this story by heart, just like she knew the many other stories repeatedly narrated under this roof. What she didn’t understand, and didn’t think she ever could, was the thrill her aunts derived from narrating a story of which the punch line was already known. The air in the living room grew snug, all too sheltered, enveloped by the recurrence of the routine, as if life were one long, uninterrupted rehearsal and everyone memorized their speech. During the ensuing minutes, as the women around her jumped from tittle-tattle to tittle-tattle, each story triggering the next, Asya perked up, looking quite unlike the girl she had been earlier this morning. Sometimes she herself was baffled by her own inconsistencies. How could she so begrudge the ones she loved most? It was as if her mood were a yo-yo, bobbing up and down, now incensed, now contented. In this respect too she resembled her mother.

A
simit
vendor’s monotonous voice infiltrated from the open window, piercing the ongoing chatter. Auntie Banu rushed to the window and popped her red head outside. “
Simitist! Simitist!
Come this way!” she yelled. “How much are they?”