The Bastard of Istanbul (21 page)

She blew a plume of smoke in the direction of the mahogany desk where the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist kept some of his best works, those he was afraid his wife might destroy after one of their frequent fights. He also kept there the first rough sketches of the
Amphibian Politician
and
Rhinoceros Politicus,
two new series in which he depicted the members of the Turkish parliament as different animal species. He planned to release this series soon, especially now that the court had agreed to postpone indefinitely his three-year prison sentence for drawing the prime minister as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The main prerequisite of the deferment was that he did not repeat the wrong, which he was determined to do. What was the use of fighting for freedom of expression, he thought, if one didn’t fight for freedom of humor first?

At the corner of the desk, beneath the ochre light of a gooseneck art deco table lamp, sat a huge hand-carved wood sculpture of Don Quixote bent over a book, lost in his ruminations. Asya liked this sculpture very much.

“My family is a bunch of clean freaks. Brushing away the dirt and dust of the memories! They always talk about the past, but it is a cleansed version of the past. That’s the Kazancıs’ technique of coping with problems; if something’s nagging you, well, close your eyes, count to ten, wish it never happened, and the next thing you know, it has never happened, hurray! Every day we swallow yet another capsule of mendacity. . . .”

What was it that Don Quixote read, Asya wondered in her pixilated mind. What was written on that open page there? Had the sculptor cared to scribble down a few words? Curiously she bolted from the sofa and got closer to the sculpture. Alas, there were no words on the wooden page. She took a long drag before she went back to her seat and started complaining again.

“It annoys me to see all those home-sweet-homes. Sad facsimiles of happy families. You know at times I envy my Petite-Ma, she is almost a hundred years old now, how I wish I had her disease. Sweet Alzheimer’s. Memory withers away.”

“That’s not good, sweetie.”

“It might not be good for the people around you, but it’s good for you,” Asya insisted.

“Well, usually the two are related.”

But Asya ignored that. “You know, today Petite-Ma opened her piano after so many years; I heard her play these dissonant sounds. It’s depressing. This woman used to play Rachmaninoff, and now she can’t even play a silly children’s song.” She paused for a second, considering what she had just said. Sometimes she talked first, thought later.

“But my point is, she doesn’t know that, we do!” Asya exclaimed with a forged zest. “Alzheimer’s is not as terrible as it sounds. The past is nothing but a shackle we need to get rid of. Such an excruciating burden. If only I could have no past—you know, if only I could be a nobody, start from point zero and just remain there forever. As light as a feather. No family, no memories and all that shit. . . .”

“Everybody needs a past,” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist took a pull from his glass, his expression hovering somewhere between rue and ire.

“Don’t count me in because I sure don’t!” Asya now grabbed the Zippo on the coffee table and thumbed it to life, only to instantly snap the lighter closed with a sharp click. She liked the sound and repeated the routine several times, without knowing that she drove the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist slightly mad. Click! Click! Click!

“I’d better go.” She handed him the Zippo and looked for her clothes. “My dear family has assigned me an important duty. I have to go to the airport with Mom and welcome my American pen pal.”

“You have an American pen pal?”

“Sort of. This girl who materialized out of nowhere. So one day I wake up and there is this letter in the mailbox, guess from where? San Francisco! Some girl named Amy. She says she is my uncle Mustafa’s stepdaughter. We didn’t even know the man had a stepdaughter! So now it dawns on us that this marriage is his wife’s second marriage, you know? He never told us that! My grandma almost had a heart attack finding out that her precious son’s wife of twenty years was in fact not a virgin when they got married, no sir, no virgin, but a
divorcée
!”

Asya paused to pay her respects to the song that had just started to play. It was “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” She whistled the melody and then mouthed the words before she went back to her speech again.

“Anyway, out of the blue this Amy writes a letter saying she is a college student at the University of Arizona, and she is deeply interested in getting to know other cultures and she looks forward to meeting us one day, blah blah blah. And then she lets the cat out of the bag: By the way, I am coming to Istanbul in a week. May I stay with you at your house?”

“Wow!” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist exclaimed as he threw three ice cubes into his replenished
rakı
glass. “But does she say why she is coming here of all places? Just as a tourist?”

“I dunno,” Asya mumbled from the floor on her knees, searching for one of her socks under the divan. “But given that she is a college student, I bet she is doing some research on ‘Islam and the oppression of women’ or ‘patriarchal precedents in the Middle East.’ Otherwise why would she want to stay at our nuthouse—you know, full of women—when there are so many hotels in this city, cheap and funky? I am sure she wants to interview each of us about the situation of women in Muslim countries and all that—”

“Shit!” the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist completed the sentence for her.

“Right!” Asya exclaimed triumphantly, having found the lost sock. In a flash, she donned her skirt and shirt and ran a brush through her hair.

“Well, bring her to Café Kundera sometime.”

“I’ll ask her, but I’m sure she’ll want to go to a museum instead. ” Asya grunted as she put on her leather boots. She glanced around to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. “Well, I will certainly have to spend some time with her, since my family keeps prodding me about guiding her all over the place so that she can marvel at Istanbul. They want her to sing the praises of this city when she goes back to America.”

Despite the open windows the room still smelled heavily of marijuana,
rakı,
and sex. Johnny Cash roared in the background.

Asya grabbed her bag and motioned toward the door. Just when she was about to leave, however, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist blocked her way. Looking her directly in the eye, he grabbed her shoulders and gently pulled her toward himself. His dark brown eyes had the plum rings and puffy bags common to the alcoholic or the grief-stricken or both.

“Dear Asya,” he whispered, his face brightening up with a compassion she’d never seen there before. “Despite all that poison that you harbor inside, and perhaps precisely because of it, you are in some odd way so special and such a kindred soul. And I love you. I fell in love with you the day you first appeared in Café Kundera, with that troubled look on your face. I don’t know if this means anything to you but I am going to confess it all the same. Before you leave this apartment you need to understand that this is no cathouse, and I do not bring
chicks
here. I come here to drink and draw and get depressed, get depressed and draw and drink, and sometimes to draw and get depressed and drink. . . . That’s it. . . .”

Utterly astounded, Asya clutched the door’s handle and stood still for a moment at the threshold. Not knowing where to place her hands, she thrust them into the pockets of her skirt and fingered something there that felt like crumbs. She took her hands out, only to see the tips of her fingers covered with the brownish seeds consecrated by Petite-Ma to protect her against the evil-eye.

“Look at this! Wheat . . . wheat . . .” Asya slurred the word every which way. “Petite-Ma is trying to protect me from evil.” She opened her hand and gave him a grain of wheat. No sooner had she done this, however, than she blushed as if having revealed an amorous secret.

Her cheeks still rosy, the bitterness inside her no longer tempered by brashness, Asya opened the door. Stepping out as quickly as she could, she hesitated for a second before she turned back. She looked as if she wanted to say something but instead she gave him a huge hug. Then she sprinted down five flights of stairs and ran as fast as she could from every torment chasing her soul.

H
ow come she is still asleep?” Asya asked, her chin pointing in the direction of her bedroom. On the way back from the airport, to her dismay, she had found out that her aunts had placed a second bed right across from hers and turned her only private space under this roof into “the girls’ room.” They had done so either because they were always looking for new ways of tormenting her or because this room had a better view and they wanted to make a good impression on their guest, or else, they had seen the accommodation as yet another opportunity to bring the girls closer within their PIFCUP—Promoting International Friendship and Cultural Understanding Project. Having absolutely no desire whatsoever to share her private space with a complete stranger, yet unable to protest in front of the guest, Asya had grudgingly consented. But now her tolerance was wearing thin. As if it weren’t enough that they put the American girl in her bedroom, the Kazancı women seemed determined not to start supper before the guest of honor joined them. Thus, although the dinner had been put on the table more than an hour ago and everyone had long taken her place around the table, including Sultan the Fifth, nobody had fully dined yet, including Sultan the Fifth. Every twenty minutes or so, somebody got up to warm the lentil soup and reheat the meat dish, carrying the pots back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, while Sultan the Fifth followed the smell each time with beseeching meows. They were in such a state, pasted to their chairs, watching TV on the lowest volume, and talking in whispers. Nonetheless, since they kept picking at this dish or that, everyone but Sultan the Fifth had already eaten more then they normally would have at one sitting.

“Perhaps she is already awake and is just lying in bed because she is too shy or something. Why don’t I go in and take a look?” Asya asked.

“Stay put, miss. Let the girl sleep.” Auntie Zeliha puckered an eyebrow.

Keeping an eye on the screen, another eye on the remote control, Auntie Feride agreed: “She needs to sleep. It is because of the jet lag. She traversed not only oceanic currents but also different time zones.”

“Well, at least some people in this house are given the chance to stay in bed as long as they want,” Asya grumbled.

It was precisely then that a sparkling soundtrack started to play in the background and the program everybody had been waiting for flashed on the screen: the Turkish version of
The Apprentice.
In rapt silence they watched the Turkish Donald Trump materialize from behind the bright satin curtains of a spacious office with a wonderful panorama of the Bosphorus Bridge. After a quick, condescending glance at the two teams awaiting his orders, the businessman informed them of their task. Each team was instructed to design a bottle of sparkling water, find a way to manufacture ninety-nine of them, and then sell them all as swiftly and as expensively as possible in one of the most luxurious quarters of the city.

“I don’t call that a challenge,” Asya said with a whoop. “If they want a real challenge they should send all these contestants to the most religious and conservative neighborhoods in Istanbul and have them sell bottled red wine there.”

“Oh, be quiet,” Auntie Banu snapped, sighing. She was discontent with the way her niece constantly made fun of religion and religiosity; in that regard she could plainly see who Asya resembled exactly: her mother. If blasphemy, more or less like breast cancer or diabetes, was genetically passed on from mother to daughter, what was the use of trying to correct it? Thus, she sighed again.

Ignoring the anguish she instilled in her aunt, Asya shrugged. “But why not? That would be far more creative than this baseless Turkish imitation of America. You should always amalgamate the technical material borrowed from the West with the particular features of the culture you address. That’s what I call a Donald Trump ingeniously
alla turca.
So he should, for instance, ask the contestants to sell packaged pork in a Muslim neighborhood. There you go. Now that’s a
challenge.
Let’s see those marketing strategies flower.”

Before anyone could comment on that, the door of the bedroom opened with a creak and out stepped Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, a bit diffident, a bit dizzy. She was wearing faded denim jeans and a navy sweatshirt long and loose enough to hide the features of her body. While packing for her flight to Turkey she had thought hard about what kind of clothing to take with her and had ended up choosing her most modest clothes so as not to look strange in a conservative place. It had therefore come as a shock to be welcomed at the Istanbul airport by Auntie Zeliha wearing an outrageously short skirt and even more outrageously high heels. What was even more startling, however, was to meet Auntie Banu afterward in a head scarf and a long dress, and to learn how pious she was, praying five times a day. That the two women, despite the stark contrast in their appearance and obviously in their personalities, were sisters living under the same roof was a puzzle Armanoush figured she would have to work on for a while.

“Welcome, welcome!” Auntie Banu exclaimed cheerily, but instantly ran out of English words.

As they watched her approach, the four aunts at the table fidgeted awkwardly with the discomfort of unfamiliarity, but still wore ear-to-ear smiles on their faces. Curious as to what the stranger smelled like, Sultan the Fifth immediately sprang to his feet and paced a narrowing circle around Armanoush, sniffing her slippers, until he had decided there was nothing of interest there.

“I am very sorry, I don’t know how I slept that long,” Armanoush stammered in slow-motion English.

“Of course, your body needed that sleep. It’s a long flight,” Auntie Zeliha said. Though she had a mellow yet blatant accent and tended to stress the wrong syllables, she also sounded pretty comfortable expressing herself in English. “Aren’t you hungry? I hope you will enjoy Turkish food.”