The Bastard of Istanbul (30 page)

Downstairs is Grandma Gülsüm’s room. She could indeed have been Ivan the Terrible in another life but the harshness of her persona is not without reason. Like many who end up bitter in life, Grandma too has her story. Growing up in a little town on the Aegean Coast where life was idyllic yet deprived; getting married into the Kazancıs, a family much wealthier, much more urbane than hers, but certainly more ill-fated; the uneasiness of being a young, rural bride to the only son of a debonair, disaster-prone lineage; the burden of being assigned to give birth to sons, the more the merrier, for you never knew how long they would survive, yet giving birth to one girl after another; enduring the anguish of seeing her husband drift further away from her with each birth.

Levent Kazancı was a troubled man who didn’t hesitate to use his belt to discipline his wife and children;
a boy, if only Allah had bestowed a boy, everything would have been all right.
Three girls in a row, and then the dream, the fourth baby, finally a boy. Hoping their fate had changed, they tried again, a fifth baby, but it was a girl again. Still, Mustafa was enough, he was all they needed to continue the family line. There was Mustafa, pampered, mollycoddled, spoiled, always favored over the girls, his every whim catered to . . . then the melody ceased and darkness and despair set into the dream: Mustafa left for the United States never to return.

Grandma Gülsüm was a woman who had never been reciprocally loved; one of those women who aged not gradually but in a hurry, leaping from virginity to wrinkles, never given the chance to dwell in the middle. She had fully dedicated herself to her only son and valued him often at the expense of her daughters, trying to find solace in him for everything that life had taken from her. Yet, once in Arizona, the boy’s existence had been reduced to postcards and letters. He had never returned to Istanbul to visit his family. Grandma Gülsüm buried a deep pain of being rejected. In time, she became more and more hard-hearted. Today she bore the look of someone who had willingly accomplished austerity and meant to keep it that way.

At the right corner of the first floor, Petite-Ma is deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, mouth agape, snoring peacefully. Next to her bed there is a cherry cabinet and on it rests the Holy Qur’an, a book on Muslim saints, and a gorgeous lamp radiating soft sage green light. Beside the book lies an ochre rosary with an amber stone dangling from its end, and a half-full glass containing her false teeth.

Time for her has long lost its linear command; there are no regulatory signs, no warning lights, and no directions along the highway of history anymore. She is free to move in any direction, or change lanes. Or, she can stop right in the middle of the road, refusing to move, refusing the obligation to proceed, since there is no such thing as “progress” in her life, but only a perpetual recurrence of isolated moments.

Certain childhood recollections are coming back to her these days, as vivid as if they were happening here and now. There she is as an eight-year-old blue-eyed, blond girl in Thessaloníki with her mom, as both silently weep after her dad’s death in the Balkan Wars; then she sees herself in Istanbul, it is late October, the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic. Flags. She sees lots of flags, red and white, crescent and star, fluttering in the wind like newly washed clothes. Behind the flags looms Rıza Selim’s face, his thick beard and full, somber eyes. Then she sees herself as a young woman sitting at her Bentley piano, playing jovial tunes to well-groomed guests.

In the small room right above Petite-Ma’s sleeps Auntie Cevriye. She is having the nightmare she has had countless times over the last years. She is a student in a classroom again, wearing an ugly, ash gray uniform. The headmaster calls her to the front of the room to take an oral quiz. She breaks into sweat as she wobbles there unsteadily, her feet heavy. None of the questions asked make any sense. Auntie Cevriye discovers she hasn’t really graduated from high school. There has been a mistake somewhere in the records and now she has to pass this one course in order to graduate and become a teacher. Every time, she wakes up at exactly the same scene. The headmaster pulls out the class grade sheet and a fountain pen with crimson ink, and then writes a huge red zero right where the name
Cevriye
is inscribed.

This is the nightmare she has had for the last ten years, ever since she lost her husband. He was in prison for bribery—a charge Auntie Cevriye always refused to believe. And only one month before his release he died watching a brawl, taken by a stupid live electrical cable. In her dreams Auntie Cevriye saw this scene over and over and envisioned the offender (there
had
to be an offender) who put the cable there and killed her husband. She dreamed of waiting at the prison gates. The rest of the scenario changed each time. Sometimes she was there to spit on the killer’s face as soon as he was released from jail, sometimes she watched him from a distance, and at other times she shot him as he walked out into the sunlight.

After losing her husband, Auntie Cevriye sold her house and joined the other daughters who had come to accept living under the same roof. In her first months there, all she did was shed tears. She started the day sifting through her late husband’s photographs, talking to them, sobbing over each one, only to end the day tired from so much sorrow. Her eyes swollen like two puffy bags of red distress, her nose peeling from too much wiping—this had been her state until one morning she had come home from the cemetery to find all the old photos gone.

“What did you do with his pictures?” Auntie Cevriye exclaimed, knowing too well whom to accuse. “Give them back to me!”

“No,” Grandma Gülsüm answered, stern and dry. “The pictures are available. You will not spend your days crying over them. For the heart to heal, the eyes need not see them for a while.”

Nothing healed. If anything, she got used to envisioning him without looking at his pictures. From time to time she found herself redesigning his face, furnishing him with a grizzled mustache or some more tufts of hair here and there. The disappearance of the photographs coincided with Auntie Cevriye’s evolution into a staunch teacher of Turkish national history.

In the room across from her sleeps Auntie Feride. She is a clever and creative woman, a collage woman. If only she could hold the pieces together. It is unusual to be so sensitive, it is fabulous to be so sensitive, it is frightening to be so sensitive. Since anything can happen at any time, she can never be sure of the ground beneath her feet. There is no sense of safety or continuity. Everything comes in bits and pieces that beg to be united and yet defy any notion of wholeness. Now and again Auntie Feride dreams of having a lover. She wants a love that will absorb her in her entirety, even to the point of embracing her multiple anxieties, eccentricities, and abnormalities. A beloved who will adore everything about her. Auntie Feride doesn’t want a love that is good to her good side but shuns her dark side. She needs someone who can stand with her through thick and thin, sanity and insanity.
Perhaps that is why lunatics have a harder time dating
, she thinks—
not because they are off the wall but because it is hard to find someone who is willing to date so many people in one person
.

But those are only daydreams. In real dreams Auntie Feride doesn’t see lovers but abstract collages. At nighttime she creates patchworks with stunning colors and manifold geometrical shapes. The wind blows hard, the oceanic currents slide along, and the world becomes an orb of endless possibilities. Everything constructed can be deconstructed at the same time. The doctors have told Auntie Feride to take it easy, to use her pills regularly. But they know little about this dialectic. Make and destroy make and destroy make and destroy. Auntie Feride’s mind is an excellent collage artist.

Next to Auntie Feride’s room there is the bathroom and next to that, Auntie Zeliha’s. She is awake. She is sitting straight up in her bed, eyeing her room as if it belonged to someone else, as if she were memorizing the details to feel closer to the stranger who belongs there.

She looks at her clothes, the dozens of skirts, all of them short, all of them flamboyant, her own way of protesting the moral codes she was born into. On the walls there are pictures and posters of tattoos. Auntie Zeliha is a woman in her late thirties but her room in many ways resembles that of a teenager. Perhaps she will never grow up and lose the anger within, the anger she has unintentionally passed on to her daughter. To her way of thinking, anyone who can’t rise up and rebel, anyone devoid of the ability to dissent, cannot really be said to be alive. In resistance lies the key to life. The rest of the people fall into two camps: the vegetables, who are fine with everything, and the tea glasses, who, though not fine with numerous things, lack the strength to confront. It is the latter that are the worse of the two. Auntie Zeliha crafted a rule about them, back when she used to make rules.

She had opted for the third choice. Auntie Zeliha abhorred fragility. To this day, she was the only one among all the Kazancı females capable of getting infuriated at tea glasses when they cracked under pressure.

Auntie Zeliha reaches out for the pack of Marlboro Lights on the bedstand and lights a cigarette. Aging has not changed her smoking habits at all. She knows her daughter is a smoker too. It all sounds like a tawdry passage from a brochure by the Ministry of Health:
Children of parents addicted to smoking are three times as likely to become smokers themselves.
Auntie Zeliha is worried about Asya’s well-being and yet she is wise enough to sense that if she intervenes too much, showing signs of mistrust, it will only generate a backlash. It’s difficult to pretend not to look concerned, just like it’s difficult to be called “auntie” by your own child. It kills her. Nonetheless, she still believes this might be better for them both. It has somehow freed the child and the mother; the two had to be detached nominally so that they could be attached physically and spiritually. Allah is her only witness; the only problem is, she doesn’t believe He exists.

She inhales a thoughtful drag, holds it for a moment, and exhales an angry puff. Provided that Allah exists and knows so much, why didn’t He do anything with that knowledge of His? Why does He let things happen the way they do? No, Auntie Zeliha is resolute, there is no way she’ll give in to religion. She lived as an agnostic, and she will die as one. Sincere and pure in her blasphemy. If Allah really exists somewhere, He should appreciate this heartfelt denunciation of hers, germane to only a select few, rather than being sweet-talked by the self-absorbed pleas of the religious fanatics, who are everywhere.

In the room at the other end of the second floor is Auntie Banu. She too is awake at this hour. The third person awake in the Kazancı domicile. There is something unusual about her this morning. Her face is pale and her large, fawn eyes flicker with worry. Across from her is a mirror. She looks at herself and sees a woman aged before her time. For the first time in years she misses her husband—the husband she walked out on, but never fully abandoned.

He is a good man who deserves a better wife. Never has he treated her badly or said a mean word, but after losing her two sons, Auntie Banu couldn’t stand living with him anymore. Every now and then, she goes to her old house, like a stranger who knows every detail of a place from déjà vu. She always buys dried apricots on the way, his favorite. Once there she does some cleaning, sews on a few buttons, cooks a few dishes, always his favorites, and tidies up the place. Not that there is too much to tidy up because he is a man who keeps the house in order. While Auntie Banu works, he watches her from close by.

At the end of the day he always asks: “Will you stay?”

Her response to that never changes: “Not today.”

Before she leaves the house she adds: “There is food in the fridge, don’t forget to heat the soup, finish the
pilaki
in two days or it’ll go bad. Don’t forget to water the violets, I changed their place next to the window.”

He nods and mutters softly, as if talking to himself: “Don’t worry. I know how to take care of myself. And thanks for the apricots. . . .”

After that Auntie Banu returns to the Kazancı domicile. That is how it has been, day after day, year after year.

The woman in the mirror looks old tonight. Auntie Banu always thought aging swiftly was the price she had to pay for her profession. The overwhelming majority of human beings age year by year, but not the clairvoyants: They age story by story. If only she had wanted to, Auntie Banu could have asked for compensation. Just as she has not asked her
djinn
for any material gains, she has not asked for physical beauty either. Maybe she will some day. So far Allah has given her the strength to carry on without asking for more. But today Auntie Banu is going to request something extra.

From a drawer she produces a jade rosary and strokes the beads. “All right then, I’m ready, let’s start. May Allah help me!”

Dangling from the bookshelf where the gas lamp stands, Mrs. Sweet grimaces, unhappy with the role of observer she has all of a sudden found herself in, unhappy with the things she is about to witness shortly in this room. Meanwhile, Mr. Bitter smiles bitterly, the only way he knows how to smile. He is content. Finally, Auntie Banu is convinced. It wasn’t Mr. Bitter’s
djinnish
command that convinced her but her own mortal curiosity. She couldn’t resist the urge to learn. That antediluvian urge for more knowledge. . . . Who could resist it, after all?