The Bastard of Istanbul (37 page)

All throughout his childhood and teens, Mustafa Kazancı had relished
ashure
more than any other sweet, and if those terrible American fast-food products had not messed up his culinary habits, Grandma Gülsüm hoped, he would be delighted to encounter bowls of his favorite dessert in the fridge, waiting for him, as if life here were still the same and he could pick up from where he had left off.

Ashure
was the symbol of continuity and stability, the epitome of the good days to come after each storm, no matter how frightening the storm had been.

Grandma had soaked the ingredients the day before and was now getting ready to begin cooking. She opened a cupboard and took out a huge cauldron. One always needed a cauldron to cook
ashure.

Inside the girls’ room, Armanoush had been quiet and pensive since early morning. She didn’t feel like going out or doing anything. Asya stayed indoors with her playing
tavla
and listening to Johnny Cash.

“Six six! You lucky thing!”

But Armanoush showed no trace of pleasure about the dice she had rolled. Instead, she broodingly pouted at her checkers as if hoping to move them by the force of her gaze.

“I have this awful feeling something bad has happened and my mother isn’t telling me.”

“Please don’t worry,” Asya said, chewing the end of her pencil, craving nicotine. “You’ve talked with your mom and she sounded all right. Thanks to you they will now visit Istanbul. They’ll come and meet you here and soon you will be back in your house. . . .” Though Asya had meant to soothe, the words had oddly come out as an objection. The truth is, it saddened her that Armanoush would be leaving so soon.

“I don’t know. It’s just this feeling I can’t get rid of.” Armanoush sighed. “My mom doesn’t travel anywhere, not even to Kentucky. That she is flying to Istanbul is mind-boggling. But then again, it is so typical of her. She cannot stand not being in control of my life. She would fly around the globe to keep me under her eye.”

While she waited for Armanoush to decide where to move which checker, Asya drew her legs under her, working on yet another article of her Personal Manifesto of Nihilism.

Distressed though she might be, Armanoush’s playing skills were surely unaffected by her mood. With the “six six,” she rammed into Asya’s home board, and trounced her opponent by crushing all three of her checkers at once. Triumph!

Asya sunk her teeth deeper into the pencil.

Having three checkers waiting on the bar, and with only two gates still open in the opposing home board, Asya now had to roll either a “five five” or a “three three.” There was no other roll that could save her from defeat. She spat in her palms for good luck and heaved a prayer to the
tavla djinni,
whom she had always envisaged as a half-black, half-white ogre with madly rotating dice as eyeballs. She then rolled the dice: “three two.” Damn! Unable to play, she clasped her hands and grumbled.

“Poor thing!” Armanoush exclaimed.

Asya put the awaiting black checkers on the bar as she listened to a street vendor outside yelling at the top of his voice:
“Raisins! I’ve got golden raisins. For kiddos and toothless grannies, golden raisins are for everyone!”
When she spoke again she raised her voice over the vendor’s.

“I’m sure your mom is fine. Think about it, if she weren’t fine how could she make this trip all the way from Arizona to Istanbul?”

“I guess you’re right.” Armanoush nodded and rolled the dice. “Six six” again!

“Yo, are you gonna keep rolling six six forever? Are those loaded dice or what?” Asya volleyed suspiciously. “Are you cheating, miss?”

Armanoush chuckled. “Oh yeah, if only I knew how to!”

But right when she was about to move another pair of white checkers into the open space, Armanoush paused abruptly, pale and drawn.

“Oh my God, how could I not see this?!” Armanoush exclaimed in anguish. “It’s not my mother, you see, it’s my
father.
This is exactly how Mom would react if something bad happened to my father . . . or to dad’s family. . . . Oh God, something has happened to my father!”

“But now you’re speculating.” Asya tried to soothe her without success. “When did you last speak with your father?”

“Two days ago,” Armanoush said. “I called him from Arizona and he was OK, everything sounded normal.”

“Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean you called him from
Arizona
?”

Armanoush blushed. “I lied.” Then she shrugged, as if to savor the satisfaction of having done something wrong for a change. “I lied to almost everyone in my family to be able to take this trip. If I’d revealed I was going to Istanbul on my own, everyone would have been so alarmed they wouldn’t have let me travel
anywhere.
So I thought, I’ll go to Istanbul and tell them about the whole thing when I get back. My father thinks I’m in Arizona with my mom while Mom thinks I’m in San Francisco with Dad. I mean, she
used
to think, at least until yesterday.”

Asya stared at Armanoush with a disbelief that soon vanished, replaced by something closer to reverence. Perhaps Armanoush was not the immaculate, well-behaved girl that Asya had suspected she was. Perhaps somewhere in her luminous universe there was room for darkness, dirt, and deviance. The confession, far from upsetting Asya, had only served to increase her esteem of Armanoush. She closed the
tavla
board and stuck it under her armpit, a symbol of accepted defeat, though Armanoush had no way of knowing this cultural gesture. “I don’t think anything is wrong . . . but come on, why don’t you give your dad a call?” Asya asked.

As if waiting for these words to take action, Armanoush reached out to the phone. Given the time difference, it was early morning in San Francisco.

It was answered after one ring, not by Grandma Shushan as usual, but by her dad.

“Sweetheart.” Barsam Tchakhmakhchian heaved a sigh of intense endearment as soon as he heard his daughter’s voice. There was an eerie clatter in the phone connection, which made them both aware of the geographical distance in between. “I was going to call you in the morning. I know you are in Istanbul; your mom called to tell me.”

A brief, prickly silence ensued but Barsam Tchakhmakhchian did not comment on it, nor did he scold her. “Your mom and I were so worried about you. Rose is flying to Istanbul with your stepfather. . . . They are coming there to get you. They will be in Istanbul tomorrow by noon.”

Now Armanoush stood frozen. Something was wrong. Something was so very wrong. That her father and her mother were talking to each other, and what’s more, updating each other, was a surefire sign of apocalypse.

“Dad, has something happened?”

Barsam Tchakhmakhchian paused, stricken with sorrow from the weight of a childhood memory that had appeared out of nowhere.

When he was a boy, every year a man with a dark pointed hood and black cape would visit their neighborhood, going door to door with the deacon of the local church. He was a priest from the old country looking for young, bright boys to take back to Armenia to train them to be priests.

“Dad, are you all right? What is going on?”

“I’m all right sweetheart. I missed you,” was all he could say.

Barsam was fascinated by religion at a young age, the best student in Sunday school. Consequently, the man with the black hood visited their house often, talking to Shushan about the boy’s future. One day, as Barsam, his mother, and the priest were sitting in the kitchen sipping hot tea, the priest had said if a decision was to be made, this was the time to do it.

Barsam Tchakhmakhchian would never forget the flash of fear in his mother’s eyes. As much as she respected the holy priest, as much as she’d have been delighted to see her son as a grown-up man in pastoral garb, as much as she wanted her only son to serve the Lord, Shushan could not help but recoil with fright, as if faced with a kidnapper who wanted to take her son away from her. She had flinched with such force and fear that the cup in her hand had shaken, spilling some tea on her dress. The priest had softly, amiably nodded, detecting the shadow of a dark story secreted in her past. He had patted her hand and blessed her. Then he had left the house, never to come back with the same request again.

That day Barsam Tchakhmakhchian had sensed something he hadn’t felt before and wasn’t going to feel ever again. A spiky, creepy premonition. Only a mother who had already lost a child would react with such profound fear in the face of the danger of losing another one. Shushan might have had another son at some point who had become separated from her.

Now as he mourned his mother’s death, he couldn’t find the heart to tell his daughter.

“Dad, talk to me,” Armanoush said urgently.

Just like his mother, his father came from a family deported from Turkey in 1915. Sarkis Tchakhmakhchian and Shushan Stamboulian shared something in common, something their children could only sense but never fully grasp. So many silences were scattered among their words. When coming to America they had left another life in another country, and they knew that no matter how often and how truthfully you evoked the past, some things could never be told.

Barsam remembered his father dancing around his mother to a
Hale
, drawing circles within circles with his arms raised like a soaring bird; the music starting out slow, becoming faster and faster, this Middle Eastern swirl that the children could only watch with admiration from the side. Music was the most vivid trace left from his upbringing. For years Barsam had played the clarinet in an Armenian band and danced in traditional costume, black bloomers and a yellow shirt. He remembered leaving his house in those costumes while all the other kids in their non-Armenian neighborhood watched him with mocking eyes. Each time he would hope the kids would forget what they had seen or simply wouldn’t bother to poke fun at him. Each time he was wrong.

While being enrolled in one Armenian activity after another, all he really wanted was to be like them, nothing more, nothing less, to be American and to get rid of this Armenian dark skin. Even years later, his mother would reproach him every now and then, explaining how as a little boy he had asked the Dutch American tenants upstairs what particular soap they used to wash themselves, because he wanted to be just as white as them. Now as the memories of his childhood gushed back to him with the loss of his mother, Barsam Tchakhmakhchian couldn’t help but feel guilty for rapidly unlearning what little Armenian he had learned as a child. He now felt sorry for not having learned more from his mother, and not having taught more to his daughter.

“Dad, why are you silent?” Armanoush asked, her voice filled with fright.

“Do you remember the youth camp you went to as a teenager?”

“Yes, of course,” Armanoush answered.

“Were you ever angry at me for not sending you there anymore?”

“Dad, it was
me
who didn’t want to go there anymore, did you forget? It was fun at the beginning but then I decided I was too mature for it. I’m the one who asked you not to send me there the next year. . . .”

“Right,” Barsam said tentatively. “But still I could have looked for a different camp for Armenian teenagers your age.”

“Dad, why are you questioning this now?” Armanoush felt on the verge of tears.

He did not have the heart to tell her. Not like this, not over the phone. He did not want her to learn about her grandmother’s death while all alone and thousands of miles away. As he tried to mutter a few words of distraction, his voice rose softly over a hum that broke out in the background. The droning hum of a gathering. It sounded like the entire family was there, relatives and friends and neighbors under the same roof, which, as Armanoush was wise enough to know, could be the sign of only two things: either someone had gotten married or someone had died.