The Bastard of Istanbul (38 page)

“What’s wrong? Where is Grandma Shushan?” Armanoush said softly. “I want to talk to Grandma.”

That is when Barsam Tchakhmakhchian brought himself to tell her.

Since late evening Auntie Zeliha had been pacing her room with a brisk energy she didn’t know how to contain. She couldn’t confide in anyone at home how bad she felt, and the more she buried her feelings, the worse she felt. First she thought of brewing herself some soothing herbal tea in the kitchen, but the heavy smell of all the cooking almost made her throw up. Then she went into the living room to watch TV, but finding two of her sisters in there frantically engaged in cleaning while chatting excitedly about the next day, she instantly changed her mind.

Once back in her room again, Auntie Zeliha closed her door, lit a cigarette, and took out the companion she kept under her mattress for such trying days: a bottle of vodka. She hurriedly, but then with increasing sluggishness, imbibed one third of the bottle. Now, after four cigarettes and six shots, she didn’t feel anxious anymore; actually, she didn’t feel anything, except hunger. All she had to snack on in her room was a package of golden raisins she had bought from a rake-thin street vendor yelling in front of the house earlier in the evening.

Halfway through the bottle and with only a handful of raisins left, her cell phone rang. It was Aram.

“I don’t want you to stay in that house tonight,” was the first thing he uttered. “Or tomorrow, or the day after that. As a matter of fact, I don’t want you to spend a day away from me for the rest of my life.”

In response, Auntie Zeliha snickered.

“Please my love, come and stay with me. Leave that house right now. I got you a toothbrush. I even have a clean towel!” Aram attempted to make a joke but stopped halfway. “Stay with me until he’s gone.”

“How are we going to explain my sudden absence to my dear family, then?” Auntie Zeliha grumbled.

“You don’t need to explain anything,” Aram said imploringly. “Look, this must be the one benefit of being the maverick in a traditional family. Whatever you do, I’m sure nobody will be shocked. Come. Please stay with me.”

“What am I going to tell Asya?”

“Nothing, you don’t have to say anything. . . . You know that.”

Holding the phone tightly, Auntie Zeliha curled up in a fetal position. She shut her eyes, ready to sleep, but then mustered the energy to ask: “Aram, when is it going to end? This compulsory amnesia. This perpetual forgetfulness. Say nothing, remember nothing, reveal nothing, not to them, not to yourself. . . . Is it ever going to come to an end?”

“Don’t think about that now,” Aram tried to soothe her. “Give yourself a break. You’re being too hard on yourself. Come here first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Oh my love . . . how I wish I could. . . .” Auntie Zeliha turned away her anguished face, as if he could monitor her via the receiver. “They expect me to go to the airport to welcome them. I am the only one who can drive in this family, remember?”

Aram remained silent, conceding this.

“Don’t worry,” Auntie Zeliha whispered. “I love you . . . I love you so. . . . Let’s sleep now.”

As soon as she hung up, Auntie Zeliha began to slip into a deep slumber. How she turned off the cell phone, put the vodka bottle aside, stubbed the cigarette into the ashtray, turned off the light, and slid under the covers she would have no recollection of the next morning, when she woke up with an excruciating headache and one of her blankets missing.

“Is it chilly in Istanbul? Should I have brought warmer clothes?” Rose asked, despite the fact that there were three main reasons not to: because she had asked this question before, because she had already packed her luggage, and because just now they were on their way to the Tucson Airport and it was too late to wonder anyway.

Tempted as he was to remind his wife of these three reasons, Mustafa Kazancı kept his eyes fixed on the road and shook his head.

On the day of their flight, Rose and Mustafa left the house at four p.m. to drive to the airport. They had two flights awaiting them: one short, the other quite long. They would first fly from Tucson to San Francisco, then from San Francisco to Istanbul. This being her very first trip to a country where English wasn’t the primary language and people did not eat maple syrup-soaked pancakes in the morning, Rose found herself simultaneously excited and distressed. The truth is, she had never been the explorer type, and if it weren’t for that much-wished-for but never-actualized dream trip to Bangkok, she and Mustafa wouldn’t even have had passports. The closest she had gotten to international travel was to watch their six DVD
Discovering Europe
collection. From it she had a sense of what Turkey was like—a far more coherent sense than the scraps of information Mustafa had let slip every now and then during their many years of marriage. The problem, however, was that because Rose had watched all six disks in one sitting, and because the “Traveling Turkey” episode happened to be at the very end, after the episodes about the British Isles, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Israel, she couldn’t help but doubt if the scenes that popped into her mind now were from Turkey or from some other country.
Discovering Europe
DVDs were indeed handy for educational purposes, especially for American families with no time, means, or desire to travel overseas, but the producers should have put a notice on the collection urging the viewers not to watch the six disks uninterrupted, not to “travel” to more than one country in one sitting.

At the Tucson International Airport, they visited every store, which meant one kiosk and one souvenir stand. Despite the ostentatious INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT sign (a name bestowed because of its out-of-country flights to Mexico, which was only an hour by car), the airport was so modest that it resembled a local bus terminal, and even Starbucks didn’t care to open a branch there. All the same, once inside the souvenir store, Rose was able to find numerous gifts for Mustafa’s family. Despite the impromptu nature of this trip and her constant worry about how her daughter was doing there, not to mention her concern about how to tell her about her grandmother’s death, as the time of departure neared, Rose had lapsed into a kind of tourist daze. Aspiring to get a special present for every member of Mustafa’s all-female family, she carefully pored over the merchandise on every shelf, though there weren’t many options. Cactus-shaped notebooks, cactus-shaped key chains, cactus-shaped magnets, tequila glasses with pictures of cacti—a bunch of tchotchkes and trinkets with images of, if not cactus, either lizards or coyotes painted on them. In the end, Rose got each Kazancı woman a gift—exactly the same to be fair—composed of a multicolored I LOVE ARIZONA pencil curved into the shape of a cactus, a white T-shirt with the Arizona map printed on the front, a calendar with photos of the Grand Canyon, a mammoth BUT IT’S A DRY HEAT mug, and a refrigerator magnet with a real baby cactus in it. She also purchased two pairs of floral shorts like the kind she was wearing at the moment, in case someone would like to try them on in Istanbul.

After having lived in Tucson for more than twenty years, Rose, once a Kentucky girl, had
Arizona
written all over her. It wasn’t only the customary leisure clothes—light T-shirts, denim shorts, and straw hats—that gave her away, or the sunglasses that stayed glued to her face, but also her body language that radiated the Arizona style. Rose was forty-six this year but carried herself with the sprightly attitude of a retired criminal court clerk who, after having rarely had the chance to don flowery dresses throughout her life, now enjoyed them to the extreme. The truth is there were a number of things Rose deeply regretted not having done by this age, including having more children. How she lamented not giving birth to another child while she was still able. Mustafa had not been particularly eager to have children, and for a long time, Rose had been fine with that, never really suspecting how she might eventually regret the decision. Perhaps it was a professional hazard —being surrounded by fourth graders all day long, she never noticed the lack of children in her own life. That said, she and Mustafa did overall have a happy marriage. Theirs was a marriage characterized more by the solace of mutually developed habits than passionate devotion, but nevertheless a marriage far better than thousands of others claiming to be amorous in essence. It was a twist of fate, when she came to remember that she had started dating Mustafa just to take revenge on the Tchakhmakhchians. But the more she had gotten to know him, the more she had liked and desired him. Though the allure of romantic affairs had from time to time left Rose secretly pining away for a different life with a different man, she had overall been quite content with the one she had.

“Leave the sauce,” said Mustafa upon seeing that Rose was considering buying a spicy Mexican sauce in a cactus-shaped bottle. “Believe me, Rose, you are not going to need that in Istanbul.”

“Really, is the Turkish cuisine spicy?”

To that, as to many other painfully obvious questions, Mustafa had only tentative answers. After so many years of complete detachment, his familiarity with Turkish culture, like a parchment drawing stripped by the sun and the wind, had been bit by bit rubbed out. Istanbul had imperceptibly become a ghost city for him, one that had no reality except to appear every now and then in dreams. Much as he used to fancy the city’s many quarters and characters and culture, ever since he had settled in the United States he had gradually become numb toward Istanbul and almost everything associated with it.

Yet it was one thing to move away from the city where he was born, and another to be so far removed from his own flesh and blood. Mustafa Kazancı did not so much mind taking refuge in America forever as if he had no native soil to return to, or even living life always forward with no memories to recall, but to turn into a foreigner with no ancestors, a man with no boyhood, troubled him. Throughout the years, there were times when he had been tempted, in his own way, to go back to see his family and face the person he once had been, but Mustafa had discovered that this was not easy and did not become any easier with age. Finding himself more and more distanced from his past, he had eventually cut all ties to it. It was better this way. Both for him and the ones he had once badly hurt. America was his home now. Yet, if truth be told, more than Arizona or any other place, it was the future that he had chosen to settle in and call his home—a home with its backdoor closed to the past.

Mustafa was visibly contemplative and withdrawn on the plane. As they took off, he sat very still, and barely changed his position even after they had reached cruising altitude. He felt fatigued, exhausted by this mandatory journey that was only just starting.

Rose, on the contrary, was full of nervous excitement. She sipped cup after cup of bad airplane coffee, munched the meager pretzels they served, skimmed through the complimentary magazine, watched
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
though she had seen the movie before, engaged in a long prattle with the old lady sitting next to her (she was going to San Francisco to visit her elder daughter and see her newborn grandchild), and when the latter fell asleep, dedicated herself to attempting to answer the history trivia questions on the video screen in front of her.

Who suffered the most casualties in World War II?

What was the name of the leading character in George Orwell’s 1984?

For the first question Rose confidently answered B, but having no idea whatsoever about the second, she simply guessed A. She would soon be surprised to learn she had the first response wrong and the second one right. If Amy were here next to her, she would have answered
both
correctly, and certainly not by accident. Her heart ached when she thought about her daughter. For all their conflicts and quarrels, for all her personal failures as a mother, Rose was still confident that she had a good relationship with Amy. As confident as believing Great Britain suffered the most casualties in the Second World War.

Then they landed in San Francisco.

Once inside the airport, Rose was swept away by another shopping urge: goodies for the road. So miserable had she been with the crumbs served on the first flight that she now took matters into her own hands. Though Mustafa tried hard to explain to her that Turkish Airlines, unlike the domestic flights in America, would serve a whole bunch of delicacies, she wanted to be on the safe side before embarking on the twelve-hour flight.

Rose purchased a package of Planters peanuts, cheese crackers, chocolate-chip cookies, two packages of BBQ potato chips, a bunch of honey-and-almond granola bars, and sticks of bubblegum. Long gone was the idea of carb watching just for the sheer
possibility
of being watchful of something,
anything.
That was back in the days when she was young and determined enough to prove to the Tchakhmakhchian family that this woman they had stamped as
odar
, and never seen as one of them, was in fact a very nice and even en-viable person. Now, twenty years later, she only smiled at the resentful young woman she once had been.

Although her bitterness toward her first husband and his family had never really subsided, in time Rose had learned to make peace with her flaws and incapacities, including her widened hips and belly. She had been on diets for such a long time, on and off, she didn’t even remember when exactly she had stopped dieting once and for all. Whatever the timing, Rose had managed to discard, though not the pounds, at least the
need
to shed the pounds. The urge had simply ceased. Mustafa liked her the way she was. He never criticized her looks.

The announcement for boarding came when they were standing in line at Wendy’s, waiting for two Big Bacon Classic combos and a sour cream-and-chive baked potato to be ready, just in case the food they served on Turkish Airlines turned out to be inedible. They grabbed their orders just in time and headed to the gate, where they would have to go through an extra security check reserved for those on intercontinental flights, particularly those heading to the Middle East. Rose watched with worried eyes as a polite but sullen officer searched through the presents she had bought in Tucson. The officer plucked a cactus-shaped pencil into the air and waved it to and fro as if wagging a finger at some wrong she was about to commit.