The Bastard of Istanbul (4 page)

Pardon me,
she would instantly apologize and then repeat again and again because whenever you apologized to Allah you had to do it thrice:
Pardon me, pardon me, pardon me.

It was wrong, she knew. Allah could not and should not be personified. Allah did not have fingers, or blood for that matter. One had to refrain from attributing human qualities to him—that’s to say, Him—which was not easy since every one of his—that’s to say, His—ninety-nine names happened to be qualities also pertinent to human beings. He could see it all but had no eyes; He could hear it all but had no ears; He could reach out everywhere but had no hands. . . . Out of all this information an eight-year-old Zeliha had drawn the conclusion that Allah could resemble us, but we could not resemble Him. Or was it vice versa? Anyway, one had to learn to think about him—that’s to say, Him—without thinking of Him as him.

The chances are she would not have minded this as much if one afternoon she had not spotted a bloody bandage around her elder sister Feride’s index finger. It looked like the Kurdish girl made her a blood-sister too. Zeliha felt betrayed. Only then it dawned on her that her real objection to Allah was not his—that’s to say, His—not having any blood but rather having too many blood-sisters, too many to care for so as to end up not caring for anyone.

The episode of friendship had not lasted long after that. The
konak
being so big and dilapidated and Mom being so grumpy and mulish, the cleaning lady quit after a while, taking her daughter away. Having been left without a best friend, whose friendship, indeed, had been rather dubious, Zeliha felt a subtle resentment, but she hadn’t quite known toward whom—to the cleaning lady for quitting, to her mom for making her quit, to her best friend for playing two sides, to her elder sister for stealing her blood-sister, or to Allah. The others being utterly out of her reach, she chose Allah to be resentful toward. Having felt like an infidel at such an early age, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t do so as an adult.

Another call to prayer from another mosque joined in. The prayers multiplied in echoes, as if drawing circles within circles. Oddly enough, at this moment in the doctor’s office, she worried about being late for dinner. She wondered what would be served at the table this evening, and which one of her three sisters had done the cooking. Each of her sisters was good with a particular recipe, so depending on the cook of the day she could pray for a different dish. She craved stuffed green peppers—a particularly tricky dish since every one of her sisters made it so differently.
Stuffed . . . green . . . peppers . . .
Her breathing slowed while the spider started to descend. Still trying to stare at the ceiling, Zeliha felt as if she and the people in the room were not occupying the same space. She stepped into the kingdom of Morpheus.

It was too bright here, almost glossy. Slowly and cautiously, she walked along a bridge teeming with cars and pedestrians, and motionless fishermen with worms wiggling at the ends of their spinning rods. As she navigated among them, every cobblestone she stepped on turned out to be loose, and to her awe, there was only void underneath. Soon she’d realize in horror that what was below was also above, and it was raining cobblestones from the blue skies. When a cobblestone fell from the sky, a cobblestone lessened from the pavement below. Above the sky and under the ground, there was the same thing: VO-ID.

As cobblestones rained from above, enlarging further the cavity underneath, she panicked, afraid of being swallowed by the hungry abyss. “Stop!” she cried out as the stones kept rolling under her feet. “Stop!” she commanded the vehicles speeding toward her and then running her over. “Stop!” she begged the pedestrians shouldering her aside.

"Please stop!”

When Zeliha woke up she was alone, nauseous, and in an unfamiliar room. How on earth she could have walked here was a puzzle she had no desire to solve. She felt nothing, neither pain nor sorrow. So, she concluded, in the end the indifference must have won the race. It wasn’t only her baby but her senses too that had been aborted on that pure white table in the next room. Perhaps there was a silver lining somewhere. Perhaps now she could go fishing, and finally manage to stand still for hours on end without feeling frustrated or left behind, as if life were a swift hare she could only watch from a distance but never possibly catch.

“There you are, finally back!” The receptionist was standing by the door, arms akimbo. “Goodness gracious! What a fright! How you scared us! Do you have any idea how you shrieked? It was so awful!”

Zeliha laid still, without blinking.

“The pedestrians on the street must have thought we were slaughtering you or something. . . . I only wonder why the police did not show up at our door!”

Because it is the Istanbul police you are talking about, not some brawny cop in an American movie,
Zeliha thought to herself as she finally allowed herself a blink. Still not quite understanding why she had annoyed the receptionist but seeing no point in annoying her any further, she offered the first excuse that came to her mind: “Maybe I screamed because it hurt. . . .”

But that excuse, no matter how compelling, was instantly crushed: “It could not possibly, miss, for the doctor . . . has not performed the operation. We have not even laid a hand on you!”

“What do you mean . . . ?” Zeliha faltered, trying less to find out the answer than to comprehend the weight of her own question. “You mean . . . you have not . . .”

“No, we haven’t.” The receptionist sighed, holding her head as if at the onset of a migraine. “There was absolutely no way the doctor could do anything with you screaming at the top of your voice. You did not pass out, woman, no way; first you were blathering, and then you started yelling and cursing. I’ve never seen anything like it in fifteen years. It must have taken the morphine twice as long to take effect on you.”

Zeliha suspected some exaggeration behind this statement but did not feel like arguing. Two hours into her visit to the gynecologist she had come to realize that herein a patient was expected to talk only when asked to.

“And when you finally blacked out it was so hard to believe that you wouldn’t start shrieking again, the doctor said, let’s wait till her mind is clear. If she wants to have this abortion for sure, she can still go for it afterward. We brought you here and let you sleep. And sleep indeed you did!”

“You mean there was no . . .” The word she had so daringly uttered in front of strangers just this afternoon felt unutterable now. Zeliha touched her belly while her eyes appealed for a consolation the receptionist was the last person on earth to grant. “So she is still here. . . .”

“Well, you do not know yet if it is a she!” the receptionist said, her voice matter-of-fact.

But Zeliha knew. She simply did.

Once on the street, despite the gathering darkness, it felt like early morning. The rain had ceased and life looked beautiful, almost manageable. Though the traffic was still a mess and the streets full of sludge, the crisp smell of the after-rain gave the whole city a sacred air. Here and there children stomped in mud puddles, taking delight in committing simple sins. If there ever was a right time to sin, it must have been at this fleeting instant. One of those rare moments when it felt like Allah not only watched over us but also cared for us; one of those moments when He felt close.

It almost felt as if Istanbul had become a blissful metropolis, romantically picturesque, just like Paris, thought Zeliha; not that she had ever been to Paris. A seagull flew close crying a coded message she was almost on the verge of deciphering. For half a minute Zeliha believed she was on the cutting edge of a new beginning. “Why did you not let me do it, Allah?” she heard herself mutter, but as soon as the words came out of her mouth, she apologized in panic to the atheist in herself.

Far and under the rainbow Zeliha limped back home, clutching the box of tea glasses and the broken heel, somehow feeling less dispirited than she had felt in weeks.

So on that first Friday of July around eight p.m. Zeliha came home, to the slightly decrepit, high-ceilinged Ottoman
konak
that looked out of place amid five times as tall modern apartment buildings on both sides. She trudged up the curved staircase and found all the Kazancı females gathered upstairs around the wide dinner table, occupied with their meal, obviously having felt no reason to wait for her.

“Hello stranger! Come on in, join our supper,” Banu exclaimed, craning her neck over an oven-fried crispy chicken wing. “The prophet Mohammed advises us to share our food with strangers.”

Her lips were glossy, so were her cheeks, as if she had taken extra time to wipe the chicken grease all over her face, including on those shiny, fawn eyes of hers. Twelve years older and thirty pounds heavier than Zeliha, she looked less like her sister than like her mother. If she was to be believed, Banu had a bizarre digestive system that stored everything ingested, which could have been a more credible claim had she not also argued that even if it were pure water that she consumed, her body would still evolve it into fat, and thereby she could not possibly be held accountable for her weight or be asked to go on a diet.

“Guess what’s on today’s menu?” Banu continued merrily, as she wagged a finger at Zeliha before she clutched another chicken wing. “Stuffed green peppers!”

“This must be my lucky day!” Zeliha said.

Today’s menu looked splendidly familiar. In addition to a huge chicken, there was yogurt soup,
karnıyarık, pilaki, kadın budu köfte
from the day before,
turşu,
newly made
çörek,
a jar of
ayran,
and, yes, stuffed green peppers. Zeliha instantly pulled up a chair, her hunger prevailing over her lack of enthusiasm for attending a family dinner on such a hard day’s eve.

“Where were you, missy?” grumbled her mother, Gülsüm, who might have been Ivan the Terrible in another life. She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, knitted her eyebrows, and then turned her contorted face toward Zeliha’s, as if by doing so she could read her youngest daughter’s mind.

So there they stood, Gülsüm and Zeliha, mother and daughter, scowling at each other, each ready to quarrel but reluctant to start the fight. It was Zeliha who first averted her eyes. Knowing too well what a big mistake it would be to display her temper in front of her mother, she forced herself to smile and attempted an answer, albeit an indirect one.

“There were good discounts at the bazaar today. I bought a set of tea glasses. They are absolutely gorgeous! They have gilded stars and little spoons that match.”

“Alas, they break so easily,” murmured Cevriye, the second eldest of the Kazancı sisters and a Turkish national history teacher at a private high school. She always ate healthy, balanced meals and wore her hair in a perfectly pinned chignon that twisted at the nape of her neck without letting even a tangle of hair loose.

“You’ve been to the bazaar? Why didn’t you get any cinnamon sticks?! I told you this morning we were going to have rice pudding today and there was no cinnamon left at home to sprinkle on it.” Banu frowned in between two bites of bread, but this problem occupied her for no more than a split second. Her theory of bread, which she was fond of pronouncing regularly and putting into practice all the time, was that if not given a proper amount at each and every sitting, the stomach would not “know” it was full and would thereby ask for more food. For the stomach to fully
comprehend
its fullness, one had to eat decent portions of bread with everything. Thus, Banu would have bread with potatoes, bread with rice, bread with pasta, bread with
börek,
and at those times when she wanted to give her stomach a far clearer message, she would have bread with bread. Dinner without bread was a sheer sin, which Allah might forgive, but Banu definitely would not.

Zeliha pursed her lips and stood silent, only now remembering the fate of the cinnamon sticks. Avoiding the question, she put a stuffed pepper on her plate. Each time she could easily tell if it was Banu or Cevriye or Feride who had prepared the peppers. If it was Banu, they turned out to be full of stuff they’d have otherwise sorely lacked, including peanuts and cashews and almonds. If it was Feride, they would be full of rice, each green pepper so ballooned it was impossible to eat without breaking. When her tendency to overstuff the peppers was added to her love for seasonings of all sorts, Feride’s
dolmas
burst with herbs and spices. Depending on the combination, this turned out either exceptionally well or simply awful. When it was Cevriye who had cooked the dish, however, it was always sweeter, because she added powdered sugar to every edible thing no matter what, as if to compensate for the sourness in her universe. And today it happened to be she who had made the
dolmas.

“I was at the doctor’s. . . . ” Zeliha murmured, carefully stripping the
dolma
of its pale green cloak.

“Doctors!” Feride grimaced and lifted her fork in the air as if it were a baton she would use to indicate a faraway mountain range on a map and her audience was not her own family but students in a geography class. Feride had a problem with making eye contact. She was more comfortable talking to objects. Accordingly, she addressed her words to Zeliha’s plate: “Haven’t you seen the newspaper this morning? They operate on a nine-year-old child for appendicitis and then forget a pair of scissors inside. Do you have any idea how many doctors in this country should be put into jail for medical malpractice?”

Among all the Kazancı women, Feride was the one best acquainted with medical procedures. In the last six years, she had been diagnosed with eight different illnesses, each of which sounded more alien than the one before. Whether it was the doctors who could not make up their minds or Feride herself industriously working on new infirmities, one could never tell. After a while it didn’t really matter one way or another. Sanity was a promised land, the Shangri-la she had been deported from as a teenager, and to which she intended to return to one day. On the way there she rested at sundry stopovers that came with erratic names and dreary treatments.