The Bastard of Istanbul (41 page)

“Can I help you?”

When she turned around she spotted Armanoush standing, watching her.

“Sure, why not? Thanks.” Asya gave her a bowl of slivered almonds. “Would you sprinkle a few of these into each bowl?”

For the following ten minutes they worked side by side as they exchanged brief, poignant words about Grandma Shushan.

“I came to Istanbul because I thought if I made a journey on my own into my grandmother’s city, I could better understand my family heritage and where I stood in life. I guess I wanted to meet Turks to better absorb what it means to be an Armenian. This whole trip was an attempt to connect with my grandma’s past. I was going to tell her that we looked for her house . . . and now she’s gone. . . .” Armanoush began to cry. “I didn’t even have the chance to see her one last time.”

Asya gave Armanoush a hug, though clumsily, not being used to showing love and compassion. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said. “Before you leave Istanbul, you and I can go hunt for other reminiscences from your grandma’s past. We can go to that place again and talk to other people, see if we can find anything.”

Armanoush shook her head. “I appreciate that, but the truth is, once my mother is here, it’ll be hard to go around alone. She’s very overprotective.”

They got quiet hearing footsteps behind them. It was Auntie Banu, coming to check how they were doing. She watched them decorate the desserts for a while. “Does Armanoush know the tale of the
ashure
?” she asked, smiling, not so much a question as an introduction to a narrative.

As the two young women worked together, cracking pomegranates and sprinkling cinnamon powder and slivered almonds on dozens of
ashure
bowls lined up on the counter, Auntie Banu began.

“Once there was, once there wasn’t, in a land not so far away, the ways of the human beings were despicable and the times were bad. After watching this wretchedness for long enough, Allah finally sent a messenger, Noah, to correct the people’s ways and to give them a chance to repent. But when Noah opened his mouth to preach the truth, nobody listened to him and his words were interrupted by curses. They called him names: crazy, lunatic, erratic. . . .”

Asya cast an amused look at her aunt, knowing how to get to her: “But more than anyone else it was the betrayal of his wife that devastated Noah, right Auntie? Didn’t Noah’s wife join the ranks of the pagans?”

“Indeed she did, that she-snake in the grass!” Auntie Banu replied, torn between narrating a religious story fittingly, and peppering it with a few remarks of her own.

“Noah tried hard to convince his wife and his people for eight hundred years. . . . And don’t ask me how come it took him that long,” Auntie Banu counseled. “Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one smaller. Just like that, Noah spent eight hundred years praying for his people, trying to bring them to the right path. One day God sent him the Angel Gabriel. ‘Build a ship,’ the angel whispered, ‘and take a pair of each species.’ . . . ”

Translating a story that needed no translation, Asya’s voice dropped a notch, for this happened to be the part she liked least.

“Eventually, in Noah’s ark there were good people of all faiths,” Auntie Banu continued. “David was there; so were Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and peace be upon him, Mohammed. Thus equipped, they embarked and started to wait.

“Soon the flood came. Allah commanded: ‘O sky! Now is the time! Let your water pour down. Do not hold yourself back anymore. Send them your water and wrath!’ He then commanded the earth: ‘O earth, hold your water, do not absorb it. The water rose so quickly no one outside the arc could survive.’ ”

Now the translator’s voice rose, for this happened to be Asya’s favorite part. She liked to visualize the flood in her mind’s eye, washing away villages and civilizations, as well as all the unwanted memories of the past.

“For days on end they sailed and sailed, it was all water everywhere. Soon food became scarce. There wasn’t food enough to make a meal. So Noah ordered: ‘Bring whatever you have.’ And they did, animals and humans, insects and birds, people of different faiths, they brought whatever little they had left. They cooked all the ingredients together and thus concocted a huge pot of
ashure.
” Auntie Banu proudly smiled at the pot on the stove as if it were the same as the one in the legend. “That is the story of this dessert.”

According to Auntie Banu every significant event in world history had taken place on the day of
ashure.
It was on this day that Allah had accepted Adam’s repentance. So was Yunus released by the dolphin that had swallowed him, Rumi encountered by Shams, Jesus taken to the heavens, and Moses given the Ten Commandments.

“Ask Armanoush to tell us the most important date for the Armenians, ” Auntie Banu remarked, thinking there was a good chance it could be this very same day.

As soon as the question was translated, Armanoush replied, “The genocide.”

“I don’t think that suits your pattern.” Asya smiled at her aunt, skipping the translation.

It was then that Auntie Zeliha appeared in the kitchen armed with her purse. “All right airport passengers, it’s time to go!”

“I’m coming with you.” Asya dropped the scoop on the counter.

“We’ve talked about this,” Auntie Zeliha responded indifferently. It didn’t quite sound like her. A husky, scary tinge infiltrated her tone, as if someone else were speaking but using her mouth. “You stay at home, miss,” decreed the stranger.

What upset Asya most was the fact that she couldn’t read Auntie Zeliha’s expression. She must have done something wrong to upset her mother, but she had no idea what it could be, unless, of course, it was her very existence.

“What have I done to her this time?” Asya lifted her hands in despair when Auntie Zeliha and Armanoush had gone.

“Nothing, my dear; she loves you so,” Auntie Banu muttered. “You stay with me and the
djinn.
We’ll all finish decorating the
ashure
and then go shopping.”

But Asya didn’t feel like going shopping. With a sigh she grabbed a handful of pomegranate seeds to sprinkle on the stillundecorated bowls to the side. She scattered the seeds evenly, as if leaving behind a trail of marks to guide some star-crossed fable child homeward. It occurred to her that pomegranate seeds could have been tiny, precious rubies in another life.

“Auntie.” She turned to her eldest aunt. “What happened to that golden brooch that you had? The pomegranate brooch, remember? Where is it?”

Auntie Banu paled as Mr. Bitter on her left shoulder whispered into her ear: “
When do we remember the things we remember? Why do we ask the things we ask?
”

Noah’s flood, terrifying though it was, started gently, inaudibly, with a few drops of rain. Sporadic drops, heralding the catastrophe to come, a message noticed by no one. There were dark, gloomy clouds clustered in the sky, so gray and heavy, as if loaded with molten lead full of evil eyes. Each hole in each cloud was an unblinking celestial eye that shed a tear for each sin committed on earth.

But the day Auntie Zeliha was raped was not a rainy day. As a matter of fact, there was not even a single cloud in the bright blue sky. She remembered the sky on that ill-omened day for years and years to come, not because she had turned her eyes up toward the heavens to pray or beg Allah for help, but because during the struggle there came a time when her head was hanging over the bed, and while unable to budge under his weight, unable to fight him back anymore, her gaze had inadvertently locked on to the sky, only to catch sight of a commercial balloon slowly floating by. The balloon was orange and black, and on it was stenciled in huge letters: KODAK.

Zeliha shivered at the thought of a colossal camera taking pictures of everything happening down here on earth at that moment in time. A Polaroid camera taking a snapshot of a rape inside a room in a
konak
in Istanbul.

She had been alone in her room since late morning, enjoying the solitude, which was a rare occasion in their household. When her father had been alive, he wouldn’t permit anyone to close the doors of their rooms. Privacy meant suspicious activity; everything had to be visible, in the open. The only place where you could lock the door was the bathroom, and even there someone would knock on the door if you lingered inside for too long. It was only after her father’s death that Zeliha was able to close her door and retreat into herself. Neither her sisters nor her mother recognized her need to shut off from the world. From time to time Zeliha fantasized how fabulous it would be to move out and have a place of her own.

Early this morning the Kazancı women had left home to visit the grave of Levent Kazancı, but Zeliha had excused herself. She didn’t want to go to the cemetery with the whole family. She’d rather go there alone, sit on the dusty ground, and ask her father several questions he had left unanswered in his lifetime. Why did he always have to be so harsh and unloving toward his own flesh and blood? Zeliha wanted to know. She also wanted to ask him if he had any idea how much his ghost still haunted them—to this day they couldn’t help but lower their voice sometimes during the day, afraid of disturbing Daddy with their presence. Levent Kazancı didn’t like noise, especially children’s clamor. As toddlers, they had to talk in whispers. Being a Kazancı child first and foremost meant learning the meaning of
dad,
not as in “Daddy” but as in “DAD”: Deliberate Ache Deferment. The principle of DAD was applied to every moment of their lives. If a child happened to trip and cut herself in a room next to his, for instance, she would hold in her wail, press her hand tightly on the wound, tiptoe downstairs into the kitchen or into the garden, make sure she was far enough away not to be heard, and only then, only there, let loose a painful cry. Underlying it all was an alluring but never-realized expectation— that if you behaved correctly, Father wouldn’t get angry.

Every evening when their father returned from work, the children would assemble in front of the table before dinner, waiting to be inspected. He never asked them directly if they had behaved well during the day. Instead he lined them up like a small regiment, and stared at each of their faces for varying amounts of time: Banu (more worried for her siblings than for herself, always the protective elder sister), Cevriye (biting her lips so as not to cry), Feride (eyes rolling nervously), Mustafa, the only son (hoping to make his way out of this miserable group, still assuming he was his father’s favorite), and the youngest, Zeliha (a subtle sourness welling up in her heart). They waited until Father finished his soup, and then gradually asked one or two or three . . . or sometimes, if they were lucky, all of them at the same time to join the table.

Zeliha did not mind her father’s repeated scoldings or even his regular spankings as much as she did these predinner inspections. It pained her to wait there by the table to be looked over, as if whatever wrong she might have committed during the day was written on her forehead with ink so invisible only Father could read it. “Why can’t you ever get anything right?” Levent Kazancı asked each time he read a misdemeanor on one of the children’s foreheads and decided to punish them all for it.

It was almost impossible to correlate this Levent Kazancı with the man he developed into once he stepped outside the house. Anyone who ran into him outside the
konak
would have taken him for an icon of reliability, considerateness, togetherness, and righteousness, the kind of man each one of his daughters’ closest friends dreamed of marrying one day. Inside the house, however, his kindness was reserved for strangers alone. Just like he took his shoes off as soon as he entered the house and put on his slippers, just as naturally he transformed from a gentle bureaucrat to an authoritarian father. Petite-Ma once said the reason why he was so strict with his children was because he had suffered as a child, having been abandoned by his own mother.

Sometimes Zeliha couldn’t help but think it had been fortunate that her father died so early, like all other males in their ancestry. A man as dominant as Levent Kazancı would have probably not enjoyed his old age, becoming weak and ill and in need of his children’s mercy.

If she went to her father’s grave, Zeliha knew she would want to talk to him, and if she talked to him, she might cry, cracking like a tea glass under an evil eye. But even the thought of crying in front of others was enough to repel her. Recently she had promised herself she would never become one of those weepy women and that whenever she needed to shed tears, she would do it alone. Hence, on that rainless day twenty years ago, Zeliha had chosen to stay at home.

She had spent most of the day lying in bed, browsing through magazines and daydreaming. Next to the bed stood a razor blade she shaved her legs with and a bottle of rosewater lotion she had applied afterward to soothe her skin. If her mother had seen this, she would have been extremely upset. Mother believed women should wax all their bodily hair but never shave. Shaving was for men only. Waxing was a womanly collective ritual. Twice a month the Kazancı women gathered in the living room to wax their legs. First they melted a clump of wax on the stove, which gave off a sweet smell like candy. Then they all sat on the carpet and applied the hot, sticky substance to their legs, chatting all the while. When the wax stiffened they peeled it off. Sometimes they all went to the local
hamam
and waxed their legs there on the huge marble slab under the steam. Zeliha hated the
hamam,
that all-women space, just as she hated the ritual of waxing. She preferred to shave with a razor; it was quick, simple, and private.

Zeliha dangled her legs over the bed and checked herself in the mirror across the way. She put some more lotion in her palm and as she slowly smeared the lotion on her skin, she studied her body carefully, admiringly. She was cognizant of her beauty and did not try to conceal it. Mother said beautiful women had to be twice as modest and careful with men. Zeliha thought that was sheer clap-trap from a woman who had never been beautiful herself.