The Bastard of Istanbul (8 page)

In next to no time the ultramarine 1984 Jeep Cherokee had reached Fry’s Supermarket’s parking lot.

The car moved in a semicircle, then maneuvered crosswise, thus reaching the main exit of the supermarket. Just when Rose was about to lose any hope of finding the young man, she spotted him patiently waiting at the bus stop with a flimsy plastic bag next to him.

“Hey, Mostapha!” Rose yelled, cocking her head from the half-open window. “Wanna ride?”

“Sure, thanks.” Mustafa nodded and made a frail attempt to correct her pronunciation: “It’s Mus-ta-fa. . . .”

Inside the car, Rose smiled. “Mustapha, meet my daughter, Armanoush. . . . But I call her Amy! Amy this is Mustapha, Mustapha this is Amy. . . .”

While the young man beamed at the sleepy baby, Rose studied his face for signs of recognition but couldn’t find any. So, she decided to give him another hint, this time a more revealing one: “My daughter’s full name is Amy Tchakhmakhchian.”

If the words had inspired any negative recognition, Mustafa’s face didn’t show it. So Rose felt the need to repeat, just in case it hadn’t been understood the first time: “Armanoush Tchakh-makhchi -an!”

It was only then that the young man’s hazel eyes flickered, though not exactly in the way Rose had anticipated.

“Chak-mak-chi-an . . . Çak-mak-çı . . . ! Hey, that sounds like Turkish!” he exclaimed happily.

“Well, as a matter of fact, it’s
Armenian,
” Rose said. Suddenly she felt insecure. “Her father—I mean, my ex-husband—” She swallowed hard as if trying to get rid of some sour taste. “He was, I mean, he
is,
Armenian.”

“Oh yeah?” he said nonchalantly.

He didn’t get it, did he?
Rose wondered to herself as she chewed the inside of her mouth. Then, as if breathing out a suppressed hiccup long welling up in her throat, she let out a whoop of laughter.
But he is cute . . . very cute. . . . He will be my sweet vengeance!
she thought.

“Listen,” Rose said. “I don’t know if you like Mexican art but there is a group exhibition opening tomorrow night. If you don’t have other plans we could go to it and grab a bite afterward.”

“Mexican art . . . ?” Mustafa paused.

“People who have seen it elsewhere say it’s really good,” Rose said. “So what do you say. . . . Would you like to come with me?”

“Mexican art . . . !” Mustafa echoed with confidence. “Sure, why not?”

“Awesome.” Rose cheered up. “It’s so nice to meet you, Mostapha, ” she said, distorting his name again. But this time Mustafa felt no need to correct her.

“Is it true? Please somebody tell me it is not true!” Uncle Dikran Stamboulian exclaimed as he banged the door open and dashed into the living room, searching for his nephew or nieces or anyone willing to console him. His dark eyes were slightly bulged with excitement. He had a full, drooping mustache that turned up slightly at the ends, making him look like he was smiling even when seriously enraged.

“Please calm down and have a seat, Uncle,” Auntie Surpun, the youngest of the Tchakhmakhchian sisters, muttered without directly looking at him. Being the only one in the family who had unreservedly supported Barsam’s marriage to Rose, she now felt culpable. Such self-reproach was not something she was used to. A professor of humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, Surpun Tchakhmakhchian was a self-confident feminist scholar who believed that every problem in this world was negotiable by calm dialogue and reason. There were times this particular conviction had made her feel alone in a family as temperamental as hers.

Dikran Stamboulian did as he was told and scuffled toward an empty chair, chewing on the ends of his mustache. The whole family was gathered around an antique mahogany table full of food, although nobody seemed to be eating anything. Auntie Varsenig’s twin babies slept peacefully on the sofa. Distant cousin Kevork Karaoglanian was here too, having flown from Minneapolis for a social event organized by the Armenian Youth Community in the Bay Area. Over the past three months Kevork had dutifully attended every event organized by the group—a benefit concert, Annual Picnic, Christmas Party, Friday Night Light Party, Annual Winter Gala, Sunday Brunch, and a rafting race to benefit ecotourism in Yerevan. Uncle Dikran suspected the reason his handsome nephew came to San Francisco so frequently was not only because he was committed to these organizational events, but also because he had a yet-to-be-revealed affection for a girl he had met in the group.

Dikran Stamboulian gazed longingly at the food set out on the table, and reached for a jar of yogurt drink, Americanized with too many ice cubes. In multihued clay bowls of different sizes were many of his favorite dishes:
fassoulye pilaki, kadın budu köfte, karnıyarık,
newly made
churek,
and to Uncle Dikran’s delight,
bastırma.
Though he was still fuming, his heart warmed at the sight of
bastırma
and entirely melted when he saw his favorite dish next to it:
burma.

Despite the fact that he had always been under the strict dietary surveillance of his wife, every year Uncle Dikran had added another layer of flab to his infamous belly, like a tree trunk adding a growth ring with the passing of each year. Now he was a squat and portly man who did not mind drawing attention to either fact. Two years ago he had been offered a role in a pasta commercial. He had played a jolly cook whose spirits could not be dampened
,
even when he was dumped by his fiancée, since he still owned his kitchen and could cook spaghetti casserole. In truth, just as in the commercial, Uncle Dikran was such an exceptionally good-humored man that whenever one of his many acquaintances wanted to illustrate the cliché of fat people being far more cheery fellows than others, they would cite his name. Except today Uncle Dikran didn’t look like his usual self.

“Where is Barsam?” Uncle Dikran asked as he reached for a
köfte
from the pile. “Does he know what his wife is up to?”

“Ex-wife!” Auntie Zarouhi corrected. As a new-to-the-job elementary school teacher grappling with unruly kids all day long, she couldn’t help correcting any mistake she heard.

“Yeah, ex! Except she doesn’t acknowledge that! That woman is nuts, I tell you. She is doing this on purpose. If Rose is not doing this just to upset us, let my name not be Dikran anymore. Find me another name!”

“You don’t need another name,” Auntie Varsenig consoled her uncle. “No doubt she is doing this deliberately. . . .”

“We have to rescue Armanoush,” interrupted Grandma Shushan, the matriarch of the family. She left the table and scuffled toward her armchair. Though a wonderful cook, she had never had a big appetite and lately, her daughters feared, had somehow developed a way to stay alive by eating no more than a teacupful a day. She was a short, bony woman who possessed an exceptional strength to handle situations even more dire than this, and whose delicate face radiated an aura of competence. Her refusal to admit defeat no matter what, her unflagging conviction that life was always a struggle but if you were an Armenian it was three times as grueling, and her ability to win over everyone she came across had over the years bewildered many in her family.

“Nothing is as important as the well-being of the child,” Grandma Shushan muttered as she caressed the silver pendant of Saint Anthony that she always wore. The patron saint of lost articles had helped her numerous times in the past to cope with the losses in her life.

With that Grandma Shushan took up her knitting needles and sat down. The first skeins of a cerulean baby’s blanket dangled from the needles with the initials
A. K.
woven on the border. There was silence for a moment as everyone in the room watched her hands move gracefully with the needles. Grandma Shushan’s knitting affected the family like group therapy. The sure and even cadence of each stitch soothed everyone watching, making them feel that as long as Grandma Shushan kept knitting, there was nothing to fear and in the end, everything would be all right.

“You are right. Poor little Armanoush,” said Uncle Dikran, who as a rule took Shushan’s side in every family dispute, knowing better than to disagree with the omnipotent materfamilias. Uncle Dikran dropped his voice as he asked, “What’s going to become of that innocent lamb?”

Before anyone could respond, there was a jingling at the doorstep and the door was opened with a key. Barsam walked in, his face pale, his eyes staring worriedly behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“Hah! Look who’s here!” said Uncle Dikran. “Mr. Barsam, your daughter is going to be raised by a Turk and here you are doing nothing about it. . . .
Amot!
”

“What can I do?” lamented Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, turning to his uncle. He moved his eyes to a huge reproduction of Martiros Saryan’s
Still Life with Masks
on the wall, as if the answer he needed was hidden somewhere in the painting. But he must have failed to encounter any solace there because when he spoke again his voice sounded as inconsolable as before. “I have no right to interfere. Rose is her mother.”

“
Aman!
What a mother!” Dikran Stamboulian laughed. For a man of his size he had an oddly shrill laugh—a detail he was usually conscious of and able to control, except when he was under stress.

“What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant Istanboulian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustafa! What kind of a joke is that? . . . Ah,
marnim khalasim!
”

Dikran Stamboulian paused and looked closely at his nephew to see the effect of his words. Barsam stood stone still.

“Go, Barsam!” Uncle Dikran exclaimed louder this time. “Fly to Tucson tonight and stop this comedy before it’s too late. Talk with your wife.
Haydeh!
”

“Ex-wife!” Auntie Zarouhi corrected him, as she served herself a piece of
burma.
“Ah, I shouldn’t be eating this. It has so much sugar in it. So many calories. Why don’t you try artificial sweeteners, Mom?”

“Because nothing artificial enters my kitchen,” Shushan Tchakhmakhchian replied. “Eat freely until you have diabetes in old age. Everything has a season.”

“Right, I guess I am still in my sugar season.” Auntie Zarouhi winked at her, but dared to eat only half a
burma.
Still chewing, she turned to her brother: “What is Rose doing in Arizona, anyway?”

“She has found a job there,” said Barsam tonelessly.

“Yeah, what a job!” Auntie Varsenig tapped the ridge of her nose. “What the hell does she think she is doing, stuffing enchiladas as if she didn’t have a penny to her name? She is doing that on purpose, you know. She wants the whole world to blame us, thinking we are not giving her any child support. A brave single mom fighting against all odds! That’s the role she is trying to play!”

“Armanoush will be just fine,” Barsam muttered, trying not to sound hopeless. “Rose stayed in Arizona because she wants to go back to college. Working at the Student Union is a temporary thing. What she really wants is to become a grade school teacher. She wants to spend her time with kids. There is nothing bad in that. As long as she is OK and takes good care of Armanoush, what difference does it make who she is dating?”

“You are right, but you are also wrong,” Auntie Surpun spoke as she drew her legs under her in her chair and resettled, her eyes suddenly hardening with a trace of cynicism. “In an ideal world, you could say, well, that’s her life, none of our business. If you have no appreciation of history and ancestry, no memory and responsibility, and if you live solely in the present, you certainly can claim that. But the past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children and you know that. . . . As long as Rose has your daughter, you have every right to intervene in her life. Especially when she starts dating a Turk!”

Never quite comfortable with philosophical speeches, and preferring straight talk over intellectual jargon, Auntie Varsenig interjected: “Barsam dear, show me a Turk who speaks Armenian, will you?”

Instead of an answer, Barsam gave his elder sister a sidelong look.

Auntie Varsenig continued, “Tell me how many Turks ever learned Armenian. None! Why did our mothers learn their language and not vice versa? Isn’t it clear who has dominated whom? Only a handful of Turks come from Central Asia, right? And then the next thing you know they are everywhere! What happened to the millions of Armenians who were already there? Assimilated! Massacred! Orphaned! Deported! And then forgotten! How can you give your flesh-and-blood daughter to those who are responsible for our being so few and in so much pain today? Mesrop Mash-tots would turn in his grave!”

Shaking his head, Barsam remained silent. To ease the distress of his nephew, Uncle Dikran began telling a story.

“An Arab goes to a barber for a haircut. After the haircut, he tries to pay but the barber says, ‘No way, I cannot accept your money. This is a community service.’ The Arab is pleasantly surprised and leaves the shop. The next morning when the barber opens his shop, he finds a ‘Thank you’ card and a basket of dates waiting at his door.”

One of the twins sleeping on the sofa fidgeted but stopped short of crying.

“The very next day a Turk goes to the same barber for a haircut. After the haircut, he tries to pay but the barber once again says, ‘I cannot accept your money. This is a community service.’ The Turk is pleasantly surprised and leaves the shop. The next morning when the barber opens his shop, he finds a ‘Thank you’ card and a box of
lokum
waiting at his door.”