The Bastard of Istanbul

TWELVE Pomegranate Seeds

Hovhannes Stamboulian stroked the hand-carved walnut desk he had been sitting at since early afternoon and felt the smooth, glossy surface glide under his fingers. The Jewish antique dealer who sold it to him had said such pieces were quite rare because they had been so hard to manufacture. Carved from walnut trees on the Aegean Islands, then adorned with tiny drawers and secret compartments like a fine piece of embroidery. Despite the delicacy of its adornment, the desk was so durable it could last several lifetimes.

"This desk will outlive you and even your children!" The dealer had guffawed, as if his merchandise outliving his customers was a standing joke with him. "Isn't it sublime that a piece of wood lives longer than us?"

Though he knew the remark was meant to demonstrate the quality of the merchandise, Hovhannes Stamboulian had felt a pang of sadness.

Even so, he had bought the desk. Along with it, he had also purchased a brooch from the same store-a graceful brooch in the shape of a pomegranate, delicately smothered with gold threads all over, slightly cracked in the middle, with seeds of red rubies glowing from within. It was a deftly crafted piece by an Armenian artisan in Sivas, he had been told. Hovhannes Stamboulian bought the piece as a present for his wife. He was planning to give it to her tonight, after dinner, or perhaps better, before, as soon as he was done with this chapter.

Of all the chapters he had written, this was the most demanding. Had he known it was going to be this grueling, he might have abandoned the entire project. But he was up to his neck in the book, and the only way out was to keep at it. Hovhannes Stamboulian, a renowned poet and columnist, was secretly writing a book entirely outside his main field. He could be rejected, ridiculed, or reviled at the end. At a time when the entire Ottoman Empire was sated with grandiose undertakings, revolutionary movements, and nationalist divisions, at a time when the Armenian community was pregnant with innovative ideologies and ardent debates, he in the privacy of his house was writing a children's book.

Writing a children's book in Armenian was something never done before, almost inconceivable. Why was there not a single piece of literature in this field? Was it because the Armenian minority had become a society unable to consider its children as children? Was childhood a futility, if not a luxury, denied to a minority in need of growing up as quickly as it could? Or was it because the literati in Istanbul had been cut off from the oral traditions faithfully ferried by Armenian grandmothers to their grandchildren?

The book was titled The Little Lost Pigeon and the Blissful Country. It was about a pigeon lost up there in the blue skies while flying with his family and friends over a blissful country. The pigeon would stop at numerous villages, towns, and cities, searching for his loved ones, and at each stop he would listen to a new story.

In this manner, Hovhannes Stamboulian gathered in the book old Armenian folktales, most of which had been transmitted from generation to generation, others long forgotten. Throughout the book he remained loyal to the authenticity of each tale, hardly changing a word. But now he planned to end the book with a story of his own. When done, the book would be published in Istanbul and then distributed in the major cities, like Adana, Harput, Van, Trabzon, and Sivas, where Armenians lived in large numbers. Even though the Muslims had started using the printing press about two centuries ago, the Armenian minority had been printing its own books and texts long before then.

Hovhannes Stamboulian wanted Armenian parents to read these stories to their children before they went to bed each night. It was ironic that this book had taken so much of his time over the past eighteen months that he himself hadn't been able to spend much time with his own children. Every afternoon he would come into this room, sit at his desk, and write for however long it took him. Each night when he emerged from the room his children would already be in their beds, asleep. The urge to write had cast a spell over everything and everyone in his life. But fortunately he was about to finish. This was the last chapter he was writing this evening, the most demanding of all. When he was finished he would go downstairs, bundle up the whole text with a ribbon, hide the golden brooch inside the knot, and hand the package to his wife. The Little Lost Pigeon and the Blissful Country was dedicated to her.

"Read it, please," he was planning to say. "If it is not good enough, I want you to burn it. All of it. I promise I won't even ask you why. But if you think it is good, I mean, good enough to be published and distributed, then please take it to Garabed Effendi at Dawn Publishers."

Hovhannes Stamboulian respected his wife's opinion like no one else's. She had sophisticated taste in literature and fine art. Thanks to her hospitality, this chalky konak along the Bosphorus had for years been a center for intellectuals and artists, visited by countless men of letters, some eminent writers, some aspiring to be. They would come to eat, drink, read, contemplate, and fervently discuss one another's works, and even more fervently, their own.

After flying too long the Little Lost Pigeon felt tired and thirsty and perched on a snowbound branch, which belonged to a pomegranate tree ready to blossom. He filled his little beak with some snow and having thus quenched his thirst, started to shed tears for his parents.

"Don't cry, little pigeon," said the pomegranate tree. "Let me tell you a story. The story of a little lost pigeon. "

Hovhannes Stamboulian paused without quite understanding what exactly disturbed his concentration. He let out a sigh of exasperation, much to his own surprise. For the last hour or so his mind had been a free-for-all of gloomy thoughts. He had a hard time understanding why he was so worried deep inside, as if his mind had been operating on its own, contemplating nameless worries. Whatever the reason behind such uneasiness he had to get rid of the torpor. This was the last chapter, the last story. It had to be good. He pursed his lips and went back to writing.

"But that's me you are talking about. I am that pigeon!" chirped the Little Lost Pigeon in surprise.

"Oh really?" asked the pomegranate tree, but didn't sound the least surprised. "Then listen to your story…. Don't you want to learn about your future?"

"Only if it's a happy one," said the Little Lost Pigeon. "I don't want to learn about it if it's sad."

Suddenly the still air was pierced by the smashing of glass. Hovhannes Stamboulian flinched in his chair, stopped writing, and instinctively turned toward the window, all- ears, frozen. For a long while he heard nothing but the howling of the wind. Oddly enough he found the silence more ominous than that eerie sound. The night was thick with a ghostly stillness while the wind outside roared as if it ferried the wrath of God, fuming for a reason unknown to mortals. In contrast to the wind whipping the walls outside, here in the house it was exceptionally silent. Hovhannes Stamboulian felt so deeply unnerved by this unusual quiet that he was almost relieved when he heard some sounds coming from downstairs. Someone scurried from one end of the house to the other, and then all the way back; panicky, abrasive footsteps in a rush as if running away from someone or something.

That must be Yervant, he thought, as a new concern crept into his eyes, a look of pensiveness and apprehension. His eldest son, Yervant, had always been naughty and boisterous, but recently the boy's waywardness had soared beyond limits. In truth, Hovhannes Stamboulian felt a pang of guilt for not spending as much time with him as he should have. Obviously the boy longed for his father.. Compared to him his three other children, two boys and a girl, were so docile it was as if their eldest brother's frenzied energy had a soporific effect on them. The two younger boys were three years apart but equally compliant. And then came the youngest sibling, the only girl in the family, little Shushan.

"Don't you worry, little bird," the pomegranate tree smiled and shook the snow on her branches. "The story that I'm going to tell you is a happy one."

Downstairs in the corridor footsteps multiplied alarmingly. Now it sounded as if there were dozens of Yervants disobediently running from one end to the other, stomping and crushing the floor underneath. But amid the scuttle, all of a sudden, he thought he heard a voice, so unexpected and curt it was hard to be sure-stern and husky, cracking for a split second. That was it. After that it was silence again, as if it all had been a figment of his imagination.

Ordinarily, he would have run out of his room to check if everything was all right. But tonight was no ordinary night. He didn't want to be disturbed, not now, not when he was about to finish the work of eighteen months. Hovhannes wriggled in angst like a diver who, after having submerged too deep, could not bring his body to swim its way back to the surface. The whirl of writing was cavernous and encapsulating but also distinctively enticing. Words jumped to and fro on the parched paper, begging him to bring this last story to a close and to shepherd them to their long-awaited destiny.

"All right, then," the Little Lost Pigeon chirped. "Tell me the story of the Little Lost Pigeon. But I warn you, if I hear anything sad, I will take wing and fly away. "

Hovhannes Stamboulian knew what the pomegranate tree was going to say in return and how the last story started, but before he could put it down on paper, something somewhere fell on the floor and smashed into pieces. Amid the burst he picked up a snuffle; though it was muffled and short he instantly recognized his wife's sob. He jumped to his feet, now entirely flushed out of the abyss of his writing, and popped up to the surface like a dead fish.

As he darted toward the staircase, Hovhannes Stamboulian recalled his quarrel that very morning with Kirkor Hagopian, an eminent lawyer and member of the Ottoman Parliament.

"The times are bad, very bad. Get ready for the worst," was the first thing Kirkor muttered when they ran into each other at the barber's shop. "First they conscripted Armenian men. `Aren't we all equal, aren't we all Ottomans?' they declared. `Muslims and non Muslims, we will fight the enemy together!' But then they disarmed all the Armenian soldiers as if they were the enemy. Next they gathered Armenian men in labor battalions. And now, my friend, there are rumors…. Some say the worst is coming."

Though sincerely concerned, Hovhannes Stamboulian had not been particularly shaken by the news. He himself was too old to be recruited and his boys too young. The only one in the family within the range of conscription age was his wife's younger brother, Levon. But he had avoided military service during the Balkan Wars thanks to receiving the badge of "the unguarded" during the selection process. Men who were the sole providers of their families were spared military duty. That old Ottoman rule, however, might be changing. Nowadays one could never be completely sure. At the beginning of the First World War, they had announced they would solely recruit those in their early twenties, but once the war had gathered speed, those in their thirties and even forties had also been conscripted.

Combat was not for Hovhannes Stamboulian. Neither was hard manual work. He loved poetry. He loved words, feeling each individual letter of the Armenian alphabet upon his tongue and lips. After ample reflection he had deduced that what the Armenian minority needed most was not arms, as some revolutionaries posed, but books, more and more books. Though new schools were founded after the Tanzimat, they were in dire need of more openminded and cultivated teachers and better books. Some additional progress had been made after the revolution in 1908. The Armenian population had supported the Young Turks in the hope that their treatment of non-Muslims would be fair and decent. The Young Turks had stated it in their proclamation:

Every citizen will enjoy complete liberty and equality, regardless of nationality or religion, and be submitted to the same obligations.All Ottomans, being equal before the law as regards rights and duties relative to the State, are eligible for government posts, according to their individual capacity and their education.

True, they had not stuck to their promise, abandoning multinational Ottomanism for Turkism, but the European powers watched the empire carefully; they would surely intervene if something grim were to take place. Hovhannes Stamboulian believed that under the present circumstances Ottomanism was the best option for Armenians, not radical ideas. Turks and Greeks and Armenians and Jews had lived together for centuries and still could find a way to coexist under one umbrella.

"You don't understand a thing, do you?" Kirkor Hagopian snapped furiously. "You live in your fairy tales!"

Hovhannes Stamboulian had never seen him so unnerved and confrontational. Still, he didn't go along with him. "I don't think zealousness is going to help us," he said, barely getting his voice above a whisper. It was his belief that nationalist zeal would solely serve to replace one misery for another, inevitably working against the deprived and the dispossessed. In the end minorities tore themselves apart from the larger entity at a great cost, only to create their own oppressors. Nationalism was no more than a replenishment of oppressors. Instead of being oppressed by someone of a different ethnicity, you ended up being oppressed by someone of your own.

"Zealousness!" Kirkor Hagopian's face scrunched into a mask of gloom. "There is news pouring in from numerous towns in Anatolia. Have you not heard about the incidents in Adana? They enter into Armenian houses with the pretext of searching for guns, and then plunder. Don't you understand? All the Armenians are going to be exiled. All of us! And here you are betraying your own people."

Hovhannes Stamboulian remained quiet for a while, chewing the ends of his mustache. Then he muttered slowly but surely, "We need to work together, Jews and Christians and Muslims. Centuries and centuries under the same imperial roof. We have been living together all this time, albeit on unequal ground. Now we can make it fair and just for all, transform this empire together."

It was then that Kirkor Hagopian uttered those gloomy words, his face already closing up: "My friend, wake up, there is no together anymore. Once a pomegranate breaks and all its seeds scatter in different directions, you cannot put it back together."

Now as he stood still at the top of the staircase, listening to the eerie silence in the house, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help seeing that image in his mind's eye: a broken pomegranate, red and sad. With visible panic he called out to his wife: "Armanoush! Armanoush, where are you?"

They must all be in the kitchen, he thought to himself, and hurried down to the first floor.

Following the commencement of the First World War, a general mobilization had been declared. Though everyone in Istanbul talked about this, it was in the small towns where its effects had been mostly felt. They had beaten the drums in the streets, echoing again and again: Seferberliktir! Seferberliktir! That was when many Armenian young men were drafted into the army. More than three hundred thousand. At the outset all these soldiers were given arms, just like their Muslim peers. After a short time, however, they were all asked to return those arms. Unlike the Muslim soldiers, the Armenians were taken into special labor battalions. Rumors ran amok that Enver Pasha was the one behind this decision: "We need working hands to construct the roads for the soldiers to cross," he had announced.

But then there came dour news, this time about the labor battalions themselves. People said all the Armenians were employed in hard labor for the road construction although some had paid their bedel and should have been exempt. They said the battalions were taken to dig roads, but that was just a pretext; in actual fact they were made to dig pits, deep and wide enough to… They said Armenians were buried in the same pits that they had been made to dig.

"The Turkish authorities have announced that the Amnenians are going to dye their Easter eggs with their own blood!" That was what Kirkor Hagopian stated before he left the barbershop.

Hovhannes Stamboulian didn't give those rumors much credit. Yet he acknowledged that the times were bad.

Downstairs on the first floor he called his wife's name once again and sighed upon hearing no answer. As he stepped outside onto the patio and walked past the long cherry table where they had their breakfast when the weather was mild, a new scene from the Little Lost Pigeon crossed his mind.

"Listen to your story, then,"said the pomegranate tree as it fluttered a few branches, shaking off specks of snow. "Once there was; once there wasn't. God's creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin. "

"But why?" chirped the Little Lost Pigeon. "Why was it a sin to talk too much?"

The kitchen door was shut. It was strange given the hour of the day; Armanoush would be working in there with Marie, their maid of five years, while the children clustered around them. They never shut the door.

Hovhannes Stamboulian reached for the handle but before he could turn it, the old, wood door was opened from inside and he stood face-to-face with a Turkish soldier, a sergeant. Both men were so shocked to run into each other like this that for a full minute they stood staring at each other blankly. It was the sergeant who first shed his stupor. He took a step back and eyed the other from head to toe. He was a tawny man who would have had a smooth, youthful face had it not been for the harshness of his stare.

"What is going on here?!" Hovhannes Stamboulian exclaimed. He spotted his wife and kids and Marie lined against the kitchen wall at the back, standing side by side like penalized children.

"We have orders to search the house," the sergeant said. There was no discernible hostility in his voice but no empathy either. He sounded as if he was tired, and whatever the reason he was here for, he wanted to be done as fast as possible and be gone. "Could you please show us the way to your study?"

They went to the back of the house and trudged up the great curved staircase; Hovhannes Stamboulian in front, the sergeant and the soldiers following behind. Once upstairs in'the study, the soldiers moved around, each poring over some article of furniture, like honey-sucking bumblebees in a field of wildflowers. They searched the cupboards, the drawers, and every single shelf of the wall-towall bookcase. They leafed through hundreds of books seeking documents hidden among the pages; they looked over his favorite literature, from Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and Gerard de Nerval's Les Chimeres to Alfred de Musset's Les Nuits and Hugo's Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. While a brawny soldier with beady eyes suspiciously scanned through Rousseau's Social Contract, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help but ponder the passages the man was staring at without really seeing:

Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him.

When done with the books, they started to sift through the many drawers of the walnut desk. It was then that one of the soldiers spotted the gold brooch on the desk. He handed it to the sergeant, who picked up the miniature pomegranate, weighed it in his palm, rotated it in the air to better see the rubies inside, and then gave it to Hovhannes Stamboulian with a smile.

"You should not leave such a precious gem in the open. Here, take it," the sergeant said with an air of placid courteousness.

"Yes, thank you. It is a present for my wife," Hovhannes Stamboulian said quietly.

The sergeant gave him a confiding man-to-man smile. But rapidly his face turned from cordiality to sulk, and when he spoke again his voice didn't have the same mild tone anymore.

"Tell me what it says here," the sergeant said as he pointed to a bunch of papers he had found in a drawer, all written in the Armenian alphabet.

Hovhannes Stamboulian immediately recognized the poem he had penned at a time when he had fallen ill with a high fever. It had been sometime last fall. He had been in bed for three days straight without being able to move, shivering and sweating at the same time as if his entire body had become a barrel of water that was full of holes and constantly oozing. Throughout Armanoush had stayed beside his bed, putting vinegar-soaked cold towels on his forehead and rubbing his chest with ice cubes. Then, at the end of the third day, when the fever had finally diminished, a poem had come to Hovhannes Stamboulian, and he had welcomed it as a compensation for his suffering. Thoughh not a religious man at all, he was a firm believer in divine compensations, which he thought operated less in large-scale manifestations than through small signs and gifts such as this.

"Read it!" The sergeant nudged the papers.

Hovhannes Stamboulian put on his glasses and with a trembling voice read the first lines aloud:

The child weeps in his sleep without knowing why, A hushed yet unending sob of longing Impossible to console

That's how I long for thee…

"This is poetry," the sergeant barged in, stressing the last word with an intonation that sounded like disappointment.

"Yes." Hovhannes Stamboulian nodded, though not sure if this was good or bad.

But the sparkle he saw in the sergeant's eyes did not seem that hostile. Perhaps he had liked it. Perhaps he would leave now, taking his soldiers with him.

"Hov-han-nes Stam-bou-li-an," the sergeant muttered, slurring the words. "You are an erudite man, a man of knowledge. You are well known and well respected. Why would a sophisticated man like you conspire with a bunch of ignoble insurgents?"

Hovhannes Stamboulian raised his dark eyes from the paper and blinked absentmindedly. He didn't know what to say in his defense since he had no idea what he was being accused of.

"The Armenian insurgents…. They read your poems and then rebel against the Ottoman Sultanate," the sergeant said, creasing his forehead in thought. "You goad them into mutiny."

All of a sudden Hovhannes Stamboulian grasped what he was being accused of and the gravity of the charge. "Officer," he said, fixedly staring at the sergeant who fixedly stared back at him, afraid that if he broke eye contact the only bridge of interchange between them would forever disintegrate. "You are an educated man yourself and you'll understand the difficulty of my situation. My poems are the echo of my imagination. I write and publish them, but I cannot possibly control who reads them and with what particular intention."

Looking pensive, the sergeant cracked his knuckles one by one. He then cleared his throat as if to accentuate the importance of what he was about to say. "I perfectly understand that dilemma. However, you can control your own words. You are the one who writes them. You are the poet…."

In a desperate effort to diminish what was quickly becoming real panic, Hovhannes Stamboulian scanned the room until he came eye to eye with his eldest son, standing by the door, peeking inside. When had he sneaked out of the kitchen? How long had he been watching them? The boy's cheeks were rosy with the intensity of his fury against the soldiers. But something in his expression contained far more than that. Yervant's young face looked oddly unflustered and somehow wise. Hovhannes Stamboulian smiled at his son, trying to convince him that things were OK, and then gestured for him to go back to his mother. But Yervant didn't move.

"I am afraid you need to come with us," the sergeant said.

"I can't," Hovhannes Stamboulian said inadvertently, but he realized how miserable was the excuse he was about to give. Tonight I need to finish my book…. It is the last chapter…. Instead he asked permission to speak to his wife.

Before they took him away, the very last thing ingrained in his memory was his wife's expression, her pupils dilated and her lips pallid. But Armanoush was neither crying nor did she look shocked. If anything she looked extremely tired, as if standing there in the doorway had drained her of all her strength. How he wished he could hold her hands now, embrace her tightly, and whisper to her to be strong, always strong, for the sake of their children and the one on the way. Armanoush was four months pregnant.

Only when nudged through the outside door onto the dark street with soldiers on both sides did Hovhannes Stamboulian remember having forgotten to give his wife her present. He thrust his hands into his pockets and was relieved not to feel the golden pomegranate on the tips of his fingers. He had left it at home, in a drawer in the desk. He softly smiled at the thought of how Armanoush would be pleased when she found it there.

As soon as the soldiers left, there were quick footsteps echoing on the doorstep. It was the Turkish neighbor next door. A sweettempered plump woman, always jolly, except that right now she was anything but. Seeing the terrified expression on her neighbor's face helped Armanoush to emerge from her trance and allow herself to be frightened. She pulled Yervant toward her and with quivering lips whispered, "Go my son, go to your uncle Levon's house…. Tell him to come here right away. Tell him what happened."

Uncle Levon's house was nearby, around the corner of the market square. He lived on his own in a modest, two-story house, the first floor of which was his workshop. Having been refused the hand of a beautiful Armenian woman he had loved in his youth and perhaps still did, he had chosen not to marry anyone and thereafter had spent his years working hard in his workshop, which was famous for the quality of its products. Uncle Levon was a cauldron maker and he crafted the best cauldrons in the entire empire.

Once outside on the street Yervant walked a few steps toward Uncle Levon's house, but then he stopped abruptly and turned in the opposite direction, the direction his father had been taken, and started to run. But even when he had covered the street from one end to the other, there was no sign of his father. Nothing. No one. It was as if the Turkish soldiers and his father had altogether vanished.

He reached Uncle Levon's house shortly after, yet there was no one upstairs. He knocked on the door of the workshop, hoping he might be there. It wasn't unusual for Uncle Levon to work late hours at his store. But the door was opened by his apprentice, Riza Selim-a quiet, diligent Turkish teenager with skin as white as porcelain and raven hair curling wildly above and around his head.

"Where is my uncle?" Yervant asked.

"Master Levon is gone," Riza Selim said with a strangled voice that he could hardly push out of his throat. "The soldiers came and took him away this afternoon."

As soon as he uttered these ominous words, Riza Selim let go of the tears he had been holding back. The boy was an orphan and Uncle Levon had been like a father to him for the last six years. "I don't know what to do," he said. "I am waiting…."

On the way back to his house Yervant ran the snaky, steep streets east and west, searching for something, anything, that could be an auspicious sign. He passed by empty coffeehouses, grubby plazas, ramshackle houses from which wafted the smells of turlu and the cries of babies. The only sign of life was a tan kitten painfully meowing next to a filthy gutter, licking its tiny belly where the flesh was cut open and the blood had caked around a deep, swollen wound.

Years later when he thought about his father, Yervant would remember that kitten all alone on the dark, empty street. Even in Sivas, in the small Catholic Armenian village of Pirkinik where they went next to seek shelter with Grandpa and Grandma, only to be expelled one night by soldiers breaking into the house; even when he found himself walking amid thousands of drained, famished, beaten Armenians guarded by soldiers on horseback; even when he trudged through a long, thick carpet of mud, vomit, blood, and excrement; even when he didn't know how to stop the cries of his little sister, Shushan, and then one day, amid an ensuing turmoil, let go of her hand for a split second and lost sight of her; even when he watched his mother's feet swell into two blue pillows of pain covered with purple veins and blood; even when she died, quiet and light as a dry willow leaf swirling in the gusting breeze; even when he saw swollen and stinking corpses along the road, stables filled with smoke and fire; even when upon having nothing left to eat, he and his brothers grazed on grass like sheep in the Syrian desert; even when they were saved by a group of American missionaries dedicated to collecting the Armenian orphans lost hither and thither along the road of exile; even when they were brought all the way back to the American College in Sivas that operated as a sanctuary, and from there sent to America; even when years later he was finally able to find his little sister, Shushan, in Istanbul and bring her to San Francisco; and even after many happy suppers surrounded by his children and grandchildren, that kitten remained ingrained in his mind.

"That's enough," Auntie Banu exclaimed, flinching. She untied her head scarf and covered the silver bowl with it. "I don't want to see this anymore. I learned what I had wanted to learn…."

"But you have not seen it all," Mr. Bitter objected with a rasping voice. "I haven't told you about the lice yet."

"The li-. . li-ce?" Auntie Banu stuttered. Whatever spirit had moved her to put an end to this session seemed to have passed now. She picked up her head scarf and peeped into the bowl again.

"Oh yeah, the lice, my master, is an important detail," Mr. Bitter said. "Remember the part when little Shushan let go of her elder brother's hand and all of a sudden got lost in the crowd? She got the lice from a family whom she had approached in the hope of getting some food. The family had little to consume themselves, and they pushed her away. A few days later little Shushan was aflame with a roaring fever: typhus!"

Auntie Banu let out a loud, prolonged sigh.

"I was there. I saw it all. Shushan dropped to her knees. Nobody in that convoy of people was in any condition to help her. They left her there on the ground, her forehead covered with sweat and her hair full of lice!"

"Enough!" Auntie Banu rose to her feet.

"But aren't you going to listen to the best part? Don't you want to learn what happened to little Shushan?" Mr. Bitter asked, sounding offended. "You wanted to learn about your guest's family, didn't you? Well, that little Shushan in my story is your guest's grandmother."

"Yes," Auntie Banu replied. "I had figured that out. Continue!"

"All right!" Mr. Bitter enthused, savoring his triumph. "After she was left half-dead on the road and after the convoy had disappeared on the horizon, little Shushan was discovered by two women from a nearby Turkish village. They were a mother and a daughter. They took the sick girl back home with them and bathed her with chunks of daphne soap and washed off the lice in her hair with potions concocted from the herbs in the valley. They fed and cured her. Three weeks later when a high-ranking officer stopped by the village with his men and interrogated the villagers to learn if they had chanced upon any Armenian orphans in the area, this Turkish mother hid Shushan inside her daughter's dowry chest to save her from harm. A month later the little girl was on her feet again, except she didn't talk much and cried in her sleep at nights."

"I thought you said she was brought to Istanbul…."

"Eventually she was. During the following six months this mother and daughter looked after her as if she were one of their own family, and would probably have kept doing so. But then a horde of bandits arrived, searching and plundering the houses. They stopped and ransacked every Turkish and Kurdish village in the region. It didn't take them long to find out that there was a little Armenian girl there. Despite the wails of the mother and daughter, they took Shushan away from them. They had heard about the orders to deliver all Armenian orphans below the age of twelve to the orphanages around the country. So before long Shushan was in an orphanage in Aleppo, and when there was no room there, in a school in Istanbul under the care of several hocahanim, some benevolent and caring, others cold and strict. Like all of the children there she was dressed in a white robe and a buttonless, black coat. There were both boys and girls. The boys were circumcised and all the children were renamed. So was Shushan. Everyone called her Shermin now. She was also given a surname: 626."

"Enough is enough," Auntie Banu put her head scarf back over the silver bowl and gave her djinni a long, piercing stare.

"Yes, master, as you wish," Mr. Bitter muttered. "However, you skipped the most important part of the story. Should you wish to listen to that part too, just let me know because we gulyabani know everything. We were there. I told you the past of Shushan, once a little girl, now the grandmother of Armanoush. I told you things that your guest doesn't know. Will you tell her? Don't you think she has a right to know?"

Auntie Banu stood silent. Would she ever narrate for Armanoush the story she had learned tonight? Even if she wanted to, how could she tell her she had seen the story of her family in a silver bowl of water shown by a gulyabani, the worst kind of djinn? Would Armanoush believe her? Besides, even if she did believe her, wasn't it better that the girl never learned about all of these sorrowful details?

Auntie Banu turned toward Mrs. Sweet for solace. But instead of an answer all she got from her benevolent djinni was a bashful smile and a sudden shimmer of the corona around her head, flickering in shades of plum, pink, and purple. Together with the djinni's corona, a thorny question flared up: Was it really better for human beings to discover more of their past? And then more and more…? Or was it simply better to know as little of the past as possible and even to forget what small amount was remembered?

It is past dawn now. A short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. The only time of the day when it is early enough to harbor hopes of realizing one's dreams but far too late to actually dream, the land of Morpheus now flung far away.

Allah's eye is omnipotent and omniscient; it is an eye that never closes, or even blinks. But still no one can tell for sure if the earth is equally omniobservable. If this is a stage wherein spectacle after spectacle is displayed for the Celestial Gaze, there might be times in between when the curtains are down and a gauzy head scarf covers the surface of a silver bowl.

Istanbul is a hodgepodge of ten million lives. It is an open book of ten million scrambled stories. Istanbul is waking up from its perturbed sleep, ready for the chaos of the rush hour. From now on there are too many prayers to answer, too many profanities to note, and too many sinners, as well as too many innocents, to keep an eye on.

Already it is morning in Istanbul.