The Bastard of Istanbul

FIFTEEN Golden Raisins

The miraculous news that Mustafa was coming to visit them with his American wife instantly instigated a series of reactions in the Kazanci domicile. The first and foremost one involved detergents, washing powder, and soap flakes. In two days the whole house had been thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom, windows scoured and buffed up, shelves dusted, curtains washed and ironed, every tile on all the three floors scrubbed and mopped. One by one Auntie Cevriye wiped the leaves of every houseplant in the living room, the geranium and the bellflower, the rosemary and the sweet woodruff. She even wiped the leaves of the touch-me-not. Meanwhile Auntie Feride surprised everyone by taking out the most precious latticework in her dowry. But it was no doubt Grandma Gulsum who was most thrilled with the news. At first she refused to believe her only son was coming to visit them after all these years, and when she finally was convinced of the news, she incarcerated herself in the kitchen amid the dishware, cutlery, and ingredients, cooking the favorite dishes of her favorite child. Now the air inside the kitchen was heavy with the scents of freshly baked pastries. She had already oven-baked two different types of borek-spinach and feta cheese-and simmered lentil soup, stewed lamb chops, and prepared the kofte mixture to be fried upon the guests' arrival. Though she was determined to make ready half a dozen more dishes before the end of the day, undoubtedly the most important item on Grandma Gulsum's menu was going to be the dessert: ashure.

All throughout his childhood and teens, Mustafa Kazanci had relished ashure more than any other sweet, and if those terrible American fast-food products had not messed up his culinary habits, Grandma Gulsum hoped, he would be delighted to encounter bowls of his favorite dessert in the fridge, waiting for him, as if life here were still the same and he could pick up from where he had left off.

Ashure was the symbol of continuity and stability, the epitome of the good days to come after each storm, no matter how frightening the storm had been.

Grandma had soaked the ingredients the day before and was now getting ready to begin cooking. She opened a cupboard and took out a huge cauldron. One always needed a cauldron to cook ashure.

Ingredients

1/2 cup garbanzo beans

1 cup whole hulled wheat 1 cup white rice 1–1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup roasted hazelnuts, chopped 1/2 cup pistachios 1/2 cup pine nuts 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/3 cup golden raisins 1/3 cup dried figs 1/3 cup dried apricots 1/2 cup orange peels 2 tablespoons rosewater

Garnishes

2 tablespoons cinnamon

1/2 cup blanched and slivered almonds 1/2 cup pomegranate seeds

Preparation

Most of the ingredients should be soaked in separate bowls the day before as follows:

In one bowl, cover the beans with cold water and soak them overnight. The wheat and rice should be rinsed carefully and then covered with water in a different bowl. Soak the figs and apricots and orange peels in hot water for 1/2 hour, then drain and reserve the soaking water; chop them, mix them with the golden raisins, and set aside.

Cooking

Cover the beans with 1 gallon of cold water. Bring to a boil and cook over medium heat until the beans are just tender, about an hour.While the beans are cooking, boil 2–1/2 quarts of water, stir in the wheat and rice, and simmer over low heat, stirring frequently, until the wheat and rice mixture is tender, about an hour. Combine.

Add the reserved soaking water, the sugar, chopped hazelnuts, pistachios, and pine nuts to the pot and bring it all to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Simmer and stir for 30 minutes or more. Allow the mixture to thicken slightly until it resembles a thick soup. Add the vanilla, raisins, figs, apricots, and orange peels and cook for another 20 minutes, stirring constantly. Turn off the heat and blend in the rosewater. Let the ashure stand at room temperature for an hour or more. Sprinkle with cinnamon and garnish with slivered almonds and pomegranate seeds.

Inside the girls' room, Armanoush had been quiet and pensive since early morning. She didn't feel like going out or doing anything.

Asya stayed indoors with her playing tavla and listening to Johnny Cash.

"Six six! You lucky thing!"

But Armanoush showed no trace of pleasure about the dice she had rolled. Instead, she broodingly pouted at her checkers as if hoping to move them by the force of her gaze.

"I have this awful feeling something bad has happened and my mother isn't telling me."

"Please don't worry," Asya said, chewing the end of her pencil, craving nicotine. "You've talked with your mom and she sounded all right. Thanks to you they will now visit Istanbul. They'll come and meet you here and soon you will be back in your house…." Though Asya had meant to soothe, the words had oddly come out as an objection. The truth is, it saddened her that Armanoush would be leaving so soon.

"I don't know. It's just this feeling I can't get rid of." Armanoush sighed. "My mom doesn't travel anywhere, not even to Kentucky. That she is flying to Istanbul is mind-boggling. But then again, it is so typical of her. She cannot stand not being in control of my life. She would fly around the globe to keep me under her eye."

While she waited for Armanoush to decide where to move which checker, Asya drew her legs under her, working on yet another article of her Personal Manifesto of Nihilism.

Article Ten: If you find a dear friend, make sure you don't get so accustomed to her as to forget that in the end, each one of us is existentially lonely and that sooner or later the everlasting solitude will overtake any fortuitous friendships.

Distressed though she might be, Armanoush's playing skills were surely unaffected by her mood. With the "six six," she rammed into Asya's home board, and trounced her opponent by crushing all three of her checkers at once. Triumph! Asya sunk her teeth deeper into the pencil.

Article Eleven: Even if you have found a dear friend whom you have gotten so accustomed to as to forget Article Ten, never overlook the fact that she can still give you a drubbing in other spheres of life. On the tavlu board, just as in birth and death, each one of us is alone.

Having three checkers waiting on the bar, and with only two gates still open in the opposing home board, Asya now had to roll either a "five five" or a "three three." There was no other roll that could save her from defeat. She spat in her palms for good luck and heaved a prayer to the tavla djinni, whom she had always envisaged as a half-black, half-white ogre with madly rotating dice as eyeballs. She then rolled the dice: "three two." Damn! Unable to play, she clasped her hands and grumbled.

"Poor thing!" Armanoush exclaimed.

Asya put the awaiting black checkers on the bar as she listened to a street vendor outside yelling at the top of his voice: "Raisins!

I've got golden raisins. For kiddos and toothless grannies, golden raisins are

for everyone!" When she spoke again she raised her voice over the vendor's.

"I'm sure your mom is fine. Think about it, if she weren't fine how could she make this trip all the way from Arizona to Istanbul?"

"I guess you're right." Armanoush nodded and rolled the dice. "Six six" again!

"Yo, are you gonna keep rolling six six forever? Are those loaded dice or what?" Asya volleyed suspiciously. "Are you cheating, miss?"

Armanoush chuckled. "Oh yeah, if only I knew how to!"

But right when she was about to move another pair of white checkers into the open space, Armanoush paused abruptly, pale and drawn.

"Oh my God, how could I not see this?!" Armanoush exclaimed in anguish. "It's not my mother, you see, it's my father. This is exactly how Mom would react if something bad happened to my father… or to dad's family…. Oh God, something has happened to my father!"

"But now you're speculating." Asya tried to soothe her without success. "When did you last speak with your father?"

"Two days ago," Armanoush said. "I called him from Arizona and he was OK, everything sounded normal."

"Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean you called him from Arizona?"

Armanoush blushed. "I lied." Then she shrugged, as if to savor the satisfaction of having done something wrong for a change. "I lied to almost everyone in my family to be able to take this trip. If I'd revealed I was going to Istanbul on my own, everyone would have been so alarmed they wouldn't have let me travel anywhere. So I thought, I'll go to Istanbul and tell them about the whole thing when I get back. My father thinks I'm in Arizona with my mom while Mom thinks I'm in San Francisco with Dad. I mean, she used to think, at least until yesterday."

Asya stared at Armanoush with a disbelief that soon vanished, replaced by something closer to reverence. Perhaps Armanoush was not the immaculate, well-behaved girl that Asya had suspected she was. Perhaps somewhere in her luminous universe there was room for darkness, dirt, and deviance. The confession, far from upsetting Asya, had only served to increase her esteem of Armanoush. She closed the tavla board and stuck it under her armpit, a symbol of accepted defeat, though Armanoush had no way of knowing this cultural gesture. "I don't think anything is wrong… but come on, why don't you give your dad a call?" Asya asked.

As if waiting for these words to take action, Armanoush reached out to the phone. Given the time difference, it was early morning in San Francisco.

It was answered after one ring, not by Grandma Shushan as usual, but by her dad.

"Sweetheart." Barsam Tchakhmakhchian heaved a sigh of intense endearment as soon as he heard his daughter's voice. There was an eerie clatter in the phone connection, which made them both aware of the geographical distance in between. "I was going to call you in the morning. I know you are in Istanbul; your mom called to tell me."

A brief, prickly silence ensued but Barsam Tchakhmakhchian did not comment on it, nor did he scold her. "Your mom and I were so worried about you. Rose is flying to Istanbul with your stepfather…. They are coming there to get you. They will be in Istanbul tomorrow by noon."

Now Armanoush stood frozen. Something was wrong. Something was so very wrong. That her father and her mother were talking to each other, and what's more, updating each other, was a surefire sign of apocalypse.

"Dad, has something happened?"

Barsam Tchakhmakhchian paused, stricken with sorrow from the weight of a childhood memory that had appeared out of nowhere.

When he was a boy, every year a man with a dark pointed hood and black cape would visit their neighborhood, going door to door with the deacon of the local church. He was a priest from the old country looking for young, bright boys to take back to Armenia to train them to be priests.

"Dad, are you all right? What is going on?"

"I'm all right sweetheart. I missed you," was all he could say.

Barsam was fascinated by religion at a young age, the best student in Sunday school. Consequently, the man with the black hood visited their house often, talking to Shushan about the boy's future. One day, as Barsam, his mother, and the priest were sitting in the kitchen sipping hot tea, the priest had said if a decision was to be made, this was the time to do it.

Barsam Tchakhmakhchian would never forget the flash of fear in his mother's eyes. As much as she respected the holy priest, as much as she'd have been delighted to see her son as a grown-up man in pastoral garb, as much as she wanted her only son to serve the Lord, Shushan could not help but recoil withh fright, as if faced with a kidnapper who wanted to take her son away from her. She had flinched with such force and fear that the cup in her hand had shaken, spilling some tea on her dress. The priest had softly, amiably nodded, detecting the shadow of a dark story secreted in her past. He had patted her hand and blessed her. Then he had left the house, never to come back with the same request again.

That day Barsam Tchakhmakhchian had sensed something he hadn't felt before and wasn't going to feel ever again. A spiky, creepy premonition. Only a mother who had already lost a child would react with such profound fear in the face of the danger of losing another one. Shushan might have had another son at some point who had become separated from her.

Now as he mourned his mother's death, he couldn't find the heart to tell his daughter.

"Dad, talk to me," Armanoush said urgently.

Just like his mother, his father came from a family deported from Turkey in 1915. Sarkis Tchakhmakhchian and Shushan Stamboulian shared something in common, something their children could only sense but never fully grasp. So many silences were scattered among their words. When coming to America they had left another life in another country, and they knew that no matter how often and how truthfully you evoked the past, some things could never be told.

Barsam remembered his father dancing around his mother to a Hale, drawing circles within circles with his arms raised like a soaring bird; the music starting out slow, becoming faster and faster, this Middle Eastern swirl that the children could only watch with admiration from the side. Music was the most vivid trace left from his upbringing. For years Barsam had played the clarinet in an Armenian band and danced in traditional costume, black bloomers and a yellow shirt. He remembered leaving his house in those costumes while all the other kids in their non-Armenian neighborhood watched him with mocking eyes. Each time he would hope the kids would forget what they had seen or simply wouldn't bother to poke fun at him. Each time he was wrong.

While being enrolled in one Armenian activity after another, all he really wanted was to be like them, nothing more, nothing less, to be American and to get rid of this Armenian dark skin. Even years later, his mother would reproach him every now and then, explaining how as a little boy he had asked the Dutch American tenants upstairs what particular soap they used to wash themselves, because he wanted to be just as white as them. Now as the memories of his childhood gushed back to him with the loss of his mother, Barsam Tchakhmakhchian couldn't help but feel guilty for rapidly unlearning what little Armenian he had learned as a child. He now feltt sorry for not having learned more from his mother, and not having taught more to his daughter.

"Dad, why are you silent?" Armanoush asked, her voice filled with fright.

"Do you remember the youth camp you went to as a teenager?" "Yes, of course," Armanoush answered.

"Were you ever angry at me for not sending you there

anymore?"

"Dad, it was me who didn't want to go there anymore, did you forget? It was fun at the beginning but then I decided I was too mature for it. I'm the one who asked you not to send me there the next year…."

"Right," Barsam said tentatively. "But still I could have looked for a different camp for Armenian teenagers yourr age."

"Dad, why are you questioning this now?" Armanoush felt on the verge of tears.

He did not have the heart to tell her. Not like this, not over the phone. He did not want her to learn about her grandmother's death while all alone and thousands of miles away. As he tried to mutter a few words of distraction, his voice rose softly over a hum that broke out in the background. The droning hum of a gathering. It sounded like the entire family was there, relatives and friends and neighbors under the same roof, which, as Armanoush was wise enough to know, could be the sign of only two things: either someone had gotten married or someone had died.

"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 Kazanci 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, cactusshaped 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 Kazanci 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 Kazanci 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 BridgetJones: 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?

a. Japan

b. Great Britain c. France

d. Soviet Union

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

a. Winston Smith

b. Akaky Akakievich c. Sir Francis Drake d. Gregor Samsa

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 enviable 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 intoo the air and waved it to and fro as if wagging a finger at some wrong she was about to commit.

Once aboard the plane, however, Rose swiftly relaxed, enjoying every detail of the experience-the tiny, chic travel kits they distributed, the matching pillows, blankets, and eye blinds, the continuous service of beverages interrupted by complimentary turkey sandwiches. Before long, the dinner service commenced, rice and oven-roasted chicken with a small salad and stir-fried vegetables. THERE ARE NO PORK PRODUCTS IN OUR FOODS, it stated on a piece of paper that came with the tray. Rose couldn't help but feel guilty about the Wendy's combos.

"You were right about the food. It's good," she said, giving her husband a shy smile and rotating a bowl of dessert in her hand. "And what's this?"

"Ashore," Mustafa said, his voice oddly constricted as he looked at the golden raisins decorating the small bowl. "It used to be my favorite dessert. I'm sure my mother cooked a big pot of it when she heard I was coming."

Much as he tried to refrain from remembering such details, Mustafa couldn't erase the sight of dozens of glass bowls of ashore lined on the shelves inside the refrigerator, ready to be distributed to the neighbors. Unlike other desserts, ashore was always cooked as much for others as for one's own family. Accordingly, it had to be cooked abundantly, each bowl an epitome of survival, solidarity, and cornucopia. Mustafa's fascination with the dessert had become apparent when at the age of seven he was caught wolfing down the bowls he had been entrusted to dole out door to door.

He still remembered waiting there in the stillness of the apartment building next to their konak with the tray in his hand. There were half a dozen bowls on the tray, each for a different neighbor. First he had nibbled the golden raisins sprinkled on each bowl, confident that if he ate just those nobody would notice. But then he went on to the pomegranate seeds and the slivered almonds used for decoration, and before he knew it, he had eaten everything, consuming six bowls at one sitting. He had hidden the empty bowls in the garden. The neighbors often kept the bowls until they would return them with some other food that they had cooked, oftentimes another ashure. Thus, it had taken the Kazanci family some time to discover Mustafa's misdeed. And when they had, though visibly embarrassed by his greediness, his mother had not scolded him, but from then on she had kept extra bowls of ashure in the fridge, ready for him and him alone.

"What would you like to drink, sir?" asked the stewardess in Turkish, half bent toward him. She had eyes of sapphire blue and wore a vest of exactly the same color, on the back of which were printed puffy, pasty clouds.

For a split second Mustafa hesitated, not because he didn't know what he would like to drink but because he didn't know which language to reply in. After so many years he felt much more comfortable expressing himself in English than in Turkish. And yet, it seemed equally unnatural, if not arrogant, to speak in English to another Turk. Consequently, Mustafa Kazanci had up till now solved this personal quandary by avoiding communicating with Turks in the United States. His aloofness toward his fellow countrymen and countrywomen became painfully blatant at ordinary encounters like this one, however. He glanced around, as if searching for an exit, and having failed to find one nearby, finally answered, in Turkish: "Tomato juice, please."

"I don't have tomato juice." The stewardess gave him a sprightly smile, as if finding great humor in this. She was one of those devoted employees who never lost their faith in the institutions they worked for, capable of saying no regularly with the same cheery face. "Would you care for a Bloody Mary mix?"

He took the thick, scarlet mixture and leaned back, his forehead broodingly creased, his hazel eyes blurred. Only then did he notice Rose staring at him, scrutinizing his moves carefully, apprehensively. Her expression darkened when she asked, "What is it, honey? You look nervous. Is it because we're going to see your family?"

Having already discussed this trip exhaustively, there wasn't much to say now. Rose knew Mustafa had no desire to go to Istanbul and was simply yielding to her adamant request to go there together. Though she appreciated that, it is hard to say she felt grateful.

A wife of nineteen years has the right to ask her husband for an act of kindness once in a blue moon, she thought to herself, as she held Mustafa's

hand and squeezed it tenderly.

This gesture caught Mustafa off guard. An immense melancholy surged over him as he inched closer to his wife. From her he had learned two fundamental things about love: first, that unlike what the romantics so pompously argued, love was more a gradual course than a sudden blossoming at first sight, and second, that he was capable of loving.

Over the years he had grown used to loving her and had found in her a measure of tranquillity. Rose, though highly demanding and difficult at times, was always true to her essence, decipherable and predictable; she was a straightforward chart of energies, every possible reaction of which he was familiar with. She never challenged him, just as she never truly confronted life, and she had a natural talent for adapting to her surroundings. Rose was an amalgam of clashing forces that effortlessly operated on their own, purely out of time, and thereby, out of family genealogies. After meeting her, the family torments that festered inside him had been transformed into a plodding but easygoing love, which was perhaps the closest he could get to real love. Rose might not have been a perfect wife in her first marriage, where she had failed to adapt to an extended Armenian family, but for exactly the same reason she was the ideal haven for a man like him, a man trying to flee his extended Turkish family.

"Are you OK?" Rose repeated with a slight edge to her tone this time.

And in this same moment, a wave of anxiety washed over Mustafa Kazanci. He paled as if he couldn't get enough air. He shouldn't be on this plane. He shouldn't go to Istanbul. Rose should go there alone and pick up her daughter and return home… home. How he longed to be back in Arizona now, where everything was canopied by the smooth flow of familiarity.

"I think I should walk a little," Mustafa said, handing his drink to Rose and standing up to control what was quickly turning into a panic attack. "It's no good sitting still for hours on end."

As he walked toward the back of the plane down the narrow aisle, he glanced at the passengers in each row, some Turkish, some American, some of other nationalities. Businessmen, journalists, photographers, diplomats, travel writers, students, mothers with newborn babies, complete strangers with whom you shared the same space and could even share the same fate. Some of them were reading books or newspapers, some watching King Arthur slay his enemies on an in-flight video game, while others were immersed in crossword puzzles. A woman ten rows back, a tanned brunette in her midthirties, looked at him intently. Mustafa averted his eyes. He was still a good-looking man, not so much for his tall, burly body, sharp features, and raven hair as for his genteel manners and style of chic dressing. Even though he had attracted the attention of numerous women throughout his life, he had never cheated on his wife. The irony was that the more he steered clear of other women, the more they had been attracted to him.

While passing the brunette's row, Mustafa noticed uneasily that the woman wore a brashly short skirt and had crossed her legs in such a way that you could easily be fooled into thinking that you might catch a glimpse of her underwear. He didn't like the disconcerting feeling the miniskirt brought on him; heavy, thorny memories he wished he could jettison once and for all; the sight of his younger sister, Zeliha, who had always been fond of such skirts, scurrying on the cobblestones of Istanbul in painfully hurried steps as if to escape her own shadow. As he lurched ahead, Mustafa's eyeballs darted to the other side so as to avoid looking where he shouldn't. Now that he had reached middle age, he sometimes wondered if he had ever liked women at all. Other than Rose, of course. But then again, Rose was not a woman. Rose was Rose.

Overall he had been a good stepfather to Rose's daughter. Though he truly loved Armanoush, he himself had not wanted to have any children. No kids for him. Nobody knew that deep inside his heart he believed he didn't deserve to have them. He wasn't sure he'd make a good father. Whom was he kidding? He would make a terrible father. Even worse than his own father.

He recalled the day he and Rose met, not a very romantic encounter perhaps, in a supermarket aisle as he stood with a can of garbanzo beans in each hand. Over the years, they had talked about that day so many times, making fun of every detail they could recollect.. Still they had quite different memories of it: Rose always evoked his shyness and nervousness, while he recalled her glowing blond hair and intrepidness, which initially had intimidated him. Never again had he felt intimidated by Rose. On the contrary, to be with Rose was like abandoning himself to a serene stream, knowing that it would never pull him down, an imperturbable flow with no surprises along the way. It hadn't taken him a long time to start loving her.

In the mornings Mustafa would watch Rose toil in the kitchen. They both loved the kitchen, although for completely different reasons. Rose loved it because she loved cooking, and it made her feel at home. As for Mustafa, he simply liked to watch her amid the multiple ordinary details, the paper towels that matched the tiles, the mugs sufficient for a garrison, the puddle of chocolate fudge sauce hardening on the counter. He particularly liked to observe her hands as they sliced, stirred, minced, and chopped. Watching her make pancakes was one of the most soothing sights life had ever bestowed upon him.

At first, his mother and elder sisters kept writing to him, asking him how he was doing, when he was coming to visit them. They asked questions he busily ran away from and kept sending letters and gifts, his mother more than anyone else. Throughout these twenty years he met his mother again only once, not in Istanbul but in Germany. While on a visit to Frankfurt for a conference of geologists and gemologists, he had asked her to fly there to join him. So they met in Germany, mother and son, just as political refugees who couldn't go back to Turkey had been doing for many years.

By that time his mother had been so desperate to see him that she hadn't even questioned why he didn't come to Istanbul. It was astounding how quickly people managed to get used to such abnormal circumstances.

When he reached the rear of the plane, Mustafa Kazanci stopped in front of the toilets, right behind two men in line. He heaved a sigh as he thought about the evening before. Rose didn't know that on the way home from work, he had stopped by a corner in Tucson he had secretly been visiting every now and then for the last ten years. The shrine of El Tiradito.

It was a modest, out-of-the-way place in downtown Tucson, the only shrine in America dedicated to the soul of a sinner, reported the historical plaque there. The soul of an excommunicate, a tiradito, an outcast. Today nobody knew much about the details of the story, which went back to the mid-nineteenth century; who exactly the sinner was, what exactly his sin was, and more significantly, how he had ended up with a shrine dedicated to his immoral name. Mexican immigrants knew more about him than others, but then again, they were inclined to share less with outsiders. But Mustafa Kazanci wasn't interested in investigating historical details. Suffice it to know that El Tiradito was a good man, at least no worse than the rest of us, and yet he had committed awful deeds in the past, mistakes base enough to turn him into a sinner. Yet he had been spared and given what many a mortal lacked, a shrine.

So last night Mustafa had visited the shrine again, tormented by thoughts. Though small, Tucson was large when it came to holy places and he could have gone to a mosque if he desired. The truth is, he wasn't a religious man, and never had been. He needed no temples or holy books. He did not go to the El Tiradito to worship. He went there because that was the one holy place that didn't compel him to change into someone else in order to welcome him. He went there because he liked the feeling of the place, unpretentious and yet imposing and gothic at the same time. The mixture of Mexican spirits with American mores, the dozens of candles and milagros placed by different people, perhaps sinners themselves, the folded papers in the walls where visitors confessed and hid their sins-all appealed to him in his present mood.

"Are you all right, sir?" It was the stewardess with the sapphire eyes.

He gave a curt nod and answered, this time in English. "Yes, thank you. I'm OK. Just a bit airsick…."

Under the velvety light of a streetlamp penetrating the curtains, Auntie Zeliha lay slumped with the cell phone still in her hand, the vodka bottle leaning against her chin, and the cigarette still lit in her other hand.

Auntie Banu tiptoed into her room. Briskly she smothered the smoldering blanket and stubbed the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. She grabbed the cell phone and placed it on the cupboard, took the vodka bottle and hid it under the bed, then tucked her sister under the bedsheet and turned off the lamp.

She opened the windows. The air was crisp with the salty tang of a sea breeze. As the smoke and smell inside the room wafted out, Auntie Banu looked at her youngest sister's pale face, tired beyond her age. In the dim, yellowish light filtering in from the outside, Zeliha's face had grown incandescent, as if alcohol and sorrow had given her a radiance rarely encountered in nature. Auntie Banu softly kissed her on her forehead, compassion welling in her eyes. She then glanced left and right at her two djinn who had been carefully watching her every move from their usual places on her shoulders.

"What are you gonna do, master?" asked Mr. Bitter, a tinge of gloating in his voice. He did not bother to hide his delight in seeing his master so helpless and distressed. It always amused him to see the powerlessness of the mighty.

Auntie Banu wore just a hint of a frown. She gave no response.

Mr. Bitter then jumped aside and sat by the bed, dangerously close to Auntie Zeliha in deep sleep. His eyes brightened with the idea that had just crossed his mind. He harshly grabbed the end of the bedsheet, almost waking Auntie Zeliha, and tied the sheet on his head like a head scarf.

"Let me tell you something," Mr. Bitter declared, arms akimbo, voice thinned to a feminine tone, imitating someone. "There are things in this world…"

Auntie Banu instantly recognized whom he mimicked and felt her spine tingle.

"There are things so awful in this world that the good-hearted people, may Allah bless them all, have absolutely no idea of. And that's perfectly fine, I tell you; it is all right that they know nothing about such things because it proves what good-hearted people they are. Otherwise they wouldn't be good, would they? But if you ever step into a mine of malice, it won't be one of these people you will ask help from."

Auntie Banu stared at Mr. Bitter with awe but the latter now pulled the bedsheet off his head, jumped back to his previous position, facing the place where he had spoken from, ready to depict the second speaker in his imaginary dialogue. To imitate the second speaker he grabbed the remaining golden raisins Zeliha had left last night, and in a flash magically arranged them in the air, making a long necklace and several bracelets. He then put on the necklace and the bracelets and grinned. It wasn't hard to fathom whom he was mimicking now. It wasn't hard to recognize Asya's style.

Suffused with the charm of his narcissistic creativity, Mr. Bitter went on, "And you think, Auntie, I will ask help from a malicious djinni!"

Mr. Bitter now took off the necklace and bracelets, leaped back onto the bed, put the bedsheet back over Zeliha, and replied in a thicker tone, "Perhaps you will, dear. Let's just hope you'll never have to."

"Enough! What was all that?" Auntie Banu cut in furiously, though she knew the answer.

"That-" Mr. Bitter hunched forward and bowed like a humble actor encountering with thunderous applause at the end of his performance-"was a moment in time. It was a petite slice of memory.

With venom in his eyes, he then straightened his back and raised his voice: "That was a reminder to you of your very own words, master!"

Auntie Banu felt a fright so strong her entire body shuddered. There was so much malevolence in this creature's gaze, she didn't know how to explain to herself why she didn't tell him to get out of her life once and for all. How could she be drawn to him like this, as if they shared an unpronounceable secret? Never had Auntie Banu been so afraid of her djinni.

Never had she been so afraid of the acts she might be capable of committing.