The Bastard of Istanbul

SEVENTEEN White Rice

Rose and Mustafa spent their first two days in Istanbul eating. At the table they answered a plethora of questions different members of the Kazanci family asked them from all directions: How was life in America? Was there really a desert in Arizona? Was it true that Americans survived on mammoth portions of fast food, only to go on a diet in TV contests? Was the American version of The Apprentice better than the Turkish version? And so on.

Then there followed a series of more personal questions: Why didn't they have children together? Why hadn't they come to Istanbul before? Why didn't they stay longer? WHY?

The questions had opposing effects on the couple. Rose for her part did not seem to mind the interrogation. If anything she enjoyed being in the spotlight. Mustafa, however, steadily drifted into silence, getting smaller and smaller in his body. He spoke little, spending most of his time reading Turkish newspapers, conservative and progressive alike, as if trying to catch up with the country he had left. From time to time he asked questions about this or that politician, questions answered by whoever might know the answer. Though always an avid newspaper reader, he had never been so interested in politics.

"So this conservative party in power seems to be losing blood. What is their chance of winning in the coming elections?"

"Rascals! They are a bunch of liars," growled Grandma Giilsum, in lieu of an answer. There was a tray in her lap with a pile of uncooked rice, which she sorted through before cooking in case there were any stones or husks. "All they know is to make promises to the people and forget what they said as soon as they get elected."

From his armchair by the window, Mustafa glanced up at his mother over the newspaper in his hand. "What about the party in opposition? The social democrats?"

"Same difference!" came the answer. "They are all a bunch of liars. All politicians are corrupt."

"If we had more women in the parliament everything would be different," Auntie Feride joined in, wearing the I LOVE ARIZONA T-shirt Rose had brought her as a present.

"Mama is right. If you ask me, the only trustworthy institution in this country has always been the army," Auntie Cevriye said. "Thank God we have the Turkish army. If it weren't for them-"

"Yes, but they should let us women serve in the army," interrupted Auntie Feride. "I myself would go immediately."

Asya stopped translating the conversation for Rose and Armanoush, who were sitting alongside her, and chuckled as she said in English, "One of my aunts is a feminist, the other is a staunch militarist! And they get along so well. What a nuthouse!"

Grandma Gulsum turned to her son, suddenly concerned. "How about you, dear? When are you going to complete your military duty?"

Having a hard time following despite the instantaneous translation, Rose turned to her husband and blinked.

"Don't you worry about me," Mustafa said. "Provided I pay a certain fee, and show them I live and work in America, I do not have to complete full-term military service. I'll be done with only basic training. Just a month, that's all…."

"But isn't there a deadline for that?" someone asked.

"Yes there is," Mustafa replied. "You need to go through this training by age forty-one."

"Well, then you need to do it this year," Grandma Gulsum said. "You are forty now…."

Sitting at the end of the table painting her nails a shiny cherry, Auntie Zeliha raised her head and darted Mustafa a glance. "What a fateful age," she hissed all of a sudden. "The age your father died, just like his father and his grandfather…. You must be pretty nervous now that you are forty, my brother…. So close to death…."

The silence that followed was so deadly it made Asya inadvertently recoil.

"How can you talk to him like that?" Grandma Gulsum rose to her feet, the tray of rice still in her hands.

"I can say whatever I want to whomever I want." Auntie Zeliha shrugged.

"You shame me! Get out, miss," Grandma Gulsum rasped, her voice low and steely. "Get out of my house right now."

Still having two fingernails unpainted, Auntie Zeliha left the brush in the bottle, pulled back her chair, and walked out of the room.

On the third day of their visit, Mustafa stayed in his room all day long, excusing himself as sick. He had been running a fever, which must have diminished not only his energy but also his ability to talk, for he had grown excessively quiet. His face was drawn, his mouth dry, and his eyes bloodshot, though he was neither boozed up nor had he cried. For hours on end, he stayed in bed lying still and supine, studying indiscernible motifs of dirt and dust up on the ceiling. Meanwhile, Rose and Armanoush and the three aunts walked the streets of Istanbul, particularly the streets around shopping centers.

They went to bed earlier than usual that night.

"Rose, honey," Mustafa whispered to his wife as he caressed her light blond hair. The straightness, the blondness, the smoothness of his wife's hair had always soothed him, canopying him tenderly against his dark-haired family and dark-haired past. She lay against him, her body warm and soft. "Rose, sweetheart. We need to go back. Let's fly back tomorrow."

"Are you crazy? I'm still jet-lagged." Rose yawned, stretching her sore limbs. She was wearing an embroidered satiny nightgown she had bought that day from the Grand Bazaar, and looked pale and tired, less from the jet lag than from the shopping frenzy. "Why are you so antsy? Can't you bear to see your own family for a few days?" She pulled the soft covers up to her chin and in the warmth of the bed pressed her breasts against him. Then she patted his hand as if sweet-talking a boy and she kissed his neck gingerly, soothingly, but when she tried to pull away he wanted more, hungry for passion.

"Everything's fine," Rose said as her body tensed up and her breath quickened only to rapidly dwindle. "I am so tired, sorry honey…. Five more days and then we'll go home." With that she turned off the lamp by her side and it only took her a few seconds to fall asleep.

Mustafa lay there in the dim light, distracted from his erection, looking disappointed and taut. Though heavy-eyed he couldn't possibly sleep. He lay still there for a long time until he heard a knock on the door. "Yes?"

The door opened a crack and a second later Auntie Banu's head peeked into the room. "Can I come in?" she asked in a hushed, hesitant voice. Upon hearing a plausibly affirmative noise, she cautiously stole across the room with her bare feet buried in the high pile carpet, and then stopped. Her red head scarf glowed as if lit by a mysterious light and the dark bags under her eyes made her look ghostly. "You haven't come downstairs all day long. I just wanted to check on you," she whispered while eyeing Rose, asleep on the other side of the bed, her arms wrapped around her pillow.

"I wasn't feeling well." Mustafa looked at her, and then quickly glanced away.

"Here, my brother," Banu said as she handed him a bowl of ashure, decorated with pomegranate seeds. "You know, Mom has cooked a huge pot of ashure for you." Her serious face broke into a smile. "I must say, she is the cook but I am the one who decorated the bowls."

"Oh thank you, you are so kind," Mustafa stuttered as he felt a chill run down his spine. He had always feared his eldest sister. Whatever voice he possessed deserted him the moment he felt Banu's gaze inspecting him. Though she had made it a habit to scrutinize others, she herself remained inscrutable. Banu was the exact opposite of Rose: transparency was not among her virtues. If anything, she resembled a cryptic book written in an arcane alphabet. No matter how hard Mustafa tried to read her intentions, he could not for the life of him unravel her shadowy expression. Nevertheless, he did his best to look appreciative as he took the bowl of ashure.

The silence that followed was heavy and unfathomable. No silence had ever felt so cruel to Mustafa. As if disturbed by it, Rose turned in her sleep, but she did not wake up.

There had been many times in his life when Mustafa had been swept away with a sudden urge to confess to his wife that what she saw in him was not the whole of him. Yet at other times he had been satisfied impersonating a man without a past, a man with a cultivated denial. This amnesia of his was deliberate, though not calculated. On the one hand, there was somewhere inside his brain a gate that wouldn't close no matter what; some memories always escaped. On the other hand was the urge to dredge up what the mind had neatly expunged. These twin currents had accompanied him all throughout his life. Now, back in his childhood house and under the penetrating gaze of his eldest sister, he knew one of the currents was bound to lose its strength. He knew if he stayed here any longer, he would start to remember. And every memory would trigger yet another one. The moment he had stepped into his childhood home, the spell that had shielded him all these years against his own memory had been shattered. How could he take refuge in his manufactured amnesia any longer?

"I need to ask you something," Mustafa gasped, his gasp almost that of a boy's in between a spanking.

A leather belt with a copper buckle. As a boy Mustafa prided himself on never crying, not even a tear, when Daddy would take the leather belt out. As much as he had learned to control his tears, he had never managed to suppress the gasp. How he hated this gasp. Struggling for breath. Struggling for space. Struggling for affection.

He paused briefly as if to gather his thoughts. "There's something that has been nagging at me for quite some time now…." There was just the slightest hint of fear in his otherwise tranquil voice. Moonlight penetrated the curtains and made a tiny circle on the rich Turkish carpet. He focused on that circle as he unleashed the question: "Where is Asya's father?"

Mustafa turned to his eldest sister in time to catch her grimace, but Banu was quick to restore her composure.

"When we met in Germany, Mom told me Zeliha had a baby from a man she had been engaged to briefly. But, she said, he had left her."

"Mom has lied to you," Banu interrupted. "But what difference does it make anymore? Asya grew up without seeing her father. She doesn't know who he is. The family doesn't know who he is either," she added hastily. "Other than Zeliha, of course."

"Including you?" Mustafa asked incredulously. "I heard you were a genuine soothsayer. Feride says you have enslaved some bad djinni to get all the information you need. You seem to have customers from everywhere. Now are you trying to tell me that you lack the knowledge of something this crucial? Haven't your djinn revealed anything to you?"

"They have, actually," Banu confided. "I wish I didn't know the things I know."

Mustafa's heart beat faster as he absorbed the words. Petrified, he closed his eyes. But even behind closed eyes he could see Banu's piercing gaze. And another pair of eyes portentously glittering in the dark, so hollow and bloodcurdling. Was that her evil djinni? But all of this must have been a dream, for when Mustafa Kazanci opened his eyes again, he was alone with his wife in the room.

Yet right beside his side of the bed there was a bowl of ashure waiting for him. He stared at it and suddenly he knew why it was placed there and what exactly he was asked to do. The choice belonged to him… to his left hand.

He looked at his left hand, now waiting next to the bowl. He smiled at his hand's power. Now his hand could either grab this bowl or just push it aside. If he chose the second option, he would wake up tomorrow to just another day in Istanbul. He would see Banu at the breakfast table. They wouldn't talk about the exchange they had the night before. They would pretend this bowl of ashure was never concocted and never served. If he chose the first option, however, things would come full circle. But having reached the age limits for a Kazanci man, death was close anyway, one day more or less would not make much difference at this point in his life. At the back of his mind echoed an old story-the story of a man who had escaped to the ends of the earth hoping to avoid the Angel of Death, only to run into him where they were originally destined to meet.

It was a choice less between life and death than between selfcontrolled death and sudden death. With such a family heritage he was sure he would die soon anyway. Now his left hand, his guilty hand, could choose when and how.

He remembered the little piece of paper he had stuck in the stone wall at the shrine of El Tradito. "Forgive me," he had written there. "For me to exist, the past had to be erased."

Now, he felt like the past was returning. And for it to exist, he had to be erased….

All these years, a harrowing remorse had been gnawing him inside, little by little, without disrupting his outer facade. But perhaps the fight between amnesia and remembering was finally over. Like a sea plain stretching as far as the eye could see after the tide went out, memories of a troubled past surfaced hither and thither from the ebbing waters. He reached out to the ashure. Knowingly and willfully, he started to eat it, little by little, savoring each and every ingredient with every mouthful.

It felt so relieving to walk out on his past and his future at once. It felt so good to walk out on life.

Seconds after he finished the ashure, he was seized with an abdominal cramp so sharp he couldn't breathe. Two minutes later his breathing stopped completely.

That is how Mustafa Kazanci died at the age of forty and three-quarters.