The Bastard of Istanbul

FIVE Vanilla

Cafe Kundera was a small coffee shop on a narrow, snaky street on the European side of Istanbul. It was the only bistro in the city where you wasted no energy on conversation and tipped the waiters to be treated badly. How and why it was named after the famous author, nobody knew for sure — a lack of knowledge magnified by the fact that there was nothing, literally nothing, inside the place reminiscent of either Milan Kundera or any one of his novels.

On four sides there were hundreds of frames that came in all sizes and shapes, a myriad of photographs, paintings, and sketches, so many that one could easily doubt if there really were walls behind them. The whole place gave the impression of being erected on frames instead of bricks. In all the frames without exception shone the image of a road. Wide motorways in America, endless highways in Australia, busy autobahns in Germany, glitzy boulevards in Paris, crammed side streets in Rome, narrow paths in Machu Picchu, forgotten caravan routes in North Africa, and maps of the ancient trade routes along the Silk Road, following the footsteps of Marco Polo-there were road pictures from all around the world. The customers were perfectly happy with the decor. They thought it was a useful alternative to useless chats that led nowhere. Whenever they didn't feel like chatting, they would pick a frame, depending on the angle of the table where they sat and on where exactly they wished to be zoomed on that specific day. Then they would fasten a bleary gaze on the chosen picture, little by little taking off to that faraway land, craving to be somewhere in there, anywhere but here. The next day they could travel elsewhere.

No matter how far away the pictures could take you, one thing was certain: None of them had anything to do with Milan Kundera. When the place was newly opened, one theory ran, the author had happened to be in Istanbul, and on his way to elsewhere he had fortuitously stopped by for a cappuccino. The cappuccino wasn't so good and he hated the vanilla biscuit they brought with it, but he had soon ordered another one and even done some writing, since nobody had disturbed or even recognized him. On that day, the place was baptized under his name. Yet another theory claimed that the owner of the cafe was an avid reader of Kundera; having devoured all his books and had each one autographed, he had decided to dedicate the place to his favorite author. This could have been the more plausible contention had the owner of the cafe not been a middle-aged musician and singer who always looked tanned and athletic, and who had such deep dislike for the printed word that he did not even bother to read the lyrics of the songs his band played on Friday nights.

The real reason why the bistro was named after Kundera, ran the counterargument, was because this spot in space was nothing but a figment of his flawed imagination. The cafe was a fictive place with fictive people as the regulars. Sometime ago Kundera had, as part of a new book project, started to write about this place, thus breathing life and chaos into it, but before long he had gotten distracted by far more important projects-invitations, panels, and literary prizes-and amid the hectic pace he had eventually forgotten this dingy hole in Istanbul, the existence of which he was solely responsible for. Ever since then, the customers and waiters in Cafe Kundera had been struggling with a sense of void, digging away at disconsolate futuristic scenarios, grimacing over Turkish coffee served in espresso cups, waiting for a purpose in some highbrow drama wherein they would play the leading role. Among all the theories on the genesis of the cafe's name, this last explanation was the most widely championed. Still, every now and then, someone new to the place or in need of drawing attention would come forward with another theory, and for an ephemeral lull the other customers would believe him, toying with the new theory, until they got bored and sunk back to their marshes of moroseness.

Today, when the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist started toying with a new theory on the cafe's name, all of his friends-even his wifefelt obliged to listen to him attentively, as a sign of their support for his finally summoning the courage to do what everyone had forever been begging him to do: join Alcoholics Anonymous.

There was, however, a second reason why everyone at the table was more sympathetic toward him than usual. Today he had for the second time been indicted for insulting the prime minister in his cartoons, and if on the day of the hearing the judge agreed with the charge, he could get up to three years in prison. The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist was famous for a series of political cartoons in which he depicted the entire cabinet as a flock of sheep and the prime minister as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Now that he had been forbidden from using this metaphor, he was planning to draw the cabinet as a pack of wolves and the prime minister as a jackal in wolf s clothing. Should this caricature too be taken away from him, he had thought of an exit strategy: penguins! He was determined to sketch all the members of the parliament as penguins in tuxedos.

"Here is my new theory!" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist said, unaware of the compassion he had evoked and a bit surprised to see this much interest on the part of his audience-and even his wife.

He was a large man with a patrician nose, high cheekbones, intense blue eyes, and a grim set to his mouth. He had long been familiar to misery and melancholy. However, after secretly falling in love with a most unattainable woman, his gloom had doubled.

Looking at him, it was hard to imagine that he made a living from humor, and that behind that sullen face of his streamed the funniest jokes. Though he was always a notorious drinker, lately his problems with alcohol had skyrocketed. He started waking up in questionable places he'd never been before. But the final straw came when early one morning he found himself in the courtyard of a mosque lying on the flat stone where the dead were washed, apparently having passed out there while trying to mastermind his own funeral. When he managed to open his eyes at dawn, a young imam, on his way to recite the morning prayer, was standing next to him, shocked to encounter a stranger snoring on the stone of the dead. After that, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's friends-and even his wife-were so alarmed they urged him to get professional help and to make something more of his life. Finally today he had attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and pledged to stop imbibing. Hence, everybody at the table-even his wife-considerately leaned back to listen to whatever his theory might be.

"This cafe is called what it is called because the word Kundera is a code. The gist of the issue is not what the name is but what the name is symptomatic of?"

"And what would that be?" asked the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies, a short, gaunt man with a beard dyed ash gray ever since the day he concluded young women preferred mature men. He was the writer and creator of a popular TV series, Timur the Lionheart, which featured a hefty, robust national hero capable of mashing entire battalions of enemies into a bloody puree. When asked about his tacky TV show and movies, he would defend himself by arguing that he was a nationalist by profession but a true nihilist by choice. Today he showed up with another girlfriends comely, eye-catching woman but without much depth. This he didn't confess to her, but within male circles they had a specific name for shallow females like her: "appetizers"-not the main course, of course, but good to snack on. Bolting cashews from the bowl on the table, he guffawed as he put his arm around his new girlfriend: "Come on, tell us what that code is!"

"Boredom," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist said with a puff of smoke. Coils of smoke ascended from all sides as people smoked like chimneys all around, and his wispy puff lazily joined the thick, gray cloud hovering over the table.

The only one who didn't smoke at the table was the ClosetedGay Columnist. He detested the smell of smoke. Every day when he went home he immediately took off his clothes to get rid of the stinky odors of Cafe Kundera. Still, he did not object when others smoked. Neither did he stop going to the cafe. He came here regularly both because he enjoyed being part of this motley group_ and also because he was secretly attracted to the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist.

Not that the Closeted-Gay Columnist wanted to have anything physical with the cartoonist. Even the thought of him naked was enough to send shivers down his spine. This wasn't about sex, he assured himself, but about kindred spirits. Besides, there were two big obstacles that blocked his way. First, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist was strictly heterosexual and the chances of him changing seemed slim. Second, he had a crush on that morose girl Asya a fact that everyone but she had noticed by this time.

So the Closeted-Gay Columnist did not harbor any hopes about having an affair with the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. He just wanted to be close to him. Every now and then he felt a sudden shudder when the cartoonist, while reaching for a glass or an ashtray, accidentally touched his hand or shoulder. Still, in the itch to assure everyone that he had absolutely no interest in him, or in any man for that matter, there were times the columnist treated the cartoonist distantly, denigrating his opinions out of the blue. It was a complicated story.

"Boredom," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist remarked when he had knocked back his cafe latte. "Boredom is the summary of our lives. Day after day we wallow in ennui. Why? Because we cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture. Western politicians presume there is a cultural gap between Eastern Civilization and Western Civilization. If it were that simple! The real civilization gap is between the Turks and the Turks. We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city."

He threw the windows a sidelong look, as if afraid that a throng of folks might ram them with their clubs and cannonballs.

"The streets belong to them, the plazas belong to them, the ferries belong to them. Every open area is theirs. Perhaps in a few years this cafe will be the only place left for us. Our last liberated zone. We rush here every day to seek refuge from them. Oh yes, them! God save me from my own people!"

"You are talking poetry," said the Exceptionally Untalented Poet. Since he was an exceptionally untalented poet, he had the habit of likening everything to poetry.

"We are stuck. We are stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalists, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side. What is left for us?"

He put the cigarette back between his pale, chapped lips, where it remained throughout his continued grievance. "The Modernists tell us to move forward, but we have no faith in their idea of progress. The Traditionalists tell us to move backward, but we do not want to return to their ideal order either. Sandwiched between the two sides, we march two steps forward and one step backward, just like the Ottoman army band did! But we don't even play an instrument! Where can we possibly escape to? We are not even a minority. I wish we were an ethnic minority or an indigenous people under the protection of the UN Charter. Then we could have at least some basic rights. But nihilists, pessimists, and anarchists are not regarded as a minority, although we are an extinct species. Our number is lessening every day. How long can we survive?"

The question hung heavily above their heads, somewhere below the cloud of smoke. The cartoonist's wife, who was a jittery woman with full, somber eyes and too much umbrage welled inside, and who happened to be a better cartoonist than her husband but far less appreciated, gnashed her teeth, torn between picking on her partner of twelve years, as she would like to do, and supporting his frenzy no matter what, as an ideal wife would do. They sincerely disliked each other and yet all these years they both. had clutched at their marriage, she with the hope of revenge, he out of hope that it would get better. Today they spoke with words and gestures stolen from each other. Even their caricatures were analogous now. They drew deformed bodies and invented twisted dialogues involving depressed people dropped into sad and sarcastic situations.

"You know what we are? The scum of this country. A sorry soggy pulp, nothing more than that! Everyone but us is obsessed with entering the EU, making profits, buying stocks, trading up their cars, and trading up their girlfriends…."

The Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies fidgeted nervously.

"This is where Kundera enters into the picture," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist continued without noticing the gaffe. "The whole idea of lightness permeates our lives in the form of a meaningless emptiness. Our existence is kitsch, a beautiful lie, which helps us to defy the reality of death and mortality. It is precisely this-"

But his words were cut off by the jingling of the bells as the door of Cafe Kundera opened with a blast and a young woman walked in, looking tired beyond her age and pissed off.

"Yo, Asya!" the scenarist yelled, as if she were the muchawaited savior who would terminate this daft conversation. "Over here! We're here!"

Asya Kazanci offered a half smile and her forehead furrowed with an expression that said, Oh well, I can join you folks briefly, what difference does it make anyway, life sucks either way. Slowly, as if saddled with invisible sacks of inertia, she approached the table, gave everyone a toneless greeting, took a seat, and started to roll a cigarette.

"What are you doing here at this hour? Aren't you supposed to be at ballet now?" asked the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, forgetting his soliloquy. His eyes flickered with consideration-a sign that was noticed by all but his wife.

"But that's exactly where I am: in my ballet class. And right now"-Asya stuffed the rolling paper with tobacco-"I am doing one of the most difficult jumps, meeting my calves in the air between forty-five and ninety degrees-cabriole!"

"Wow!" The cartoonist smiled.

"Then I make a turning jump," Asya continued. "Right foot front, demi plie, jump up!" She grabbed the leather tobacco pouch and held it in the air. "Turn a hundred and eighty degrees"-she ordered as she rotated the pouch, sprinkling some tobacco on the table-"and land on left foot!" The pouch perched next to the bowl of cashews. "Then repeat the whole thing one more time to go back to the starting position. Emboite!"

"Ballet is like writing poetry with your body," muttered the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.

A sullen torpor set in. Someplace far away churned the sounds of the city, an amalgam of sirens, horns, shouts, and laughter accompanied by the squeaks of the seagulls. A few new customers came in, a few customers left. One of the waiters fell with a trayful of glasses. Another waiter fetched a broom and as he swept the glass off the floor, the customers watched nonchalantly. Here the waiters changed frequently. The working hours were long and the pay not great. Still, no waiter had resigned to this day; instead they would get themselves fired. That's how it was in the Cafe Kundera; once you stepped inside, you remained fastened to it until the place spat you out.

In the following half hour some people at Asya Kazanci's table ordered coffee, the rest ordered beer. In the second round, the former drank beer and the latter drank coffee. And so it went. Only the cartoonist stuck to cafe lattes and nibbled the vanilla biscuits that came with them, although by this time his frustration was becoming visible. In any case, nothing was done in harmony, and yet in that dissonance there lay an unusual cadence. This is what Asya liked most about the cafe: its comatose indolence and farcical disharmony. This place was out of time and space. Istanbul was in a constant hurry and yet at Cafe Kundera only lethargy prevailed. People outside the cafe stuck to one another to disguise their loneliness, pretending to be far more intimate than they really were, whereas in here it was the opposite, everyone pretending to be far more detached than they really were. This spot was the negation of the whole city. Asya took a drag on her cigarette, fully appreciating the inaction until the cartoonist looked at his watch and turned toward her. "It's seven forty, dear. Your class is over."

"Oh, do you have to go? Your family is so outmoded," the scenarist's girlfriend blurted out. "Why are they making you take ballet classes when obviously you aren't into it?"

That was the problem with all these butterfly-life-spanned girlfriends the scenarist brought with him. Driven by an impulse to become friends with everyone in the group, they asked too many personal questions and made too many personal comments, miserably failing to acknowledge that it was precisely the opposite, the lack of any serious and sincere interest in each other's privacy, that drew the group members to one another.

"How can you cope with all those aunts?" the scenarist's girlfriend continued, failing to read Asya's face. "Gosh, so many women playing the role of mother all under the same roof…. I couldn't stand it a minute."

Now that was too much. There were unwritten rules in a group as eclectic as this and they were not to be violated. Asya sniffed. She did not like women, which would have been easier to deal with had she not been one of them. Whenever she met a new woman she did one of two things: either waited to see when she would hate her or hated her right away.

"I don't have a family in the normal sense of the word." Asya gave her a condescending gaze, hoping this would stop whatever the other was planning to say next. Yet in the endeavor she caught sight of a shiny silver frame on the wall right above the latter's right shoulder. It was the picture of a road to the Red Lagoon in Bolivia. How nice it would be to be on that road right now! She finished her coffee, stubbed out her cigarette, and began to roll another one as she mumbled, "We are a pack of female animals forced to live together. I don't call that a family."

"But that's exactly what a family is about, my dear," objected the Exceptionally Untalented Poet. At times like this he remembered that he was the eldest of the group, not only in terms of age years but also in terms of mistakes years. Married and divorced three times, he had watched as one by one all of his ex-wives left Istanbul to get as far away from him as possible. From each marriage he had children whom he visited only once in a long while, but always proudly claimed ownership of. "Remember"-he wagged a paternal finger toward Asya-"all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"It is so easy for Tolstoy to sputter that nonsense," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's wife shrugged. "The guy had a wife who took care of every little detail, raised the dozens of kids they had, and worked like a dog so that his majesty the great Tolstoy could concentrate and write novels!"

"What do you want?" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist asked.

"Recognition! That's what I want. I want the whole world to admit that if given the opportunity, Tolstoy's wife could be a better writer than him."

"Why? Just because she was a woman?"

"Because she was a very talented woman oppressed by a very talented man," his wife snapped.

"Oh," said the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. Perturbed, he called the waiter and to everyone's chagrin, he ordered a beer. Yet when it was served he must have felt some sort of guilt, for all of a sudden he switched the topic, embarking on a speech on the benefits of alcohol.

"This country owes its freedom to this little bottle which I can so freely hold in my hand." The cartoonist raised his voice over an ambulance siren squealing outside. "Neither social reforms, nor political regulations. Not even the War of Independence. It is this very bottle that differentiates Turkey from all other Muslim countries. This beer here"-he raised the bottle as if to toast-"is the symbol of freedom and civil society."

"Oh, come on. Since when is being a rotten drunkard a symbol of freedom?" the scenarist reprimanded sharply. The others did not join in. Debating was a waste of energy. Instead, they chose a frame on the wall and focused on a road picture.

"Since the day alcohol was forbidden and denigrated in all the Muslim Middle East. Since forever." The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist grunted. "Think about Ottoman history. All those taverns, all those metes to accompany each glass…. It looks like the guys were having a good time. We as a nation relish alcohol, why don't we accept that? This is a society that likes to imbibe eleven months a year and then panic, repent, and fast in Ramadan, only to go back to drinking when the holy month is over. If there never was sharia in this country, if the fundamentalists never succeeded as they did elsewhere, I tell you, we owe it to this twisted tradition. It is thanks to alcohol that there is something resembling democracy in Turkey."

"Well, why don't we drink, then?" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's wife gave a tired smile. "And what better reason do we have to drink than Mr. Tiptoe? What was his name-Cecche?"

"Cecchetti," Asya corrected her, still lamenting the day she had been intoxicated enough to give the group a speech on ballet history, and in passing mentioned the name Cecchetti. They loved him. Ever since that day, now and again someone at the table would propose a toast to him, the dancer who introduced the pointe walk on the toes.

"So if it weren't for him ballet dancers wouldn't be able to walk on their toes, huh?" Someone would chuckle each time.

"What was he thinking?" Someone else would add, and then everybody would have a laugh.

Every day they met at the Cafe Kundera. The Exceptionally Untalented Poet, the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies and whomever his girlfriend might be at that moment, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's wife, the Closeted-Gay Columnist, and Asya Kazanci. There was tension buried far below the surface, waiting for talk of the day to pump it out. In the meantime, things flowed swimmingly. Some days they brought other people along, friends or colleagues or consummate strangers; some days they came alone. The group was a self-regulating organism wherein individual differences were displayed but could never take over, as if the organism had a life outside and beyond the personalities composing it.

Among them Asya Kazanci found inner peace. Cafe Kundera was her sanctuary. In the Kazanci domicile she always had to correct her ways, striving for a perfection that was beyond her comprehension, whereas here in Cafe Kundera no one forced you to change since human beings were thought to be essentially imperfect and uncorrectable.

It is true, they were not the ideal friends her aunts would have chosen for her. Some in the group were old enough to be Asya's mother or father. Being the youngest, she enjoyed watching their childishness. It was rather comforting to see that nothing really improved in life over the years; if you were a sullen teenager, you ended up being a sullen adult. The pattern was with us to stay. True, it sounded a bit glum, but at least, Asya consoled herself, it proved that one didn't have to become something else, something more, like her aunts kept nagging her about day and night. Since nothing was going to change in time and this sullenness was here forever, she could continue to be her same sullen self:

"Today is my birthday," announced Asya, surprising herself since she hadn't had any intention of declaring that.

"Oh yeah?" someone asked.

"What a coincidence! It is also my youngest daughter's birthday today," exclaimed the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.

"Oh yeah?" Now it was Asya's turn.

"So you were born on the same day as my daughter! Gemini." The poet shook his fluffy head with glee, theatrically.

"Pisces," Asya corrected.

And that was that. Nobody tried to hug her or suffocate her with kisses, just like nobody thought about ordering a cake. Instead the poet recited an awful poem for her, the cartoonist drank three bottles of beer in her honor, and the cartoonist's wife drew her caricature on a napkin-a surly young woman with electrified hair, huge tits, and a sharp nose under a pair of piercingly astute eyes. The others bought her another coffee and at the end did not let her pay her share of the bill. It was as simple as that. Not that they hadn't taken Asya's birthday seriously. To the contrary, they had taken it so seriously that soon they were excogitating aloud the notion of time and mortality, only to travel from there to the questions of when they were going to die and whether there really was an afterlife. "There is an afterlife and it's going to be worse than here," was the general opinion in the group. "So enjoy whatever time you have left."

Some mulled it over, others stopped midword and fled into this or that road picture on the wall. They took their time, as if no one was waiting for them outside, as if there was no outside, their grimaces gradually evolving into beatific smiles of indifference. Having no energy, no passion, no need for further conversation, they sunk deeper into the murky waters of apathy, wondering why on earth this place was named Cafe Kundera.

At nine o'clock that night, after finishing a square meal and with the lights turned off, amid singing and clapping, Asya Kazanci blew out the candles on the triple-layer caramelized apple cake (extremely sugary) with whipped lemon cream frosting (extremely sour). She was able to blow out only a third of them. The rest of the candles were doused by her aunts, grandmother, and Petite-Ma, all of them blowing from all sides.

"How was your ballet class today?" Auntie Feride asked as she turned the lights back on.

"It was good." Asya smiled. "My back hurts a little because of all the stretching the teacher compels us to do, but, still, I can't complain. I learned many new moves…."

"Oh yeah?" came a suspicious voice. It was Auntie Zeliha. "Like what?"

"Well… " Asya replied as she took her first bite of the cake. "Let's see. I learned the petit jete, which is a little jump, and the pirouette and the glissade."

"You know, this is like killing two birds with one stone," Auntie Feride remarked. "We pay for her ballet class, but she ends up learning both ballet and French. We save a whole lot of money!"

Everyone nodded-everyone except Auntie Zeliha. With a skeptical glint in the abyss of her jade green eyes, she drew her face up close to her daughter's and said in an almost inaudible voice, "Show us!"

"Are you crazy?" Asya flinched. "I can't do those things right in the middle of our living room! I need to be in the studio and working with a teacher. We warm up and stretch first, and concentrate. And there is always music…. Glissade means to glide, did you know that? How am I possibly going to glide here on the carpet?! One cannot start doing ballet just like that!"

A saturnine smile etched along Auntie Zeliha's lips as she ran her fingers through her dark hair. She said nothing further, seeming to be more interested in eating her cake than in quarreling with her daughter. But her smile was enough to infuriate Asya. She pushed her own plate away, pulled her chair back, and stood up.

At nine fifteen that evening, in the living room of a once fashionably opulent but now long outmoded and dilapidated konak in Istanbul, Asya Kazanci was doing ballet on a Turkish carpet, her face romantically poised, her arms stretched out, her hands softly curved so that her middle fingers touched her thumbs, while her mind swirled with rage and resentment.