The Bastard of Istanbul

SIX Pistachios

Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian watched the cashier at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books pile the twelve novels she had just purchased one by one into a canvas backpack while they waited for her credit card to be processed. When finally given the receipt, she signed the paper, trying to avoid looking at the total. Once again she had spent all her monthly savings on books! She was a true bookworm, not a promising feature at all given that it had zero value in the eyes of boys and thus served to only further upset her mother about the prospects of her getting married to a moneyed husband. Just this morning on the phone her mother had made her promise not to whisper a word about novels when she went out tonight. Armanoush felt a surge of angst rise in her stomach as she thought about her upcoming date. After a year of not going out with anyone-a solemn tribute to her twenty-one years of chronic singleness marked with disastrous pseudodates finally today Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian was going to give love a try again.

If her passion for books had been one fundamental reason be hind her recurring inability to sustain a standard relationship with the opposite sex, there were two additional factors that had fanned the flames of her failure. First and foremost, Armanoush was beautiful too beautiful. With a well-proportioned body, delicate face, dark blond, wavy hair, huge gray blue eyes, and a sharp nose with a slight ridge that might seem a defect on others but on her only added an air of self-confidence, her physical attractiveness when combined with her brains intimidated young men. Not that they preferred ugly women, or that they had no appreciation for intelligence. But they didn't quite know where exactly to pigeonhole her: among the group of women they were dying to sleep with (the darlings), or among the group they sought advice from (the buddies), or among the group they wished to marry eventually (the fiancee types). Since she was sublime enough to be all at once, she ended up being none.

The second factor was far more complicated but equally beyond her control: her relatives. The Tchakhmakhchian family in San Francisco and her mother in Arizona had antagonistically different views when it came to the question of who would be the right man for Armanoush. Since she had been spending almost five months here (summer vacation, spring break, and frequent visits over the weekends) and the remaining seven months in Arizona almost every year since she was a toddler, Armanoush had had the chance to learn firsthand what each side expected from her and how utterly irreconcilable those expectations were. Whatever made one side happy was bound to distress the other. In order not to upset anyone, Armanoush had tried to date Armenian boys in San Francisco and anyone but them when she was in Arizona. But fate must have been pulling her leg, because in San Francisco she had been attracted only to non-Armenians, whereas all three of the young men she had had a crush on while in Arizona turned out to be Armenian Americans, much to her mother's disappointment.

Lugging her anxieties together with the heavy backpack, she crossed Opera Plaza while the wind whistled and wailed uncanny tunes to her ears. She caught sight of a young couple inside Max's Opera Cafe who were either disappointed with the piled-high corned beef sandwiches in front of them, or' else had just had a quarrel. Thank God I'm single, Armanoush half jokingly thought to herself before she turned toward Turk Street. Years ago when she was still in her teens, Armanoush had shown the city to an Armenian American girl from New York. Upon reaching this street the girl's face had crumpled. "Turk Street! Aren't they everywhere?"

Armanoush recalled her own surprise at the girl's reaction. She had tried to explain to her that the street was named after Frank Turk, an attorney who had served as second alcalde and was important in the city's history.

"Whatever." Her friend had broken off the lecture, showing not too much interest in urban history. "All the same, aren't they everywhere?"

Yes indeed, they were everywhere, so much so that one of them was married to her mom. But this last bit of information Armanoush had kept to herself:

She avoided talking about her stepfather with her Armenian friends. She did not talk about him with non-Armenians either. Not even with those who had absolutely no interest in life outside of their own and therefore couldn't care less about the history of the Armenian-Turkish conflict. All the same, wise enough to know that secrets could spread quicker than dust in the wind, Armanoush maintained her silence. When you didn't tell anyone the extraordinary, everyone assumed the normal, Armanoush discovered at an early age. Since her mother was an odar, what could have been more normal for her than to get married to another odar? This being the general assumption on the part of her friends, Armanoush's stepfather was thought to be an American, presumably from the Midwest.

On Turk Street she passed by a gay-friendly bed-and-breakfast, a Middle Eastern grocery store, and a small Thai market, and strolled next to pedestrians from all walks of life until she finally got on the trolley to Russian Hill. Leaning her forehead on the dusty window, she reflected on the "other I" in Borges's Labyrinths as she watched the wispy fog drift up off the horizon. Armanoush too had another self, one that she kept at bay no matter where she went.

She liked being in this city, its vim and vigor pulsating in her body. Ever since she was a toddler she had enjoyed coming here and living with her dad and Grandma Shushan. Unlike her mom, her dad had not married again. Armanoush knew he had had girlfriends in the past but none had been introduced to her, either because the affairs weren't serious enough or her dadd had been afraid of upsetting her in some way. Probably it was the latter. That would be more typical of Barsam Tchakhmakhchian. He was the most unselfish soul and the most genderless man, Armanoush believed, that existed on the face of the earth, and to this day she couldn't help marveling at how he could have ever ended up with a woman as self-absorbed as Rose. Not that Armanoush didn't love her mother; she did, in her own way, but there were times in which she felt suffocated by her mother's dissatisfied love. At those times she escaped to San Francisco right into the arms of the Tchakhmakhchian family, where a satisfied but equally demanding love would be awaiting her.

Once off the trolley she began to hurry. Matt Hassinger would be picking her up at seven thirty. She had less than an hour and a half to get ready, which basically meant to take a shower and don a dress, perhaps the turquoise one everyone said looked so good on her. That would be all. No makeup, no jewelry. She was not going to doll herself up for this date and she certainly wasn't going to expect much from it. If it worked out well, that would be nice. But if it didn't, she would be prepared for that too. Thus inching her way under the fog canopying the city, at ten past six in the evening Armanoush reached her grandmother's two-bathroom condominium in Russian Hill, a lively neighborhood built on one of the steepest hills in San Francisco.

"Hello, sweetheart, welcome home!"

Surprisingly, it was not her grandmother but Auntie Surpun who opened the door. "I missed you," she twittered lovingly. "What have you done all day long? How was your day?"

"It was OK," Armanoush said placidly, wondering what her youngest aunt was doing here on a Tuesday evening.

Auntie Surpun lived in Berkeley, where she had been teaching forever, at least ever since Armanoush was a child. She drove to San Francisco on the weekends but it was highly unusual of her to show up during the week. But the question would cease to concern Armanoush once she proceeded to give an account of her day. She remarked heartily, with a beaming face, "I bought myself some new books."

"Books!? Did she say `books' again?" a familiar voice yelled from inside.

That sounded like Auntie Varsenig! Armanoush hung up her raincoat, flattened her wind-ruffled hair, and wondered in the meantime what Auntie Varsenig was doing here as well. Her twin daughters were coming back this evening from Los Angeles, where they had been participating in a basketball tournament. Auntie Varsenig was so excited about the competition that she hadn't been able to sleep properly for the last three days, constantly chatting on the phone with either of her daughters or their coach. And yet on the day the team was returning, instead of arriving at the airport hours early, as was her habit, here she was at grandma's house setting the dinner table.

"Yes, I did say `books,"' Armanoush said, shouldering her canvas backpack as she walked into the spacious living room.

"Don't you listen to her. She's just getting old and grumpy," Auntie Surpun chirped from behind her as she followed her into the living room. "We are all so proud of you, sweetheart."

"We are proud of her, but she could just as well act her age." Auntie Varsenig shrugged as she placed the last china plate on the table and then gave her niece a hug. "Girls your age are usually busy beautifying themselves, you know. Not that you need to, of course, but if you read and read and read, where is it going to end?"

"You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one." Armanoush winked without knowing how pretty she looked under the sun's fading light in the room. She set her backpack on her grandma's armchair and instantly emptied it, like a kid eager to see a bunch of new toys. Books rained on top of one another: The Aleph and Other Stories, A Confederacy of Dunces, A Frolic of His Own, The Management of Grief, Borges's Collected Fictions, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Landscape Painted with Tea, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, and two by Milan Kundera, her favorite author, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Life Is Elsewhere. Some of them were new to her, others she'd read years ago but had been wanting to read again.

All things considered, Armanoush knew, perhaps not rationally but instinctively, that the Tchakhmakhchian family's resistance to her passion for books came from a deeper, darker source than simply from an urge to remind her of the things girls her age were busy with. It was not only because she was a woman but also because she was an Armenian that she was expected to refrain twice as much from becoming a bibliophile. Armanoush had a feeling that beneath Auntie Varsenig's constant objection to her reading lay a more structural, if not primordial, concern: a fear of survival. She simply did not want her to shine too bright, to stand out from the flock. Writers, poets, artists, intellectuals were the first ones within the Armenian millet to be eliminated by the late Ottoman government. They had first gotten rid of "the brains" and only then proceeded to extradite the rest-the laypeople. Like too many Armenian families in the diaspora, safe and sound here but never truly at ease, the Tchakhmakhchians were both elated and vexed when a child of theirs read too much, thought too much, and swerved too far away from the ordinary.

Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you could be so carried away that you could lose touch with reality-that stringent and stolid truth from which no minority should ever veer too far from in order not to end up unguarded when the winds shifted and bad times arrived. It didn't help to be so naive to think things wouldn't get bad, for they always did. Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced. If as a child of survivors you still wanted to read and ruminate, you should do so quietly, apprehensively, and introspectively, never turning yourself into a vociferous reader. If you couldn't help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as ifyou had been de-energized and now had only enough strength to be average. With a fate and family like this, Armanoush had to learn to downplay her talents and do her best not to glimmer too brightly.

A sharp, spicy smell wafted from the kitchen and tickled her nostrils, yanking her out of her reverie. "So," Armanoush exclaimed, turning toward the most talkative of her three aunts, "are you going to stay for dinner?"

"Only briefly, honey," Auntie Varsenig murmured. "I need to leave for the airport soon; the twins are coming back today. I just stopped by to bring you guys homemade manta and" Auntie Varsenig beamed with pride-"guess what? We got bastirma from Yerevan! "

"Gosh, I'm not eating manta and I'm definitely not going to eat bastirma." Armanoush frowned. "I can't reek of garlic tonight."

"No problem. If you brush your teeth and chew a mint gum there will be no smell whatsoever."

That was Auntie Zarouhi walking in with a plate of musaqqa, beautifully garnished with parsley and slices of lemon. She left the plate on the table and opened her arms wide to embrace her niece.

Armanoush embraced her back wondering all the while what was she doing here…? But she started to get the picture. What a wellplanned "coincidence" it was that the whole Tchakhmakhchian family had materialized at Grandma Shushan's house at the same time Armanoush would be going on her date. Everyone here had shown up with a different pretext but exactly the same purpose: They wanted to see, test, and judge with their own eyes this Matt Hassinger, the lucky young man who would be dating the apple of their eye this evening.

Armanoush looked at her relatives with a stare that bordered on desperate. What could she do? How could she be independent when they were so frighteningly close? How could she convince them that they didn't have to worry so much about her when they had had so much in life to worry about? How could she break free from her genetic heritage, especially when a part of her was so proud of it? How could she fight off the kindness of her loved ones? Could goodness be fought?

"That's not going to help!" Armanoush gasped. "No toothpaste, no chewing gum, not even those awful minry mouthwashesthere is nothing on earth strong enough to suppress the smell of bastirma. It takes a week to finally disappear. If you eat bastirma you smell and sweat and breathe bastirma for days on end. Even your pee smells like bastirma!"

"What's peeing got to do with dating?" Armanoush heard a befuddled Auntie Varsenig whisper to Auntie Surpun as soon as she had turned her back.

Still protesting but unwilling to squabble with them, Armanoush headed to the bathroom, only to find Uncle Dikran there, his head inside the cabinet under the sink, his bulky body on hands and knees.

"Uncle?" Armanoush almost let out a shriek.

"Hellooo!" Dikran Stamboulian hooted from the cabinet. "This house is full of Chekhovian characters," Armanoush muttered to herself

"If you say so," echoed a voice from under the sink.

"Uncle, what are you doing?"

"Your grandma always complains about the old faucets in the house, you know. So this evening I said to myself, why don't I close the store early, stop by Shushan's house, and repair those damn pipes?"

"Yeah, I can see," Armanoush remarked, suppressing a smile. "Where is she, by the way?"

"She's taking a nap," Dikran said, worming his way out of the cabinet to get the pipe bender and crawling back inside. "Old age-what you gonna do? — body needs sleep! She will be awake before seven thirty, though, don't worry."

Seven thirty! It looked like every person in the family had set a biological alarm for the moment Matt Hassinger would ring the bell.

"Give me the smooth jaw wrench, will you?" came a frustrated voice. "This one doesn't seem to be working."

Armanoush pouted at the bag on the floor, in which glinted over a hundred tools of all sizes. She handed him a chain tong, a pipe reamer, and an HTP300 hydrostatic test pump before she chanced upon the smooth jaw wrench. Inauspiciously, that wrench too turned out to be "not working." Seeing the impossibility of taking a shower with Uncle Dikran the Impossible Plumber on the job, Armanoush moved toward her grandma's bedroom, opened the door slightly, and peeked inside. There she was sleeping lightly but with the blissful placidity found only in elderly women who are surrounded by their children and grandchildren. An elfin woman who had always had a flimsy body and too much to shoulder, she had been shortened and slimmed down by old age. As she had aged she had grown more and more in need of some sleep during the day. At night, however, she was as awake as ever. Old age had not diminished Shushan's insomnia one tiny bit. The past didn't let her rest for too long, her family thought; it allowed her only these fleeting catnaps. Armanoush closed the door and let her sleep.

The table was ready when she returned to the living room. They had also set a plate for her. She wondered how she could possibly be expected to eat if she was going to have a date in less than an hour, but preferred not to ask. To be too reasonable in this family would be a blunder. She could nibble a little so that everyone would be happy. Besides, she liked this cuisine. Her mother in Arizona wanted to keep Armenian cuisine as far from the borders of her kitchen as possible, and profoundly enjoyed vilifying it to her neighbors and friends. She was especially fond of drawing attention to two dishes, which she publicly disparaged on every available occasion: cooked calf's feet and stuffed intestines. Armanoush recalled how Rose once complained to Mrs. Grinnell, the next-door neighbor.

"Gross," Mrs. Grinnell exclaimed with a trace of disgust creeping into her voice. "Do they really eat the intestines?"

"Oh yeah." Rose nodded heartily. "Believe me, they do. They spice it up with garlic and herbs, stuff it with rice, and wolf it down."

The two women unleashed a condescending snicker and would have probably snickered some more if at that moment Armanoush's stepfather had not turned toward them and, with a jaded look on his face, remarked: "What's the big deal? That sounds just like mumbar. You should try it sometime, it's really good."

"Is he Armenian too?" Mrs. Grinnell whispered when Mustafa left the room.

"Of course not," Rose said, her voice trailing off. "It's just that they have some things in common."

The doorbell rang shrilly, snatching Armanoush out of her trance and making everyone else jump in panic. It was not even seven o'clock yet. Punctuality, apparently, wasn't one of Matt Hassinger's merits. As if a button had been pressed, all three aunts scampered to the door only to stop short of opening it. Uncle Dikran hit his head on the cupboard he was still working in and Grandma Shushan opened her eyes in fright. Only Armanoush remained calm and composed. In intentionally measured steps she walked to the door under the fixed gaze of her aunts and opened it.

"Daddy!!!" Armanoush fluted with delight. "I thought you had a meeting this evening. How come you're home so early?"

But before she reached the end of her question, Armanoush had already sensed the answer.

Barsam Tchakhmakhchian smiled his soft dimpled smile and hugged his daughter, his eyes glimmering with pride and traces of anxiety. "Yeah, but it didn't work out, we had to reschedule the meeting," he said to Armanoush. As soon as she was beyond earshot, he whispered to his sisters: "Is he here yet?"

The last thirty minutes before Matt Hassinger's arrival were marked with escalating apprehension on the part of everyone but Armanoush. They made her put on several dresses and parade around in each one, until they unilaterally reached a decision: the turquoise dress. The outfit was completed with earrings that matched, a burgundy beaded purse that Auntie Varsenig claimed would add a feminine touch, and a fluffy dark blue cardigan, just in case it got cold. That was one other thing Armanoush knew she should not question. Somehow the world outside the family house had an arctic character in the eyes of the Tchakhmakhchians. "Outside" meant "chilly land," and to visit it, you had to take your cardigan, preferably handwoven. This she partly knew from her childhood, having spent her early years under the downy blankets Grandma knit for her with her initials stitched at the edges. To go to sleep without anything covering your body was simply unthinkable, and going out into the street without a cardigan would be a blunder. Just like a house needed a roof above its head, human beings too needed an additional skin between them and the rest of the world so that they could feel safe and warm.

Once Armanoush agreed to put on her cardigan and the dressing part was over, they came forth with another demand, one that was fundamentally paradoxical but not to the Tchakhmakhchians.

They wanted her to sit with them at the table and eat, so that she could be ready and strong for tonight's dinner.

"But honey you are just nibbling like a bird. Don't tell me you are not even going to taste my manta?" Auntie Varsenig wailed with a scoop in her hand and such severe dismay in her dark brown eyes that it made Armanoush wonder if something far more life-anddeath than a bowl of manta was concerned.

"Auntie, I can't." Armanoush exhaled. "You already filled my plate with khaday f Let me finish this, that's more than enough."

"Well you didn't want to smell of meat and garlic," Auntie Surpun chimed in with a hint of mischief in her voice. "So we served you ekmek khaday f This way your breath will smell of pistachios."

"Why would anyone want to smell like pistachios?" Grandma Shushan asked amazed, having missed the first episode of the debate, not that it would have made sense to her anyway.

"I do not want to smell like pistachios." Armanoush widened her eyes with desperation and turned to her dad, flashing a distress signal, waiting to be saved.

Before Barsam Tchakhmakhchian could utter a word, however, Armanoush's cell phone started to ring a classical melody by Tchaikovsky: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy." She picked it up and pouted at the little screen. Private number. It could be anyone. It could even be Matt Hassinger, calling to give her a weird excuse to cancel the dinner tonight. Armanoush stood there, holding the phone uneasily. On the fourth ring, she answered it, hoping it wasn't her mother.

It was.

"Honey, are they treating you all right?" was the first thing she asked.

"Yes, Mother," Armanoush muttered tonelessly. By now she was kind of used to it. Ever since she was a little girl, whenever she stayed at the Tchakhmakhchian domicile, her mother acted as if her life was in danger.

"Amy, don't tell me you're still at home?"

Armanoush was used to this too, relatively speaking. Since the day her parents had separated, a separation of a different sort had happened between her mother and her own name. She had stopped calling her "Armanoush," as if she needed to rename her daughter to be able to continue loving her. To this day Armanoush had not told anyone in the Tchakhmakhchian family about this shift of nomenclature. Sometimes things had to be kept as secrets, of which she happened to have way too many.

"Why don't you respond?" her mother insisted. "Weren't you going out tonight?"

Armanoush paused, fully aware that everyone in the room was eavesdropping. "Yes, Mother," was all she uttered after an awkward lull.

"You haven't changed your mind, have you?"

"No, Mother. But why do you have a private number?"

"Well, I have my own reasons, just like any mother would. You don't always answer the phone if you know it's me." Rose's voice dwindled desolately only to escalate again. "Is Matt going to meet the family?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Don't! That will be the worst mistake ever. They'll scare the life out of him. Oh your aunts, you don't know them, you are such a good girl you can't see the bad, they'll strike terror into the poor boy with their questions and interrogations."

Armanoush didn't say anything. There were bizarre swishes on the line and she suspected her mother was brushing her hair at the same time as she delivered her tongue-lashing.

"Honey, why don't you say something? Are they all there?" Rose asked. There came another muffled rustle, except it didn't sound like brushing to Armanoush anymore. Rather it sounded like a mushy object dropping into a liquid without a splash, or more precisely, a scoop of pancake mix being poured into a sizzling pan.

"Oh, why do I ask the obvious? Of course they are. All of them, I bet. They still hate me, don't they?"

Armanoush had no answers. She could see Rose in her mind's eye, there in the dim kitchen with light salmon laminate cabinets, which she planned to have refaced but never had the money or the time to do, her hair pulled into a loose bun, the cordless phone glued to her ear, a spatula in her other hand, making a heap of pancakes as if there were an army of children at home, only to eat them all by herself at the end of the day. She could also envision her stepfather, Mustafa Kazanci, sitting at the kitchen table, stirring halfand-half into his coffee as he skimmed through the Arizona Daily Star.

Upon graduating from the University of Arizona and getting married to Rose, Mustafa had started working at a mineral company in the region, and as far as Armanoush could tell, he enjoyed the world of rocks and stones more than anything. He wasn't a bad man; if anything he was just a bit dull. He seemed to have no passion whatsoever for anything in life. He hadn't gone back to Istanbul for God knows how long, although he had family there. At times Armanoush had the impression that he wanted to break away from his past, but she could not possibly tell why. A few times she had tried to converse with him about 1915 and what the Turks had done to the Armenians. "I don't know much about those things," Mustafa had replied, shutting her out with a genteel but equally stiff manner. "It's all history. You should talk with historians."

"Amy, are you gonna talk to me?" Rose's voice now sounded irritated.

"Mama, I have to hang up. I'll call you later," Armanoush said. There was an abrupt click accompanied by a swish on the phone, which sounded like her mother had either scooped another dollop of pancake mix into the pan or had broken into a sob. Armanoush preferred to think it was the former.

Utterly pissed off, she returned to the table, resettled in her chair, grabbed her spoon, and avoiding eye contact, started to cram down what was in front of her, except it wasn't what she wanted. It took her a few more spoonfuls to realize the mistake.

"Why am I eating manta!?" Armanoush exclaimed.

"I don't know, honey," Auntie Varsenig exclaimed back, staring at her with fright as if she were a kind of creature new to her. "I put it there in case you wanted to try it. And it looks like you did."

Now Armanoush felt like crying. She asked permission to leave the table and whisked off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, deeply regretting in the meantime this whole silly date. She stood in front of the mirror with a half-squeezed tube of toothpaste in her hand and the look of someone who was about to forswear society forever to become a lonely hermit on some godforsaken mountain. What could a Colgate Total Whitening Paste do to fight the infamous manta? Perhaps she could call Matt Hassinger and cancel the whole thing? All she wanted was to lie in bed saturated in despair and read the novels she had purchased. Read and read until her nose bled and her eyes drooped. That was all she wanted.

"You should have stayed in bed and read your novels," she scolded the familiar face in the mirror.

"Nonsense!" It was Auntie Zarouhi, having just materialized next to her in the mirror. "You are a beautiful young woman who deserves the best man in the world. Now let's see a little feminine glamor. Put on some lipstick, miss!"

She did. It didn't say feminine glamor on the bottom of the lipstick tube but close enough: It said CHERRY GLAMOR. Armanoush generously applied the lipstick, only to pat her mouth with a napkin and wipe most of it off. And that was precisely when the doorbell rang. Seven thirty-two! Punctuality seemed to be among Matt Hassinger's merits, after all.

A minute later Armanoush was smiling at a neatly dressed, noticeably excited, and somewhat baffled Matt Hassinger standing at the door. He was three years younger than her-a trivial fact which she hadn't felt the need to tell anyone but was very much evident from his face now. Either because he had done something with his cropped hair or slipped into clothes he wouldn't normally wear, dark brown lambskin blazer and Ralph Lauren honeydew pants, Matt Hassinger looked like a teenager dressed as an adult. He stepped inside with a huge bouquet of crimson tulips in his left hand, smiled at Armanoush, then noticed the audience in the background and froze. The whole Tchakhmakhchian family had lined up behind Armanoush.

"Come on in, young man," said Auntie Varsenig in her most encouraging voice, which also happened to be her most intimidating one.

Matt Hassinger shook hands with each family member, feeling their inquiring gazes rake his face. He lost his confidence and broke into a sweat. Somebody took the flowers and someone else took his blazer. Looking like a plucked peacock now that his blazer was off, he shuffled toward the living room and threw himself on the first chair he spotted. Everyone else sat close, forming a half-moon around him. They exchanged a few words about the weather, about Matt's education (he was in law school, which could be good and bad), about Matt's family (he was an only child, which could be good and bad), about Matt's parents (they too were lawyers, which could be good and bad), about Matt's level of knowledge on the Armenians (not much, which was bad, but he was eager to learn more, which was good), and then went back to the weather again before an irritating silence fell. For almost five minutes no one had a word to utter but everyone beamed as if they all had something lodged in their throats and found humor in this. From this awkward state they were about to pass into an almost dismal impasse when "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" was heard again. Armanoush checked the screen: private number. She shut off the phone, letting it vibrate. She arched her eyebrows and twisted her lips as a "never mind" gesture to Matt, which neither he nor anyone else understood.

At seven forty-five Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian and Matt Hassinger were finally outside, steadily speeding up along Hyde Street in a Venetian red Suzuki Verona, heading toward a restaurant that Matt had heard much about and assumed would be cute and romantic: Skewed Window.

"I hope you like Asian fusion with a touch of Caribbean influence," Matt chuckled, amused at his own words. "This place was highly recommended."

Now "highly recommended" was not a criterion for Armanoush, mainly because she was always wary of "highly recommended" best sellers. Still, she didn't object, hoping that her cynicism would stand corrected at the end of the night.

That, however, turned out to be far from the case. A popular meeting place for urban intellectuals and artists, Skewed Window was anything but a cute, romantic restaurant. It was a funky warehouse with lofty ceilings, art deco pendant lights, and walls on which glimmered examples of contemporary abstract art. Dressed headto-toe in black, the waiters scurried around like a colony of ants who had just discovered a pile of granulated sugar. The colony of waiters served artfully crafted dishes with the knowledge that soon you'd be replaced by a new customer, probably someone who would tip better. As for the menu, it was simply incomprehensible. As if the contents weren't perplexing enough, each dish was shaped, trimmed, and garnished so as to allude to a particular abstract expressionist painting.

The Dutch chef of the restaurant had three aspirations in life: to become a philosopher, to become a painter, and to become a restaurant chef. Having badly failed in both philosophy and art during his youth, he saw no reason not to bring his unappreciated talents into his cuisine. Thus, he prided himself on rematerializing the abstract, and reinserting into the human body the work of art that had come out through an artist's desire to externalize his inner emotional state. Here at the Skewed Window, dining was less culinary than philosophical, and the act of eating was deemed to be guided not by the primordial urge to fill your stomach or suppress your hunger but by a sublime dance with catharsis.

After numerous aborted attempts to choose what they were going to eat, Armanoush decided to go for the sesame-crusted ahi tuna tartare with foie gras yakiniku, and Matt decided to try a prime rib-eye with hot mustard cream sauce on a bed of passion fruit vinaigrette and jicama. Not knowing which wine would match with these dishes but in need of making a good impression, Matt inspected the wine list and after five minutes of bewilderment, he did what he always did when he had absolutely no idea about what to pick: Decide on a wine by looking at its price. A 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon looked perfect, expensive enough but also within his means. Thus having given their order, they tried to read how good their choices were on the face of the waiter who served them, but all they could find there was a blank page of professional politeness.

They talked a little, he about the career he wanted to build, she about the childhood she would like to destroy; he about his future plans, she about the traces of the past; he about his expectations in life, she about family recollections. The Sugar Plum Fairy started to dance just when they were about to embark on another conversational topic. Armanoush fretfully checked the number. It wasn't a familiar number, but it wasn't private either. She answered.

"Amy, where are you?"

Dumbfounded, Armanoush stuttered, "Ma-ma! How did you… how come your number is different now?"

"Oh, it's because I'm calling you on Mrs. Grinnell's cell phone," Rose conceded. "I wouldn't have to go to this much trouble if you cared to answer my calls, of course."

Armanoush blinked blankly as she watched the waiter place a peculiar-looking plate of food in front of her, composed of hues of red, beige, and white. Amid a sauce that resembled smudged brush strokes rested three spherical chunks of red, raw tuna and a bright yellow egg yolk, altogether forming a sorry face with hollow eyes. Still holding the cell phone to her ear but not listening to her mother anymore, Armanoush puckered her lips, as she tried to figure out how to eat a face.

"Amy, why aren't you responding to me? Am I not your mother? Don't you allow me at least half the rights you grant the Tchakhmakhchians?"

"Mom, please," Armanoush said, because this seemed like a question that could only be answered by begging her not to ask it. She hunched her shoulders as if the weight of her body had doubled. Why was it so hard to communicate with her mother?

With a quick excuse and a promise to call her back as soon as she got home, Armanoush hung up and turned off the cell phone. She sneaked a look at Matt to see if he minded the phone call, but upon noticing he was still inspecting his plate, she decided not to worry. Matt's plate was rectangular, not round, and the food on it was divided into two zones separated by a perfectly straight line of mustard cream sauce. It was less the design or the colors that had struck him than the flawlessness of the arrangement. He swallowed hard as if afraid of spoiling the seamless rectangularity.

Their dishes were replicas of two expressionist paintings. Armanoush's plate was based on a painting by Francesco Boretti titled The Blind Whore. As for Matt's plate, it was inspired by one of Mark Rothko's paintings and was aptly titled Untitled. So absorbed were the two in their plates that neither of them heard the waiter when he asked them if everything was all right.

The rest of the evening was nice but only as far as the word nice can go. The food turned out to be delicious and they quickly got used to wolfing down works of art, so much so that when their desserts arrived, Matt had no trouble in messing up the impeccably lined blueberries in April Blues Bring May Yellows by Peter Kitchell, and Armanoush did not even hesitate to jab her spoon into the shaky velvety custard representing Jackson Pollock's Shimmering Substance. But when it came to conversing they couldn't make half the progress they achieved in eating. Not that Armanoush did not enjoy being with Matt or did not find him attractive. But something was terribly missing, not in the sense of a detail missing from the whole, but in the sense of the whole dissolving into pieces without that missing part. Perhaps it was too much philosophical food. At any rate, Armanoush had understood her limits; she could not possibly fall in love with Matt Hassinger. After making this discovery, she stopped questioning herself, and her interest in him was replaced by sheer sympathy.

On the way back home they stopped the car and walked a little bit along Columbus Avenue, both pensive and silent. The breeze shifted then, and for a fleeting moment Armanoush caught the sharp, salty whiff of the sea, longing to be by the seaside now, aching to run away from this very moment. Once in front of the City Lights bookstore, however, she couldn't help perking up with interest as she spotted one of her favorite books behind the window: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

"Oh, have you read that book? It's awesome!" she blurted out, and upon hearing a definite "no," she started describing the:;first story of the book, and then all seven of them. Since she sincerely believed the book could not be fully grasped without mapping the bumpy terrain of Eastern European literature first, during the ensuing ten minutes that was more or less what Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian did, thus breaking the promise she had made to her mother that very morning about not uttering a word about books, at least for just the first date.

Once back in Russian Hill, in front of Grandma Shushan's condo, they stood face to face, aware that the night was over and eager to make the ending better than the preceding evening in the only way they could think of. It was meant to be a real kiss, longawaited and fantasized. Instead it turned out to be a gentle kiss, sealed with compassion on the part of Armanoush and admiration on the part of Matt, as both were miles away from feeling any passion.

"You know I meant to tell you this all night long," Matt stammered, as if saddled with the uncomfortable truth he was about to confess. "You have this incredible smell…. It's unusual and exotic…. Just like-" "Like what?" Armanoush's face went pale, as the sight of a plate of steaming manta popped into her mind.

Matt Hassinger put his arm around her and whispered: "Pistachios… yes, you smell just like pistachios."

At a quarter past eleven Armanoush fished out a bunch of keys to open the many locks of Grandma Shushan's door, fearing in the meantime encountering the whole family in the living room, talking politics, drinking tea, and eating fruit, awaiting her return.

But inside it was dark and empty. Her dad and grandma had gone to sleep and everyone else had left. On the table there was a plate of two apples and two oranges, all carefully peeled and apparently left for her to eat. Armanoush grabbed one of the apples, now darkened on the outside. Her heart sank. In the eerie serenity of the night she nibbled the apple, feeling sad and tired. Soon she would have to go back to Arizona, but she wasn't sure she could put up with her mother's encapsulating universe. Though she liked it here in San Francisco and perhaps could take a semester off to stay with her father and Grandma Shushan, she also couldn't help feeling that something was absent here, that a part of her identity was missing and without it she couldn't start living her own life. The lackluster date with Matt Hassinger had only served to reinforce this feeling. Now she felt wiser, more cognizant of her situation, but saddened at the cost of this knowledge.

She kicked off her shoes and hurried to her room, taking the fruit with her. There she bundled her hair into a ponytail, stripped off the turquoise dress, and slipped into the silk pajamas she had bought in Chinatown. When she was ready, she closed the door of her room and immediately turned on the computer. It took just a few minutes to reach the only safe haven she could escape into at times like this: Cafe Constantinopolis.

Cafe Constantinopolis was a chat room, or as the regulars called it, a cybercafe, initially designed by a bunch of Greek Americans, Sephardim Americans, and Armenian Americans who, other than being New Yorkers, had one fundamental thing in common: They all were the grandchildren of families once based in Istanbul. The Web site opened with a familiar tune: Istanbul was Constantinople/ Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople…

With that melody appeared the silhouette of the city canopied under the flickering shades of sunset, veils upon veils of amethyst and black and yellow. In the middle of the screen there was a flashing arrow to indicate where to click to enter the chat room. You had to sign in with a password to be able to proceed further. Just like many real cafes this one was in theory open to everyone but in practice reserved for regular customers. Accordingly, although numerous off-the-cuff chatters showed up day in and day out, the core group remained more or less the same. Once you successfully signed in, the silhouette faded at the bottom and pulled apart, the way a velvet theater curtain opens before the act begins. As you entered the cybercafe, you heard bells chiming and then the same melody, only this time distant in the background.

Once inside, Armanoush disregarded the Armeniansingles, Greeksingles, Weareallsingles forums and clicked on Anoush Tree-a forum where only the regulars and those with intellectual interests met. Armanoush had discovered the group ten months ago and ever since she had been a regular member, joining the discussion on an almost daily basis. Although some members occasionally posted during the daytime, the real discussions always took place at night when the fuss of the daily routine was over. Armanoush liked to imagine this forum as a dingy, smoky bar she habitually stopped by on her way home. Just like that, Cafe Constantinopolis was a sanctuary where you could forgo your true, humdrum Self at the entrance, like leaving a sopping raincoat in need of drying in the vestibule.

The Anoush Tree section of Cafe Constantinopolis consisted of seven permanent members, five Armenians and two Greeks. They had not met in person and had never felt the need to. All of them came from different cities and had dissimilar professions and lives. All of them had nicknames. Armanoush's nickname was Madame My-Exiled-Soul. She had chosen this name as a tribute to Zabel Yessaian, the only woman novelist the Young Turks put on their death list in 1915. Zabel was a fascinating personality. Born in Constantinople, she lived much of her life in exile.'She had enjoyed a tumultuous life as a novelist and columnist. Armanoush kept a picture of her on her desk, in which Zabel broodingly peered out from under the brim of her hat at some unknown spot beyond the frame.

The others in the Anoush Tree had different nicknames for reasons unasked. Every week they would choose a specific discussion topic. Though the themes varied greatly, they all tended to revolve around their common history and culture-" common" oftentimes meaning "common enemy": the Turks. Nothing brought people together more swiftly and strongly-though transiently and shakilythan a shared enemy.

This week the subject was "The Janissaries." As she scanned through some of the most recent postings Armanoush was happy to see Baron Baghdassarian was online. She didn't know much about him, other than that he was the grandchild of survivors, just like her, and resplendent with rage, unlike her. Sometimes he could be extremely harsh and skeptical. Throughout the last few months, despite the elusiveness of cyberspace or perhaps thanks to it, Armanoush had unknowingly developed a liking for him. A day would be incomplete if she couldn't read his messages. Whatever this thing she felt for him-friendship, fondness, or sheer curiosity-Armanoush knew it was mutual.

People who believe the Ottoman rule was righteous don't

know anything about the Janissary's Paradox. The Janissaries were Christian children captured and converted by the Ottoman state with a chance to climb the social ladder at the expense of despising their own people and forgetting their own past. The Janissary's Paradox is as relevant today for every minority as it was yesterday. You the child of expatriates! You need to ask yourself this age-old question time and again: What will your position be with regards to this paradox; are you going to accept the role of the Janissary? Will you abandon your community to make peace with the Turks and let them whitewash the past so that, as they say, we can all move forward?

Glued to the screen, Armanoush took a bite of the remaining apple and chewed nervously. Never before had she felt such admiration for a man-other than her dad, of course, but that was different. There was something in Baron Baghdassarian that both enthralled and scared her; she wasn't afraid of him exactly or the things he so boldly claimed-if anything, she was scared of herself. His words had a far-reaching effect, capable of digging out this other Armanoush that resided inside her but as of yet had not come out, a cryptic being in deep slumber. Somehow Baron Baghdassarian poked that creature with the spear of his words, prodding it until it woke up with a roar and came to light.

Armanoush was still running her brain over this frightening outcome when she glimpsed a long message posted by Lady Peacock/ Siramark-an Armenian American wine expert who worked for a California-based winery, frequently traveled to Yerevan, and was known for her amusingly smart comparisons between the United States and Armenia. Today, she had posted a self-scoring test that measured the degree of one's "Armenianness."

1. If you grew up sleeping under handwoven blankets or wearing

handwoven cardigans to school

2. If you have been given an Armenian alphabet book on each

birthday until the age of six or seven

3. If you have a picture of Mount Ararat hanging in your house,

garage, or office

4. If you are used to being loved and cooed at in Armenian, scolded

and disciplined in English, and avoided in Turkish

5. If you serve your guests hummus with nacho chips and eggplant

dip with rice cakes

6. If you are familiar with the taste of manta, the smell of sudzuk,

and the curse of bastirma

7. If you easily get pestered and aggravated over remarkably trivial

things but manage to stay composed when there is something

really grave to worry or panic about

8. If you have had (or are planning to have) a nose job

9. If you have a jar of Nutella in your refrigerator and a tav/a board

somewhere in your storeroom

10. If you have a cherished rug on the floor of your living room

11. If you can't help feeling sad when you dance to "Lorke Lorke,"

even if the melody is bouncy and you don't understand the lyrics 12. If gathering to eat fruit after each dinner is a deeply rooted habit

at your house and if your dad still peels oranges for you, no

matter what age you might have reached

13. If your relatives keep shoveling food into your mouth and do not

accept "I am full" as an answer

14. If the sound of duduk sends shivers down your spine and you

cannot help wondering how a flute made from an apricot tree

can cry so sadly

15. If deep inside you feel like there is always more about your past than you will ever be allowed to learn

Having given a "yes" to every single one of the questions, Armanoush scrolled down to learn her score:

0-3 points: Sorry dude, you must be an outsider.

4-8 points: You sound like an inside-outsider. Chances are you are

married to an Armenian.

9-12 points: Almost certainly you are an Armenian.

13-15 points: There's no doubt, you are a proud Armenian.

Armanoush smiled at the screen. And in that moment she grasped what she already knew. It was as if a secret gate had been unlatched in the depths of her brain, and before her mind could accommodate the thoughts gushing in, a wave of introspection rolled over her. She had to go there. That was what she sorely needed: a journey.

Because of her fragmented childhood, she had still not been able to find a sense of continuity and identity. She had to make a journey to her past to be able to start living her own life. As the weight of this new revelation dawned on her, it also motivated her to type a message, seemingly to everyone but in particular to Baron Baghdassarian:

The Janissary's Paradox is being torn between two clashing states of existence. On the one hand, the remnants of the past pile up-a womb of tenderness and sorrow, a sense of injustice and discrimination. On the other hand glimmers the promised future-a shelter decorated with the trimmings and trappings of success, a sense of safety like you have never had before, the comfort of joining the majority and finally being deemed normal.

Hello there Madame My-Exiled-Soul! Glad you are back. So nice to hear the poetess in you.

That was Baron Baghdassarian. Armanoush couldn't help rereading the last part aloud: so nice to hear the poetess in you. She lost her train of thought but only momentarily.

I think I can relate to the Janissary's Paradox. As the only child of resentfully divorced parents coming from different cultural backgrounds,

She paused with the discomfort of revealing her personal story, but the urge to carry on was too strong.

Being the only daughter of an Armenian father, he himself a child of survivors, and of a mother from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I do know how it feels to be torn between opposite sides, unable to fully belong anywhere, constantly fluctuating between two states of existence.

To this day she had never written anything so personal and so direct to anyone in the group. Her heart pumping hard, she took a breather. What was Baron Baghdassarian going'to think about her now and would he write his true thoughts?

That must be hard. For most Armenians in the diaspora, Hai Dat is the sole psychological anchor that we have in order to sustain an identity. Your situation is different but ultimately we are all Americans and Armenians, that plurality is good as long as we do not lose our anchor.

That was Miserable-Coexistence, a housewife unhappily married to the editor-in-chief of a prominent literary journal in the Bay Area.

Plurality means the state of being more than one. But that was not the case with me. I've never been able to become an Armenian in the first place, Armanoush wrote, realizing she was on the brink of making a confession. I need to find my identity. You know what I've been secretly contemplating? Going to visit my family's house in Turkey. Grandma always talks about this gorgeous house in Istanbul. I'll go and see it with my own eyes. This is a journey into my family's past, as well as into my future. The Janissary's Paradox will haunt me unless I do something to discover my past.

Wait, wait, wait, Lady Peacock/Siramark typed in panic. What the hell do you think you are doing? Are you planning to go to Turkey on your own, did you take leave of your senses?

I can find connections. It's not that difficult.

How so Madame My-Exiled-Soul? Lady Peacock/Siramark insisted. How far do you think you can go with that name on your passport?

Why don't you instead directly walk into a police headquarters in Istanbul and get yourself nicely arrested! broke in Anti-Khavurma, a grad student in Near Eastern Studies at Columbia University.

Armanoush felt this could be the right moment to confess another fundamental truth of her life. Finding the right connections might not be that difficult for me since my mother is now married to a Turk.

There was an unsettling lull. For a full minute no one wrote anything back, so Armanoush continued.

His name is Mustafa, he is a geologist who works for a company in Arizona. He's a nice man, but he is completely disinterested in history and ever since he arrived in the USA, which is like twenty years ago, he has never been back home. He didn't even invite his family to the wedding. Something's fishy there but I don't know what. He just doesn't talk about that. But I know he has a large family in Istanbul. I asked him once what kind of people they were and he said: Oh, they are just ordinary people, like you and me.

He doesn't sound like the most sensitive man on earth-that-is, of course, if men can ever have feelings, barged in the Daughter of Sappho, a lesbian bartender who had recently found a job in a shabby reggae bar in Brooklyn.

He sure doesn't, Miserable-Coexistence added. Does he have a heart?

Oh, he does. He loves my mom, and my mom loves him, Armanoush replied. She realized she had for the first time recognized the love between her mother and stepfather, as if seeing them through a stranger's eyes. Anyway, I can stay with his family; after all I am his stepdaughter, I guess they will have to accept me as a guest. It's a puzzle to me how t will be received by ordinary Turks. A real Turkish family, not one of those Americanized academics.

What are you going to talk about with ordinary Turks? asked Lady Peacock/Siramark. Look, even the well-educated are either nationalist or ignorant. Do you think ordinary people will be interested in accepting historical truths? Do you think they are going to say: Oh yeah, we are sorry we massacred and deported you guys and then contentedly denied it all. Why do you want to get yourself in trouble?

I understand that. But you should try to understand me as well.

Armanoush felt a sudden surge of despondency. Disclosing one secret after another had triggered the feeling of being lonely in this huge world-something she always knew about but waited for the right moment to face. You guys were all born into the Armenian community and never had to prove you were one of them. Whereas I have been stuck on this threshold since the day I was born, constantly fluctuating between a proud but traumatized Armenian family and a hysterically antiArmenian mom. For me to be able to become an Armenian American the way you guys are, I need to find my Armenianness first. If this requires a voyage into the past, so be it, I am going to do that, no matter what the Turks will say or do.

But how will your father and his family let you go to Turkey? That was Alex the Stoic, a Bostonian Greek American who was content with life as long as he was surrounded by sunny weather, tasty food, and pretty women. As a loyal follower of Zeno, he believed that people should do their best not to push their limits and be happy with what they had. Don't you think your family in San Francisco will be worried?

Worried? Armanoush grimaced as the faces of her aunts and grandmother crossed her mind. She knew they would be worried sick.

They should not know anything about this, for their own good. Spring break is coming and I can spend the whole ten days in Istanbul. Dad will think I am in Arizona with my mom. And mom will think l am still here in San Francisco. They never talk to each other. And my stepfather never talks with his family in Istanbul. There's no way this can be revealed. It'll be a secret. Armanoush squinted at the screen as if she were perplexed by the statement she had typed there. If I keep calling my mom on a daily basis and my dad every two or three days, I can keep everything under control.

Nice plan! Once in Istanbul, Lady Peacock/Siramark suggested, you can send reports to the cafe every day.

Wow, you will be our war reporter, enthused Anti-Khavurma, but there followed an even longer pause as no one joined in the joke.

Armanoush leaned back in her chair. Deep in the stillness of the night she could hear her father's unruffled breathing and her grandmother tossing in her bed. She felt her body slipping sideways, as if part of her craved sitting in this chair all night long to savor what insomnia was like, while part of her wanted to go to bed and fall into a deep slumber. She munched the last bit of her apple, feeling a rush of adrenaline about her dangerous decision.

Armanoush turned off the table lamp, leaving a grainy light radiating from the computer. Just when she was about to exit Cafe Constantinopolis, however, a line appeared on the screen.

Wherever your inner journey might take you, please take care of yourself dear Madame My-Exiled-Soul, and don't let the Turks treat you badly.

It was Baron Baghdassarian.