The Bastard of Istanbul

SEVEN Wheat

It had been more than two hours since she had woken up, but Asya Kazanci was still lying in bed under a goose-feather quilt, listening to the myriad sounds only Istanbul is capable of producing while her mind meticulously composed a Personal Manifesto of Nihilism.

Article One: If you cannot find a reason to love the life you are living, do not pretend to love the life you are living.

She gave this statement some thought and decided she liked it well enough to make it the opening line of her manifesto. As she proceeded into the second article, outside on the street somebody slammed on his brakes. In next to no time the driver was heard swearing and shouting at the top of his voice at some pedestrian who had materialized on the road, crossing an intersection diagonally and also on a red light. The driver yelled and yelled until his voice dwindled amid the humming of the city.

Article Two: The overwhelming majority of people never think and those who think never become the overwhelming majority. Choose your side.Article Three: If you cannot choose, then just exist; be a mushroom or a plant.

"I cannot believe you are stilll in the same position that I found you in half an hour ago! What the hell are you doing in bed, lazy girl?"

That was Auntie Banu, having ducked her head into the room without feeling the need to knock on the door first. She was wearing an eye-catching head scarf this morning of a hue so dazzlingly red that from a distance it made her head look like a huge, ripe tomato. "We have finished a whole samovar of tea while waiting for you, our Lady Queen. Come on, rise and shine! Can't you smell the grilled sucuk? Aren't you hungry?" She slammed the door shut before waiting for an answer.

Asya muttered under her breath as she pulled the quilt up to her nose and turned to the other side.

Article Four: If you have no interest in their answers, then do not ask questions.

There amid the typical bustle of a weekend breakfast, she could hear the water dropping from the tiny faucet of the samovar, the seven eggs feverishly boiling in a stockpot, the slices of sucuk sizzling inside the grill pan, and somebody continually flipping through the TV channels, skipping from cartoons to pop music videos and from there, to local and international news. Without needing to sneak a peek, Asya knew that it was Grandma Gulsum who was in charge of the samovar; just like she could tell it was Auntie Banu who grilled the sucuk, her unparalleled appetite having returned now that the forty days of Sufi penitence was over and she had successfully declared herself a clairvoyant. Asya also knew that it was Auntie Feride who flipped through the channels, unable to decide on one, having enough room in the vast land of schizophrenic paranoia to absorb them all, cartoons and pop music and news at the same time, just like she yearned for success in multiple tasks in life and ended up accomplishing none.

Article Five: If you have no reason or ability to accomplish anything, then just practice the art of becoming.

Article Six: If you have no reason or ability to practice the art of becoming, then just be.

"Asya!!!" The door banged open and Auntie Zeliha rammed in, her green eyes glittering like two round pieces of jade. "Do we have to keep sending envoys to your bed to make you join us?"

Article Seven: If you have no reason or ability to be, then just endure.

"Asya!!! "

"What?!!!" Asya's head popped up from under the bedcovers in a curly, raven ball of fury. Jumping to her feet she kicked the pair of lavender slippers beside the bed, missing one of them but managing to catapult the other directly on top of the dresser where it hit the mirror and from there parachuted to the floor. She then pulled up her loose-around-the-waist pajamas in a funny sort of way, which, if truth be told, did not quite support the dramatic effect she wanted to generate.

"For heaven's sake, can't I possibly have a moment's peace on a Sunday morning?"

"Regrettably there exists no moment on earth that lasts two hours," Auntie Zeliha pointed out, after watching the distressing trajectory of the slipper. "Why are you getting on my nerves? If this is a teenage rebellion that you are going through, you're too late, miss, you should have been there at least five years ago. Remember, you are already nineteen."

"Yeah, the age you had me out of wedlock," Asya croaked, knowing she shouldn't be so brutal but doing it anyway.

Standing in the doorway, Auntie Zeliha stared at Asya with the disappointment of a visual artist who after drinking and working on a piece of art all night long sleeps with satisfaction, only to wake up later the next morning confronted with the bedlam he has created while intoxicated. Despite the dourness of the discovery, she didn't say anything for a full minute. Then her lips twisted into a morose smile as if she had just realized that the face she had been looking at was in fact her own image in the mirror, so alike and yet completely detached. Her daughter had turned out to be just like her in character, though vastly different in appearance.

As far as the personality went, it was the same skepticism, the same unruliness, the same bitterness she had displayed when she was Asya's age. Before she knew it, she had neatly passed on the role of the maverick of the Kazanci family to her daughter. Fortunately, Asya didn't look world-weary or angst-ridden yet, being too young for all of that. But the temptation to raze the edifice of her own existence was there, softly glittering in her eyes, the sweet lure of selfdestruction that only the sophisticated or the saturnine will ever suffer from.

As far as the appearance went, however, Auntie Zeliha could plainly see that Asya barely resembled her. She was not and probably would never become a beautiful woman. Not that there was anything wrong with her body or face or anything. In point of fact, when regarded independently every part of her was in good shape: the right height and weight, the right curly raven hair, the right chin… but when added together, there was something flawed in the combination. She wasn't ugly either, not at all. If anything, a mediocre prettiness, one that is good to look at but won't stick in anybody's mind. Her face was so average many who met her for the first time had the impression of having seen her before. She was uniquely ordinary. Rather than "beautiful," "cute" would be the best compliment she could get at this stage, which was perfectly okay, except that here she was painfully going through a phase of her life in which "cuteness" was the last thing she wanted to be associated with. Twenty years down the road she would come to see her body differently. Asya was one of those women who though not pretty in their teens or attractive in their youth, could nevertheless become quite good-looking in their middle age, provided they could endure until then.

Regrettably Asya was not blessed with even a wee bit of faith. She was too mordant to have confidence in the flow of time. She was a burning fire inside without the slightest faith in the righteousness of the divine order. In that respect too, she greatly resembled no one but her mother. With this kind of moral fiber and in this mood, there was no way she could be patient and faithful, waiting for the day life would turn her body to her advantage. At this point in time, Auntie Zeliha could clearly see that the knowledge of her physical dullness, among other things, was pricking at her daughter's young heart. If only she could tell her that the beauties would only attract the worst guys. If only she could make her understand how lucky she was not to be born too beautiful; that in fact both men and women would be more benevolent to her, and that her life would be better off, yes, much better off without the exquisiteness she now so craved.

Still without a word Auntie Zeliha walked toward the dresser, fetched the slipper, and placed the now united pair in front of Asya's naked feet. She stood up before her mutinous daughter, who instantly lifted her chin and straightened her back in the posture of a proud prisoner of war who had surrendered arms but certainly not his dignity.

"Let's go!" Auntie Zeliha commanded. Mutely, mother and daughter convoyed toward the living room. The folding table was long set for breakfast. Despite her grump iness Asya couldn't help noticing that when the table was festooned like this, it fit perfectly, almost picturesquely, with the huge, firebrick rug underneath, glowing in its intricate floral patterns within a handsome coral border. Just like the rug, the table above looked ornamented. There were black olives, red pepper-stuffed green olives, white cheese, braided cheese, goat cheese, boiled eggs, honeycombs, buffalo cream, homemade apricot marmalade, homemade raspberry jam, and olive-oil-soaked minted tomatoes in china bowls. The delectable smell of newly baked borek wafted from the kitchen: white cheese, spinach, butter, and parsley melting into one another amid thin layers of phyllo pastry.

Now ninety-six years old, Petite-Ma was sitting at the far end of the table, holding a teacup even thinner than herself. With an engrossed and somewhat befuddled look on her face, she was watching the canary twittering in the cage by the balcony door, as if she had only now noticed the bird. Perhaps she had. Having entered the fifth stage of Alzheimer's, she had started to muddle up the most familiar faces and facts of her life.

Last week, for instance, toward the end of the afternoon prayer, as soon as she had bent down and put her forehead on her little rug for the stage of sajda, she had forgotten what to do next. The words of the prayer she had to utter had all of a sudden fastened together into an elongated chain of letters and walked away in tandem, like a black, hairy caterpillar with too many feet to count. After a while, the caterpillar had stopped, turned around, and waved at Petite-Ma from a distance, as if surrounded by glass walls, so clearly visible yet unreachable. Lost and confused, Petite-Ma had just sat there facing the Qibla, glued on her rug with a prayer scarf on her head and the string of amber prayer beads in her hand, motionless and soundless, until someone noticed the situation and lifted her up.

"What was the rest of it?" Petite-Ma had asked in panic when they made her lie on the sofa and put soft cushions under her head. "In the sajda you must say Subhana rabbiyal-ala. You must say it at least thrice. I did. I said it three times. Subhana rabbiyal-ala, Subhana rabbiyal-ala, Subhana rabbiyal-ala," she twirped the words repeatedly, as if in a frenzy. "And then what? What is next?"

As luck would have it, it was Auntie Zeliha who happened to be by her side when Petite-Ma raised this question. Having no practice in namaz, or in any religious duty for that matter, she had absolutely no idea what her grandmother might be talking about. But she wanted to help, to soothe the old woman's anguish in any way she could. Thus she fetched the Holy Qur'an, and skimmed through the pages until she came across a resemblance of solace in some verse: "Look what it says. Whenn the call is sounded for prayer on Fridays, hasten to the remembrance of God… but when the prayer is ended, disperse abroad in the land and seek of God's grace and remember God, that you may be successful" (62:9-10).

"What do you mean?" Petite-Ma blinked her eyes, now more lost than ever.

"I mean, now that the prayer has ended in one way or another, you can stop thinking about it. That's what it says here, right? Come on Petite-Ma, disperse abroad in the land… and have supper with us."

It had worked. Petite-Ma had stopped worrying about the forgotten line and had dined with them peacefully. Nonetheless, incidences like this had lately started to occur with an alarming frequency. Often subdued and withdrawn, there were times in which she forgot the simplest things, including where she was, which day of the week it was, or who these strangers were with whom she sat at the same table. And yet there were also times it was hard to believe she was ill, as her mind seemed as clear as newly polished Venetian glass. This morning it was hard to tell. Too early to tell.

"Good morning, Petite-Ma!" Asya exclaimed as she shuffled her lavender feet toward the table, having finally washed her face and brushed her teeth. She leaned over the old woman and gave her a sloppy kiss on both cheeks.

Ever since she was a little girl, of all the women in her family, Petite-Ma retained a most special place in Asya's heart. She loved her dearly. Unlike some others in the family, Petite-Ma had always been capable of loving without suffocating. Shewould never nag or nitpick or sting. Her protectiveness was not possessive. From time to time she secretly put grains of wheat sanctified with prayers into Asya's pockets to save her from the evil eye. Other than crusading against the evil eye, laughing was the thing she did best and mostthat is, until the day her illness escalated. Back in the past, she and Asya used to laugh together a lot: Petite-Ma, a lengthy stream of mellifluous chuckles; Asya, a sudden spurt of rich, resonant tones. Nowadays, though deeply worried about her great-grandmother's well-being, Asya was also respectful of the autonomous realm of amnesia that she drifted into, being constantly denied autonomy herself. And the more the old woman digressed from them, the closer she felt to her.

"Good morning my pretty great-granddaughter," Petite-Ma replied, impressing everyone with the clarity of her memory.

Sitting there with a remote control in her hand, Auntie Feride chirped without looking at her. "At last, the grumpy princess is awake." She sounded jovial despite the tinge of harangue in her voice. Just this morning she had dyed her hair, turning it to a light blond, almost ashen. By now Asya knew too well that a radical change in hairstyle was a sign of a radical change in mood. She inspected Auntie Feride for traces of insanity. Other than that she seemed to be absorbed in the TV, watching with delight a terribly untalented pop singer spinning around in a dance too ridiculous to be real, Asya couldn't find any.

"You have to get ready, you know, our guest is arriving today," Auntie Banu said as she entered the living room with the tray of borek fresh out of the oven, visibly pleased to have her daily carbohydrates. "We need to get the house ready before she arrives."

Trying to push Sultan the Fifth away from the dripping little faucet with her feet, Asya poured herself tea from the steaming samovar and asked dully: "Why are you all so excited about this American girl?" She took a sip of the tea, only to make a face and search for sugar. One, two… she filled up the tiny glass with four cubes of sugar.

"What do you mean `why are you all excited'? She is a guest! She is coming all the way from the other side of the globe." Auntie Feride stretched her arm forward in the Nazi salute to indicate where and how far the other side of the globe was. The thought of the globe brought an agitated timbre to her voice, as the map of global atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns flashed in her mind's eye. The last time Auntie Feride had seen this map on paper, she was in high school. This nobody knew, but she had learned the map by heart down to its tiniest detail, and today it remained engraved in her memory as vividly as the day she had first scrutinized it.

"Most importantly, she is a visitor sent to us by your uncle," broke in Grandma Gulsum, who still tenaciously retained her reputation of having been Ivan the Terrible in another life.

"My uncle? Which uncle? The one I have never seen to this day?" Asya tasted her tea. It was still bitter. She threw in another cube of sugar. "Hello, wake up everyone! The man you are talking about has not visited us even once ever since he stepped on American soil. The only thing we have received from him to prove he is still alive are patchy postcards of Arizona landscapes," Asya said, with a venomous look. "Cactus under the sun, cactus at twilight, cactus with purple flowers, cactus with red birds…. The guy doesn't even care enough to change his postcard style."

"He also sends his wife's pictures," Auntie Feride added to be fair.

"I couldn't care less about those pictures. Plump blond wife smiling in front of their adobe house, where by the way we have never been invited; plump blond wife smiling in the Grand Canyon; plump blond wife smiling, wearing a huge Mexican sombrero; plump blond wife smiling with a dead coyote on the porch; plump blond wife smiling, cooking pancakes in the kitchen…. Aren't you sick of him sending us every month the poses of this complete stranger? Why is she smiling at us, anyway? We have not even met the woman, for Allah's sake!" Asya gulped her tea, ignoring the fact that it was still scalding hot.

"Journeys are not safe. The roads are full of perils. Airplanes are hijacked, cars crash in accidents even trains tumble. Eight people died in a car accident yesterday on the Aegean Coast," Auntie Feride noted. Unable to make eye contact with anyone, her eyeballs drew nervous circles around the table until they landed on a black olive resting on her plate.

Every time Auntie Feride conveyed ghastly news from the third page of the Turkish tabloids there followed a prickly silence. This time it was no different. In the ensuing silence Grandma Gulsum grimaced, disturbed to hear her only son being disparaged like this; Auntie Banu tugged on the ends oilier head scarf; Auntie Cevriye tried to remember what kind of an animal "coyote" was, but since twenty-four years in the profession of teaching had made her terrific with answers and equally bad with questions, she didn't dare ask anyone; Petite-Ma stopped nibbling the slice of sucuk on her plate; and Auntie Feride tried to think of some other accidents she'd read about, but instead of more macabre news, she recalled the bright blue sombrero that Mustafa's American wife was wearing in one of the pictures-if only she could find anything close to that in Istanbul, she sure would like to wear it day and night. In the meantime, no one noticed that Auntie Zeliha's face looked woeful all of a sudden.

"We need to face the truth!" Asya announced with certitude. "All these years you have all doted on Uncle Mustafa as the one and only precious son of this family, and the instant he flew from the nest, he forgot about you. Isn't it obvious that the man doesn't give a hoot about his family? Why should he mean anything for us, then?"

"The boy is busy," Grandma Gulsum interjected. In truth, she favored her son, of which she had only one, over the daughters, of which she had too many. "It is not easy to be abroad. America is a long way away."

"Yeah, of course it's a long way, especially when you consider the fact that you need to swim the Atlantic Ocean and walk the entire European continent," Asya said, biting into a slice of white cheese to soothe her tea-burned tongue. To her surprise the cheese was really good, soft and salty, the way she liked it. Finding it a bit difficult to gripe and enjoy the food at the same time, she shut up for a second and chewed nervously.

Taking advantage of the momentary lull, Auntie Banu launched into a moral story, as she always did in times of distress. She told them the story of a man who decided to travel the entire globe round and round, in an endeavor to escape his mortality. North and south, east and west, he wandered every which way he could. Once, in one of his numerous trips, he unexpectedly ran into Azrail, the angel of death, in Cairo. Azrail's piercing gaze raked the man with a mysterious expression. He neither said a word nor followed him. The man right away abandoned Cairo, traveling nonstop thereafter until he arrived in a small, sleepy town in China. Thirsty and tired he rushed into the first tavern on his way. There, next to the table to which he was ushered, sat Azrail patiently waiting for him, this time with a relieved expression on his face. "I was so surprised to run into you in Cairo," he rasped to the man, "for your destiny said it wass here in China that we two would meet."

Asya knew this story by heart, just like she knew the many other stories repeatedly narrated under this roof. What she didn't understand, and didn't think she ever could, was the thrill her aunts derived from narrating a story of which the punch line was already known. The air in the living room grew snug, all too sheltered, enveloped by the recurrence of the routine, as if life were one long, uninterrupted rehearsal and everyone memorized their speech. During the ensuing minutes, as the women around her jumped from tittle-tattle to tittle-tattle, each story triggering the next, Asya perked up, looking quite unlike the girl she had been earlier this morning. Sometimes she herself was baffled by her own inconsistencies. How could she so begrudge the ones she loved most? It was as if her mood were a yo-yo, bobbing up and down, now incensed, now contented. In this respect too she resembled her mother.

A simit vendor's monotonous voice infiltrated from the open window, piercing the ongoing chatter. Auntie Banu rushed to the window and popped her red head outside. "Simitist! Simitist! Come this way!" she yelled. "How much are they?"

Not that she didn't know how much a simit cost, she sure did. The question was less a query than a rite, performed dutifully. That is why as soon as the question came out of her mouth, she proceeded to the next line, without waiting for the man to answer. "All right, give us eight simits."

Every Sunday at breakfast they bought eight simits, one for each person in the family, and then one extra, for the missing sibling now far away.

"Oh, they smell superb." Auntie Banu beamed when she returned to the table wearing the simits on each arm like a circus acrobat ready to juggle with hoops. She left one in front of everyone, scattering the sesame seeds all over. Visibly relaxed now that she had a stockpile of carbohydrates, Auntie Banu started to cram them down, combining simit with borek, and borek with bread. But soon after, either because she was struck by heartburn or by a sullen thought, she put on a grim expression, like the one she used when telling a customer about an ominous portent flickering in the tarot cards. "It all depends on how you see things." Auntie Banu shot up her eyebrows, betraying the gravity of the statement she was going to announce.

"Once there was; once there wasn't…. There lived two basket weavers back in the old Ottoman days. Both were hard workers, but one had faith, the other was always grumpy. One day the sultan came to the village. He said to them: `I will fill your baskets with wheat, and if you take good care of this wheat, the grains will turn into golden coins.' The first weaver accepted the offer with joy and filled his baskets. The second weaver, who was no less crabby than you, my dear, refused the great sultan's gift. You know what happened in the end?"

"Of course I do," Asya said. "How can I not know the end of a story I must have listened to at least a hundred times? But what you don't know is the damage these stories do to a child's creativity. It is because of this ridiculous story that I spent my preschool years sleeping with a wheat straw under my pillow, hoping it would turn into a golden coin the next morning. And then what? I start going to school. One day I tell the other kids how I will soon become rich with my gold-to-be wheat, and the next thing I know, I am the butt of every silly joke in the classroom. You made an idiot out of me."

Of all the shocks and traumas Asya suffered in her childhood, none remained in her memory more bitterly than the wheat incident. It was then that she reheard the word that would keep escorting her in the years to come, always at those moments when she least expected it: "Bastard!" Until that wheat incident in her first year at primary school, Asya had only once heard the word bastard but not minded it much, primarily because she didn't know what it meant. The other students were quick to make up for her lack of knowledge. But that part of the story she keenly kept to herself and instead poured another tea, burning hot.

"Listen Asya, you can keep grouching to us as much as you like, but when our guest arrives, you should pipe down and be nice to her. Your English is better than mine and better than anyone else's in the family."

This was not a modest statement on the part of Auntie Banu since it made her look as if she spoke some English when in fact she spoke none. Sure, she had taken English courses back in high school, but whatever she may have learned there, she had forgotten twice as much. Since the art of fortune-telling had no foreign language requirement, she never felt the need to study English. As for Auntie Feride, she had never been interested in learning English in the first place, choosing German at school. But since that coincided with the time she had lost interest in every course other than physical geography, her German had not made much progress either. With Petite-Ma and Grandma Gulsum as disqualified members, that left only Auntie Zeliha and Auntie Cevriye with enough English to move forward from beginner level to an intermediate stage. That said, there was a stark difference between the two aunts' command of the English language. Auntie Zeliha spoke a daily-life English, woven with slang and idioms and argot, which she practiced almost every day with the foreigners visiting her tattoo parlor; while Auntie Cevriye spoke a grammar-oriented, frozen-in-time, textbook English taught at high schools and at high schools only. Concomitantly, Auntie Cevriye could distinguish simple, complex, and compound sentences, identify adverb, adjective, and noun clauses, even recognize misplaced and dangling modifiers in syntactic structure, but she could not talk.

"Therefore, dear, you will be her translator. You will ferry her words to us and our words to her." Auntie Banu narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow in an attempt to hint at the magnitude of what she was about to announce. "Like a bridge extending over cultures, you will connect the East and the West."

Asya crinkled her nose, as if she had just detected an awful stink in the house that was apparent only to her, and screwed up her lips, as if to say, "You wish!"

In the meantime nobody noticed that Petite-Ma had risen from her chair and approached the piano, which had been unplayed in years. From time to time they used the top of the closed piano as a sideboard for the extra dishes and plates that did not fit on the dinner table.

"It is wonderful that you two girls are the same age," Auntie Banu concluded her soliloquy. "You two will become friends."

Asya stared at Auntie Banu with renewed interest, wondering if she would ever stop seeing her as a kid. When she was little, whenever another child was brought to the house, her aunts would put the two of them together and order: "Play now! Be friends!" Being of the same age group automatically meant getting along well; somehow peers were regarded as the broken pieces of the same puzzle, expected to suddenly make it complete when brought side by side.

"This is going to be so exciting. And when she goes back to her country, you girls can become pen pals," Auntie Cevriye trilled. She was a strong believer in pen-pal friendships. As a comradeteacher of the Turkish Republican regime it was her belief that every Turkish citizen, no matter how ordinary she might be in society, had a duty to proudly represent the motherland vis-a-vis the whole world. What better opportunity than in an international pen-pal friendship was there to represent one's country?

"You girls will exchange letters to and fro between San Francisco and Istanbul," Auntie Cevriye murmured half to herself. Corresponding with a stranger without an educational purpose being utterly unthinkable for her, she then lectured on the underlying pedagogical reason. "The problem with us Turks is that we are constantly being misinterpreted and misunderstood. The Westerners need to see that we are not like the Arabs at all. This is a modern, secular state."

With Auntie Feride increasing the volume of the TV all of a sudden, they got distracted by a new Turkish pop video. As her eyes slid to the zany singer, Asya noticed that the woman's hairstyle looked familiar, very familiar. Her gaze bounced back and forth between the screen and Auntie Feride, now recognizing where the inspiration for the new hairdo had stemmed from.

"The Americans have mostly been brainwashed by the Greeks and the Armenians, who unfortunately arrived in the United States before the Turks did," Auntie Cevriye continued. "So they are misled into believing that Turkey is the country of the Midnight Express. You'll show the American girl what a beautiful country this is, and promote international friendship and cultural understanding."

Asya gasped with a frustrated expression on her face, and she could have more or less remained in that position had her eldest aunt not proven relentless.

"What's more, she will improve your English and perhaps you will teach her Turkish. Won't this be a wonderful friendship?"

Friendship…. Speaking of which, Asya rose to her feet and grabbed her half-eaten simit, getting ready to leave to see somee real friends.

"Where are you going, miss? The breakfast is not over yet," Auntie Zeliha said, opening her mouth for the first time since they sat down at the table. Working amid the hustle and bustle of the tattoo store six days a week from twelve to nine, it was she more than anyone else in the family who savored the droopy slowness of Sunday-morning breakfasts.

"There's this Chinese Film Festival," Asya answered, her voice slightly strained from the effort to look serious and sincere. "The professor of one of my courses asked us to go and see a movie this weekend and then write a critical, analytical paper on it."

"What kind of an assignment is that?" Auntie Cevriye cocked an eyebrow, always wary of unconventional pedagogical techniques.

But Auntie Zeliha did not push it any further. "All right, go and see your Chinese movie," she nodded. "But don't be late, miss. I want you back home before five o'clock. We pick up our guest at the airport this evening."

Asya grabbed her hippie bag and hurried toward the door. Just when she was about to step outside, however, she heard a most unexpected sound. Somebody was playing the piano. Timid, rickety notes looking for a melody long lost.

A look of recognition appeared on Asya's face as she whispered to herself: "Petite-Ma!"

Petite-Ma was born in Thessaloniki. She was only a little girl when she migrated with her mother, a widow, to Istanbul. It was the year 1923. The time Petite-Ma arrived in this city cannot be confused for it coincided with the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic.

"You and the Republic have arrived in this city together. I was desperately waiting for both of you," her husband Rlza Selim Kazanci told her amorously years later. "You both ended the old regimes forever, the one in the country and the one in my house. When you came to me, life brightened up."

"When I came to you, you were sad but strong. I brought you joy and you gave me strength," Petite-Ma had said back.

The truth is, Petite-Ma being so pretty and convivial, the number of men who asked for her hand by the time she was sixteen could have made a line from one end of the old Galata Bridge to the other. Among all the candidates who knocked on her door, there was one and only one that she felt sympathy for the moment she set eyes on him from behind the latticework partition: a portly, tall man who went by the name Riza.

He had a thick beard and a thin mustache, full, somber, dark eyes, and was no lesss than thirty-three years older than her. He had been married before and rumor had it that his wife, a heartless woman, had abandoned him and their boy. After his wife's betrayal, and though left on his own with a toddler, he had for a long time refused to remarry, preferring to live in his family mansion all alone. There he had stayed, inflating his wealth, which he shared with his friends, and his wrath, which he reserved for his enemies. He was a self-made businessman, once a cauldron maker, an artisan, then an entrepreneur wise enough to enter into the flag-making business at the right time and the right place. During the 1920s the new Turkish Republic was still throbbing with fervor, and manual work, though systematically venerated in government propaganda, brought little money. The new regime needed teachers to create patriotic Turks out of their students, financiers to help generate a national bourgeoisie, and flag manufacturers to adorn the entire country with the Turkish flag, but it surely did not need any cauldron makers. This is how Riza Selim entered into the flag-making business.

Despite earning oodles of money and influential friends in his new business, when choosing a surname in 1925, after the Law of Surnames obliged every Turkish citizen to carry a surname, it was his first craft that Riza Selim wished to be called after: Kazanci.

Though fine-looking and definitely well off, given his age and the trauma of his first marriage (who knows why his wife abandoned him; perhaps the man was a pervert, the women gossiped), Riza Selim Kazanci was one of the last men on earth Petite-Ma's mother would have liked to see her treasured daughter marry. There sure were better candidates than him. But despite her mother's persistent objections, Petite-Ma refused to listen to anyone but her heart. Perhaps it was because there was something in Riza Selim Kazanci's dark eyes that made Petite-Ma grasp, not intellectually but intuitively, that he was gifted with something barred to many in this world: the ability to love another human being more than you love yourself. Though too young and too inexperienced at thee age of sixteen, Petite-Ma was sensible enough to comprehend what an exceptional bliss it could be to be loved and adored by a man with such a gift. Riza Selim Kazanci's eyes were soft and sparkly, just like his voice; there was something in him that made one feel secure in his company, cherished and protected even amid surrounding turbulence. This man was no deserter.

But that was not the only reason why Petite-Ma was attracted to Riza Selim Kazancl. The truth is, she was drawn to his story long before being attracted to him. She sensed how badly his soul had been bruised by the desertion of his first wife. She sure could mend those bruises. After all, women enjoy taking care of one another's wreckages. Petite-Ma didn't take long to make up her mind. She was going to marry him and nobody, not even her destiny, could change that.

If Petite-Ma so intuitively believed in Riza Selim Kazanci, he, in turn, was going to merit that trust until his last breath. This blond, blue-eyed wife, who came to him with a furry, snow white cat instead of a proper dowry, was the delight of his life. Never a day did he refuse to fulfill any demand of hers, no matter how whimsical. That, however, was hardly the case with the then six-year-old boy at home: Levent Kazanci never accepted Petite-Ma as a mother. He resisted and ridiculed her at every opportunity for years to come, ending his childhood with suppressed bitterness, if childhood could ever come to an end when one remained so bitter inside.

At a time when marriage without kids was, if not a sign of an incurable malady, then surely a sacrilege, Petite-Ma and Riza Selim Kazanci didn't have a child. Not because he was too old but because at the beginning she was too young and disinterested in raising kids, and then when she changed her mind, he was simply too old. Levent Kazanci remained the only child to continue the lineage, a title he wasn't thrilled to hold.

Though saddened and offended by her stepson's acrimony, Petite-Ma was an exuberant, extroverted girl with a wide imagination and an even wider list of requests. There were things in this world far more interesting than nursing babies, such as learning the piano. Before long, a Bentley piano made by Stroud Piano Co., Ltd., in England was gleaming in the best spot in the living room. It was with this piano that Petite-Ma started taking her first lessons from her first piano teacher-a white Russian musician who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution and settled permanently in Istanbul. Petite-Ma was his best student. She not only had the talent but also the perseverance to make the piano a lifelong companion rather than a fleeting pastime.

Rachmaninoff, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky were her favorites. Whenever she was alone at home, playing just for herself with Pasha the First on her lap, these were the composers whose works she would perform. When she played for guests, however, she'd choose songs from an entirely different repertoire. A Western repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and above all, Wagner, on those special occasions when they had government officials and their dainty wives as guests. After supper the men would gather near the fireplace with drinks in their hands to discuss world politics. The late 1920s were the years when national politics could only be either venerated or reaffirmed, the louder the better since the walls had ears. Accordingly, whenever there emerged a need for genuine discussion, the new Turkish Republic's political and cultural elite instantly switched to world politics, which was a mess on its own and thereby always interesting to talk about.

Meanwhile, the ladies clustered at the other end of the house, holding crystal glasses of mint liquor, eyeing one another's clothes. In the ladies section there were two types of women, starkly different from each other: the professionals and the wives.

The professionals were the comrade-women, the epitome of the new Turkish female: idealized, glorified, and championed by the reformist elite. These women constituted the new professionalslawyers, teachers, judges, managers, clerks, academics…. Unlike their mothers they were not confined to the house and had the chance to climb the social, economic, and cultural ladder, provided that they shed their sexuality and femininity on the way there. More often than not they wore two-piece suits in browns, blacks, and grays-the colors of chastity, modesty, and partisanship. They had short haircuts, no makeup, no accessories. They moved in defeminized, desexualized bodies. And whenever the wives giggled in that annoyingly feminine way of theirs, the professionals tightened their fingers around the small, leather purses under their arms, as if they had some top-secret information in them and had given their word of honor to protect it no matter what. The wives, conversely, came to these invitations wearing satin evening gowns in whites, pasty pinks, and pastel blues-the hues of ladylikeness, innocence, and vulnerability. They didn't like the professionals very much, whom they regarded more as "comrades" than women, and the professionals didn't like them, whom they regarded more as "concubines" than women. In the end nobody found anyone "woman" enough.

Each time the tension between the comrades and the concubines intensified, Petite-Ma, who identified herself with neither group, secretly gestured to the maid to serve mint liquor in crystal glasses and almond paste sweets on silver plates. This duo, she had discovered, was the only thing that could soothe the nerves of every single Turkish woman in the room, no matter which camp she was in.

Late into the party, Riza Selim Kazanci would call his wife and ask her to play the piano for the honored guests. Petite-Ma never refused. In addition to Western composers, she played national anthems exuding patriotic fervor. The guests cheered and applauded. Particularly in the year 1933, when the anthem of the Tenth Anniversary was composed, "March of the Republic," she had to play it over and over again. The anthem was everywhere, echoing in their ears when they slept. It was a time when even babies in their cradles were put to sleep with this hearty rhythm.

Consequently, at a time when Turkish women were going through a radical transformation in the public sphere thanks to a series of social reforms, Petite-Ma was savoring her own independence within the private sphere of her home. Though her interest in the piano never diminished, it didn't take Petite-Ma too long to come up with a list of new diversions. Hence in the years to follow, she would learn French, pen never-to-be-published short stories, excel in different techniques of oil painting, doll herself up in shiny shoes and satin ball gowns, drag her husband to dances, throw crazy parties, and never do a day of housework. Whatever his perky wife asked for, Riza Selim Kazanci complied with fully. He was usually a composed man with a lot of esteem for others and a profound sense of justice. However, like too many made out of a similar mold, he could not be mended once broken. Consequently, there was one topic that brought the bad side out in him: his first wife.

Even years later whenever Petite-Ma happened to ask him anything about his first wife, Riza Selim Kazanci drifted into silence, his eyes shadowed by an uncharacteristic gloom. "What kind of a woman can abandon her son?" he said, his face crumpling with detestation.

"But don't you want to know what happened to her?" PetiteMa inched closer and sat on her husband's lap, caressing his chin softly, as if to cajole him into facing the question.

"I have no interest in learning that slut's fate." Riza Selim Kazanci stiffened, without caring to lower his voice so that Levent wouldn't hear him smear his mother.

"Did she run away with someone else?" Petite-Ma insisted, knowing she was surpassing her limits but confident that she could not fully know what her limits were until she had surpassed them.

"Why are you poking your nose into things that are none of your business?" Riza Selim Kazanci snapped in reply. "Are you interested in repeating the act or what?"

With that Petite-Ma learned what her limits were.

Except for the moments when the topic of the first wife came up, their life flowed tranquilly in the years that followed.. Comfortable and contented. Unusual indeed given that the families around them were anything but. Their contentment was a source of envyy for relatives and friends and neighbors. They would meddle in whenever they could. The most suitable topic to pick on was the couple's childlessness. Many tried to persuade Riza Selim Kazanci to marry another woman before it was too late. Since under the new civil law men could no longer have more than one wife, he would have to divorce this wife of his who, by now everybody suspected, was either barren or bolshie. Riza Selim Kazanci turned a deaf ear to such counsels.

On the day he died, a totally unexpected death common to generations of Kazanci men, Petite-Ma came to believe in the evil eye for the first time in her life. She was convinced that it was the gaze of the jealous people around them that had pierced through the walls of this otherwise blissful konak and killed her husband.

Today she barely remembered any of that. As her creased, bony fingers caressed the old piano, Petite-Ma's days with Riza Selim Kazanci flickered from a distance like a dim, ancient lighthouse misguiding her through the stormy waters of Alzheimer's.

On a divan in a renovated apartment facing the Galata Tower, a neighborhood where the streets never slept and the cobblestones knew many secrets, under the rays of the sunset reflecting from the glass windows of decrepit buildings and amid the squeals of the seagulls, Asya Kazanci sat nude and still, like a statuette absorbing the talent of the artist who had carved her out of a block of marble. As her mind drifted into fantasyland, so did the thick smoke she had just inhaled coil inside her body, burning her lungs, elating her spirits until she finally exhaled it slowly, reluctantly.

"What are you pondering, sweetheart?"

"I am working on Article Eight of my Personal Manifesto of Nihilism," Asya replied as she opened her foggy eyes.

Article Eight: If between society and the Self there lies a cavernous ravine and upon it only a wobbly bridge, you might as well burn that bridge and stay on the side of the Self, safe and sound, unless it is the ravine that you are after.

Asya took another drag, and held the smoke in.

"Here, let me feed you," said the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, taking the joint from her hands. He leaned toward her, his hairy chest pressing against her; she opened her mouth like a blind baby bird ready to be fed. He blew the stream of smoke directly into her mouth; she inhaled it eagerly as if thirstily drinking water.

Article Nine: If the ravine inside enthralls you more than the world outside, you might as well fall in it, fall into yourself.

They repeated the act, he directing the smoke into her mouth, she taking it in again and again, until the last puff of smoke that had disappeared down her throat was released.

"I bet you are feeling better now," cooed the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, his face reflecting his desire for more sex. "There is no cure better than a good screw and a good joint."

Asya bit the inside of her mouth to fight back the urge to raise objections. Instead, she tilted her head toward the open window and stretched her arms as though she were about to embrace the whole city, with all its chaos and splendor.

He in the meantime was busy perfecting his statement: "Let's see. There is nothing so overrated as a bad fuck and nothing so underrated as a good-"

"Shit." Asya lent a hand.

Nodding heartily, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist stood up with only his silken boxers on and his slight beer belly exposed. He lolloped toward the CD player to put on a song, which happened to be one of her all-time Johnny Cash favorites: "Hurt." Swinging with the opening rhythm of the song, he walked back, his eyes all glittery: I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel…

Asya scrunched up her face like she had just been pinched by an invisible needle. "It's such a pity…."

"What is a pity, sweetheart?"

She stared at him with widely opened troubled eyes that seemed to belong to someone three times her age. "It sucks," she groaned. "These managers and organizers, whatever they are called, they organize European tours or Asian tours or even hurrah-perestroikaSoviet Union tours… but if you are a music fan in Istanbul you do not fit into any geographical definition. We fall through the cracks. You know, thee only reason why we don't have as many concerts as we'd like to is the geostrategic position of Istanbul."

"Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West.

If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East." He chuckled. "It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity."

But high above the clouds, Asya didn't hear him. She lit another joint and put it between her chapped lips. She drew a deep puff of indifference, ignoring afterward the feeling of his fingers on her skin, his tongue on her tongue.

"There had to be a way to reach Johnny Cash before he passed away. I mean the guy had to come to Istanbul, he died without knowing he had die-hard fans here…."

The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist broke into a soft smile. He kissed the little mole on her left cheek, caressed her neck gently, until his hands started moving down to her abundant breasts, cupping them each in his hands. The kiss was brash, unhurried, but also woven with a shade of force, if not ferocity. With shimmering eyes he asked, "When are we meeting again?"

"Whenever we both run into each other in Cafe Kundera, I guess." Asya shrugged, pulling herself away from him. When she withdrew, he came closer.

"But when are we meeting here in my house?"

"You mean when are we meeting here in my cathouse?" Asya spit out, no longer fighting back the urge to backbite. "Because as we both know too well, this is not your home! Home is where your wife of so many years is, whereas this place is your secret cathouse where you can imbibe and get laid without your wife knowing a thing. This is where you screw your chicks. The younger, the shallower, the tipsier, the better!"

The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist sighed and grabbed his glass of raki. He drank half in one gulp. His face was marred with a desolation so intense that for a second Asya feared he would either yell at her or start to sob, she could not imagine that much hurt remaining calm. Instead, he muttered in a hoary voice, "You can be so cruel sometimes."

There was an eerie silence in the room, muffled by the screams of the children playing soccer on the street outside. From the pitch of the screams it sounded like one of the boys had just been shown a red card and all the players on his team were now busy arguing with the referee, whoever that was.

"You have such a dark side, Asya," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's voice came from a distance. "Because it doesn't show on your sweet face, it is hard to tell at first glance. But it is there. You have a bottomless potential for demolition."

"Well, I do not demolish anyone, do I?" Asya felt the need to defend herself. "All I want is to be free and to be myself and all that shit…. If only I could be left on my own.."

"If only you could be left on your own so that you could destroy yourself faster and earlier…. Is that what you want? You are attracted to self-destruction like a moth is attracted to light."

Asya snorted a tense chuckle.

"When you drink you drink to extremes, when you criticize you bulldoze, when you get down you sink and hit the bottom. I honestly don't know how to approach you. You are so full of rage, baby…."

"Perhaps it's because I was born a bastard," remarked Asya, taking another puff. "I don't even know who my father is. I never ask, they never tell. Sometimes when my mother looks at me I think she sees him in my face but never says a word. We all pretend there is no such thing as_father. Instead there is only Father, with a capital F. When you have Allah up there in the sky to look after you, who needs a father? Aren't we all His children? Not that my mother buys that crap. I tell you she is more cynical than any woman I've ever known. And that is precisely where the problem is. My mom and I, we are so alike and yet so distant."

She blew a plume of smoke in the direction of the mahogany desk where the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist kept some of his best works, those he was afraid his wife might destroy after one of their frequent fights. He also kept there the first rough sketches of the Amphibian Politician and Rhinoceros Politicus, two new series in which he depicted the members of the Turkish parliament as different animal species. He planned to release this series soon, especially now that the court had agreed to postpone indefinitely his three-year prison sentence for drawing the prime minister as a wolf in sheep's clothing. The main prerequisite of the deferment was that he did not repeat the wrong, which he was determined to do. What was the use of fighting for freedom of expression, he thought, if one didn't fight for freedom of humor first?

At the corner of the desk, beneath the ochre light of a gooseneck art deco table lamp, sat a huge hand-carved wood sculpture of Don Quixote bent over a book, lost in his ruminations. Asya liked this sculpture very much.

"My family is a bunch of clean freaks. Brushing away the dirt and dust of the memories! They always talk about the past, but it is a cleansed version of the past. That's the Kazancis' technique of coping with problems; if something's nagging you, well, close your eyes, count to ten, wish it never happened, and the next thing you know, it has never happened, hurray! Every day we swallow yet another capsule of mendacity…."

What was it that Don Quixote read, Asya wondered in her pixilated mind. What was written on that open page there? Had the sculptor cared to scribble down a few words? Curiously she bolted from the sofa and got closer to the sculpture. Alas, there were no words on the wooden page. She took a long drag before she went back to her seat and started complaining again.

"It annoys me to see all those home-sweet-homes. Sad facsimiles of happy families. You know at times I envy my Petite-Ma, she is almost a hundred years old now, how I wish I had her disease. Sweet Alzheimer's. Memory withers away."

"That's not good, sweetie."

"It might not be good for the people around you, but it's good for you," Asya insisted.

"Well, usually the two are related."

But Asya ignored that. "You know, today Petite-Ma opened her piano after so many years; I heard her play these dissonant sounds. It's depressing. This woman used to play Rachmaninoff, and now she can't even play a silly children's song." She paused for a second, considering what she had just said. Sometimes she talked first, thought later.

"But my point is, she doesn't know that, we do!" Asya exclaimed with a forged zest. "Alzheimer's is not as terrible as it sounds. The past is nothing but a shackle we need to get rid of. Such an excruciating burden. If only I could have no past you know, if only I could be a nobody, start from point zero and just remain there forever. As light as a feather. No family, no memories and all that shit…."

"Everybody needs a past," the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist took a pull from his glass, his expression hovering somewhere between rue and ire.

"Don't count me in because I sure don't!" Asya now grabbed the Zippo on the coffee table and thumbed it to life, only to instantly snap the lighter closed with a sharp click. She liked the sound and repeated the routine several times, without knowing that she drove the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist slightly mad. Click! Click! Click!

"I'd better go." She handed him the Zippo and looked for her clothes. "My dear family has assigned me an important duty. I have to go to the airport with Mom and welcome my American pen pal."

"You have an American pen pal?"

"Sort of. This girl who materialized out of nowhere. So one day I wake up and there is this letter in the mailbox, guess from where? San Francisco! Some girl named Amy. She says she is my uncle Mustafa's stepdaughter. We didn't even know the man had a stepdaughter! So now it dawns on us that this marriage is his wife's second marriage, you know? He never told us that! My grandma almost had a heart attack finding out that her precious son's wife of twenty years was in fact not a virgin when they got married, no sir, no virgin, but a divorcee!"

Asya paused to pay her respects to the song-that had just started to play. It was "It Ain't Me, Babe." She whistled the melody and then mouthed the words before she went back to her speech again.

"Anyway, out of the blue this Amy writes a letter saying she is a college student at the University of Arizona, and she is deeply interested in getting to know other cultures and she looks forward to meeting us one day, blah blah blah. And then she lets the cat out of the bag: By the way, I am coming to Istanbul in a week. May I stay with you at your house?"

"Wow!" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist exclaimed as he threw three ice cubes into his replenished rake glass. "But does she say why she is coming here of all places? Just as a tourist?"

"I dunno," Asya mumbled from the floor on her knees, searching for one of her socks under the divan. "But given that she is a college student, I bet she is doing some research on `Islam and the oppression of women' or `patriarchal precedents in the Middle East.' Otherwise why would she want to stay at our nuthouse-you know, full of women-when there are so many hotels in this city, cheap and funky? I am sure she wants to interview each of us about the situation of women in Muslim countries and all that-"

"Shit!" the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist completed the sentence for her.

"Right!" Asya exclaimed triumphantly, having found the lost sock. In a flash, she donned her skirt and shirt and ran a brush through her hair.

"Well, bring her to Cafe Kundera sometime."

"I'll ask her, but I'm sure she'll want to go to a museum instead." Asya grunted as she put on her leather boots. She glanced around to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything. "Well, I will certainly have to spend some time with her, since my family keeps prodding me about guiding her all over the place so that she can marvel at Istanbul. They want her to sing the praises of this city when she goes back to America."

Despite the open windows the room still smelled heavily of marijuana, rake, and sex. Johnny Cash roared in the background.

Asya grabbed her bag and motioned toward the door. Just when she was about to leave, however, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist blocked her way. Looking her directly in the eye, he grabbed her shoulders and gently pulled her toward himself His dark brown eyes had the plum rings and puffy bags common to the alcoholic or the grief-stricken or both.

"Dear Asya," he whispered, his face brightening up with a compassion she'd never seen there before. "Despite all that poison that you harbor inside, and perhaps precisely because of it, you are in some odd way so special and such a kindred soul. And I love you. I fell in love with you the day you first appeared in Cafe Kundera, with that troubled look on your face. I don't know if this means anything to you but I am going to confess it all the same. Before you leave this apartment you need to understand that this is no cathouse, and I do not bring chicks here. I come here to drink and draw and get depressed, get depressed and draw and drink, and sometimes to draw and get depressed and drink…. That's it…."

Utterly astounded, Asya clutched the door's handle and stood still for a moment at the threshold. Not knowing where to place her hands, she thrust them into the pockets of her skirt and fingered something there that felt like crumbs. She took her hands out, only to see the tips of her fingers covered with the brownish seeds consecrated by Petite-Ma to protect her against the evil-eye.

"Look at this! Wheat… wheat.." Asya slurred the word every which way. "Petite-Ma is trying to protect me from evil." She opened her hand and gave him a grain of wheat. No sooner had she done this, however, than she blushed as if having revealed an amorous secret.

Her cheeks still rosy, the bitterness inside her no longer tempered by brashness, Asya opened the door. Stepping out as quickly as she could, she hesitated for a second before she turned back. She looked as if she wanted to say something but instead she gave him a huge hug. Then she sprinted down five flights of stairs and ran as fast as she could from every torment chasing her soul.