The Bastard of Istanbul

EIGHT Pine Nuts

How come she is still asleep?" Asya asked, her chin pointing in the direction of her bedroom. On the way back from the airport, to her dismay, she had found out that her aunts had placed a second bed right across from hers and turned her only private space under this roof into "the girls' room." They had done so either because they were always looking for new ways of tormenting her or because this room had a better view and they wanted to make a good impression on their guest, or else, they had seen the accommodation as yet another opportunity to bring the girls closer within their PIFCUP-Promoting International Friendship and Cultural Understanding Project. Having absolutely no desire whatsoever to share her private space with a complete stranger, yet unable to protest in front of the guest, Asya had grudgingly consented. But now her tolerance was wearing thin. As if it weren't enough that they put the American girl in her bedroom, the Kazanci women seemed determined not to start supper before the guest of honor joined them. Thus, although the dinner had been put on the table more than an hour ago and everyone had long taken her place around the table, including Sultan the Fifth, nobody had fully dined yet, including Sultan the Fifth. Every twenty minutes or so, somebody got up to warm the lentil soup and reheat the meat dish, carrying the pots back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, while Sultan the Fifth followed the smell each time with beseeching meows. They were in such a state, pasted to their chairs, watching TV on the lowest volume, and talking in whispers. Nonetheless, since they kept picking at this dish or that, everyone but Sultan the Fifth had already eaten more then they normally would have at one sitting.

"Perhaps she is already awake and is just lying in bed because she is too shy or something. Why don't I go in and take a look?" Asya asked.

"Stay put, miss. Let the girl sleep." Auntie Zeliha puckered an eyebrow.

Keeping an eye on the screen, another eye on the remote control, Auntie Feride agreed: "She needs to sleep. It is because of the jet lag. She traversed not only oceanic currents but also different time zones."

"Well, at least some people in this house are given the chance to stay in bed as long as they want," Asya grumbled.

It was precisely then that a sparkling soundtrack started to play in the background and the program everybody had been waiting for flashed on the screen: the Turkish version of The Apprentice. In rapt silence they watched the Turkish Donald Trump materialize from behind the bright satin curtains of a spacious office with a wonderful panorama of the Bosphorus Bridge. After a quick, condescending glance at the two teams awaiting his orders, the businessman informed them of their task. Each team was instructed to design a bottle of sparkling water, find a way to manufacture ninety-nine of them, and then sell them all as swiftly and as expensively as possible in one of the most luxurious quarters of the city.

"I don't call that a challenge," Asya said with a whoop. "If they want a real challenge they should send all these contestants to the most religious and conservative neighborhoods in Istanbul and have them sell bottled red wine there."

"Oh, be quiet," Auntie Banu snapped, sighing. She was discontent with the way her niece constantly made fun of religion and religiosity; in that regard she could plainly see who Asya resembled exactly: her mother. If blasphemy, more or less like breast cancer or diabetes, was genetically passed on from mother to daughter, what was the use of trying to correct it? Thus, she sighed again.

Ignoring the anguish she instilled in her aunt, Asya shrugged. "But why not? That would be far more creative than this baseless Turkish imitation of America. You should always amalgamate the technical material borrowed from the West with the particular features of the culture you address. That's what I call a Donald Trump ingeniously alla tuna. So he should, for instance, ask the contestants to sell packaged pork in a Muslim neighborhood. There you go. Now that's a challenge. Let's see those marketing strategies flower."

Before anyone could comment on that, the door of the bedroom opened with a creak and out stepped Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, a bit diffident, a bit dizzy. She was wearing faded denim jeans and a navy sweatshirt long and loose enough to hide the features of her body. While packing for her flight to Turkey she had thought hard about what kind of clothing to take with her and had ended up choosing her most modest clothes so as not to look strange in a conservative place. It had therefore come as a shock to be welcomed at the Istanbul airport by Auntie Zeliha wearing an outrageously short skirt and even more outrageously high heels. What was even more startling, however, was to meet Auntie Banu afterward in a head scarf and a long dress, and to learn how pious she was, praying five times a day. That the two women, despite the stark contrast in their appearance and obviously in their personalities, were sisters living under the same roof was a puzzle Armanoush figured she would have to work on for a while.

"Welcome, welcome!" Auntie Banu exclaimed cheerily, but instantly ran out of English words.

As they watched her approach, the four aunts at the table fidgeted awkwardly with the discomfort of unfamiliarity, but still wore ear-to-ear smiles on their faces. Curious as to what the stranger smelled like, Sultan the Fifth immediately sprang to his feet and paced a narrowing circle around Armanoush, sniffing her slippers, until he had decided there was nothing of interest there.

"I am very sorry, I don't know how I slept that long," Armanoush stammered in slow-motion English.

"Of course, your body needed that sleep. It's a long flight," Auntie Zeliha said. Though she had a mellow yet blatant accent and tended to stress the wrong syllables, she also sounded pretty comfortable expressing herself in English. "Aren't you hungry? I hope you will enjoy Turkish food."

Capable of recognizing the word food in every language possible, Auntie Banu bolted to the kitchen to bring the lentil soup. Almost robotically Sultan the Fifth leaped over his cushion to follow her, meowing and pleading along the way.

As she sat in the chair reserved for her, Armanoush inspected the living room for the first time. Quickly, warily, she looked around, pausing at certain spots: the carved rosewood, glass-door cupboard with gilded coffee cups, tea-glass sets, and several antiques inside; the old piano against the wall; the exquisite rug on the floor; the multiple pieces of latticework glowing on top of the coffee tables, velvet armchairs, and even the TV set; the canary in an ornamented cage swinging by the balcony door; the pictures on the walls-a bucolic oil painting of a countryside too picturesque to be real, a calendar with the photograph of a different cultural and natural site in Turkey for each month; an evil-eye amulet; and a portrait of Atatiirk in a tuxedo, waving his fedora toward a crowd not included in the frame. The entire room was pulsating with mementos and vivid hues blues, maroons, sea greens, turquoises-and blazing with such luminosity that it seemed there was an additional light somewhere other than what radiated from the lamps.

Armanoush then looked at the dishes on the table with growing interest. "What a gorgeous table." She beamed. "These are all my favorite foods. I see you have made hummus, baba ghanoush, yalanci sarma… and look at this, you have baked churek!"

"Aaaah, do you speak Turkish?!" Auntie Banu exclaimed, flabbergasted as she walked back in with a steaming pot in her hands and Sultan the Fifth still tailing her.

Armanoush shook her head, half-amused, half-solemn, as if feeling sorry to let down so much anticipation. "No, no. I do not speak the Turkish language, unfortunately, but I guess I speak the Turkish cuisine.

Unable to get this last bit, Auntie Banu turned to Asya in despair, but the latter seemed to have no interest in fulfilling her role as translator, so fully absorbed was she in the task designated by the Turkish Donald Trump. The competitors were now instructed to dive deep into the textile industry to redesign the yellow and azure uniforms of one of the biggest soccer teams competing in the national league. The design rated highest by the soccer players themselves was going to win the competition. Meanwhile, Asya had been contemplating an alternative plan for this specific task as well, but this time she decided to keep it to herself She didn't feel like talking anymore. To tell the truth, the American girl had turned out to be far more beautiful than she had expected; not that she was expecting anything, but deep inside Asya had thought, and perhaps hoped, that it would be some stupid blonde who they would welcome at the airport.

For some reason unknown to her, Asya wanted to confront the guest, but lacked not so much the reason as the energy. At this point, she'd rather remain aloof and reserved to make clear that she shunned this Turkish hospitality.

"So, tell us," Auntie Feride asked after completing the inspection of the American girl's hairstyle and finding it too plain. "How is America?"

The absurdity of the question was enough to make Asya lose her composure, no matter how resolute she might have been in her decision to remain detached. She gave her aunt a pained look. But if Armanoush too had found the question ludicrous, she didn't show it. She was good with aunts. Aunts were her specialty. Her right cheek slightly gorged with the lump of hummus inside, she replied: "Good, good. It's a big country, you know. Depending on where you live, there are different Americas."

"Ask her how is Mustafa." Grandma Gulsum demanded, completely dismissing the last pieces of information, which she hadn't understood.

"He is good, working hard," Armanoush said while she simultaneously listened to Auntie Zeliha's melodious voice translate her words. "They have a lovely house and two dogs. It is gorgeous out there in the desert. And the weather in Arizona is always nice, you know, nice and sunny…."

When the soup was eaten and the starters nibbled, Grandma Gulsum and Auntie Feride made a visit to the kitchen and returned carrying a huge tray each, perfectly synchronized in an Egyptian walk. They put the plates they had shouldered onto the table.

"You have pilaf," Armanoush smiled and leaned forward inspecting the dishes. "There is tursu and…"

"Wow!" the aunts exclaimed in unison, impressed by their guest's command of Turkish cuisine.

Armanoush suddenly spotted the last pot brought to the table. "Oh, I wish my grandma could see this, now this is a treat,

kaburga…."

"Wow!" echoed the chorus. Even Asya perked up with a dash of interest.

"Turkish restaurant many in America?" Auntie Cevriye asked. "Actually, I happen to know this food because it is also part of the Armenian cuisine," Armanoush replied slowly. Being presented to the family as Mustafa's stepdaughter Amy, an American girl from San Francisco, she had initially planned to gradually reveal the secret about the remaining part of her identity, after having built up some degree of mutual trust. But here she was, galloping full speed directly into the nub of the matter.

Now lapsing into a taut yet equally self-confident mood, Armanoush straightened her back and looked from one end of the table to the other to see how everyone was reacting. The blank expressions she encountered on their faces urged her to explain herself better.

"I am Armenian… well, Armenian American."

The words were not translated this time. There was no need to. The four aunts smiled simultaneously, each in her own way: one of them politely, the second worriedly, the third curiously, and the last amiably. But the most visible reaction came from Asya. Having now stopped watching The Apprentice, she eyed their guest with genuine interest for the first time, realizing that, after all, she might not be here to conduct research on "Islam and women."

"Oh yeah?" Asya finally opened her mouth, and leaned forward putting her elbows on the table. "Tell me, is it true that System of a Down hates us?"

Armanoush blinked, having no idea what she was talking about. A cursory glance was enough to make her understand that she was not alone in her bewilderment; the aunts too looked puzzled.

"It's this rock band that I like very much. The guys are Armenian and there are all these urban legends about how they hate the Turks and they wouldn't want any Turk to enjoy their music, so I was just curious." Asya shrugged, visibly discontent with giving this explanation to such an unknowledgeable bunch of people.

"I don't know anything about them." Armanoush pursed her lips. All of a sudden she felt so tiny here, weedy and vulnerable in the lonesomeness of being a stranger in a strange land. "My family was from Istanbul-I mean, my grandmother." She pointed a finger at Petite-Ma as though she needed an elderly person to better illustrate the story.

"Ask her what their family name is." Grandma Gulsum elbowed Asya, sounding like she possessed the key to a secret archive in the basement wherein the records of all the Istanbulite families, past and present, were neatly kept.

"Tchakhmakhchian," Armanoush replied when the question was translated to her. "You can call me Amy if you want but my full name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian."

Auntie Zeliha's face brightened as she exclaimed in recognition, "I've always found that interesting. The Turks add this suffix — ci to every possible word to generate professions. Look at our family name. It is Kazan-a. We are the "Cauldron Makers." Now I see Armenians do the same thing. "tchakmak… tchakmakhchi, tchakmakhchi-yan."

"So that's one more thing in common." Armanoush smiled. There was something in Auntie Zeliha she had liked right away. Was it the way she carried herself, with that eye-catching nose ring, the radically mini miniskirts, and the extra makeup she applied? Or was it her stare? Somehow she had a look that made one trust her to understand without being judgmental.

"Look, I have the address of the house." Armanoush fished out a piece of paper from her pocket. "My grandma Shushan was born in this house. If you could help me with the directions, I'd like to go and visit it sometime."

While Auntie Zeliha peered at the writing on the piece of paper, Asya noticed that something was bothering Auntie Feride. Casting panicky glances at the partly open balcony door, she looked agitated, like someone who had found herself facing a dangerous situation and not knowing which way to run.

Asya leaned sideways and, hunching over the steaming pilaf, muttered to her crazy aunt, "Yo, what's up?"

Auntie Feride too leaned sideways, hunched over the steaming pilaf, and then, with eccentric sparkles in her gray green eyes, she whispered, "I heard stories about Armenians coming back to their old houses to dig out the chests their grandfathers had hidden there before they ran away." She squinted her eyes and raised her voice a notch. "Gold and jewels," she gasped, and paused to give that some thought until she had affably come to an agreement with herself: "Gold and jewels!"

It took Asya a few extra seconds to grasp what her aunt might be talking about.

"You understand what I'm saying, this girl is here to track down a treasure chest," Auntie Feride added excitedly, now poring over the contents of an imaginary chest, her face brightening with the taste of adventure and the glow of rubies.

"You're damn right!" Asya exclaimed. "Didn't I tell you this? When she walked off the airplane, she was carrying a shovel and pushing a wheelbarrow instead of luggage…."

"Oh, shut up!" Auntie Feride snapped, offended. She folded her arms and leaned back.

In the meantime, having detected a far deeper reason behind Armanoush's visit, Auntie Zeliha asked, "So you came here to see your grandmother's house. But why had she left?"

Armanoush was both eager to be asked this question and reluctant to answer. Was it too early to let them know? How much of her story should she reveal? If not now, when? Why should she have to wait, anyway? She sipped her tea. In a listless, almost sapped voice she said, "They were forced to leave." But as soon as she said this, her weariness disappeared. She lifted her chin as she added, "My grandmother's father, Hovhannes Stamboulian, was a poet and a writer. He was an eminent man, who was profoundly respected in the community."

"What does she say?" Auntie Feride nudged Asya's elbow, understanding the first half of the sentence but missing the rest.

"She says her family was a prominent family in Istanbul," Asya whispered to her.

"Dedim sana altin liralar icingelmiSS olmah…. I told you she must have come here for golden coins!"

Asya rolled her eyes, less sarcastically than she had intended, before concentrating on Armanoush's story.

"They tell me he was a man of letters who liked to read and contemplate more than anything in this world. My grandmother says I remind her of him. I too like books very much," Armanoush added with a bashful smile.

Some of the listeners smiled back, and when the translation was over, all of the listeners smiled back.

"But unfortunately his name was on the list," Armanoush said tentatively.

"What list?" Auntie Cevriye wanted to know.

"The list of Armenian intellectuals to be eliminated. Political leaders, poets, writers, members of clergy…. They were two hundred and thirty-four people total."

"But why's that?" asked Auntie Banu, a question which Armanoush skipped.

"On April 24, a Saturday, at midnight, dozens of Armenian notables living in Istanbul were arrested and forcibly taken to police headquarters. All of them had dressed up properly, spick-and-span as if going to a ceremony. They were wearing immaculate collars and elegant suits. All were men of letters. They were kept in the headquarters without an explanation until finally they were deported either to Ayash or to Chankiri. The ones in the first group were in worse condition than the second. Nobody survived in Ayash. The ones taken to Chankiri were killed gradually. My grandpa was among this group. They took the train from Istanbul to Chankiri under the supervision of Turkish soldiers. They had to walk three miles from the station to the town. Until then they had been treated decently. But during the walk from the station, they were beaten with canes and pickax handles. The legendary musician Komitas went mad as a result of what he saw. Once in Chankiri they were released on one condition: They were banned from leaving the town. So they rented rooms there, living with the natives. Every day, two or three of them would be taken by the soldiers outside the town for a walk and then the soldiers would come back alone. One day the soldiers took my grandpa for a walk too."

Still smiling, Auntie Banu looked left and right, first to her sister then to her niece, to see who was going to translate all this, but to her surprise there was only perplexity on the faces of the two translators.

"Anyway, it is a long story. I won't take your time with all the details. When her father died, my grandma Shushan was three years old. There were four siblings, she being the youngest and the only girl. The family had been left without its patriarch. My grandmother's mother was a widow now. Finding it difficult to stay in Istanbul with the children, she sought refuge in her father's house, which was in Sivas. But as soon as they arrived, the deportations began. The entire family was ordered to leave their house and belongings and march with thousands of others to an unknown destination."

Armanoush studied her audience carefully, and decided to finish the story.

"They marched and marched. My grandmother's mother died on the way and before long the elderly died as well. Having no parents to look after them, the younger children lost each other amid the confusion and chaos. But after months apart, the brothers were miraculously reunited in Lebanon with the help of a Catholic missionary. The only missing sibling among those still alive was my grandmother Shushan. Nobody had heard of the fate of the infant. Nobody knew that she had been taken back to Istanbul and placed in an orphanage."

Out of the corner of her eye, Asya could tell that her mother was now intently looking at her. At first she suspected Auntie Zeliha might be trying to convey to her to censure the story as she translated it. But then she realized that what flickered in her mother's stunning eyes was nothing but interest in Armanoush's story. Perhaps she was also wondering how much of all this her unruly daughter was willing to translate to the Kazanci women.

"It took Grandma Shushan's elder brother ten full years to trackher down. Finally Great Uncle Yervant found her and took her to America to join her relatives," Armanoush added softly.

Auntie Banu tilted her head to one side and started twining the beads of her amber rosary through her bony, never-manicured fingers, all the while murmuring, "All that is on earth will perish: But will abide (for ever) the Face of thy Lord, full of Majesty, Bounty- and Honor. "

"But I don't understand," Auntie Feride was the first to raise doubts. "What happened to them? They died because they walked?"

Before she translated that, Asya glanced at her mother to see if she should continue translating. Auntie Zeliha raised her eyebrows and nodded.

When the question was asked to her, Armanoush paused briefly and caressed her grandma's Saint Francis of Assisi pendant before she answered. She spotted Petite-Ma sitting at the other end of the table, her sallow complexion carrying the wrinkles of so many years, staring at her with an expression so deeply compassionate that Armanoush could suspect only two possibilities: Either she had not paid attention to the story at all, and was not here with them anymore, or else she had been listening so attentively that she had lived the story, and was not here with them anymore.

"They were denied water and food and rest. They were made to march a long distance on foot. Women, some of them pregnant, and children, the elderly, the sick, and the debilitated. . " Armanoush's voice now trailed off. "Many starved to death. Some others were executed."

This time Asya translated everything without skipping a word.

"Who did this atrocity?!" Auntie Cevriye exclaimed as if addressing a classroom of ill-disciplined students.

Auntie Banu joined in her sister's reaction, although hers was inclined more toward disbelief than anger. Her eyes wide open, she tugged the ends of her head scarf as she always did in times of stress, and then heaved a prayer, as she always did when tugging the ends of her head scarf didn't get her anywhere.

"My aunt is asking who did this?" Asya said.

"The Turks did it," Armanoush replied, without paying attention to the implications.

"What a shame, what a sin, are they not human?" Auntie Feride volleyed.

"Of course not, some people are monsters!" Auntie Cevriye declared without comprehending that the repercussions could be far more complex than she would care to acknowledge. Twenty years in her career as a Turkish national history teacher, she was so accustomed to drawing an impermeable boundary between the past and the present, distinguishing the Ottoman Empire from the modern Turkish Republic, that she had actually heard the whole story as grim news from a distant country. The new state in Turkey had been established in 1923 and that was as far as the genesis of this regime could extend. Whatever might or might not have happened preceding this commencement date was the issue of another eraand another people.

Armanoush looked at them one by one, puzzled. She was relieved to see that the family had not taken the story as badly as she feared, but then she couldn't be sure that they had really taken it. True, they neither refused to believe her nor attacked with a counterargument. If anything, they listened attentively and they all seemed sorry. But was that the limit of their commiseration? And what exactly had she expected? Armanoush felt slightly disconcerted as she wondered whether it would have been different if she were talking to a group of intellectuals.

Slowly it dawned on Armanoush that perhaps she was waiting for an admission of guilt, if not an apology. And yet that apology had not come, not because they had not felt for her, for it looked as if they had, but because they had seen no connection between themselves and the perpetrators of the crimes. She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such notion of continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames. For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.

"But you haven't eaten anything. Come on, my child, you came a long way, eat now," Auntie Banu said, shifting the topic to food, one of the two cures she knew for sorrow.

"It's very good, thank you." Armanoush grabbed her fork. She noticed they had cooked the rice exactly the way her grandmother did, with butter and sauteed pine nuts.

"Good, good! Eat, eat!" Auntie Banu nodded as vigorously as she could manage.

With a sinking heart Asya had watched Armanoush politely accept the offer and grab her fork to go back to her kaburga. She lowered her head, losing her appetite. Not that she was hearing the story of the deportation of the Armenians for the first time. She had heard things before, some pro and most con. But it was quite a different experience to hear an account from an actual person. Never before had Asya met someone so young with a memory so old.

It wouldn't take the nihilist in her too long, however, to chuck out the distress. She shrugged. Whatever! The world sucked anyway. Past and future, here and there… it was all the same. The same misery everywhere. God either did not exist, or was simply too aloof to see the wretchedness into which he had thrust us all. Life was mean and cruel, and a lot of other things she had long been tired of knowing. Her hazy gaze slid toward the screen where the Turkish Donald Trump was now grilling the three most culpable members of the losing group. The uniforms they'd designed for the soccer team had turned out to be so awful that even the most easygoing athletes had refused to wear them. Now somebody had to be fired. As if a button had been pushed, all three contestants started insulting one another to avoid being the one eliminated.

Withdrawn, Asya lapsed into a disdainful smile. This was the world we lived in. History, politics, religion, society, competition, marketing, free market, power struggle, at one anther's throats for another morsel of triumph…. She sure did not need any of these and all that…

… shit.

Still keeping an eye on the screen, but now having fully regained her appetite, Asya jerked her chair forward and started filling her plate. She took a large piece of kaburga and began to eat. When she lifted her head, she met her mother's piercing gaze, and quickly looked away.

After dinner Armanoush retreated to the girls' room to make two phone calls. First she called San Francisco. She stood face-to-face with a Johnny Cash poster on the wall directly above the desk.

"Grandma, it's me!" she exclaimed excitedly, but instantly stopped. "What is that noise in the background?"

"Oh, it is nothing, honey," came the answer. "They are repairing the pipes in the bathroom. It turns out your Uncle Dikran messed them up the other day. We had to call a plumber. Tell me how you have been doing?"

Anticipating this question, Armanoush talked about her daily routine in Arizona. Though she felt awful about the deception, she tried to assuage her discomfort by thinking it was for the best. How could she tell her, "I am not in Arizona. I am in the city where you were born!"?

After she hung up, she waited a few minutes. Pensively, she took a deep breath, mustered her courage, and made her second call. She decided to stay calm and not to sound frustrated-a promise she found hard to keep upon hearing her mother's edgy voice.

"Amy, honey, why didn't you call before? How are you? How is the weather in San Francisco? Are they treating you well?"

"Yes, Mom. I'm OK. The weather is" Armanoush regretted not having checked the weather in San Francisco on the Internet "fine, a bit windy, as always-"

"Yeah," Rose interjected, "I have called you over and over but your cell phone was dead. Oh, I've been so worried!"

"Mom, please listen," Armanoush said, surprised at the note of determination in her own voice. "I feel uncomfortable when you keep calling me at my grandma's house. Let's make a deal, OK? Let me call you and do not call me. Please."

"Are they making you say this?" Rose asked suspiciously.

"No Ma, of course not. For God's sake. I'm the one who's asking you this."

Though reluctant, Rose accepted the terms. She complained about not having any time for herself, her days being divided between home and work. But then she cheered up as she told how there was a sale at Home Depot and she and Mustafa had agreed to get new kitchen cabinets.

"Tell me your opinion," Rose enthused. "What do you think about cherry wood? Do you think it would look good in our kitchen?"

"Yeah, I guess so…"

"I think so too. But how about the dark oak? It's a bit more expensive but it has class written all over it. Which one do you think would be better?"

"I dunno, Mom, the dark oak sounds good too."

"Yeah, but you see, you're not helping me much." Rose sighed.

When she hung up Armanoush looked around her and felt a deep estrangement. The Turkish rugs, the old-fashioned bedside lamps, the unfamiliar furniture, books and newspapers that spoke another language…. Suddenly she felt a panic that she hadn't felt since she was a small child.

When Armanoush was six years old, she and her mother had once run out of gas in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. They'd had to wait almost an hour before another vehicle passed by them. Rose stuck her thumb out and a truck stopped to pick them up. Inside there were two rough-looking, brawny` men, scary, sullen fellows. They didn't say a word and drove them to the next gas station. Once they were dropped off and the truck disappeared, Rose hugged Armanoush with a quivering lip, weeping in panic. "Oh God, what if they had been bad people? They could have kidnapped, raped, and killed us, and nobody would have found our bodies. How could I have taken this risk?"

Though not quite that dramatic, Armanoush had a similar feeling right now. Here she was in Istanbul staying at the house of strangers without anyone in her family knowing about it. How could she have acted so impulsively?

What if they were bad people?

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