The Winter Thief

55

Vahid sat in his father’s armchair and watched his mother’s hands dance in her lap over the tatting for a tablecloth that he knew she would give to one of the neighbors. She would then begin a new one. His mother sat beneath a window, a square of sunlight illuminating her head and hands as if she were an idol from some unknown tribe. He tapped his finger on the armrest. Since Rhea’s death and Yorg Pasha’s disturbing revelations about his father, he had been unable to find peace in the usual ways, despite ever more frequent and painful attempts. He must do something to calm himself, he realized, before he made a fatal mistake. His middle finger drummed on the upholstery.

“Why are you fidgeting?” his mother asked suddenly, her hands paused in midair.

“I’m not fidgeting, Mama. I’m thinking.”

“Well, think quietly.” She returned to her tatting.

Vahid rose and went down the hall to his bedroom. After locking the door, he opened the wardrobe and pulled a large box from the top shelf. It was a presentation box of the kind that held expensive pieces of china. He sat down at a table and passed his hand across the moth-eaten nap of blue velvet before opening the clasp. At the center of the frayed satin lining was a depression where a serving dish had once nestled. That dish, hand-painted with carnations picked out in gold, rested on a shelf in a glassed-in cabinet in the sitting room. It was his mother’s prized possession, a wedding gift from her mother-in-law, never used and dusted only by his mother’s hand.

Within the depression lay three fist-sized switches of different-colored hair, the curls neatly tied with a twist of ribbon. Beneath them lay a sheet of parchment, torn in half. Vahid picked out the pieces and laid them side by side on the desk. Together they formed a charcoal sketch of a mother and her baby. In the image, the woman’s hair tumbled in black waves around a delicate face, with wide-set eyes and a generous mouth that curled in the beginning of a smile. Her expression was one of utter solicitude as she looked down at the baby wrapped in a shawl in her arms.

Vahid adjusted the pieces so that the tear was less noticeable. The edges were stained with finger marks. The night he had followed his father to the bridge, Vahid had come home in tears and his mother had insisted on knowing why. When he told her his father had called him Iskender, she had marched into their bedroom and returned with the sketch. She held it under her husband’s nose and said in an angry voice, “You think I don’t know about this? This icon you pray to. She’s gone, dead.” Her voice rose. “They’re both dead, do you hear me?”

Vahid’s father reached for the drawing. “You have no right…”

At this, Vahid’s mother tore the sketch in half, threw it at her husband, shouting, “We are what you have. We are all that you have, or ever will have.”

Enraged, Vahid’s father grabbed her by the hair. He beat her with his fists and, when she collapsed to the floor, kicked her savagely in the ribs.

Vahid had watched in horrified fascination, every nerve alive with feeling. He didn’t try to help his mother, and for this he had felt enormous guilt. She had been bedridden for weeks and thereafter was plagued with pains and illnesses that often made her take to her bed. His father was absent from home after that, returning only to sleep and sometimes not even then. It made little impact when one day he did not come home at all. They learned that he had been found dead, a drunk who in the early-morning hours had plummeted from the Galata Bridge into the oily water below. He had disappeared little by little over the years, and this was simply the final vanishing.