“I just came to see how you are, Aunt Aida, for god’s sake.”
“Well, see it, then.” She dramatically removed her shades. An experiment gone awry, a reflection on the distorting mirror of a fun house, her skin creased like a premature baby’s stewed in the maternal liquids. The exaggerated lines around her eyes made her resemble the bride of Fu Manchu and the corners of her mouth curled up in a clownish smile—Jack Nicholson in Batman. She couldn’t really move her jaw very well, except to part her lips ever so slightly—barely wide enough to make smoke rings and blow words. The place under her arms, drained of fat now, scarred like a badly performed cesarean.
Amber could not imagine a greater tragedy for her aunt who, even in her aging, even after losing her family and her breast, had still retained an innocent grace. “You have to sue the bastard,” she told Aida.
“Do you think I’d want people to know I had my face lifted and they screwed up? They’d think I was an idiot. They’d chew it like gum and pass it from mouth to mouth. What good is money now that I don’t have my face anymore?”
“You’re not planning to hide here the rest of your life?”
Aida dropped her head, didn’t say anything at first. “No one will see me like this, Amber,” she said, wiping her tears. “I will not leave my house. I will not. I will not.”
“It’s all right,” Amber said. “You don’t have to.” She held her aunt in her arms like a child. “I brought you a gift.” It seemed odd to be presenting the prosthesis at a moment like this. But she had intended to give it to Aida and there it was.
Aida opened the case and in a breast-shaped mold was the artificial breast. She took it out, squeezed it, and burst into laughter. She laughed harsh and throaty.
“Poor Aida,” Camilla said when later she heard. “I must go visit her often. I’ll get a big box of pistachio delight from the Divan Café, her favorite. That should cheer her up a bit, don’t you think?”
But Aida refused seeing Camilla or anyone else, except Amber and the concierge’s wife, who did her shopping and cleaned the house. Confining herself to her apartment, she shut out the world. Or so everyone thought.
“What about your young man? Are you still in touch?” Amber could not resist asking her. She had been watching the quaint little house every day in hopes of getting a glimpse of someone. But she never saw anyone, even though she was certain somebody lived there. The lights went on every evening, and every morning she saw a different kind of flower on the balcony and looked in her book of flowers, trying to identify the message.
“I can’t bear the thought of him ever seeing me like this.” Aida drifted back into watching a Turkish sitcom and eating pumpkin seeds. “I wanted to be beautiful for him.”
“Poor Aida,” Camilla shook her head, listening to Amber, as they fed on takeout kebabs and Nellie watched TV in the living room. “What a grotesque misadventure. Satan talked her into changing her face. I’m sure of it but why did she have to listen? It’s always been Aida’s great weakness. Her vanity, her doom.”
It was a salubrious summer evening. Amber was beginning to feel stir-crazy.
“Do you guys want to walk to the Baghdad Boulevard? I’ll treat you to some ice cream,” Amber offered, eager to break out of the claustrophobia.
Camilla said she was too tired. Nellie wanted to watch Turkish MTV instead.
“Then, I’m going to the grocer’s to get some chocolate.”
“You’re eating too much chocolate, Amber. You’ll get acne. Bad for your liver, too. Makes it grow hot. Gives you migraines.”
“But it makes me feel good,” Amber smiled and walked out.
“Mom, get me one of those chocolate pistachio bars, would you?” Nellie yelled out over a Madonna look-alike singing to the tune of “Material Girl” in Turkish.
Essence of Honey Street was unusually empty and sullen for such an evening. Windows strobed with phosphorescent colors emanating from TV sets in every building. The muezzin sang through the loudspeaker on top of the unfinished minaret.
Someone was following Amber. The street was well lit. People still lingered at their balconies—some having dinner. She had nothing except a few liras and her keys.
The steps quickened and caught up with her. Amber turned around flushed, her heart racing, and stopped. She flashed a mean look, ready to shout obscenities when she caught his eyes. There was no malice in them. He bowed apologetically.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said, talking with a slight accent. “I’m sorry if I frightened you. But I had no other choice. You see, I’ve been trying to contact your aunt. Unsuccessfully. I’d be grateful if you’d deliver this note to her personally.”
He possessed the composure, the clarity of a Victorian gentleman almost. Nothing seemed further removed from Camilla’s description of him as a gigolo. He was a tall man and not so young. Sea blue eyes. Intense forehead. Grounded, with a warm gentle voice.
Amber took the note and walked away without a word. She sensed the shadows of the old-maid sisters fidgeting behind their jealousy shades. As she walked up the stairs, she could hear noise and chatter rising out of Aida’s. It had to be the TV but the uneven levels made it sound like real people.
Instead of Aida, another woman who looked as though she was from an alien distance answered the door. When she saw Amber, she shrank like a vampire confronted with a cross. Her hairline had a deep scar framing her face. “Someone’s here, Aida?”
“My niece. The only one who’s seen me besides you all. Come inside, Amber, join the circle. Come. Don’t be timid.”
In Aida’s dimly lit living room, seven other women with damaged faces sat solemnly, dressed in colorless rags, heads covered like devout Moslems—unusual sort of company for Aida.
“I have to call mother first, you know how nervous she gets when I’m late,” Amber made an excuse.
“Go, you go call her then.”
“I’m at Aida’s,” Amber told Camilla on the phone.
“You said you were going to the store to get chocolate.”
“I did but on the way I stopped by to see Aida.”
“You promised Nellie a pistachio bar.”
“You told me yourself Aida needs me. I’ll be back soon.”
“Don’t be too late. You don’t want to get caught breaking the Martial Law. Besides, I want to go to bed early tonight.”
“Don’t worry. I have a key.”
The women drank their coffee from Aida’s fine Sevres demitasse cups. Aida took her last sip. She turned the cup upside down, placed it on the saucer, then spun it three times before setting it on the end table. For a while, she joined the chatter, occasionally checking to see if the bottom of the saucer had cooled down. Convinced at last, she handed the cup to the woman who’d opened the door. The woman lifted the cup and lingered inside.
“A lot of darkness,” she told Aida. “Your heart is blackened. You’re worried about someone. A young man. Not a lover. A relative. A son maybe? I see this black bird hovering above him. But look at this, look at this cloud lifting above your head. It’s going to lift, puff, just like that and you’ll be flying in the air, carefree. Look at the wings. See how you’re flying?”
Amber had a sudden flash of realization. Your son maybe? Not Osman, not the demented psychopath and pedophile who’s restrained in some institution but . . . not a lover but a son? Whose son? Maybe she did not have a miscarriage. Maybe she had the child in Germany and had to give him up. But why? Suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit.
Aida was still lost in her coffee sludge while a woman with a wispy voice read from a newspaper as the rest listened. At first, it sounded like poetry—the tone suggested that—but the words disintegrated into the story of a man who had cooked and eaten his three wives. When the woman finished, the others sighed, shook their heads. Another began to read: “Epileptic Deaf Mute Drowns in Primitive Toilet.” They read horrible stories and they laughed at the saddest and cruelest things.
�
�What kind of a party is this?” Amber asked the woman who had answered the door.
“A depression party,” the woman replied. “Can’t you tell? We try to think of the most depressing things. It cancels our own suffering, makes us feel better about what happened to us.”
Another woman sitting next to her whispered, “We prefer the dark. We are the shadow women. This is the shadow women’s society. We’re all survivors, always ending on our four feet like cats.”
This was a Walpurgis night. Amber felt the pull of the subterranean realm of human imperfection and misery, inviting her to its catacombs. She had a great urge to find the door.
Aida ran after her. “Are you leaving?”
“Camilla needs me.”
“She always needs you,” Aida said. “So, give her what she wants. She’s your only mother. What have you got to lose?”
Then Amber handed her the note. Aida recognized the handwriting at once. She faked a courageous smile. “What comes from fate should be returned to fate. Tell him, hearts are made of crystal, once broken they can’t be mended,” she chirped in her elephant man’s voice.
Everything happened that night with an element of predetermined synchronicity. The entire world seemed choreographed like a magnetic energy field of attractions and repulsions. No gravity. One will, only.
As Amber walked down the Essence of Honey Street, under the canopy of sweet-smelling linden blossoms, she felt an urge to let the fermented air fill her body with all its colors and spread into everything surrounding her. Her pain. Aida’s. Camilla’s. Maria’s. Nellie, too, already nurturing her own, inherited from the rest.
“If I fall apart, who’ll catch me?” she said aloud. “No one to catch me. No mother or father. No lover. No close friend. No therapist. No spiritual teacher. Nothing. No one.”
“It’s all here,” a voice responded inside her. “All here.” She looked up at the apartment building with its many units, barbecues smelling of mutton and fish, wisps of Oriental music. Out of Camilla’s living room window, flashes of color from the TV blinked like signals from an alien spaceship.
“Neither one would notice me come in anyway,” she thought. “They’re already lost in their worlds. I could quietly slip into the bedroom, pretend to be asleep. But they’d feel me and I couldn’t bear being in their proximity now. Besides, no pistachio delight.” The grocery was closed.
She circled around the block a couple of times before heading toward the Baghdad Boulevard. Something surely would be open there. She’d walk down. See the young kids cruising. Look in the shop windows. A cappuccino at the Divan Café. But first, she had to make another stop.
The closeup view of the house with the green awning surpassed the spell of its distant charm. A light was on. Amber rang the doorbell after making sure no one was watching. There was no answer. She rang again. The entrance was so dimly lit that when the door opened, she could not make out his features.
“I delivered the note,” she told him.
“Did she read it?”
“Yes. ‘What comes from fate should be returned to fate,’ she told me to tell you. And, ‘a heart is like a crystal, once broken it cannot be mended.’ ”
“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said.
“Look. I think I figured out who you must be. Your relationship to Aida and all that. We don’t have to play games.”
He nodded as if he was expecting this. “Sooner or later someone would put the pieces together. If there were true secrets, they wouldn’t be alive. In fact, I’m glad someone knows. Someone like you. Would you like a glass of çay?”
“No, thank you. I’m walking down to the Baghdad Boulevard to get some things. It’s getting late.”
“Wait for me.”
When he went inside to get his jacket, Amber noticed the miniature paintings all over the walls. Little jewels, highly detailed watercolors of perfect shapes, perfect light. A dim dreaminess in their tones. A certain melancholy.
“Are they yours?”
He nodded.
“I thought you were an archaeologist.”
“I am.”
“They’re really beautiful. I think it’s best we walk separately to the end of Essence of Honey Street. They’ll gossip if they see us together. Can we meet in front of Kenan’s kebab shop?”
They walked separately on parallel streets in the same direction toward the minibus road where dolmuş vans packed with people whizzed through at murderous speed. Dolmuş meant stuffed, a van stuffed to the brim with people.
They met by the kebab shop, continued walking in silence until he saw an opening, took her arm, and together they darted across the road trying to dodge the fanatic motorists. They turned left on the Chicken Does Not Run street for three blocks down to the Cyber Café, winding down streets with enormous holes dug up for constructions now abandoned like empty graves. Left again on Abraham from Black Hell street, to the produce market with empty stalls. Then, right up to the tunnel under the railroad station. Suddenly, the purring hum of the elegant Baghdad Boulevard with its boutiques, Italian-style interior-design stores, open-air cafés, clubs and discos, where well-dressed people strolled day and night, as always, through streets lined with vacation houses, down to the waterfront.
They had not exchanged any words but were arm in arm and she could feel her breast leaning into his arm. It felt unusually natural as if a lifelong bond existed between them.
“What happened to the beach that used to be here?” she asked looking at a long stretch of landfill.
“They closed all the beaches along the Marmara. The oil leaks from tankers coming from the Black Sea. There’s no marine life left in the Marmara or the Aegean. Not safe to swim anymore.”
She took him to the site of the old İpekçi home along the water’s edge, which had had its own beach. The iron gate leading up to it still remained, as did the alley of tall palm trees since they were invulnerable. But instead of the waterfront houses, an expressway, the scenic driving route. Instead of the crashing of the waves, the ebb and flow of traffic.
“Have you ever been here before? Did she bring you here?” she asked him.
“No. Where are we?”
“This used to be the family summer house, belonged to my grandmother’s family. We came here every summer when I was little. All of us İpekçis. We had several other houses too, and plantations.”
Weary of walking, they sat on a tide breaker, facing Marmara. The wind was slightly sharp. He moved closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder to keep her warm. She snuggled up to him. They held each other like survivors of a shipwreck, witnesses of something unspoken. Knots loosened up bit by bit until the holding became undone. Fear, like rain clouds, came and went, leaving them weightless, purged of malice.
No fear, no doubt, no concern for the consequences. His kindness flowed into her body, every touch unlocking her twisted chain of pain. He didn’t invade her privacy. Maybe why she trusted him so easily. He didn’t impose his will. He was her familiar. Her cousin.
She was afraid to let him touch her secrets, her breath, her voice, eyes empty of lies. She was afraid the touch might evoke all the ways she’d been betrayed. She was afraid to touch him. That night they weren’t human but the greater ones who had known no suffering, who had no memory of this life.
Then the train stopped at the station across the way, unloaded. People came and went but no one seemed to notice their cocooned presence. Like the way it had been with Iskender. They could have stayed like this as long as they could but the sounds of the curfew sirens reminded them of their situation.
When they returned to the streets, the veil had lifted, Essence of Honey Street, lost in the world of interpretations. Teoman was leaving the following day for the Aegean, to join an archaeological team in Aphrodisias. They promised to stay in touch and parted.
Amber did not want to sleep that night, fearing that she might lose this day, remembering all the times that sleep had led her to the realm of forgetfulness.
>
“What will happen to us, what with our need to repeat, to prolong, to resolve?”
As she tiptoed toward her bedroom she shared with Nellie, she noticed Camilla’s light, which every night stayed on for a long time after they all turned in. Camilla had insomnia, had to stay up for long hours reading. Sometimes all night. She said old people don’t need sleep as they did when they were young.
Her door was slightly parted so Amber could see the inside without being seen. Camilla was getting undressed and talking to herself. She can’t stop talking, Amber thought. Her compulsion. She talks over everyone else’s voices and in her solitude she’s talking over her own. Poor lonesome woman.
She listened. It was a murmur, she couldn’t hear all the words but made out her name, and Nellie’s, her father’s, and Maria’s, and Aida’s, before she realized that her mother was praying aloud, to a god of her invention—had to be a god, she had forgotten her goddesses long ago even though she was from the Aegean—making up the conventions as she went. She called him Allah, but it was not the Allah of the Moslems but her own. An Allah, part Catholic, part Sunni, and mostly pagan.
That night Amber watched Camilla as she thanked her god for things, as she asked for his help and talked about having the strength to accomplish the things she needed to accomplish before reuniting with her partner, Cadri. She prayed for all. When finished, she rubbed her face with her hands like a child and whispered, “Amen.”
She was in her underwear, waist-high loose cotton briefs and a thermal tank top. She liked keeping warm. Her back to Amber, who was amazed at how remarkably young Camilla’s body looked—no cellulite, no flabs, no curvature of the spine. She had a perfect posture, a large head and a short torso but everything flat and sexless like a naked doll. She pulled a faded flannel gown over her head and turned off the lights.
This is my mother. My mother Camilla. This is the woman. This woman alone. This alone woman. Not the one in my pictures. Not the one in my stories. This is my mother. Not my Dolores Del Rio mother but this poor woman. This gnome-like woman. Not my beautiful mother. My mother in crepe de chine. Not my pistachio mother. Not the one who spoke the language of the flowers. Not the one reading Forever Amber.
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