by Elif Shafak
Thus on each birthday Asya Kazanci had eaten the same cake and at the same time had discovered a new fact about herself. At the age of three, for instance, she had found that she could get almost anything she wanted, provided she went into tantrums. Three years later on her sixth birthday, however, she realized she'd better stop the tantrums since with each episode, although her demands were met, her childhood was prolonged. When she reached the age of eight, she learned something that until then she had had only a sense of but did not know for sure: that she was a bastard. Looking back, she thought she shouldn't be given the credit for this particular information since if it weren't for Grandma Gulsum, it would have taken her much longer to discover it.
It so happened that the two were alone in the living room on that day. Grandma Gulsum was immersed in watering her plants, and Asya in watching her as she colored in a clown in a children's coloring book.
"Why do you talk to your plants?" Asya wanted to know.
"Plants bloom if you talk to them."
"Really?" Asya beamed.
"Really. If you tell them soil is their mother and water is their father, they buoy up and blossom."
Asking no more, Asya went back to her coloring. She made the clown's costume orange and his teeth green. Just when she was about to color his shoes a bright crimson, she stopped, and began to mimic her grandmother. "Sweetie, sweetie! Soil is your mom, water is your daddy."
Grandma Gulsum pretended not to have noticed. Emboldened by her indifference, Asya increased the dose of her chant.
It was the African violet's turn to be watered, Grandma Giilsum's favorite. She cooed to the flower, "How are you, sweetie?" Asya cooed mockingly, "How are you, sweetie?"
Grandma Gulsum frowned and pursed her lips. "How beautifully purple you are!" she said.
"How beautifully purple you are!"
It was then that Grandma Gulsum's mouth tightened and she murmured, "Bastard." She uttered the word so calmly, Asya did not immediately understand that her grandmother was addressing her, not the flower.
Asya didn't learn the meaning of the word until one year later, sometime close to her ninth birthday, when she was called a bastard by a kid at school. Then, at age ten, she discovered that unlike all the other girls in her classroom, she had no male role model in her household. It would take her another three years to comprehend that this could have a lasting effect on her personality. On her fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth birthdays, she uncovered respectively three other truths about her life: that other families weren't like hers and some families could be normal; that in her ancestry there were too many women and too many secrets about men who disappeared too early and too peculiarly; and that no matter how hard she strived, she was never going to be a beautiful woman.
By the time Asya Kazanci reached seventeen she had further comprehended that she no more belonged to Istanbul than did the ROAD UNDER CONSTRUCTION Or BUILDING UNDER RESTORATION Signs temporarily put up by the municipality, or the fog that fell over the city on gloomy nights, only to be dispersed at the crack of dawn, leading nowhere, accumulating into nothing.
The very next year, exactly two days before her eighteenth birthday, Asya plundered the pillbox in the house and swallowed all the capsules she found there. She opened her eyes in a bed surrounded by all her aunts and Petite-Ma and Grandmother Gulsum, having been forced to drink muddy, smelly herbal teas as if it wasn't bad enough that they had made her vomit up everything she had had in her stomach. She began her eighteenth year discerning a further fact to be added to her previous discoveries: that in this weird world, suicide was a privilege as rare as rubies, and with a family like hers, she sure wouldn't be one of the privileged.
It's hard to know if there was a connection between this deduction and what ensued next, but her obsession with music started more or less in those days. It wasn't an abstract, encompassing love for music in general, not even a fondness for selected musical genres, but rather a fixation on one and only one singer: Johnny Cash.
She knew everything about him: the myriad details of his trajectory from Arkansas to Memphis, his drinking buddies and marriages and ups and downs, his pictures, gestures, and, of course, his lyrics. Making the lyrics of "Thirteen" her lifelong motto at the age of eighteen, Asya had decided she too was born in the soul of misery and was going to bring trouble wherever she went.
Today, on her nineteenth birthday, she felt more mature, having made yet another mental note of another reality of her life: that she had now reached the age at which her mother had given birth to her. Having made this discovery, she didn't quite know what to do with it. All she knew was that from now on she could not possibly be treated like a kid.
So she grumbled, "I warn you! I do not want a birthday cake this year!"
Shoulders squared, arms akimbo, she forgot for a second that whenever she stood like this, her big breasts came to the fore.,If she had noticed it, she surely would have gone back to her hunchback position, since she abhorred her ample bosom, which she detected as yet another genetic burden from her mother.
Sometimes she likened herself to the cryptic Qur'anic creature Dabbet-ul Arz, the ogre destined to emerge on the Day of judgment, with each one of its organs taken from a different animal found in nature. Just like that hybrid creature, she carried a body composed of disconnected parts inherited from the women in her family. She was tall, much taller than most women in Istanbul, just like her mother, Zeliha, whom she also called "Auntie"; she had the bony, thin-veined fingers of Auntie Cevriye, the annoyingly pointed chin of Auntie Feride, and the elephantine ears of Auntie Banu. She had a most blatantly aquiline nose, of which there were only two others in world history Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror's and Auntie Zeliha's. Sultan Mehmed had conquered Constantinople whether you liked it or not, a fact significant enough to overlook the shape of his nose. As for Auntie Zeliha, so imposing was her personality and so captivating her body that no one would see her nose-or any other part of her, for that matter-as a source of imperfection. But having no imperial achievements on her curriculum vitae and possessing a natural incapability for charming people, Asya thought, what on earth could she do about her nose?
Among what she inherited from her relatives, there were some pleasant qualities too. For one thing, her hair! She had frizzy, sable, wild hair theoretically, like every other woman in the family, but in practice, only like Auntie Zeliha. The disciplined high school teacher in Auntie Cevriye, for instance, kept her hair in a tight chignon while Auntie Banu was disqualified from any comparison, since she wore a head scarf almost all the time. Auntie Feride frantically changed her hair color and style depending on her mood. Grandma Gulsum was a cotton-head, as her hair had gone snowy and she refused to dye it, claiming it wouldn't be appropriate for an old woman. Yet Petite-Ma was a devoted redhead. Her everworsening Alzheimer's might have caused Petite-Ma to forget a plethora of things, including her children's names, but to this day she had never forgotten to dye her hair with henna.
Finally in her list of positive genetic features, Asya Kazanci included her almond-shaped fawn eyes (from Auntie Banu), a high forehead (from Auntie Cevriye), and a temperament that rendered her prone to explode too quickly but that also, in an odd way, kept her alive (from Auntie Feride). Nevertheless, she hated to see that with the passing of each year she more and more resembled them. Except for one thing: their proclivity for irrationality. The Kazanci women were categorically irrational. Some time ago, so that she would not act like them, Asya had promised herself she'd never swerve from the path of her own rational, analytical mind.
By the time of her nineteenth birthday, Asya was a young woman so profoundly stimulated by the need to assert her individuality that she had become capable of the most peculiar rebellions. Thus, if she repeated her cake objection, this time even more fervently, there was a deeper reason behind her fury: "No more stupid cakes for me!"
"Too late, miss. It's already done," Auntie Banu said, darting a glance at Asya over a newly opened Eight of P
entacles. Unless the next three cards did not turn out to be exceptionally promising, the tarot deck on the table was heading in the direction of a bad omen. "But pretend not to know anything about it or your poor mama will be upset. It must be a surprise!"
"How could something so predictable be a surprise?" Asya grumbled. By now she knew too well that being a member of the Kazanci family meant, among other things, professing the alchemy of absurdity, continually converting nonsense into some sort of logic with which you could convince everyone, and with a little push, even yourself.
"I am the one who is supposed to predict and portend in this house, not you." Auntie Banu winked.
It was true, at least to a certain extent. Having worked upon and fleshed out her talent for clairvoyance over the years, Auntie Banu had started seeing customers at home and making money from it. It took a fortune-teller no longer than a flash to become legendary in Istanbul. If luck was on your side, it sufficed to successfully read someone's future, and the next thing you knew, that person would become your top customer. And with the help of the wind and the seagulls, she would spread the word so quickly throughout the city that in no more than a week there would be a line of customers waiting at the door. So had Auntie Banu made her way up the ladder of the art of clairvoyance, becoming more famous with each rung. Her customers came from all around the city, virgins and widows, lasses and toothless grannies, the poor and the affluent, each immersed in their own qualms and all dying to learn what Fortuna, that fickle feminine force, had in store for them. They arrived with gobs of questions and left the house with additional ones. Some paid large sums of money to express their gratitude or in the expectation that they could bribe Fortuna, but there were also some who did not shell out a penny. Diverse as they were, the customers had one basic thing in common: All were women. The day she had baptized herself a soothsayer, Auntie Banu had taken an oath never to receive male customers.
Several things about Auntie Banu had undergone a radical transformation in the meantime, starting with her appearance. At the beginning of her career as a clairvoyant, she had paraded around the house in flamboyantly embroidered scarlet shawls carelessly flung around her shoulders. Soon, however, the shawls were replaced by cashmere scarves and scarves by pashmina stoles and stoles by loosely tied silk turbans, always in hues of red. After that, Auntie Banu had suddenly announced the decision that she had secretly been contemplating for only Allah knows how long: to withdraw from everything material and mundane, and to dedicate herself totally to the service of God. Toward this end, she had solemnly declared that she was ready to go through a phase of penitence and abandon all worldly vanities, just like the dervishes had done in the past.
"You are not a dervish," her sisters cynically chorused in unison, determined to dissuade her from such sacrilege, unheard of within the annals of the Kazanci family. And then all three of them started to raise objections, each in the most officious voice she could muster.
"Mind you, the dervishes used to clad themselves in coarse sacks or woolen garbs, not cashmere scarves," interjected Auntie Cevriye, the most maudlin of all.
Auntie Banu swallowed uneasily, uncomfortable in her clothes, uncomfortable in her body.
"Dervishes used to sleep on hay, not on queen-size feather mattresses," Auntie Feride joined in, the most moonstruck of all.
Auntie Banu stood silent, gazing across the room to avoid eye contact with her interrogators. What could she do, her back pain went through the roof if she didn't sleep on a special bed.
"Besides, the dervishes had no nefs. Look at you!" It was Auntie Zeliha, the most offbeat of all.
Eager to defend herself, Auntie Banu launched a counterattack.
"Neither do I. Not any longer. Those days are over." Then she added in her new mystical voice, "I will go into battle with my nefs and I shall prevail!!!"
In the Kazanci family whenever someone had the nerve to do something unusual, the others always reacted in the same way, following the old course of action, which could be summarized as: "Go ahead. See if we care." Accordingly, no one took Auntie Banu seriously. Upon noticing the general skepticism, she headed to her room and slammed the door, never to open it again for the next forty days except for quick visits to the kitchen and toilet. Other than that the only time she left the door ajar was to attach a cardboard sign that said: ALL SELF ABANDON YE WHO ENTER HERE!
Initially, Banu attempted to take with her Pasha the Third, who at the time was going through his last days on earth. She must have thought he could keep her company in her lonesome penitence, not that the dervishes kept pets. But no matter how antisocial he could be at times, the life of a hermit was too much for Pasha the Third, he having too many stakes in worldly vanities, starting with feta cheese and electrical cords. After no more than an hour inside Auntie Banu's cell, Pasha the Third launched a series of highpitched meows and scratched the door so forcefully he was immediately let out. After losing her only company, Auntie Banu sunk into her lonesomeness and stopped talking, mute and deaf to everyone. She also stopped taking showers, combing her hair, and even watching her favorite soap opera, The Malediction of the Ivy of Infatuation-a Brazilian drama in which a kindhearted supermodel suffered all sorts of betrayals by those she loved most.
But the true shock came when Auntie Banu, always a woman of immense appetite, stopped eating anything but bread and water. She had been notoriously fond of carbohydrates, especially bread, but no one ever thought that she could survive on bread. To tempt her into indulgence, her three sisters did their best, cooking many dishes, filling the house with the scents of sweet desserts, deep-fried fish, and roasted meat, often heavily buttered to enhance the smell.
Auntie Banu did not waver. If anything, she more resolutely clung to her devotion, as well as to her dry bread. For forty days and nights she remained unreachable under the same roof. Washing the dishes, doing the laundry, watching TV, gossiping with neighbors-everyday life routines became profanities she wanted to have nothing to do with. During the days that followed, every time the sisters checked to see how she was doing, they found her reciting the Holy Qur'an. So intense was her blissful abyss, she became alien to those who had known her all her life. Then on the morning of day forty-one, while everyone else was eating grilled sucuk and fried eggs at the breakfast table, Banu shuffled out of her room, beaming a radiant smile, with an uncanny sparkle in her eyes and a cherry red scarf on her head.
"What's that sorry thing on your head?" was the first reaction of Grandma Gulsum, who having not softened a wee bit after, all these years still maintained her Ivan the Terrible resemblance.
"From this moment on I am going to cover my head as my faith requires."
"What kind of nonsense is that?" Grandma Gulsum frowned. "Turkish women took off the veil ninety years ago. No daughter of mine is going to betray the rights the great commander-in-chief Ataturk bestowed on the women of this country."
"Yeah, women were given the right to vote in 1934," Auntie Cevriye echoed. "In case you didn't know, history moves forward, not backward. Take that thing off immediately!"
But Auntie Banu did not.
She remained head-scarved, and having passed the test of the three Ps-penitence, prostration, and piety-declared herself a soothsayer.
Just like her appearance, her techniques of clairvoyance underwent profound change throughout her psychic trajectory. At first she solely used coffee cups to read the future of her customers, but in the fullness of time she gradually employed new as well as highly unconventional techniques, including tarot cards, dried beans, silver coins, rosary beads, doorbells, imitation pearls, real pearls, ocean pebbles anything, as long as it would bring news from the paranormal world. Sometimes she chatted passionately with her shoulders whereupon, she claimed, sat two invisible djinn, dangling their feet. The good one on the right shoulder and the bad one on the left shoulder. Though she knew the name of each, in order not to utter them aloud, she simply called them Mrs. Sweet and Mr. Bitter, respectively.
"Because there are times when we all need the company of the bad," was the answer.
Asya tried a frown and then rolled her eyes, gaining no effect with either gesture other than a childish face. She whistled a tune from a Johnny Cash song, which she liked to recall on various encounters with her aunts: "Why me Lord, what have I ever done… "
"What are you whistling?" Auntie Banu asked suspiciously. She didn't know any English and was deeply distrustful of any language that made her miss something obvious.
"I was singing a song that says as my eldest aunt you are supposed to be a role model for me and teach me right from wrong. But here you are giving me lessons on the necessity of evil."
"Well, let me tell you something," Auntie Banu decreed, looking at her niece intently. "There are things so awful in this world that the good-hearted people, may Allah bless them all, have absolutely no idea of. And that's perfectly fine, I tell you; it is all right that they know nothing about such things because it proves what good-hearted people they are. Otherwise they wouldn't be good, would they?"
Asya couldn't help but nod. After all, she had a feeling Johnny Cash would be of the same opinion.
"But if you ever step into a mine of malice, it won't be one of these people you will ask help from."
"And you think I will ask help from a malicious djinni!" Asya exclaimed.
"Perhaps you will." Auntie Banu shook her head. "Let's just hope you'll never have to."