The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  At nine fifteen that evening, in the living room of a once fashionably opulent but now long outmoded and dilapidated konak in Istanbul, Asya Kazanci was doing ballet on a Turkish carpet, her face romantically poised, her arms stretched out, her hands softly curved so that her middle fingers touched her thumbs, while her mind swirled with rage and resentment.

  SIX

  Pistachios

  Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian watched the cashier at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books pile the twelve novels she had just purchased one by one into a canvas backpack while they waited for her credit card to be processed. When finally given the receipt, she signed the paper, trying to avoid looking at the total. Once again she had spent all her monthly savings on books! She was a true bookworm, not a promising feature at all given that it had zero value in the eyes of boys and thus served to only further upset her mother about the prospects of her getting married to a moneyed husband. Just this morning on the phone her mother had made her promise not to whisper a word about novels when she went out tonight. Armanoush felt a surge of angst rise in her stomach as she thought about her upcoming date. After a year of not going out with anyone-a solemn tribute to her twenty-one years of chronic singleness marked with disastrous pseudodates finally today Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian was going to give love a try again.

  If her passion for books had been one fundamental reason be hind her recurring inability to sustain a standard relationship with the opposite sex, there were two additional factors that had fanned the flames of her failure. First and foremost, Armanoush was beautiful too beautiful. With a well-proportioned body, delicate face, dark blond, wavy hair, huge gray blue eyes, and a sharp nose with a slight ridge that might seem a defect on others but on her only added an air of self-confidence, her physical attractiveness when combined with her brains intimidated young men. Not that they preferred ugly women, or that they had no appreciation for intelligence. But they didn't quite know where exactly to pigeonhole her: among the group of women they were dying to sleep with (the darlings), or among the group they sought advice from (the buddies), or among the group they wished to marry eventually (the fiancee types). Since she was sublime enough to be all at once, she ended up being none.

  The second factor was far more complicated but equally beyond her control: her relatives. The Tchakhmakhchian family in San Francisco and her mother in Arizona had antagonistically different views when it came to the question of who would be the right man for Armanoush. Since she had been spending almost five months here (summer vacation, spring break, and frequent visits over the weekends) and the remaining seven months in Arizona almost every year since she was a toddler, Armanoush had had the chance to learn firsthand what each side expected from her and how utterly irreconcilable those expectations were. Whatever made one side happy was bound to distress the other. In order not to upset anyone, Armanoush had tried to date Armenian boys in San Francisco and anyone but them when she was in Arizona. But fate must have been pulling her leg, because in San Francisco she had been attracted only to non-Armenians, whereas all three of the young men she had had a crush on while in Arizona turned out to be Armenian Americans, much to her mother's disappointment.

  Lugging her anxieties together with the heavy backpack, she crossed Opera Plaza while the wind whistled and wailed uncanny tunes to her ears. She caught sight of a young couple inside Max's Opera Cafe who were either disappointed with the piled-high corned beef sandwiches in front of them, or' else had just had a quarrel. Thank God I'm single, Armanoush half jokingly thought to herself before she turned toward Turk Street. Years ago when she was still in her teens, Armanoush had shown the city to an Armenian American girl from New York. Upon reaching this street the girl's face had crumpled. "Turk Street! Aren't they everywhere?"

  Armanoush recalled her own surprise at the girl's reaction. She had tried to explain to her that the street was named after Frank Turk, an attorney who had served as second alcalde and was important in the city's history.

  "Whatever." Her friend had broken off the lecture, showing not too much interest in urban history. "All the same, aren't they everywhere?"

  Yes indeed, they were everywhere, so much so that one of them was married to her mom. But this last bit of information Armanoush had kept to herself:

  She avoided talking about her stepfather with her Armenian friends. She did not talk about him with non-Armenians either. Not even with those who had absolutely no interest in life outside of their own and therefore couldn't care less about the history of the Armenian-Turkish conflict. All the same, wise enough to know that secrets could spread quicker than dust in the wind, Armanoush maintained her silence. When you didn't tell anyone the extraordinary, everyone assumed the normal, Armanoush discovered at an early age. Since her mother was an odar, what could have been more normal for her than to get married to another odar? This being the general assumption on the part of her friends, Armanoush's stepfather was thought to be an American, presumably from the Midwest.

  On Turk Street she passed by a gay-friendly bed-and-breakfast, a Middle Eastern grocery store, and a small Thai market, and strolled next to pedestrians from all walks of life until she finally got on the trolley to Russian Hill. Leaning her forehead on the dusty window, she reflected on the "other I" in Borges's Labyrinths as she watched the wispy fog drift up off the horizon. Armanoush too had another self, one that she kept at bay no matter where she went.

  She liked being in this city, its vim and vigor pulsating in her body. Ever since she was a toddler she had enjoyed coming here and living with her dad and Grandma Shushan. Unlike her mom, her dad had not married again. Armanoush knew he had had girlfriends in the past but none had been introduced to her, either because the affairs weren't serious enough or her dadd had been afraid of upsetting her in some way. Probably it was the latter. That would be more typical of Barsam Tchakhmakhchian. He was the most unselfish soul and the most genderless man, Armanoush believed, that existed on the face of the earth, and to this day she couldn't help marveling at how he could have ever ended up with a woman as self-absorbed as Rose. Not that Armanoush didn't love her mother; she did, in her own way, but there were times in which she felt suffocated by her mother's dissatisfied love. At those times she escaped to San Francisco right into the arms of the Tchakhmakhchian family, where a satisfied but equally demanding love would be awaiting her.

  Once off the trolley she began to hurry. Matt Hassinger would be picking her up at seven thirty. She had less than an hour and a half to get ready, which basically meant to take a shower and don a dress, perhaps the turquoise one everyone said looked so good on her. That would be all. No makeup, no jewelry. She was not going to doll herself up for this date and she certainly wasn't going to expect much from it. If it worked out well, that would be nice. But if it didn't, she would be prepared for that too. Thus inching her way under the fog canopying the city, at ten past six in the evening Armanoush reached her grandmother's two-bathroom condominium in Russian Hill, a lively neighborhood built on one of the steepest hills in San Francisco.

  "Hello, sweetheart, welcome home!"

  Surprisingly, it was not her grandmother but Auntie Surpun who opened the door. "I missed you," she twittered lovingly. "What have you done all day long? How was your day?"

  "It was OK," Armanoush said placidly, wondering what her youngest aunt was doing here on a Tuesday evening.

  Auntie Surpun lived in Berkeley, where she had been teaching forever, at least ever since Armanoush was a child. She drove to San Francisco on the weekends but it was highly unusual of her to show up during the week. But the question would cease to concern Armanoush once she proceeded to give an account of her day. She remarked heartily, with a beaming face, "I bought myself some new books."

  "Books!? Did she say `books' again?" a familiar voice yelled from inside.

  That sounded like Auntie Varsenig! Armanoush hung up her raincoat, flattened her wind-ruffled hair, and wondered in the meantime what Auntie Varsenig was doing here as well
. Her twin daughters were coming back this evening from Los Angeles, where they had been participating in a basketball tournament. Auntie Varsenig was so excited about the competition that she hadn't been able to sleep properly for the last three days, constantly chatting on the phone with either of her daughters or their coach. And yet on the day the team was returning, instead of arriving at the airport hours early, as was her habit, here she was at grandma's house setting the dinner table.

  "Yes, I did say `books,"' Armanoush said, shouldering her canvas backpack as she walked into the spacious living room.

  "Don't you listen to her. She's just getting old and grumpy," Auntie Surpun chirped from behind her as she followed her into the living room. "We are all so proud of you, sweetheart."

  "We are proud of her, but she could just as well act her age." Auntie Varsenig shrugged as she placed the last china plate on the table and then gave her niece a hug. "Girls your age are usually busy beautifying themselves, you know. Not that you need to, of course, but if you read and read and read, where is it going to end?"

  "You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one." Armanoush winked without knowing how pretty she looked under the sun's fading light in the room. She set her backpack on her grandma's armchair and instantly emptied it, like a kid eager to see a bunch of new toys. Books rained on top of one another: The Aleph and Other Stories, A Confederacy of Dunces, A Frolic of His Own, The Management of Grief, Borges's Collected Fictions, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Landscape Painted with Tea, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, and two by Milan Kundera, her favorite author, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Life Is Elsewhere. Some of them were new to her, others she'd read years ago but had been wanting to read again.

  All things considered, Armanoush knew, perhaps not rationally but instinctively, that the Tchakhmakhchian family's resistance to her passion for books came from a deeper, darker source than simply from an urge to remind her of the things girls her age were busy with. It was not only because she was a woman but also because she was an Armenian that she was expected to refrain twice as much from becoming a bibliophile. Armanoush had a feeling that beneath Auntie Varsenig's constant objection to her reading lay a more structural, if not primordial, concern: a fear of survival. She simply did not want her to shine too bright, to stand out from the flock. Writers, poets, artists, intellectuals were the first ones within the Armenian millet to be eliminated by the late Ottoman government. They had first gotten rid of "the brains" and only then proceeded to extradite the rest-the laypeople. Like too many Armenian families in the diaspora, safe and sound here but never truly at ease, the Tchakhmakhchians were both elated and vexed when a child of theirs read too much, thought too much, and swerved too far away from the ordinary.

  Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you could be so carried away that you could lose touch with reality-that stringent and stolid truth from which no minority should ever veer too far from in order not to end up unguarded when the winds shifted and bad times arrived. It didn't help to be so naive to think things wouldn't get bad, for they always did. Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced. If as a child of survivors you still wanted to read and ruminate, you should do so quietly, apprehensively, and introspectively, never turning yourself into a vociferous reader. If you couldn't help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as ifyou had been de-energized and now had only enough strength to be average. With a fate and family like this, Armanoush had to learn to downplay her talents and do her best not to glimmer too brightly.

  A sharp, spicy smell wafted from the kitchen and tickled her nostrils, yanking her out of her reverie. "So," Armanoush exclaimed, turning toward the most talkative of her three aunts, "are you going to stay for dinner?"

  "Only briefly, honey," Auntie Varsenig murmured. "I need to leave for the airport soon; the twins are coming back today. I just stopped by to bring you guys homemade manta and" Auntie Varsenig beamed with pride-"guess what? We got bastirma from Yerevan! "

  "Gosh, I'm not eating manta and I'm definitely not going to eat bastirma." Armanoush frowned. "I can't reek of garlic tonight."

  "No problem. If you brush your teeth and chew a mint gum there will be no smell whatsoever."

  That was Auntie Zarouhi walking in with a plate of musaqqa, beautifully garnished with parsley and slices of lemon. She left the plate on the table and opened her arms wide to embrace her niece.

  Armanoush embraced her back wondering all the while what was she doing here…? But she started to get the picture. What a wellplanned "coincidence" it was that the whole Tchakhmakhchian family had materialized at Grandma Shushan's house at the same time Armanoush would be going on her date. Everyone here had shown up with a different pretext but exactly the same purpose: They wanted to see, test, and judge with their own eyes this Matt Hassinger, the lucky young man who would be dating the apple of their eye this evening.

  Armanoush looked at her relatives with a stare that bordered on desperate. What could she do? How could she be independent when they were so frighteningly close? How could she convince them that they didn't have to worry so much about her when they had had so much in life to worry about? How could she break free from her genetic heritage, especially when a part of her was so proud of it? How could she fight off the kindness of her loved ones? Could goodness be fought?

  "That's not going to help!" Armanoush gasped. "No toothpaste, no chewing gum, not even those awful minry mouthwashesthere is nothing on earth strong enough to suppress the smell of bastirma. It takes a week to finally disappear. If you eat bastirma you smell and sweat and breathe bastirma for days on end. Even your pee smells like bastirma!"

  "What's peeing got to do with dating?" Armanoush heard a befuddled Auntie Varsenig whisper to Auntie Surpun as soon as she had turned her back.

  Still protesting but unwilling to squabble with them, Armanoush headed to the bathroom, only to find Uncle Dikran there, his head inside the cabinet under the sink, his bulky body on hands and knees.

  "Uncle?" Armanoush almost let out a shriek.

  "Hellooo!" Dikran Stamboulian hooted from the cabinet. "This house is full of Chekhovian characters," Armanoush muttered to herself

  "If you say so," echoed a voice from under the sink.

  "Uncle, what are you doing?"

  "Your grandma always complains about the old faucets in the house, you know. So this evening I said to myself, why don't I close the store early, stop by Shushan's house, and repair those damn pipes?"

  "Yeah, I can see," Armanoush remarked, suppressing a smile. "Where is she, by the way?"

  "She's taking a nap," Dikran said, worming his way out of the cabinet to get the pipe bender and crawling back inside. "Old age-what you gonna do? — body needs sleep! She will be awake before seven thirty, though, don't worry."

  Seven thirty! It looked like every person in the family had set a biological alarm for the moment Matt Hassinger would ring the bell.

  "Give me the smooth jaw wrench, will you?" came a frustrated voice. "This one doesn't seem to be working."

  Armanoush pouted at the bag on the floor, in which glinted over a hundred tools of all sizes. She handed him a chain tong, a pipe reamer, and an HTP300 hydrostatic test pump before she chanced upon the smooth jaw wrench. Inauspiciously, that wrench too turned out to be "not working." Seeing the impossibility of taking a shower with Uncle Dikran the Impossible Plumber on the job, Armanoush moved toward her grandma's bedroom, opened the door slightly, and peeked inside. There she wa
s sleeping lightly but with the blissful placidity found only in elderly women who are surrounded by their children and grandchildren. An elfin woman who had always had a flimsy body and too much to shoulder, she had been shortened and slimmed down by old age. As she had aged she had grown more and more in need of some sleep during the day. At night, however, she was as awake as ever. Old age had not diminished Shushan's insomnia one tiny bit. The past didn't let her rest for too long, her family thought; it allowed her only these fleeting catnaps. Armanoush closed the door and let her sleep.

  The table was ready when she returned to the living room. They had also set a plate for her. She wondered how she could possibly be expected to eat if she was going to have a date in less than an hour, but preferred not to ask. To be too reasonable in this family would be a blunder. She could nibble a little so that everyone would be happy. Besides, she liked this cuisine. Her mother in Arizona wanted to keep Armenian cuisine as far from the borders of her kitchen as possible, and profoundly enjoyed vilifying it to her neighbors and friends. She was especially fond of drawing attention to two dishes, which she publicly disparaged on every available occasion: cooked calf's feet and stuffed intestines. Armanoush recalled how Rose once complained to Mrs. Grinnell, the next-door neighbor.

  "Gross," Mrs. Grinnell exclaimed with a trace of disgust creeping into her voice. "Do they really eat the intestines?"

  "Oh yeah." Rose nodded heartily. "Believe me, they do. They spice it up with garlic and herbs, stuff it with rice, and wolf it down."

  The two women unleashed a condescending snicker and would have probably snickered some more if at that moment Armanoush's stepfather had not turned toward them and, with a jaded look on his face, remarked: "What's the big deal? That sounds just like mumbar. You should try it sometime, it's really good."