The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  "We need to face the truth!" Asya announced with certitude. "All these years you have all doted on Uncle Mustafa as the one and only precious son of this family, and the instant he flew from the nest, he forgot about you. Isn't it obvious that the man doesn't give a hoot about his family? Why should he mean anything for us, then?"

  "The boy is busy," Grandma Gulsum interjected. In truth, she favored her son, of which she had only one, over the daughters, of which she had too many. "It is not easy to be abroad. America is a long way away."

  "Yeah, of course it's a long way, especially when you consider the fact that you need to swim the Atlantic Ocean and walk the entire European continent," Asya said, biting into a slice of white cheese to soothe her tea-burned tongue. To her surprise the cheese was really good, soft and salty, the way she liked it. Finding it a bit difficult to gripe and enjoy the food at the same time, she shut up for a second and chewed nervously.

  Taking advantage of the momentary lull, Auntie Banu launched into a moral story, as she always did in times of distress. She told them the story of a man who decided to travel the entire globe round and round, in an endeavor to escape his mortality. North and south, east and west, he wandered every which way he could. Once, in one of his numerous trips, he unexpectedly ran into Azrail, the angel of death, in Cairo. Azrail's piercing gaze raked the man with a mysterious expression. He neither said a word nor followed him. The man right away abandoned Cairo, traveling nonstop thereafter until he arrived in a small, sleepy town in China. Thirsty and tired he rushed into the first tavern on his way. There, next to the table to which he was ushered, sat Azrail patiently waiting for him, this time with a relieved expression on his face. "I was so surprised to run into you in Cairo," he rasped to the man, "for your destiny said it wass here in China that we two would meet."

  Asya knew this story by heart, just like she knew the many other stories repeatedly narrated under this roof. What she didn't understand, and didn't think she ever could, was the thrill her aunts derived from narrating a story of which the punch line was already known. The air in the living room grew snug, all too sheltered, enveloped by the recurrence of the routine, as if life were one long, uninterrupted rehearsal and everyone memorized their speech. During the ensuing minutes, as the women around her jumped from tittle-tattle to tittle-tattle, each story triggering the next, Asya perked up, looking quite unlike the girl she had been earlier this morning. Sometimes she herself was baffled by her own inconsistencies. How could she so begrudge the ones she loved most? It was as if her mood were a yo-yo, bobbing up and down, now incensed, now contented. In this respect too she resembled her mother.

  A simit vendor's monotonous voice infiltrated from the open window, piercing the ongoing chatter. Auntie Banu rushed to the window and popped her red head outside. "Simitist! Simitist! Come this way!" she yelled. "How much are they?"

  Not that she didn't know how much a simit cost, she sure did. The question was less a query than a rite, performed dutifully. That is why as soon as the question came out of her mouth, she proceeded to the next line, without waiting for the man to answer. "All right, give us eight simits."

  Every Sunday at breakfast they bought eight simits, one for each person in the family, and then one extra, for the missing sibling now far away.

  "Oh, they smell superb." Auntie Banu beamed when she returned to the table wearing the simits on each arm like a circus acrobat ready to juggle with hoops. She left one in front of everyone, scattering the sesame seeds all over. Visibly relaxed now that she had a stockpile of carbohydrates, Auntie Banu started to cram them down, combining simit with borek, and borek with bread. But soon after, either because she was struck by heartburn or by a sullen thought, she put on a grim expression, like the one she used when telling a customer about an ominous portent flickering in the tarot cards. "It all depends on how you see things." Auntie Banu shot up her eyebrows, betraying the gravity of the statement she was going to announce.

  "Once there was; once there wasn't…. There lived two basket weavers back in the old Ottoman days. Both were hard workers, but one had faith, the other was always grumpy. One day the sultan came to the village. He said to them: `I will fill your baskets with wheat, and if you take good care of this wheat, the grains will turn into golden coins.' The first weaver accepted the offer with joy and filled his baskets. The second weaver, who was no less crabby than you, my dear, refused the great sultan's gift. You know what happened in the end?"

  "Of course I do," Asya said. "How can I not know the end of a story I must have listened to at least a hundred times? But what you don't know is the damage these stories do to a child's creativity. It is because of this ridiculous story that I spent my preschool years sleeping with a wheat straw under my pillow, hoping it would turn into a golden coin the next morning. And then what? I start going to school. One day I tell the other kids how I will soon become rich with my gold-to-be wheat, and the next thing I know, I am the butt of every silly joke in the classroom. You made an idiot out of me."

  Of all the shocks and traumas Asya suffered in her childhood, none remained in her memory more bitterly than the wheat incident. It was then that she reheard the word that would keep escorting her in the years to come, always at those moments when she least expected it: "Bastard!" Until that wheat incident in her first year at primary school, Asya had only once heard the word bastard but not minded it much, primarily because she didn't know what it meant. The other students were quick to make up for her lack of knowledge. But that part of the story she keenly kept to herself and instead poured another tea, burning hot.

  "Listen Asya, you can keep grouching to us as much as you like, but when our guest arrives, you should pipe down and be nice to her. Your English is better than mine and better than anyone else's in the family."

  This was not a modest statement on the part of Auntie Banu since it made her look as if she spoke some English when in fact she spoke none. Sure, she had taken English courses back in high school, but whatever she may have learned there, she had forgotten twice as much. Since the art of fortune-telling had no foreign language requirement, she never felt the need to study English. As for Auntie Feride, she had never been interested in learning English in the first place, choosing German at school. But since that coincided with the time she had lost interest in every course other than physical geography, her German had not made much progress either. With Petite-Ma and Grandma Gulsum as disqualified members, that left only Auntie Zeliha and Auntie Cevriye with enough English to move forward from beginner level to an intermediate stage. That said, there was a stark difference between the two aunts' command of the English language. Auntie Zeliha spoke a daily-life English, woven with slang and idioms and argot, which she practiced almost every day with the foreigners visiting her tattoo parlor; while Auntie Cevriye spoke a grammar-oriented, frozen-in-time, textbook English taught at high schools and at high schools only. Concomitantly, Auntie Cevriye could distinguish simple, complex, and compound sentences, identify adverb, adjective, and noun clauses, even recognize misplaced and dangling modifiers in syntactic structure, but she could not talk.

  "Therefore, dear, you will be her translator. You will ferry her words to us and our words to her." Auntie Banu narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow in an attempt to hint at the magnitude of what she was about to announce. "Like a bridge extending over cultures, you will connect the East and the West."

  Asya crinkled her nose, as if she had just detected an awful stink in the house that was apparent only to her, and screwed up her lips, as if to say, "You wish!"

  In the meantime nobody noticed that Petite-Ma had risen from her chair and approached the piano, which had been unplayed in years. From time to time they used the top of the closed piano as a sideboard for the extra dishes and plates that did not fit on the dinner table.

  "It is wonderful that you two girls are the same age," Auntie Banu concluded her soliloquy. "You two will become friends."

  Asya stared at Auntie Banu with ren
ewed interest, wondering if she would ever stop seeing her as a kid. When she was little, whenever another child was brought to the house, her aunts would put the two of them together and order: "Play now! Be friends!" Being of the same age group automatically meant getting along well; somehow peers were regarded as the broken pieces of the same puzzle, expected to suddenly make it complete when brought side by side.

  "This is going to be so exciting. And when she goes back to her country, you girls can become pen pals," Auntie Cevriye trilled. She was a strong believer in pen-pal friendships. As a comradeteacher of the Turkish Republican regime it was her belief that every Turkish citizen, no matter how ordinary she might be in society, had a duty to proudly represent the motherland vis-a-vis the whole world. What better opportunity than in an international pen-pal friendship was there to represent one's country?

  "You girls will exchange letters to and fro between San Francisco and Istanbul," Auntie Cevriye murmured half to herself. Corresponding with a stranger without an educational purpose being utterly unthinkable for her, she then lectured on the underlying pedagogical reason. "The problem with us Turks is that we are constantly being misinterpreted and misunderstood. The Westerners need to see that we are not like the Arabs at all. This is a modern, secular state."

  With Auntie Feride increasing the volume of the TV all of a sudden, they got distracted by a new Turkish pop video. As her eyes slid to the zany singer, Asya noticed that the woman's hairstyle looked familiar, very familiar. Her gaze bounced back and forth between the screen and Auntie Feride, now recognizing where the inspiration for the new hairdo had stemmed from.

  "The Americans have mostly been brainwashed by the Greeks and the Armenians, who unfortunately arrived in the United States before the Turks did," Auntie Cevriye continued. "So they are misled into believing that Turkey is the country of the Midnight Express. You'll show the American girl what a beautiful country this is, and promote international friendship and cultural understanding."

  Asya gasped with a frustrated expression on her face, and she could have more or less remained in that position had her eldest aunt not proven relentless.

  "What's more, she will improve your English and perhaps you will teach her Turkish. Won't this be a wonderful friendship?"

  Friendship…. Speaking of which, Asya rose to her feet and grabbed her half-eaten simit, getting ready to leave to see somee real friends.

  "Where are you going, miss? The breakfast is not over yet," Auntie Zeliha said, opening her mouth for the first time since they sat down at the table. Working amid the hustle and bustle of the tattoo store six days a week from twelve to nine, it was she more than anyone else in the family who savored the droopy slowness of Sunday-morning breakfasts.

  "There's this Chinese Film Festival," Asya answered, her voice slightly strained from the effort to look serious and sincere. "The professor of one of my courses asked us to go and see a movie this weekend and then write a critical, analytical paper on it."

  "What kind of an assignment is that?" Auntie Cevriye cocked an eyebrow, always wary of unconventional pedagogical techniques.

  But Auntie Zeliha did not push it any further. "All right, go and see your Chinese movie," she nodded. "But don't be late, miss. I want you back home before five o'clock. We pick up our guest at the airport this evening."

  Asya grabbed her hippie bag and hurried toward the door. Just when she was about to step outside, however, she heard a most unexpected sound. Somebody was playing the piano. Timid, rickety notes looking for a melody long lost.

  A look of recognition appeared on Asya's face as she whispered to herself: "Petite-Ma!"

  Petite-Ma was born in Thessaloniki. She was only a little girl when she migrated with her mother, a widow, to Istanbul. It was the year 1923. The time Petite-Ma arrived in this city cannot be confused for it coincided with the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic.

  "You and the Republic have arrived in this city together. I was desperately waiting for both of you," her husband Rlza Selim Kazanci told her amorously years later. "You both ended the old regimes forever, the one in the country and the one in my house. When you came to me, life brightened up."

  "When I came to you, you were sad but strong. I brought you joy and you gave me strength," Petite-Ma had said back.

  The truth is, Petite-Ma being so pretty and convivial, the number of men who asked for her hand by the time she was sixteen could have made a line from one end of the old Galata Bridge to the other. Among all the candidates who knocked on her door, there was one and only one that she felt sympathy for the moment she set eyes on him from behind the latticework partition: a portly, tall man who went by the name Riza.

  He had a thick beard and a thin mustache, full, somber, dark eyes, and was no lesss than thirty-three years older than her. He had been married before and rumor had it that his wife, a heartless woman, had abandoned him and their boy. After his wife's betrayal, and though left on his own with a toddler, he had for a long time refused to remarry, preferring to live in his family mansion all alone. There he had stayed, inflating his wealth, which he shared with his friends, and his wrath, which he reserved for his enemies. He was a self-made businessman, once a cauldron maker, an artisan, then an entrepreneur wise enough to enter into the flag-making business at the right time and the right place. During the 1920s the new Turkish Republic was still throbbing with fervor, and manual work, though systematically venerated in government propaganda, brought little money. The new regime needed teachers to create patriotic Turks out of their students, financiers to help generate a national bourgeoisie, and flag manufacturers to adorn the entire country with the Turkish flag, but it surely did not need any cauldron makers. This is how Riza Selim entered into the flag-making business.

  Despite earning oodles of money and influential friends in his new business, when choosing a surname in 1925, after the Law of Surnames obliged every Turkish citizen to carry a surname, it was his first craft that Riza Selim wished to be called after: Kazanci.

  Though fine-looking and definitely well off, given his age and the trauma of his first marriage (who knows why his wife abandoned him; perhaps the man was a pervert, the women gossiped), Riza Selim Kazanci was one of the last men on earth Petite-Ma's mother would have liked to see her treasured daughter marry. There sure were better candidates than him. But despite her mother's persistent objections, Petite-Ma refused to listen to anyone but her heart. Perhaps it was because there was something in Riza Selim Kazanci's dark eyes that made Petite-Ma grasp, not intellectually but intuitively, that he was gifted with something barred to many in this world: the ability to love another human being more than you love yourself. Though too young and too inexperienced at thee age of sixteen, Petite-Ma was sensible enough to comprehend what an exceptional bliss it could be to be loved and adored by a man with such a gift. Riza Selim Kazanci's eyes were soft and sparkly, just like his voice; there was something in him that made one feel secure in his company, cherished and protected even amid surrounding turbulence. This man was no deserter.

  But that was not the only reason why Petite-Ma was attracted to Riza Selim Kazancl. The truth is, she was drawn to his story long before being attracted to him. She sensed how badly his soul had been bruised by the desertion of his first wife. She sure could mend those bruises. After all, women enjoy taking care of one another's wreckages. Petite-Ma didn't take long to make up her mind. She was going to marry him and nobody, not even her destiny, could change that.

  If Petite-Ma so intuitively believed in Riza Selim Kazanci, he, in turn, was going to merit that trust until his last breath. This blond, blue-eyed wife, who came to him with a furry, snow white cat instead of a proper dowry, was the delight of his life. Never a day did he refuse to fulfill any demand of hers, no matter how whimsical. That, however, was hardly the case with the then six-year-old boy at home: Levent Kazanci never accepted Petite-Ma as a mother. He resisted and ridiculed her at every opportunity for years to come, ending his childhood with s
uppressed bitterness, if childhood could ever come to an end when one remained so bitter inside.

  At a time when marriage without kids was, if not a sign of an incurable malady, then surely a sacrilege, Petite-Ma and Riza Selim Kazanci didn't have a child. Not because he was too old but because at the beginning she was too young and disinterested in raising kids, and then when she changed her mind, he was simply too old. Levent Kazanci remained the only child to continue the lineage, a title he wasn't thrilled to hold.

  Though saddened and offended by her stepson's acrimony, Petite-Ma was an exuberant, extroverted girl with a wide imagination and an even wider list of requests. There were things in this world far more interesting than nursing babies, such as learning the piano. Before long, a Bentley piano made by Stroud Piano Co., Ltd., in England was gleaming in the best spot in the living room. It was with this piano that Petite-Ma started taking her first lessons from her first piano teacher-a white Russian musician who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution and settled permanently in Istanbul. Petite-Ma was his best student. She not only had the talent but also the perseverance to make the piano a lifelong companion rather than a fleeting pastime.

  Rachmaninoff, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky were her favorites. Whenever she was alone at home, playing just for herself with Pasha the First on her lap, these were the composers whose works she would perform. When she played for guests, however, she'd choose songs from an entirely different repertoire. A Western repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and above all, Wagner, on those special occasions when they had government officials and their dainty wives as guests. After supper the men would gather near the fireplace with drinks in their hands to discuss world politics. The late 1920s were the years when national politics could only be either venerated or reaffirmed, the louder the better since the walls had ears. Accordingly, whenever there emerged a need for genuine discussion, the new Turkish Republic's political and cultural elite instantly switched to world politics, which was a mess on its own and thereby always interesting to talk about.