The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  "What does she say?" Auntie Feride nudged Asya's elbow, understanding the first half of the sentence but missing the rest.

  "She says her family was a prominent family in Istanbul," Asya whispered to her.

  "Dedim sana altin liralar icingelmiSS olmah…. I told you she must have come here for golden coins!"

  Asya rolled her eyes, less sarcastically than she had intended, before concentrating on Armanoush's story.

  "They tell me he was a man of letters who liked to read and contemplate more than anything in this world. My grandmother says I remind her of him. I too like books very much," Armanoush added with a bashful smile.

  Some of the listeners smiled back, and when the translation was over, all of the listeners smiled back.

  "But unfortunately his name was on the list," Armanoush said tentatively.

  "What list?" Auntie Cevriye wanted to know.

  "The list of Armenian intellectuals to be eliminated. Political leaders, poets, writers, members of clergy…. They were two hundred and thirty-four people total."

  "But why's that?" asked Auntie Banu, a question which Armanoush skipped.

  "On April 24, a Saturday, at midnight, dozens of Armenian notables living in Istanbul were arrested and forcibly taken to police headquarters. All of them had dressed up properly, spick-and-span as if going to a ceremony. They were wearing immaculate collars and elegant suits. All were men of letters. They were kept in the headquarters without an explanation until finally they were deported either to Ayash or to Chankiri. The ones in the first group were in worse condition than the second. Nobody survived in Ayash. The ones taken to Chankiri were killed gradually. My grandpa was among this group. They took the train from Istanbul to Chankiri under the supervision of Turkish soldiers. They had to walk three miles from the station to the town. Until then they had been treated decently. But during the walk from the station, they were beaten with canes and pickax handles. The legendary musician Komitas went mad as a result of what he saw. Once in Chankiri they were released on one condition: They were banned from leaving the town. So they rented rooms there, living with the natives. Every day, two or three of them would be taken by the soldiers outside the town for a walk and then the soldiers would come back alone. One day the soldiers took my grandpa for a walk too."

  Still smiling, Auntie Banu looked left and right, first to her sister then to her niece, to see who was going to translate all this, but to her surprise there was only perplexity on the faces of the two translators.

  "Anyway, it is a long story. I won't take your time with all the details. When her father died, my grandma Shushan was three years old. There were four siblings, she being the youngest and the only girl. The family had been left without its patriarch. My grandmother's mother was a widow now. Finding it difficult to stay in Istanbul with the children, she sought refuge in her father's house, which was in Sivas. But as soon as they arrived, the deportations began. The entire family was ordered to leave their house and belongings and march with thousands of others to an unknown destination."

  Armanoush studied her audience carefully, and decided to finish the story.

  "They marched and marched. My grandmother's mother died on the way and before long the elderly died as well. Having no parents to look after them, the younger children lost each other amid the confusion and chaos. But after months apart, the brothers were miraculously reunited in Lebanon with the help of a Catholic missionary. The only missing sibling among those still alive was my grandmother Shushan. Nobody had heard of the fate of the infant. Nobody knew that she had been taken back to Istanbul and placed in an orphanage."

  Out of the corner of her eye, Asya could tell that her mother was now intently looking at her. At first she suspected Auntie Zeliha might be trying to convey to her to censure the story as she translated it. But then she realized that what flickered in her mother's stunning eyes was nothing but interest in Armanoush's story. Perhaps she was also wondering how much of all this her unruly daughter was willing to translate to the Kazanci women.

  "It took Grandma Shushan's elder brother ten full years to trackher down. Finally Great Uncle Yervant found her and took her to America to join her relatives," Armanoush added softly.

  Auntie Banu tilted her head to one side and started twining the beads of her amber rosary through her bony, never-manicured fingers, all the while murmuring, "All that is on earth will perish: But will abide (for ever) the Face of thy Lord, full of Majesty, Bounty- and Honor. "

  "But I don't understand," Auntie Feride was the first to raise doubts. "What happened to them? They died because they walked?"

  Before she translated that, Asya glanced at her mother to see if she should continue translating. Auntie Zeliha raised her eyebrows and nodded.

  When the question was asked to her, Armanoush paused briefly and caressed her grandma's Saint Francis of Assisi pendant before she answered. She spotted Petite-Ma sitting at the other end of the table, her sallow complexion carrying the wrinkles of so many years, staring at her with an expression so deeply compassionate that Armanoush could suspect only two possibilities: Either she had not paid attention to the story at all, and was not here with them anymore, or else she had been listening so attentively that she had lived the story, and was not here with them anymore.

  "They were denied water and food and rest. They were made to march a long distance on foot. Women, some of them pregnant, and children, the elderly, the sick, and the debilitated. . " Armanoush's voice now trailed off. "Many starved to death. Some others were executed."

  This time Asya translated everything without skipping a word.

  "Who did this atrocity?!" Auntie Cevriye exclaimed as if addressing a classroom of ill-disciplined students.

  Auntie Banu joined in her sister's reaction, although hers was inclined more toward disbelief than anger. Her eyes wide open, she tugged the ends of her head scarf as she always did in times of stress, and then heaved a prayer, as she always did when tugging the ends of her head scarf didn't get her anywhere.

  "My aunt is asking who did this?" Asya said.

  "The Turks did it," Armanoush replied, without paying attention to the implications.

  "What a shame, what a sin, are they not human?" Auntie Feride volleyed.

  "Of course not, some people are monsters!" Auntie Cevriye declared without comprehending that the repercussions could be far more complex than she would care to acknowledge. Twenty years in her career as a Turkish national history teacher, she was so accustomed to drawing an impermeable boundary between the past and the present, distinguishing the Ottoman Empire from the modern Turkish Republic, that she had actually heard the whole story as grim news from a distant country. The new state in Turkey had been established in 1923 and that was as far as the genesis of this regime could extend. Whatever might or might not have happened preceding this commencement date was the issue of another eraand another people.

  Armanoush looked at them one by one, puzzled. She was relieved to see that the family had not taken the story as badly as she feared, but then she couldn't be sure that they had really taken it. True, they neither refused to believe her nor attacked with a counterargument. If anything, they listened attentively and they all seemed sorry. But was that the limit of their commiseration? And what exactly had she expected? Armanoush felt slightly disconcerted as she wondered whether it would have been different if she were talking to a group of intellectuals.

  Slowly it dawned on Armanoush that perhaps she was waiting for an admission of guilt, if not an apology. And yet that apology had not come, not because they had not felt for her, for it looked as if they had, but because they had seen no connection between themselves and the perpetrators of the crimes. She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such notion of continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames. For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and
the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.

  "But you haven't eaten anything. Come on, my child, you came a long way, eat now," Auntie Banu said, shifting the topic to food, one of the two cures she knew for sorrow.

  "It's very good, thank you." Armanoush grabbed her fork. She noticed they had cooked the rice exactly the way her grandmother did, with butter and sauteed pine nuts.

  "Good, good! Eat, eat!" Auntie Banu nodded as vigorously as she could manage.

  With a sinking heart Asya had watched Armanoush politely accept the offer and grab her fork to go back to her kaburga. She lowered her head, losing her appetite. Not that she was hearing the story of the deportation of the Armenians for the first time. She had heard things before, some pro and most con. But it was quite a different experience to hear an account from an actual person. Never before had Asya met someone so young with a memory so old.

  It wouldn't take the nihilist in her too long, however, to chuck out the distress. She shrugged. Whatever! The world sucked anyway. Past and future, here and there… it was all the same. The same misery everywhere. God either did not exist, or was simply too aloof to see the wretchedness into which he had thrust us all. Life was mean and cruel, and a lot of other things she had long been tired of knowing. Her hazy gaze slid toward the screen where the Turkish Donald Trump was now grilling the three most culpable members of the losing group. The uniforms they'd designed for the soccer team had turned out to be so awful that even the most easygoing athletes had refused to wear them. Now somebody had to be fired. As if a button had been pushed, all three contestants started insulting one another to avoid being the one eliminated.

  Withdrawn, Asya lapsed into a disdainful smile. This was the world we lived in. History, politics, religion, society, competition, marketing, free market, power struggle, at one anther's throats for another morsel of triumph…. She sure did not need any of these and all that…

  … shit.

  Still keeping an eye on the screen, but now having fully regained her appetite, Asya jerked her chair forward and started filling her plate. She took a large piece of kaburga and began to eat. When she lifted her head, she met her mother's piercing gaze, and quickly looked away.

  After dinner Armanoush retreated to the girls' room to make two phone calls. First she called San Francisco. She stood face-to-face with a Johnny Cash poster on the wall directly above the desk.

  "Grandma, it's me!" she exclaimed excitedly, but instantly stopped. "What is that noise in the background?"

  "Oh, it is nothing, honey," came the answer. "They are repairing the pipes in the bathroom. It turns out your Uncle Dikran messed them up the other day. We had to call a plumber. Tell me how you have been doing?"

  Anticipating this question, Armanoush talked about her daily routine in Arizona. Though she felt awful about the deception, she tried to assuage her discomfort by thinking it was for the best. How could she tell her, "I am not in Arizona. I am in the city where you were born!"?

  After she hung up, she waited a few minutes. Pensively, she took a deep breath, mustered her courage, and made her second call. She decided to stay calm and not to sound frustrated-a promise she found hard to keep upon hearing her mother's edgy voice.

  "Amy, honey, why didn't you call before? How are you? How is the weather in San Francisco? Are they treating you well?"

  "Yes, Mom. I'm OK. The weather is" Armanoush regretted not having checked the weather in San Francisco on the Internet "fine, a bit windy, as always-"

  "Yeah," Rose interjected, "I have called you over and over but your cell phone was dead. Oh, I've been so worried!"

  "Mom, please listen," Armanoush said, surprised at the note of determination in her own voice. "I feel uncomfortable when you keep calling me at my grandma's house. Let's make a deal, OK? Let me call you and do not call me. Please."

  "Are they making you say this?" Rose asked suspiciously.

  "No Ma, of course not. For God's sake. I'm the one who's asking you this."

  Though reluctant, Rose accepted the terms. She complained about not having any time for herself, her days being divided between home and work. But then she cheered up as she told how there was a sale at Home Depot and she and Mustafa had agreed to get new kitchen cabinets.

  "Tell me your opinion," Rose enthused. "What do you think about cherry wood? Do you think it would look good in our kitchen?"

  "Yeah, I guess so…"

  "I think so too. But how about the dark oak? It's a bit more expensive but it has class written all over it. Which one do you think would be better?"

  "I dunno, Mom, the dark oak sounds good too."

  "Yeah, but you see, you're not helping me much." Rose sighed.

  When she hung up Armanoush looked around her and felt a deep estrangement. The Turkish rugs, the old-fashioned bedside lamps, the unfamiliar furniture, books and newspapers that spoke another language…. Suddenly she felt a panic that she hadn't felt since she was a small child.

  When Armanoush was six years old, she and her mother had once run out of gas in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. They'd had to wait almost an hour before another vehicle passed by them. Rose stuck her thumb out and a truck stopped to pick them up. Inside there were two rough-looking, brawny` men, scary, sullen fellows. They didn't say a word and drove them to the next gas station. Once they were dropped off and the truck disappeared, Rose hugged Armanoush with a quivering lip, weeping in panic. "Oh God, what if they had been bad people? They could have kidnapped, raped, and killed us, and nobody would have found our bodies. How could I have taken this risk?"

  Though not quite that dramatic, Armanoush had a similar feeling right now. Here she was in Istanbul staying at the house of strangers without anyone in her family knowing about it. How could she have acted so impulsively?

  What if they were bad people?

  i68

  NINE

  Orange Peels

  The next day Asya Kazanci and Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian left the konak early in the morning to search for the house where Grandma Shushan had been born. They found the neighborhood easily-a charming, posh borough in the European side of the city. But the house wasn't there anymore. A modern, five-story apartment building had been erected in its place. The entire first floor was a classy-looking fish restaurant. Before going in, Asya checked her reflection in the glass, adjusting her hair while discontentedly eyeing her breasts.

  As it was still too early for dinner, there was no one inside except for a handful of waiters sweeping the traces of the previous night off the floor and a rosy-cheeked, stout cook in the kitchen preparing the metes and the main courses for the evening under a cloud of mouth-watering smells. Asya talked to each of them, asking questions about the building's past. But the waiters had arrived in the city only recently, migrating from a Kurdish village in the southeast, and the cook, though he had lived longer in Istanbul, did not have any memory of the street's history.

  "Of the long-standing Istanbulite families, only a few have remained on their soil of birth," the cook explained with an air of authority, as he started gutting and cleaning a huge mackerel.

  "This city was so cosmopolitan once," the cook continued, breaking the mackerel's backbone first above its tail, then below its head. "We had Jewish neighbors, lots of them. We also had Greek neighbors, and Armenian neighbors…. As a boy I used to buy fish from Greek fishermen. My mother's tailor was Armenian. My father's boss was Jewish. You know, we were all intermingled."

  "Ask him why things have changed," Armanoush turned to Asya.

  "Because Istanbul is not a city," the cook remarked, his face lighting up with the importance of the statement he was about to make. "It looks like a city but it is not. It is a city-boat. We live in a vessel!"

  With that he held the fish by its head and started moving the backbone right and left. For a second Armanoush imagi
ned the mackerel to be made of porcelain, fearing it would shatter to pieces in the cook's hands. But in a few seconds the man had managed to take the whole bone out. Pleased with himself, he continued. "We are all passengers here, we come and go in clusters, Jews go, Russians come, my brother's neighborhood is full of Moldovans…. Tomorrow they will go, others will arrive. That's how it is…."

  They thanked the cook and shot a last glance at the mackerel waiting to be stuffed, its mouth still open.

  Asya disappointed, Armanoush distressed, they walked out of the restaurant into an exquisite Bosphorus landscape sparkling under the late winter sun. They put their hands over their eyes to block the sun. Both took a deep breath and knew instantly that spring was in the air.

  Having no better plans, they strolled through the neighborhood, buying something from almost every street vendor they came upon: boiled sweet corn, stuffed mussels, semolina halvah, and finally, a large package of sunflower seeds. With each new treat, they launched on a new topic, talking about many things, except the three customary untouchables between young women who were still strangers to one another: sex, men, and fathers.

  "I like your family," Armanoush said. "They are so full of life."

  "Yeah, sure, tell me about it," Asya countered, and jingled her many bracelets. She was wearing a long, sage green hippie skirt with a maroon flower print, a patchwork bag, and lots of jewelryglass bead necklaces, bracelets, and silver rings on almost every finger. Next to her Armanoush felt a bit underdressed in her jeans and tweed jacket.

  "There's a downside," Asya said. "It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around. I'm grateful that I was sent to a first-rate school and probably given the best education possible in this country. But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life. You know what I mean?"