The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  The scenarist allowed a tired smile to cross his grim features. "There is such a thing as collective hysteria. I'm not saying that the Armenians are hysterical or anything, don't get me wrong. It is a scientifically known fact that collectivities are capable of manipulating their individual members' beliefs, thoughts, and even bodily reactions. You keep hearing a certain story over and over again, and the next thing you know you have internalized the narrative. From that moment on it ceases to be someone else's story. It is not even a story anymore, but reality, your reality!"

  "It's like being under a spell," remarked the Exceptionally Untalented Poet.

  Running a hand through her hair, Asya slouched back in her chair, puffed some smoke, and said, "Let me tell you what hysteria is. All those scripts you've penned thus far, the whole series of Timor the Lionheart-the muscular, herculean Turk running from one adventure to another against the idiot Byzantine. That's what I call hysteria. And once you make it into a TV show and make millions internalize your awful message, it becomes collective hysteria."

  This time it was the Closeted-Gay Columnist who broke in. "Yes, all those vulgarly macho Turkish heroes you created to ridicule the effeminacy of the enemy are signs of authoritarianism."

  "What's wrong with you people?" the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies asked, his lower lip quivering in rage.

  "You guys know so well I do not believe in that crap. You know those shows are just for entertainment."

  Armanoush did her very best to change the mood. Though she knew Baron Baghdassarian would strongly disagree, she believed increasing the tension did not help the recognition of the genocide. "That frame over there," she pointed to the wall. "You know that carroty-framed road picture over there is from Arizona. That's a road my mom and I used to take many times when I was a kid."

  "Arizona," the Exceptionally Untalented Poet muttered, and sighed as if the name implied a utopialand for him, some sort of Shangri-la.

  But Asya was not going to let it go. "But that's the thing," she said. "What you have been doing is even worse. If you believed in what you were doing, if you had the foggiest faith in those movies, I would still question your standpoint, but at least not your sincerity. You write those screenplays for the masses. You write and sell and earn huge amounts of money. And then you come here, take cover in this intellectual cafe, and join us to mock those movies. Hypocrisy!"

  Color drained from the scenarist's face, leaving his expression hard and his eyes almost glacial. "Who do you think you are to tell me about hypocrisy, Miss Bastard? Why don't you go and rummage around for your papa instead of plaguing me here?"

  He reached for his wine glass but there actually was no need since by this time a glass of wine was reaching out for him: The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist jumped to his feet, grabbed a wine glass, and threw it at the scenarist, just missing. The glass hit a frame on the wall, spilling wine all over, but surprisingly it did not break. Having failed to hit his target, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist rolled up his sleeves.

  Though barely half the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist's size, and just as drunk, the Nonnationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies managed to dodge the first blow. He then quickly retreated to a corner, keeping an eye on the exit.

  He didn't see it coming. The Closeted-Gay Columnist bolted from his chair and darted to the corner with the carafe in his hand. In next to no time the scenarist was on the floor with blood oozing from his forehead. Pressing a bloody napkin to his head like a war casualty, he stared first at the columnist, next at the cartoonist, and then at an oblique angle.

  But after all, Cafe Kundera is a comfy, dreary intellectual cafe where the rhythm of life is, for better or worse, never disrupted. This is no place for a drunken brawl. Even before the scenarist's forehead stopped bleeding, everyone else at the cafe had gone back to what they were doing before the interruption-some grimacing, some chatting over wine or coffee, and some others drifting into the framed photos on the walls.

  ELEVEN

  Dried Apricots

  It is almost dawn, a short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. It is the only time in which it is still possible to find solace in dreams and yet too late to build them anew.

  If there is an eye in the seventh sky, a Celestial Gaze watching each and every one from way up high, He would have had to keep Istanbul under surveillance for quite some time to get a sense of who did what behind closed doors and who, if any, uttered profanities. To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in the hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour. From where the Celestial Gaze is situated, from that high above, all these sporadically lit bulbs must seem in perfect harmony, constantly flickering, as if coding a cryptic message to God.

  Apart from the scattered twinkles, it is still densely dark in Istanbul. Whether along the grimy, narrow streets snaking the oldest quarters, in the modern apartment buildings cramming the newly built districts, or throughout the fancy suburbs, people are fast asleep. All but some.

  Some Istanbulites have, as usual, awakened earlier than others. The imams all around the city, for instance; the young and the old, the mellow-voiced and the not-so-mellow-voiced, the imams of the copious mosques are the first ones to wake up, ready to call the believers to morning prayer. Then there are the simit vendors. They too are awake, headed to their respective bakeries to pick up the crispy sesame bagels they will be selling all day long. Accordingly, the bakers are awake too. Most of them get only a few hours of sleep before they start work, while others never sleep at night. Every day without exception, the bakers heat their ovens in the middle of the night, so that before dawn, the bakeries in the city are thick with the delicious smell of bread.

  The cleaning ladies are also awake. These women, of all ages, get up early to take at least two or three different buses to arrive at the houses of the well-off, where they will scrub, clean, and polish all day long. It is a different world here. The wealthy women always wear makeup and never show their age. Unlike the husbands of the cleaning ladies, the husbands in suburbia are always busy, surprisingly polite, and somewhat effeminate. Time is not a scarce commodity in suburbia. People use it as lavishly and freely as hot water.

  It is dawn now. The city is a gummy, almost gelatinous entity at this moment, an amorphous shape half-liquid, half-solid.

  To the Celestial Gaze up in the sky, the Kazanci domicile must seem like a glittering sphere of sullied sparklers amid the shadows of the night. Most of its rooms are dark and quiet now, but a few are lit.

  One of the Kazanci residents awake at this hour is Armanoush. She woke up early and instantly went online, eager to tell the members of the Cafe Constantinopolis about the shocking incident of the day before. She told them about the bohemian circles in Istanbul and then about the quarrel, summarizing every character and detail she took in at Cafe Kundera. Now sheds giving them a full description of the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, adding how he had found a new function for the wine at the table.

  That cartoonist sounds fun, writes Anti-Khavurma. So you are saying he might go to prison for drawing the prime minister as a wolf? Humor is serious biz in Turkey!

  Yeah, the guy seems cool, Lady Peacock/Siramark agrees. Tell us more about him.

  But apparently someone has an entirely dissimilar interpretation of the incident.

  Come on, guys, there is nothing cool or that interesting either in him or in any other character at that dingy cafe. Don't you see, they are all faces and names from the bohemian, avant-gardist, arty-farty side of Istanbul. Typical third world country elite who hate themselves more than anything else in the world.

  Armanoush winced at this sharp message from Baron Baghdassarian and looked around.

  Asya is asleep on the other side of the room with Sultan the Fifth
curled up on her chest, a pair of headphones on her head, and an open book in her hand: Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, by Emmanuel Levinas. There is also a CD case next to Asya's bed Johnny Cash dressed from head to toe in black, erect against a gray, gloomy sky with a dog on one side of him and a cat on the other, staring dourly at something far beyond the frame. Asya has slept with the Walkman set on constant replay. She is her mother's daughter in this respect as well, perfectly capable of battling all sorts of voices but unable to cope with silence.

  Armanoush cannot make out the lyrics from where she is, but she can hear the rhythm spinning round. She enjoys hearing Cash's baritone voice pour into the room from the headphones, just as she enjoys listening to the various sounds circulating inside and outside: the morning prayers echoing from the distant mosques; the clatter of the milkman as he leaves milk bottles in front of the grocery store across the street; the surprisingly cadenced breathing of Sultan the Fifth and Asya, a whistlelike fusion of snores and purrs, though it is not always easy to tell who does which; and the sound of Armanoush's fingertips as they move on the keyboard searching for the best response to give to Baron Baghdassarian. It is almost morning, and although Armanoush hasn't had enough sleep, she feels elated, with the sense of triumph that comes after defeating sleep.

  Downstairs is Grandma Gulsum's room. She could indeed have been Ivan the Terrible in another life but the harshness of her persona is not without reason. Like many who end up bitter in life, Grandma too has her story. Growing up in a little town on the Aegean Coast where life was idyllic yet deprived; getting married into the Kazancis, a family much wealthier, much more urbane than hers, but certainly more ill-fated; the uneasiness of being a young, rural bride to the only son of a debonair, disaster-prone lineage; the burden of being assigned to give birth to sons, the more the merrier, for you never knew how long they would survive, yet giving birth to one girl after another; enduring the anguish of seeing her husband drift further away from her with each birth.

  Levent Kazanci was a troubled man who didn't hesitate to use his belt to discipline his wife and children; a boy, if only Allah had bestowed a boy, everything would have been all right. Three girls in a row, and then the dream, the fourth baby, finally a boy. Hoping their fate had changed, they tried again, a fifth baby, but it was a girl again. Still, Mustafa was enough, he was all they needed to continue the family line. There was Mustafa, pampered, mollycoddled, spoiled, always favored over the girls, his every whim catered to… then the melody ceased and darkness and despair set into the dream: Mustafa left for the United States never to return.

  Grandma Gulsum was a woman who had never been reciprocally loved; one of those women who aged not gradually but in a hurry, leaping from virginity to wrinkles, never given the chance to dwell in the middle. She had fully dedicated herself to her only son and valued him often at the expense of her daughters, trying to find solace in him for everything that life had taken from her. Yet, once in Arizona, the boy's existence had been reduced to postcards and letters. He had never returned to Istanbul to visit his family. Grandma Gulsum buried a deep pain of being rejected. In time, she became more and more hard-hearted. Today she bore the look of someone who had willingly accomplished austerity and meant to keep it that way.

  At the right corner of the first floor, Petite-Ma is deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, mouth agape, snoring peacefully. Next to her bed there is a cherry cabinet and on it rests the Holy Qur'an, a book on Muslim saints, and a gorgeous lamp radiating soft sage green light. Beside the book lies an ochre rosary with an amber stone dangling from its end, and a half-full glass containing her false teeth.

  Time for her has long lost its linear command; there are no regulatory signs, no warning lights, and no directions along the highway of history anymore. She is free to move in any direction, or change lanes. Or, she can stop right in the middle of the road, refusing to move, refusing the obligation to proceed, since there is no such thing as "progress" in her life, but only a perpetual recurrence of isolated moments.

  Certain childhood recollections are coming back to her these days, as vivid as if they were happening here and now. There she is as an eight-year-old blue-eyed, blond girl in Thessaloniki with her mom, as both silently weep after her dad's death in the Balkan Wars; then she sees herself in Istanbul, it is late October, the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic. Flags. She sees lots of flags, red and white, crescent and star, fluttering in the wind like newly washed clothes. Behind the flags looms Riza Selim's face, his thick beard and full, somber eyes. Then she sees herself as a young woman sitting at her Bentley piano, playing jovial tunes to wellgroomed guests.

  In the small room right above Petite-Ma's sleeps Auntie Cevriye. She is having the nightmare she has had countless times over the last years. She is a student in a classroom again, wearing an ugly, ash gray uniform. The headmaster calls her to the front of the room to take an oral quiz. She breaks into sweat as she wobbles there unsteadily, her feet heavy. None of the questions asked make any sense. Auntie Cevriye discovers she hasn't really graduated from high school. There has been a mistake somewhere in the records and now she has to pass this one course in order to graduate and become a teacher. Every time, she wakes up at exactly the same scene. The headmaster pulls out the class grade sheet and a fountain pen with crimson ink, and then writes a huge red zero right where the name Cevriye is inscribed.

  This is the nightmare she has had for the last ten years, ever since she lost her husband. He was in prison for bribery-a charge Auntie Cevriye always refused to believe. And only one month before his release he died watching a brawl, taken by a stupid live electrical cable. In her dreams Auntie Cevriye saw this scene over and over and envisioned the offender (there had to be an offender) who put the cable there and killed her husband. She dreamed of waiting at the prison gates. The rest of the scenario changed each time. Sometimes she was there to spit on the killer's face as soon as he was released from jail, sometimes she watched him from a distance, and at other times she shot him as he walked out into the sunlight.

  After losing her husband, Auntie Cevriye sold her house and joined the other daughters who had come to accept living under the same roof. In her first months there, all she did was shed tears. She started the day sifting through her late husband's photographs, talking to them, sobbing over each one, only to end the day tired from so much sorrow. Her eyes swollen like two puffy bags of red distress, her nose peeling from too much wiping-this had been her state until one morning she had come home from the cemetery to find all the old photos gone.

  "What did you do with his pictures?" Auntie Cevriye exclaimed, knowing too well whom to accuse. "Give them back to me!"

  "No," Grandma Gulsum answered, stern and dry. "The pictures are available. You will not spend your days crying over them. For the heart to heal, the eyes need not see them for a while."

  Nothing healed. If anything, she got used to envisioning him without looking at his pictures. From time to time she found herself redesigning his face, furnishing him with a grizzled mustache or some more tufts of hair here and there. The disappearance of the photographs coincided with Auntie Cevriye's evolution into a staunch teacher of Turkish national history.

  In the room across from her sleeps Auntie Feride. She is a clever and creative woman, a collage woman. If only she could hold the pieces together. It is unusual to be so sensitive, it is fabulous to be so sensitive, it is frightening to be so sensitive. Since anything can happen at any time, she can never be sure of the ground beneath her feet. There is no sense of safety or continuity. Everything comes in bits and pieces that beg to be united and yet defy any notion of wholeness. Now and again Auntie Feride dreams of having a lover. She wants a love that will absorb her in her entirety, even to the point of embracing her multiple anxieties, eccentricities, and abnormalities. A beloved who will adore everything about her. Auntie Feride doesn't want a love that is good to her good side but shuns her dark side. She needs someone who can stand with
her through thick and thin, sanity and insanity. Perhaps that is why lunatics have a harder time dating, she thinks-not because they are off the wall but because it is hard to find someone who is willing to date so many people in one person.

  But those are only daydreams. In real dreams Auntie Feride doesn't see lovers but abstract collages. At nighttime she creates patchworks with stunning colors and manifold geometrical shapes. The wind blows hard, the oceanic currents slide along, and the world becomes an orb of endless possibilities. Everything constructed can be deconstructed at the same time. The doctors have told Auntie Feride to take it easy, to use her pills regularly. But they know little about this dialectic. Make and destroy make and destroy make and destroy. Auntie Feride's mind is an excellent collage artist.

  Next to Auntie Feride's room there is the bathroom and next to that, Auntie Zeliha's. She is awake. She is sitting straight up in her bed, eyeing her room as if it belonged to someone else, as if she were memorizing the details to feel closer to the stranger who belongs there.

  She looks at her clothes, the dozens of skirts, all of them short, all of them flamboyant, her own way of protesting the moral codes she was born into. On the walls there are pictures and posters of tattoos. Auntie Zeliha is a woman in her late thirties but her room in many ways resembles that of a teenager. Perhaps she will never grow up and lose the anger within, the anger she has unintentionally passed on to her daughter. To her way of thinking, anyone who can't rise up and rebel, anyone devoid of the ability to dissent, cannot really be said to be alive. In resistance lies the key to life. The rest of the people fall into two camps: the vegetables, who are fine with everything, and the tea glasses, who, though not fine with numerous things, lack the strength to confront. It is the latter that are the worse of the two. Auntie Zeliha crafted a rule about them, back when she used to make rules.

  The Iron Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite Woman: If you are as fragile as a tea glass, either find a way to never encounter burning water and hope to marry an ideal husband or get yourself laid and broken as soon as possible. Alternatively, stop being a tea-glass woman!