The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  "Zealousness!" Kirkor Hagopian's face scrunched into a mask of gloom. "There is news pouring in from numerous towns in Anatolia. Have you not heard about the incidents in Adana? They enter into Armenian houses with the pretext of searching for guns, and then plunder. Don't you understand? All the Armenians are going to be exiled. All of us! And here you are betraying your own people."

  Hovhannes Stamboulian remained quiet for a while, chewing the ends of his mustache. Then he muttered slowly but surely, "We need to work together, Jews and Christians and Muslims. Centuries and centuries under the same imperial roof. We have been living together all this time, albeit on unequal ground. Now we can make it fair and just for all, transform this empire together."

  It was then that Kirkor Hagopian uttered those gloomy words, his face already closing up: "My friend, wake up, there is no together anymore. Once a pomegranate breaks and all its seeds scatter in different directions, you cannot put it back together."

  Now as he stood still at the top of the staircase, listening to the eerie silence in the house, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help seeing that image in his mind's eye: a broken pomegranate, red and sad. With visible panic he called out to his wife: "Armanoush! Armanoush, where are you?"

  They must all be in the kitchen, he thought to himself, and hurried down to the first floor.

  Following the commencement of the First World War, a general mobilization had been declared. Though everyone in Istanbul talked about this, it was in the small towns where its effects had been mostly felt. They had beaten the drums in the streets, echoing again and again: Seferberliktir! Seferberliktir! That was when many Armenian young men were drafted into the army. More than three hundred thousand. At the outset all these soldiers were given arms, just like their Muslim peers. After a short time, however, they were all asked to return those arms. Unlike the Muslim soldiers, the Armenians were taken into special labor battalions. Rumors ran amok that Enver Pasha was the one behind this decision: "We need working hands to construct the roads for the soldiers to cross," he had announced.

  But then there came dour news, this time about the labor battalions themselves. People said all the Armenians were employed in hard labor for the road construction although some had paid their bedel and should have been exempt. They said the battalions were taken to dig roads, but that was just a pretext; in actual fact they were made to dig pits, deep and wide enough to… They said Armenians were buried in the same pits that they had been made to dig.

  "The Turkish authorities have announced that the Amnenians are going to dye their Easter eggs with their own blood!" That was what Kirkor Hagopian stated before he left the barbershop.

  Hovhannes Stamboulian didn't give those rumors much credit. Yet he acknowledged that the times were bad.

  Downstairs on the first floor he called his wife's name once again and sighed upon hearing no answer. As he stepped outside onto the patio and walked past the long cherry table where they had their breakfast when the weather was mild, a new scene from the Little Lost Pigeon crossed his mind.

  "Listen to your story, then,"said the pomegranate tree as it fluttered a few branches, shaking off specks of snow. "Once there was; once there wasn't. God's creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin. "

  "But why?" chirped the Little Lost Pigeon. "Why was it a sin to talk too much?"

  The kitchen door was shut. It was strange given the hour of the day; Armanoush would be working in there with Marie, their maid of five years, while the children clustered around them. They never shut the door.

  Hovhannes Stamboulian reached for the handle but before he could turn it, the old, wood door was opened from inside and he stood face-to-face with a Turkish soldier, a sergeant. Both men were so shocked to run into each other like this that for a full minute they stood staring at each other blankly. It was the sergeant who first shed his stupor. He took a step back and eyed the other from head to toe. He was a tawny man who would have had a smooth, youthful face had it not been for the harshness of his stare.

  "What is going on here?!" Hovhannes Stamboulian exclaimed. He spotted his wife and kids and Marie lined against the kitchen wall at the back, standing side by side like penalized children.

  "We have orders to search the house," the sergeant said. There was no discernible hostility in his voice but no empathy either. He sounded as if he was tired, and whatever the reason he was here for, he wanted to be done as fast as possible and be gone. "Could you please show us the way to your study?"

  They went to the back of the house and trudged up the great curved staircase; Hovhannes Stamboulian in front, the sergeant and the soldiers following behind. Once upstairs in'the study, the soldiers moved around, each poring over some article of furniture, like honey-sucking bumblebees in a field of wildflowers. They searched the cupboards, the drawers, and every single shelf of the wall-towall bookcase. They leafed through hundreds of books seeking documents hidden among the pages; they looked over his favorite literature, from Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and Gerard de Nerval's Les Chimeres to Alfred de Musset's Les Nuits and Hugo's Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. While a brawny soldier with beady eyes suspiciously scanned through Rousseau's Social Contract, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help but ponder the passages the man was staring at without really seeing:

  Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him.

  When done with the books, they started to sift through the many drawers of the walnut desk. It was then that one of the soldiers spotted the gold brooch on the desk. He handed it to the sergeant, who picked up the miniature pomegranate, weighed it in his palm, rotated it in the air to better see the rubies inside, and then gave it to Hovhannes Stamboulian with a smile.

  "You should not leave such a precious gem in the open. Here, take it," the sergeant said with an air of placid courteousness.

  "Yes, thank you. It is a present for my wife," Hovhannes Stamboulian said quietly.

  The sergeant gave him a confiding man-to-man smile. But rapidly his face turned from cordiality to sulk, and when he spoke again his voice didn't have the same mild tone anymore.

  "Tell me what it says here," the sergeant said as he pointed to a bunch of papers he had found in a drawer, all written in the Armenian alphabet.

  Hovhannes Stamboulian immediately recognized the poem he had penned at a time when he had fallen ill with a high fever. It had been sometime last fall. He had been in bed for three days straight without being able to move, shivering and sweating at the same time as if his entire body had become a barrel of water that was full of holes and constantly oozing. Throughout Armanoush had stayed beside his bed, putting vinegar-soaked cold towels on his forehead and rubbing his chest with ice cubes. Then, at the end of the third day, when the fever had finally diminished, a poem had come to Hovhannes Stamboulian, and he had welcomed it as a compensation for his suffering. Thoughh not a religious man at all, he was a firm believer in divine compensations, which he thought operated less in large-scale manifestations than through small signs and gifts such as this.

  "Read it!" The sergeant nudged the papers.

  Hovhannes Stamboulian put on his glasses and with a trembling voice read the first lines aloud:

  The child weeps in his sleep without knowing why, A hushed yet unending sob of longing Impossible to console

  That's how I long for thee…

  "This is poetry," the sergeant barged in, stressing the last word with an intonation that sounded like disappointment.

  "Yes." Hovhannes Stamboulian nodded, though not sure if this was good or bad.

  But the sparkle he saw in the sergeant's eyes did not seem that hostile. Perhaps he had liked it. Perhaps he would leave now, taking his soldiers with him.

  "Hov-han-nes St
am-bou-li-an," the sergeant muttered, slurring the words. "You are an erudite man, a man of knowledge. You are well known and well respected. Why would a sophisticated man like you conspire with a bunch of ignoble insurgents?"

  Hovhannes Stamboulian raised his dark eyes from the paper and blinked absentmindedly. He didn't know what to say in his defense since he had no idea what he was being accused of.

  "The Armenian insurgents…. They read your poems and then rebel against the Ottoman Sultanate," the sergeant said, creasing his forehead in thought. "You goad them into mutiny."

  All of a sudden Hovhannes Stamboulian grasped what he was being accused of and the gravity of the charge. "Officer," he said, fixedly staring at the sergeant who fixedly stared back at him, afraid that if he broke eye contact the only bridge of interchange between them would forever disintegrate. "You are an educated man yourself and you'll understand the difficulty of my situation. My poems are the echo of my imagination. I write and publish them, but I cannot possibly control who reads them and with what particular intention."

  Looking pensive, the sergeant cracked his knuckles one by one. He then cleared his throat as if to accentuate the importance of what he was about to say. "I perfectly understand that dilemma. However, you can control your own words. You are the one who writes them. You are the poet…."

  In a desperate effort to diminish what was quickly becoming real panic, Hovhannes Stamboulian scanned the room until he came eye to eye with his eldest son, standing by the door, peeking inside. When had he sneaked out of the kitchen? How long had he been watching them? The boy's cheeks were rosy with the intensity of his fury against the soldiers. But something in his expression contained far more than that. Yervant's young face looked oddly unflustered and somehow wise. Hovhannes Stamboulian smiled at his son, trying to convince him that things were OK, and then gestured for him to go back to his mother. But Yervant didn't move.

  "I am afraid you need to come with us," the sergeant said.

  "I can't," Hovhannes Stamboulian said inadvertently, but he realized how miserable was the excuse he was about to give. Tonight I need to finish my book…. It is the last chapter…. Instead he asked permission to speak to his wife.

  Before they took him away, the very last thing ingrained in his memory was his wife's expression, her pupils dilated and her lips pallid. But Armanoush was neither crying nor did she look shocked. If anything she looked extremely tired, as if standing there in the doorway had drained her of all her strength. How he wished he could hold her hands now, embrace her tightly, and whisper to her to be strong, always strong, for the sake of their children and the one on the way. Armanoush was four months pregnant.

  Only when nudged through the outside door onto the dark street with soldiers on both sides did Hovhannes Stamboulian remember having forgotten to give his wife her present. He thrust his hands into his pockets and was relieved not to feel the golden pomegranate on the tips of his fingers. He had left it at home, in a drawer in the desk. He softly smiled at the thought of how Armanoush would be pleased when she found it there.

  As soon as the soldiers left, there were quick footsteps echoing on the doorstep. It was the Turkish neighbor next door. A sweettempered plump woman, always jolly, except that right now she was anything but. Seeing the terrified expression on her neighbor's face helped Armanoush to emerge from her trance and allow herself to be frightened. She pulled Yervant toward her and with quivering lips whispered, "Go my son, go to your uncle Levon's house…. Tell him to come here right away. Tell him what happened."

  Uncle Levon's house was nearby, around the corner of the market square. He lived on his own in a modest, two-story house, the first floor of which was his workshop. Having been refused the hand of a beautiful Armenian woman he had loved in his youth and perhaps still did, he had chosen not to marry anyone and thereafter had spent his years working hard in his workshop, which was famous for the quality of its products. Uncle Levon was a cauldron maker and he crafted the best cauldrons in the entire empire.

  Once outside on the street Yervant walked a few steps toward Uncle Levon's house, but then he stopped abruptly and turned in the opposite direction, the direction his father had been taken, and started to run. But even when he had covered the street from one end to the other, there was no sign of his father. Nothing. No one. It was as if the Turkish soldiers and his father had altogether vanished.

  He reached Uncle Levon's house shortly after, yet there was no one upstairs. He knocked on the door of the workshop, hoping he might be there. It wasn't unusual for Uncle Levon to work late hours at his store. But the door was opened by his apprentice, Riza Selim-a quiet, diligent Turkish teenager with skin as white as porcelain and raven hair curling wildly above and around his head.

  "Where is my uncle?" Yervant asked.

  "Master Levon is gone," Riza Selim said with a strangled voice that he could hardly push out of his throat. "The soldiers came and took him away this afternoon."

  As soon as he uttered these ominous words, Riza Selim let go of the tears he had been holding back. The boy was an orphan and Uncle Levon had been like a father to him for the last six years. "I don't know what to do," he said. "I am waiting…."

  On the way back to his house Yervant ran the snaky, steep streets east and west, searching for something, anything, that could be an auspicious sign. He passed by empty coffeehouses, grubby plazas, ramshackle houses from which wafted the smells of turlu and the cries of babies. The only sign of life was a tan kitten painfully meowing next to a filthy gutter, licking its tiny belly where the flesh was cut open and the blood had caked around a deep, swollen wound.

  Years later when he thought about his father, Yervant would remember that kitten all alone on the dark, empty street. Even in Sivas, in the small Catholic Armenian village of Pirkinik where they went next to seek shelter with Grandpa and Grandma, only to be expelled one night by soldiers breaking into the house; even when he found himself walking amid thousands of drained, famished, beaten Armenians guarded by soldiers on horseback; even when he trudged through a long, thick carpet of mud, vomit, blood, and excrement; even when he didn't know how to stop the cries of his little sister, Shushan, and then one day, amid an ensuing turmoil, let go of her hand for a split second and lost sight of her; even when he watched his mother's feet swell into two blue pillows of pain covered with purple veins and blood; even when she died, quiet and light as a dry willow leaf swirling in the gusting breeze; even when he saw swollen and stinking corpses along the road, stables filled with smoke and fire; even when upon having nothing left to eat, he and his brothers grazed on grass like sheep in the Syrian desert; even when they were saved by a group of American missionaries dedicated to collecting the Armenian orphans lost hither and thither along the road of exile; even when they were brought all the way back to the American College in Sivas that operated as a sanctuary, and from there sent to America; even when years later he was finally able to find his little sister, Shushan, in Istanbul and bring her to San Francisco; and even after many happy suppers surrounded by his children and grandchildren, that kitten remained ingrained in his mind.

  "That's enough," Auntie Banu exclaimed, flinching. She untied her head scarf and covered the silver bowl with it. "I don't want to see this anymore. I learned what I had wanted to learn…."

  "But you have not seen it all," Mr. Bitter objected with a rasping voice. "I haven't told you about the lice yet."

  "The li-. . li-ce?" Auntie Banu stuttered. Whatever spirit had moved her to put an end to this session seemed to have passed now. She picked up her head scarf and peeped into the bowl again.

  "Oh yeah, the lice, my master, is an important detail," Mr. Bitter said. "Remember the part when little Shushan let go of her elder brother's hand and all of a sudden got lost in the crowd? She got the lice from a family whom she had approached in the hope of getting some food. The family had little to consume themselves, and they pushed her away. A few days later little Shushan was aflame with a roaring fever: typ
hus!"

  Auntie Banu let out a loud, prolonged sigh.

  "I was there. I saw it all. Shushan dropped to her knees. Nobody in that convoy of people was in any condition to help her. They left her there on the ground, her forehead covered with sweat and her hair full of lice!"

  "Enough!" Auntie Banu rose to her feet.

  "But aren't you going to listen to the best part? Don't you want to learn what happened to little Shushan?" Mr. Bitter asked, sounding offended. "You wanted to learn about your guest's family, didn't you? Well, that little Shushan in my story is your guest's grandmother."

  "Yes," Auntie Banu replied. "I had figured that out. Continue!"

  "All right!" Mr. Bitter enthused, savoring his triumph. "After she was left half-dead on the road and after the convoy had disappeared on the horizon, little Shushan was discovered by two women from a nearby Turkish village. They were a mother and a daughter. They took the sick girl back home with them and bathed her with chunks of daphne soap and washed off the lice in her hair with potions concocted from the herbs in the valley. They fed and cured her. Three weeks later when a high-ranking officer stopped by the village with his men and interrogated the villagers to learn if they had chanced upon any Armenian orphans in the area, this Turkish mother hid Shushan inside her daughter's dowry chest to save her from harm. A month later the little girl was on her feet again, except she didn't talk much and cried in her sleep at nights."

  "I thought you said she was brought to Istanbul…."

  "Eventually she was. During the following six months this mother and daughter looked after her as if she were one of their own family, and would probably have kept doing so. But then a horde of bandits arrived, searching and plundering the houses. They stopped and ransacked every Turkish and Kurdish village in the region. It didn't take them long to find out that there was a little Armenian girl there. Despite the wails of the mother and daughter, they took Shushan away from them. They had heard about the orders to deliver all Armenian orphans below the age of twelve to the orphanages around the country. So before long Shushan was in an orphanage in Aleppo, and when there was no room there, in a school in Istanbul under the care of several hocahanim, some benevolent and caring, others cold and strict. Like all of the children there she was dressed in a white robe and a buttonless, black coat. There were both boys and girls. The boys were circumcised and all the children were renamed. So was Shushan. Everyone called her Shermin now. She was also given a surname: 626."