by Elif Shafak
All my life I wanted to be pastless. Being a bastard is less about having no father than having no past… and now here you are asking me to own the past and apologize for a mythical father!
There came no answer, but Asya didn't seem to be waiting for one. She kept typing as if her fingers acted on their own, as if she were navigating with eyes closed.
Yet, perhaps it is exactly my being without a past that will eventually help me to sympathize with your attachment to history. I can recognize the significance of continuity in human memory. I can do that… and I do apologize for all the sufferings my ancestors have caused your ancestors.
Anti-Khavurma wasn't content. It really doesn't mean much if you apologize to us, he cut in. Apologize aloud in front of the Turkish state.
Oh come on! all of a sudden Armanoush had pulled the keyboard toward her and wrote, unable to resist the temptation to interject. It's Madame My-Exiled-Soul, here. What is that gonna do other than get her into trouble?"
She has to go thru that trouble if she is sincere! Anti-Khavurma blew up.
But before anyone could respond to that came a most unexpected comment.
Well, the truth is, dear Madame My-Exiled-Soul and dear A Girl Named Turk… some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.
It was Baron Baghdassarian.
"They still aren't sleeping," Auntie Feride paced left and right outside the girls' room. "Is there something wrong?"
The older women had gone to sleep, and so had Auntie Cevriye, as a disciplined teacher. Auntie Zeliha had passed out on the couch.
"Why don't you go to sleep, sister, and let me guard their door to make sure they are all right." Auntie Banu squeezed her sister's shoulder. Now and then, whenever her illness escalated, Auntie Feride panicked about the possible harm that might come from anyone or anything in the outside world.
"Let me take the night shift," Auntie Banu smiled. "You go to bed and sleep. Don't forget that your mind is a stranger at nights. Don't talk to strangers."
"Yes." Auntie Feride nodded, and for a moment she seemed like a little girl stirred by a tale. Now visibly relaxed, she shuffled toward her room.
As soon as they had logged off Armanoush checked her watch. It was time to give her mother a call. This week she had called her every day at the same time, and each time Rose had scolded her for not calling more often. Trying not to be distressed about this unvarying pattern, she dialed the number and waited for her mom to pick up.
"Amy!!!" Rose's voice escalated into a shriek. "Honey, is it you?"
"Yes, Mom. How are you doing?"
"How am I doing? How am I doing?!" Rose repeated, now sounding bewildered and her voice muffled. "I need to hang up now, but you promise, you promise me, you will call me back in ten… no, no, ten isn't enough, in fifteen minutes exactly. I need to hang up and collect my thoughts now and then I will wait for your call. Promise me, promise me," Rose echoed hysterically.
"Okay, Mom, I promise," Armanoush stammered. "Mom, are you all right? What's happening?" But Rose had already gone.
Stunned, pale, and desolately holding the phone, Armanoush looked at Asya. "My mother asked me to call back later instead of asking me why I hadn't called before. It's so unlike her. This is so not her."
"Please relax." Asya shifted in her bed, popping her head up from under the blanket. "Maybe she was driving or something and couldn't talk on the phone."
But Armanoush shook her head, a fretful shadow crossing her face. "Oh God, there's something wrong. Something's very wrong."
Her eyes swollen from crying, her nose miserably red, Rose reached out for a paper towel as she broke into tears. She always bought the same paper towels from the same store: strong, absorbent Sparkle. The company produced these in different styles and Rose's favorite was called My Destination. Printed on the towels were pictures of seashells, fish, and boats, all in blue, and among them swam the following words: I CAN'T CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF THE WIND, BUT I CAN ADJUST MY SAILS TO ALWAYS REACH MY DESTINATION.
Rose liked this slogan. Besides, the azure tint of the printed images perfectly matched the color of the tiles in her kitchen, the part of the house she was particularly proud of. Despite her initial fondness, once they had purchased the house, Rose had lost no time in remodeling the kitchen, adding pull-out shelves, placing a thirtysix-bottle lacquered-top wine rack in the corner-though neither she nor Mustafa were drinkers-and decorating the entire room with oak swivel stools. Now as she felt a surge of panic, it was onto one of those stools that she dropped her body.
"Oh my God, we've got fifteen minutes. What are we gonna tell her? We've only got fifteen minutes to decide," she cried to Mustafa.
"Rose, darling, will you please calm down," Mustafa said as he rose from his chair. He didn't like the stools and instead kept two solid-wood honey pine dining chairs in the kitchen, one for him and the other for him too. He approached his wife and held her hand, in the hope of laying her worries to rest. "You will be calm, very calm, you understand? And you will calmly ask her where she is right now. This is the first thing you need to ask her, OK?"
"What if she doesn't tell me?" Rose said.
"She will. You ask her nicely, she'll tell you nicely." Mustafa
spoke slowly. "But no scolding. You need to keep your cool. Here,
have some water."
Rose took the glass with trembling hands. "Is that possible? My little girl has lied to me! How stupid of me to trust her. All this time I think she's in San Francisco with her grandma and then it turns out she's lied to everyone… and now her grandma… oh, God, how am I gonna tell her?"
The day before when they were both in the kitchen, she making pancakes, he reading the Arizona Daily Star, the phone rang. Rose picked up the phone with the spatula in her hand. The call was from San Francisco. Her ex-husband, Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, was on the line.
How many years had they spent without exchanging a word? After their divorce they had been forced to communicate often concerning their baby girl. But then, as Armanoush had grown up, their talks had become rare and then ceased entirely. Of their brief marriage, only two things remained: mutual resentment and a daughter.
"I am sorry to disturb you, Rose," Barsam said with a smooth yet drained voice. "But it is an emergency. I need to talk to my daughter."
"Our daughter," Rose corrected tartly, and as soon as the words
had come out of her mouth she instantly regretted her bitterness. "Rose, please, I need to give Armanoush some bad news. Will
you please call her to the phone? She is not answering her cell
phone. I had to call her here."
"Wait… wait-isn't she there?" "What do you mean?"
"Isn't she there in San Francisco with you?" Rose's lips quiv
ered with panic.
Barsam wondered if his ex-wife was playing games. He tried not to sound irritated. "No, Rose, she decided to go back to Arizona. She is spending the spring break there."
"Oh my God!! But she is not here! Where is my baby?! Where is she?!" Rose started to sob, falling into one of those anxiety attacks she thought she had long ago left in the past.
"Rose, will you please calm down? I don't know what's going on, but I am sure there is an explanation. I trust Armanoush with all my heart. She won't do anything wrong. When did you last speak with her?"
"Yesterday, she calls every day-from San Francisco!"
Barsam paused. He didn't tell her that Armanoush had been calling him too, although from Arizona. "That's good, it means she is fine. We need to trust her. She is an intelligent, dependable girl, you know that. Next time she calls just tell her to give me a call. Tell her it is u
rgent. You got that, Rose? Will you do that?"
"Oh my God!" Rose started to cry louder. But then all of a sudden it occurred to her to ask: "Barsam, you said there was bad news. What is it?"
"Oh. . " A heavy pause. "It's my mom…" He could not finish his sentence.
"Just tell Armanoush that Grandma Shushan has died in her sleep. She did not wake up this morning."
Fifteen minutes had never passed so slowly. Armanoush paced the room under the worried gaze of Asya. Finally, it was time to give her mom another call. This time Rose picked up the phone instantly.
"Amy, I will ask you just one question and you will tell me the truth; you promise you'll tell me the truth."
Armanoush felt a wave of worry well up in her stomach.
"Where are you?" Rose rasped, her voice breaking. "You lied to us! You are not in San Francisco, you are not in Arizona, where are you?"
Armanoush swallowed hard. "Mom, I'm in Istanbul." "What?!"
"Mom, I'll tell you everything but please calm down."
Rose's eyes sparkled with pure indignation. How she hated to hear everyone telling her to calm down.
"Mother, I am terribly sorry for worrying you so much. I should never have done this. I am so sorry, but there is nothing to worry about, believe me."
Rose put her hand over the phone. "My baby is in Istanbul!" she said to her husband with a hint of a reprimand as if this were his fault. Then she yelled into the receiver: "What the hell are you doing there?"
"Actually, I am staying at your mother-in-law's house. It is a wonderful family."
Flabbergasted, Rose turned again to Mustafa and this time scolded harder: "She is staying with your family."
Then, before an ashen and alarmed Mustafa Kazanci could put in a word, she said, "We are coming there. Don't disappear anywhere. We are coming. And don't you ever turn off your cell phone again!" With that she hung up.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Mustafa squeezed his wife's arm, harder than he intended. "I am not going anywhere."
"Yes, you are going," Rose said. "We are going. My only daughter is in Istanbul!!!" she screamed, as if it meant Armanoush had been taken hostage.
"I cannot leave my job now."
"You can take a few days off. And if you don't, I will go alone," Rose, or someone who looked like Rose, snapped. "We will go there, make sure she is safe, pick her up, and bring her back home."
Late that night when they were about to go to sleep the Kazancis' phone rang.
"Inshallah it is nothing bad," Petite-Ma whispered from her bed, a rosary in her hand, a shadow of anxiety on her face. She reached out for the glass of water with her false teeth inside and, still praying, took a sip. Only water could quell fear.
Still awake, it was Auntie Feride who picked up the phone. More than anyone else in the family, she was the most talkative and communicative when it came to phone conversations.
"moo?
"Hi, Feride, is it you?" the receiver asked in a male voice. And without waiting for an answer, he added, "It is me… from America… Mustafa…."
Thrilled to hear her brother's voice, Auntie Feride grinned. "Why don't you call us more often? How are you? When are you coming to see us?"
"Listen, dear, please. Is Amy-Armanoush there?"
"Yes yes, of course, you sent her to stay here with us. We love her very much." Auntie Feride beamed. "Why didn't you come with her, you and your wife?"
Mustafa stayed put, his forehead buckled with discomfort. Behind him in the window lay the Arizona soil, always dependable, always secretive. In time he had learned to appreciate the desert, its infinity soothing his fear of looking back, its tranquillity easing his fear of death. At times like this he remembered, as if his body reminisced on its own, the fate awaiting all the men in his family. At times like this he felt close to committing suicide. Finding death before death found him. He had lived two very different lives. Mustafa and Mostapha. And sometimes the only way to bridge the gap between the two names seemed to silence them simultaneously-to bring both of his lives to an abrupt end. He shunned the thought. A sound similar to sighing. Perhaps it was him. Perhaps it was just the desert.
"I think we are. We will come for a few days to pick Amy up and to see you…. We are coming."
These words seemed to come effortlessly, as if time was not a sequence of ruptures but an uninterrupted continuity, easily bendable even when fractured. Mustafa would visit as if it had not been almost twenty years since he had been home.
FIFTEEN
Golden Raisins
The miraculous news that Mustafa was coming to visit them with his American wife instantly instigated a series of reactions in the Kazanci domicile. The first and foremost one involved detergents, washing powder, and soap flakes. In two days the whole house had been thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom, windows scoured and buffed up, shelves dusted, curtains washed and ironed, every tile on all the three floors scrubbed and mopped. One by one Auntie Cevriye wiped the leaves of every houseplant in the living room, the geranium and the bellflower, the rosemary and the sweet woodruff. She even wiped the leaves of the touch-me-not. Meanwhile Auntie Feride surprised everyone by taking out the most precious latticework in her dowry. But it was no doubt Grandma Gulsum who was most thrilled with the news. At first she refused to believe her only son was coming to visit them after all these years, and when she finally was convinced of the news, she incarcerated herself in the kitchen amid the dishware, cutlery, and ingredients, cooking the favorite dishes of her favorite child. Now the air inside the kitchen was heavy with the scents of freshly baked pastries. She had already oven-baked two different types of borek-spinach and feta cheese-and simmered lentil soup, stewed lamb chops, and prepared the kofte mixture to be fried upon the guests' arrival. Though she was determined to make ready half a dozen more dishes before the end of the day, undoubtedly the most important item on Grandma Gulsum's menu was going to be the dessert: ashure.
All throughout his childhood and teens, Mustafa Kazanci had relished ashure more than any other sweet, and if those terrible American fast-food products had not messed up his culinary habits, Grandma Gulsum hoped, he would be delighted to encounter bowls of his favorite dessert in the fridge, waiting for him, as if life here were still the same and he could pick up from where he had left off.
Ashure was the symbol of continuity and stability, the epitome of the good days to come after each storm, no matter how frightening the storm had been.
Grandma had soaked the ingredients the day before and was now getting ready to begin cooking. She opened a cupboard and took out a huge cauldron. One always needed a cauldron to cook ashure.
Ingredients
1/2 cup garbanzo beans
1 cup whole hulled wheat 1 cup white rice 1–1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup roasted hazelnuts, chopped 1/2 cup pistachios 1/2 cup pine nuts 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/3 cup golden raisins 1/3 cup dried figs 1/3 cup dried apricots 1/2 cup orange peels 2 tablespoons rosewater
Garnishes
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1/2 cup blanched and slivered almonds 1/2 cup pomegranate seeds
Preparation
Most of the ingredients should be soaked in separate bowls the day before as follows:
In one bowl, cover the beans with cold water and soak them overnight. The wheat and rice should be rinsed carefully and then covered with water in a different bowl. Soak the figs and apricots and orange peels in hot water for 1/2 hour, then drain and reserve the soaking water; chop them, mix them with the golden raisins, and set aside.
Cooking
Cover the beans with 1 gallon of cold water. Bring to a boil and cook over medium heat until the beans are just tender, about an hour.While the beans are cooking, boil 2–1/2 quarts of water, stir in the wheat and rice, and simmer over low heat, stirring frequently, until the wheat and rice mixture is tender, about an hour. Combine.
Add the reserved soaking water, the sugar, chopped hazelnuts, pistachios, and pine nuts to
the pot and bring it all to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Simmer and stir for 30 minutes or more. Allow the mixture to thicken slightly until it resembles a thick soup. Add the vanilla, raisins, figs, apricots, and orange peels and cook for another 20 minutes, stirring constantly. Turn off the heat and blend in the rosewater. Let the ashure stand at room temperature for an hour or more. Sprinkle with cinnamon and garnish with slivered almonds and pomegranate seeds.
Inside the girls' room, Armanoush had been quiet and pensive since early morning. She didn't feel like going out or doing anything.
Asya stayed indoors with her playing tavla and listening to Johnny Cash.
"Six six! You lucky thing!"
But Armanoush showed no trace of pleasure about the dice she had rolled. Instead, she broodingly pouted at her checkers as if hoping to move them by the force of her gaze.
"I have this awful feeling something bad has happened and my mother isn't telling me."
"Please don't worry," Asya said, chewing the end of her pencil, craving nicotine. "You've talked with your mom and she sounded all right. Thanks to you they will now visit Istanbul. They'll come and meet you here and soon you will be back in your house…." Though Asya had meant to soothe, the words had oddly come out as an objection. The truth is, it saddened her that Armanoush would be leaving so soon.
"I don't know. It's just this feeling I can't get rid of." Armanoush sighed. "My mom doesn't travel anywhere, not even to Kentucky. That she is flying to Istanbul is mind-boggling. But then again, it is so typical of her. She cannot stand not being in control of my life. She would fly around the globe to keep me under her eye."
While she waited for Armanoush to decide where to move which checker, Asya drew her legs under her, working on yet another article of her Personal Manifesto of Nihilism.
Article Ten: If you find a dear friend, make sure you don't get so accustomed to her as to forget that in the end, each one of us is existentially lonely and that sooner or later the everlasting solitude will overtake any fortuitous friendships.