The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  Auntie Banu tiptoed into her room. Briskly she smothered the smoldering blanket and stubbed the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. She grabbed the cell phone and placed it on the cupboard, took the vodka bottle and hid it under the bed, then tucked her sister under the bedsheet and turned off the lamp.

  She opened the windows. The air was crisp with the salty tang of a sea breeze. As the smoke and smell inside the room wafted out, Auntie Banu looked at her youngest sister's pale face, tired beyond her age. In the dim, yellowish light filtering in from the outside, Zeliha's face had grown incandescent, as if alcohol and sorrow had given her a radiance rarely encountered in nature. Auntie Banu softly kissed her on her forehead, compassion welling in her eyes. She then glanced left and right at her two djinn who had been carefully watching her every move from their usual places on her shoulders.

  "What are you gonna do, master?" asked Mr. Bitter, a tinge of gloating in his voice. He did not bother to hide his delight in seeing his master so helpless and distressed. It always amused him to see the powerlessness of the mighty.

  Auntie Banu wore just a hint of a frown. She gave no response.

  Mr. Bitter then jumped aside and sat by the bed, dangerously close to Auntie Zeliha in deep sleep. His eyes brightened with the idea that had just crossed his mind. He harshly grabbed the end of the bedsheet, almost waking Auntie Zeliha, and tied the sheet on his head like a head scarf.

  "Let me tell you something," Mr. Bitter declared, arms akimbo, voice thinned to a feminine tone, imitating someone. "There are things in this world…"

  Auntie Banu instantly recognized whom he mimicked and felt her spine tingle.

  "There are things so awful in this world that the good-hearted people, may Allah bless them all, have absolutely no idea of. And that's perfectly fine, I tell you; it is all right that they know nothing about such things because it proves what good-hearted people they are. Otherwise they wouldn't be good, would they? But if you ever step into a mine of malice, it won't be one of these people you will ask help from."

  Auntie Banu stared at Mr. Bitter with awe but the latter now pulled the bedsheet off his head, jumped back to his previous position, facing the place where he had spoken from, ready to depict the second speaker in his imaginary dialogue. To imitate the second speaker he grabbed the remaining golden raisins Zeliha had left last night, and in a flash magically arranged them in the air, making a long necklace and several bracelets. He then put on the necklace and the bracelets and grinned. It wasn't hard to fathom whom he was mimicking now. It wasn't hard to recognize Asya's style.

  Suffused with the charm of his narcissistic creativity, Mr. Bitter went on, "And you think, Auntie, I will ask help from a malicious djinni!"

  Mr. Bitter now took off the necklace and bracelets, leaped back onto the bed, put the bedsheet back over Zeliha, and replied in a thicker tone, "Perhaps you will, dear. Let's just hope you'll never have to."

  "Enough! What was all that?" Auntie Banu cut in furiously, though she knew the answer.

  "That-" Mr. Bitter hunched forward and bowed like a humble actor encountering with thunderous applause at the end of his performance-"was a moment in time. It was a petite slice of memory.

  With venom in his eyes, he then straightened his back and raised his voice: "That was a reminder to you of your very own words, master!"

  Auntie Banu felt a fright so strong her entire body shuddered. There was so much malevolence in this creature's gaze, she didn't know how to explain to herself why she didn't tell him to get out of her life once and for all. How could she be drawn to him like this, as if they shared an unpronounceable secret? Never had Auntie Banu been so afraid of her djinni.

  Never had she been so afraid of the acts she might be capable of committing.

  SIXTEEN

  Rose water

  "There goes another evil eye. Did you hear that ominous

  sound? Crack! Oh it echoed in my heart! That was somebody's evil eye, so jealous and malicious. May Allah protect us all!"

  Thus exclaimed Petite-Ma Sunday morning at the breakfast table as a samovar boiled in the corner of the room. As Sultan the Fifth purred under the table waiting to be fed another chunk of feta cheese, and the candidate who had been fired on this week's Turkish version of The Apprentice appeared on TV in an exclusive interview announcing what had gone wrong and why he shouldn't have been fired, a tea glass cracked in Asya's hands. So unexpectedly did this happened that it gave her a jolt. All she knew was that she had as usual filled up half the tea glass with black, brewed tea, poured hot water to the brim, and then, just when she was about to take a sip, heard a crack. The glass fractured from top to bottom in a zigzag, like an ominous rift appearing on the face of the earth from a violent earthquake. In a flash, the tea inside the glass started to leak out and a dark brown puddle formed on the lacework tablecloth.

  "Is there an evil eye on you?" Auntie Feride said, peering at Asya suspiciously.

  "Evil eye on me?" Asya laughed bitterly. "I'll bet there is! Isn't everyone in this city jealous of my beauty?"

  "There was an article in today's newspaper about an eighteenyear-old who dropped on his knees and died while crossing the street. I think it might have been the evil eye," Auntie Feride said with an air of genuine fear.

  "Thanks for the morale boost," Asya said. But her grin quickly turned into a frown when she noticed what her crazy aunt was now gaping at: the snowman and snowwoman shakers. Just yesterday Asya had hidden them in a cupboard with the hope that nobody would find them for at least a month. And there they were on the table again. The ceramic pair was not only shoddy and kitschyand regrettably durable-but also so alike that it was hard to tell which one was the pepper, which the salt.

  "I wish Petite-Ma was feeling better, she could have poured some lead for you," Auntie Banu remarked with as vexed a look as Asya'had ever seen on her face. Though indisputably the most experienced in the house with respect to the crepuscular and the paranormal, Auntie Banu was not authorized to pour lead since that required being initiated by a practitioner, a right she had been denied in the past.

  Oddly enough, almost ten years ago, when she was still in the earlier stages of Alzheimer's and had decided that the time was ripe to choose the next woman in the family to hand over the secret of lead pouring, Petite-Ma picked out as her successor not Auntie Banu, as everyone had rightly expected, but the all-time champion agnostic Auntie Zeliha-a decision which back then had caused considerable turmoil in the family.

  "Are you kidding?" Auntie Zeliha remarked upon hearing the old woman's decision. "I can't pour lead, I am not even a believer. I'm an agnostic!"

  "I don't know what that word means, but I can tell it is no good." Petite-Ma snorted. "You've got the talent. Learn the secret."

  "Why me?" Auntie Zeliha asked while forcing herself to consider the possibility. "Why don't you choose my eldest sister? Banu will be more than happy to learn the secret. I am the last person you should teach magic to."

  "This has nothing to do with magic. The Qur'an forbids us to practice magic!" Petite-Ma retorted, looking slightly affronted. "You are the right person. You have the determination and spirit and fury."

  "Fury? But what do you need fury for? I could have been the perfect candidate if this were about hurling obscenities at obnoxious people, but I doubt I would be of any use when it comes to helping others." Auntie Zeliha broke into a grin.

  "Do not underestimate the good in you," Petite-Ma replied.

  It was then that Auntie Zeliha unleashed a remark to end the subject once and for all. "I am not the right person for this task. I might be a confused agnostic, but at least I've got the balls to stay one!"

  "Wash your mouth out with soap!" Grandma Gulsum flashed a scowl, overhearing the discussion.

  But Auntie Zeliha entirely avoided the subject after that. Half of her family was staunchly secularist Kemalist, the other half, practicing Muslim. While the two sides constantly conflicted but also managed to coexist under the same roof, par
anormality, crosscutting ideological divisions, was deemed to be as normal in their lives as consuming bread and water on a daily basis. This being the general framework, Auntie Zeliha, for her part, had chosen to spurn both sides equally.

  Consequently, after all these years, Petite-Ma remained the one and only lead pourer in the Kazanci domicile. Lately she felt obliged to stop the practice, however, when one day she found herself with a blazing hot pan of melted lead that she didn't know what to do with. "Why are you handing me a boiling pan?" she asked in visible panic. They had gently taken the pan from her and, ever since then, never entrusted her withh the task. But now that the topic had come up once again, all heads turned toward the old woman to see if she was following the conversation.

  Being the object of all the attention at the breakfast table, PetiteMa raised her head and looked curiously back at her family, while continuing to chew loudly on a piece of sucuk. She gulped down her bite, belched, and just when she seemed to be slipping off into her own world once again, shocked everyone with the clarity of her memory.

  "Asya, my dear, I will pour lead for you and crack whatever evil eye might have clustered around you."

  "Thank you, Petite-Ma." Asya smiled.

  When Asya was a young girl, Petite-Ma had on a regular basis poured melted lead to ward off the evil eye around her. The truth is, given the weedy toddler that she once was, Asya seemed in need of a little boost at the onset of her mortal life. For some reason she used to frequently trip over and fall down, face-first, cutting her bottom lip each time. Suspecting the evil eye, instead of the toddler's yet unbalanced steps, they would hand her to Petite-Ma.

  At first the ceremony had been a fun game for Asya, amusing and exciting, and also somewhat gratifying since she was flattered to be at the center of so much attention. She remembered taking great pleasure in every paranormal feat as a child, back when she was still young enough to have faith, not necessarily in magic, but in her family's ability to command destiny. She used to enjoy every detail of the ritual: sitting cross-legged on the prettiest rug in the house while a blanket would be stretched above her head, feeling protected and well hidden inside this peculiar tent, listening to the prayers uttered from all sides, and finally, that sizzling sound, like a shriek, the sound of Petite-Ma pouring melted lead into a pan full of water, as she kept repeating: "Elemtereft~ kem gozlere ~i~. Goz edenin gozune kizgin fi~. "

  The lead would quickly solidify into ever-changing shapes. If there happened to be some evil eye in the vicinity, there would always materialize a hole in the lead in the shape of an eye. To this day Asya didn't remember an occasion where there wasn't one.

  When all had been said and done, even though Asya had grown up watching Auntie Banu read coffee cups and Petite-Ma ward off the evil eye, she had eventually inherited her mother's skeptical agnosticism. She had deduced that it all boiled down to a matter of rendition. If you were looking for purple unicorns, it wouldn't take you long to start seeing them everywhere. In a similar vein, if there ever was a rapport between divinatory material-be it coffee cups or poured lead-and the process of interpretation, it ran no deeper than that between the desert and a desert moon. Though the latter needed the former as background scenery, it undoubtedly had an autonomous existence of its own. A desert moon existed outside the desert. Likewise, what the human eye saw in a piece of gray lead could not be reduced to the shape that materialized there. If you looked long and devotedly enough, you could even come across a purple unicorn there.

  But despite her lingering disbelief, now that Petite-Ma remembered the routine, Asya did not intend to object. Her affection for Petite-Ma was too profound to turn the offer down. "All right." She shrugged. She was also confident that the old woman would probably forget the issue in a matter of minutes. "After breakfast you will pour lead for me, like in the old days."

  The door of the bathroom downstairs opened just then and Armanoush joined them, looking sleepless and worn out, despondency showing in her beautiful eyes. This was a different Armanoush, barely connected with the world around her and somehow older. She walked in slowly and cautiously.

  "We are very sorry for the loss of your grandma," Auntie Zeliha said after a brief silence. "You have our most heartfelt condolences."

  "Thank you," Armanoush replied, avoiding everyone's eyes. She grabbed an empty chair and sat between Asya and Auntie Banu. Asya poured tea into her glass, while Auntie Banu served her eggs and cheese and homemade apricot marmalade. They also gave her the eighth simit, not having broken the habit of buying eight simits from a street vendor every Sunday morning.

  Yet Armanoush looked at the food indifferently. She stirred her tea distractedly for a few seconds, and then turned to Auntie Zeliha and asked, "Can I come to the airport with you to pick up my mother?"

  "Sure, we will go there together," Auntie Zeliha said, and translated her words to the rest.

  "I am coming too," Grandma Gulsum interjected.

  "Okay, Mom, we'll all go there together," Auntie Zeliha said.

  Asya blurted out: "I am coming too."

  "No, miss, you stay here," Auntie Zeliha responded with a tone of finality. "You stay and have your lead poured."

  Asya stared at her as if to say: What the hell was that? Why was she left out? If there ever was any degree of democracy and freedom of speech in this house, it was reserved for everyone but her. When it came to matters about her, the domestic regime automatically metamorphosed into sheer totalitarianism. Asya sighed with a look that bordered on despair. Then, without knowing why, but somehow goaded by a sudden urge to put pepper in her food, she grabbed the ceramic shakers. A fleeting uncertainty crossed her face as she dismissed the ugly snowman and grabbed the ugly snowwoman, and with that, sprinkled way too much salt on the last bites of her scrambled egg.

  During the rest of the breakfast Asya remained remote and reserved. Watching her from aside, Auntie Banu rose to her feet after a while and asked, her voice sopping with compassion, "Why don't you and I go out shopping, sweetheart? We can leave after breakfast and be back in two hours. It'll be fun!"

  "But first-" Auntie Banu perked up in midsentenc e-" come and help me in the kitchen to dole out the ashore."

  Asya nodded her head in surrender. What the hell? she thought. What the hell…?

  The kitchen smelled like a popular diner might on a busy weekend afternoon. The scent of cinnamon pungently outweighed all others. Asya took a scoop and started to dole out ashore from a huge pot into small glass bowls, one and a half scoops in each. She wondered why Auntie Zeliha didn't want to take her along to the airport. There certainly was room in the car. It crossed her mind that perhaps Auntie Zeliha was trying to keep her away from the visitors. Asya had noticed that her mother was not thrilled with the news of Mustafa's return after twenty years.

  "Can I help you?"

  When she turned around she spotted Armanoush standing, watching her.

  "Sure, why not? Thanks." Asya gave her a bowl of slivered almonds. "Would you sprinkle a few of these into each bowl?"

  For the following ten minutes they worked side by side as they exchanged brief, poignant words about Grandma Shushan.

  "I came to Istanbul because I thought if I made a journey on my own into my grandmother's city, I could better understand my family heritage and where I stood in life. I guess I wanted to meet Turks to better absorb what it means to be an Armenian. This whole trip was an attempt to connect with my grandma's past. I was going to tell her that we looked for her house… and now she's gone…." Armanoush began to cry. "I didn't even have the chance to see her one last time."

  Asya gave Armanoush a hug, though clumsily, not being used to showing love and compassion. "I'm so sorry for your loss," she said. "Beforee you leave Istanbul, you and I can go hunt for other reminiscences from your grandma's past. We can go to that place again and talk to other people, see if we can find anything."

  Armanoush shook her head. "I appreciate that, but the truth is, once my mother is here, it'll
be hard to go around alone. She's very overprotective."

  They got quiet hearing footsteps behind them. It was Auntie Banu, coming to check how they were doing. She watched them decorate the desserts for a while. "Does Armanoush know the tale of the ashure?" she asked, smiling, not so much a question as an introduction to a narrative.

  As the two young women worked together, cracking pomegranates and sprinkling cinnamon powder and slivered almonds on dozens of ashure bowls lined up on the counter, Auntie $anu began.

  "Once there was, once there wasn't, in a land not so far away, the ways of the human beings were despicable and the times were bad. After watching this wretchedness for long enough, Allah finally sent a messenger, Noah, to correct the people's ways and to give them a chance to repent. But when Noah opened his mouth to preach the truth, nobody listened to him and his words were interrupted by curses. They called him names: crazy, lunatic, erratic…."

  Asya cast an amused look at her aunt, knowing how to get to her: "But more than anyone else it was the betrayal of his wife that devastated Noah, right Auntie? Didn't Noah's wife join the ranks of the pagans?"

  "Indeed she did, that she-snake in the grass!" Auntie Banu replied, torn between narrating a religious story fittingly, and peppering it with a few remarks of her own.

  "Noah tried hard to convince his wife and his people for eight hundred years…. And don't ask me how come it took him that long," Auntie Banu counseled. "Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one smaller. Just like that, Noah spent eight hundred years praying for his people, trying to bring them to the right path. One day God sent him the Angel Gabriel. `Build a ship,' the angel whispered, `and take a pair of each species.'… "

  Translating a story that needed no translation, Asya's voice dropped a notch, for this happened to be the part she liked least.

  "Eventually, in Noah's ark there were good people of all faiths," Auntie Banu continued. "David was there; so were Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and peace be upon him, Mohammed. Thus equipped, they embarked and started to wait.