The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  Mustafa turned to his eldest sister in time to catch her grimace, but Banu was quick to restore her composure.

  "When we met in Germany, Mom told me Zeliha had a baby from a man she had been engaged to briefly. But, she said, he had left her."

  "Mom has lied to you," Banu interrupted. "But what difference does it make anymore? Asya grew up without seeing her father. She doesn't know who he is. The family doesn't know who he is either," she added hastily. "Other than Zeliha, of course."

  "Including you?" Mustafa asked incredulously. "I heard you were a genuine soothsayer. Feride says you have enslaved some bad djinni to get all the information you need. You seem to have customers from everywhere. Now are you trying to tell me that you lack the knowledge of something this crucial? Haven't your djinn revealed anything to you?"

  "They have, actually," Banu confided. "I wish I didn't know the things I know."

  Mustafa's heart beat faster as he absorbed the words. Petrified, he closed his eyes. But even behind closed eyes he could see Banu's piercing gaze. And another pair of eyes portentously glittering in the dark, so hollow and bloodcurdling. Was that her evil djinni? But all of this must have been a dream, for when Mustafa Kazanci opened his eyes again, he was alone with his wife in the room.

  Yet right beside his side of the bed there was a bowl of ashure waiting for him. He stared at it and suddenly he knew why it was placed there and what exactly he was asked to do. The choice belonged to him… to his left hand.

  He looked at his left hand, now waiting next to the bowl. He smiled at his hand's power. Now his hand could either grab this bowl or just push it aside. If he chose the second option, he would wake up tomorrow to just another day in Istanbul. He would see Banu at the breakfast table. They wouldn't talk about the exchange they had the night before. They would pretend this bowl of ashure was never concocted and never served. If he chose the first option, however, things would come full circle. But having reached the age limits for a Kazanci man, death was close anyway, one day more or less would not make much difference at this point in his life. At the back of his mind echoed an old story-the story of a man who had escaped to the ends of the earth hoping to avoid the Angel of Death, only to run into him where they were originally destined to meet.

  It was a choice less between life and death than between selfcontrolled death and sudden death. With such a family heritage he was sure he would die soon anyway. Now his left hand, his guilty hand, could choose when and how.

  He remembered the little piece of paper he had stuck in the stone wall at the shrine of El Tradito. "Forgive me," he had written there. "For me to exist, the past had to be erased."

  Now, he felt like the past was returning. And for it to exist, he had to be erased….

  All these years, a harrowing remorse had been gnawing him inside, little by little, without disrupting his outer facade. But perhaps the fight between amnesia and remembering was finally over. Like a sea plain stretching as far as the eye could see after the tide went out, memories of a troubled past surfaced hither and thither from the ebbing waters. He reached out to the ashure. Knowingly and willfully, he started to eat it, little by little, savoring each and every ingredient with every mouthful.

  It felt so relieving to walk out on his past and his future at once. It felt so good to walk out on life.

  Seconds after he finished the ashure, he was seized with an abdominal cramp so sharp he couldn't breathe. Two minutes later his breathing stopped completely.

  That is how Mustafa Kazanci died at the age of forty and three-quarters.

  EIGHTEEN

  Potassium Cyanide

  The body was cleansed with a bar of daphne soap, as fragrant and pure and green as the pastures in paradise are said to be. It was scrubbed, swabbed, rinsed, and then left to dry naked on the flat stone in the mosque-yard before being wrapped in a three-piece cotton shroud, placed in a coffin, and, despite the adamant counsel of the elderly to bury it on the same day, loaded in a hearse to be driven directly back to the Kazanci domicile.

  "You cannot take him home!" exclaimed the scrawny deadwasher as he blocked the exit of the mosque-yard and frowned at each and every one involved. "The man is going to stink, for Allah's sake! You are embarrassing him."

  Somewhere between the "you" and "him" it started to drizzle; sparse, reluctant drops, as if the rain too wanted to play a role in all this but just hadn't taken sides yet. This Tuesday, in the month of March, no doubt the most unbalanced and unbalancing month in Istanbul, seemed to have changed its mind yet again, deciding it in fact belonged to the winter season.

  "But dead-washer brother"-Auntie Feride sniffed, instantly integrating the nervous man into her engulfing and egalitarian cosmos of hebephrenic schizophrenia "we will take him back to his house so that everyone can see him one last time. You see, my brother had been abroad for so many years, we had almost forgotten his face. After twenty years, he finally returns to Istanbul and on his third day here, he breathes his last breath. His death was so unexpected, neighbors and distant relatives will not believe he has passed away if they don't have a chance to see him dead."

  "Woman, are you out of your mind? There is no such thing in our religion!" the dead-washer snapped, hoping this would stop whatever she might be planning to say next. "We Muslims do not exhibit our deceased in a showcase." His face visibly hardened as he added, "If your neighbors want to see him, they'll have to visit his gravestone in the cemetery."

  While Auntie Feride paused to ponder this suggestion, Auntie Cevriye, standing next to her, stared at the man with a raised eyebrow, the way she looked at her students in an oral quiz when she wanted them to realize, by themselves, how illogical was the answer they had just given.

  "But dead-washer brother," Auntie Feride continued, now catching up. "How can they see him when he is in a grave six feet down?"

  The dead-washer's thick eyebrows shot up in frustration, but he preferred not to answer, finally sensing the futility of discussing anything with these women.

  Auntie Feride had dyed her hair black that morning. This was her mourning hair. She shook her head with determination and then added: "Don't you worry. You can rest assured that we are not going to display him like the Christians do in the movies."

  Pouting at Auntie Feride's relentlessly moving eyeballs and fluttering hands, the dead-washer stood dead still for an awful minute, now looking less annoyed than distressed, as if he had suddenly realized she was the craziest person he had ever come across. His ferrety eyes looked around for help. Having found none, they then slid toward the corpse patiently waiting for them to reach a decision about its fate, and finally back to both aunts again, but if there was a message secreted somewhere in this back-and-forth chilly glance, none of them could decode the meaning.

  Instead, Auntie Cevriye tipped him, generously.

  So the dead-washer took his tip and the Kazancis their dead.

  In a flash, they formed a convoy of four vehicles. Leading the procession was a hearse, sage green as a Muslim hearse is dictated to be, the color black being reserved for the funerals of the minorities, Armenians and Jews and Greeks alike. The coffin lay at the back of the three-sided truck, and since somebody had to go with the dead, Asya volunteered. Armanoush, her face full of confusion, was tightly gripping Asya's hand so that it looked like the two had volunteered together.

  "I am not having any women sitting in front of a hearse," remarked the driver who startlingly looked very much like the deadwasher. Maybe they were brothers; one of them washed while the other carried the dead, and perhaps there was a third brother working in the cemetery, in charge of burying them.

  "Well, you have to because there aren't any more men left in our family," Auntie Zeliha chided from behind, in a voice so icy the man grew quiet. Perhaps it had occurred to him that if there truly were no men to escort the dead in the hearse, it was better that these two girls accompanied him rather than this intimidating woman with her miniskirt and nose ring.

  So th
e man stopped complaining and soon the hearse lumbered off.

  Right behind them was Rose's Toyota Corolla. Her panic was almost palpable from the way the car lurched and halted, moving inch by inch, as if she were either convulsed by rhythmic hiccups or intimidated by the wild traffic.

  Given her steadily increasing trepidation, it was now hardly possible to imagine Rose at the wheel of a five-door, ultramarine Grand Cherokee Limited 4x4, equipped with an 8.0 cylinder engine. The woman who roared down the wide boulevards of Arizona had turned into a different driver on the snaky, crowded streets of Istanbul. Truth be told, Rose was completely astounded at the moment, her bafflement and disorientation almost outweighing her grief. In no more than seventy-two hours after their arrival, she felt like she had accidentally fallen through a wormhole in the cosmos and stumbled into another dimension, a strange land where nothing seemed normal, and even death was smothered by surrealness.

  Grandma Gulsum sat next to her, unable to communicate with this American daughter-in-law she hadn't seen all her life, but also feeling concern and pity for her now that she had lost her husband, though not as much concern and pity as she felt for herself, now that she had lost her son.

  In the back seat was Petite-Ma. Today she wore a teal outdoor head scarf trimmed with inky black on the edges. On her first day in Istanbul, Rose had spent a great deal of time trying to unravel the essential criteria that would illuminate once and for all why some women in Turkey wore the head scarf and others did not. Before long, however, she had given up, failing to solve the puzzle even at the local level, or even within the household. Why on earth ageless Petite-Ma wore the head scarf while her daughter-in-law Gulsum did not, and why one of the aunties wore the head scarf while her three sisters did not, was simply beyond her.

  Right behind the Toyota was Auntie Zeliha's metallic silver Alfa Romeo, with her three sisters crammed inside and Sultan the Fifth curled in a basket on Auntie Cevriye's lap, startlingly tranquil today, as if human death had a soothing effect on his feline ferocity.

  Alongside the Alfa Romeo whooshed a yellow Volkswagen Beetle driven by Aram. Having a hard time understanding why the Kazanci women were taking their dead home but wise enough to know that nothing so tires a person as to attempt an objection to the aunties, especially when they came in a cluster like that, he had chosen not to ask. Hence he simply tagged along, trying to make sure his sweetheart was doing okay amid all this commotion.

  At the jam-packed traffic lights at Shishli, only blocks away from the Muslim cemetery the dead-washer had tried to direct them to, by chance they all lined up side by side, like the leading regiment of an indomitable army with all the zeal to fight but no common cause. Auntie Feride popped her head out of the window and waved left and right, apparently thrilled by the happenstance of them all being lined up like this, acting in unison for the first time, even if it were for the sake of some mechanical red light. Rose ignored the gesture, Grandma Gulsum the gesturer.

  At the next red light, sitting between Armanoush and the driver of the hearse, Asya scrutinized the surrounding cars again, but luckily they had lost sight of one another. She felt a sudden, shameless relief to spot no Kazanci relatives of hers within eye range, except the one lying in the coffin in the back, of course, but then again that might not be included in her eye range as long as she did not turn around. As they drifted along in the jellylike traffic, so thick and congealed, slit here and there by unpredicted openings, in front of them materialized a bright red Coca-Cola van.

  When the light turned green and they were moving again, in the lane to their right a fleet of cars with soccer fans appeared. They had caps and scarves and flags and banners and bandannas, and some had the colors of their team in their hair: red and yellow. Frustrated with the slow-moving traffic, most of the fans had momentarily sunk into lethargy, idly chattering among themselves, and once in a while waving a bandanna or two from the open windows.

  As the traffic began lurching forward again, however, they resumed their chants and shouts with renewed vigor. Before long, a yellow cab with dozens of bumper stickers on it recklessly boxed itself into the tiny bit of space between the hearse and the CocaCola van ahead. The driver next to Asya cursed angrily as he slowed down. While he growled some more and Armanoush watched the cab in front with increasing wonder, Asya struggled to decode the writing on the bumper stickers. There, among many others, she spotted an iridescent sticker that claimed: DON'T CALL ME WRETCHED. THE WRETCHED TOO HAVE A HEART.

  The driver of the cab in front was a rough-looking, swarthy man who had a gray Zapata mustache and who looked to be at least sixty, too old to get involved in such a soccer hullabaloo. There was a sharp mismatch between the man's utterly traditional look and the frenzy with which he drove. Even more interesting than him, however, were the customers-or else, friends-in his cab. The man next to the cabdriver had his face painted half yellow, half red. This Asya could clearly see from the hearse behind because this man had popped his head out the open window, waving a yellow and red banner with one hand, while loosely holding on to the front seat with the other. The upper part of his body jerking outside, and the lower part hidden inside the car, he looked like someone cut in two by a magician. Even from a distance Asya could see that the man's nose was so alcohol crimson that it upset the symmetry of half yellow and half red on his face, tipping the balance on behalf of the red. Just as she was pondering which particular drink-beer or raki or both-could endow a human being's nose with this particular shade, the window behind his was rolled down and another fan raised a drum in the air with one hand and held on to the interior of the car with the other. In perfect unison, the two hooligans sprouted half their bodies out of the windows, like the pruned branches of a yellow cab tree.

  Then the man in the front seat pulled out a stick and started beating the drum the other held in the air. The impossibility of the task must have energized them, for they soon supplemented the banging and thumping with an anthem. Several pedestrians on the sidewalks stood stunned, but a good number applauded and joined the duo, mouthing the lyrics in an ever-increasing fervor:

  Let earth, sky, water listen to our voice

  Let the whole world shake with our heavy steps.

  "What are they saying?" Armanoush elbowed Asya, but Asya was slow to translate mainly because her attention had been fixed on a pedestrian. It was a lanky lad in rags, inhaling glue from a plastic bag while stomping his naked, blackened feet in time to the rhythm of the anthem. Every few seconds the boy stopped inhaling and mouthed the words of the anthem, but behind the rest of them, like an eerie echo: ". . with our heavy steps…."

  In the meantime the other partyers also started to wave flags and bandannas out of their car windows, as they jovially joined in the song. Now and then the drummer stopped and used his stick to draw imaginary snakes in the air at the pedestrians and the street vendors on the sidewalk, as if directing them all, orchestrating the whole city's hubbub.

  When the first half of the song was over, a brief confusion ensued since few in this motley chorus seemed to know the lyrics of the second half. Not letting this bothersome detail shatter their solidarity, they started singing right from the beginning once again, this time more feistily than before.

  Let earth, sky, water listen to our voice

  Let the whole world shake with our heavy steps.

  Thus they all flowed along the avenue in a flood of red and yellow, amid chaos and clamor. Inside the hearse Armanoush and Asya and the driver silently watched, their eyes fixed on the yellow cab ahead. They tailgated so dangerously close to the vehicle that Asya could see empty cans of beer rolling around in the back window.

  "Look at them! Is this how grown-up men should behave?!" the driver of the hearse exploded. "Now and again it happens. A fanatic dies, and his family or his madcap friends want to wrap his coffin with the flag of this or that soccer team. Then they shamelessly expect me to transport these sacrilegious coffins to the cemetery! If you ask me, all this is sheer b
lasphemy! There should be a law prohibiting such nonsense. Only the green prayer mantle should be allowed, I say. Nothing else. What do these people think they are doing? Aren't they Muslim or what? You are dead for Allah's sake, what do you need a soccer flag for? Has Allah built a stadium up there in the sky? Are there tournaments in heaven?"

  Not knowing how to answer this last question, Asya fidgeted uncomfortably in her seat, but then the driver's attention was drawn toward the yellow cab again. A mechanical melody rang out from the cell phone of the fanatic leaning out the front window. Still holding on to the cab with one hand, still conducting the city with his other hand, the portly hooligan made an attempt to answer his phone, forgetting he had no other hand for the task. He lost his balance, and along with it he lost two other things: first the drumstick, then the cell phone. Both fell onto the road, right in front of the hearse.

  The yellow cab abruptly stopped and the hearse came to a halt just when the rift between the two cars had shrunk to a hair. Asya and Armanoush lurched forward with the sudden stop, and then both simultaneously checked the coffin in the back. It was safe and sound.

  In a flash the owner of the dropped items jumped down, still smiling and singing, his half-yellow, half-red face glowing with fervor. He stared back as if apologizing to the traffic behind for halting them all. Only then did he notice it was no ordinary vehicle that had been tailgating them but a sage green hearse, the symbol of death tagging along like an ominous shadow. For a long, prickly minute the man stood there in the middle of the traffic, looking perplexed. Finally, when yet another earful of fans whisked past him singing the anthem and his buddy impatiently banged the drum with his hand, it occurred to him to grab his cell phone and stick from the road. After giving the coffin in the hearse one last look he turned around and climbed back into the cab. This time he did not pop out the window again, but remained inside, subdued.