The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

  "Please stop!"

  When Zeliha woke up she was alone, nauseous, and in an unfamiliar room. How on earth she could have walked here was a puzzle she had no desire to solve. She felt nothing, neither pain nor sorrow. So, she concluded, in the end the indifference must have won the race. It wasn't only her baby but her senses too that had been aborted on that pure white table in the next room. Perhaps there was a silver lining somewhere. Perhaps now she could go fishing, and finally manage to stand still for hours on end without feeling frustrated or left behind, as if life were a swift hare she could only watch from a distance but never possibly catch.

  "There you are, finally back!" The receptionist was standing by the door, arms akimbo. "Goodness gracious! What a fright! How you scared us! Do you have any idea how you shrieked? It was so awful! "

  Zeliha laid still, without blinking.

  "The pedestrians on the street must have thought we were slaughtering you or something…. I only wonder why the police did not show up at our door!"

  Because it is the Istanbul police you are talking about, not some brawny cop in an American movie, Zeliha thought to herself as she finally al

  lowed herself a blink. Still not quite understanding why she had,annoyed the receptionist but seeing no point in annoying her any further, she offered the first excuse that came to her mind: "Maybe I screamed because it hurt…."

  But that excuse, no matter how compelling, was instantly crushed: "It could not possibly, miss, for the doctor… has not performed the operation. We have not even laid a hand on you!"

  "What do you mean…?" Zeliha faltered, trying less to find out the answer than to comprehend the weight of her own question. "You mean… you have not…"

  "No, we haven't." The receptionist sighed, holding her head as if at the onset of a migraine. "There was absolutely no way the doctor could do anything with you screaming at the top of your voice. You did not pass out, woman, no way; first you were blathering, and then you started yelling and cursing. I've never seen anything like it in fifteen years. It must have taken the morphine twice as long to take effect on you."

  Zeliha suspected some exaggeration behind this statement but did not feel like arguing. Two hours into her visit to the gynecologist she had come to realize that herein a patient was expected to talk only when asked to.

  "And when you finally blacked out it was so hard to believe that you wouldn't start shrieking again, the doctor said, let's wait till her mind is clear. If she wants to have this abortion for sure, she can still go for it afterward. We brought you here and let you sleep. And sleep indeed you did!"

  "You mean there was no. ." The word she had so daringly uttered in front of strangers just this afternoon felt unutterable now. Zeliha touched her belly while her eyes appealed for a consolation the receptionist was the last person on earth to grant. "So she is still here…."

  "Well, you do not know yet if it is a she!" the receptionist said, her voice matter-of-fact.

  But Zeliha knew. She simply did.

  Once on the street, despite the gathering darkness, it felt like early morning. The rain had ceased and life looked beautiful, almost manageable. Though the traffic was still a mess and the streets full of sludge, the crisp smell of the after-rain gave the whole city a sacred air. Here and there children stomped in mud puddles, taking delight in committing simple sins. If there ever was a right time to sin, it must have been at this fleeting instant. One of those rare moments when it felt like Allah not only watched over us but also cared for us; one of those moments when He felt close.

  It almost felt as if Istanbul had become a blissful metropolis, romantically picturesque, just like Paris, thought Zeliha; not that she had ever been to Paris. A seagull flew close crying a coded message she was almost on the verge of deciphering. For half a minute Zeliha believed she was on the cutting edge of a new beginning. "Why did you not let me do it, Allah?" she heard herself mutter, but as soon as the words came out of her mouth, she apologized in panic to the atheist in herself.

  Pardon me, pardon me, pardon me. Far and under the rainbow Zeliha limped back home, clutching the box of tea glasses and the broken heel, somehow feeling less dispirited than she had felt in weeks.

  So on that first Friday of July around eight p.m. Zeliha came home, to the slightly decrepit, high-ceilinged Ottoman konak that looked out of place amid five times as tall modern apartment buildings on both sides. She trudged up the curved staircase and found all the Kazanci females gathered upstairs around the wide dinner table, occupied with their meal, obviously having felt no reason to wait for her.

  "Hello stranger! Come on in, join our supper," Banu exclaimed, craning her neck over an oven-fried crispy chicken wing. "The prophet Mohammed advises us to share our food with strangers."

  Her lips were glossy, so were her cheeks, as if she had taken extra time to wipe the chicken grease all over her face, including on those shiny, fawn eyes of hers. Twelve years older and thirty pounds heavier than Zeliha, she looked less like her sister than like her mother. If she was to be believed, Banu had a bizarre digestive system that stored everything ingested, which could have been a more credible claim had she not also argued that even if it were pure water that she consumed, her body would still evolve it into fat, and thereby she could not possibly be held accountable for her weight or be asked to go on a diet.

  "Guess what's on today's menu?" Banu continued merrily, as she wagged a finger at Zeliha before she clutched another chicken wing. "Stuffed green peppers!"

  "This must be my lucky day!" Zeliha said.

  Today's menu looked splendidly familiar. In addition to a huge chicken, there was yogurt soup, karniyarak, pilaki, kadin budu kofte from the day before, turu, newly made borek, ajar of ayran, and, yes, stuffed green peppers. Zeliha instantly pulled up a chair, her hunger prevailing over her lack of enthusiasm for attending a family dinner on such a hard day's eve.

  "Where were you, missy?" grumbled her mother, Gulsum, who might have been Ivan the Terrible in another life. She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, knitted her eyebrows, and then turned her contorted face toward Zeliha's, as if by doing so she could read her youngest daughter's mind.

  So there they stood, Gulsum and Zeliha, mother and daughter, scowling at each other, each ready to quarrel but reluctant to start the fight. It was Zeliha who first averted her eyes. Knowing too well what a big mistake it would be to display her temper in front of her mother, she forced herself to smile and attempted an answer, albeit an indirect one.

  "There were good discounts at the bazaar today. I bought a set of tea glasses. They are absolutely gorgeous! They have gilded stars and little spoons that match."

  "Alas, they break so easily," murmured Cevriye, the second eldest of the Kazanci sisters and a Turkish national history teacher at a private high school. She always ate healthy, balanced meals and wore her hair in a perfectly pinned chignon that twisted at the nape of her neck without letting even a tangle of hair loose.

  "You've been to the bazaar? Why didn't you get any cinnamon sticks?! I told you this morning we were going to have rice pudding today and there was no cinnamon left at home to sprinkle on it." Banu frowned in between two bites of bread, but this problem occupied her for no more than a split second. Her theory of bread, which she was fond of pronouncing regularly and putting into practice all the time, was that if not given a proper amount at each and every sitting, the stomach would not "know" it was full and would thereby ask for more food. For the stomach to fully comprehend its fullness, one had to eat decent portions of bread with everything. Thus, Banu would have bread with potatoes, bread with rice, bread with pasta, bread with borek, and at those times when she wanted to give her stomach a far clearer message, she would have bread with bread. Dinner without bread was a sheer sin, which Allah might forgive, but Banu definitely would not.

  Zeliha pursed her lips and stood silent, only now remembering the fate of the cinnamon sticks. Avoiding the question, she put a stuffed pepper on her plate. Each
time she could easily tell if it was Banu or Cevriye or Feride who had prepared the peppers. If it was Banu, they turned out to be full of stuff they'd have otherwise sorely lacked, including peanuts and cashews and almonds. If it was Feride, they would be full of rice, each green pepper so ballooned it was impossible to eat without breaking. When her tendency to overstuff the peppers was added to her love for seasonings of all sorts, Feride's dolmas burst with herbs and spices. Depending on the combination, this turned out either exceptionally well or simply awful. When it was Cevriye who had cooked the dish, however, it was always sweeter, because she added powdered sugar to every edible thing no matter what, as if to compensate for the sourness in her universe. And today it happened to be she who had made the dolmas.

  "I was at the doctor's…. " Zeliha murmured, carefully stripping the dolma of its pale green cloak.

  "Doctors!" Feride grimaced and lifted her fork in the air as if it were a baton she would use to indicate a faraway mountain range on a map and her audience was not her own family but students in a geography class. Feride had a problem with making eye contact. She was more comfortable talking to objects. Accordingly, she addressed her words to Zeliha's plate: "Haven't you seen the newspaper this morning? They operate on a nine-year-old child for appendicitis and then forget a pair of scissors inside. Do you have any idea how many doctors in this country should be put into jail for medical malpractice?"

  Among all the Kazanci women, Feride was the one best acquainted with medical procedures. In the last six years, she had been diagnosed with eight different illnesses, each of which sounded more alien than the one before. Whether it was the doctors who could not make up their minds or Feride herself industriously working on new infirmities, one could never tell. After a while it didn't really matter one way or another. Sanity was a promised land, the Shangri-la she had been deported from as a teenager, and to which she intended to return to one day. On the way there she rested at sundry stopovers that came with erratic names and dreary treatments.

  Even as a little girl, there was something bizarre about Feride. A most difficult student at school, she had shown no interest in anything other than physical geography classes, and in the geography classes had shown no interest in anything other than a few subjects, starting with the layers of the atmosphere. Her favorite topics were how the ozone was broken down in the stratosphere, and the connection between surface ocean currents and atmospheric patterns. She had learned all the information she could gather on high-latitude stratospheric circulation, the characteristics of the mesosphere, valley winds and sea breezes, solar cycles and tropical latitudes, and the shape and size of the earth. Everything she had memorized at school she would then volley in the house, peppering every conversation with atmospheric information. Each time she displayed her knowledge on physical geography, she would speak with unprecedented zeal, floating high above the clouds, jumping from one atmospheric layer to the next. Then, a year after her graduation, Feride had started to display signs of eccentricity and detachment.

  Although Feride's interest in physical geography had never petered out in the fullness of time, it inspired yet another area of interest that she profoundly enjoyed: accidents and disasters. Every day she read the third page of the tabloids. Car accidents, serial killings, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and floods, terminal illnesses, contagious diseases, and unknown viruses…. Feride would peruse them all. Her selective memory would absorb local, national, and international calamities only to convey them to others out of the blue.

  It never took her long to darken any conversation, as from birth she was inclined to see misery in each and every story, and to fabricate some when there was none.

  But the news she conveyed did not upset the others, as they had renounced believing in her long ago. Her family had figured out one way of dealing with insanity, and that was to confuse it with a lack of credibility.

  Feride was first diagnosed with a "stress ulcer," a diagnosis no one in the family took seriously because "stress" had become some sort of catchphrase. As soon as it was introduced into Turkish culture, "stress" had been so euphorically welcomed by the Istanbulites that there had emerged countless patients of stress in the city. Feride had traveled nonstop from one stress-related illness to another, surprised to discover the vastness of the land since there seemed to be virtually nothing that could not be related to stress. After that, she had loitered around obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative amnesia, and psychotic depression. Managing to poison herself, she was once diagnosed with Bittersweet Nightshade, the name she most relished among her infirmities.

  At each stage of her journey to insanity, Feride changed her hair color and style, so that after a while the doctors, in their endeavor to follow the changes in her psychology, started to keep a hair chart. Short, midlength, very long, and once entirely shaven; spiked, flattened, flipped, and braided; subjected to tons of hairspray, gel, wax, or styling cream; accessorized with barrettes, gems, or ribbons; cropped in punk style, pinned up in ballerina buns, highlighted and dyed in every possible hue, each one of her hairstyles had been a fleeting episode while her illness had remained firm and fixed.

  After a lengthy sojourn in "major depressive disorder,".Feride had moved to "borderline"-a term construed quite arbitrarily by different members of the Kazanci family. Her mother interpreted the word "border" as a problem to be associated with police, customs officers, and illegality, thereby finding a "felon foreigner" in the persona of Feride. She thus became even more suspicious of this crazy daughter whom she had not trusted in the first place. In stark contrast, for Feride's sisters, the concept of "border" mainly invoked the idea of edge, and the idea of edge invoked the image of a deadly cliff. For quite a while they treated her with utmost care, as if she were a walking somnambulist on a wall meters high and could fall down any time. However, the word "border" invoked the trim of latticework for Petite-Ma, and she studied her granddaughter with deep interest and sympathy.

  Feride had recently emigrated into another diagnosis nobody could even pronounce, let alone dare to interpret: "hebephrenic schizophrenia." Ever since then, she remained faithful to her new nomenclature, as if finally content to achieve the nominal clarification she sorely needed. Whatever the diagnosis, she lived according to the rules of her own fantasy land, outside of which she had never set foot.

  But on this first Friday of July, Zeliha paid no attention to her sister's renowned distaste for doctors. As she started to eat, she realized how hungry she had been all day long. Almost mechanically, she ate a piece of forek, poured herself a glass of ayran, forked another green dolma onto her plate, and revealed the piece of information growing inside her: "I went to a gynecologist today…."

  "Gynecologist!" Feride repeated instantly, but she made no specific comment. Gynecologists were the one group among all the physicians she had had the least experience with.

  "I went to a gynecologist today to have an abortion." Zeliha completed her sentence without looking at anyone.

  Banu dropped her chicken wing and looked down at her feet as if they had something to do with this; Cevriye pursed her lips hard; Feride shrieked and then oddly unleashed a whoop of laughter; their mother tensely rubbed her forehead, feeling the first aura of a terrible headache approaching; and Petite-Ma… well, Petite-Ma just continued to eat her yogurt soup. It might be because she had gone quite deaf in the course of the recent months. It might also be because she was suffering from the early stages of dementia. Perhaps it was simply because she thought there was nothing to fuss about. With Petite-Ma you never knew.

  "How could you slaughter your baby?" Cevriye asked in awe.

  "It is not a baby!" Zeliha shrugged. "At this stage, I'd rather call it a droplet. That'd be more scientific!"

  "Scientific! You are not scientific, you are cold-blooded!" Cevriye burst into tears. "Cold-blooded! That's what you are!"

  "Well, I have good news then. I have not killed… it-her whatever!" Zeliha turned toward her sister calmly. "No
t that I did not want to. I did! I tried to have the droplet aborted but somehow it did not happen."

  "What do you mean?" asked Banu.

  Zeliha put on a brave face. "Allah sent me a message," she said tonelessly, knowing it was the wrong thing to say to a family like hers but saying it anyway. "So there I am lying anesthetized with a doctor and a nurse on each side. In a few minutes the operation will begin and the baby will be gone. Forever! But then just when I am about to go unconscious on that operating table, I hear the afternoon prayer from a nearby mosque…. The prayer is soft, like a piece of velvet. It envelops my whole body. Then, as soon as the prayer is over, I hear a murmur as if somebody is whispering in my ear: 'Thou shall not kill this child!'"

  Cevriye flinched, Feride nervously coughed into her table napkin, Banu swallowed hard, and Gulsum frowned. Only Petite-Ma remained far off in a better land, having now finished her soup, obediently waiting for her next dish to arrive.

  "And then. . " Zeliha carried on with her story, "this mysterious voice commands: 'Oooo Zeliha! Oooo you the culprit of the righteous Kazanci family! Let this child live! You don't know it yet, but this child will be a leader. This baby will be a monarch!'"

  "He cannot!" the teacher Cevriye broke in, missing no opportunity to show her expertise. "There aren't monarchs anymore, we are a modern nation."

  "'Oooo you sinner, this child will rule over others!"' Zeliha continued, pretending not to have heard the lesson. "'Not only this country, not only the entire Middle East and the Balkans, but the whole world will know her name. This child of yours will lead the masses, and bring peace and justice to humankind!"'

  Zeliha paused and let out a breath.

  "Anyhow, good news everybody! The baby is still with me! Before long, we'll put another plate at this table."

  "A bastard!" Gulsum exclaimed. "You want to bring into this family a child out of wedlock. A bastard!"