He climbed Yeni Çarşı Street, turned into the sleepy Grand Avenue, and hurried into a cobbled byway leading to the Panagia church. The rain began just as he was entering the gate. He greeted the two gruff Antiochians serving as guards and waited until he was inside to cross himself because his mother had taught him never to do so in the street. In the night-sky-painted narthex, he lit three candles: one for himself, one for his dead father, and a third for the blue-eyed beauty whom he was about to meet.
Kosmas had never seen the Rum Orthodox churches so full that “there was no room for a pin to drop,” as his elders fondly described the golden days before the 1955 pogrom. On that Sunday, the church contained no more than twenty warm bodies: a dozen old women with flowers and barrettes in their hair; a handful of fifty-something dames in short skirts; a few men in suits; and a couple of Greek tourists in shorts and athletic shoes. A headscarved Russian woman was venerating an icon in the ornate gold-painted iconostasis wall that separated the nave from the sanctuary. Fanis was chanting away at the cantor’s stand and—judging from the way he dragged out the syllables—enjoying his own voice. The well-dressed Rum women congregated near the bishop’s throne, where they could see and be seen. The Rum men had taken positions near the door, through which they could easily escape for a cigarette. Tourists were strolling up and down the aisles, looking at the ceiling and snapping photos as if they were in a museum.
Madame Eva entered, brushed Kosmas’s back, and whispered, “Today’s the big day.”
“Where is she?” he asked.
Just then the priest appeared in the Beautiful Gate of the iconostasis and blessed the congregation. Kosmas and Eva crossed their right hands over their chests and bowed in reply. A lady wearing old-fashioned lace gloves and a wide-brimmed hat emerged from behind the left-side stasidia, the wooden stalls with high arms that helped the Orthodox remain standing during long services. Kosmas wondered if the lady was Rita Tereza. Only Levantine women wore hats in churches. But as the woman traversed the red runner stretching from the Beautiful Gate to the entrance, Kosmas noticed that she had albino white skin, wore bottle-cap glasses, and walked with a pronounced hobble. Obviously not Rita Tereza.
As soon as the priest had withdrawn into the sanctuary, Madame Eva said, “Be patient.” She squeezed Kosmas’s arm and settled into one of the right-aisle stasidia that still retained the name plates of formerly privileged—and now dead—parishioners.
Kosmas lingered by the entrance with the other men. Every time the heavy narthex door squeaked open, he listened to the footsteps. At first he thought he was listening for Rita Tereza, and then he realized he was also hoping for Madame Gavriela’s niece. Every time he was disappointed, for he could tell from the lazy shuffle that the entrant was just another old person. The American had either stayed home that morning or gone to Holy Trinity. As for Rita Tereza, perhaps she had slipped in before him and hidden behind one of the faux-marble basilica columns, freshly painted green during the church’s recent restoration.
Finally the grizzly priest chanted an unmelodious benediction. Kosmas lined up with the others to receive his square of blessed antidoron bread. As soon as he had taken it, Fanis stepped down from the cantor’s stand, grabbed Kosmas’s arm, and nodded toward the albino, who was praying before the iconostasis icon of the Holy Mother. “Watch out for that one,” Fanis whispered. “She’s been after me for months. I’ll have to disappear as soon as we’re done . . . or she’ll eat me alive.”
“Sure, Mr. Fanis,” said Kosmas.
After venerating almost every icon in the church, Madame Eva led Kosmas across the courtyard.
“She didn’t come, did she?” he said.
“Be patient,” Madame Eva repeated. They entered the bright tea room, whose shelves were full of community antiques, including leather-bound codices, a desk clock, and donation boxes that resembled old clothes irons with wooden handles. There was a box for the church’s lighting, another for the soup kitchen, another for the long-closed orphanage, and yet another for the Zografeion Lyceum, Kosmas’s alma mater.
“Let my tea be light, please,” said Madame Eva, to the guardian, as they took their seats. “The doctor says that too much caffeine doesn’t combine well with my medications.”
“Same for us,” said an octogenarian with a purple lily in her chignon.
The lame woman with eyes of ice limped into the tea room and dropped herself into the free chair next to Kosmas.
“Rita Tereza,” said Madame Eva, still speaking Greek, “I’d like you to meet Kosmas. Kosmas, Rita Tereza, a graduate of the Liceo Italiano and the University of Rome. She’s also a brilliant watercolor painter, aren’t you, dear?”
Kosmas wanted to protest. She could not possibly be his Rita Tereza. Then he recalled his passing years, his awkwardness, his lack of luck with women, and a rhyme that his father had coined about their lame but pretty neighbor Madame Aglaia, who always had difficulty climbing their hilly street: “She huffs and puffs, but she’s still got a muff.” So Kosmas made up his mind to be sociable and give Rita Tereza a chance.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Kosmas in Turkish. “Ι’ve always thought that multicultural people are the wealthiest of all.”
She smiled and bashfully lowered her eyes—or at least so he thought. It was difficult to see what was happening behind her thick glasses.
“Is this your first time at an Orthodox church?” he asked.
“My grandmother was Rum,” Rita Tereza replied in Greek. “She taught me the language. And all churches are the same to me.”
It was a pleasant answer, and Rita Tereza’s Greek was impeccable. Up close—and in a seated position—there was indeed something sweet about her, just as Madame Eva had said. “Are you a professional painter then?” he asked.
Rita Tereza pushed up her glasses with a gloved finger. “I’m a speech therapist. For special-needs children.”
A caring profession, thought Kosmas. She would probably make a good mother.
“Kosmas, dear,” said Madame Eva, rising slightly and then reseating herself, “what was the prestigious prize you won a few months ago?”
“The Pfeifenberger. For my wedding cakes.”
“He’s very talented. Rita Tereza, what’s your favorite pastry? I’m sure he makes it.”
“I’m diabetic,” she said.
“Üf!” said Madame Eva, blowing through pursed lips. “Never mind that, then. Kosmas, your mother never told me if you have any hobbies. I always hear about your awards and distinctions, but do you do anything else?”
“I’ve never had time. Except for reading history, especially architectural, and studying Ottoman Turkish. But I’ve always wanted to learn ballroom dance. What about you, Rita Tereza, have you ever thought of taking dance lessons?”
Madame Eva elbowed Kosmas and whispered, “She can’t!”
At that moment, the old lady with the purple lily in her hair said, “Smile for Facebook!”
Rita Tereza adjusted her glasses, leaned in toward Kosmas, and pulled a smile. As soon as the flash had gone off, she directed her attention toward the other end of the table.
In an attempt to make amends, Kosmas grabbed Rita Tereza’s empty tea glass and took it into the church office, which doubled as a coffee- and tea-making station. While filling it, he noticed an almost empty coffee cup resting on the desk of the decrepit, nearly deaf priest. It was obvious from the way the fine grounds were spilled into the saucer that someone had been reading his future in their designs.
The priest came in and took a drag on the cigarette smoking in the desk ashtray.
“Father,” said Kosmas, “isn’t coffee-reading forbidden by the Church?”
The priest blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Pardon?”
Kosmas pointed to the overturned cup and raised his voice as much as he could without sounding disrespectful: “Is coffee-reading allowed? I mean, can clerics do that?”
The father righted the cup, covered it with a napkin, and winked
. “You’re still a bachelor, aren’t you, Kosmaki?” he said. “Are you aware that no one in Pera gets married without my authorization?”
“Of course, Father,” said Kosmas. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Kosmas returned to the tea room hoping that Rita Tereza might have forgotten his faux pas. But she frowned when he delivered her tea, turned her back when he sat down, and resumed a heated debate with the lily-adorned old lady about the nutritional value of white flour. Another bride lost.
Kosmas was the first to depart. Halfway down the hill, at the point where Yeni Çarşı becomes Boğazkesen Street, he stopped and looked up at the birds sweeping through the stratified glow around the dome of Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque. Now that was architecture: a mosque built on the model of Hagia Sophia for Ali Paşa, a sixteenth-century Italian corsair who had converted to Islam and later become an Ottoman admiral. The complex was designed by Mimar Sinan, a converted Rum and the chief architect to three Ottoman sultans, including Suleiman the Magnificent. For a second, Kosmas thought that maybe he, too, should stop wasting his energy and convert, like Ali Paşa and Mimar Sinan. Then he lowered his head beneath his umbrella and walked on.
He didn’t want to return home to his mother, yet on a rainy Sunday morning there were few places to go. Without any particular destination in mind, he trudged down to the Bosporus, wandered through the muddy seaside park where working-class families picnicked on sunny days, and took a seat at one of the tea gardens. What he really wanted was to see Gavriela’s niece, but she was probably still in bed.
He ordered a toasted cheese sandwich and settled down to watch the boats gliding between the Asian and European shores within the strait and across the mouth of the Sea of Marmara. Waves crashed against the quay and sprang up like fountains, leaving pools of saltwater on the rough cement. On the other side of the inland sea, the mountains of Anatolia rose into low gray clouds. Kosmas wondered, as he always did while watching Istanbul’s waters and the smooth movement of the ferries, why he still lived in the City of his isolation, where he didn’t seem to have the slightest chance of ever finding a Rum wife. Perhaps he should have left long ago for America, Canada, Australia, or Greece, like everybody else. But now he had his pâtisserie and an aging mother on his head. It was too late.
A waiter with a full tray of tea glasses made his way through the tables. Kosmas raised a finger. The man set a glass before him. The seagulls, which seemed to have more of a right to the City than anyone, uttered murderous cries when a hobby fisherman emptied a plastic bucket of fish heads onto the quay. Within minutes, nothing but a water-blood trail remained. As Kosmas watched the poor Sunday fishermen casting their lines into the gray Bosporus, he wished to God that he could be like Fanis, who knew the names of all the female cashiers at the local supermarket, never exited without saying hello to each, and sat in the tea garden like a pasha while women of all ages came to kiss his cheeks and forehead. Kosmas, on the other hand, had never even worked up the courage to ask for Emine’s phone number.
Κosmas was sick of the moldy angels of love who worked in Tarlabaşı’s derelict Rum houses: the last prostitute he had visited had filed her nails while he toiled away and then charged him extra to touch her breasts. Kosmas had vowed to change on numerous occasions, yet he couldn’t manage to assume the confident, carefree air that enabled Fanis to acquire the numbers of half the women of Pera. He had tried impressing the American with his new business card—complete with the gold-embossed Pfeifenberger symbol—but she hadn’t even deemed it worthy of a glance. He realized that part of the problem was that he had a penchant for cultivated “salon girls,” but look what had happened when he gave homely Rita Tereza a chance. If she had no interest in him, how could he possibly aspire to please Gavriela’s niece?
“My God,” he said out loud, “if only you had made me like Fanis.”
And then he had it. He would go straight to the source, to Fanis, and ask the old rascal to become his mentor. He took his phone from his pocket, called Monsieur Julien, and scribbled Fanis Paleologos’s phone number on a napkin.
3
The Lady of the Western Approaches
The night before daphne left for Istanbul, Sultana Badem warned her daughter that she must not under any circumstances fall in love with a man still living in the Poli, which is the only word Istanbul Rums use for their homeland: the City.
“Why?” Daphne asked in Greek, her mother tongue.
Sultana pulled taut the floral-print sofa cover, sat down beside her, and lit a cigarette. “Because he’ll only be using you as a ticket out. And his mother! There’s nobody nastier than an Istanbul mother-in-law.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. Sultana was sometimes strangely critical of other immigrants and overly admiring of natural-born citizens. This explained her particular affection for Daphne’s boyfriend Paul, a white-toast American mutt with only a vague notion of his English, Polish, and Lithuanian heritage. Even Paul’s surname—Winters—was a rootless, immigration-office switch for a long and difficult Polish name.
“And don’t go about alone,” Sultana continued. “At least until you’ve learned your way around. All you have to do is smile at a man and he’ll think you want to jump into bed with him.”
“Things have probably changed since 1969, Mom,” said Daphne. She grabbed the embroidered pillow with which her mother had propped open the living-room window.
Sultana snatched the pillow from Daphne and stuffed it back between the glass and the frame. “You’ve been with Paul for four years now. He’s gold. So polite, fixes everything in the house, encourages you to continue your studies. Don’t you love him?”
Daphne nodded.
“Then when are you getting married?”
“Mom, please. He’s all that you said but . . . he dances with other women.”
“He’d been dancing for years when you met him! If that was going to bother you, why did you take up with him in the first place? And how did you become such a jealous Easterner? You were born here. You should be more American, more open-minded.”
“He lied to me about that tango festival in Vegas. Why don’t you get that?”
“Seni taşımak kolay değil,” said Sultana, peppering the otherwise Greek conversation with a bit of Turkish.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Putting up with you isn’t easy. Look, Daphne, he went to a dance event. It doesn’t mean he slept with anyone. He shouldn’t have said it was a teacher’s conference, true, but maybe you shouldn’t be so possessive. . . . Yes, I’m going to say it: you shouldn’t be so Turkish!”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have married a Turk.”
Sultana scowled. “I’m just saying that American men don’t like our kind of jealousy. It’s insulting to them, not flattering. It shows a lack of trust.”
“But what if he did sleep with someone?” said Daphne. She’d believed Paul when he tearfully swore that he’d never been unfaithful. But the possibility later returned to torment her, cause her nightmares, and make her feel painfully insecure every time she and Paul went tangoing.
“Look, Daphne, you can’t prevent a man from going to another woman. All you can do is find one who respects you, treats you well, and fulfills his family duties. Paul is that sort of man.”
“I’m not even married yet and you’re saying I should put up with other women?”
“Allah, Allah!” said Sultana, in exasperation. “You’re missing the point.”
Daphne banged her cup onto the dining table. Coffee spilled onto the semi-transparent runner. Thank God her mother didn’t notice. “You know,” she said, “you can get windows that stay open by themselves.”
“That’s the way my grandmother kept the window open, and that’s the way I do it. And if you’re not going to follow my advice about Paul, you should at least listen to what I have to say about the City.” Sultana drew an arch from one corner of her mouth to the other. “This needs a zipper. Never ever talk politics.”
&
nbsp; “Why not?”
“Because it’s dangerous. Always has been, always will be. Things might seem fine over there right now, but don’t be deceived: it’s just a period of calm before the storm. And don’t be too open with anyone about your personal life, including Gavriela’s friends. They mustn’t learn that your father isn’t Rum.”
“Is it so terrible?”
“If they find out your father’s Muslim, they won’t trust you. They won’t consider you one of their own.”
“Is that why you and Baba never took me there?”
“Maybe.” Sultana inhaled deeply on her cigarette and blew a white cloud out the window, well over the propping cushion. She smoked “like an Arab,” as Daphne’s father was fond of saying. Even so, Sultana had an intense distaste for cigarette stench. She only smoked outdoors and by the window so that the slipcovers and curtains she washed regularly and ironed with rosewater wouldn’t stink.
“Is that why Aunt Gavriela stopped visiting?” said Daphne.
“Listen, miss.” Sultana pulled up the strap of the last sundress she had made for herself before she retired from Flora’s Fabrics. “When Gavriela came here for your high-school graduation, she asked me to send you to college in Istanbul. As your godmother, she insisted, she had a right to see you more often.”
“And?”
“I knew what she was up to. She wanted you to move back there and marry a Rum. That way she could keep you all to herself. And that’s why I never let her visit again.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?”
“Your father and I didn’t work all our lives to send you back there. The City is a magic place, like no other, but remember: you can’t stay. There’s no future for the Rums there. Bitti.” It’s finished.
Daphne struggled not only with her mother’s domineering ways, but also with her pessimism. On Facebook, Aunt Gavriela was always posting photos of renovated churches, tea parties with Rum friends, and cultural events at the Greek Consulate. Gavriela also shared hopeful articles about the future of the Rum community and the return of confiscated Rum property. It seemed that the current government wanted to make amends, yet Sultana clung to the mess of the past.
A Recipe for Daphne Page 3
