He did not pull back the lace curtains that shielded his view of the street. Instead, he imagined his neighborhood of vines hanging from wires between the houses. He saw Ağa Hamamı Street torn up for repaving, as it had been the previous summer. He envisioned the men who had set up their plastic chairs to watch the bulldozers as if they were at a sporting event. He saw his mother and wife step out of a beauty parlor that had closed decades ago. They were whispering as they walked, and he was sure that they were talking about him.
“Mother,” he said out loud. “Why did you tell me not to go?”
Fanis took off the two wedding bands he had worn on the same finger since his wife’s death. He placed them on his mother’s pillow, took Kalypso’s photo from the side table on which he had left it after Murat’s visit, and exited the building. He climbed Turnacıbaşı Street, merged into the pedestrian traffic in the Grand Avenue, and turned off into the byway leading to the Panagia church. There he found the bishop half asleep in an office chair.
Fanis cleared his voice to wake him gently. When that didn’t work, he said, “Your Eminence.”
“Leave off with the fancy title,’” said the bishop, pulling himself up straight. “You know I’m not fond of protocol.”
Fanis stuck his nose into the narcissus flowers on the bishop’s desk and inhaled spring. “Do you remember, Elder,” he said, “when we were not alone?”
“Of course,” said the bishop.
“And do you remember when Pera was full of churches?”
“It still is. But more than all that, I remember when Pera was full of pastry shops. A step and a pastry shop. Another step and another pastry shop. Those were the days. Now tell me, what brings you here?”
“Confession,” said Fanis.
“You haven’t confessed for as long as I’ve been a cleric.”
“Then it’s about time, isn’t it?”
The bishop removed his tie and jacket, donned his vestments and pectoral cross, and said a prayer. Then he sat down across from Fanis, in one of the armchairs in front of the desk. “Behold, my child,” he said. “Christ stands here and hears your confession.”
“I have been licentious my whole life,” said Fanis. “I was unfaithful to my wife countless times . . .”
“Why don’t you tell me something I don’t already know?”
Fanis took the photo of Kalypso from his breast pocket, kissed it, and handed it to the bishop. “It was the name day of my fiancée’s grandmother,” he began. “I was supposed to close the shop at six and go to dinner at her grandmother’s house in the Old City. Instead, when the troubles started, I saw to the shop and my mother. My fiancée’s father went to protect the family business. My fiancée, her mother, grandmother, and siblings were left alone.”
“There is no sin in looking after one’s mother,” said the bishop, quietly passing the photo back to Fanis.
“Perhaps there isn’t, but while I was looking after my mother, my fiancée was . . . raped on the steps of her grandmother’s house. People saw. When those things occur behind closed doors or in secret places, the girls can attempt to face the world as if nothing has happened, as if the shame doesn’t hover between them and their family, friends, and neighborhood. They aren’t forever known as one of the girls dishonored on the night of the pogrom. But Kalypso—”
“Still, it wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s not just that, Elder. My real sin—the weight I have been carrying all these years—is that I didn’t go to visit her immediately afterwards. I thought there was time. I didn’t want to cause her any more distress. My mother said it was better to let a couple days pass, let her womenfolk attend to her, and I was so angry at those men I didn’t know . . . I wasn’t sure if I could control myself, or if I could listen to details if she chose to tell me—”
“Fanis, caring for a loved one who has survived trauma is difficult, to say the least. You need to be a bit gentler with yourself. You didn’t know what to do. That’s all.”
“But, Elder, that has to be why she killed herself.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel it. She thought I’d abandoned her.”
The bishop sighed. “The secrecy of the mystery of penance is indisputable,” he said, staring up at the yellow watermarks on the ceiling. “But”—he lowered his gaze—“when the penitent has already passed to the other side, and when one of those in this life can be helped, perhaps a disclosure is in order . . .”
“Elder?”
“The girl’s father came to me before the family’s sudden departure for Canada. He, too, blamed himself for the suicide. Apparently, despite what happened, the girl didn’t want to leave the City. Whether it was for you or because she didn’t want to leave her home, or both, I don’t know, but Petridis insisted on taking her away from here, shouted in his frustration even. A few hours later, after the others had gone to bed, she did what she did, God rest her soul.”
“It wasn’t that she knew I knew? That I didn’t tell her it was all right, that it didn’t matter, that it made no difference to me? It wasn’t any of that?”
“Fanis, what happened was terrible, but it certainly wasn’t your fault. Or her father’s. You were both traumatized. Secondary survivors.”
“What does that mean?” said Fanis, annoyed that the bishop would choose a time like this to show off his English.
“My niece—the smart one who did her PhD in Boston—taught me the term. It’s what American psychologists call the family of trauma victims. In a way, you, too, are—indirectly, of course—a rape survivor. And survivors must never blame themselves.”
Secondary survivor? Fanis had never thought of himself in that way. If he had called himself secondary anything, it would have been secondary criminal. Or secondary murderer. Certainly not secondary survivor. Tears came to his eyes.
The bishop ran his fingers along the edge of the embroidered stole. “What brought you here today, Fanis? After all these years?”
Fanis glanced down at the sunburned girl sitting on the church wall. “I need to say goodbye to her, Elder. I . . . even if what you say is true . . . I feel I need to erase the old notebook, as they say. I don’t want to live with ghosts anymore. And . . . I never visited her grave. I just couldn’t. I guess I thought that maybe, if I didn’t see her grave, then it didn’t exist. So, you see, I abandoned her in death as well.”
The bishop cleared his throat. “Listen, Fanis. It’s true that, as Orthodox Christians, we have no past and no dead. Our past is always present, and the dead are always with us while we are in church. Still, the dead should not be a part of our daily life. Put your hand to the plow. Stop looking back. And take a good look around you: now is quite different from then.”
“Yes, Elder.” Fanis crossed his arms over his chest and bowed at the waist.
The bishop covered Fanis’s head with his stole and gave the absolution: “Whatever you have said to my humble person, and whatever you have failed to say, whether through ignorance or forgetfulness, whatever it may be, may God forgive you in this world and the next.”
The bishop whistled—the same piercing whistle with which he had frightened girls when he was a teenager. “Get the car ready,” he called to Samuel, his assistant. Then, to Fanis, “I’m on my way to Şişli Cemetery for a Trisagion. Would you like to come? We’ll say a memorial for Kalypso as well.”
“So you remember her name?”
“Of course I do. You’re the only one who pretends to have forgotten her. Now, are you coming or not?”
Fanis sat in the back of the bishop’s black Opel Astra with nervous anticipation. At the cemetery gate, the bishop gave him an affectionate shoulder shake and went off with Samuel to read the first Trisagion. Fanis asked the Antiochian caretaker to look up the location of Kalypso’s family tomb. Both her death and her funeral had been kept quiet by her family. Fanis hadn’t learned of either until she was already in the grave. He had thought of buying poison and going by night to join her, lik
e Romeo unable to live without his Juliet, but he knew that his mother would never have been able to bear it. So he had never gone.
The caretaker spent a few minutes searching for the record of Kalypso’s burial in a dusty leather-bound book. Finally he put his finger on a listing: “There she is.” He turned to the cemetery map and pointed to the rear left corner.
Fanis was surprised. One of his friends was buried close by, yet he had never noticed Kalypso there. Then he realized that he had brought nothing—no flowers, no potted plants, no whirligigs, votives, or incense. In a childlike manner, he stated his predicament.
The caretaker grabbed a pocket knife, exited, and returned with three hydrangea mopheads. “We have plenty of these, Uncle. I don’t normally cut them, but never mind.”
“Brother,” corrected Fanis.
“Excuse me?”
“Brother,” Fanis repeated. “I prefer that you call me ‘Brother’ instead of ‘Uncle.’”
The caretaker patted him on the back.
They picked their way over the slippery mud, and cobbles still wet with the previous night’s rain. At one point Fanis nearly fell. The gardener caught him and offered to carry the hydrangeas so that Fanis could hold onto his arm with both hands. Ten minutes later, they came upon a bare metal cross.
“There must be a mistake,” said Fanis. He had always imagined that Kalypso’s tomb would be covered with a marble slab and crowned by more marble, oval photos, and carved lilies.
“No, we’re in the right place, Brother. That’s Kalypso Petridou’s grave. Says so right there.”
Fanis examined the marker more closely. Circling the four points of the cross was a metal wreath on which her name and years had been engraved and blackened. Then he remembered the state that the cemetery had been in at the time. The family tomb had probably been destroyed.
The caretaker stepped away to smoke a cigarette beneath the cypress trees. Fanis threaded the hydrangea stems through the metal wreath and knelt on the damp earth. He ran his fingers over the letters etched in black. The moisture on the ground seeped through his pants and made wet circles on his knees. Kalypso probably hadn’t had a visit since her funeral.
“Are you all right?” said the caretaker.
“Fine.” Fanis could hear the clinking of Samuel’s censor and the light shuffling footsteps of the bishop.
“Is that your wife buried there?” asked the caretaker.
Fanis ran his fingers over the first letters of her name. “No,” he said. “It is the tomb of a goddess.”
He heard the sweeping of cloth on the dry leaves and then the chant, “Blessed is our God always, both now and ever, and to the ages of ages.” He rose to his feet and crossed himself. He tried to concentrate on the prayers, but instead he heard Kalypso humming their song. He closed his eyes.
Kalypso slipped her hand into his and led him down Faik Paşa Street. Through shop windows that had existed decades ago, Fanis saw the quilt maker kneeling on a piece of pink satin and covering it with down. The maid of the stately gray–mauve building finished watering the window-box geraniums and brought out a bucket and mop to scrub her employer’s front step. The dusty silk crocuses in Fanis’s next-door neighbor’s window boxes came to life.
Fanis’s street became a beach. Kalypso in her white summer dress, laughing her careless laughter, conjured a warm land breeze. Just before stepping into a sailboat, she threw her arms around his neck, licked his outer ear, and nibbled his lobe with a tender ferocity that made him moan with pleasure. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. They both knew that the way she had gone no longer mattered.
Kalypso cast off the stern hawsers by herself. Fanis, recovering from the ear treatment, pushed the sailboat into the moonlight. She leaned on the oar, keeping the Great Bear and Orion to her left, and sang “My Sweet Canary.”
Fanis took a deep breath and opened his eyes to the swaying of the cypresses in the spring breeze.
The bishop chanted: “Establish the soul of His servant Kalypso, departed from us, in the tentings of the Just; give her rest in the bosom of Abraham; and number her among the Just, through His goodness and compassion as our merciful God.”
Fanis crossed himself again and said out loud, “Farewell.”
27
A Recipe Resurrected
Exhausted after carrying boxes up three flights of stairs, Kosmas made himself a Nescafé and collapsed onto the padded bench of his oriel window. Boiling-hot coffee spilled onto his jeans. “Siktir,” he said, feeling the coffee burn his leg. Fuck it.
He set the mug on a box, took off his pants, and threw them onto the floor. Then he examined the pink mark on his thigh: after twenty years of assessing his own burns in the pâtisserie, he could tell it wasn’t serious. He settled back down on the oriel bench and took a sip of the remaining coffee.
“Ach,” he said aloud.
He hated instant coffee, but it was better than nothing. He had only moved into his apartment the day before, and he still didn’t have a proper coffee pot. He looked out the window, over the Bosporus. A fast boat on its way to Bostancı left a trail of white in the Sea of Marmara. Üsküdar, on the opposite shore, was lit up bronze and gold in the last strong rays of sunset. Its windows looked as if they were on fire. Kosmas had chosen the apartment for Daphne, who loved oriels. The kitchen was narrow, the floorboards creaked, and the rent was ridiculous, but the building was a beautiful example of late Ottoman architecture. It had high ceilings, floral carton-pierre wall decoration, original flooring and tiles, and richly carved woodwork. Kosmas could already imagine Daphne sitting on the window bench, drinking Turkish coffee with him, watching the Bosporus traffic, or studying some history book—perhaps Edmondo de Amici’s Constantinople. They were going to be happy here . . . if he could convince her to give him another chance.
Kosmas picked up his phone to call her. He selected her number, but instead of pushing the button, he just stared at her name. According to Fanis and Selin, Daphne was due back in Istanbul in one week. But it would only be a flash Holy Week and Easter visit—eight days in total. Kosmas wondered if her secrecy about the upcoming visit stemmed from her desire to surprise him or from second thoughts about their relationship. Perhaps he should call, tell her about the apartment, and convince her to stay with him. But begging probably wasn’t going to help anything. He decided to wait until she arrived to tell her about the apartment. He would walk her in—blindfolded—and present her with a fully furnished place, empty dresser drawers for her clothes, and bathroom shelves that awaited women’s creams and powders. He’d even buy a pair of slippers and place them by the door, ready for her bare feet. Size 37.
Kosmas dropped the phone back onto the oriel cushion, set the empty mug on the box beside him, and closed his eyes. His moving day had not gone well. He had expected that Rea would give him a few household things, cook and package a couple of days of food, perhaps even accompany him to the furniture store. But since Dimitris had moved in, Rea had been distracted. She had stopped making cheese pies for Kosmas’s afternoon snack, and she no longer cared whether he watched their favorite TV shows with her. She’d spent his moving morning at the hairdresser’s. Later she had called to apologize for her forgetfulness and offer to bring Kosmas dinner, but when she learned that the apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up, she sighed and said, “Why don’t you come here instead?”
Kosmas was too tired to descend the stairs at that point, but he couldn’t complain: one of the main reasons he’d chosen the flat was that it was entirely inaccessible to his mother. He sat up, transferred his empty mug to the herringbone parquet, and picked up his pocketknife to open the small package beside him. It wasn’t one of the boxes from his mother’s house, but rather something that Uncle Mustafa had sent over with the delivery truck. Kosmas cut through the tape, opened the flaps, and found Hamdi’s three volumes of recipes. It had to be some sort of mistake. Kosmas called Mustafa. “Uncle?” he said. “Your grandfather’s books were delivered to me.�
�
“Of course they were.”
“But shouldn’t they be kept in the Lily’s safe? Until you find a better place than beneath your bed, at least?”
“They’re my housewarming gift,” said Uncle Mustafa.
Kosmas felt his throat constrict. “But these are family heirlooms . . .”
“Correct,” said Uncle Mustafa. “You’re family, and they’re yours.”
Kosmas stared at the books, caressed the smooth leather binding. They had an entirely new charm now that they were his.
“But there’s a condition,” said Uncle Mustafa. “You’re not going to let them sit on a shelf like museum pieces. I want them to smell of cinnamon until your dying day.”
“Not just cinnamon,” said Kosmas, his voice wobbly with emotion, “but also nutmeg, chocolate, mahleb, vanilla, and every other sweet thing in my kitchen. I promise.”
The gift helped Kosmas to refocus. Despite the moving mess, he had to perfect the Balkanik for Palm Sunday, Daphne’s name day. Although he’d been experimenting since January, the variously flavored creams still didn’t complement each other as they should. For that reason, he had hesitated to add orchid-root cream, even though Hamdi’s recipe contained it as a flavor option. To Kosmas, the addition of orchid root would be a cacophonous overload. Furthermore, Orchis mascula and Orchis militaris roots, grown only in Turkey’s Kahramanmaraş region, were now so rare that their export had been banned. Even within Turkey, genuine, unadulterated Orchis tuber powder was a precious commodity. But it was the only thing that Kosmas hadn’t yet tried.
He remembered that Muharrem, the septuagenarian owner of the famous candy shop in the Balık Pazarı, sold a very expensive orchid-root drink called sahlep in the winter months. Muharrem was too much of a traditionalist to use anything but the purest ingredients in his sweet, warm, rosewater-flavored sahlep. So Kosmas called the shop and explained that he was using a recipe that demanded pure Orchis tuber powder of the finest quality.
A Recipe for Daphne Page 28
