“About?” she asks.
“These stories. They define me just as much as they define you.”
She exhales.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For looking at these photos, listening to these stories. Sometimes it feels like we’re just talking to ourselves when who we really want to talk to is you.”
“Me?”
“You and the rest of the world.”
Orhan nods. “About my grandfather’s will,” he begins.
“That’s between you and my aunt,” Ani says, lifting a palm to stop his words.
Orhan fidgets with the camera in his hands.
“I thought you said you weren’t a photographer,” she says.
“I thought I had to be one thing or another,” he says. “Not everything is black-and-white.”
He brings the camera back up to his eye, clicking the shutter every time that life, in all its lovely and miserable guises, shows up in the frame. He takes picture after picture of the residents as they share their stories. Though he cannot understand their words, Orhan is able to capture the emotion in their faces, the vibrations of their sorrow, and their need for solace. All of life, Orhan realizes, is a story within a story; how we choose to listen and which words we choose to speak makes all the difference.
He zooms in for a close-up of an old man covering his face, when someone grabs his forearm. He looks down to see Seda in her wheelchair, with Betty gripping the handles behind her.
“You’re here,” he says. “I thought you said you wanted no part of this.”
Seda looks at the camera, then back at him and smiles. She lifts a bundle of papers up toward him and presses them to his chest. They are his legal papers, signed and dated.
“You keep the house,” Seda whispers.
Orhan’s chin drops with the weight of her words. This is why he came. What he wanted, but instead of relief he feels shame. “What about you?” he asks.
“I’ll keep my story,” she says.
“I don’t know what to say,” he says. “Except I’m very sorry.”
“We are all sorry for something. It’s what makes us human,” says Seda. “But sometimes empathy is not enough. Sometimes empathy needs to be followed by action.”
She turns away from him then and with some assistance by Betty, approaches the podium, where she begins to tell her tale all over again.
She begins with, “My story is very different from all of yours.”
CHAPTER 37
Fatma Forgiven
CELIK’S OFFICE IS exactly how Orhan imagined it. His father’s lawyer has chosen the corner suite in one of the tallest buildings in Istanbul. The place is all black lacquer and gold. Orhan guesses that the color scheme is designed to communicate modernity and wealth. And if those two things fail to intimidate, splashes of red in the abstract art remind one that, if necessary, Celik could draw blood.
Orhan and Fatma are alone in the empty conference room. Seated at a glossy black table as vast and vapid as the room itself, they wait in silence for Mustafa and his lawyer, the man named after steel. Orhan’s own lawyer is notably absent. The only one he wanted was Fatma, and she is here, sitting to his left. At least he hopes it is her. She arrived this morning, sporting a dramatic black burka that covered everything from her head to her feet. Today’s costume, unlike the head scarf she sported at the funeral weeks ago, is more of a shroud. Even her eyes are hidden behind a small square of black mesh embedded in the headpiece. Getting her out of the car and into the elevator had been an almost-fatal experience. Orhan hasn’t asked her why she is dressed like a Saudi housewife, but everyone is entitled to their prebattle rituals.
“You look ridiculous,” he whispers to her, thinking her black burka and head full of gold teeth actually match Celik’s decor.
“Nothing scares these Kemalists more than a devout Muslim,” she says. “I’d whip out my prayer rug in the middle of this meeting if I were you.”
Orhan snorts. “You know I don’t own one, Buyukanne.”
It is their little game now. He calls her grandmother whenever they are alone, which is often, since his father refuses to speak to him. It never fails to make her smile.
“Where is that bastard Celik? I’m boiling under this black curtain,” she says.
At that moment, Mustafa appears at the door, a cloud of cigarette smoke floating above him. There was a time Orhan would stand out of respect for his father, but today he remains seated. Mustafa limps into the room with the help of his cane. Ignoring Fatma, he goes straight to Orhan’s chair.
“What the hell is she doing here?” he says.
Fatma plays dead under her burka.
“This affects her as much as it does us,” Orhan says.
“What’s this?” he asks, turning to Fatma and fingering the black cloth. “Finally found God?”
“Something like that,” says Fatma.
Mustafa makes his way to the other side of the massive conference table. He sits in the chair as he would in a throne.
Celik glides into the room a few seconds after Mustafa, a musky cologne trailing behind him. “Hakan Celik,” he says, shaking Orhan’s hand. When his eyes fall upon the black ghost that is Fatma, Celik stops suddenly. He takes in the dark slopes of her shrouded body as if they were the apocalyptic remains of a ravaged society. He stares at her with disgust, as if she has annihilated every modernist tendency he and his like have fought hard for. He clears his throat before assuming his place next to Mustafa.
“Where’s Yilmaz?” he asks, without looking up. He slaps a manila folder on the table.
“He couldn’t make it,” Orhan lies. The truth is Orhan had to beg Yilmaz not to come. The fewer people in the room, the better.
“Good. It’s a simple case anyway. Very cut-and-dry. No need to complicate it.” Celik says it all in one breath. “This will is bogus. You know that. Under Turkish law, the amount of the inheritance depends upon the closeness of the surviving heirs to the deceased. As Kemal’s only son, your father is entitled to the majority of his wealth. The good news is your father wishes for you to stay on as acting president of Tarik Incorporated for now, until he decides otherwise. And if all goes well, the whole estate will eventually be passed on to you at the time of his death. So you see? No harm, no foul. A case of semantics and timing. That’s all it is.”
“And the house?” asks Orhan.
“Naturally, it belongs to your father now.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t accept that.”
Celik fixes his eyes on Orhan. He uses his thumb to twirl the gold ring on his pinkie. “Your grandfather’s will is a sham,” he says. “Yilmaz should have advised him about our inheritance laws.”
“I’m certain Mr. Yilmaz understands the law perfectly well,” says Orhan.
“I don’t really have time for this,” Celik says, closing the file and standing up. “I’ve got a whole roster of cases to get to. We’ll have to resolve this in court.”
Orhan waits to see if the man in bluffing, but Celik storms out faster than he came in.
“I can’t understand you,” Mustafa shouts. “Why must you shit in every pot we own?”
“I’m keeping the company and the house,” says Orhan.
“What?” Mustafa’s face matches the red inkblots in the artwork. “You’re either a madman or an idiot.”
“I will take care of you and Fatma. You don’t have to worry about that. You can stay near me, in one of the apartments in the city,” says Orhan, “but I have other plans for the house.”
“Are you dense? You heard the man. I am his son, his first heir. You have no right. Not until I am dead!”
“What if I told you that you are not who you think you are?” Orhan pronounces the words slowly, enunciating each one separately.
“What are you talking about?”
“You are not Kemal’s son, and I am not his grandson,” Orhan says.
“What the hell is he talking ab
out?” Mustafa asks Fatma. Fatma inhales, sucking in a pouch of black cloth around her mouth.
“We are not legally entitled to any of it,” Orhan continues. “We come from her,” he says, nodding at Fatma.
Mustafa looks from Fatma to Orhan and back again. He leans across the table, grabs Fatma’s headpiece and pulls it off.
Fatma fixes her eyes on him. “It’s true. I’m sorry, Mustafa,” she says. She lowers her eyes and points to her groin area. “You came through here.”
Orhan blushes at her words.
For a moment, Mustafa is frozen in stunned silence.
“I gave birth to you,” says Fatma, “and I mothered you. All these years, that’s what I’ve been doing.”
“You . . .” Mustafa begins but does not continue.
Orhan waits a moment to let his father digest the news. “There’s more,” he says. “Will you tell him, Buyukanne?”
Mustafa looks perplexed by Orhan’s use of the word grandmother.
“Kemal is not your father,” says Fatma. “He and I. We never—”
“I don’t believe you,” Mustafa interrupts.
“It’s true. I’m not sure who your father was exactly,” says Fatma.
“What are you talking about?”
“Fatma did what she had to do to survive,” says Orhan.
Mustafa sits back in his chair. Mouth agape, his eyes dart from Fatma to Orhan and back again.
“You could go ahead with the lawsuit,” Orhan continues, “but I’m sure you understand that I would be compelled to share this new information. It would be most embarrassing, to you and to our whole family.”
“You would admit to being a whore?” Mustafa squints at Fatma.
“God forgives all sins,” says Fatma.
Mustafa stands, giving his chair a dramatic push, but his body is visibly shaken.
Orhan stands too, afraid his father may lose his balance. He reaches for his father’s arm, but Mustafa pushes him away.
“Get away from me,” he says before limping out of the room.
CHAPTER 38
Transformation
THE CAULDRONS SURROUNDING the house have been cleaned and restored, their smooth copper surfaces gleaming in the sun. The house itself has been renovated to its former splendor, its mustard-colored stucco bright against white wood-trimmed windows. Everything is brighter in the spring air. Orhan stands some thirty feet away, across the street, taking long drags from his cigarette. He doesn’t dare go inside, where his father and Fatma have been engaged in daily battle.
Mustafa’s legal fortitude did not melt upon hearing the news of his questionable parentage. The sting of illegitimacy only served to confirm to him that the whole world was out to betray him. Orhan checks his watch: 5:42 a.m. A speaker mounted on the highest minaret of the mosque crackles. The voice of the muezzin cuts against the gray sky, calling believers like his father to their morning prayers. At the sound of footsteps and the clicking of his father’s cane, Orhan turns his back and steps into a nearby alleyway. Only a coward hides from his own aging father. But he isn’t entirely cowardly, he reminds himself. The legal battle for his ancestral home ensues, and in that, he has been downright heroic.
Orhan waits for Mustafa to disappear entirely before extinguishing his cigarette and walking toward the house, where Fatma stands by the open door.
“Good morning, Buyukanne,” he says kissing her cheek.
“I get many more kisses since you’ve started calling me grandmother,” she says.
“Where’s your burka?” he says, stepping inside.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says, smiling.
“How long do we have?”
“An hour.”
“The exterior of the house looks good,” he says.
“Like a butterfly landing on a donkey’s dick,” she says, making him laugh with one of her favorite Turkish phrases.
Inside, the house looks emptied and gutted. The home, once cluttered and covered almost entirely with doilies and kilims, is now a blank space. The bare floor looks naked without its ancient carpets. His dede’s green lounge chair sits like a modern art installation in the middle of the room.
“What happened here?” he asks.
“Home improvement.”
“It looks like an empty museum,” he says.
Fatma shrugs. Two metal folding chairs lean against a blank wall where the television and shelves used to be.
“Where’s the television?” Orhan can’t imagine his father sitting in the room without it.
“Out for repairs,” she says winking at him.
Orhan gives her a doubting look.
“What are you trying to do here?” Orhan asks. “Smoke him out?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought more about what you said about basing my whole life, our lives, on a lie. It was wrong. Necessary back then but wrong. I can correct it now.”
“By stripping the house of furniture?”
“By starting fresh. Every word from my mouth, every object in this house, will be based on the truth. No more decrepit seeds.”
Orhan nods. “That may take longer than we thought,” he says.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, grabbing a folding chair and placing it near Dede’s chair. “Besides, a good general doesn’t leave a front until it’s conquered.”
“We are fighting over a dilapidated house,” he says, knowing full well that there is so much more at stake here—things he cannot define to anyone but her. Reclaiming the house is the first step toward reclaiming his family’s and his country’s past.
“I wasn’t talking about the house,” she says, folding her crumpled hands in her lap like a schoolgirl. “I was talking about your father’s heart.”
She looks so vulnerable and frail. Orhan wants to reach over and embrace her shrinking body, and he almost does, but she stands up, breaking the moment in half.
“Besides,” she says, her voice cheerful now. “The house isn’t dilapidated anymore. Did you see the stucco outside? And the cauldrons? Good as new.”
“We can paint, and scrub, and remove things, but the past is always here,” he says.
“Everything is built on something else,” Fatma says.
“Yes, but we’ve built an entire fortune on her loss, an entire country on their bones,” says Orhan.
“An unlucky Bedouin will get fucked by a polar bear in the desert,” she responds. “What can be done about it?”
“Acknowledge it, I suppose,” says Orhan. “Isn’t that what Dede was trying to do with his will?”
He turns away from her and Dede’s chair and walks out of the house. He doesn’t stop until he is engulfed in the abundant foliage of the mulberry tree. Lush leaves, so large they can be worn as masks, hang low and wrap around him like a bright green cloak. Adorned with the deep reds and purples of the fleshy fruit, they sway in the wind, brushing Orhan’s head and shoulders. He hears the sound of Fatma’s footsteps amid the whispered chatter of the wind and leaves.
“A miracle of nature,” she says. “The thing just came back to life.”
“It’s beautiful,” says Orhan. It is in this place of reincarnations, under the leaves of the mulberry tree, that Dede’s bones lie. Here with the umbilical cord of the woman he loved, where worms feast and emerge as moths, it’s as if the earth itself is telling a story of its betrayals and resurrections.
“We will win this battle. I will see to it. One way or another,” Fatma says.
“Yes, but what then?” he asks, thinking of Seda’s words about empathy and action.
“That’s for you to decide. I’ll be gone soon enough.”
Orhan closes his eyes against the thought. “We can turn it into a museum,” he says suddenly, partly to chase the thought of her dying away from his mind.
“A museum?” laughs Fatma. “Who would come to a museum in the middle of nowhere? And a museum of what? Sorrows?”
“No, of exiles,” says Orhan.
“Exiles?” asks Fatma.
“Sürgün Gallery,” he says, half jokingly, gesturing in the wind.
Fatma lets out a bellowing laugh.
“A place for the voiceless,” he continues. The idea germinates in the very syllables coming out of his mouth. It comes out fully formed, as bountiful and fertile as the tree he is standing under. Orhan pictures the walls of the house displaying the works of artists whose identities have rendered them voiceless in Turkey. The second floor could house some of the photographs from the exhibit at the Ararat Home, alongside his own.
“The basement could be dedicated entirely to the past owners of the house,” he says out loud, picturing his great-grandmother’s wooden loom displaying the green kilim, rumored to have been woven for the sultan himself. A picture of Dede, clad in a three-piece suit and standing before the first offices of Tarik Inc., would grace the wall, along with a plaque describing his life. A glass case would house all of his sketchbooks and Auntie Fatma’s handcrafted doilies. And of course, the house’s original Armenian owners would be there too. A photographic timeline of the Melkonian family displayed along the length of the back wall. He would use the word genocide. He’d make sure the story was there in all its horrific detail, under the heading DEPORTATIONS AND MASSACRES.
“That’s a ridiculous idea,” says Fatma, interrupting his thoughts. “Anyway, the house isn’t even ours yet. It may never be.”
“Maybe,” says Orhan. “And maybe not. How does that proverb go?”
“You’re quoting proverbs now?” she asks, amused.
“You know, the one that goes ‘Do good and throw it into the sea,’” he says.
“If the fish don’t know it, God will,” she says, finishing for him.
“Iyilik yap denize at, balık bilmezse Halik bilir,” he repeats in Turkish.
On a leaf beneath his left elbow, a silkworm, thick as a finger, wraps itself in a blanket of silk. Soon the larva will disappear into the protective confines of its cocoon, where the possibility of transformation awaits.
Acknowledgments
THE FIRST-TIME NOVELIST is a dreamer and a fool. I’d like to thank the following people for indulging these two qualities in me. My mom was the first to encourage reckless dreaming. Thanks, Mom, for letting me choose freely. Garin Armenian read every word twice and indulged me when I wanted to have long talks about imaginary people and places. This book wouldn’t be the same without the candid feedback of Holly Gaglio and Marrie Stone. Barbara DeMarco Barrett and the Writer’s Block Party provided a community and encouragement when I needed it most. Deniz and Aytek showed me all the beauty in Turkey. Khatchig Mouradian was an early reader and champion of my work. My editor, Kathy Pories, for her unwavering support and her discerning eye. Eleanor Jackson, for being the best agent/fairy godmother I could wish for.
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