"Once there was; once there wasn't…. There lived two basket weavers back in the old Ottoman days. Both were hard workers, but one had faith, the other was always grumpy. One day the sultan came to the village. He said to them: `I will fill your baskets with wheat, and if you take good care of this wheat, the grains will turn into golden coins.' The first weaver accepted the offer with joy and filled his baskets. The second weaver, who was no less crabby than you, my dear, refused the great sultan's gift. You know what happened in the end?"
"Of course I do," Asya said. "How can I not know the end of a story I must have listened to at least a hundred times? But what you don't know is the damage these stories do to a child's creativity. It is because of this ridiculous story that I spent my preschool years sleeping with a wheat straw under my pillow, hoping it would turn into a golden coin the next morning. And then what? I start going to school. One day I tell the other kids how I will soon become rich with my gold-to-be wheat, and the next thing I know, I am the butt of every silly joke in the classroom. You made an idiot out of me."
Of all the shocks and traumas Asya suffered in her childhood, none remained in her memory more bitterly than the wheat incident. It was then that she reheard the word that would keep escorting her in the years to come, always at those moments when she least expected it: "Bastard!" Until that wheat incident in her first year at primary school, Asya had only once heard the word bastard but not minded it much, primarily because she didn't know what it meant. The other students were quick to make up for her lack of knowledge. But that part of the story she keenly kept to herself and instead poured another tea, burning hot.
"Listen Asya, you can keep grouching to us as much as you like, but when our guest arrives, you should pipe down and be nice to her. Your English is better than mine and better than anyone else's in the family."
This was not a modest statement on the part of Auntie Banu since it made her look as if she spoke some English when in fact she spoke none. Sure, she had taken English courses back in high school, but whatever she may have learned there, she had forgotten twice as much. Since the art of fortune-telling had no foreign language requirement, she never felt the need to study English. As for Auntie Feride, she had never been interested in learning English in the first place, choosing German at school. But since that coincided with the time she had lost interest in every course other than physical geography, her German had not made much progress either. With Petite-Ma and Grandma Gulsum as disqualified members, that left only Auntie Zeliha and Auntie Cevriye with enough English to move forward from beginner level to an intermediate stage. That said, there was a stark difference between the two aunts' command of the English language. Auntie Zeliha spoke a daily-life English, woven with slang and idioms and argot, which she practiced almost every day with the foreigners visiting her tattoo parlor; while Auntie Cevriye spoke a grammar-oriented, frozen-in-time, textbook English taught at high schools and at high schools only. Concomitantly, Auntie Cevriye could distinguish simple, complex, and compound sentences, identify adverb, adjective, and noun clauses, even recognize misplaced and dangling modifiers in syntactic structure, but she could not talk.
"Therefore, dear, you will be her translator. You will ferry her words to us and our words to her." Auntie Banu narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow in an attempt to hint at the magnitude of what she was about to announce. "Like a bridge extending over cultures, you will connect the East and the West."
Asya crinkled her nose, as if she had just detected an awful stink in the house that was apparent only to her, and screwed up her lips, as if to say, "You wish!"
In the meantime nobody noticed that Petite-Ma had risen from her chair and approached the piano, which had been unplayed in years. From time to time they used the top of the closed piano as a sideboard for the extra dishes and plates that did not fit on the dinner table.
"It is wonderful that you two girls are the same age," Auntie Banu concluded her soliloquy. "You two will become friends."
Asya stared at Auntie Banu with renewed interest, wondering if she would ever stop seeing her as a kid. When she was little, whenever another child was brought to the house, her aunts would put the two of them together and order: "Play now! Be friends!" Being of the same age group automatically meant getting along well; somehow peers were regarded as the broken pieces of the same puzzle, expected to suddenly make it complete when brought side by side.
"This is going to be so exciting. And when she goes back to her country, you girls can become pen pals," Auntie Cevriye trilled. She was a strong believer in pen-pal friendships. As a comradeteacher of the Turkish Republican regime it was her belief that every Turkish citizen, no matter how ordinary she might be in society, had a duty to proudly represent the motherland vis-a-vis the whole world. What better opportunity than in an international pen-pal friendship was there to represent one's country?
"You girls will exchange letters to and fro between San Francisco and Istanbul," Auntie Cevriye murmured half to herself. Corresponding with a stranger without an educational purpose being utterly unthinkable for her, she then lectured on the underlying pedagogical reason. "The problem with us Turks is that we are constantly being misinterpreted and misunderstood. The Westerners need to see that we are not like the Arabs at all. This is a modern, secular state."
With Auntie Feride increasing the volume of the TV all of a sudden, they got distracted by a new Turkish pop video. As her eyes slid to the zany singer, Asya noticed that the woman's hairstyle looked familiar, very familiar. Her gaze bounced back and forth between the screen and Auntie Feride, now recognizing where the inspiration for the new hairdo had stemmed from.
"The Americans have mostly been brainwashed by the Greeks and the Armenians, who unfortunately arrived in the United States before the Turks did," Auntie Cevriye continued. "So they are misled into believing that Turkey is the country of the Midnight Express. You'll show the American girl what a beautiful country this is, and promote international friendship and cultural understanding."
Asya gasped with a frustrated expression on her face, and she could have more or less remained in that position had her eldest aunt not proven relentless.
"What's more, she will improve your English and perhaps you will teach her Turkish. Won't this be a wonderful friendship?"
Friendship…. Speaking of which, Asya rose to her feet and grabbed her half-eaten simit, getting ready to leave to see somee real friends.
"Where are you going, miss? The breakfast is not over yet," Auntie Zeliha said, opening her mouth for the first time since they sat down at the table. Working amid the hustle and bustle of the tattoo store six days a week from twelve to nine, it was she more than anyone else in the family who savored the droopy slowness of Sunday-morning breakfasts.
"There's this Chinese Film Festival," Asya answered, her voice slightly strained from the effort to look serious and sincere. "The professor of one of my courses asked us to go and see a movie this weekend and then write a critical, analytical paper on it."
"What kind of an assignment is that?" Auntie Cevriye cocked an eyebrow, always wary of unconventional pedagogical techniques.
But Auntie Zeliha did not push it any further. "All right, go and see your Chinese movie," she nodded. "But don't be late, miss. I want you back home before five o'clock. We pick up our guest at the airport this evening."