Asya grabbed her hippie bag and hurried toward the door. Just when she was about to step outside, however, she heard a most unexpected sound. Somebody was playing the piano. Timid, rickety notes looking for a melody long lost.
A look of recognition appeared on Asya's face as she whispered to herself: "Petite-Ma!"
Petite-Ma was born in Thessaloniki. She was only a little girl when she migrated with her mother, a widow, to Istanbul. It was the year 1923. The time Petite-Ma arrived in this city cannot be confused for it coincided with the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic.
"You and the Republic have arrived in this city together. I was desperately waiting for both of you," her husband Rlza Selim Kazanci told her amorously years later. "You both ended the old regimes forever, the one in the country and the one in my house. When you came to me, life brightened up."
"When I came to you, you were sad but strong. I brought you joy and you gave me strength," Petite-Ma had said back.
The truth is, Petite-Ma being so pretty and convivial, the number of men who asked for her hand by the time she was sixteen could have made a line from one end of the old Galata Bridge to the other. Among all the candidates who knocked on her door, there was one and only one that she felt sympathy for the moment she set eyes on him from behind the latticework partition: a portly, tall man who went by the name Riza.
He had a thick beard and a thin mustache, full, somber, dark eyes, and was no lesss than thirty-three years older than her. He had been married before and rumor had it that his wife, a heartless woman, had abandoned him and their boy. After his wife's betrayal, and though left on his own with a toddler, he had for a long time refused to remarry, preferring to live in his family mansion all alone. There he had stayed, inflating his wealth, which he shared with his friends, and his wrath, which he reserved for his enemies. He was a self-made businessman, once a cauldron maker, an artisan, then an entrepreneur wise enough to enter into the flag-making business at the right time and the right place. During the 1920s the new Turkish Republic was still throbbing with fervor, and manual work, though systematically venerated in government propaganda, brought little money. The new regime needed teachers to create patriotic Turks out of their students, financiers to help generate a national bourgeoisie, and flag manufacturers to adorn the entire country with the Turkish flag, but it surely did not need any cauldron makers. This is how Riza Selim entered into the flag-making business.
Despite earning oodles of money and influential friends in his new business, when choosing a surname in 1925, after the Law of Surnames obliged every Turkish citizen to carry a surname, it was his first craft that Riza Selim wished to be called after: Kazanci.
Though fine-looking and definitely well off, given his age and the trauma of his first marriage (who knows why his wife abandoned him; perhaps the man was a pervert, the women gossiped), Riza Selim Kazanci was one of the last men on earth Petite-Ma's mother would have liked to see her treasured daughter marry. There sure were better candidates than him. But despite her mother's persistent objections, Petite-Ma refused to listen to anyone but her heart. Perhaps it was because there was something in Riza Selim Kazanci's dark eyes that made Petite-Ma grasp, not intellectually but intuitively, that he was gifted with something barred to many in this world: the ability to love another human being more than you love yourself. Though too young and too inexperienced at thee age of sixteen, Petite-Ma was sensible enough to comprehend what an exceptional bliss it could be to be loved and adored by a man with such a gift. Riza Selim Kazanci's eyes were soft and sparkly, just like his voice; there was something in him that made one feel secure in his company, cherished and protected even amid surrounding turbulence. This man was no deserter.
But that was not the only reason why Petite-Ma was attracted to Riza Selim Kazancl. The truth is, she was drawn to his story long before being attracted to him. She sensed how badly his soul had been bruised by the desertion of his first wife. She sure could mend those bruises. After all, women enjoy taking care of one another's wreckages. Petite-Ma didn't take long to make up her mind. She was going to marry him and nobody, not even her destiny, could change that.
If Petite-Ma so intuitively believed in Riza Selim Kazanci, he, in turn, was going to merit that trust until his last breath. This blond, blue-eyed wife, who came to him with a furry, snow white cat instead of a proper dowry, was the delight of his life. Never a day did he refuse to fulfill any demand of hers, no matter how whimsical. That, however, was hardly the case with the then six-year-old boy at home: Levent Kazanci never accepted Petite-Ma as a mother. He resisted and ridiculed her at every opportunity for years to come, ending his childhood with suppressed bitterness, if childhood could ever come to an end when one remained so bitter inside.
At a time when marriage without kids was, if not a sign of an incurable malady, then surely a sacrilege, Petite-Ma and Riza Selim Kazanci didn't have a child. Not because he was too old but because at the beginning she was too young and disinterested in raising kids, and then when she changed her mind, he was simply too old. Levent Kazanci remained the only child to continue the lineage, a title he wasn't thrilled to hold.
Though saddened and offended by her stepson's acrimony, Petite-Ma was an exuberant, extroverted girl with a wide imagination and an even wider list of requests. There were things in this world far more interesting than nursing babies, such as learning the piano. Before long, a Bentley piano made by Stroud Piano Co., Ltd., in England was gleaming in the best spot in the living room. It was with this piano that Petite-Ma started taking her first lessons from her first piano teacher-a white Russian musician who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution and settled permanently in Istanbul. Petite-Ma was his best student. She not only had the talent but also the perseverance to make the piano a lifelong companion rather than a fleeting pastime.
Rachmaninoff, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky were her favorites. Whenever she was alone at home, playing just for herself with Pasha the First on her lap, these were the composers whose works she would perform. When she played for guests, however, she'd choose songs from an entirely different repertoire. A Western repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and above all, Wagner, on those special occasions when they had government officials and their dainty wives as guests. After supper the men would gather near the fireplace with drinks in their hands to discuss world politics. The late 1920s were the years when national politics could only be either venerated or reaffirmed, the louder the better since the walls had ears. Accordingly, whenever there emerged a need for genuine discussion, the new Turkish Republic's political and cultural elite instantly switched to world politics, which was a mess on its own and thereby always interesting to talk about.
Meanwhile, the ladies clustered at the other end of the house, holding crystal glasses of mint liquor, eyeing one another's clothes. In the ladies section there were two types of women, starkly different from each other: the professionals and the wives.
The professionals were the comrade-women, the epitome of the new Turkish female: idealized, glorified, and championed by the reformist elite. These women constituted the new professionalslawyers, teachers, judges, managers, clerks, academics…. Unlike their mothers they were not confined to the house and had the chance to climb the social, economic, and cultural ladder, provided that they shed their sexuality and femininity on the way there. More often than not they wore two-piece suits in browns, blacks, and grays-the colors of chastity, modesty, and partisanship. They had short haircuts, no makeup, no accessories. They moved in defeminized, desexualized bodies. And whenever the wives giggled in that annoyingly feminine way of theirs, the professionals tightened their fingers around the small, leather purses under their arms, as if they had some top-secret information in them and had given their word of honor to protect it no matter what. The wives, conversely, came to these invitations wearing satin evening gowns in whites, pasty pinks, and pastel blues-the hues of ladylikeness, innocence, and vulnerability. They didn't like the professionals very much, whom they regarded more as "comrades" than women, and the professionals didn't like them, whom they regarded more as "concubines" than women. In the end nobody found anyone "woman" enough.